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1Thucydides also presents examples that differ markedly from the Melian Dialogue, such as the Mytilene debate. See Michael Walzer’s comparison in Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 5–11.

The appeal of different schools of thought in international relations tends to vary with developments in the real world. Perhaps because the 20th Century was one of unprecedented catastrophe, the dominant tra- dition has been what is known colloquially as “power politics.” In academic circles this family of ideas is known as “realism.” The main themes in this school of thought are that in order to survive, states are driven to seek power, that moral or legal principles that may govern relations among citizens within states cannot control the relations among states, and that wars occur because there is no sovereign in the international system to settle disputes peacefully and enforce judgments. States have no one but themselves to rely on for pro- tection, or to obtain what they believe they are entitled to by right.

Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, the history of the conflict between Ath- ens and Sparta two and a half millennia ago, is the classic statement of these ideas. The selection included here—the Melian Dialogue—is perhaps the most extreme and frank discussion of power politics, unclouded by diplomatic niceties, ever recorded. Taken alone, the dialogue can appear a caricature, so readers are encouraged to read more of the original work which is rich in commentary on various aspects of balance of power politics, strategy, and the role of ideology and domestic conflict in international relations.1

The tradition of realism can be traced in various forms through Machia- velli, Hobbes, the German schools of Realpolitik and Machtpolitik, to E.H. Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau and others in the mid-twentieth century. The selections from Machiavelli’s The Prince and Hobbes’ Levia- than that follow capsulize their views of the roots of political ruthlessness, the

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PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power 67

3Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979). See also Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).

similarity of diplomacy and political competition to the state of nature, and the need for leaders who seek to secure their regimes to do things in public life that are condemned in traditional codes of morality.

Readers should avoid the popular misinterpretation of these thinkers as amoral. Rather they should be understood as moral relativists, concerned with the need to secure the prerequisite (power) for achievement of anything moral, a need which may require behavior inconsistent with absolute norms or reli- gious ethics. As Machiavelli argues in the excerpt below, a prince must “not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained.”

In the past century, Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations2 was the most prominent textbook of realism in the United States. Carr’s Twenty Years Crisis, on the other hand, is distinguished by its pungency, which helps to convey the essence of realism in brief selections. Before pigeon-holing Carr as a strident realist, however, note his eloquent discussion of the serious deficien- cies of the theory in the middle of the excerpts that follow.

The most prominent recent writings in the realist school have been dubbed “neo” or “structural” realism to distinguish their more rigorously scientific formulation of the theory. Neorealists focus less on the questions of human motivation or the nature of political regimes than on the security incentives posed by the structure of the international system. The selection below by Kenneth Waltz, the dean of neorealism, is close to a summary of his master- work, Theory of International Politics.3 Mearsheimer’s hyper-realist argument in favor of the Cold War, in Part I above, derives directly from Waltz’ reason- ing about the stability of a bipolar world (discussed in this selection), and the pacifying effect of nuclear weapons (discussed in the selection by Waltz in Section VIII).

The favorable view of bipolarity among neorealists, however, contradicts traditional balance of power theory. In considering whether a world of only two major powers, as opposed to a world of many, should be less likely to lead to war, compare Waltz and Mearsheimer with Thucydides, Blainey, and Gilpin. The competitions between Athens and Sparta or Rome and Carthage, for example, unlike that between the United States and the Soviet Union, ended in disaster. Where Waltz sees bipolarity as imposing clarity and stabil- ity on the competition, others see it as inherently unstable, a delicate balance between contenders ever striving for primacy. Robert Gilpin sees history as a succession of struggles for hegemony between declining and rising powers, with the struggles normally resolved by a major war. Geoffrey Blainey consid- ers a hierarchical system, in which differences in power are clear, as most sta- ble. When there is no doubt about who would prevail if disagreements were to lead to combat, there is little chance that the strong will need to resort to combat or that the weak will dare. Blainey sees a world of rough parity, in

2Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 5th edition (New York: Knopf, 1973).

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5A further irony would be that if the liberal explanation for Soviet foreign policy at the end of the Cold War is convincing, the results in terms of international politics are still consistent with realism. The Gorbachev revolution contributed to the destruction of the Soviet Union, even if it did not fully cause it. It was not necessarily inevitable that a more ruthless Soviet leadership would have failed to preserve the empire, at least into the twenty-first Century. In Waltz’ terms, the Soviet Union certainly did “fall by the wayside.”

4Kenneth N. Waltz, “Structural Realism After the Cold War,” International Security 25, No. 1 (Summer 2000); William C. Wohlforth, “Realism and the End of the Cold War,” International Security 19, No. 3 (Winter 1994/95); Richard K. Betts, “Not with My Thucydides. You Don’t,” The American Interest 2, No. 4 (March/April 2007).

contrast, as unstable, because it is easier for states to miscalculate the balance of power and their chances of being able to impose their will by either initiat- ing or resisting the use of force. This view is consistent with Gilpin’s, since the challenger in a hegemonic transition is usually one whose power is approach- ing that of the leading state.

How much do the structure of the international balance of power and competition for primacy determine the actions of states? We might ask how one could have predicted the end of the Cold War from realist theories. Was the Soviet Union’s voluntary surrender of control over Eastern Europe in 1989, indeed its entire withdrawal from the power struggle with the West, consistent with such explanations of state behavior? Realists understand that statesmen do not always act in accord with realist norms. But the enormity of the Gorbachev revolution is an uncomfortable exception for the theory to have to bear. Nevertheless, realist scholars offer arguments for why the end of the Cold War should confirm their theories rather than revise them.4

If readers are not fully convinced that realist theories adequately explain the end of the Cold War they might consider another possibility. The greatest irony might be that the end came from the adoption of liberal ideas about in- ternational cooperation by the leadership of the Soviet Union, the superpower that had so tenaciously opposed western liberalism as a model for the world.5 The readings in Part III will present some tenets of the liberal tradition that offer a very different view of the possibilities of peace from the one presented in this section.

—RKB

The Melian Dialogue THUCYDIDES

The Melians are a colony of Lacedaemon [Sparta] that would not submit to the Athenians like the other islanders, and at first remained neutral and took no part in the struggle, but afterwards upon the Athenians using violence and plundering their territory, assumed an attitude of open hostility. Cleomedes, son of Lycomedes, and Tisias, son of Tisimachus, the generals, encamping in their territory with the above armament, before do- ing any harm to their land, sent envoys to negotiate. These the Melians did not bring before the people, but bade them state the object of their mission to the magistrates and the few; upon which the Athenian envoys spoke as follows:—

Athenians: ‘Since the negotiations are not to go on before the people, in order that we may not be able to speak straight on without interruption, and deceive the ears of the multitude by seductive arguments which would pass without refuta- tion (for we know that this is the meaning of our being brought before the few), what if you who sit there were to pursue a method more cautious still! Make no set speech yourselves, but take us up at whatever you do not like, and settle that before going any farther. And first tell us if this proposition of ours suits you.’

The Melian commissioners answered:—

Melians: ‘To the fairness of quietly instructing each other as you propose there is nothing to object; but your military preparations are too far advanced to agree with what you say, as we see you are come to be judges in your own cause, and that all we can reasonably expect from this negotiation is war, if we prove to have right on our side and refuse to submit, and in the contrary case, slavery.’

Athenians: ‘If you have met to reason about presentiments of the future, or for anything else than to consult for the safety of your state upon the facts that you see before you, we will give over; otherwise we will go on.’

Melians: ‘It is natural and excusable for men in our position to turn more ways than one both in thought and utterance. However, the question in this conference is, as you say, the safety of our country; and the discussion, if you please, can proceed in the way which you propose.’

Athenians: ‘For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences— either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us—and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Richard Crawley, trans. (New York: The Modern Library, 1934), Book V.

THUCYDIDES / The Melian Dialogue 69

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we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’

Melians: ‘As we think, at any rate, it is expedient—we speak as we are obliged, since you enjoin us to let right alone and talk only of interest—that you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of be- ing allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right, and even to profit by arguments not strictly valid if they can be got to pass current. And you are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon.’

Athenians: ‘The end of our empire, if end it should, does not frighten us: a rival empire like Lacedaemon, even if Lacedaemon was our real antagonist, is not so terrible to the vanquished as subjects who by themselves attack and overpower their rulers. This, however, is a risk that we are content to take. We will now proceed to show you that we are come here in the interest of our empire, and that we shall say what we are now going to say, for the preserva- tion of your country; as we would fain exercise that empire over you without trouble, and see you preserved for the good of us both.’

Melians: ‘And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule?’

Athenians: ‘Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you.’

Melians: ‘So that you would not consent to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side.’

Athenians: ‘No; for your hostility cannot so much hurt us as your friend- ship will be an argument to our subjects of our weakness, and your enmity of our power.’

Melians: ‘Is that your subjects’ idea of equity, to put those who have nothing to do with you in the same category with peoples that are most of them your own colonists, and some conquered rebels?’

Athenians: ‘As far as right goes they think one has as much of it as the other, and that if any maintain their independence it is because they are strong, and that if we do not molest them it is because we are afraid; so that besides extending our empire we should gain in security by your subjection; the fact that you are islanders and weaker than others rendering it all the more important that you should not succeed in baffling the masters of the sea.’

Melians: ‘But do you consider that there is no security in the policy which we indicate? For here again if you debar us from talking about justice and invite us to obey your interest, we also must explain ours, and try to persuade you, if the two happen to coincide. How can you avoid making enemies of all existing neutrals who shall look at our case and conclude from it that one day or another you will attack them? And what is this but to make greater the enemies that you have already, and to force others to become so who would otherwise have never thought of it?’

Athenians: ‘Why, the fact is that continentals generally give us but little alarm; the liberty which they enjoy will long prevent their taking precau- tions against us; it is rather islanders like yourselves, outside our empire, and

THUCYDIDES / The Melian Dialogue 71

s ubjects smarting under the yoke, who would be the most likely to take a rash step and lead themselves and us into obvious danger.’

Melians: ‘Well then, if you risk so much to retain your empire, and your subjects to get rid of it, it were surely great baseness and cowardice in us who are still free not to try everything that can be tried, before submitting to your yoke.’

Athenians: ‘Not if you are well advised, the contest not being an equal one, with honour as the prize and shame as the penalty, but a question of self- preservation and of not resisting those who are far stronger than you are.’

Melians: ‘But we know that the fortune of war is sometimes more impar- tial than the disproportion of numbers might lead one to suppose; to submit is to give ourselves over to despair, while action still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect.’

Athenians: ‘Hope, danger’s comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources, if not without loss at all events without ruin; but its nature is to be extravagant, and those who go so far as to put their all upon the venture see it in its true colours only when they are ruined; but so long as the discovery would enable them to guard against it, it is never found want- ing. Let not this be the case with you, who are weak and hang on a single turn of the scale; nor be like the vulgar, who, abandoning such security as human means may still afford, when visible hopes fail them in extremity, turn to in- visible, to prophecies and oracles, and other such inventions that delude men with hopes to their destruction.’

Melians: ‘You may be sure that we are as well aware as you of the diffi- culty of contending against your power and fortune, unless the terms be equal. But we trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust, and that what we want in power will be made up by the alliance of the Lacedaemonians, who are bound if only for very shame, to come to the aid of their kindred. Our confidence, therefore, after all is not so utterly irrational.’

Athenians: ‘When you speak of the favour of the gods, we may as fairly hope for that as yourselves; neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practise among them- selves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage. But when we come to your notion about the Lacedaemonians, which leads you to believe that shame will make them help you, here we bless your simplicity but do not envy your folly. The Lacedaemonians, when their own interests of their country’s laws are in question, are the worthiest men alive; of their conduct towards others much might be said, but no clearer idea of it could be given than by shortly saying that of all the men we know they are most conspicuous

72 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

in considering what is agreeable honourable, and what is expedient just. Such a way of thinking does not promise much for the safety which you now unrea- sonably count upon.’

Melians: ‘But it is for this very reason that we now trust to their respect for expediency to prevent them from betraying the Melians, their colonists, and thereby losing the confidence of their friends in Hellas and helping their enemies.’

Athenians: ‘Then you do not adopt the view that expediency goes with security, while justice and honour cannot be followed without danger; and danger the Lacedaemonians generally court as little as possible.’

Melians: ‘But we believe that they would be more likely to face even dan- ger for our sake, and with more confidence than for others, as our nearness to Peloponnese makes it easier for them to act, and our common blood insures our fidelity.’

Athenians: ‘Yes, but what an intending ally trusts to, is not the goodwill of those who ask his aid, but a decided superiority of power for action; and the Lacedaemonians look to this even more than others. At least, such is their distrust of their home resources that it is only with numerous allies that they attack a neighbour; now is it likely that while we are masters of the sea they will cross over to an island?’

Melians: ‘But they would have others to send. The Cretan sea is a wide one, and it is more difficult for those who command it to intercept others, than for those who wish to elude them to do so safely. And should the Lace- daemonians miscarry in this, they would fall upon your land, and upon those left of your allies whom Brasidas did not reach; and instead of places which are not yours, you will have to fight for your own country and your own confederacy.’

Athenians: ‘Some diversion of the kind you speak of you may one day experience, only to learn, as others have done, that the Athenians never once yet withdrew from a siege for fear of any. But we are struck by the fact, that after saying you would consult for the safety of your country, in all this dis- cussion you have mentioned nothing which men might trust in and think to be saved by. Your strongest arguments depend upon hope and the future, and your actual resources are too scanty, as compared with those arrayed against you, for you to come out victorious. You will therefore show great blindness of judgment, unless, after allowing us to retire, you can find some counsel more prudent than this. You will surely not be caught by that idea of disgrace, which in dangers that are disgraceful, and at the same time too plain to be mistaken, proves so fatal to mankind; since in too many cases the very men that have their eyes perfectly open to what they are rushing into, let the thing called disgrace, by the mere influence of a seductive name, lead them on to a point at which they become so enslaved by the phrase as in fact to fall wilfully into hopeless disaster, and incur disgrace more disgraceful as the companion of error, than when it comes as the result of misfortune. This, if you are well advised, you will guard against; and you will not think it dishonourable to submit to the greatest city in Hellas, when it makes you

THUCYDIDES / The Melian Dialogue 73

the moderate offer of becoming its tributary ally, without ceasing to enjoy the country that belongs to you; nor when you have the choice given you between war and security, will you be so blinded as to choose the worse. And it is certain that those who do not yield to their equals, who keep terms with their superiors, and are moderate towards their inferiors, on the whole succeed best. Think over the matter, therefore, after our withdrawal, and re- flect once and again that it is for your country that you are consulting, that you have not more than one, and that upon this one deliberation depends its prosperity or ruin.’

The Athenians now withdrew from the conference; and the Melians, left to themselves, came to a decision corresponding with what they had main- tained in the discussion, and answered, ‘Our resolution, Athenians, is the same as it was at first. We will not in a moment deprive of freedom a city that has been inhabited these seven hundred years; but we put our trust in the fortune by which the gods have preserved it until now, and in the help of men, that is, of the Lacedaemonians; and so we will try and save ourselves. Meanwhile we invite you to allow us to be friends to you and foes to neither party, and to retire from our country after making such a treaty as shall seem fit to us both.’

Such was the answer of the Melians. The Athenians now departing from the conference said, ‘Well, you alone, as it seems to us, judging from these res- olutions, regard what is future as more certain than what is before your eyes, and what is out of sight, in your eagerness, as already coming to pass; and as you have staked most on, and trusted most in, the Lacedaemonians, your for- tune, and your hopes, so will you be most completely deceived.’

The Athenian envoys now returned to the army; and the Melians showing no signs of yielding, the generals at once betook themselves to hostilities, and drew a line of circumvallation round the Melians, dividing the work among the different states. Subsequently the Athenians returned with most of their army, leaving behind them a certain number of their own citizens and of the allies to keep guard by land and sea. The force thus left stayed on and besieged the place. . . .

Summer was now over. The next winter the Lacedaemonians intended to invade the Argive territory, but arriving at the frontier found the sac- rifices for crossing unfavourable, and went back again. This intention of theirs gave the Argives suspicions of certain of their fellow-citizens, some of whom they arrested; others, however, escaped them. About the same time the Melians again took another part of the Athenian lines which were but feebly garrisoned. Reinforcements afterwards arriving from Athens in con- sequence, under the command of Philocrates, son of Demeas, the siege was now pressed vigorously; and some treachery taking place inside, the Me- lians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.

74 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Luigi Ricci and E. R. P. Vincent, trans. (Modern Library, 1950), Chapters 15, 17, 18.

Doing Evil in Order to Do Good NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

OF THE THINGS FOR WHICH MEN, AND ESPECIALLY PRINCES, ARE PRAISED OR BLAMED It now remains to be seen what are the methods and rules for a prince as regards his subjects and friends. And as I know that many have written of this, I fear that my writing about it may be deemed presumptuous, differing as I do, especially in this matter, from the opinions of others. But my inten- tion being to write something of use to those who understand, it appears to me more proper to go to the real truth of the matter than to its imagination; and many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preserva- tion. A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Therefore it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case.

Leaving on one side, then, those things which concern only an imaginary prince, and speaking of those that are real, I state that all men, and especially princes, who are placed at a greater height, are reputed for certain qualities which bring them either praise or blame. Thus one is considered liberal, an- other misero or miserly (using a Tuscan term, seeing that avaro with us still means one who is rapaciously acquisitive and misero one who makes grudging use of his own); one a free giver, another rapacious; one cruel, another merci- ful; one a breaker of his word, another trustworthy; one effeminate and pusil- lanimous, another fierce and high-spirited; one humane, another haughty; one lascivious, another chaste; one frank, another astute; one hard, another easy; one serious, another frivolous; one religious, another an unbeliever, and so on. I know that every one will admit that it would be highly praiseworthy in a prince to possess all the above-named qualities that are reputed good, but as they cannot all be possessed or observed, human conditions not permitting of it, it is necessary that he should be prudent enough to avoid the scandal of those vices which would lose him the state, and guard himself if possible against those which will not lose it him, but if not able to, he can indulge them with less scruple. And yet he must not mind incurring the scandal of those

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI / Doing Evil in Order to Do Good 75

vices, without which it would be difficult to save the state, for if one considers well, it will be found that some things which seem virtues would, if followed, lead to one’s ruin, and some others which appear vices result in one’s greater security and well-being. . . .

