Friday, 11 September 2009
Join the War, Politics & Strategy group on LinkedIn
It's just started and we have some great members around the world in the military, political advisory, and academic spheres of influence, and will shortly be organising discussion suppers in London.
Friday, 4 September 2009
A BOOK WORTH READING! Thinking About Peace And War, Martin Ceadel, OUP, 1987
Arguing that much of the debate about war and peace can be reduced to disagreements about ideology and assumptions about the nature of international politics, Martin Ceadel, founder of Oxford University's Department of Politics and International Relations, presents an engaging framework for studying the debate.
Militarism is the view that war is necessary to human development and thus a positive good. All wars are justified, even aggressive ones.
Crusading, whilst often indistinguishable from either defencism or pacificism, is distinctive for its willingness, under favourable circumstances, to use aggressive war to promote either order or justice, as those who follow this ideology conceive them. For them an aggressive war will help to prevent or abolish war in the longer term.
Someone taking a defencist position may argue that aggression is always wrong, but that defence is always right, therefore maintaining strong defence is the best way to prevent war.
Pacific-ism maintains that war is preventable in time, and that other reforms are also necessary, such as justice in domestic politics. This position derives from reforming philosophies such as liberalism, radicalism, socialism, feminism or the green movements.
Finally, pacifism as an ideology maintains that support for war is always impermissible. However, there are three varieties of pacifism. First, an optimistic version which argues that pacifism is the most effective defence policy to adopt because non-violence can deter or repel an invasion. The assumption here is that the international system is more a community than a society, possessing even stronger norms and institutions. Second, a mainstream version. Those arguing this believe that pacifism is not yet practical politics, but that it will be in the future. Meanwhile pacifists should, so far as their consciences allow, support pacificism as a step in the right direction. The assumption here is that the international system is already a society, but is capable of evolving into a community. Third, a pessimistic version which believes that pacifism is a faith rather than a political strategy. Consequently such pacifists can merely bear witness to those profound values which will be widely adopted only in the very long term when people eventually undergo a change of heart. This stance has been seen to occupy the moral high ground. It views the international system much like domestic politics - as 'a vale of tears'.
Ceadel covers these ideologies and their histories in a highly readable fashion in chapters 2-7, and ably explains how each ideology can be confused with its neighbours. I think he dismisses too complacently militarism, as this ideology is alive and well in many terrorist cells around the world because of their focus on using the military instrument as the first resort. Ceadel has demonstrated alot of interest over the years in pacifism, pacific-ism, socialism and other reforming philosophies espousing various forms of social justice, and subsequently he is so taken in by the public relations, rhetoric, and progaganda of terrorists, guerillas and insurgents that he categorises them as crusading (the ideology most akin to militarism) rather than militarist; from Che Guevara through the IRA to Muslim suicide bombers, their love of violence for its own sake viciously explodes into their spin-doctoring and tears the heart out of their humanity. They are the worst kind of militarist.
Not all militarists are completely evil and so consumed with violent hatred as Muslim extremists though. The impulse of ordinary soldiers just doing their jobs while admitting to enjoying the violence of war and looking forward to the next one (I've just finished Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero) is a necessary though not sufficient part of militarism. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club dramatically illustrates the same hunger among some in the Men's Movement, although the author frames Tyler Durden, the thought-leading anti-hero, as a doomed psychopath. And Ceadel does attest to a thought-provoking counter-factual that it could have been militarism that spawned the anti-nuclear movement: if war is to be necessary to human development and thus a positive good, it could not logically allow the use or threat of nuclear weapons. So militarism isn't quite the spent force Ceadel thinks it is.
In the final chapter 8 on the determinants of the debate he outlines how well each ideology fares in historical contexts of how liberal the domestic political culture and how secure the state. Somewhat dissembling, I thought, he notes in the Appendix Kenneth Waltz's typology of the international system, which throughout the book underpinned much of Ceadel's analysis of the five ideologies at work. In the same Appendix he waffles on about Martin Wight's typology only to rubbish it when he could have used Wight's pupil Hedley Bull's much clearer and coherent analysis; indeed, in his frequent explanations of the five ideologies having assumptions about international politics being akin to, variously, a community, a society, and an anarchy, he is directly taking from Hedley Bull's simple and memorable typology. Chapter 8 would have been much more incisive, therefore, had he made more of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society, Waltz's Man, the State, and War, and especially Barry Buzan's People, States & Fear, which itself uses Waltz's typology to build the seminal framework to analyse how secure a state and the international system is. Nevertheless, his explanation of the dynamics of the war-and-peace debate using the five ideologies is still erudite and insightful twenty years after publication, and a jolly good read!
