Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age by Bear F. Braumoeller

Author:Bear F. Braumoeller [Braumoeller, Bear F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science, Civics & Citizenship, International Relations, Diplomacy
ISBN: 9780190849535
Google: viaeDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-11-15T00:30:36.230563+00:00

The Impact of Order

How might the presence of international order have an effect on the prevalence of issues that lead to war? First of all, international orders can mitigate or eliminate the issues that have caused conflict in the past. In fact, those that are constructed in the wake of large-scale wars are typically explicitly designed to do so. This goal can most explicitly be seen in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a statement of war aims designed to ensure a lasting peace after World War I. It’s true that, as Professor Holsti points out in his study, the diplomats and politicians who craft new international orders generally have a far better grasp of the issues that have produced war in the recent past than they do of the issues that will generate war in the future. But that generalization may be true at least in part because those diplomats and politicians succeed in addressing the issues that had previously led to war.

At the same time, agreement on the principles of legitimacy that underpin international order can take other war-causing issues off the table. To take an extreme example, an international order based on political democracy more or less eliminates the incentive for wars of royal succession. More subtly, agreement on the principles and values that underpin order can reduce or eliminate conflict based on violations of those principles and values. To take an example from the realm of domestic political order, armed conflict broke out in the aftermath of the 2010 Presidential election in the Ivory Coast after the incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo, refused to accept his loss in the election. United Nations forces were tasked with protecting the newly elected President, former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara, and preventing both escalation and human rights abuses. When Gbago’s forces unwisely fired on the peacekeepers’ base with heavy weaponry, UN and French forces retaliated unambiguously, and within two months Outtara had been officially installed as President.31 While it’s not impossible to imagine a situation like this breaking out in a country with more established democratic norms of political contestation—Ivorian opposition parties were only legalized in 1990—such a clash seems far less likely in, say, modern-day Germany or France.

Moreover, the existence and development of an international order is often characterized by a positive feedback process in which the normative underpinnings of political legitimacy are deepened and reinforced among member countries.32 To the extent that this process occurs, the persistence of international order should make conflict over issues related to those norms less and less likely over time.33

On the other hand, international order can actually produce new issues over which states inside the order will fight with states outside of it. International order depends on legitimacy, and once an international order has been created that legitimacy must be maintained. Unfortunately, one of the most convenient ways to enhance that legitimacy is via external conflict. In American foreign policy, following Professor Mueller’s (1970) landmark article, this phenomenon is known as the “rally ’round the flag” effect.

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