FIGURE 5–19. Length of military conscription, 48 major long-established nations, 1970–2010
Sources: Graph for 1970–2000 from Payne, 2004, p. 74, based on data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), The Military Balance, various editions. Data for 2010 from the 2010 edition of The Military Balance (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2010), supplemented when incomplete from The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 2010.
Another indicator of war-friendliness is the size of a nation’s military forces as a proportion of its population, whether enlisted by conscription or by television ads promising volunteers that they can be all that they can be. Payne has shown that the proportion of the population that a nation puts in uniform is the best indicator of its ideological embrace of militarism.164 When the United States demobilized after World War II, it took on a new enemy in the Cold War and never shrank its military back to prewar levels. But figure 5–20 shows that the trend since the mid-1950s has been sharply downward. Europe’s disinvestment of human capital in the military sector began even earlier.
Other large countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, and China, also shrank their armed forces during this half-century. After the Cold War ended, the trend went global: from a peak of more than 9 military personnel per 100,000 people in 1988, the average across long-established countries plunged to less than 5.5 in 2001.165 Some of these savings have come from outsourcing noncombat functions like laundry and food services to private contractors, and in the wealthiest countries, from replacing front-line military personnel with robots and drones. But the age of robotic warfare is far in the future, and recent events have shown that the number of available boots on the ground is still a major constraint on the projection of military force. For that matter, the roboticizing of the military is itself a manifestation of the trend we are exploring. Countries have developed these technologies at fantastic expense because the lives of their citizens (and, as we shall see, of foreign citizens) have become dearer.
FIGURE 5–20. Military personnel, United States and Europe, 1950–2000
Sources: Correlates of War National Material Capabilities Dataset (1816–2001); http://www.correlatesofwar.org, Sarkees, 2000. Unweighted averages, every five years. “Europe” includes Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia/USSR, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, U.K., Yugoslavia.
Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.
—UNESCO motto
Another indication that the Long Peace is no accident is a set of sanity checks which confirm that the mentality of leaders and populaces has changed. Each component of the war-friendly mindset—nationalism, territorial ambition, an international culture of honor, popular acceptance of war, and indifference to its human costs—went out of fashion in developed countries in the second half of the 20th century.
The first signal event was the 1948 endorsement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by forty-eight countries. The declaration begins with these articles:Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or institutional status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, nonself-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.
It’s tempting to dismiss this manifesto as feel-good verbiage. But in endorsing the Enlightenment ideal that the ultimate value in the political realm is the individual human being, the signatories were repudiating a doctrine that had reigned for more than a century, namely that the ultimate value was the nation, people, culture, Volk, class, or other collectivity (to say nothing of the doctrine of earlier centuries that the ultimate value was the monarch, and the people were his or her chattel). The need for an assertion of universal human rights had become evident during the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–46, when some lawyers had argued that Nazis could be prosecuted only for the portion of the genocides they committed in occupied countries like Poland. What they did on their own territory, according to the earlier way of thinking, was none of anyone else’s business.
Another sign that the declaration was more than hot air was that the great powers were nervous about signing it. Britain was worried about its colonies, the United States about its Negroes, and the Soviet Union about its puppet states.166 But after Eleanor Roosevelt shepherded the declaration through eighty-three meetings, it passed without opposition (though pointedly, with eight abstentions from the Soviet bloc).
The era’s repudiation of counter-Enlightenment ideology was made explicit forty-five years later by Václav Havel, the playwright who became president of Czechoslovakia after the nonviolent Velvet Revolution had overthrown the communist government. Havel wrote, “The greatness of the idea of European integration on democratic foundations is its capacity to overcome the old Herderian idea of the nation state as the highest expression of national life.”167
One paradoxical contributor to the Long Peace was the freezing of national borders. The United Nations initiated a norm that existing states and their borders were sacrosanct. By demonizing any attempt to change them by force as “aggression,” the new understanding took territorial expansion off the table as a legitimate move in the game of international relations. The borders may have made little sense, the governments within them may not have deserved to govern, but rationalizing the borders by violence was no longer a live option in the minds of statesmen. The grandfathering of boundaries has been, on average, a pacifying development because, as the political scientist John Vasquez has noted, “of all the issues over which wars could logically be fought, territorial issues seem to be the one most often associated with wars. Few interstate wars are fought without any territorial issue being involved in one way or another.”168
The political scientist Mark Zacher has quantified the change.169 Since 1951 there have been only ten invasions that resulted in a major change in national boundaries, all before 1975. Many of them planted flags in sparsely populated hinterlands and islands, and some carved out new political entities (such as Bangladesh) rather than expanding the territory of the conqueror. Ten may sound like a lot, but as figure 5–21 shows, it represents a precipitous drop from the preceding three centuries.
