The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Page 35
What about the human toll of the conflicts? Here is where the capaciousness of the Conflict Catalog comes in handy. The power-law distribution tells us that the biggest of the great power wars should account for the lion’s share of the deaths from all wars—at least, from all wars that exceed the thousand-death cutoff, which make up the data I have plotted so far. But Richardson alerted us to the possibility that a large number of smaller conflicts missed by traditional histories and datasets could, in theory, pile up into a substantial number of additional deaths (the gray bars in figure 5–11). The Conflict Catalog is the first long-term dataset that reaches down into that gray area and tries to list the skirmishes, riots, and massacres that fall beneath the traditional military horizon (though of course many more in the earlier centuries may never have been recorded). Unfortunately the catalog is a work in progress, and at present fewer than half the conflicts have fatality figures attached to them. Until it is completed, we can get a crude glimpse of the trajectory of conflict deaths in Europe by filling in the missing values using the median of the death tolls from that quarter-century. Brian Atwood and I have interpolated these values, added up the direct and indirect deaths from conflicts of all types and sizes, divided them by the population of Europe in each period, and plotted them on a linear scale.87 Figure 5–18 presents this maximalist (albeit tentative) picture of the history of violent conflict in Europe:
FIGURE 5–17. Conflicts per year in greater Europe, 1400–2000
Sources: Conflict Catalog, Brecke, 1999; Long & Brecke, 2003. The conflicts are aggregated over 25-year periods and include interstate and civil wars, genocides, insurrections, and riots. “Western Europe” includes the territories of the present-day U.K., Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. “Eastern Europe” includes the territories of the present-day Cyprus, Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, the republics formerly making up Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey (both Europe and Asia), Russia (Europe), Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and other Caucasus republics.
The scaling by population size did not eliminate an overall upward trend through 1950, which shows that Europe’s ability to kill people outpaced its ability to breed more of them. But what really pops out of the graph are three hemoclysms. Other than the quarter-century containing World War II, the most deadly time to have been alive in Europe was during the Wars of Religion in the early 17th century, followed by the quarter with World War I, then the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
FIGURE 5–18. Rate of death in conflicts in greater Europe, 1400–2000
Sources: Conflict Catalog, Brecke, 1999; Long & Brecke, 2003. Figures are from the “Total Fatalities” column, aggregated over 25-year periods. Redundant entries were eliminated. Missing entries were filled in with the median for that quarter-century. Historical population estimates are from McEvedy & Jones, 1978, taken at the end of the quarter-century. “Europe” is defined as in figure 5–17.
The career of organized violence in Europe, then, looks something like this. There was a low but steady baseline of conflicts from 1400 to 1600, followed by the bloodbath of the Wars of Religion, a bumpy decline through 1775 followed by the French troubles, a noticeable lull in the middle and late 19th century, and then, after the 20th-century Hemoclysm, the unprecedented ground-hugging levels of the Long Peace.
How can we make sense of the various slow drifts and sudden lurches in violence during the past half-millennium among the great powers and in Europe? We have reached the point at which statistics must hand the baton over to narrative history. In the next sections I’ll tell the story behind the graphs by combining the numbers from the conflict-counters with the narratives from historians and political scientists such as David Bell, Niall Ferguson, Azar Gat, Michael Howard, John Keegan, Evan Luard, John Mueller, James Payne, and James Sheehan.
Here is a preview. Think of the zigzags in figure 5–18 as a composite of four currents. Modern Europe began in a Hobbesian state of frequent but small wars. The wars became fewer in number as political units became consolidated into larger states. At the same time the wars that did occur were becoming more lethal, because of a military revolution that created larger and more effective armies. Finally, in different periods European countries veered between totalizing ideologies that subordinated individual people’s interests to a utopian vision and an Enlightenment humanism that elevated those interests as the ultimate value.
THE HOBBESIAN BACKGROUND AND THE AGES OF DYNASTIES AND RELIGIONS
The backdrop of European history during most of the past millennium is everpresent warring. Carried over from the knightly raiding and feuding in medieval times, the wars embroiled every kind of political unit that emerged in the ensuing centuries.
