Russett and Oneal propose that membership in intergovernmental organizations is the third vertex of a triangle of pacifying forces which they attribute to Kant, the other two being democracy and trade. (Though Kant did not single out trade in “Perpetual Peace,” he extolled it elsewhere, so Russett and Oneal felt they could take some license in drawing their triangle.) The international organizations needn’t have utopian or even idealistic missions. They can coordinate defense, currency, postal service, tariffs, canal traffic, fishing rights, pollution, tourism, war crimes, weights and measures, road signs, anything—as long as they are voluntary associations of governments. Figure 5–25 shows how membership in these organizations steadily increased during the 20th century, with a bump after World War II.
To verify whether IGO membership made an independent contribution to peace, or just went along for the ride with democracy and trade, Russett and Oneal counted the number of IGOs that every pair of nations jointly belonged to, and they threw it into the regression analysis together with the democracy and trade scores and the realpolitik variables. The researchers concluded that Kant got it right three out of three times: democracy favors peace, trade favors peace, and membership in intergovernmental organizations favors peace. A pair of countries that are in the top tenth of the scale on all three variables are 83 percent less likely than an average pair of countries to have a militarized dispute in a given year, which means the likelihood is very close to zero.250
Might Kant have been right in an even grander sense? Russett and Oneal defended the Kantian triangle with sophisticated correlations. But a causal story derived from correlational data is always vulnerable to the possibility that some hidden entity is the real cause of both the effect one is trying to explain and the variables one is using to explain it. In the case of the Kantian triangle, each putative pacifying agent may depend on a deeper and even more Kantian cause: a willingness to resolve conflicts by means that are acceptable to all the affected parties, rather than by the stronger party imposing its will on the weaker one. Nations become stable democracies only when their political factions tire of murder as the means of assigning power. They engage in commerce only when they put a greater value on mutual prosperity than on unilateral glory. And they join intergovernmental organizations only when they are willing to cede a bit of sovereignty for a bit of mutual benefit. In other words, by signing on to the Kantian variables, nations and their leaders are increasingly acting in such a way that the principle behind their actions can be made universal. Could the Long Peace represent the ascendancy in the international arena of the Categorical Imperative? 251
FIGURE 5–25. Average number of IGO memberships shared by a pair of countries, 1885–2000
Source: Graph from Russett, 2008.
Many scholars in international relations would snort at the very idea. According to an influential theory tendentiously called “realism,” the absence of a world government consigns nations to a permanent state of Hobbesian anarchy. That means that leaders must act like psychopaths and consider only the national self-interest, unsoftened by sentimental (and suicidal) thoughts of morality.252
Realism is sometimes defended as a consequence of the existence of human nature, where the underlying theory of human nature is that people are selfinterested rational animals. But as we shall see in chapters 8 and 9, humans are also moral animals: not in the sense that their behavior is moral in the light of disinterested ethical analysis, but in the sense that it is guided by moral intuitions supported by emotions, norms, and taboos. Humans are also cognitive animals, who spin out beliefs and use them to guide their actions. None of these endowments pushes our species toward peace by default. But it is neither sentimental nor unscientific to imagine that particular historical moments can engage the moral and cognitive faculties of leaders and their coalitions in a combination that inclines them toward peaceful coexistence. Perhaps the Long Peace is one of them.
In addition to the three proximate Kantian causes, then, the Long Peace may depend on an ultimate Kantian cause. Norms among the influential constituencies in developed countries may have evolved to incorporate the conviction that war is inherently immoral because of its costs to human well-being, and that it can be justified only on the rare occasions when it is certain to prevent even greater costs to human well-being. If so, interstate war among developed countries would be going the way of customs such as slavery, serfdom, breaking on the wheel, disemboweling, bearbaiting, cat-burning, heretic-burning, witch-drowning, thief-hanging, public executions, the display of rotting corpses on gibbets, dueling, debtors’ prisons, flogging, keelhauling, and other practices that passed from unexceptionable to controversial to immoral to unthinkable to not-thought-about during the Humanitarian Revolution.
Can we identify exogenous causes of the new humanitarian aversion to war among developed countries? In chapter 4 I conjectured that the Humanitarian Revolution was accelerated by publishing, literacy, travel, science, and other cosmopolitan forces that broaden people’s intellectual and moral horizons. The second half of the 20th century has obvious parallels. It saw the dawn of television, computers, satellites, telecommunications, and jet travel, and an unprecedented expansion of science and higher education. The communications guru Marshall McLuhan called the postwar world a “global village.” In a village, the fortunes of other people are immediately felt. If the village is the natural size of our circle of sympathy, then perhaps when the village goes global, the villagers will experience greater concern for their fellow humans than when it embraced just the clan or tribe. A world in which a person can open the morning paper and meet the eyes of a naked, terrified little girl running toward him from a napalm attack nine thousand miles away is not a world in which a writer can opine that war is “the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of man” or that it “enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character.”
