OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/03/17, SPi THE CAUSES OF WAR AND THE SPR EAD OF PEACE OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/03/17, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/03/17, SPi T H E C AU S E S O F WA R A N D T H E S P R E A D O F P E AC E but wi ll waR Re bound? AZAR GAT 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/03/17, SPi 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Azar Gat 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956899 ISBN 978–0–19–879502–5 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/03/17, SPi Preface Why War? The Unsolved Mystery T he causes of war—why people fight—is one of the big questions of human existence. The subject of much speculation and consternation throughout the ages, it remains a puzzle. Two contrasting views of war have always manifested themselves. On the one hand, war is perceived in utilitarian terms as a rational means for the attainment of desired ends—a continuation of state policy by other means, as theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) famously put it. At the emotional level, people throughout history have celebrated war and sung the praises of its heroes and heroism. On the other hand, and with the same intensity, people have lamented war as a scourge from heaven wreaked upon a hapless humanity, along and often in conjunction with pestilence and famine. According to this view, war is a wholly senseless activity whose lethality, destructiveness, and resulting misery outweigh any potential benefit to either of the sides involved. War as an absurdity, a mistake, or ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ tragedy has become a widespread notion in today’s modern developed world. Which of these two contrasting views is correct, and can they be reconciled? In explaining why people fight one needs to account for both. Another salient difficulty with the question of why people fight is that it is widely regarded as inherently unanswerable, because the causes of war are assumed to be too varied or context-/culture-dependent. Although we tend to have a generally good intuitive idea of the aims that motivate collectives to go to war, an attempt at forming a stricter definition of them is believed to be futile. Historians, in particular, whose job it is to bring out the unique specifics and rich diversity of the particular societies they happen to study, are inclined to hold this view. By contrast, students of inter- national relations are oriented towards the general; and yet the discipline’s yield on the causes of war is poor.1 Furthermore, what are regarded as the grand theories of international relations have either addressed the causes of OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/03/17, SPi vi Preface war only obliquely or, as we shall see, have espoused manifestly incomplete or incoherent explanations for them. As a review of the literature on the causes of war has concluded: ‘a clear answer is yet to be found’.2 Finally, while Steven Pinker’s study of the decrease of violence in history, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), is superb, some of the few reservations I have about it concern its treatment of the causes of violence and war. And the questions of why war occurs and why it has declined—if it has—are intimately connected. In my War in Human Civilization (2006) I advanced a comprehensive answer to the question of why people fight. However, that book was an 800-page, multifaceted treatment of the phenomenon of war, in which the causes of war were only one among many topics.3 Given the subject’s great significance, there seems to be a need for a shorter book dedicated entirely to the causes of war and explaining why peace has become the norm in the most developed parts of today’s world. Proceeding from what I wrote in War in Human Civilization, this book brings the subject into sharper focus, condensing some of my arguments there, while developing, updating, and expanding on some of the major themes. Like its predecessor, the book cheerfully breaks through disciplinary boundaries. Instead of the disparate, closed-onto-themselves and, as suggested here, often contrived discourses on the causes of war found in disciplines such as anthropology and inter- national relations, the book combines the wealth of evidence and many valid insights from these disciplines, as well as from other social sciences, history, and evolutionary theory, to offer a general answer to a lingering mystery. At the same time, I have striven to keep the book as free as possible from academic jargon and make it accessible to the general public, no less than to scholars and students. The book progresses as follows. Chapter 1 sets out to resolve a centuries-old puzzle: when did human fighting begin—have people always fought among themselves, or did warfare emerge only later in human history? The chapter refutes the last-ditch attempts—made over the past fifteen years—to salvage the latter position, known as Rousseauism. Chapters 2 and 3 summarize my evolutionary scheme of the human web of desires in relation to the causes of war. Chapter 2 explains the root causes of war during the human evolu- tionary state of nature, the more than 90 per cent of our species’ history that took place before the adoption of agriculture and the emergence of states. It was during this immensely long time period, when people lived in small kin groups as hunter-gatherers, that our natural propensities and OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/03/17, SPi Preface vii system of desires were shaped, with violent conflict as one of the means for achieving them, alongside cooperation and peaceful competition. Chapter 3 traces the multifarious ways in which our deep evolutionary core inter- acted with the rich and diverse human cultural evolution built around it in shaping the causes of war since the adoption of agriculture and the rise of state societies. Chapters 4 and 5 pause to offer a critical panoramic review of the historical development of, state of research in, and problems that beset the disciplines of anthropology and international relations (which study the pre-state and state era, respectively) with regards to conflict, war, and their causes. This part opens a prism, and provides a sobering lesson, on how dominant dis- ciplinary discourses are formed, often become overbearing, and may lead the members of scholarly communities astray. Returning to the real world, Chapters 6 and 7, together constituting nearly half of the book, greatly expand my analysis of the forces and counter-forces behind the decline of war during the past two centuries, and probe more extensively into the future. Chapter 6 analyses how developments since the onset of the industrial age from 1815 onwards have radically shifted the cal- culus of war and peace as means for fulfilling desired human ends, sharply decreasing belligerency in the parts of the world affected by the process of modernization. Rather than war becoming more costly in terms of life and resources, as many believe to be the case (not so), the real change is that peace has become more rewarding. Scholars who have suggested that there has been a decline in belligerency differ on the causes, scope, and time frame of this decline. The Modernization Peace concept presented here scrutin- izes, contextualizes, and encompasses within a comprehensive framework the various peace theories advanced over the past few decades, such as the ‘democratic’ or ‘liberal peace’ and the ‘interdependence/capitalist peace’. Finally, Chapter 7 accounts for the divergences from the Modernization Peace, most conspicuously the two world wars. It shows that although the Modernization Peace is a very real development, it has been disrupted in the past—and may still be challenged in the future—by projections of ‘alternative modernity’, by anti-modernists, and by failed modernizers, all of which are still active in today’s world. While the world has become more peaceful than ever before, with war unprecedentedly disappearing in its most developed parts, there is still much to worry about in terms of security and there is no place for complacency. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/03/17, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/03/17, SPi Acknowledgements A s always, I owe a debt to friends and colleagues who read parts of the manuscript and offered much valuable advice. They include: Uriel Abulof, Peter Berkowitz, Nizan Feldman, Amir Lupovici, Yotam Margalit, Gil Merom, Benjamin Miller, Yossi Shain, and Alexander Yakobson. Anonymous article reviewers have driven me to expand and deepen. The following journals published early versions of some themes from the book: Anthropological Quarterly, World Politics, Foreign Affairs, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Peace Studies, and Evolutionary Anthropology. The research and writing of the book have been generously supported by the Axel and Margaret Axson Johnson Foundation, by the Israel Science Foundation (grant 1258/13), and by Tel Aviv University. I thank them all.