OF CRUELTY AND CLEMENCY, AND WHETHER IT IS BETTER TO BE LOVED OR FEARED Proceeding to the other qualities before named, I say that every prince must desire to be considered merciful and not cruel. He must, however, take care not to misuse this mercifulness. Cesare Borgia was considered cruel, but his cruelty had brought order to the Romagna, united it, and reduced it to peace and fealty. If this is considered well, it will be seen that he was really much more merciful than the Florentine people, who, to avoid the name of cruelty, allowed Pistoia to be destroyed. A prince, therefore, must not mind incur- ring the charge of cruelty for the purpose of keeping his subjects united and faithful; for, with a very few examples, he will be more merciful than those who, from excess of tenderness, allow disorders to arise, from whence spring bloodshed and rapine; for these as a rule injure the whole community, while the executions carried out by the prince injure only individuals. And of all princes, it is impossible for a new prince to escape the reputation of cruelty, new states being always full of dangers. Wherefore Virgil through the mouth of Dido says:

Res dura, et regni novitas me talia cogunt Moliri, et late fines custode tueri.

Nevertheless, he must be cautious in believing and acting, and must not be afraid of his own shadow, and must proceed in a temperate manner with prudence and humanity, so that too much confidence does not render him incautious, and too much diffidence does not render him intolerant.

From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved more than feared, or feared more than loved. The reply is, that one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting. For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, a nxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain; as long as you benefit them, they are entirely yours; they offer you their blood, their goods, their life, and their children, as I have before said, when the necessity is remote; but when it approaches, they revolt. And the prince who has relied solely on their words, without making other preparations, is ruined; for the friendship which is gained by purchase and not through grandeur and nobility of spirit is bought but not secured, and at a pinch is not to be expended in your service. And men have less scruple in offending one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a chain of obligation which,

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men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is main- tained by a dread of punishment which never fails.

Still, a prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred; for fear and the absence of hatred may well go together, and will be always attained by one who abstains from interfering with the property of his citizens and subjects or with their women. And when he is obliged to take the life of any one, let him do so when there is a proper justification and manifest reason for it; but above all he must ab- stain from taking the property of others, for men forget more easily the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. Then also pretexts for seizing property are never wanting, and one who begins to live by rapine will always find some reason for taking the goods of others, whereas causes for taking life are rarer and more fleeting.

But when the prince is with his army and has a large number of sol- diers under his control, then it is extremely necessary that he should not mind being thought cruel; for without this reputation he could not keep an army united or disposed to any duty. Among the noteworthy actions of Hannibal is numbered this, that although he had an enormous army, com- posed of men of all nations and fighting in foreign countries, there never arose any dissension either among them or against the prince, either in good fortune or in bad. This could not be due to anything but his inhuman cruelty, which together with his infinite other virtues, made him always venerated and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, and without it his other virtues would not have sufficed to produce that effect. Thoughtless writers admire on the one hand his actions, and on the other blame the principal cause of them.

And that it is true that his other virtues would not have sufficed may be seen from the case of Scipio (famous not only in regard to his own times, but all times of which memory remains), whose armies rebelled against him in Spain, which arose from nothing but his excessive kindness, which al- lowed more licence to the soldiers than was consonant with military disci- pline. He was reproached with this in the senate by Fabius Maximus, who called him a corrupter of the Roman militia. Locri having been destroyed by one of Scipio’s officers was not revenged by him, nor was the insolence of that officer punished, simply by reason of his easy nature; so much so, that someone wishing to—excuse him in the senate, said that there were many men who knew rather how not to err, than how to correct the errors of others. This disposition would in time have tarnished the fame and glory of Scipio had he persevered in it under the empire, but living under the rule of the senate this harmful quality was not only concealed but became a glory to him.

I conclude, therefore, with regard to being feared and loved, that men love at their own free will, but fear at the will of the prince, and that a wise prince must rely on what is in his power and not on what is in the power of others, and he must only contrive to avoid incurring hatred, as has been explained.

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI / Doing Evil in Order to Do Good 77

IN WHAT WAY PRINCES MUST KEEP FAITH How laudable it is for a prince to keep good faith and live with integrity, and not with astuteness, everyone knows. Still the experience of our times shows those princes to have done great things who have had little regard for good faith, and have been able by astuteness to confuse men’s brains, and who have ultimately overcome those who have made loyalty their foundation.

You must know, then, that there are two methods of fighting, the one by law, the other by force: the first method is that of men, the second of beasts; but as the first method is often insufficient, one must have recourse to the second. It is therefore necessary for a prince to know well how to use both the beast and the man. This was covertly taught to rulers by ancient writers, who relate how Achilles and many others of those ancient princes were given to Chiron the centaur to be brought up and educated under his discipline. The parable of this semi-animal, semi-human teacher is meant to indicate that a prince must know how to use both natures, and that the one without the other is not durable.

A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imi- tate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten wolves. Those that wish to be only lions do not understand this. Therefore, a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them. Nor have legiti- mate grounds ever failed a prince who wished to show colourable excuse for the non-fulfilment of his promise. Of this one could furnish an infinite number of modern examples, and show how many times peace has been broken, and how many promises rendered worthless, by the faithlessness of princes, and those that have been best able to imitate the fox have succeeded best. But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and so ready to obey present necessi- ties, that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.

I will only mention one modern instance. Alexander VI did nothing else but deceive men, he thought of nothing else, and found the occasion for it; no man was ever more able to give assurances, or affirmed things with stronger oaths, and no man observed them less; however, he always succeeded in his deceptions, as he well knew this aspect of things.

It is not, therefore, necessary for a prince to have all the above-named qualities, but it is very necessary to seem to have them. I would even be bold to say that to possess them and always to observe them is dangerous, but to appear to possess them is useful. Thus it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but you must have the mind so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you may be able to change to

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the opposite qualities. And it must be understood that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things which are considered good in men, being often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion. And, therefore, he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune dictate, and, as I said before, not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained.

A prince must take great care that nothing goes out of his mouth which is not full of the above-named five qualities, and, to see and hear him, he should seem to be all mercy, faith, integrity, humanity, and religion. And nothing is more necessary than to seem to have this last quality, for men in general judge more by the eyes than by the hands, for everyone can see, but very few have to feel. Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are, and those few will not dare to oppose themselves to the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of men, and especially of princes, from which there is no appeal, the end justifies the means. Let a prince there- fore aim at conquering and maintaining the state, and the means will always be judged honourable and praised by everyone, for the vulgar is always taken by appearances and the issue of the event; and the world consists only of the vulgar, and the few who are not vulgar are isolated when the many have a ral- lying point in the prince. A certain prince of the present time, whom it is well not to name, never does anything but preach peace and good faith, but he is really a great enemy to both, and either of them, had he observed them, would have lost him state or reputation on many occasions.

The State of Nature and the State of War THOMAS HOBBES

OF THE NATURAL CONDITION OF MANKIND AS CONCERNING THEIR FELICITY AND MISERY Men by nature equal. Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by con- federacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott. Macmillan Publishing Company, 1962. Originally published in 1651.

THOMAS HOBBES / The State of Nature and the State of War 79

And as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon general, and infallible rules, called science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, as prudence, while we look after somewhat else, I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For prudence, is but experience; which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceit of one’s own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the na- ture of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves; for they see their own wit at hand, and other men’s at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equal, than unequal. For there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribu- tion of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.

From equality proceeds diffidence. From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end, which is principally their own conserva- tion, and sometimes their delectation only, endeavour to destroy, or subdue one another. And from hence it comes to pass, that where an invader hath no more to fear, than another man’s single power; if one plant, sow, build, or possess a convenient seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united, to dispossess, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or liberty. And the invader again is in the like danger of another.

From diffidence war. And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself, so reasonable, as anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him: and this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed. Also because there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires; if others, that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defence, to subsist. And by consequence, such augmentation of dominion over men being necessary to a man’s conservation, it ought to be allowed him.

Again, men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all. For every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate he sets upon himself: and upon all signs of contempt, or undervaluing, naturally endeavours, as far as he dares, (which amongst them that have no common power to keep them in quiet, is far enough to make them destroy each other), to extort a greater value from his contemners, by damage; and from others, by the example.

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So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.

The first, maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons, or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.

Out of civil states, there is always war of every one against every one. Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man. For WAR, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time, is to be considered in the nature of war; as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an i nclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.

The incommodities of such a war. Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and conse- quently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this infer- ence, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws, and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow-subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse man’s nature in it. The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them: which till laws be made they cannot know: nor can any law be made, till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it.

THOMAS HOBBES / The State of Nature and the State of War 81

It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condi- tion of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common power to fear, by the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peace- ful government, use to degenerate into, in a civil war.

But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another; yet in all times, kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbours; which is a posture of war. But because they uphold thereby, the industry of their subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the liberty of particular men.

In such a war nothing is unjust. To this war of every man, against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no com- mon power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice, and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses, and passions. They are qualities, that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same con- dition, that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man’s, that he can get: and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by mere nature is ac- tually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason.

The passions that incline men to peace. The passions that incline men to peace, are fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement. These articles, are they, which otherwise are called the Laws of Nature: whereof I shall speak more particularly, in the two following chapters. . . .

OF OTHER LAWS OF NATURE The third law of nature, justice. From that law of nature, by which we are obliged to transfer to another, such rights, as being retained, hinder the peace of mankind, there followeth a third; which is this, that men perform their c ovenants made: without which, covenants are in vain, and but empty words; and the right of all men to all things remaining, we are still in the condition of war.

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Justice and injustice what. And in this law of nature, consisteth the fountain and original of JUSTICE. For where no covenant hath preceded, there hath no right been transferred, and every man has right to everything; and consequently, no action can be unjust. But when a covenant is made, then to break it is unjust: and the definition of INJUSTICE, is no other than the not performance of covenant. And whatsoever is not unjust, is just.

Justice and propriety begin with the constitution of commonwealth. But be- cause covenants of mutual trust, where there is a fear of not performance on ei- ther part, as hath been said in the former chapter, are invalid; though the original of justice be the making of covenants; yet injustice actually there can be none, till the cause of such fear be taken away; which while men are in the natural condi- tion of war, cannot be done. Therefore before the names of just, and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power, to compel men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of some punishment, greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant; and to make good that propriety, which by mutual contract men acquire, in recompense of the universal right they abandon: and such power there is none before the erection of a com- monwealth. And this is also to be gathered out of the ordinary definition of jus- tice in the Schools: for they say, that justice is the constant will of giving to every man his own. And therefore where there is no own, that is no propriety, there is no injustice; and where there is no coercive power erected, that is, where there is no commonwealth, there is no propriety; all men having right to all things: there- fore where there is no commonwealth, there nothing is unjust. So that the nature of justice, consisteth in keeping of valid covenants: but the validity of covenants begins not but with the constitution of a civil power, sufficient to compel men to keep them: and then it is also that propriety begins.

Realism and Idealism EDWARD HALLETT CARR

. . . In Europe after 1919, planned economy, which rests on the assumption that no natural harmony of interests exists and that interests must be artifi- cially harmonised by state action, became the practice, if not the theory, of almost every state. In the United States, the persistence of an expanding do- mestic market staved off this development till after 1929. The natural har- mony of interests remained an integral part of the American view of life; and in this as in other respects, current theories of international politics were deeply imbued with the American tradition. Moreover, there was a special reason for the ready acceptance of the doctrine in the international sphere. In domestic affairs it is clearly the business of the state to create harmony if no

Edward Hallett Carr and Michael Cox, from The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, published 1960, Plagrave. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

EDWARD HALLETT CARR / Realism and Idealism 83

natural harmony exists. In international politics, there is no organized power charged with the task of creating harmony; and the temptation to assume a natural harmony is therefore particularly strong. But this is no excuse for burking the issue. To make the harmonisation of interests the goal of political action is not the same thing as to postulate that a natural harmony of interests exist; and it is this latter postulate which has caused so much confusion in international thinking.

Politically, the doctrine of the identity of interests has commonly taken the form of an assumption that every nation has an identical interest in peace, and that any nation which desires to disturb the peace is therefore both irrational and immoral. This view bears clear marks of its Anglo-Saxon origin. It was easy after 1918 to convince that part of mankind which lives in English-speaking countries that war profits nobody. The argument did not seem particularly convincing to Germans, who had profited largely from the wars of 1866 and 1870, and attributed their more recent sufferings, not to the war of 1914, but to the fact that they had lost it; or to Italians, who blamed not the war, but the treachery of allies who defrauded them in the peace settlement; or to Poles or Czecho-Slovaks who, far from deploring the war, owed their national existence to it; or to Frenchmen, who could not unreservedly regret a war which had restored Alsace-Lorraine to France; or to people of other nationalities who remembered profitable wars waged by Great Britain and the United States in the past. But these people had fortunately little influence over the formation of current theories of inter- national relations, which emanated almost exclusively from the English- speaking countries. British and American writers continued to assume that the uselessness of war had been irrefutably demonstrated by the experience of 1914–18, and that an intellectual grasp of this fact was all that was nec- essary to induce the nations to keep the peace in the future; and they were sincerely puzzled as well as disappointed at the failure of other countries to share this view.

The confusion was increased by the ostentatious readiness of other coun- tries to flatter the Anglo-Saxon world by repeating its slogans. In the fifteen years after the first world war, every Great Power (except, perhaps, Italy) re- peatedly did lip-service to the doctrine by declaring peace to be one of the main objects of its policy.1 But as Lenin observed long ago, peace in itself is

1“Peace must prevail, must come before all” (Briand, League of Nations: Ninth Assembly, p. 83). “The maintenance of peace is the first objective of British foreign policy” (Eden, League of Nations: Sixteenth Assembly, p. 106). “Peace is our dearest treasure” (Hitler, in a speech in the German Reichstag on January 30, 1937, reported in The Times, February 1, 1937). “The principal aim of the international policy of the Soviet Union is the preservation of peace” (Chicherin in The Soviet Union and Peace [1929], p. 249). “The object of Japan, despite propa- ganda to the contrary, is peace” (Matsuoka, League of Nations: Special Assembly 1932–33, iii, p. 73). The paucity of Italian pronouncements in favour of peace was probably explained by the poor reputation of Italian troops as fighters: Mussolini feared that any emphatic expression of preference for peace would be construed as an admission that Italy had no stomach for war.

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a meaningless aim. “Absolutely everybody is in favour of peace in general,” he wrote in 1915, “including Kitchener, Joffre, Hindenburg and Nicholas the Bloody, for everyone of them wishes to end the war.”2 The common interest in peace masks the fact that some nations desire to maintain the status quo without having to fight for it, and others to change the status quo without having to fight in order to do so. . . .

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC HARMONY . . . We find in the modern period an extraordinary divergence between the theories of economic experts and the practice of those responsible for the eco- nomic policies of their respective countries. Analysis will show that this diver- gence springs from a simple fact. The economic expert, dominated in the main by laissez-faire doctrine, considers the hypothetical economic interest of the world as a whole, and is content to assume that this is identical with the inter- est of each individual country. The politician pursues the concrete interest of his country, and assumes (if he makes any assumption at all) that the interest of the world as a whole is identical with it. Nearly every pronouncement of every international economic conference held between the two world wars was vitiated by this assumption that there was some “solution” or “plan” which, by a judicious balancing of interests, would be equally favourable to all and prejudicial to none. . . .

In the nineteenth century, Germany and the United States, by pursuing a “strictly nationalistic policy,” had placed themselves in a position to challenge Great Britain’s virtual monopoly of world trade. No conference of economic experts, meeting in 1880, could have evolved a “general plan” for “parallel or concerted action” which would have allayed the economic rivalries of the time in a manner equally advantageous to Great Britain, Germany and the United States. It was not less presumptuous to suppose that a conference meeting in 1927 could allay the economic rivalries of the later period by a “plan” beneficial to the interests of everyone. Even the economic crisis of 1930–33 failed to bring home to the economists the true nature of the problem which they had to face. The experts who prepared the “Draft Annotated Agenda” for the World Economic Conference of 1933—condemned the “world-wide adoption of ideals of national self-sufficiency which cut unmistakably athwart the lines of economic development.”3 They did not apparently pause to re- flect that those so-called “lines of economic development,” which might be beneficial to some countries and even to the world as a whole, would inevita- bly be detrimental to other countries, which were using weapons of economic

2Lenin, Collected Works (Engl. transl.), xviii. p. 264. Compare Spenser Wilkinson’s dictum: “It is not peace but preponderance that is in each case the real object. The truth cannot be too often repeated that peace is never the object of policy: you cannot define peace except by reference to war, which is a means and never an end” (Government and the War, p. 121). 3League of Nations: C.48, M.18, 1933, ii. p. 6.

EDWARD HALLETT CARR / Realism and Idealism 85

nationalism in self-defence. . . . Laissez-faire, in international relations as in those between capital and labour, is the paradise of the economically strong. State control, whether in the form of protective legislation or of protective tariffs, is the weapon of self-defence invoked by the economically weak. The clash of interests is real and inevitable; and the whole nature of the problem is distorted by an attempt to disguise it.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF REALISM . . . The three essential tenets implicit in Machiavelli’s doctrine are the founda- tion-stones of the realist philosophy. In the first place, history is a sequence of cause and effect, whose course can be analysed and understood by intellectual effort, but not (as the utopians believe) directed by “imagination.” Secondly, theory does not (as the utopians assume) create practice, but practice theory. In Machiavelli’s words, “good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good coun- sels.” Thirdly, politics are not (as the utopians pretend) a function of ethics, but ethics of politics. Men “are kept honest by constraint.” Machiavelli recognised the importance of morality, but thought that there could be no effective moral- ity where there was no effective authority. Morality is the product of power.4

The extraordinary vigour and vitality of Machiavelli’s challenge to ortho- doxy may be attested by the fact that, more than four centuries after he wrote, the most conclusive way of discrediting a political opponent is still to describe him as a disciple of Machiavelli. . . .