The end of the Cold War and the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire have also been linked to the easier movement of people and ideas at the end of the 20th century.253 By the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union’s attempt to retain its power by totalitarian control of media and travel was becoming a significant handicap. Not only was it becoming ludicrous for a modern economy to do without photocopiers, fax machines, and personal computers (to say nothing of the nascent Internet), but it was impossible for the country’s rulers to keep scientists and policy wonks from learning about the ideas in the increasingly prosperous West, or to keep the postwar generation from learning about rock music, blue jeans, and other perquisites of personal freedom. Mikhail Gorbachev was a man of cosmopolitan tastes, and he installed in his administration many analysts who had traveled and studied in the West. The Soviet leadership made a verbal commitment to human rights in the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and a cross-border network of human rights activists were trying to get the populace to hold them to it. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (openness) allowed Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn’s The Gulag Archipelago to be serialized in 1989, and it allowed debates in the Congress of People’s Deputies to be televised, exposing millions of Russians to the brutality of the past Soviet leadership and the ineptitude of the current one.254 Silicon chips, jet airplanes, and the electromagnetic spectrum were loosing ideas that helped to corrode the Iron Curtain. Though today’s authoritarian China may seem to be straining the hypothesis that technology and travel are liberalizing forces, its leadership is incomparably less murderous than Mao’s insular regime, as the numbers in the next chapter will show.
There may be another reason why antiwar sentiments finally took. The trajectory of violent deaths in Europe that we saw in figure 5–18 is a craggy landscape in which three pinnacles—the Wars of Religion, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the two world wars—are followed by extended basins, each at a lower altitude than the preceding one. After each hemoclysm, world leaders tried, with some success, to make a recurrence less likely. Of course their treaties and concerts did not last forever, and an inn
umerate reading of history may invite the conclusion that the days of the Long Peace are running out and that an even bigger war is waiting to be born. But the Poisson pitter-patter of war shows no periodicity, no cycle of buildup and release. Nothing prevents the world from learning from its mistakes and driving the probability lower each time.
Lars-Erik Cederman went back to Kant’s essays and discovered a twist in his prescription for perpetual peace. Kant was under no illusion that national leaders were sagacious enough to deduce the conditions of peace from first principles; he realized they would need to learn them from bitter historical experience. In an essay called “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” he wrote:Wars, tense and unremitting preparations, and the resultant distress which every state must eventually feel within itself, even in the midst of peace—these are the means by which nature drives nations to make initially imperfect attempts, but finally, after many devastations, upheavals and even complete inner exhaustion of their powers, to take the step which reason could have suggested to them even without so many sad experiences—that of abandoning their lawless state of savagery.255
Cederman suggests that Kant’s theory of peace-through-learning should be combined with his theory of peace-through-democracy. Though all states, including democracies, start off warlike (since many democracies began as great powers), and all states can be blindsided by sudden terrible wars, democracies may be better equipped to learn from their catastrophes, because of their openness to information and the accountability of their leaders.256
Cederman plotted the historical trajectory of militarized disputes from 1837 to 1992 within pairs of democracies and other pairs of countries (figure 5–26). The inclined sawtooth for democracies shows that they started out warlike and thereafter underwent periodic shocks that sent their rate of disputes skyward. But after each peak their dispute rate quickly fell back to earth. Cederman also found that the learning curve was steeper for mature democracies than for newer ones. Autocracies too returned to more peaceable levels after the sudden shocks of major wars, but they did so more slowly and erratically. The fuzzy idea that after the 20th-century Hemoclysm an increasingly democratic world “got tired of war” and “learned from its mistakes” may have some truth to it.257
FIGURE 5–26. Probability of militarized disputes between pairs of democracies and other pairs of countries, 1825–1992
Source: Graph from Cederman, 2001. The curves plot 20-year moving averages for at-risk pairs of countries.
A popular theme in the antiwar ballads of the 1960s was that evidence of the folly of war had always been available but that people stubbornly refused to see it. “How many deaths will it take till they learn that too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” “Where have all the soldiers gone? Gone to graveyards, every one. When will they ever learn?” After half a millennium of wars of dynasties, wars of religion, wars of sovereignty, wars of nationalism, and wars of ideology, of the many small wars in the spine of the distribution and a few horrendous ones in the tail, the data suggest that perhaps, at last, we’re learning.
