Chapter 1

The Origins of Great Wars

They spent the rest of the hour discussing violence in the modern world. On the whole, the bricklayers seemed to think it was a good thing.

'I mean what's the point of going out on a Saturday night and getting pissed if you can't have a bit of a barney at the same time? Got to get rid of your aggression somehow', said an unusually articulate bricklayer, 'I mean it's natural isn't it?'

'So you think man is a naturally aggressive animal', said Wilt.

'Course he is. That's history for you, all them wars and things. It's only bloody poofters don't like violence.'

(Tom Sharpe, Wilt)¹

Psychological Explanations of War

The problem with which the day-release bricklayers were wrestling at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology has exercised many minds from many disciplines in every age, and never more intensively than at present. A recent bibliography, disconcertingly but perhaps appropriately sponsored by the Mental Health Research Institute of the University of Michigan, lists about 2,500 authors.² The destructive potential of the nuclear bomb, although used in anger only twice during the forty-odd years since its invention, has made war per se a subject on which only one opinion is possible. While there is much furious debate on how best to avoid it, deterrence theorists vie with unilateralists in the vehemence of their condemnation. Long gone are the days when such robust theorists as Heinrich von Treitschke extolled 'the greatness of war', 'the sublimity of war', 'the moral majesty of war' and derided the notion of perpetual peace as 'not only impossible but immoral as well'.³ Treitschke, of course, lived at a time when wars were short, when casualties were light and - most important of all -when the God of Victories smiled on the 'right' side. Tens of millions of deaths in twentieth-century conflicts - and the prospect of untold millions more to come - have lent a new urgency to the investigation of the origins and nature of war, so that it can be better avoided in future.

To the fore in this exercise have been psychologists. As they have plumbed the depths of the human psyche, they have been able to trawl up what seem to be the really fundamental causes of war. Far, far removed from the diplomatic historian's surface-world of tainted mushrooms or railway timetables, down past the structures of the social scientist and the economist's forces of production, the psychologists' bathyscope keeps going until it touches rock-bottom. Needless to say, the fantastic creatures they find there vary considerably in shape and dimension. What the observers have in common, however, is an angle of vision which is both individualistic (because the starting-point is always the individual human psyche) and abstract (because human nature is always regarded as timeless and universal).

In 1932, under the auspices of the League of Nations, Sigmund Freud exchanged letters with Albert Einstein on the causes of war, without alas being able to rise above the level of tentative superficiality.⁴ More representative of the genre is E. F. M. Durbin and John Bowlby's Personal Aggressiveness and War, first published on the eve of the Second World War but still influential and still cited with respect.⁵ At the core of their analysis lie man's aggressive impulses. Punished and prevented in childhood by parents and in adulthood by the state, his ensuing frustration is resolved by three unconscious mechanisms. The first is 'transformation', by which the hostility is transferred from the immediate repressing agent to some more distant collective target: Jews, Communists, Fascists, Germans, Argentinians, or whoever have the best credentials at the time. But just as a child's relationship with his parents is an ambivalent mixture of love and hatred, so is transformation accompanied by a second, more positive mechanism: 'displacement'. By this means, familial loves and hatreds are transferred to some greater entity such as a church, a political party or, above all, a state: 'These various kinds of groups can attract absolute loyalty and canalise torrents of hatred and murder through the mechanism of displacement.'⁶ A third crucial mechanism is 'projection', by which the individual projects on to others his own unrecognised and unaccepted dark impulses. To avoid being divided against his own self, all his potential self-hatred is lavished on third parties: 'Projection is an admirable mechanism for turning the other man into the aggressor, for making hatred appear as a passion for righteousness, for purifying the hate-tormented soul. By this means all war is made into religious war - a crusade for truth and virtue.'⁷

Transformed aggression, displacement and projection have always existed, as mechanisms to resolve what would otherwise be intolerable psychological strain. In the modern period, however, it is the nation-state which has emerged as the main agent of release. That was inevitable, given the state's superior ability to punish private aggression, while its collective nature and size allow it to act with an amorality and lack of conscience which would be intolerable in an individual. So the scene is set for endemic international warfare: 'War is due to nationalism, not because the nation-state is either a peace-making or a war-mongering form of organisation in itself - there are pacific nations and aggressive nations - but because the triumph of aggressive impulses will always manifest itself in a group form and the great group organisation of the age is the nation-state.'⁸ But whatever the scale of the agent of our release, it must never be forgotten that the essential unit is the individual human psyche, with all its impulses and frustrations: 'War is due to the expression in and through group life of the transformed aggressiveness of individuals.'⁹

Although Durbin and Bowlby disclaim any great originality, disarmingly describing their work as 'enlightened common sense', their analysis has an appealing cogency. That is due partly, of course, to the depths at which they are operating: in the Stygian darkness of the psyche, a 40-watt bulb seems bright. It is when one applies their concepts — and those of other psychologists — to concrete situations that doubts begin to arise. In particular, there looms the obstinate problem of peace. If only all men at all times in all societies were engaged in war, then the psychological sequence of aggression — frustration —projection would be a sufficient cause. Awkwardly, war is neither permanent nor ubiquitous. In certain societies at certain times it is only intermittent, even exceptional.