. . . Theories of social morality are always the product of a dominant group which identifies itself with the community as a whole, and which pos- sesses facilities denied to subordinate groups or individuals for imposing its view of life on the community. Theories of international morality are, for the same reason and in virtue of the same process, the product of dominant nations or groups of nations. For the past hundred years, and more especially since 1918, the English-speaking peoples have formed the dominant group in the world; and current theories of international morality have been designed to perpetuate their supremacy and expressed in the idiom peculiar to them. France, retaining something of her eighteenth-century tradition and restored to a position of dominance for a short period after 1918, has played a minor part in the creation of current international morality, mainly through her in- sistence on the role of law in the moral order. Germany, never a dominant Power and reduced to helplessness after 1918, has remained for these rea- sons outside the charmed circle of creators of international morality. Both the view that the English-speaking peoples are monopolists of international mo- rality and the view that they are consummate international hypocrites may be reduced to the plain fact that the current canons of international virtue have, by a natural and—inevitable process, been mainly created by them.

4Machiavelli, The Prince, chs. 15 and 23 (Engl. transl., Everyman’s Library, pp. 121, 193).

86 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

THE REALIST CRITIQUE OF THE HARMONY OF INTERESTS The doctrine of the harmony of interests yields readily to analysis in terms of this principle. It is the natural assumption of a prosperous and privileged class, whose members have a dominant voice in the community and are therefore naturally prone to identify its interest with their own. In virtue of this identification, any assailant of the interests of the dominant group is made to incur the odium of assailing the alleged common interest of the whole community, and is told that in making this assault he is attacking his own higher interests. The doctrine of the harmony of interests thus serves as an ingenious moral device invoked, in perfect sincerity, by privileged groups in order to justify and maintain their dominant position. But a further point requires notice. The supremacy within the community of the privileged group may be, and often is, so overwhelming that there is, in fact, a sense in which its interests are those of the community, since its well-being neces- sarily carries with it some measure of well-being for other members of the community, and its collapse would entail the collapse of the community as a whole. In so far, therefore, as the alleged natural harmony of interests has any reality, it is created by the overwhelming power of the privileged group, and is an excellent illustration of the Machiavellian maxim that morality is the product of power.

. . . British nineteenth-century statesmen, having discovered that free trade promoted British prosperity, were sincerely convinced that, in doing so, it also promoted the prosperity of the world as a whole. British predominance in world trade was at that time so overwhelming that there was a certain undeni- able harmony between British interests and the interests of the world. British prosperity flowed over into other countries, and a British economic collapse would have meant world-wide ruin. British free traders could and did argue that protectionist countries were not only egotistically damaging the prosper- ity of the world as a whole, but were stupidly damaging their own, so that their behaviour was both immoral and muddle headed. In British eyes, it was irrefutably proved that international trade was a single whole, and flourished or slumped together. Nevertheless, this alleged international harmony of in- terests seemed a mockery to those under-privileged nations whose inferior sta- tus and insignificant stake in international trade were consecrated by it. The revolt against it destroyed that overwhelming British preponderance which had provided a plausible basis for the theory. Economically, Great Britain in the nineteenth century was dominant enough to make a bold bid to impose on the world her own conception of international economic morality. When competition of all against all replaced the domination of the world market by a single Power, conceptions of international economic morality necessarily became chaotic.

Politically, the alleged community of interest in the maintenance of peace, whose ambiguous character has already been discussed, is capitalised in the same way by a dominant nation or group of nations. Just as the ruling class

EDWARD HALLETT CARR / Realism and Idealism 87

in a community prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces class-war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a special vested interest of predominant Powers. In the past, Roman and British imperialism were commended to the world in the guise of the pax Romana and the pax Britannica. Today, when no single Power is strong enough to dominate the world, and supremacy is vested in a group of nations, slogans like “collective security” and “resistance to aggres- sion” serve the same purpose of proclaiming an identity of interest between the dominant group and the world as a whole in the maintenance of peace.

. . . It is a familiar tactic of the privileged to throw moral discredit on the under-privileged by depicting them as disturbers of the peace; and this tactic is as readily applied internationally as within the national community. “Interna- tional law and order,” writes Professor Toynbee of a recent crisis, “were in the true interests of the whole of mankind . . . whereas the desire to perpetuate the region of violence in international affairs was an anti-social desire which was not even in the ultimate interests of the citizens of the handful of states that officially professed this benighted and anachronistic creed.”5 This is p recisely the argument, compounded of platitude and falsehood in about equal parts, which did duty in every strike in the early days of the British and American Labour movements. It was common form for employers, supported by the whole capitalist press, to denounce the “anti-social” attitude of trade union leaders, to accuse them of attacking law and order and of introducing “the reign of violence,” and to declare that “true” and “ultimate” interests of the workers lay in peaceful cooperation with the employers.6 In the field of social relations, the disingenuous character of this argument has long been recog- nised. But just as the threat of class-war by the proletarian is “a natural cyni- cal reaction to the sentimental and dishonest efforts of the privileged classes to obscure the conflict of interest between classes by a constant emphasis on the minimum interests which they have in common,”7 so the war-mongering of the dissatisfied Powers was the “natural, cynical reaction” to the sentimental and dishonest platitudinising of the satisfied Powers on the common interest in peace. When Hitler refused to believe “that God has permitted some na- tions first to acquire a world by force and then to defend this robbery with moralising theories”8 he was merely echoing in another context the Marx- ist denial of a community of interest between “haves” and “have-nots,” the Marxist exposure of the interested character of “bourgeois morality,” and the Marxist demand for the expropriation of the expropriators. . . .

5Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1935, ii. p. 46. 6“Pray earnestly that right may triumph,” said the representative of the Philadelphia coal-owners in an early strike organised by the United Mine Workers, “remembering that the Lord God Omnipotent still reigns, and that His reign is one of law and order, and not of violence and crime” (H. F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 267). 7R. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 153. 8Speech in the Reichstag, January 30, 1939.

88 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

THE LIMITATIONS OF REALISM The exposure by realist criticism of the hollowness of the utopian edifice is the first task of the political thinker. It is only when the sham has been demolished that there can be any hope of raising a more solid structure in its place. But we cannot ultimately find a resting place in pure realism; for realism, though logically overwhelming, does not provide us with the springs of action which are necessary even to the pursuit of thought. Indeed, realism itself, if we attack it with its own weapons, often turns out in practice to be just as much condi- tioned as any other mode of thought. In politics, the belief that certain facts are unalterable or certain trends irresistible commonly reflects a lack of desire or lack of interest to change or resist them. The impossibility of being a con- sistent and thorough-going realist is one of the most certain and most curious lessons of political science. Consistent realism excludes four things which ap- pear to be essential ingredients of all effective political thinking: a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgment and a ground for action. . . .

Consistent realism, as has already been noted, involves acceptance of the whole historical process and precludes moral judgments on it. As we have seen, men are generally prepared to accept the judgment of history on the past, praising success and condemning failure. This test is also widely applied to contemporary politics. Such institutions as the League of Nations, or the Soviet or Fascist regimes, are to a considerable extent judged by their capac- ity to achieve what they profess to achieve; and the legitimacy of this test is implicitly admitted by their own propaganda, which constantly seeks to exag- gerate their successes and minimise their failures. Yet it is clear that mankind as a whole is not prepared to accept this rational test as a universally valid basis of political judgment. The belief that whatever succeeds is right, and has only to be understood to be approved, must, if consistently held, empty thought of purpose, and thereby sterilise and ultimately destroy it. Nor do those whose philosophy appears to exclude the possibility of moral judgments in fact refrain from pronouncing them. Frederick the Great, having explained that treaties should be observed for the reason that “one can trick only once,” goes on to call the breaking of treaties “a bad and knavish policy,” though there is nothing in his thesis to justify the moral epithet. Marx, whose philoso- phy appeared to demonstrate that capitalists could only act in a certain way, spends many pages—some of the most effective in Capital—in denouncing the wickedness of capitalists for behaving in precisely that way. The necessity, recognised by all politicians, both in domestic and in international affairs, for cloaking—interests in a guise of moral principles is in itself a symptom of the inadequacy of realism. Every age claims the right to create its own values, and to pass judgments in the light of them; and even if it uses realist weap- ons to dissolve other values, it still believes in the absolute character of its own. It refuses to accept the implication of realism that the word “ought” is meaningless.

Most of all, consistent realism breaks down because it fails to provide any ground for purposive or meaningful action. If the sequence of cause and effect

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is sufficiently rigid to permit of the “scientific prediction” of events, if our thought is irrevocably conditioned by our status and our interests, then both action and thought become devoid of purpose. If, as Schopenhauer maintains, “the true philosophy of history consists of the insight that, throughout the jumble of all these ceaseless changes, we have ever before our eyes the same unchanging being, pursuing the same course today, yesterday and for ever,” then passive contemplation is all that remains to the individual. Such a conclu- sion is plainly repugnant to the most deep-seated belief of man about himself. That human affairs can be directed and modified by human action and human thought is a postulate so fundamental that its rejection seems scarcely com- patible with existence as a human being. Nor is it in fact rejected by those realists who have left their mark on history. Machiavelli, when he exhorted his compatriots to be good Italians, clearly assumed that they were free to follow or ignore his advice. Marx, by birth and training a bourgeois, believed himself free to think and act like a proletarian, and regarded it as his mission to persuade others, whom he assumed to be equally free, to think and act like- wise. Lenin, who wrote of the imminence of world revolution as a “scientific prediction”, admitted elsewhere that “no situations exist from which there is absolutely no way out.” In moments of crisis, Lenin appealed to his follow- ers in terms which might equally well have been used by so thorough-going a believer in the power of the human will as Mussolini or by any other leader of any period: “At the decisive moment and in the decisive place, you must prove the stronger, you must be victorious.” Every realist, whatever his professions, is ultimately compelled to believe not only that there is something which man ought to think and do, but that there is something which he can think and do, and that his thought and action are neither mechanical nor meaningless.

We return therefore to the conclusion that any sound political thought must be based on elements of both utopia and reality. Where utopianism has become a hollow and intolerable sham, which serves merely as a disguise for the interests of the privileged, the realist performs an indispensable service in unmasking it. But pure realism can offer nothing but a naked struggle for power which makes any kind of international society impossible. Having de- molished the current utopia with the weapons of realism, we still need to build a new utopia of our own, which will one day fall to the same weapons. The human will continue to seek and escape from the logical consequences of real- ism in the vision of an international order which, as soon as it crystallizes itself into concrete political form, becomes tainted with self-interest and hypocrisy, and must once more be attacked with the instruments of realism.

Here, then, is the complexity, the fascination and the tragedy of all politi- cal life. Politics are made up of two elements—utopia and reality—belonging to two different planes which can never meet. There is no greater barrier to clear political thinking than failure to distinguish between ideals, which are utopia, and institutions, which are reality. The communist who set commu- nism against democracy was usually thinking of communism as a pure ideal of equality and brotherhood, and of democracy as an institution which ex- isted in Great Britain, France or the United States and which exhibited the

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vested interests, the inequalities and the oppression inherent in all political institutions. The democrat who made the same comparison was in fact com- paring an ideal pattern of democracy laid up in heaven with communism as an institution existing in Soviet Russia with its class-divisions, its heresy-hunts and its concentration camps. The comparison, made in each case between an ideal and an institution, is irrelevant and makes no sense. The ideal, once it is embodied in an institution, ceases to be an ideal and becomes the expression of a selfish interest, which must be destroyed in the name of a new ideal. This constant interaction of irreconcilable forces is the stuff of politics. Every po- litical situation contains mutually incompatible elements of utopia and reality, of morality and power. . . .

Military Power The supreme importance of the military instrument lies in the fact that the ultima ratio of power in international relations is war. Every act of the state, in its power aspect, is directed to war, not as a desirable weapon, but as a weapon which it may require in the last resort to use. Clausewitz’s famous aphorism that “war is nothing but the continuation of political relations by other means” has been repeated with approval both by Lenin and by the Communist International9 and Hitler meant much the same thing when he said that “an alliance whose object does not include the intention to fight is meaningless and useless.”10 In the same sense, Mr. Hawtrey defines diplo- macy as “potential war.”11 These are half-truths. But the important thing is to recognise that they are true. War lurks in the background of international politics just as revolution lurks in the background of domestic politics. There are few European countries where, at some time during the past thirty years, potential revolution has not been an important factor in politics;12 and the international community has in this respect the closest analogy to those states where the possibility of revolution is most frequently and most conspicuously present to the mind.

Potential war being thus a dominant factor in international politics, mili- tary strength becomes a recognised standard of political values. Every great ci- vilisation of the past has enjoyed in its day a superiority of military power. . . .

Military power, being an essential element in the life of the state, becomes not only an instrument, but an end in itself. Few of the important wars of the last hundred years seem to have been waged for the deliberate and con- scious purpose of increasing either trade or territory. The most serious wars

9Lenin, Collected Works (English transl.), xviii. p. 97; Theses of the Sixth Congress of Comintern quoted in Taracouzio, The Soviet Union and International Law, p. 436. 10Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 749. 11R. G. Hawtrey, Economic Aspects of Sovereignty, p. 107. 12It is perhaps necessary to recall the part played in British politics in 1914 by the threat of the Conservative Party to support revolutionary action in Ulster.

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are fought in order to make one’s own country militarily stronger or, more often, to prevent another country from becoming militarily stronger, so that there is much justification for the epigram that “the principal cause of war is war itself.”13 Every stage in the Napoleonic Wars was devised to prepare the way for the next stage: the invasion of Russia was undertaken in order to make Napoleon strong enough to defeat Great Britain. The Crimean War was waged by Great Britain and France in order to prevent Russia from becoming strong enough to attack their Near Eastern possessions and interests at some future time. The origin of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 is described as follows in a note addressed to the League of Nations by the Soviet Government in 1924: “When the Japanese torpedo-boats attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, it was clearly an act of aggression from a technical point of view, but, politically speaking, it was an act caused by the aggressive policy of the Tsarist Government towards Japan, who, in order to forestall the danger, struck the first blow at her adversary.”14 In 1914, Austria sent an ultimatum to Servia because she believed that Servians were planning the downfall of the Dual Monarchy; Russia feared that Austria-Hungary, if she defeated Servia, would be strong enough to menace her; Germany feared that Russia, if she defeated Austria-Hungary, would be strong enough to menace her; France had long believed that Germany, if she defeated Russia, would be strong enough to menace her, and had therefore concluded the Franco-Russian alliance; and Great Britain feared that Germany, if she defeated France and occupied Bel- gium, would be strong enough to menace her. Finally, the United States came to fear that Germany, if she won the war would be strong enough to menace them. Thus the war, in the minds of all the principal combatants, had a de- fensive or preventive character. They fought in order that they might not find themselves in a more unfavourable position in some future war. Even colonial acquisitions have often been prompted by the same motive. The consolidation and formal annexation of the original British settlements in Australia were in- spired by fear of Napoleon’s alleged design to establish French colonies there. Military, rather than economic, reasons dictated the capture of German colo- nies during the war of 1914 and afterwards precluded their return to Germany.

It is perhaps for this reason that the exercise of power always appears to beget the appetite for more power. There is, as Dr. Niebuhr says, “no possibil- ity of drawing a sharp line between the will-to-live and the will-to-power.”15 Nationalism, having attained its first objective in the form of national unity and independence, develops almost automatically into imperialism. Interna- tional politics amply confirm the aphorisms of Machiavelli that “men never appear to themselves to possess securely what they have unless they acquire something further from another,”16 and of Hobbes that man “cannot assure

13R. G. Hawtrey, Economic Aspects of Sovereignty, p. 105. 14League of Nations: Official Journal, May 1924, p. 578. 15R. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 42. 16Machiavelli, Discorsi, I. i. ch. v.

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the power and means to live well which he hath present, without the acquisi- tion of more.”17 Wars, begun for motives of security, quickly become wars of aggression and self-seeking. President McKinley invited the United States to intervene in Cuba against Spain in order “to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between the Government of Spain and the people of Cuba and to secure on the island the establishment of a stable government.”18 But by the time the war was over the temptation to self-aggrandisement by the annexation of the Philippines had become irresistible. Nearly every country participating in the first world war regarded it initially as a war of self-defence; and this belief was particularly strong on the Allied side. Yet during the course of the war, every Allied Government in Europe announced war aims which included the acquisition of territory from the enemy Powers. In modern conditions, wars of limited objective have become almost as impossible as wars of limited li- ability. It is one of the fallacies of the theory of collective security that war can be waged for the specific and disinterested purpose of “resisting aggression.” Had the League of Nations in the autumn of 1935, under the leadership of Great Britain, embarked on “military sanctions” against Italy, it would have been impossible to restrict the campaign to the expulsion of Italian troops from Abyssinia. Operations would in all probability have led to the occupation of Italy’s East African colonies by Great Britain and France, of Trieste, Fiume and Albania by Yugoslavia, and of the islands of the Dodecanese by Greece or Turkey or both; and war aims would have been announced, precluding on various specious grounds the restoration of these territories to Italy. Territorial ambitions are just as likely to be the product as the cause of war.

Economic Power Economic strength has always been an instrument of political power, if only through its association with the military instrument. Only the most primi- tive kinds of warfare are altogether independent of the economic factor. The wealthiest prince or the wealthiest city-state could hire the largest and most efficient army of mercenaries; and every government was therefore compelled to pursue a policy designed to further the acquisition of wealth. The whole progress of civilisation has been so closely bound up with economic develop- ment that we are not surprised to trace, throughout modern history, an in- creasingly intimate association between military and economic power. In the prolonged conflicts which marked the close of the Middle Ages in Western Europe, the merchants of the towns, relying on organised economic power, defeated the feudal barons, who put their trust in individual military prow- ess. The rise of modern nations has everywhere been marked by the emer- gence of a new middle class economically based on industry and trade. Trade and finance were the foundation of the short-lived political supremacy of

17Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. xi. 18British and Foreign State Papers, ed. Hertslet, xc. p. 811.

EDWARD HALLETT CARR / Realism and Idealism 93

the Italian cities of the Renaissance and later of the Dutch. The principal international wars of the period from the Renaissance to the middle of the eighteenth century were trade wars (some of them were actually so named). Throughout this period, it was universally held that, since wealth is a source of political power, the state should seek actively to promote the acquisition of wealth; and it was believed that the right way to make a country power- ful was to stimulate production at home, to buy as little as possible from abroad, and to accumulate wealth in the convenient form of precious metals. Those who argued in this way afterwards came to be known as mercantilists. Mercantilism was a system of economic policy based on the hitherto unques- tioned assumption that to promote the acquisition of wealth was part of the normal function of the state.