6
THE NEW PEACE
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes,
even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of
Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no
ideology.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You would think that the disappearance of the gravest threat in the history of humanity would bring a sigh of relief among commentators on world affairs. Contrary to expert predictions, there was no invasion of Western Europe by Soviet tanks, no escalation of a crisis in Cuba or Berlin or the Middle East to a nuclear holocaust.1 The cities of the world were not vaporized; the atmosphere was not poisoned by radioactive fallout or choked with debris that blacked out the sun and sent Homo sapiens the way of the dinosaurs. Not only that, but a reunified Germany did not turn into a fourth reich, democracy did not go the way of monarchy, and the great powers and developed nations did not fall into a third world war but rather a long peace, which keeps getting longer. Surely the experts have been acknowledging the improvements in the world’s fortunes from a few decades ago.
But no—the pundits are glummer than ever! In 1989 John Gray foresaw “a return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great power rivalries . . . and irredentist claims and wars.”2 A New York Times editor wrote in 2007 that this return had already taken place: “It did not take long [after 1989] for the gyre to wobble back onto its dependably blood-soaked course, pushed along by fresh gusts of ideological violence and absolutism.”3 The political scientist Stanley Hoffman said that he has been discouraged from teaching his course on international relations because after the end of the Cold War, one heard “about nothing but terrorism, suicide bombings, displaced people, and genocides.” 4 The pessimism is bipartisan: in 2007 the conservative writer Norman Podhoretz published a book called World War IV (on “the long struggle against Islamofascism”), while the liberal columnist Frank Rich wrote that the world was “a more dangerous place than ever.”5 If Rich is correct, then the world was more dangerous in 2007 than it was during the two world wars, the Berlin crises of 1949 and 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and all the wars in the Middle East. That’s pretty dangerous.
Why the gloom? Partly it’s the result of market forces in the punditry business, which favor the Cassandras over the Pollyannas. Partly it arises from human temperament: as David Hume observed, “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endowed with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning.” But mainly, I think, it comes from the innumeracy of our journalistic and intellectual culture. The journalist Michael Kinsley recently wrote, “It is a crushing disappointment that Boomers entered adulthood with Americans killing and dying halfway around the world, and now, as Boomers reach retirement and beyond, our country is doing the same damned thing.”6 This assumes that 5,000 Americans dying is the same damned thing as 58,000 Americans dying, and that a hundred thousand Iraqis being killed is the same damned thing as several million Vietnamese being killed. If we don’t keep an eye on the numbers, the programming policy “If it bleeds it leads” will feed the cognitive shortcut “The more memorable, the more frequent,” and we will end up with what has been called a false sense of insecurity.7
This chapter is about three kinds of organized violence that have stoked the new pessimism. They were given short shrift in the preceding chapter, which concentrated on wars among great powers and developed states. The Long Peace has not seen an end to these other kinds of conflict, leaving the impression that the world is “a more dangerous place than ever.”
The first kind of organized violence embraces all the other categories of war, most notably the civil wars and wars between militias, guerrillas, and paramilitaries that plague the developing world. These are the “new wars” or “low-intensity conflicts” that are said to be fueled by “ancient hatreds.”8 Familiar images of African teenagers with Kalashnikovs support the impression that the global burden of war has not declined but has only been displaced from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere.
The new wars are thought to be especially destructive to civilians because of the hunger and disease they leave in their wake, which are omitted from most counts of war dead. According to a widely repeated statistic, at the beginning of the 20th century 90 percent of war deaths were suffered by soldiers and 10 percent by civilians, but by the end of the century these proportions had reversed. Horrifying estimates of fatalities from famines and epidemics, rivaling the death toll of the Nazi Holocaust, have been reported in war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The second kind of organized violence I will track is the mass killing of ethnic and political groups. The hundred-year period from which we
have recently escaped has been called “the age of genocide” and “a century of genocide.” Many commentators have written that ethnic cleansing emerged with modernity, was held at bay by the hegemony of the superpowers, returned with a vengeance with the end of the Cold War, and today is as prevalent as ever.
The third is terrorism. Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the fear of terrorism has led to a massive new bureaucracy, two foreign wars, and obsessive discussion in the political arena. The threat of terrorism is said to pose an “existential threat” to the United States, having the capacity to “do away with our way of life” or to end “civilization itself.”9
Each of these scourges, of course, continues to take a toll in human lives. The question I will ask in this chapter is exactly how big a toll, and whether it has increased or decreased in the past few decades. It’s only recently that political scientists have tried to measure these kinds of destruction, and now that they have, they have reached a surprising conclusion: All these kinds of killing are in decline.10 The decreases are recent enough—in the past two decades or less—that we cannot count on them lasting, and in recognition of their tentative nature I will call this development the New Peace. Nonetheless the trends are genuine declines of violence and deserve our careful attention. They are substantial in size, opposite in sign to the conventional wisdom, and suggestive of ways we might identify what went right and do more of it in the future.