The psychologists are well aware of this problem, of course. Durbin and Bowlby concede without further ado that 'Fighting and peaceful cooperation are equally "natural" forms of behaviour, equally fundamental tendencies in human relations. Peaceful cooperation predominates — there is much more peace than war.' All they claim — with a modesty that is now becoming more irritating than disarming — is that 'the willingness to fight is so widely distributed in space and time that it must be regarded as a basic pattern of human behaviour'.¹⁰ But that is to reduce the explanation to the simple, if not banal, formula that: there is war between humans because there are humans. What is needed is an explanation of why peaceful cooperation breaks down and is replaced by war. It is at this point that the limitations of the psychologists' abstract individualism becomes apparent, as their analysis dissolves in a welter of possibilities: 'The nations may fight because of simple acquisitiveness, or simple frustration, or a simple fear of strangers. They may fight because of displaced hatred, or projected hates or fears. There is no single all-embracing cause — no single villain of the piece, no institution nor idea that is wholly to blame.'¹¹ Psychologists willing to be more precise are more entertaining but no more enlightening, as the following list of 'motives making for war' from another influential work shows: the auto-erotic motive of narcissism (identification with the grandeur of the nation), exhibitionism, the allo-erotic motive of homosexuality (physical contact with a large number of one's own sex in the services), heterosexuality (defence of womenfolk), sadism and the Oedipus complex.¹²

In short, psychologists can explain war (to their own satisfaction, at least) but, by the very nature of their methodology, they cannot explain wars. They are aware of this, of course. Durbin and Bowlby announce at the outset that they do not intend to explain the causes of any specific war, only the causes of war per se. They conclude later that 'nations can fight only because they are able to release the explosive stores of transformed aggression, but they do fight for any of a large number of reasons'.¹³ Pryns Hopkins is equally blunt: 'Whatever are the causes of war — and they may be legion — it is clear that the fact of war depends completely upon man's willingness to fight.'¹⁴ But that, surely, is veering perilously close to a tautology. Moreover, if psychology cannot explain any specific war, then one must wonder whether it can explain war per se — for war per se is only the aggregate of all wars, past and present. Just because psychology postulates the universality of human nature, it cannot explain a phenomenon which is intermittent. As Kenneth Waltz has pointed out, human nature may have been the cause of war in 1914, but it was also the cause of peace in 1910 — and whatever else changed in those four years, it was not human nature.¹⁵ It is violence which is universal, not war, which is just one very specialised form of violence. So the formula expressed at the beginning of this paragraph needs to be refined still further: psychologists can explain violence, but they cannot explain wars, or indeed war.¹⁶

One way round the war-peace dichotomy is to argue that war is a permanent and ubiquitous condition of mankind. That is the solution adopted by Franz Alexander, who has argued that war is the natural and normal way of settling conflicts between groups. Consequently, pacifism is a morbid phenomenon and pacifists (if they are not mentally deficient) are neurotics. What looks like a period of peace is in reality nothing more than a preparation for war: 'A student of European and ancient history can differentiate rightly only between periods of actual and latent war, the latter being misleadingly called periods of peace.'¹⁷ This possesses an attractive simplicity, not to say brutality, but fails on two counts. In the first place, no evidence is presented to show that the periods of war are more 'normal' than the periods of peace (or 'latent war'). It therefore makes just as much —or just as little — sense to say that it is war which has never really existed and that what looks like a period of war is in reality nothing more than a preparation for peace. Secondly, it obscures rather than solves the war-peace dichotomy, leaving still unanswered the fundamental question: what determines the incidence of out-and-out war, as opposed to latent war?