THE SEPARATION OF ECONOMICS FROM POLITICS The laissez-faire doctrine of the classical economists made a frontal attack on this assumption. The principal implications of laissez-faire have already been discussed. Its significance in the present context is that it brought about a complete theoretical divorce between economics and politics. The classical economists conceived a natural economic order with laws of its own, indepen- dent of politics and functioning to the greatest profit of all concerned when political authority interfered least in is automatic operation. This doctrine domi- nated the economic thought, and to some extent the economic practice (though far more in Great Britain than elsewhere), of the nineteenth century. . . .

Marx was overwhelmingly right when he insisted on the increasing im- portance of the role played by economic forces in politics; and since Marx, history can never be written again exactly as it was written before him. But Marx believed, just as firmly as did the laissez-faire liberal, in an economic system with laws of its own working independently of the state, which was its adjunct and its instrument. In writing as if economics and politics were separate domains, one subordinate to the other, Marx was dominated by nineteenth-century presuppositions in much the same way as his more re- cent opponents who are equally sure that “the primary laws of history are political laws, economic laws are secondary.”19 Economic forces are in fact political forces. Economics can be treated neither as a minor accessory of history, nor as an independent science in the light of which history can be interpreted. Much confusion would be saved by a general return to the term “political economy,” which was given the new science by Adam Smith him- self and not abandoned in favour of the abstract “economics,” even in Great Britain itself, till the closing years of the nineteenth century.20 The science of

19Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire, p. 50. The idea is a commonplace of National Socialist and Fascist writers. 20In Germany, “political economy” was at first translated Nationalökonomie, which was tenta- tively replaced in the present century by Sozialökonomie.

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economics presupposes a given political order, and cannot be profitably stud- ied in isolation from politics.

SOME FALLACIES OF THE SEPARATION OF ECONOMICS FROM POLITICS . . . The most conspicuous practical failure caused by the persistence of this nineteenth-century illusion was the breakdown of League sanctions in 1936. Careful reading of the text of Article 16 of the Covenant acquits its framers of responsibility for the mistake. Paragraph 1 prescribes the economic weap- ons, paragraph 2 the military weapons, to be employed against the violator of the Covenant. Paragraph 2 is clearly complementary to paragraph 1, and assumes as a matter of course that, in the event of an application of sanc- tions, “armed forces” would be required “to protect the Covenants of the League.” The only difference between the two paragraphs is that, whereas all members of the League would have to apply the economic weapons, it would be natural to draw the necessary armed forces from those members which possessed them in sufficient strength and in reasonable geographical proximity to the offender.21 Subsequent commentators, obsessed with the assumption that economics and politics were separate and separable things, evolved the doctrine that paragraphs 1 and 2 of Article 16 were not com- plementary, but alternative, the difference being that “economic sanctions” were obligatory and “military sanctions” optional. This doctrine was eagerly seized on by the many who felt that the League might conceivably be worth a few million pounds worth of trade, but not a few million human lives; and in the famous 1934 Peace Ballot in Great Britain, some two million deluded voters expressed simultaneously their approval of economic, and their disap- proval of military, sanctions. “One of the many conclusions to which I have been drawn,” said Lord Baldwin at this time, “is that there is no such thing as a sanction which will work, which does not mean war.”22 But the bit- ter lesson of 1935–36 was needed to drive home the truth that in sanctions, as in war, the only motto is “all or nothing,” and that economic power is impotent if the military weapon is not held in readiness to support it.23 Power

21This interpretation is confirmed by the report of the Phillimore Committee, on whose propos- als the text of Article 16 was based. The Committee “considered financial and economic sanc- tions as being simply the contribution to the work of preventing aggression which might properly be made by countries which were not in a position to furnish actual military aid” (International Sanctions: Report by a Group of Members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, p. 115 where the relevant texts are examined). 22House of Commons, May 18, 1934; Official Report, col. 2139. 23It is not, of course, suggested that the military weapon must always be used. The British Grand Fleet was little used in the first world war. But it would be rash to assume that the result would have been much the same if the British Government had not been prepared to use it. What paralyzed sanctions in 1935–36 was the common knowledge that the League Powers were not prepared to use the military weapon.

EDWARD HALLETT CARR / Realism and Idealism 95

is indivisible; and the military and economic weapons are merely different instruments of power.24

A different, and equally serious, form in which this illusory separation of politics and economics can be traced is the popular phraseology which dis- tinguishes between “power” and “welfare,” between “guns” and “butter.” “Welfare arguments are ‘economic,’ ” remarks an American writer, “power arguments are ‘political.’”25 This fallacy is particularly difficult to expose be- cause it appears to be deducible from a familiar fact. Every modern govern- ment and every parliament is continually faced with the dilemma of spending money on armaments or social services; and this encourages the illusion that the choice really lies between “power” and “welfare,” between political guns and economic butter. Reflexion shows, however, that this is not the case. The question asked never takes the form, Do you prefer guns or butter? For every- one (except a handful of pacifists in those Anglo-Saxon countries which have inherited a long tradition of uncontested security) agrees that, in case of need, guns must come before butter. The question asked is always either, Have we already sufficient guns to enable us to afford some butter? or, Granted that we need x guns, can we increase revenue sufficiently to afford more but- ter as well? But the neatest exposure of this fallacy comes from the pen of Professor Zimmern; and the exposure is none the less effective for being un- conscious. Having divided existing states on popular lines into those which pursue “welfare” and those which pursue “power,” Professor Zimmern re- vealingly adds that “the welfare states, taken together, enjoy a preponderance of power and resources over the power states”26 thereby leading us infallibly to the correct conclusion that “welfare states” are states which, already enjoy- ing a preponderance of power, are not primarily concerned to increase it, and can therefore afford butter, and “power states” those which, being inferior in power, are primarily concerned to increase it, and devote the major part of their resources to this end. In this popular terminology, “welfare states” are those which possess preponderant power, and “power states” those which do not. Nor is this classification as illogical as it may seem. Every Great Power takes the view that the minimum number of guns necessary to assert the de- gree of power which it considers requisite takes precedence over butter, and that it can only pursue “welfare” when this minimum has been achieved. For many years prior to 1933, Great Britain, being satisfied with her power, was a “welfare state.” After 1935, feeling her power contested and inadequate, she

24It is worth noting that Stresemann was fully alive to this point when Germany entered the League of Nations. When the Secretary-General argued that Germany, if she contracted out of military sanctions, could still participate in economic sanctions, Stresemann replied: “We cannot do that either; if we take part in an economic boycott of a powerful neighbour, a declaration of war against Germany might be the consequence, since the exclusion of another country from intercourse with a nation of sixty million citizens would be a hostile act” (Stresemann’s Diaries and Papers [Engl. Transl.], ii. p. 69). 25F. L. Schuman, International Politics, p. 356. 26Zimmern, Quo Vadimus? p. 41.

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became a “power state”; and even the Opposition ceased to press with any in- sistence the prior claim of the social services. The contrast is not one between “power” and “welfare,” and still less between “politics” and “economics,” but between different degrees of power. In the pursuit of power, military and economic instruments will both be used. . . .

THE NATURE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW International law differs from the municipal law of modern states in being the law of an undeveloped and not fully integrated community. It lacks three in- stitutions which are essential parts of any developed system of municipal law: a judicature, an executive and a legislature.

(1) International law recognises no court competent to give on any issue of law or fact decisions recognised as binding by the community as a whole. It has long been the habit of some states to make special agree- ments to submit particular disputes to an international court for judicial settlement. The Permanent Court of International Justice, set up under the Covenant of the League, represents an attempt to extend and generalise this habit. But the institution of the court has not changed international law: it has merely created certain special obligations for states willing to accept them.

(2) International law has no agents competent to enforce observance of the law. In certain cases, it does indeed recognise the right of an aggrieved party, where a breach of the law has occurred, to take reprisals against the of- fender. But this is the recognition of a right of self-help, not the enforcement of a penalty by an agent of the law. The measures contemplated in Article 16 of the Covenant of the League, in so far as they can be regarded as punitive and not merely preventive, fall within this category.

(3) Of the two main sources of law—custom and legislation— international law knows only the former, resembling in this respect the law of all primitive communities. To trace the stages by which a certain kind of action or behaviour, from being customary, comes to be recog- nised as obligatory on all members of the community is the task of the social psychologist rather than of the jurist. But it is by some such process that international law has come into being. In advanced communities, the other source of law— direct legislation—is more prolific, and could not possibly be dispensed with in any modern state. So serious does this lack of international legislation appear that, in the view of some authorities, states do on certain occasions constitute themselves a legislative body, and many multilateral agreements between states are in fact “law-making treaties” (traités-lois).27 This view is open to grave objections. A treaty, whatever its scope and content, lacks the essential quality of law: it is

27The Carnegie Endowment has, for example, given the title International Legislation to a collec- tion published under its auspices of “multipartite instruments of general interest.”

EDWARD HALLETT CARR / Realism and Idealism 97

not automatically and unconditionally applicable to all members of the community whether they assent to it or not. Attempts have been made from time to time to embody customary international law in multilateral treaties between states. But the value of such attempts has been largely nullified by the fact that no treaty can bind a state which has not accepted it. The Hague Conventions of 1907 on the rules of war are sometimes treated as an example of international legislation. But these conventions were not only not binding on states which were not parties to them, but were not binding on the parties vis-à-vis states which were not parties. The Briand-Kellogg Pact is not, as is sometimes loosely said, a legislative act prohibiting war. It is an agreement between a large number of states “to renounce war as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.” International agreements are contracts concluded by states with one another in their capacity as subjects of international law, and not laws created by states in the capacity of international legislators. International legislation does not yet exist. . . .

In June 1933, the British Government ceased to pay the regular install- ments due under its war debt agreement, substituting minor “token pay- ments”; and a year later these token payments came to an end. Yet in 1935 Great Britain and France once more joined in a solemn condemnation of Germany for unilaterally repudiating her obligations under the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty. Such inconsistencies are so common that the realist finds little difficulty in reducing them to a simple rule. The ele- ment of power is inherent in every political treaty. The contents of such a treaty reflect in some degree the relative strength of the contracting parties. Stronger states will insist on the sanctity of the treaties concluded by them with weaker states. Weaker states will renounce treaties concluded by them with stronger states so soon as the power position alters and the weaker state feels itself strong enough to reject or modify the obligation. Since 1918, the United States have concluded no treaty with a stronger state, and have there- fore unreservedly upheld the sanctity of treaties. Great Britain concluded the war debt agreement with a country financially stronger than herself, and defaulted. She concluded no other important treaty with a stronger Power and, with this single exception, upheld the sanctity of treaties. The countries which had concluded the largest number of treaties with states stronger than themselves, and subsequently strengthened their position, were Germany, Italy and Japan; and these are the countries which renounced or violated the largest number of treaties. But it would be rash to assume any moral dis- tinction between these different attitudes. There is no reason to assume that these countries would insist any less strongly than Great Britain or the United States on the sanctity of treaties favourable to themselves concluded by them with weaker states.

The case is convincing as far as it goes. The rule pacta sunt servanda is not a moral principle, and its application cannot always be justified on ethical grounds. It is a rule of international law; and as such it not only is,

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but is universally recognised to be, necessary to the existence of an inter- national society. But law does not purport to solve every political problem; and where it fails, the fault often lies with those who seek to put it to uses for which it was never intended. It is no reproach to law to describe it as a bulwark of the existing order. The essence of law is to promote stability and maintain the existing framework of society; and it is perfectly natural everywhere for conservatives to describe themselves as the party of law and order, and to denounce radicals as disturbers of the peace and enemies of the law. The history of every society reveals a strong tendency on the part of those who want important changes in the existing order to com- mit acts which are illegal and which can plausibly be denounced as such by conservatives. It is true that in highly organised societies, where legally constituted machinery exists for bringing about changes in the law, this tendency to illegal action is mitigated. But it is never removed altogether. Radicals are always more likely than conservatives to come into conflict with the law.

Before 1914, international law did not condemn as illegal resort to war for the purpose of changing the existing international order; and no legally constituted machinery existed for bringing about changes in any other way. After 1918 opinion condemning “aggressive” war became almost universal, and nearly all the nations of the world signed a pact renouncing resort to war as an instrument of policy. While therefore resort to war for the purpose of altering the status quo now usually involves the breach of a treaty obli- gation and is accordingly illegal in international law, no effective interna- tional machinery has been constituted for bringing about changes by pacific means. The rude nineteenth-century system, or lack of system, was logical in recognising as legal the one effective method of changing the status quo. The rejection of the traditional method as illegal and the failure to provide any effective alternative have made contemporary international law a bulwark of the existing order to an extent unknown in previous international law or in the municipal law of any civilised country. This is the most fundamental cause of the recent decline of respect for international law; and those who, in deploring the phenomenon, fail to recognise its origin, not unnaturally expose themselves to the charge of hypocrisy or of obtuseness.

Of all the considerations which render unlikely the general observance of the legal rule of the sanctity of treaties, and which provide a plausible moral justification for the repudiation of treaties, this last is by far the most important. Respect for international law and for the sanctity of trea- ties will not be increased by the sermons of those who, having most to gain from the maintenance of the existing order, insist most firmly on the morally binding character of the law. Respect for law and treaties will be maintained only in so far as the law recognises effective political machin- ery through which it can itself be modified and superseded. There must be a clear recognition of that play of political forces which is antecedent to all law. Only when these forces are in stable equilibrium can the law perform

EDWARD HALLETT CARR / Realism and Idealism 99

its social function without becoming a tool in the hands of the defenders of the status quo. The achievement of this equilibrium is not a legal, but a political task. . . .

Peaceful Change . . . The attempt to make a moral distinction between wars of “aggression” and wars of “defence” is misguided. If a change is necessary and desirable, the use or threatened use of force to maintain the status quo may be morally more culpable than the use or threatened use of force to alter it. Few people now believe that the action of the American colonists who attacked the status quo by force in 1776, or of the Irish who attacked the status quo by force between 1916 and 1920, was necessarily less moral than that of the British who defended it by force. The moral criterion must be not the “aggressive” or “defensive” character of the war, but the nature of the change which is being sought and resisted. . . .

. . . When the change is effected by legislation, the compulsion is that of the state. But where the change is effected by the bargaining procedure, the force majeure can only be that of the stronger party. The employer who con- cedes the strikers’ demands pleads inability to resist. The trade union leader who calls off an unsuccessful strike pleads that the union was too weak to continue. “Yielding to threats of force,” which is sometimes used as a term of reproach, is therefore a normal part of the process. . . .

The defence of the status quo is not a policy which can be lastingly successful. It will end in war as surely as rigid conservatism will end in revolution. “Resistance to aggression,” however necessary as a momentary device of national policy, is no solution; for readiness to fight to prevent change is just as unmoral as readiness to fight to enforce it. To establish methods of peaceful change is therefore the fundamental problem of inter- national morality and of international politics. We can discard as purely uto- pian and muddle-headed plans for a procedure of peaceful change dictated by a world legislature or a world court. We can describe as utopian in the right sense (i.e. performing the proper function of a utopia in proclaiming an ideal to be aimed at, though not wholly attainable) the desire to eliminate the element of power and to base the bargaining process of peaceful change on a common feeling of what is just and reasonable. But we shall also keep in mind the realist view of peaceful change as an adjustment to the changed relations of power; and since the party which is able to bring most power to bear normally emerges successful from operations of peaceful change, we shall do our best to make ourselves as powerful as we can. In practice, we know that peaceful change can only be achieved through a compromise be- tween the utopian conception of a common feeling of right and the realist conception of a mechanical adjustment to a changed equilibrium of forces. That is why a successful foreign policy must oscillate between the apparently opposite poles of force and appeasement. . . .

100 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory KENNETH N. WALTZ

Like most historians, many students of international politics have been skeptical about the possibility of creating a theory that might help one to understand and explain the international events that interest us. Thus Morgenthau, foremost among traditional realists, was fond of repeating Blaise Pascal’s remark that “the history of the world would have been different had Cleopatra’s nose been a bit shorter” and then asking “How do you systemize that?”1 His appreciation of the role of the accidental and the occurrence of the unexpected in politics dampened his theoretical ambition.

The response of neorealists is that, although difficulties abound, some of the obstacles that seem most daunting lie in misapprehensions about theory. Theory obviously cannot explain the accidental or account for unexpected events; it deals in regularities and repetitions and is possible only if these can be identified. A further difficulty is found in the failure of realists to con- ceive of international politics as a distinct domain about which theories can be fashioned. Morgenthau, for example, insisted on “the autonomy of poli- tics,” but he failed to apply the concept to international politics. A theory is a depiction of the organization of a domain and of the connections among its parts. A theory indicates that some factors are more important than oth- ers and specifies relations among them. In reality, everything is related to everything else, and one domain cannot be separated from others. But the- ory isolates one realm from all others in order to deal with it intellectually. By defining the structure of international political systems, neorealism establishes the autonomy of international politics and thus makes a theory about it possible.2

In developing a theory of international politics, neorealism retains the main tenets of realpolitik, but means and ends are viewed differently, as are causes and effects. Morgenthau, for example, thought of the “rational”

1Hans J. Morgenthau, “International Relations: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches,” in Norman D. Palmer (ed.), A Design for International Relations Research: Scope, Theory, Methods, and Relevance (Philadelphia, 1970), 78. 2Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York, 1973; 5th ed.), 11. Ludwig Boltzman (trans. Rudolf Weingartner), “Theories as Representations,” excerpted in Arthur Danto and Sidney Morgenbesser (eds.), Philosophy of Science (Cleveland, 1960), 245–252. Neorealism is some- times dubbed structural realism. I use the terms interchangeably and, throughout this article, refer to my own formulation of neorealist theory. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass., 1979); Robert Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York, 1986).

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statesman as ever striving to accumulate more and more power. He viewed power as an end in itself. Although he acknowledged that nations at times act out of considerations other than power, Morgenthau insisted that, when they do so, their actions are not “of a political nature.”3 In contrast, neorealism sees power as a possibly useful means, with states running risks if they have ei- ther too little or too much of it. Excessive weakness may invite an attack that greater strength would have dissuaded an adversary from launching. Excessive strength may prompt other states to increase their arms and pool their efforts against the dominant state. Because power is a possibly useful means, sensible statesmen try to have an appropriate amount of it. In crucial situations, how- ever, the ultimate concern of states is not for power but for security. This revi- sion is an important one.