Militarism is the view that war is necessary to human development and thus a positive good. All wars are justified, even aggressive ones.
Crusading, whilst often indistinguishable from either defencism or pacificism, is distinctive for its willingness, under favourable circumstances, to use aggressive war to promote either order or justice, as those who follow this ideology conceive them. For them an aggressive war will help to prevent or abolish war in the longer term.
Someone taking a defencist position may argue that aggression is always wrong, but that defence is always right, therefore maintaining strong defence is the best way to prevent war.
Pacific-ism maintains that war is preventable in time, and that other reforms are also necessary, such as justice in domestic politics. This position derives from reforming philosophies such as liberalism, radicalism, socialism, feminism or the green movements.
Finally, pacifism as an ideology maintains that support for war is always impermissible. However, there are three varieties of pacifism. First, an optimistic version which argues that pacifism is the most effective defence policy to adopt because non-violence can deter or repel an invasion. The assumption here is that the international system is more a community than a society, possessing even stronger norms and institutions. Second, a mainstream version. Those arguing this believe that pacifism is not yet practical politics, but that it will be in the future. Meanwhile pacifists should, so far as their consciences allow, support pacificism as a step in the right direction. The assumption here is that the international system is already a society, but is capable of evolving into a community. Third, a pessimistic version which believes that pacifism is a faith rather than a political strategy. Consequently such pacifists can merely bear witness to those profound values which will be widely adopted only in the very long term when people eventually undergo a change of heart. This stance has been seen to occupy the moral high ground. It views the international system much like domestic politics - as 'a vale of tears'.
Ceadel covers these ideologies and their histories in a highly readable fashion in chapters 2-7, and ably explains how each ideology can be confused with its neighbours. I think he dismisses too complacently militarism, as this ideology is alive and well in many terrorist cells around the world because of their focus on using the military instrument as the first resort. Ceadel has demonstrated alot of interest over the years in pacifism, pacific-ism, socialism and other reforming philosophies espousing various forms of social justice, and subsequently he is so taken in by the public relations, rhetoric, and progaganda of terrorists, guerillas and insurgents that he categorises them as crusading (the ideology most akin to militarism) rather than militarist; from Che Guevara through the IRA to Muslim suicide bombers, their love of violence for its own sake viciously explodes into their spin-doctoring and tears the heart out of their humanity. They are the worst kind of militarist.
Not all militarists are completely evil and so consumed with violent hatred as Muslim extremists though. The impulse of ordinary soldiers just doing their jobs while admitting to enjoying the violence of war and looking forward to the next one (I've just finished Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero) is a necessary though not sufficient part of militarism. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club dramatically illustrates the same hunger among some in the Men's Movement, although the author frames Tyler Durden, the thought-leading anti-hero, as a doomed psychopath. And Ceadel does attest to a thought-provoking counter-factual that it could have been militarism that spawned the anti-nuclear movement: if war is to be necessary to human development and thus a positive good, it could not logically allow the use or threat of nuclear weapons. So militarism isn't quite the spent force Ceadel thinks it is.
In the final chapter 8 on the determinants of the debate he outlines how well each ideology fares in historical contexts of how liberal the domestic political culture and how secure the state. Somewhat dissembling, I thought, he notes in the Appendix Kenneth Waltz's typology of the international system, which throughout the book underpinned much of Ceadel's analysis of the five ideologies at work. In the same Appendix he waffles on about Martin Wight's typology only to rubbish it when he could have used Wight's pupil Hedley Bull's much clearer and coherent analysis; indeed, in his frequent explanations of the five ideologies having assumptions about international politics being akin to, variously, a community, a society, and an anarchy, he is directly taking from Hedley Bull's simple and memorable typology. Chapter 8 would have been much more incisive, therefore, had he made more of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society, Waltz's Man, the State, and War, and especially Barry Buzan's People, States & Fear, which itself uses Waltz's typology to build the seminal framework to analyse how secure a state and the international system is. Nevertheless, his explanation of the dynamics of the war-and-peace debate using the five ideologies is still erudite and insightful twenty years after publication, and a jolly good read!
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