Israel is an exception that proves the rule. The serpentine “green line” where the Israeli and Arab armies stopped in 1949 was not particularly acceptable to anyone at the time, especially the Arab states. But in the ensuing decades it took on an almost mystical status in the international community as Israel’s one true correct border. The country has acceded to international pressure to relinquish most of the territory it has occupied in the various wars since then, and within our lifetimes it will probably withdraw from the rest, with some minor swaps of land and perhaps a complicated arrangement regarding Jerusalem, where the norm of immovable borders will clash with the norm of undivided cities. Most other conquests, such as the Indonesian takeover of East Timor, have been reversed as well. The most dramatic recent example was in 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait (the only time since 1945 that one member of the UN has swallowed another one whole), and an aghast multinational coalition made short work of pushing him out.
FIGURE 5–21. Percentage of territorial wars resulting in redistribution of territory, 1651–2000
Source: Data from Zacher, 2001, tables 1 and 2; the data point for each half-century is plotted at its midpoin
t, except for the last half of the 20th century, in which each point represents a quarter-century.
The psychology behind the sanctity of national boundaries is not so much empathy or moral reasoning as norms and taboos (a topic that will be explored in chapter 9). Among respectable countries, conquest is no longer a thinkable option. A politician in a democracy today who suggested conquering another country would be met not with counterarguments but with puzzlement, embarrassment, or laughter.
The territorial-integrity norm, Zacher points out, has ruled out not just conquest but other kinds of boundary-tinkering. During decolonization, the borders of newly independent states were the lines that some imperial administrator had drawn on a map decades before, often bisecting ethnic homelands or throwing together enemy tribes. Nonetheless there was no movement to get all the new leaders to sit around a table with a blank map and a pencil and redraw the borders from scratch. The breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia also resulted in the dashed lines between internal republics and provinces turning into solid lines between sovereign states, without any redrafting.
The sacralization of arbitrary lines on a map may seem illogical, but there is a rationale to the respecting of norms, even arbitrary and unjustifiable ones. The game theorist Thomas Schelling has noted that when a range of compromises would leave two negotiators better off than they would be if they walked away, any salient cognitive landmark can lure them into an agreement that benefits them both.170 People bargaining over a price, for example, can “get to yes” by splitting the difference between their offers, or by settling on a round number, rather than haggling indefinitely over the fairest price. Melville’s whalers in Moby-Dick acceded to the norm that a fast-fish belongs to the party fast to it because they knew it would avoid “the most vexatious and violent disputes.” Lawyers say that possession is nine tenths of the law, and everyone knows that good fences make good neighbors.
A respect for the territorial-integrity norm ensures that the kind of discussion that European leaders had with Hitler in the 1930s, when it was considered perfectly reasonable that he should swallow Austria and chunks of Czechoslovakia to make the borders of Germany coincide with the distribution of ethnic Germans, is no longer thinkable. Indeed, the norm has been corroding the ideal of the nation-state and its sister principle of the self-determination of peoples, which obsessed national leaders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The goal of drawing a smooth border through the fractal of interpenetrating ethnic groups is an unsolvable geometry problem, and living with existing borders is now considered better than endless attempts to square the circle, with its invitations to ethnic cleansing and irredentist conquest.
The territorial-integrity norm brings with it numerous injustices, as ethnic groups may find themselves submerged in political entities that have no benevolent interest in their welfare. The point was not lost on Ishmael, who mused, “What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish?” Some of Europe’s peaceful borders demarcate countries that were conveniently homogenized by the massive ethnic cleansing of World War II and its aftermath, when millions of ethnic Germans and Slavs were forcibly uprooted from their homes. The developing world is now being held to higher standards, and it is likely, as the sociologist Ann Hironaka has argued, that its civil wars have been prolonged by the insistence that states always be preserved and borders never altered. But on balance, the sacred-border norm appears to have been a good bargain for the world. As we shall see in the next chapter, the death toll from a large number of small civil wars is lower than that from a few big interstate wars, to say nothing of world wars, consistent with the power-law distribution of deadly quarrels. And even civil wars have become fewer in number and less damaging as the modern state evolves from a repository for the national soul to a multiethnic social contract conforming to the principle of human rights.