An even more important revision is found in a shift of causal relations. The infinite materials of any realm can be organized in endlessly different ways. Realism thinks of causes as moving in only one direction, from the in- teractions of individuals and states to the outcomes that their acts and inter- actions produce. Morgenthau recognized that, when there is competition for scarce goods and no one to serve as arbiter, a struggle for power will ensue among the competitors and that consequently the struggle for power can be explained without reference to the evil born in men. The struggle for power arises simply because men want things, not because of the evil in their desires. He labeled man’s desire for scarce goods as one of the two roots of conflict, but, even while discussing it, he seemed to pull toward the “other root of con- flict and concomitant evil”—“the animus dominandi, the desire for power.” He often considered that man’s drive for power is more basic than the chance conditions under which struggles for power occur. This attitude is seen in his statement that “in a world where power counts, no nation pursuing a rational policy has a choice between renouncing and wanting power; and, if it could, the lust for power for the individual’s sake would still confront us with its less spectacular yet no less pressing moral defects.”4

Students of international politics have typically inferred outcomes from salient attributes of the actors producing them. Thus Marxists, like liberals, have linked the outbreak of war or the prevalence of peace to the internal qualities of states. Governmental forms, economic systems, social institutions, political ideologies—these are but a few examples of where the causes of war have been found. Yet, although causes are specifically assigned, we know that states with widely divergent economic institutions, social customs, and politi- cal ideologies have all fought wars. More striking still, many different sorts of organizations fight wars, whether those organizations be tribes, petty prin- cipalities, empires, nations, or street gangs. If an identified condition seems to have caused a given war, one must wonder why wars occur repeatedly even though their causes vary. Variations in the characteristics of the states

3Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 27. 4Idem, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago, 1946), 192, 200. Italics added.

102 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

are not linked directly to the outcomes that their behaviors produce, nor are variations in their patterns of interaction. Many historians, for example, have claimed that World War I was caused by the interaction of two opposed and closely balanced coalitions. But then many have claimed that World War II was caused by the failure of some states to combine forces in an effort to right an imbalance of power created by an existing alliance.

Neorealism contends that international politics can be understood only if the effects of structure are added to the unit-level explanations of traditional realism. By emphasizing how structures affect actions and outcomes, neoreal- ism rejects the assumption that man’s innate lust for power constitutes a suf- ficient cause of war in the absence of any other. It reconceives the causal link between interacting units and international outcomes. According to the logic of international politics, one must believe that some causes of international outcomes are the result of interactions at the unit level, and, since variations in presumed causes do not correspond very closely to variations in observed outcomes, one must also assume that others are located at the structural level. Causes at the level of units interact with those at the level of structure, and, because they do so, explanation at the unit level alone is bound to be mislead- ing. If an approach allows the consideration of both unit-level and structural- level causes, then it can cope with both the changes and the continuities that occur in a system.

Structural realism presents a systemic portrait of international politics de- picting component units according to the manner of their arrangement. For the purpose of developing a theory, states are cast as unitary actors wanting at least to survive, and are taken to be the system’s constituent units. The es- sential structural quality of the system is anarchy—the absence of a central monopoly of legitimate force. Changes of structure and hence of system occur with variations in the number of great powers. The range of expected out- comes is inferred from the assumed motivation of the units and the structure of the system in which they act.

A systems theory of international politics deals with forces at the interna- tional, and not at the national, level. With both systems-level and unit-level forces in play, how can one construct a theory of international politics without simultaneously constructing a theory of foreign policy? An international-political theory does not imply or require a theory of foreign policy any more than a market theory implies or requires a theory of the firm. Systems theories, whether political or economic, are theories that explain how the organiza- tion of a realm acts as a constraining and disposing force on the interacting units within it. Such theories tell us about the forces to which the units are subjected. From them, we can draw some inferences about the expected be- havior and fate of the units: namely, how they will have to compete with and adjust to one another if they are to survive and flourish. To the extent that the dynamics of a system limit the freedom of its units, their behavior and the outcomes of their behavior become predictable. How do we expect firms to respond to differently structured markets, and states to differently structured international-political systems? These theoretical questions require us to take

KENNETH N. WALTZ / The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory 103

firms as firms, and states as states, without paying attention to differences among them. The questions are then answered by reference to the placement of the units in their system and not by reference to the internal qualities of the units. Systems theories explain why different units behave similarly and, de- spite their variations, produce outcomes that fall within expected ranges. Con- versely, theories at the unit level tell us why different units behave differently despite their similar placement in a system. A theory about foreign policy is a theory at the national level. It leads to expectations about the responses that dissimilar polities will make to external pressures. A theory of international politics bears on the foreign policies of nations although it claims to explain only certain aspects of them. It can tell us what international conditions na- tional policies have to cope with.

From the vantage point of neorealist theory, competition and conflict among states stem directly from the twin facts of life under conditions of an- archy: States in an anarchic order must provide for their own security, and threats or seeming threats to their security abound. Preoccupation with identi- fying dangers and counteracting them become a way of life. Relations remain tense; the actors are usually suspicious and often hostile even though by nature they may not be given to suspicion and hostility. Individually, states may only be doing what they can to bolster their security. Their individual intentions aside, collectively their actions yield arms races and alliances. The uneasy state of affairs is exacerbated by the familiar “security dilemma,” wherein mea- sures that enhance one state’s security typically diminish that of others.5 In an anarchic domain, the source of one’s own comfort is the source of another’s worry. Hence a state that is amassing instruments of war, even for its own defensive, is cast by others as a threat requiring response. The response it- self then serves to confirm the first state’s belief that it had reason to worry. Similarly, an alliance that in the interest of defense moves to increase cohesion among its members and add to its ranks inadvertently imperils an opposing alliance and provokes countermeasures.

Some states may hunger for power for power’s sake. Neorealist theory, how- ever, shows that it is not necessary to assume an innate lust for power in order to account for the sometimes fierce competition that marks the international arena. In an anarchic domain, a state of war exists if all parties lust for power. But so too will a state of war exist if all states seek only to ensure their own safety.

Although neorealist theory does not explain why particular wars are fought, it does explain war’s dismal recurrence through the millennia. Neo- realists point not to the ambitions or the intrigues that punctuate the out- break of individual conflicts but instead to the existing structure within which events, whether by design or accident, can precipitate open clashes of arms. The origins of hot wars lie in cold wars, and the origins of cold wars are found in the anarchic ordering of the international arena.

5See John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics, II (1950), 157–180.

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The recurrence of war is explained by the structure of the international system. Theorists explain what historians know: War is normal. Any given war is explained not by looking at the structure of the international-political system but by looking at the particularities within it: the situations, the char- acters, and the interactions of states. Although particular explanations are found at the unit level, general explanations are also needed. Wars vary in fre- quency, and in other ways as well. A central question for a structural theory is this: How do changes of the system affect the expected frequency of war?

KEEPING WARS COLD: THE STRUCTURAL LEVEL In an anarchic realm, peace is fragile. The prolongation of peace requires that potentially destabilizing developments elicit the interest and the calculated re- sponse of some or all of the system’s principal actors. In the anarchy of states, the price of inattention or miscalculation is often paid in blood. An important issue for a structural theory to address is whether destabilizing conditions and events are managed better in multipolar or bipolar systems.

In a system of, say, five great powers, the politics of power turns on the di- plomacy by which alliances are made, maintained, and disrupted. Flexibility of alignment means both that the country one is wooing may prefer another suitor and that one’s present alliance partner may defect. Flexibility of alignment lim- its a state’s options because, ideally, its strategy must please potential allies and satisfy present partners. Alliances are made by states that have some but not all of their interests in common. The common interest is ordinarily a negative one: fear of other states. Divergence comes when positive interests are at issue. In alli- ances among near equals, strategies are always the product of compromise since the interests of allies and their notions of how to secure them are never identical.

If competing blocs are seen to be closely balanced, and if competition turns on important matters, then to let one’s side down risks one’s own de- struction. In a moment of crisis the weaker or the more adventurous party is likely to determine its side’s policy. Its partners can afford neither to let the weaker member be defeated nor to advertise their disunity by failing to back a venture even while deploring its risks.

The prelude to World War I provides striking examples of such a situ- ation. The approximate equality of partners in both the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente made them closely interdependent. This interdependence, com- bined with the keen competition between the two camps, meant that, although any country could commit its associates, no one country on either side could exercise control. If Austria-Hungary marched, Germany had to follow; the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have left Germany alone in the middle of Europe. If France marched, Russia had to follow; a German victory over France would be a defeat for Russia. And so the vicious circle continued. Because the defeat or the defection of a major ally would have shaken the balance, each state was constrained to adjust its strategy and the use of its forces to the aims and fears of its partners.

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In alliances among equals, the defection of one member threatens the secu- rity of the others. In alliances among unequals, the contributions of the lesser members are at once wanted and of relatively small importance. In alliances among unequals, alliance leaders need worry little about the faithfulness of their followers, who usually have little choice anyway. Contrast the situation in 1914 with that of the United States and Britain and France in 1956. The United States could dissociate itself from the Suez adventure of its two prin- cipal allies and subject one of them to heavy financial pressure. Like Austria- Hungary in 1914, Britain and France tried to commit or at least immobilize their ally by presenting a fait accompli. Enjoying a position of predominance, the United States could continue to focus its attention on the major adver- sary while disciplining its two allies. Opposing Britain and France endangered neither the United States nor the alliance because the security of Britain and France depended much more heavily on us than our security depended on them. The ability of the United States, and the inability of Germany, to pay a price measured in intra-alliance terms is striking.

In balance-of-power politics old style, flexibility of alignment led to rigidity of strategy or the limitation of freedom of decision. In balance-of-power politics new style, the obverse is true: Rigidity of alignment in a two-power world re- sults in more flexibility of strategy and greater freedom of decision. In a multi- polar world, roughly equal parties engaged in cooperative endeavors must look for the common denominator of their policies. They risk finding the lowest one and easily end up in the worst of all possible worlds. In a bipolar world, alliance leaders can design strategies primarily to advance their own interests and to cope with their main adversary and less to satisfy their own allies.

Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has to seek the approval of other states, but each has to cope with the other. In the great-power politics of a multipolar world, who is a danger to whom and who can be expected to deal with threats and problems are matters of uncertainty. In the great-power politics of a bipolar world, who is a danger to whom is never in doubt. Any event in the world that involves the fortunes of either of the great powers au- tomatically elicits the interest of the other. President Harry S. Truman, at the time of the Korean invasion, could not very well echo Neville Chamberlain’s words in the Czechoslovakian crisis by claiming that the Americans knew nothing about the Koreans, a people living far away in the east of Asia. We had to know about them or quickly find out.

In a two-power competition, a loss for one is easily taken to be a gain for the other. As a result, the powers in a bipolar world promptly respond to unsettling events. In a multipolar world, dangers are diffused, respon- sibilities unclear, and definitions of vital interests easily obscured. Where a number of states are in balance, the skillful foreign policy of a forward power is designed to gain an advantage without antagonizing other states and frightening them into united action. At times in modern Europe, the benefits of possible gains have seemed to outweigh the risks of likely losses. Statesmen have hoped to push an issue to the limit without causing all of the potential opponents to unite. When there are several possible enemies,

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unity of action among them is difficult to achieve. National leaders could therefore think—or desperately hope, as did Theobald Von Bethmann Hollweg and Adolf Hitler before two world wars—that a united opposition would not form.

If interests and ambitions conflict, the absence of crises is more worri- some than their presence. Crises are produced by the determination of a state to resist a change that another state tries to make. As the leaders in a bipolar system, the United States and the Soviet Union are disposed to do the resisting, for in important matters they cannot hope that their allies will do it for them. Political action in the postwar world has reflected this condition. Communist guerrillas operating in Greece prompted the Truman Doctrine. The tightening of Soviet control over the states of Eastern Europe led to the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Defense Treaty, and these in turn gave rise to the Cominform and the Warsaw Pact. The plan to create a West German government pro- duced the Berlin blockade. During the past four decades, our responses have been geared to the Soviet Union’s actions, and theirs to ours.

Miscalculation by some or all of the great powers is a source of danger in a multipolar world; overreaction by either or both of the great powers is a source of danger in a bipolar world. Which is worse: miscalculation or overreaction? Miscalculation is the greater evil because it is more likely to permit an unfold- ing of events that finally threatens the status quo and brings the powers to war. Overreaction is the lesser evil because at worst it costs only money for unneces- sary arms and possibly the fighting of limited wars. The dynamics of a bipolar system, moreover, provide a measure of correction. In a world in which two states united in their mutual antagonism overshadow any others, the benefits of a calculated response stand out most clearly, and the sanctions against irre- sponsible behavior achieve their greatest force. Thus two states, isolationist by tradition, untutored in the ways of international politics, and famed for impul- sive behavior, have shown themselves—not always and everywhere, but always in crucial cases—to be wary, alert, cautious, flexible, and forbearing. . . .

WARS, HOT AND COLD Wars, hot and cold, originate in the structure of the international political sys- tem. Most Americans blame the Soviet Union for creating the Cold War, by the actions that follow necessarily from the nature of its society and government. Revisionist historians, attacking the dominant view, assign blame to the United States. Some American error, or sinister interest, or faulty assumption about Soviet aims, they argue, is what started the Cold War. Either way, the main point is lost. In a bipolar world, each of the two great powers is bound to focus its fears on the other, to distrust its motives, and to impute offensive intentions to defensive measures. The proper question is what, not who, started the Cold War. Although its content and virulence vary as unit-level forces change and interact, the Cold War continues. It is firmly rooted in the structure of postwar international politics, and will last as long as that structure endures.

ROBERT GILPIN / Hegemonic War and International Change 107

Hegemonic War and International Change ROBERT GILPIN

Because of the redistribution of power, the costs to the traditional domi-nant state of maintaining the international system increase relative to its capacity to pay; this, in turn, produces the severe fiscal crisis. . . . By the same token, the costs to the rising state of changing the system decrease; it begins to appreciate that it can increase its own gains by forcing changes in the nature of the system. Its enhanced power position means that the relative costs of changing the system and securing its interests have decreased. Thus, in accordance with the law of demand, the rising state, as its power increases, will seek to change the status quo as the perceived potential benefits begin to exceed the perceived costs of undertaking a change in the system.

As its relative power increases, a rising state attempts to change the rules governing the international system, the division of the spheres of influence, and, most important of all, the international distribution of territory. In re- sponse, the dominant power counters this challenge through changes in its policies that attempt to restore equilibrium in the system. The historical re- cord reveals that if it fails in this attempt, the disequilibrium will be resolved by war. Shepard Clough, in his book The Rise and Fall of Civilization, drew on a distinguished career in historical scholarship to make the point: “At least in all the cases which we have passed . . . in review in these pages, cultures with inferior civilization but with growing economic power have always at- tacked the most civilized cultures during the latters’ economic decline” (1970, p. 263). The fundamental task of the challenged dominant state is to solve what Walter Lippmann once characterized as the fundamental problem of for- eign policy—the balancing of commitments and resources (Lippmann, 1943, p. 7). An imperial, hegemonic, or great power has essentially two courses of action open to it as it attempts to restore equilibrium in the system. The first and preferred solution is that the challenged power can seek to increase the resources devoted to maintaining its commitments and position in the international system. The second is that it can attempt to reduce its existing commitments (and associated costs) in a way that does not ultimately jeop- ardize its international position. Although neither response will be followed to the exclusion of the other, they may be considered analytically as separate policies. The logic and the pitfalls of each policy will be considered in turn.

Historically, the most frequently employed devices to generate new resources to meet the increasing costs of dominance and to forestall decline have been to increase domestic taxation and to exact tribute from other states.

Robert Gilpin, Chapter 5, “Hegemonic War and International Change,” from War and Change in World Politics. © Cambridge University Press 1981. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

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Both of these courses of action have inherent dangers in that they can pro- voke resistance and rebellion. The French Revolution was triggered in part by the effort of the monarchy to levy the higher taxes required to meet the British challenge (von Ranke, 1950, p. 211). Athens’s “allies” revolted against Athenian demands for increased tribute. Because higher taxes (or tribute) mean decreased productive investment and a lowered standard of living, in most instances such expedients can be employed for only relatively short peri- ods of time, such as during a war.

The powerful resistance within a society to higher taxes or tribute en- courages the government to employ more indirect methods of generating additional resources to meet a fiscal crisis. Most frequently, a government will resort to inflationary policies or seek to manipulate the terms of trade with other countries. As Carlo Cipolla observed (1970, p. 13), the invariable symptoms of a society’s decline are excessive taxation, inflation, and balance- of-payments difficulties as government and society spend beyond their means. But these indirect devices also bring hardship and encounter strong resistance over the long run.

The most satisfactory solution to the problem of increasing costs is in- creased efficiency in the use of existing resources. Through organizational, technological, and other types of innovations, a state can either economize with respect to the resources at its disposal or increase the total amount of disposable resources. Thus, as Mark Elvin explained, the fundamental rea- son that imperial China survived intact for so long was its unusually high rate of economic and technological innovation; over long periods China was able to generate sufficient resources to finance the costs of protection against successive invaders (Elvin, 1973). Conversely, the Roman economy stagnated and failed to innovate. Among the reasons for the decline and destruction of Rome was its inability to generate resources sufficient to stave off barbarian invaders. More recently, the calls for greater industrial productivity in con- temporary America derive from the realization that technological innovation and more efficient use of existing resources are needed to meet the increasing demands of consumption, investment, and protection.

This innovative solution involves rejuvenation of the society’s military, economic, and political institutions. In the case of declining Rome, for exam- ple, a recasting of its increasingly inefficient system of agricultural production and a revised system of taxation were required. Unfortunately, social reform and institutional rejuvenation become increasingly difficult as a society ages, because this implies more general changes in customs, attitudes, motivation, and sets of values that constitute a cultural heritage (Cipolla, 1970, p. 11). Vested interests resist the loss of their privileges. Institutional rigidities frus- trate abandonment of “tried and true” methods (Downs, 1967, pp. 158–66). One could hardly expect it to be otherwise: “Innovations are important not for their immediate, actual results but for their potential for future develop- ment, and potential is very difficult to assess” (Cipolla, 1970, pp. 9–10).