The sheer number of European wars is mind-boggling. Brecke has compiled a prequel to the Conflict Catalog which lists 1,148 conflicts from 900 CE to 1400 CE, and the catalog itself lists another 1,166 from 1400 CE to the present—about two new conflicts a year for eleven hundred years.88 The vast majority of these conflicts, including most of the major wars involving great powers, are outside the consciousness of all but the most assiduous historians. To take some random examples, the Dano-Swedish War (1516–25), the Schmalkaldic War (1546–47), the Franco-Savoian War (1600–1601), the Turkish-Polish War (1673–76), the War of Julich Succession (1609–10), and the Austria-Sardinia War (1848–49) elicit blank stares from most educated people.89
Warring was not just prevalent in practice but accepted in theory. Howard notes that among the ruling classes, “Peace was regarded as a brief interval between wars,” and war was “an almost automatic activity, part of the natural order of things.”90 Luard adds that while many battles in the 15th and 16th centuries had moderately low casualty rates, “even when casualties were high, there is little evidence that they weighed heavily with rulers or military commanders. They were seen, for the most part, as the inevitable price of war, which in itself was honourable and glorious.”91
What were they fighting over? The motives were the “three principal causes of quarrel” identified by Hobbes: predation (primarily of land), preemption of predation by others, and credible deterrence or honor. The principal difference between European wars and the raiding and feuding of tribes, knights, and warlords was that the wars were carried out by organized political units rather than by individuals or clans. Conquest and plunder were the principal means of upward mobility in the centuries when wealth resided in land and resources rather than in commerce and innovation. Nowadays ruling a dominion doesn’t strike most of us as an appealing career choice. But the expression “to live like a king” reminds us that centuries ago it was the main route to amenities like plentiful food, comfortable shelter, pretty objects, entertainment on demand, and children who survived their first year of life. The perennial nuisance of royal bastards also reminds us that a lively sex life was a perquisite of European kings no less than of harem-holding sultans, with “serving maids” a euphemism for concubines.92
But what the leaders sought was not just material rewards but a spiritual need for dominance, glory, and grandeur—the bliss of contemplating a map and seeing more square inches tinted in the color that represents your dominion than someone else’s. Luard notes that even when rulers had little genuine authority over their titular realms, they went to war for “the theoretical right of overlordship: who owed allegiance to whom and for which territories.”93 Many of the wars were pissing contests. Nothing was at stake but the willingness of one leader to pay homage to another in the form of titles, courtesies, and seating arrangements. Wars could be triggered by symbolic affronts such as a refusal to dip a flag, to salute colors, to remove heraldic symbols from a coat of arms, or to follow protocols of ambassadorial precedence.94
Though the motive to lead a dominant political bloc was constant through European history, the definition of the blocs changed, and w
ith it the nature and extent of the fighting. In War in International Society, the most systematic attempt to combine a dataset of war with narrative history, Luard proposes that the sweep of armed conflict in Europe may be divided into five “ages,” each defined by the nature of the blocs that fought for dominance. In fact Luard’s ages are more like overlapping strands in a rope than boxcars on a track, but if we keep that in mind, his scheme helps to organize the major historical shifts in war.
Luard calls the first of his ages, which ran from 1400 to 1559, the Age of Dynasties. In this epoch, royal “houses,” or extended coalitions based on kinship, vied for control of European turfs. A little biology shows why the idea of basing leadership on inheritance is a recipe for endless wars of succession.
Rulers always face the dilemma of how to reconcile their thirst for everlasting power with an awareness of their own mortality. A natural solution is to designate an offspring, usually a firstborn son, as a successor. Not only do people think of their genetic progeny as an extension of themselves, but filial affection ought to inhibit any inclination of the successor to hurry things along with a little regicide. This would solve the succession problem in a species in which an organism could bud off an adult clone of himself shortly before he died. But many aspects of the biology of Homo sapiens confound the scheme.
First, humans are altricial, with immature newborns and a long childhood. That means that a father can die while a son is too young to rule. Second, character traits are polygenic, and hence obey the statistical law called regression to the mean: however exceptional in courage or wisdom a parent may be, on average his or her children will be less so. (As the critic Rebecca West wrote, 645 years of the Habsburg dynasty produced “no genius, only two rulers of ability . . . , countless dullards, and not a few imbeciles and lunatics.”)95 Third, humans reproduce sexually, which means that every person is the genetic legacy of two lineages, not one, each of which can lay a claim to the person’s loyalties when he is alive and to his perquisites when he dies. Fourth, humans are sexually dimorphic, and though the female of the species may, on average, get less emotional gratification from conquest and tyranny than the male, many are capable of cultivating the taste when the opportunity presents itself. Fifth, humans are mildly polygynous, so males are apt to sire bastards, who become rivals to their legitimate heirs. Sixth, humans are multiparous, having several offspring over their reproductive careers. This sets the stage for parent-offspring conflict, in which a son may want to take over a lineage’s reproductive franchise before a father is through with it; and sibling rivalry, in which a laterborn may covet the parental investment lavished on a firstborn. Seventh, humans are nepotistic, investing in their siblings’ children as well as in their own. Each of these biological realities, and often several at a time, left room for disagreement about who was the appropriate successor of a dead monarch, and the Europeans hashed out these disagreements in countless dynastic wars.96
Luard designates 1559 as the inception of the Age of Religions, which lasted until the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. Rival religious coalitions, often aligning with rulers according to the principle Un roi, une loi, une foi (One king, one law, one faith), fought for control of cities and states in at least twenty-five international wars and twenty-six civil wars. Usually Protestants warred against Catholics, but during Russia’s Time of Troubles (an interregnum between the reign of Boris Godunov and the establishment of the Romanov dynasty), Catholic and Orthodox factions vied for control. The religious fever was not confined to Christendom: Christian countries fought Muslim Turkey, and Sunni and Shiite Muslims fought in four wars between Turkey and Persia.
