Plunging to Leviathan? by Robert Bates Graber

Author:Robert Bates Graber [Graber, Robert Bates]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594511578
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2007-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Conquest’s End

Warfare, wrote Herbert Spencer in 1882, was finished—a thing of the past. An odd suggestion it would seem, given that Garibaldi had conquered Sicily in 1860, and that Prussia under Bismarck had overrun—and annexed—several states in 1866; for that matter, the United States had taken two-fifths of Mexico as recently as 1848.

If this epitaph to war is puzzling given what went before, it might appear tragically premature in light of the horrific world wars that came after. But maybe Spencer’s meaning was not so simple? Here are his words:

From war has been gained all that it had to give.… That integration of simple groups into compound ones, and of these into doubly compound ones, which war has effected, until at length great nations have been produced, is a process already carried as far as seems either practicable or desirable. Empires formed of alien peoples habitually fall to pieces when the coercive power which holds them together fails; and even could they be held together, would not form harmoniously-working wholes: peaceful federation is the only further consolidation to be looked for. (Spencer 1897, II- 2:664)

Spencer’s statement that additional conquest does not seem “either practicable or desirable” admittedly sounds like an ethical pronouncement, but the final phrase “to be looked for” suggests that he really was trying to say what we could objectively expect the future to bring. In context, his last eleven words above evidently mean not that there will be no more war, but that effective political consolidation will no longer be among its immediate results. I therefore take Spencer to mean that what had ended was not war itself, only war as an effective means of political integration—that is, successful conquest war.

Understood this way, could he have been right?

The twentieth century saw great proliferation in the number of states as traditionally defined; that is what made it look like a century of levitation compared with the millennial plunge toward Leviathan. Clearly, then, neither conquest warfare nor anything else prevented the century from being one of overall proliferation rather than deproliferation.

Doesn’t this already show that conquest warfare had lost its effectiveness, just as Spencer had predicted? Not quite. It is conceivable that conquest warfare itself was successful, but its integrative effects were overridden by other factors. Suppose, for instance, that there were only a very few cases of conquest war, or that they were small in scale, or both. The mere fact that the century was one of overall proliferation is not sufficient for us to conclude that conquest war had failed.

There seems little choice but to undertake a historical investigation aimed at assessing the actual effects of conquest warfare in the twentieth century.

When we consider individual cases, the twentieth century admittedly affords some cases of apparently successful conquest warfare. France, for example, won back the Alsace-Lorraine (lost in 1871) from Germany in World War I; the USSR took the Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and parts of prewar Poland and Romania in World War II. The fact

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