A declining society experiences a vicious cycle of decay and immobility, much as a rising society enjoys a virtuous cycle of growth and expansion.

ROBERT GILPIN / Hegemonic War and International Change 109

On the one hand, decline is accompanied by lack of social cooperation, by em- phasis on rights rather than emphasis on duty, and by decreasing productivity. On the other hand, the frustration and pessimism generated by this gloomy at- mosphere inhibit renewal and innovation. The failure to innovate accentuates the decline and its psychologically debilitating consequences. Once caught up in this cycle, it is difficult for the society to break out (Cipolla, 1970, p. 11). For this reason, a more rational and more efficient use of existing resources to meet increasing military and productive needs is seldom achieved.

There have been societies that have managed their resources with great skill for hundreds of years and have rejuvenated themselves in response to external challenges, and this resilience has enabled them to survive for centuries in a hostile environment. In fact, those states that have been notable for their longev- ity have been the ones most successful in allocating their scarce resources in an optimal fashion in order to balance, over a period of centuries, the conflicting demands of consumption, protection, and investment. An outstanding example was the Venetian city-state. Within this aristocratic republic the governing elite moderated consumption and shifted resources back and forth between protec- tion and investment as need required over the centuries (Lane, 1973). The Chi- nese Empire was even more significant. Its longevity and unity were due to the fact that the Chinese were able to increase their production more rapidly than the rise in the costs of protection (Elvin, 1973, pp. 92–3, 317). The progressive nature of the imperial Chinese economy meant that sufficient resources were in most cases available to meet external threats and preserve the integrity of the empire for centuries. In contrast to the Romans, who were eventually inundated and destroyed by the barbarians, the Chinese “on the whole . . . managed to keep one step ahead of their neighbours in the relevant technical skills, military, economic and organizational” (Elvin, 1973, p. 20).

An example of social rejuvenation intended to meet an external challenge was that of revolutionary France. The point has already been made that Eu- ropean aristocracies were reluctant to place firearms in the hands of the lower social orders, preferring to rely on small professional armies. The French Revolution and the innovation of nationalism made it possible for the French state to tap the energies of the masses of French citizens. The so-called levée en masse greatly increased the human resources available to the republic and, later, to Napoleon. Although this imperial venture was ultimately unsuccess- ful, it does illustrate the potentiality for domestic rejuvenation of a society in response to decline.

The second type of response to declining fortunes is to bring costs and resources into balance by reducing costs. This can be attempted in three gen- eral ways. The first is to eliminate the reason for the increasing costs (i.e., to weaken or destroy the rising challenger). The second is to expand to a more secure and less costly defensive perimeter. The third is to reduce international commitments. Each of these alternative strategies has its attractions and its dangers.

The first and most attractive response to a society’s decline is to eliminate the source of the problem. By launching a preventive war the declining power

110 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

destroys or weakens the rising challenger while the military advantage is still with the declining power. Thus, as Thucydides explained, the Spartans initi- ated the Peloponnesian War in an attempt to crush the rising Athenian chal- lenger while Sparta still had the power to do so. When the choice ahead has appeared to be to decline or to fight, statesmen have most generally fought. However, besides causing unnecessary loss of life, the greatest danger inherent in preventive war is that it sets in motion a course of events over which states- men soon lose control (see the subsequent discussion of hegemonic war).

Second, a state may seek to reduce the costs of maintaining its position by means of further expansion.1 In effect, the state hopes to reduce its long-term costs by acquiring less costly defensive positions. As Edward Luttwak (1976) demonstrated in his brilliant study of Roman grand strategy, Roman expan- sion in its later phases was an attempt to find more secure and less costly defensive positions and to eliminate potential challengers. Although this re- sponse to declining fortunes can be effective, it can also lead to further overex- tension of commitments, to increasing costs, and thereby to acceleration of the decline. It is difficult for a successful and expanding state to break the habit of expansion, and it is all too easy to believe that “expand or die” is the impera- tive of international survival. Perhaps the greatest danger for every imperial or hegemonic power, as it proved eventually to be for Rome, is overextension of commitments that gradually begin to sap its strength (Grant, 1968, p. 246).2

The third means of bringing costs and resources into balance is, of course, to reduce foreign-policy commitments. Through political, territorial, or eco- nomic retrenchment, a society can reduce the costs of maintaining its interna- tional position. However, this strategy is politically difficult, and carrying it out is a delicate matter. Its success is highly uncertain and strongly dependent on timing and circumstances. The problem of retrenchment will be considered first in general terms; then a case of relatively successful retrenchment by a great power will be discussed.

The most direct method of retrenchment is unilateral abandonment of cer- tain of a state’s economic, political, or military commitments. For example, a state may withdraw from exposed and costly strategic positions. Venice, as was pointed out, pursued for centuries a conscious policy of alternating advance and retreat. The longevity of the later Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire may be partially explained by its withdrawal from its exposed and difficult-to- defend western provinces and consolidation of its position on a less costly basis in its eastern provinces; its survival for a thousand years was due to the fact that it brought the scale of empire and resources into balance (Cipolla, 1970, p. 82; Rader, 1971, p. 54). In our own time, the so-called Nixon doctrine may

1This cause of expansion is frequently explained by the “turbulent-frontier” thesis. A classic example was Britain’s steady and incremental conquest of India in order to eliminate threatening political disturbances on the frontier of the empire. Two recent examples are the American invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 2As Raymond Aron argued (1974), defeat in Vietnam may, in the long run, save the United States from the corrupting and ultimately weakening vice of overexpansion of commitments.

ROBERT GILPIN / Hegemonic War and International Change 111

be interpreted as an effort on the part of the United States to disengage from vulnerable commitments and to shift part of the burden of defending the inter- national status quo to other powers (Hoffmann, 1978, pp. 46–7).

A second standard technique of retrenchment is to enter into alliances with or seek rapprochement with less threatening powers. In effect, the dominant but declining power makes concessions to another state and agrees to share the benefits of the status quo with that other state in exchange for sharing the costs of preserving the status quo. Thus the Romans brought the Goths into the empire (much to their later regret) in exchange for their assistance in defending the frontiers of the empire. As will be pointed out in a moment, the policy of entente or rapprochement was pursued by the British prior to World War I as they sought to meet the rising German challenge. The American rapprochement with Communist China is a late-twentieth-century example. In exchange for weakening the American commitment to Taiwan, the Americans seek Chinese assistance in containing the expanding power of the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, there are several dangers associated with this response to decline. First, in an alliance between a great power and a lesser power there is a tendency for the former to overpay in the long run, as has occurred with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the great power increases its commitments without a commensurate increase in the re- sources devoted by its allies to finance those commitments. Further, the ally is benefited materially by the alliance, and as its capabilities increase, it may turn against the declining power. Thus the Romans educated the Goths in their military techniques only to have the latter turn these techniques against them. Second, the utility of alliances is limited by Riker’s theory of coalitions: An increase in the number of allies decreases the benefits to each. Therefore, as an alliance increases in number, the probability of defection increases (Riker, 1962). Third, the minor ally may involve the major ally in disputes of its own from which the latter cannot disengage itself without heavy costs to its pres- tige. For these reasons, the utility of an alliance as a response to decline and a means to decrease costs is severely restricted.

The third and most difficult method of retrenchment is to make concessions to the rising power and thereby seek to appease its ambitions. Since the Munich conference in 1938, “appeasement” as a policy has been in disrepute and has been regarded as inappropriate under every conceivable set of circumstances. This is unfortunate, because there are historical examples in which appeasement has succeeded. Contending states have not only avoided conflict but also achieved a relationship satisfactory to both. A notable example was British appeasement of the rising United States in the decades prior to World War I (Perkins, 1968). The two countries ended a century-long hostility and laid the basis for what has come to be known as the “special relationship” of the two Anglo-Saxon powers.

The fundamental problem with a policy of appeasement and accommoda- tion is to find a way to pursue it that does not lead to continuing deteriora- tion in a state’s prestige and international position. Retrenchment by its very nature is an indication of relative weakness and declining power, and thus retrenchment can have a deteriorating effect on relations with allies and rivals.

112 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

Sensing the decline of their protector, allies try to obtain the best deal they can from the rising master of the system. Rivals are stimulated to “close in,” and frequently they precipitate a conflict in the process. Thus World War I began as a conflict between Russia and Austria over the disposition of the remnants of the retreating Ottoman Empire (Hawtrey, 1952, pp. 75–81).

Because retrenchment signals waning power, a state seldom retrenches or makes concessions on its own initiative. Yet, not to retrench voluntarily and then to retrench in response to threats or military defeat means an even more severe loss of prestige and weakening of one’s diplomatic standing. As a consequence of such defeats, allies defect to the victorious party, opponents press their advantage, and the retrenching society itself becomes demoralized. Moreover, if the forced retrenchment involves the loss of a “vital interest,” then the security and integrity of the state are placed in jeopardy. For these reasons, retrenchment is a hazardous course for a state; it is a course seldom pursued by a declining power. However, there have been cases of a retrench- ment policy being carried out rather successfully.

An excellent example of a declining hegemon that successfully brought its resources and commitments into balance is provided by Great Britain in the decades just prior to World War I. Following its victory over France in the Napoleonic wars, Great Britain had become the world’s most powerful and most prestigious state. It gave its name to a century of relative peace, the Pax Britannica. British naval power was supreme on the high seas, and British industry and commerce were unchallengeable in world markets. An equilibrium had been established on the European continent by the Congress of Vienna (1814), and no military or industrial rivals then existed outside of Europe. By the last decades of the century, however, a profound transforma- tion had taken place. Naval and industrial rivals had risen to challenge British supremacy both on the Continent and overseas. France, Germany, the United States, Japan, and Russia, to various degrees, had become expanding impe- rial powers. The unification of Germany by Prussia had destroyed the protec- tive Continental equilibrium, and Germany’s growing naval might threatened Britain’s command of the seas.

As a consequence of these commercial, naval, and imperial challenges, Great Britain began to encounter the problems that face every mature or declining power. On the one hand, external demands were placing steadily increasing strains on the economy; on the other hand, the capacity of the economy to meet these demands had deteriorated. Thus, at the same time that the costs of protection were escalating, both private consumption and public consumption were also increasing because of greater affluence. Superficially the economy appeared strong, but the rates of industrial expansion, tech- nological innovation, and domestic investment had slowed. Thus the rise of foreign challenges and the climacteric of the economy had brought on disequi- librium between British global commitments and British resources.

As the disequilibrium between its global hegemony and its limited resources intensified, Britain faced the dilemma of increasing its resources or reducing its commitments or both. In the national debate on this critical issue the proponents

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of increasing the available resources proposed two general courses of action. First, they proposed a drawing together of the empire and drawing on these combined resources, as well as the creation of what John Seeley (1905) called Greater Britain, especially the white dominions. This idea, however, did not have sufficient appeal at home or abroad. Second, reformers advocated measures to rejuvenate the declining British economy and to achieve greater efficiency. Unfor- tunately, as W. Arthur Lewis argued, all the roads that would have led to indus- trial innovation and a higher rate of economic growth were closed to the British for social, political, or ideological reasons (Lewis, 1978, p. 133). The primary solution to the problem of decline and disequilibrium, therefore, necessarily lay in the reduction of overseas diplomatic and strategic commitments.

The specific diplomatic and strategic issue that faced British leadership was whether to maintain the global position identified with the Pax Britannica or to bring about a retrenchment of its global commitments. By the last de- cade of the century, Great Britain was confronted by rival land and sea pow- ers on every continent and every sea. European rivals were everywhere: Russia in the Far East, south Asia, and the Middle East; France in Asia, the Middle East, and north Africa; Germany in the Far East, the Middle East, and Africa. Furthermore, in the Far East, Japan had suddenly emerged as a great power; the United States also was becoming a naval power of consequence and was challenging Great Britain in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean.

At the turn of the century, however, the predominant problem was per- ceived to be the challenge of German naval expansionism. Whereas all the other challenges posed limited and long-term threats, the danger embodied in Germany’s decision to build a battle fleet was immediate and portentous. De- spite intense negotiations, no compromise of this naval armaments race could be reached. The only course open to the British was retrenchment of their power and commitments around the globe in order to concentrate their total efforts on the German challenge.

Great Britain settled its differences with its other foreign rivals one after another. In the 1890s came the settlement of the Venezuela-British Guiana bor- der dispute in accordance with American desires; in effect, Britain acquiesced in America’s primacy in the Caribbean Sea. A century of American-British uneasi- ness came to an end, and the foundation was laid for the Anglo-American alli- ance that would prevail in two world wars. Next, in the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902, Great Britain gave up its policy of going it alone and took Japan as its partner in the Far East. Accepting Japanese supremacy in the northwestern Pacific as a counterweight to Russia, Great Britain withdrew to the south. This was immediately followed in 1904 by the entente cordiale, which settled the Mediterranean and colonial confrontation between France and Great Britain and ended centuries of conflict. In 1907 the Anglo-Russian agreement resolved the British-Russian confrontation in the Far East, turned Russia’s interest to- ward the Balkans, and eventually aligned Russia, Great Britain, and France against Germany and Austria. Thus, by the eve of World War I, British commit- ments had been retrenched to a point that Britain could employ whatever power it possessed to arrest further decline in the face of expanding German power.

114 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

Thus far we have described two alternative sets of strategies that a great power may pursue in order to arrest its decline: to increase resources or to de- crease costs. Each of these policies has succeeded to some degree at one time or another. Most frequently, however, the dominant state is unable to generate sufficient additional resources to defend its vital commitments; alternatively, it may be unable to reduce its cost and commitments to some manageable size. In these situations, the disequilibrium in the system becomes increasingly acute as the declining power tries to maintain its position and the rising power attempts to transform the system in ways that will advance its interests. As a consequence of this persisting disequilibrium, the international system is beset by tensions, uncertainties, and crises. However, such a stalemate in the system seldom persists for a long period of time.

Throughout history the primary means of resolving the disequilibrium be- tween the structure of the international system and the redistribution of power has been war, more particularly, what we shall call a hegemonic war. In the words of Raymond Aron, describing World War I, a hegemonic war “is char- acterized less by its immediate causes or its explicit purposes than by its extent and the stakes involved. It affected all the political units inside one system of relations between sovereign states. Let us call it, for want of a better term, a war of hegemony, hegemony being, if not conscious motive, at any rate the inevitable consequence of the victory of at least one of the states or groups” (Aron, 1964, p. 359). Thus, a hegemonic war is the ultimate test of change in the relative standings of the powers in the existing system.

Every international system that the world has known has been a conse- quence of the territorial, economic, and diplomatic realignments that have followed such hegemonic struggles. The most important consequence of a hegemonic war is that it changes the system in accordance with the new international distribution of power; it brings about a reordering of the basic components of the system. Victory and defeat reestablish an unambiguous hierarchy of prestige congruent with the new distribution of power in the system. The war determines who will govern the international system and whose interests will be primarily served by the new international order. The war leads to a redistribution of territory among the states in the system, a new set of rules of the system, a revised international division of labor, etc. As a consequence of these changes, a relatively more stable international order and effective governance of the international system are created based on the new realities of the international distribution of power. In short, hegemonic wars have (unfortunately) been functional and integral parts of the evolution and dynamics of international systems.

It is not inevitable, of course, that a hegemonic struggle will give rise im- mediately to a new hegemonic power and a renovated international order. As has frequently occurred, the combatants may exhaust themselves, and the “victorious” power may be unable to reorder the international system. The destruction of Rome by barbarian hordes led to the chaos of the Dark Ages. The Pax Britannica was not immediately replaced by the Pax Americana; there

ROBERT GILPIN / Hegemonic War and International Change 115

was a twenty year interregnum, what E. H. Carr called the “twenty years’ crisis.” Eventually, however, a new power or set of powers emerges to give governance to the international system.

What, then, are the defining characteristics of a hegemonic war? How does it differ from more limited conflicts among states? In the first place, such a war involves a direct contest between the dominant power or powers in an international system and the rising challenger or challengers. The conflict be- comes total and in time is characterized by participation of all the major states and most of the minor states in the system. The tendency, in fact, is for every state in the system to be drawn into one or another of the opposing camps. Inflexible bipolar configurations of power (the Delian League versus the Pelo- ponnesian League, the Triple Alliance versus the Triple Entente) frequently presage the outbreak of hegemonic conflict.

Second, the fundamental issue at stake is the nature and governance of the system. The legitimacy of the system may be said to be challenged. For this reason, hegemonic wars are unlimited conflicts; they are at once political, eco- nomic, and ideological in terms of significance and consequences. They become directed at the destruction of the offending social, political, or economic system and are usually followed by religious, political, or social transformation of the defeated society. The leveling of Carthage by Rome, the conversion of the Mid- dle East to Islam by the Arabs, and the democratization of contemporary Japan and West Germany by the United States are salient examples. . . .

Third, a hegemonic war is characterized by the unlimited means employed and by the general scope of the warfare. Because all parties are drawn into the war and the stakes involved are high, few limitations, if any, are observed with respect to the means employed; the limitations on violence and treachery tend to be only those necessarily imposed by the state of technology, the avail- able resources, and the fear of retaliation. Similarly, the geographic scope of the war tends to expand to encompass the entire international system; these are “world” wars. Thus, hegemonic wars are characterized by their intensity, scope, and duration.

From the premodern world, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome meet these c riteria of hegemonic war. In the modern era, several wars have been hegemonic struggles: the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48); the wars of Louis XIV (1667–1713); the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon (1792– 1814); World Wars I and II (1914–18, 1939–45) (Mowat, 1928, pp. 1–2). At issue in each of these great conflicts was the governance of the international system.

In addition to the preceding criteria that define hegemonic war, three pre- conditions generally appear to be associated with the outbreak of hegemonic war. In the first place, the intensification of conflicts among states is a conse- quence of the “closing in” of space and opportunities. With the aging of an international system and the expansion of states, the distance between states decreases, thereby causing them increasingly to come into conflict with one

116 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

another. The once-empty space around the centers of power in the system is appropriated. The exploitable resources begin to be used up, and opportuni- ties for economic growth decline. The system begins to encounter limits to the growth and expansion of member states; states increasingly come into con- flict with one another. Interstate relations become more and more a zero-sum game in which one state’s gain is another’s loss.