This is the age that contributed atrocities number 13, 14, and 17 to the population-adjusted top-twenty-one list on page 195, and it is marked by pinnacles of death in figure 5–15 and figure 5–18. The era broke new records for killing partly because of advances in military technology such as muskets, pikes, and artillery. But that could not have been the main cause of the carnage, because in subsequent centuries the technology kept getting deadlier while the death toll came back to earth. Luard singles out religious passion as the cause:It was above all the extension of warfare to civilians, who (especially if they worshipped the wrong god) were frequently regarded as expendable, which now increased the brutality of war and the level of casualties. Appalling bloodshed could be attributed to divine wrath. The duke of Alva had the entire male population of Naarden killed after its capture (1572), regarding this as a judgement of God for their hard-necked obstinacy in resisting; just as Cromwell later, having allowed his troops to sack Drogheda with appalling bloodshed (1649), declared that this was a “righteous judgement of God.” Thus by a cruel paradox those who fought in the name of their faith were often less likely than any to show humanity to their opponents in war. And this was reflected in the appalling loss of life, from starvation and the destruction of crops as much as from warfare, which occurred in the areas most ravaged by religious conflict in this age.97
Names like the “Thirty Years’ War” and the “Eighty Years’ War,” together with the never-equaled spike in war durations shown in figure 5–14, tell us that the Wars of Religion were not just intense but interminable. The historian of diplomacy Garrett Mattingly notes that in this period a major mechanism for ending war was disabled: “As religious issues came to dominate political ones, any negotiations with the enemies of one state looked more and more like heresy and treason. The questions which divided Catholics from Protestants had ceased to be negotiable. Consequently . . . diplomatic contacts diminished.”98 It would not be the last time ideological fervor would act as an accelerant to a military conflagration.
THREE CURRENTS IN THE AGE OF SOVEREIGNTY
Historians consider the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 not only to have put out the Wars of Religion but to have established the first version of the modern international order. Europe was now partitioned into sovereign states rather than being a crazy quilt of jurisdictions nominally overseen by the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. This Age of Sovereignty saw the ascendancy of states that were still linked to dynasties and religions but that really hung their prestige on their governments, territories, and commercial empires. It was this gradual consolidation of sovereign states (culminating a process that began well before 1648) that set off the two opposing trends that have emerged from every statistical study of war we have seen: wars were getting less frequent but more damaging.
A major reason wars declined in number was that the units that could fight each other declined in number. Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank from five hundred around the time of the Thirty Years’ War to fewer than thirty in the 1950s.99 Now, you might think that this makes the decline in the frequency of wars just an accounting trick. With the stroke of an eraser, diplomats remove a line on a map that separates warring parties and magically take their conflict out of the “interstate war” books and hide it in the “civil war” books. But in fact the reduction is real. As Richardson showed, when we hold area constant, there are far fewer civil wars within national boundaries than there are interstate wars crossing them. (Just think of England, which hasn’t had a true civil war in 350 years, but has fought many interstate wars since then.) It is another illustration of the logic of the Leviathan. As small baronies and duchies coalesced into larger kingdoms, the centralized authorities prevented them from warring with each other for the same reason that they prevented individual citizens from murdering each other (and that farmers prevent their livestock from killing each other): as far as an overlord is concerned, private quarrels within his domain are a dead loss. The reduction in the frequency of war is thus another manifestation of Elias’s Civilizing Process.
The greater lethality of the wars that did take place was the result of a development called the military revolution.100 States got serious about war. This was partly a matter of improved weaponry, especially cannons and guns, but it was more a matt
er of recruiting greater numbers of people to kill and be killed. In medieval Europe and the Age of Dynasties, rulers were understandably nervous about arming large numbers of their peasants and training them in combat. (One can hear them asking themselves: What could possibly go wrong?) Instead they assembled ad hoc militias by hiring mercenaries or conscripting miscreants and ne’er-do-wells who could not buy their way out. In his essay “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” Charles Tilly wrote:In times of war . . . , the managers of full-fledged states often commissioned privateers, hired sometime bandits to raid their enemies, and encouraged their regular troops to take booty. In royal service, soldiers and sailors were often expected to provide for themselves by preying on the civilian population: commandeering, raping, looting, taking prizes. When demobilized, they commonly continued the same practices, but without the same royal protection; demobilized ships became pirate vessels, demobilized troops bandits.
It also worked the other way: A king’s best source of armed supporters was sometimes the world of outlaws. Robin Hood’s conversion to royal archer may be a myth, but the myth records a practice. The distinctions between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” users of violence came clear only very slowly, in the process during which the states’ armed forces became relatively unified and permanent.101