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A “Liberal” Moment of Peace?

Source:
The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace

A “Liberal” Moment of Peace?

Since the mid-1980s, the world has experienced a relatively peaceful period in international relations. While the end of the Cold War reopened many old wounds (not least in the Balkans and the Caucasus) and many older conflicts remained unsolved, leading to pessimistic predictions about going “back to the future” and assertions of the need to implement various military measures to face a new set of threats, the world saw a major decline in the incidence of armed conflict during the 1990s. At the peak in 1992, there were fifty-two armed conflicts in thirty-eight countries, each claiming more than twenty-five battle deaths per year, and some a great deal bloodier. The number of conflicts has now been reduced by almost 40 percent. The number of wars—i.e., armed conflicts with at least one thousand battle deaths per given year—has been reduced by some 80 percent; most of these remaining armed conflicts are end-plays or minor reruns of past conflicts. The number of new conflicts declined in this period to a point in 2005 or 2006 where no new conflicts started. There was also a decline during that period in the number of countries affected by war on their territory.

The one measure of armed conflict that appears at first glance to give a different picture is the number of countries participating in armed conflict. This is, however, a function of the coalition-building in four wars, from the Gulf War of 1991 to the expansion of the Iraq War of 2003 and after, with the number of countries participating in wars ranging from twenty to thirty-six. But these numbers do not reflect the amount of fighting; many of these countries participate as a symbol of political solidarity or interpret their presence in other countries, such as Afghanistan or Iraq, as a form of peacekeeping sanctioned by the United Nations. In that sense, the rise in the number of countries nominally at war is consistent with the concurrent increase in the number of international peacekeeping operations, the number of countries sending troops for peacekeeping missions, and the number of personnel participating in them.

The severity of war, as measured by the number of military personnel and civilians killed in battle, has been declining for an even longer period. The annual statistical trend for the number of battle deaths in the twentieth century is completely dominated by the two World Wars, but after World War II, annual battle deaths continued to be heavily influenced by individual wars, though the peaks were declining. The first peak, around 1950, represents the Chinese Civil War, followed closely by the Korean War; the second peak is due mostly to the Vietnam War; the third represented the Iran-Iraq War and the Soviet-Afghanistan War; the fourth peak represents the internationalized civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and a fifth was mainly due to the Iraq War. But the long-term trend over a sixty-year period is clearly downward. Figures for civilian casualties in many of these wars are highly disputed, and the Iraq War is no exception. A survey from the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 150,000 casualties in a little over three years following the 2003 invasion. This figure includes deaths from types of violence that have not been counted in the numbers for earlier wars, so a direct comparison with battle-death figures for earlier wars is unrealistic. But even if we include the entire WHO number in the toll of battle deaths, this does not change the basic picture of a downward trend. Recently, violence in Iraq has been declining. It remains a very violent war, and it may well settle into a state of drawn-out internal violence, as was Sri Lanka or a much more violent version of Northern Ireland, but the figures from Iraq have not reversed the global trend toward a lower lethality in war.

Statistics of state-based armed conflicts and their consequences in terms of battle-deaths do not tell the whole story of human violence. A first missing element is indirect deaths in war. Long-term effects of war include the killing of enemies after the war has ended, displacement of populations, destruction of physical and human capital, disrupted medical services, weaker social norms and political chaos, weapons proliferation, crime, and environmental destruction. A World Bank study has aptly characterized civil war as “development in reverse.” All of this has a considerable cost in human lives. Such indirect effects of war do not, however, represent a new phenomenon. The influenza epidemic that followed World War I claimed tens of million of lives, more than the battle deaths in the war. The war contributed to the spread and lethality of the disease, but we cannot say with any accuracy how many would have died if the war had not contributed. Similar counterfactual estimation problems apply to more recent wars such as those in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Sudan. We may surmise that indirect effects of war are now greater relative to battle deaths because most armed conflicts take place in poor societies with inadequate health facilities. But we have no reliable chronological data to back up such a conjecture.

A second omission from the story of human violence is nonstate conflicts, that is, organized groups fighting each other but without the state being a direct party to the conflict. Currently, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program records about as many of these—most of them in Africa—as state-based conflicts. Again, we do not have long-term comparative data to establish conclusively whether such conflicts are increasing or decreasing. But generally they claim relatively few lives and thus do not appear to offer a serious challenge to the idea of a waning of war.

The third and most serious omission is that of one-sided conflicts (i.e., genocides, politicides, and, more generally, fatal attacks on unorganized people). Many of these, such as the Holocaust or the liquidation of the kulaks in the Soviet Union, rank with the largest wars in terms of the numbers killed. There is considerable controversy over what should be included. Some have counted genocide, in the internationally recognized legal sense of the destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Rudolph Rummel includes in his concept of “democide” not only intentional killing, but also “death by virtue of an intentionally or knowingly reckless . . . disregard for life,” as in concentration camps, medical experiments on humans, and famines or epidemics during which the authorities withhold aid. Using such a wide definition, he finds that the victims of democide made up four to five times the number of victims of war in the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Regardless of the scope of the definition, one-sided violence—just like battle-deaths in war—peaked in the middle of the twentieth century and has declined since, despite the mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, and elsewhere.