Together with nationalism and conquest, another ideal has faded in the postwar decades: honor. As Luard understates it, “In general, the value placed on human life today is probably higher, and that placed on national prestige (or ‘honor’) probably lower, than in earlier times.”171 Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union during the worst years of the Cold War, captured the new sensibility when he said, “I’m not some czarist officer who has to kill himself if I fart at a masked ball. It’s better to back down than to go to war.”172 Many national leaders agree, and have backed down or held their fire in response to provocations that in previous eras would have incited them to war.
In 1979 the United States responded to two affronts in quick succession—the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the government-indulged takeover of the American embassy in Iran—with little more than an Olympic boycott and a nightly televised vigil. As Jimmy Carter said later, “I could have destroyed Iran with my weaponry, but I felt in the process it was likely that the hostages’ lives would be lost, and I didn’t want to kill 20,000 Iranians. So I didn’t attack.”173 Though American hawks were furious at Carter’s wimpiness, their own hero, Ronald Reagan, responded to a 1983 bombing that killed 241 American servicemen in Beirut by withdrawing all American forces from the country, and he sat tight in 1987 when Iraqi jet fighters killed thirty-seven sailors on the USS Stark. The 2004 train bombing in Madrid by an Islamist terrorist group, far from whipping the Spanish into an anti-Islamic lather, prompted them to vote out the government that had involved them in the Iraq War, an involvement many felt had brought the attack upon them.
The most consequential discounting of honor in the history of the world was the resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Though the pursuit of national prestige may have precipitated the crisis, once Khrushchev and Kennedy were in it, they reflected on their mutual need to save face and set that up as a problem for the two of them to solve.174 Kennedy had read Tuchman’s The Guns of August, a history of World War I, and knew that an international game of chicken driven by “personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur” could lead to a cataclysm. Robert Kennedy, in a memoir on the crisis, recalled:Neither side wanted war over Cuba, we agreed, but it was possible that either side could take a step that—for reasons of “security” or “pride” or “face”—would require a response by the other side, which, in turn, for the same reasons of security, pride, or face, would bring about a counterresponse and eventually an escalation into armed conflict. That was what he wanted to avoid.175
Khrushchev’s wisecrack about the czarist officer shows that he too was cognizant of the psychology of honor, and he had a similar intuitive sense of game theory. During a tense moment in the crisis, he offered Kennedy this analysis:You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter this knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut.176
They untied the knot by making mutual concessions—Khrushchev removed his missiles from Cuba, Kennedy removed his from Turkey, and Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba. Nor was the de-escalation purely a stroke of uncanny good luck. Mueller reviewed the history of superpower confrontations during the Cold War and concluded that the sequence was more like climbing a ladder than stepping onto an escalator. Though several times the leaders began a perilous ascent, with each rung they climbed they became increasingly acrophobic, and always sought a way to gingerly step back down.177
And for all the shoe-pounding bluster of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, its leadership spared the world another cataclysm when Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the Soviet bloc, and then the Soviet Union itself, to go out of existence—what the historian Timothy Garton Ash has called a “breathtaking renunciation of the use of force” and a “luminous example of the importance of the individual in history.”
This last remark reminds us that historical contingency works both ways. There are parallel universes in which the archduke’s driver didn’t make a wrong
turn in Sarajevo, or in which a policeman aimed differently during the Beer Hall Putsch, and history unfolded with one or two fewer world wars. There are other parallel universes in which an American president listened to his Joint Chiefs of Staff and invaded Cuba, or in which a Soviet leader responded to the breach of the Berlin Wall by calling out the tanks, and history unfolded with one or two more. But given the changing odds set by the prevailing ideas and norms, it is not surprising that in our universe it was the first half of the 20th century that was shaped by a Princip and a Hitler, and the second half by a Kennedy, a Khrushchev, and a Gorbachev.
Yet another historic upheaval in the landscape of 20th-century values was a resistance by the populations of democratic nations to their leaders’ plans for war. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw mass demonstrations to Ban the Bomb, whose legacy includes the trident-in-circle peace symbol co-opted by other antiwar movements. By the late 1960s the United States was torn apart by protests against the Vietnam War. Antiwar convictions were no longer confined to sentimental aunts of both sexes, and the idealists who went about in sandals and beards were no longer cranks but a significant proportion of the generation that reached adulthood in the 1960s. Unlike the major artworks deploring World War I, which appeared more than a decade after it was over, popular art in the 1960s condemned the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War in real time. Antiwar advocacy was woven into prime-time television programs (such as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and M*A*S*H) and many popular films and songs:Catch-22 • Fail-Safe • Dr. Strangelove • Hearts and Minds • FTA • How I Won the War • Johnny Got His Gun • King of Hearts • M*A*S*H • Oh! What a Lovely War • Slaughterhouse-Five
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 39