War by A. C. Grayling

Author:A. C. Grayling
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300175349
Publisher: Yale University Press

In the Introduction to this book, war was defined as ‘a state of armed conflict between states or nations, or between identified and organised groups of significant size and character’. The second half of the definition is designed to take account of the fact that non-state actors can be parties to war, and that war predates the existence of states as such – indeed, by a long way. It might be better to expand the definition to substitute ‘political entity’ for ‘state’, if ‘political’ is understood in the broadest sense to embrace almost any organised grouping of people. The parties to a war are always groups, not individuals, and moreover groups with cohesion, a common purpose, leadership, division of responsibilities, and a sharing of hardships and, if they come, benefits. One might not think of the Huns as a state, but they were a political entity in the foregoing sense, and the sustained periods of fighting between them and those they attacked, not least the Romans, cannot be described other than as war.

Clausewitz took the paradigm of war to be interstate war because that is where the political nature of what is at stake is clearest. In such wars there is a measure of symmetry, in that contending states have similar forces with similar weapons, and the state itself monopolises in its own interests the sanctioned use of force that can be applied internally and externally. The wars in the two centuries preceding Clausewitz’s writing of On War (1832) fitted this model. The point of the (over-quoted) definition of war that he premised on this model, that war is ‘an extension of politics by other means’, is well illustrated by an exchange between an American colonel and a Vietcong colonel after the Vietnam War, in which the United States was defeated. The former said to the latter, ‘Your side never beat us on the battlefield,’ to which the latter replied, ‘True but irrelevant.’ It was the political result alone that counted.37

In the last chapter it was noted that major wars have become less frequent over the last five centuries, though their lethality has increased dramatically. In the last five centuries almost all the major wars were fought in Europe, then the dominant quarter of the world whose states were expanding their reach both locally and globally, and therefore contesting one another. Since 1945 the former Yugoslavia, Georgia and the eastern Ukraine have seen hostilities, but Europe has been free of war until this time of writing, in major part because of the European Union, whereas elsewhere in the world civil wars have proliferated in the aftermath of decolonisation, and a combination of great power intervention and sectarian strife has precipitated the Middle East and west Asia (Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan) into what seems like perpetual conflict.38

Moreover, the form of war has changed: insurgency, civil war, asymmetric war, trans-state war, have mainly replaced the clash of states since 1945, though that trend could reverse quickly enough – the irredentism of

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