Marxists and realists share a sense of the importance of contracting fron- tiers and their significance for the stability and peace of the system. As long as expansion is possible, the law of uneven growth (or development) can operate with little disturbing effect on the overall stability of the system. In time, how- ever, limits are reached, and the international system enters a period of crisis. The clashes among states for territory, resources, and markets increase in fre- quency and magnitude and eventually culminate in hegemonic war. Thus, as E. H. Carr told us, the relative peace of nineteenth-century Europe and the belief that a harmony of interest was providing a basis for increasing economic inter- dependence were due to the existence of “continuously expanding territories and markets” (1951, p. 224). The closing in of political and economic space led to the intensification of conflict and the final collapse of the system in the two world wars.

The second condition preceding hegemonic war is temporal and psy- chological rather than spatial; it is the perception that a fundamental his- torical change is taking place and the gnawing fear of one or more of the great powers that time is somehow beginning to work against it and that one should settle matters through preemptive war while the advantage is still on one’s side. It was anxiety of this nature that Thucydides had in mind when he wrote that the growth of Athenian power inspired fear on the part of the Lacedaemonians and was the unseen cause of the war. The alterna- tives open to a state whose relative power is being eclipsed are seldom those of waging war versus promoting peace, but rather waging war while the balance is still in that state’s favor or waging war later when the tide may have turned against it. Thus the motive for hegemonic war, at least from the perspective of the dominant power, is to minimize one’s losses rather than to maximize one’s gains. In effect, a precondition for hegemonic war is the realization that the law of uneven growth has begun to operate to one’s disadvantage.

The third precondition of hegemonic war is that the course of events begins to escape human control. Thus far, the argument of this study has proceeded as if mankind controlled its own destiny. The propositions presented and ex- plored in an attempt to understand international political change have been phrased in terms of rational cost/benefit calculations. Up to a point, rational- ity does appear to apply; statesmen do explicitly or implicitly make rational calculations and then attempt to set the course of the ship of state accordingly. But it is equally true that events, especially those associated with the passions of war, can easily escape from human control.

“What is the force that moves nations?” Tolstoy inquires in the conclud- ing part of War and Peace, and he answers that ultimately it is the masses in

ROBERT GILPIN / Hegemonic War and International Change 117

motion (1961, Vol. II, p. 1404). Leadership, calculation, control over events— these are merely the illusions of statesmen and scholars. The passions of men and the momentum of events take over and propel societies in novel and un- anticipated directions. This is especially true during times of war. As the Athe- nians counseled the Peloponnesians in seeking to forestall war, “consider the vast influence of accident in war, before you engage in it. As it continues, it generally becomes an affair of chances, chances from which neither of us is exempt, and whose event we must risk in the dark. It is a common mistake in going to war to—begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disaster to discuss the matter” (Thucydides, 1951, p. 45).

Indeed, men seldom determine or even anticipate the consequences of hegemonic war. Although in going to war they desire to increase their gains or minimize their losses, they do not get the war they want or expect; they fail to recognize the pent-up forces they are unleashing or the larger his- torical significance of the decisions they are taking. They underestimate the eventual scope and intensity of the conflict on which they are embarking and its implications for their civilization. Hegemonic war arises from the structural conditions and disequilibrium of an international system, but its consequences are seldom predicted by statesmen. As Toynbee suggested, the law governing such conflicts would appear to favor rising states on the pe- riphery of an international system rather than the contending states in the system itself. States directly engaged in hegemonic conflict, by weakening themselves, frequently actually eliminate obstacles to conquest by a periph- eral power.

The great turning points in world history have been provided by these hegemonic struggles among political rivals; these periodic conflicts have re- ordered the international system and propelled history in new and uncharted directions. They resolve the question of which state will govern the system, as well as what ideas and values will predominate, thereby determining the ethos of succeeding ages. The outcomes of these wars affect the economic, social, and ideological structures of individual societies as well as the structure of the larger international system.

In contrast to the emphasis placed here on the role of hegemonic war in changing the international system, it might be argued that domestic revolu- tion can change the international system. This is partially correct. It would be foolish to suggest, for example, that the great revolutions of the twentieth century (the Russian, Chinese, and perhaps Iranian) have not had a profound impact on world politics. However, the primary consequence of these social and political upheavals (at least of the first two) has been to facilitate the mo- bilization of the society’s resources for purposes of national power. In other words, the significance of these revolutions for world politics is that they have served to strengthen (or weaken) their respective states and thereby cause a redistribution of power in the system.

As the distinguished French historian Elie Haléy put it, “all great con- vulsions in the history of the world, and more particularly in modern Eu- rope, have been at the same time wars and revolutions” (1965, p. 212).

118 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

Thus the Thirty Years’ War was both an international war among Sweden, France, and the Hapsburg Empire and a series of domestic conflicts among Protestant and Catholic parties. The wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period that pitted France against the rest of Europe triggered political upheavals of class and national revolutions throughout Europe. World Wars I and II represented not only the decay of the European inter- national political order but also an onslaught against political liberalism and economic laissez-faire. The triumph of American power in these wars meant not only American governance of the system but also reestablishment of a liberal world order.

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Anthropology, edited by Leon Bramson and George W. Goethals, pp. 351–394. New York: Basic Books, 1964.

———. The Imperial Republic. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Beer, Francis A. Peace Against War—The Ecology of International Violence. San Fran-

cisco: W. H. Freeman, 1981. Carr, Edward Hallett, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939. An Introduction to the

Study of International Relations. London: Macmillan, 1951. Cipolla, Carlo M. Guns, Sails and Empires—Technological Innovation and the Early

Phases of European Expansion 1400–1700. New York: Minerva Press, 1965. ———. ed. The Economic Decline of Empires. London: Methuen, 1970. Clark, George. War and Society in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge University

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———. Primacy or World Order—American Foreign Policy since the Cold War. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978.

Lane, Frederic C. “The Economic Meaning of War and Protection.” Journal of Social Philosophy and Jurisprudence 7 (1942): 254–70.

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———. Venice—A Maritime Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

Lewis, W. Arthur. The Theory of Economic Growth. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

———. Growth and Fluctuations 1870–1913. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978.

Lippmann, Walter. U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic. Boston: Little, Brown, 1943.

“The Long Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation-State.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978): 214–35.

Luttwak, Edward. The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire—From the First Century A.D. to the Third. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Mensch, Gerhard. Stalemate in Technology—Innovations Overcome the Depression. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing, 1979.

Modelski, George. “Agraria and Industria: Two Models of the International System.” World Politics 14 (1961): 118–43.

———. Principles of World Politics. New York: Free Press, 1972. Mowat, R. B. A History of European Diplomacy 1451–1789. New York: Longmans,

Green, 1928. Perkins, Bradford. The Great Rapprochement—England and the United States, 1895–

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120 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

Power, Culprits, and Arms GEOFFREY BLAINEY

THE ABACUS OF POWER I

The Prussian soldier, Carl von Clausewitz, died of cholera in 1831, while leading an army against Polish rebels. He left behind sealed packets contain- ing manuscripts which his widow published in the following year. The mas- sive dishevelled books, entitled On War, could have been called On War and Peace, for Clausewitz implied that war and peace had much in common. In his opinion the leisurely siege of the eighteenth century was not much more than a forceful diplomatic note; that kind of war was ‘only diplomacy somewhat intensified.’1 In essence diplomatic despatches breathed deference, but their courtesy was less effective than the silent threats which underwrote them. The threat might not be mentioned, but it was understood. The blunt words of Frederick the Great had similarly summed up the way in which military power influenced diplomacy: ‘Diplomacy without armaments is like music without instruments.’2

Clausewitz had fought for Prussia in many campaigns against the French but he had more influence on wars in which he did not fight. He is said to have been the talisman of the German general who planned the in- vasions of France in 1870 and 1914. His books were translated into French just before the Crimean War and into English just after the Franco-Prussian War, and in military academies in many lands the name of this man who had won no great battles became more famous than most of those names inseparably linked with victorious battles. His writings however had less influence outside military circles. He was seen as a ruthless analyst who believed that war should sometimes be ‘waged with the whole might of national power.’3 His views therefore seemed tainted to most civilians; he appeared to be the sinister propagandist of militarism. Those who studied a war’s causes, as distinct from its course, ignored him. And yet one of the most dangerous fallacies in the study of war is the belief that the causes of a war and the events of a war belong to separate compartments and reflect completely different principles. This fallacy, translated into medicine, would require the causes and course of an illness to be diagnosed on quite different principles.

Reprinted with permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., and Palgrave Macmillan, from The Causes of War, Third Edition by Geoffrey Blainey. Copyright © 1973, 1977, 1988 by Geoffrey Blainey. All rights reserved. Chapters 8, 10. 1A siege likened to diplomacy: Clausewitz, III 97. 2‘Diplomacy without armaments’: Gooch, Studies in Diplomacy, p. 226. 3‘Waged with the whole might’: Leonard, p. 25.

GEOFFREY BLAINEY / Power, Culprits, and Arms 121

Clausewitz’s tumble of words was overwhelmingly on warfare, and the index of the three English volumes of his work points to only one sentence on peace. Nevertheless some of his views on peace can be inferred from lonely sentences. He believed that a clear ladder of international power tended to pro- mote peace. ‘A conqueror is always a lover of peace,’ he wrote.4 His statement at first sight seems preposterous, but at second sight it commands respect.5

II Power is the crux of many explanations of war and peace, but its effects are not agreed upon. Most observers argue that a nation which is too powerful endangers the peace. A few hint, like Clausewitz, that a dominant nation can preserve the peace simply by its ability to keep inferior nations in order. There must be an answer to the disagreement. The last three centuries are studded with examples of how nations behaved in the face of every extremity of mili- tary and economic power.

That a lopsided balance of power will promote war is probably the most popular theory of international relations. It has the merit that it can be turned upside down to serve as an explanation of peace. It is also attractive because it can be applied to wars of many centuries, from the Carthaginian wars to the Second World War. The very phrase, ‘balance of power,’ has the soothing sound of the panacea: it resembles the balance of nature and the balance of trade and other respectable concepts. It therefore suggests that an even balance of power is somehow desirable. The word ‘balance,’ unfortunately, is confusing. Whereas at one time it usually signified a set of weighing scales—in short it formerly signified either equality or inequality— it now usually signifies equality and equilibrium. In modern language the as- sertion that ‘Germany had a favourable balance of power’ is not completely clear. It is rather like a teacher who, finding no equality of opportunity in a school, proceeded to denounce the ‘unfavourable equality of opportunity.’ The verbal confusion may be partly responsible for the million vague and unpersuasive words which have been written around the concept of the bal- ance of power.

The advantages of an even balance of power in Europe have been stressed by scores of historians and specialists in strategy. The grand old theory of international relations, it is still respected though no longer so venerated. Ac- cording to Hedley Bull, who was a director of a research unit on arms con- trol in the British foreign office before becoming professor of international relations at the Australian National University, ‘The alternative to a stable balance of military power is a preponderance of power, which is very much

4‘A conqueror’: Clausewitz, II 155. 5Clausewitz on peace: On first reading Clausewitz I noticed no comment on peace. Later, real- izing that he must have commented by implication, I skimmed through his work again. As his references to peace seem sparse, I cannot be sure that I have interpreted his views correctly.

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more dangerous.’6 Likewise, Alastair Buchan, director of London’s Institute for Strategic Studies, suggested in his excellent book War in Modern Society: ‘certainly we know from our experience of the 1930s that the lack of such a balance creates a clear temptation to aggression.’7 Many writers of history have culled a similar lesson from past wars.

Most believers in the balance of power think that a world of many pow- erful states tends to be more peaceful. There an aggressive state can be coun- terbalanced by a combination of other strong states. Quincy Wright, in his massive book, A Study of War, suggested with some reservations that ‘the probability of war will decrease in proportion as the number of states in the system increases.’8 Arnold Toynbee,9 observing that the world contained eight major powers on the eve of the First World War and only two—the United States and the Soviet Union—at the close of the Second World War, thought the decline was ominous. A chair with only two legs, he argued, had less balance. As the years passed, and the two great powers avoided major war, some specialists on international affairs argued that a balance of terror had replaced the balance of power. In the nuclear age, they argued, two great powers were preferable to eight. The danger of a crisis that slipped from con- trol was diminished if two powers dominated the world.10 Nevertheless even those who preferred to see two powers dominant in the nuclear age still be- lieved, for the most part, that in the pre-nuclear era a world of many strong powers was safer.11

To my knowledge no historian or political scientist produced evidence to confirm that a power system of seven strong states was more conducive to peace than a system of two strong states. The idea relies much on analo- gies. Sometimes it resembles the kind of argument which old men invoked in European cities when the two-wheeled bicycle began to supersede the tricycle. At other times it resembles a belief in the virtues of free competi- tion within an economic system. It parallels the idea that in business many strong competitors will so function that none can win a preponderance of power; if one seems likely to become predominant, others will temporarily combine to subdue him. It is possibly significant that this doctrine of flex- ible competition in economic affairs was brilliantly systematised at the time when a similar doctrine was refined in international affairs. While Adam Smith praised the virtues of the free market in economic affairs, the Swiss jurist Emerich de Vattel praised it in international affairs. In one sense

6Bull: cited in Buchan, p. 34. 7Buchan, p. 177. 8Wright, abridged edn., p. 122.

10The preference for a bi-polar system often seems to hinge on the idea that wars are often the result of situations which go further than either nation intended.

9Toynbee, A Study of History, IX 244.

11Scholars’ preference for a multi-polar system before 1945 and bi-polar system thereafter: G. H. Snyder in Pruitt and Snyder, p. 124.

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both theories were reactions against a Europe in which powerful monarchs hampered economic life with meddlesome regulations and disturbed politi- cal life with frequent wars.

It is axiomatic that a world possessing seven nations of comparable strength, each of which values its independence, will be a substantial safe- guard against the rise of one world-dominating power. Even two nations of comparable strength will be a useful safeguard. When all this has been said we possess not an axiom for peace but an axiom for national independence. And that in fact was the main virtue of a balance of power in the eyes of those who originally practiced it. It was not primarily a formula for peace: it was a formula for national independence. Edward Gulick,12 Massachusetts historian, was adamant that its clearest theorists and practitioners—the Met- ternichs and Castlereaghs—‘all thought of war as an instrument to preserve or restore a balance of power.’ In essence a balance of power was simply a formula designed to prevent the rise of a nation to world dominance. It merely masqueraded as a formula for peace.

III The idea that an even distribution of power promotes peace has gained strength partly because it has never been accompanied by tangible evidence. Like a ghost it has not been captured and examined for pallor and pulse-beat. And yet there is a point of time when the ghost can be captured. The actual distribution of power can be measured at the end of the war.

The military power of rival European alliances was most imbalanced, was distributed most unevenly, at the end of a decisive war. And decisive wars tended to lead to longer periods of international peace. Indecisive wars, in contrast, tended to produce shorter periods of peace. Thus the eighteenth century was characterised by inconclusive wars and by short periods of peace. During the long wars one alliance had great difficulty in defeating the other. Many of the wars ended in virtual deadlock: military power obviously was evenly balanced. Such wars tended to lead to short periods of peace. The War of the Polish Succession—basically an ineffectual war between France and—Austria—was followed within five years by the War of the Austrian Succession. That war after eight years was so inconclusive on most fronts that the peace treaty signed in 1748 mainly affirmed the status quo. That ineffectual war was followed only eight years later by another general war, the Seven Years War, which ended with Britain the clear victor in the war at sea and beyond the seas, though on European soil the war was a stalemate. But even the Anglo-French peace which followed the Treaty of Paris in 1763 was not long; it ended after fifteen years. It ended when the revolt of the American colonies against Britain removed Britain’s preponderance of power over France.

12Gulick, p. 36.

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The French Revolutionary Wars which, beginning in 1792, raged across Europe and over the sea for a decade were more decisive than any major war for more than a century. They ended with France dominant on the continent and with England dominant at sea and in America and the East. They thus failed to solve the crucial question: was England or France the stronger power? The Peace of Amiens, which England and France signed in 1802, lasted little more than a year. So began the Napoleonic Wars which at last produced un- disputed victors.

This is not to suggest that a general war which ended in decisive victory was the sole cause of a long period of peace. A decisive general war did not always lead to a long period of peace. This survey of the major wars of the period 1700 to 1815 does suggest however that the traditional theory which equates an even balance of power with peace should be reversed. Instead a clear preponderance of power tended to promote peace.

Of the general wars fought in Europe in the last three centuries those with the most decisive outcome were the Napoleonic (1815), Franco-Prussian (1871), First World War (1918), and Second World War (1945). The last days of those wars and the early years of the following periods of peace marked the height of the imbalance of power in Europe. At the end of those wars the scales of power were so tilted against the losers that Napoleon Bonaparte was sent as a captive to an island in the South Atlantic, Napoleon III was captured and permitted to live in exile in England, Kaiser Wilhelm II went into exile in Holland and Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Years after the end of those wars, the scales of power were still strongly tilted against the losers. And yet those years of extreme—imbalance marked the first stages of perhaps the most pro- nounced periods of peace known to Europe in the last three or more centuries.

Exponents of the virtues of an even distribution of military power have concentrated entirely on the outbreak of war. They have ignored however the conditions surrounding the outbreak of peace. By ignoring the outbreak of peace they seem to have ignored the very period when the distribution of mili- tary power between warring nations can be accurately measured. For warfare is the one convincing way of measuring the distribution of power. The end of a war produces a neat ledger of power which has been duly audited and signed. According to that ledger an agreed preponderance of power tends to foster peace. In contrast the exponents of the orthodox theory examine closely the prelude to a war, but that is a period when power is muffled and much more difficult to measure. It is a period characterised by conflicting estimates of which nation or alliance is the most powerful. Indeed one can almost sug- gest that war is usually the outcome of a diplomatic crisis which cannot be solved because both sides have conflicting estimates of their bargaining power.

