War was abolished in 1928. Or at least that was the theory. Horrified by the loss of life in the First World War and led by the US and France, states signed up to the Pact of Paris under which they resolved not to have recourse to war between them and to settle disputes or conflicts among them solely by peaceful means.
Not that the Pact prevented an even more devastating conflict only eleven years later. In 1945, the UN Charter inflected by the advent of nuclear weapons reinforced the obligation not to fight wars other than in self-defence.
Over the past one hundred years, there has been a continuous effort to find ways to prevent conflict and constrain its character should prevention fail. Despite such efforts, wars continue to blight the lives of humankind on an industrial scale.
As Russia’s indefensible and illegal attack on Ukraine continues to cause unrelieved suffering and as conflict in Israel/Palestine remains unabated, it’s perhaps as good a time as any to ask ourselves why wars still happen, what causes them and what can be done to prevent them or at least to mitigate their impact. Are human beings incorrigibly aggressive, made so over the millennia of their evolution? What in any event can we learn from the natural and social sciences as well as historical experience to increase our understanding and inform future practice and expectations? That is the very large question that the distinguished British historian Richard Overy has set himself to answer in his new book, “Why War?”
In the space of only a little over three hundred pages, Overy has sought to synthesise an enormous and incredibly varied body of research reaching back via archaeological and anthropological evidence to the very emergence of Homo sapiens as a social animal. He starts disarmingly by suggesting his book is a kind of “impertinence” given that most of the story of human warlike violence has hitherto been “the preserve of the scientific humanities” while he is only an historian.
Though claiming he must tread carefully through an academic minefield, he rarely holds back from confident and robust analysis and from deploying his own opinions and judgements. Overy would surely call himself a “realist” and, in his view, humankind’s propensity for intergroup violence is nothing new and shows little sign of changing for the better in the future.
“Why War?” is structured in two parts. The first part seeks answers to the question of why warfare, defined as “collective, purposive, lethal, intergroup violence”, has occurred throughout the millennia of human evolution in all parts of the world. In considering this underlying question, Overy seeks understanding from biology, psychology, anthropology (with archaeology alongside) and ecology. The second part examines what he calls “motivational categories” which he corrals together under four headings: resources, belief, power and security.
It is perhaps ironic that some of the most contested conclusions as to the causes of wars are to be found in the accounts of the “scientific humanities”. Darwin and Freud – and more especially their disciples – appear early in Overy’s account and suffer most from closer examination. Biological analyses are often seen now as both too speculative and too deterministic. Popular biology books on the sources or explanation of human aggression have been dismissed by one leading anthropologist as mere “biobabble”.
Having been invited by Einstein to offer insights into the sources of human aggression, Freud produced a rather limp suggestion of a human “death wish” which didn’t take anyone very far. Indeed psychologists of all kinds have not produced convincing hypotheses about sources of intergroup violence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment-inspired optimism about the decline of violence in his celebrated study of “The Better Angels of our Nature”, is hardly mentioned by Overy.
The social science which stands up best as a source for Overy’s reflections is anthropology, especially when set beside evidence from archaeology. Even here the assumed “objectivity” of such disciplines is shown up sharply. The conclusions of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead from her tribal studies in the 1930s to the effect that early Homo sapiens were pacific and not prone to inter-group violence, hasn’t stood up to serious examination and even anthropologists have changed their minds since then.
Overy relentlessly underlines, from evidence drawn from bone remains and stone engravings across many thousands of years, that weapons were made, traded and used in inter-group conflict or warfare from the very earliest time for which evidence is available. Rousseau’s noble savage never existed, or at least not once humankind had formed into groups or tribes and agriculturalists and hunter gatherers battled over land. And here ecologists, in indicating how land shortages and climate changes influenced past patterns of warfare, point all too clearly towards risks in our own time.
Where Overy’s own skills and expertise as an historian are particularly in play is in the second part of his book. He draws widely on examples of conflict across the ages but especially from the period since the late eighteenth century. Each of the motivational dimensions or causes of war is drawn out clearly in the individual chapters. “Resources” are defined broadly to include territory, minerals (and most recently oil), people (including slavery) as well as looted goods. The bottom line is that resource rivalry has been present in one way or another in almost all conflicts. “Belief” understood as religious-denominated wars (and secular equivalents, notably Communism and Nazism in the twentieth century) remains an important influence in decisions to go to war and in the willingness of many combatants to fight in such wars; and Overy rightly cautions against thinking otherwise.
“Power” is a slippery category as it is not usually an objective in itself, except in the cases of what Overy calls “hubris” wars. These he illustrates by reference to Alexander the Great’s campaigns in the ancient world and Napoleon’s and later Hitler’s in more recent times. Each of them at times sought seemingly unending conflict and conquest, sometimes for its own sake. “Security” is a concept that has emerged and developed since the Second World War and which Overy outlines briefly. The unbridled character of the First but especially of the Second World War and the advent of the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons led to a new emphasis on security rather than conquest: how to contain and constrain the instruments and character of contemporary conflict without eliminating the threat of its use.
Doubtless some readers will find Overy’s analysis profoundly disheartening. For he sees in the long history of humankind’s willingness to engage in war and the many reasons why it has done so, no grounds for thinking the patterns of the past can be overcome today or that the future offers any long-term respite. In facing that future, Overy wants us to do so without what he would see as comforting illusions. Perhaps this is why though he alludes to post-Second World War efforts to develop and foster measures of international arms control, there is little mention or recognition in “Why War?” of the growing body of international laws on armed conflict and conduct in war and the constraining roles they can play in conflicts today.
The statesmen who framed the Paris Pact in 1928 and helped point the way to the larger limits reflected in the UN Charter, would surely have been saddened by Overy’s overall conclusions. For these seem to offer little hope or prospect of less warfare in the future at a time moreover when the threat of nuclear proliferation is growing, new techniques of warfare such as cyber are being developed and new frontiers of conflict such as Outer Space are being explored.
Why War by Richard Overy is published by Pelican Books, £22
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