Tracking all sources of deadly violence is difficult. Rather than analyzing them one by one or trying to add the number of deaths from the different sources, we may look to life expectancy as the best overall measure of lives not lost. In fact, life expectancy has been increasing steadily over the last fifty years, and this is expected to continue for the next half-century. This applies to the world as a whole as well as to most regions individually. The exceptions are sub-Saharan Africa (mainly because of the AIDS epidemic) and Eastern Europe (mainly because of alcoholism, smoking, and other lifestyle diseases). Taking a longer view, global life expectancy has increased from about twenty-six years in the early nineteenth century to more than sixty-five today. The world has gained in this way many more years of life than it has lost through war and genocide.

Historians, not to mention anthropologists and archaeologists, may be displeased with any reference to data from only the twentieth century as “long-term.” Work by Jack Levy and others indicates that the number of great-power wars has declined in the last five hundred years. Thus, the current decline in war may well be part of a longer trend.

Judging the long-term development of wars and other forms of violence becomes even more difficult when we move to the prehistoric period. Several anthropologists have argued convincingly that the idea of the “peaceful savage” must be definitively discarded, though this view remains strongly contested. Moreover, there are at least two other positions in this debate; Keeley and LeBlanc have attacked the “myth of the peaceful savage,” but others, such as Fry and Ferguson, take the opposite view, while Raymond Kelly occupies the middle ground. Annual per capita death rates in war in many prehistoric societies are higher than those recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for major European combatants like Germany, Russia, Japan, or France. There are also prehistoric societies that are largely peaceful. War is not intrinsic to human nature, but neither is peace.

Those who, like me, were born before the middle of the twentieth century have lived through a particularly bloody period, during which the old view of war as a useful instrument of policy combined lethally with the modern technological capacity to wage war effectively. Our technological capabilities have clearly continued to increase, to the point at which we could kill each other many times over if we applied the full range of human ingenuity to that task. A single direct nuclear exchange between the two superpowers during the Cold War would have created a peak in war casualties that would have dwarfed even those of the two World Wars. That we have managed to avoid such an event is a testimony to the evolution of our institutions and attitudes.

In the past fifteen years, liberal explanations of the decline of violence have been in ascendance. Liberal theories of international affairs are, of course, nothing new—they can be traced to Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers, to Wilsonian ideas about world governance, and more recently to the writings of Karl Deutsch about international security communities. But in recent years a systematic empirical research program on democratic peace has emerged, which was extended to a broader program on the joint effects of democracy, international organization, and international trade, the “liberal tripod.” In fact, this has become one of the most sustained and wide-ranging empirical research efforts in any area of international relations. Despite many challenges to the liberal peace program, studies have consistently found support for the tripod, although scholars disagree about the relative importance of the three factors in reducing international as well as civil war. These liberal factors have been on the increase over the last thirty years. Membership in international governmental organizations has been increasing almost linearly since the end of World War II. The problem is of co-optation, the concept used by neoconservatives as a rationale for extending liberal democratic hegemony (based mainly on U.S. power), by forceful intervention and imposition. Democracy, whether measured as the fraction of states under democratic rule or as the percentage of world population living in a democracy, has been rising for more than thirty years. Meanwhile, international trade has increased dramatically since the early 1970s. Nevertheless, there is still enormous deprivation (one billion people living on less than a dollar a day), failure to meet global health and education targets, and unequal distribution of wealth and resources.

For realists, the international system remains anarchic, and its ups and downs are determined by the state struggle for survival. The present trend toward peace is interpreted as resulting from a unipolar order with no real global challenge to the one remaining superpower. Many radicals, too, see the “liberal peace” as the product of a global dominance system. Many—not all of them neo-Malthusians—hold up the specter of unsustainable development and global environmental decay, with climate change as the greatest threat. Common to all these challenges to the “liberal peace” is that they see the present turn toward peace as a temporary aberration rather than as a sign of a long-term civilizing trend in the international system.

The liberals concede that major changes will occur in the international system with the United States at some point (possibly soon) being overtaken as an economic power by China and India. The liberal factors will experience setbacks. Some newly democratized countries will slip back into autocracy. Global financial crises such as that beginning in 2008 will put a brake on globalization and increase poverty. Some old violent conflicts will reignite, and some preexisting animosities will turn violent for the first time. The question is whether such setbacks will be large enough to offset the long-term trend toward democracy, development, and peace. It is our hope that these volumes will help us pursue paths that will make the optimism of the liberal peace program a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nils Petter Gleditsch