The link between a diplomatic crisis and the outbreak of war seems central to the understanding of war. That link however seems to be misunderstood. Thus many historians, in explaining the outbreak of war, argue that ‘the breakdown in diplomacy led to war.’ This explanation is rather like the argu- ment that the end of winter led to spring: it is a description masquerading as an explanation. In fact that main influence which led to the breakdown of

GEOFFREY BLAINEY / Power, Culprits, and Arms 125

diplomacy—a contradictory sense of bargaining power—also prompted the nations to fight. At the end of a war the situation was reversed. Although I have not come across the parallel statement—‘so the breakdown of war led to diplomacy’—it can be explained in a similar way. In essence the very factor which made the enemies reluctant to continue fighting also persuaded them to negotiate. That factor was their agreement about their relative bargaining position.

It is not the actual distribution or balance of power which is vital: it is rather the way in which national leaders think that power is distributed. In contrast orthodox theory assumes that the power of nations can be measured with some objectivity. It assumes that, in the pre-nuclear era, a statesman’s knowledge of the balance of international power rested mainly on an ‘objec- tive comparison of military capabilities.’13 I find it difficult however to ac- cept the idea that power could ever be measured with such objectivity. The clear exception was at the end of wars—the points of time which theorists ignore. Indeed, it is the problem of accurately measuring the relative power of nations which goes far to explain why wars occur. War is a dispute about the measurement of power. War marks the choice of a new set of weights and measures.

IV In peace time the relations between two diplomats are like relations between two merchants. While the merchants trade in copper or transistors, the diplo- mats’ transactions involve boundaries, spheres of influence, commercial con- cessions and a variety of other issues which they have in common. A foreign minister or diplomat is a merchant who bargains on behalf of his country. He is both buyer and seller, though he buys and sells privileges and obligations rather than commodities. The treaties he signs are simply more courteous ver- sions of commercial contracts.

The difficulty in diplomacy, as in commerce, is to find an acceptable price for the transaction. Just as the price of merchandise such as copper roughly represents the point where the supply of copper balances the demand for it, the price of a transaction in diplomacy roughly marks the point at which one nation’s willingness to pay matches the price demanded by the other. The dip- lomatic market however is not as sophisticated as the mercantile market. Po- litical currency is not so easily measured as economic currency. Buying and selling in the diplomatic market is much closer to barter, and so resembles an ancient bazaar in which the traders have no accepted medium of exchange. In diplomacy each nation has the rough equivalent of a selling price—a price which it accepts when it sells a concession—and the equivalent of a buying price. Sometimes these prices are so far apart that a transaction vital to both

13‘The objective comparison of military capabilities’: G. H. Snyder in Pruitt and Snyder, p. 117. According to Wright, p. 116, the term ‘balance of power’ implies that fluctuations in power ‘can be observed and measured’.

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nations cannot be completed peacefully; they cannot agree on the price of the transaction. The history of diplomacy is full of such crises. The ministers and diplomats of Russia and Japan could not agree in 1904, on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War; the Germans could not find acceptable terms with Brit- ish and French ministers on the eve of the Second World War.

A diplomatic crisis is like a crisis in international payments; like a crisis in the English pound or the French franc. In a diplomatic crisis the currency of one nation or alliance is out of alignment with that of the others. These cur- rencies are simply the estimates which each nation nourishes about its relative bargaining power. These estimates are not easy for an outsider to assess or to measure; and yet these estimates exist clearly in the minds of the ministers and diplomats who bargain.

For a crisis in international payments there are ultimate solutions which all nations recognise. If the English pound is the object of the crisis, and if its value is endangered because England is importing too much, the English government usually has to admit that it is living beyond its present means. As a remedy it may try to discourage imports and encourage exports. It may even have to declare that the value of the English pound is too high in relation to the French franc, the German mark and all other currencies, and accord- ingly it may fix the pound at a lower rate. Whichever solution it follows is not pleasant for the national pride and the people’s purse. Fortunately there is less shame and humiliation for a nation which has to confess that its monetary currency is overvalued than for a country which has to confess that its dip- lomatic currency is overvalued. It is almost as if the detailed statistics which record the currency crisis make it seem anonymous and unemotional. In con- trast a diplomatic crisis is personal and emotional. The opponent is not a sheet of statistics representing the sum of payments to and from all nations: the opponent is an armed nation to which aggressive intentions can be attributed and towards whom hatred can be felt.

A nation facing a payments crisis can measure the extent to which it is living beyond its means. As the months pass by, moreover, it can measure whether its remedies have been effective, for the statistics of its balance of payments are an accurate guide to the approach of a crisis and the passing of crisis. On the other hand a deficit in international power is not so easy to de- tect. A nation with an increasing deficit in international power may not even recognise its weaknesses. A nation may so mistake its bargaining power that it may make the ultimate appeal to war, and then learn through defeat in war- fare to accept a humbler assessment of its bargaining position.

The death-watch wars of the eighteenth century exemplified such crises. A kingdom which was temporarily weakened by the accession of a new ruler or by the outbreak of civil unrest refused to believe that it was weaker. It usually behaved as if its bargaining position were unaltered. But its position, in the eyes of rival nations, was often drastically weaker. Negotiations were therefore frustrated because each nation demanded far more than the other was prepared to yield. Likewise the appeal to war was favoured because each side believed that it would win.

GEOFFREY BLAINEY / Power, Culprits, and Arms 127

In diplomacy some nations for a longer period can live far beyond their means: to live beyond their means is to concede much less than they would have to concede if the issue was resolved by force. A government may be un- yielding in negotiations because it predicts that its adversary does not want war. It may be unyielding because it has an inflated idea of its own military power. Or it may be unyielding because to yield to an enemy may weaken its standing and grip within its own land. Whereas an endangered nation facing a currency crisis cannot escape some punishment, in a diplomatic crisis it can completely escape punishment so long as the rival nation or alliance does not insist on war. Thus diplomacy may become more unrealistic, crises may become more frequent, and ultimately the tension and confusion may end in war. . . .

War itself provides the most reliable and most objective test of which nation or alliance is the most powerful. After a war which ended decisively, the warring nations agreed on their respective strength. The losers and the winners might have disagreed about the exact margin of superiority; they did agree however that decisive superiority existed. A decisive war was there- fore usually followed by an orderly market in political power, or in other words peace. Indeed one vital difference between the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries was that wars tended to become more decisive. This is part of the explanation for the war-studded history of one century and the relative peacefulness of the following century. Whereas the eighteenth century more often had long and inconclusive wars followed by short periods of peace, the century after 1815 more often had short and decisive wars and long periods of peace.

Nevertheless, during both centuries, the agreement about nations’ bar- gaining power rarely lasted as long as one generation. Even when a war had ended decisively the hierarchy of power could not last indefinitely. It was blurred by the fading of memories of the previous war, by the accession of new leaders who blamed the old leaders for the defeat, and by the legends and folklore which glossed over past defeats. It was blurred by the weakening ef- fects of internal unrest or the strengthening effects of military reorganisation, by economic and technical change, by shifts in alliances, and by a variety of other influences. So the defeated nation regained confidence. When important issues arose, war became a possibility. The rival nations believed that each could gain more by fighting than by negotiating. Those contradictory hopes are characteristic of the outbreak of war. . . .

VII Wars usually end when the fighting nations agree on their relative strength, and wars usually begin when fighting nations disagree on their relative strength. Agreement or disagreement is shaped by the same set of factors. Thus each factor that is a prominent cause of war can at times be a prominent cause of peace. Each factor can oscillate between war and peace, and the os- cillation is most vivid in the history of nations which decided to fight because

128 PART II International Realism: Anarchy and Power

virtually everything was in their favour and decided to cease fighting because everything was pitted against them. . . .

AIMS AND ARMS I

A culprit stands in the centre of most generalised explanations of war. While there may be dispute in naming the culprit, it is widely believed that the cul- prit exists.

In the eighteenth century many philosophers thought that the ambitions of absolute monarchs were the main cause of war: pull down the mighty, and wars would become rare. Another theory contended that many wars came from the Anglo-French rivalry for colonies and commerce: restrain that quest, and peace would be more easily preserved. The wars following the French Revolution fostered an idea that popular revolutions were becoming the main cause of international war. In the nineteenth century, monarchs who sought to unite their troubled country by a glorious foreign war were widely seen as culprits. At the end of that century the capitalists’ chase for markets or invest- ment outlets became a popular villain. The First World War convinced many writers that armaments races and arms salesmen had become the villains, and both world wars fostered the idea that militarist regimes were the main dis- turbers of the peace.

Most of these theories of war have flourished, then fallen away, only to appear again in new dress. The eighteenth-century belief that mercantilism was the main cause of war was re-clothed by the Englishman, J. A. Hobson, and the Russian exile, V. I. Lenin, in the Boer War and in the First World War; and the theme that manufacturers of armaments were the chief plotters of war was revived to explain the widening of the war in Vietnam. The resil- ience of this type of explanation is probably aided by the fact that it carries its own solution to war. Since it points to a particular culprit, we only have to eliminate the culprit in order to abolish war. By abolishing dictators, capital- ists, militarists, manufacturers of armaments or one of the other villains, peace would be preserved. Indeed it is often the passion for the antidote—whether democracy, socialism or free trade—rather than an analysis of the illness that popularises many of these theories of war.

These theories assume that ambitions and motives are the dominant cause of wars. As war is increasingly denounced as the scarlet sin of civilisation, it is un- derstandable that the search for the causes of war should often become a search for villains. The search is aided by the surviving records of war. So many of the documents surrounding the outbreak of every war—whether the War of Spanish Succession or the recent War of the Saigon Succession—are attempts to blame the other side. The surviving records of wars are infected with insinuations and accusations of guilt, and some of that infection is transmitted to the writings of those who, generations or centuries later, study those wars. Since so much re- search into war is a search for villains, and since the evidence itself is dominated

GEOFFREY BLAINEY / Power, Culprits, and Arms 129

by attempts to apportion blame, it is not surprising that many theories of war and explanations of individual wars are centred on the aims of ‘aggressors.’

Most controversies about the causes of particular wars also hinge on the aims of nations. What did France and England hope to gain by aiding the Turks against the Russians in the Crimean War? What were the ambitions of Bismarck and Napoleon III on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870? Who deserves most blame for the outbreak of the First World War? The ever- green examination-question at schools and universities—were the main causes of a certain war political or economic or religious—reflects the strong tradi- tion that ambitions are the key to understanding war.

The running debate on the causes of the Vietnam War is therefore in a rich tradition. Measured by the mileage of words unrolled it must be the most voluminous which any war has aroused, but it is mainly the traditional debate about ambitions and motives. The war in Vietnam is variously said to have been caused by the desire of United States’ capitalists for markets and invest- ment outlets, by the pressures of American military suppliers, by the American hostility to communism, by the crusading ambitions of Moscow and Peking, the aggressive nationalism or communism of Hanoi, the corruption or aggres- sion of Saigon, or the headlong clash of other aims. The kernel of the debate is the assumption that pressures or ambitions are the main causes of the war.

II The idea that war is caused simply by a clash of aims is intrinsically satisfying. It is easy to believe that historians will ultimately understand the causes of war if only they can unravel the ambitions held on the eve of a war by the relevant monarchs, prime ministers, presidents, chiefs of staff, archbishops, editors, in- tellectuals and cheering or silent crowds. Explanations based on ambitions however have a hidden weakness. They portray ambitions which were so strong that war was inevitable. It is almost a hallmark of such interpretations to describe ambitions—whether for prestige, ideology, markets or empire—as the fundamental causes, the basic causes, the deepseated, underlying or long- term causes. Such causes merely need the provocation of minor events to pro- duce war. The minor events are usually referred to as the occasion for war as distinct from the causes of war. Sometimes the incidents which immediately precede the war are called the short-term causes: the assumption is that long- term causes are more powerful.

This idea of causation has a distinctive shape. Its exponents see conflict as a volcano which, seeming to slumber, is really approaching the day of ter- ror. They see conflict as water which slowly gathers heat and at last comes to the boil. The events which happen on the eve of a war add the last few degrees of heat to the volcano or kettle. It is a linear kind of argument: the causes of war are like a graph of temperatures and the last upward movement on the graph marks the transition from peace to war. If in fact such a graph were a valid way of depicting the coming of war, one would also expect to see the temperature curve move downwards in the last days of a war. One would

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also expect that if, on the eve of a war, minor incidents could convert the long-term causes of conflict into war, similar incidents could activate the transition from war to peace. No such explanations however are offered for the end of a war. If one believes that the framework of an explanation of war should also be valid for an explanation of peace, the volcano or kettle theo- ries are suspect.

For any explanation the framework is crucial. In every field of knowledge the accepted explanations depend less on the marshalling of evidence than on preconceptions of what serves as a logical framework for the evidence. The framework dominates the evidence, because it dictates what evidence should be sought or ignored. Our idea of a logical framework is often unconscious, and this elusiveness enhances its grip. One may suggest that the explana- tions of war which stress ambitions are resting on a persuasive but rickety framework.

The policies of a Frederick the Great, a Napoleon and a President Lincoln were clearly important in understanding wars. So too were the hopes of the inner circles of power in which they moved and the hopes of the people whom they led. Likewise the aims of all the surrounding nations—irrespective of their eagerness or reluctance to fight—were important. It is doubtful however whether a study of the aims of many wars will yield useful patterns. There is scant evidence to suggest that century after century the main aims of nations which went to war could be packaged into a simple economic, religious or political formula. There is no evidence that, over a long period, the desire for territory or markets or the desire to spread an ideology tended to dominate all other war aims. It is even difficult to argue that certain kinds of aims were dominant in one generation. Admittedly it is often said that the main ‘causes’— meaning the main aims—of war were religious in the sixteenth century, dynas- tic or mercantile in various phases of the eighteenth century and nationalist or economic in the nineteenth century. It seems more likely, however, that those who share in a decision to wage war pursued a variety of aims which even fluc- tuated during the same week and certainly altered during the course of the war.

One generalisation about war aims can be offered with confidence. The aims are simply varieties of power. The vanity of nationalism, the will to spread an ideology, the protection of kinsmen in an adjacent land, the desire for more territory or commerce, the avenging of a defeat or insult, the craving for greater national strength or independence, the wish to impress or cement alliances—all these represent power in different wrappings. The conflicting aims of rival nations are always conflicts of power. Not only is power the issue at stake, but the decision to resolve that issue by peaceful or warlike methods is largely determined by assessments of relative power.

III The explanations that stress aims are theories of rivalry and animosity and not theories of war. They help to explain increasing rivalry between nations but they do not explain why the rivalry led to war. For a serious rift between

GEOFFREY BLAINEY / Power, Culprits, and Arms 131

nations does not necessarily end in war. It may take other forms: the severing of diplomatic relations; the peaceful intervention of a powerful outside nation; an economic blockade; heavy spending on armaments; the imposing of tariffs; an invasion accomplished without bloodshed; the enlisting of allies; or even the relaxing of tension through a successful conference. Of course these variet- ies of conflict may merely postpone the coming of war but serious rivalry and animosity can exist for a century without involving warfare. France and Brit- ain were serious rivals who experienced dangerous crises between 1815 and 1900, but the war so often feared did not eventuate.

One may suggest that this kind of interpretation is hazy about the causes of peace as well as war. Its exponents usually ignore the question of why a war came to an end. They thus ignore the event which would force them to revise their analysis of the causes of war. Consider for in- stance the popular but dubious belief that the main cause of the First World War was Berlin’s desire to dominate Europe. Now if such an explanation is valid, what were the main causes of the peace which ensued in 1918? It would be consistent with this interpretation to reply that the crumbling of German ambitions led to peace. And why had those ambitions crumbled? Because by October 1918 Germany’s military power—and morale is a vital ingredient of power—was no longer adequate. As the emphasis on aims cannot explain Germany’s desire for peace in 1918, it would be surpris- ing if the emphasis on aims could explain Germany’s decision for war in 1914. Indeed Germany’s aims would not have been high in 1914 if her leaders then had believed that Germany lacked adequate power. Bethmann Hollweg, chancellor of Germany at the outbreak of war, confessed later that Germany in 1914 had overvalued her strength. ‘Our people’, he said, ‘had developed so amazingly in the last twenty years that wide circles suc- cumbed to the temptation of overestimating our enormous forces in rela- tion to those of the rest of the world.’14

One conclusion seems clear. It is dangerous to accept any explanation of war which concentrates on ambitions and ignores the means of carrying out those ambitions. A government’s aims are strongly influenced by this as- sessment of whether it has sufficient strength to achieve these aims. Indeed the two factors interact quietly and swiftly. When Hitler won power in 1933 and had long-term hopes of reviving German greatness, his ambitions could not alone produce a forceful foreign policy. Hitler’s foreign policy in 1933 was no more forceful than his means, in his judgment, permitted. His military and diplomatic weapons, in his opinion, did not at first permit a bold foreign policy. A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War, one of the most masterly books on a particular war, reveals Hitler as an alert opportunist who tempered his objectives to the available means of achieving them. When Hitler began to rearm Germany he was guided not only by ambitions but by his sense of Germany’s bargaining position in Europe. He would not have

14‘Our people,’ Fischer, p. 637.

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rearmed if he had believed that France or Russia would forcefully prevent him from building aircraft, submarines and tanks. In the main decisions which Hitler made between 1933 and the beginning of war in 1939, his short-term objectives and his sense of Germany’s bargaining position marched so neatly in step that it is impossible to tell whether his aims or his oscillating sense of Germany’s strength beat the drum. Opportunity and ambition—or aims and arms—so acted upon one another that they were virtually inseparable. The interaction was not confined to Berlin; it occurred in the 1930s in London, Paris, Warsaw, Moscow, Rome, Prague and all the cities of power. . . .

REFERENCES Buchan, Alastair. War in Modern Society: An Introduction (London, 1968). Clausewitz, Carl von. On War, ed. by F. N. Maude, tr. from German, 3 vols. (London,

1940). Fischer, Fritz. Germany’s Aims in the First World War, tr. from German (London,

1967). Gooch, G. P. Studies in Diplomacy and Statecraft (London, 1942). ———. Louis XV: The Monarchy in Decline (London, 1956). Gulick, E. V. Europe’s Classical Balance of Power (New York, 1967). Leonard, Roger A., ed. A Short Guide to Clausewitz on War (London, 1967). Pruitt, Dean G. and Snyder, R. C., eds. Theory and Research on the Causes of War

(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969). Toynbee, Arnold. Experiences (London, 1969). ———. A Study of History, 12 vols. (London, 1934–61). Wright, Quincy. A Study of War, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1942). ———. A Study of War, abridged by Louis L. Wright (Chicago, 1965).