If verbal dexterity cannot solve that particular problem, neither can it overcome another defect deriving from psychology's abstract individualism: its populism. Just because psychology can only deal at the level of the individual psyche, it can only explain causation at a mass level. It does not deal with human beings but with the human being. So a psychological account of the origin of war is essentially populist, in that it assumes the impulse to come from the people as a whole. For example:

Those hatreds which in peace-time smoulder in every human soul, varying only in intensity, become licensed then [in war] to vent themselves upon the national enemy. One is allowed- nay ordered-to march against this symbol of the evil father with gun and bayonet, bomb and flame-thrower. The more one tortures, maims, and kills him, the more is one praised. So let there be a holiday from pity. . . .Our native land feeds, clothes and educates us. She therefore becomes to us our mother-country whom we love truly as we love our flesh-and-blood mother. When foreign troops threaten our country, we describe their action as one of invading or assaulting her, thus showing who in our unconscious minds we think they are. . . Unconscious fear of an assault on our mother, therefore, is largely responsible for the clamour that our country shall be 'protected' against potential evil father-figures.¹⁸

Those murderous impulses, Oedipal and otherwise, which lurk repressed in the subconscious, could only be said to cause wars if it were clear that wars came about as a result of popular pressure. It could then be argued — reasonably — that the patriotic claptrap which precedes wars derives ultimately from the repression of frustrated impulses. To paraphrase Dr Johnson: 'patriotism is the last refuge of the neurotic.' Unfortunately for this line of argument, it is very difficult to find any war which was launched as a result of popular pressure. It played a certain part in the War of Jenkins's Ear, the American War of Independence, the French revolutionary war of 1792, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, perhaps the First World War, but however generous one's category, the list would not be long. Moreover, even in these cases popular pressure was just one of many forces, and not usually the most important. Even in an age of mass democracy, decision-making remains concentrated in the hands of a few.¹⁹ Sometimes the few follow — or are impelled — by the many, but more usually the relationship is reversed. So it is with wars. It is the outbreak of a war which creates a great surge of bellicose enthusiasm among the masses, not the other way round. Until perhaps the very eve of war, popular interest in foreign affairs is, at best, tepid. Nor is there any clear correlation between those popular attitudes that do exist and actual conflicts. The collective attitude of the British towards the Germans is one of admiration and respect, that towards the French one of dislike and contempt, but it has not prevented them waging two wars this century against the former in alliance with the latter.²⁰

The populist flaw in the psychologists' explanation of the causes of war derives of course from their methodology. They are most confident and convincing when dealing with human nature per se, with all human beings, past present and future. One individual human being they can also treat with relative ease — but only if sufficient data are available. Ideally, the subject should be available for first-hand examination, a condition which is rarely, if ever, fulfilled. The psychologists' method really breaks down when it is required to deal, not with one or all human beings, but with some human beings. To generalise on man's projection mechanism or to speculate about Hitler's megalomania is one thing, to arrive at a psychological profile of the British Cabinet, the Austrian Staatskonferenz or the Soviet Politburo is quite another. It cannot be done. But that is just what has to be done if a valid psychological explanation of wars — and of war — is to be achieved. The insoluble problem was well posed by Emile Durkheim: "The psychological factor is too general to predetermine the course of social phenomena. Since it does not call for one social form rather than another, it cannot explain any of them.'²¹

It is only when the psychologist is able to identify an exceptional condition that he can be of much assistance to the historian investigating the origins of wars. A good example is William Brown's analysis of national paranoia:

[It is] the mental tendency of a person who is in a self-assertive mood, rather cut off from others, unable to develop within the group or system, and yet, having to repress his tendencies, feels in repressing them that he is being checked by others and that others wish him ill. Thus he becomes suspicious and obstructive, and may later become somewhat megalomaniac. ... A paranoid state in any nation makes it a danger to itself and to its neighbours. It may break out into open aggression through the very fact of fear.²²

That could hardly be bettered as a description of the collective mentality of the decision-makers in revolutionary France on the eve of the war of 1792, (see pp. 99-112), in imperial Germany on the eve of the First World War or in the state of Israel throughout its trouble-tom history. So one is tempted to conclude that only psychopathology, not psychology in general, can be of assistance. That may well be so, but even the more specialised concepts of mental illness leave too great a gap between theory and practice. When reading an abstract diagnosis of the kind offered above by William Brown, its applicability to concrete historical events is often striking: 'Yes, that sounds just like France in 1792.' On the other hand, it is difficult to get much beyond the level of coincidence. The behaviour of the deputies of the National Assembly during the winter of 1791-92 certainly sounds like a prime example of group paranoia, but it is hard to be confident, let alone sure. It is clear that the Girondin orators, who persuaded those deputies to vote for war, did appeal to their self-assertiveness, their sense of isolation and persecution and their pre-emptive aggressiveness. It is equally clear that those Girondin orators themselves were also acting for very different reasons, of a purely political kind: to expose the Court, to drive the Revolution left and to seize power. And what was true of a front-line spokesman like Brissot, about whom a great deal is known, may also be true of some silent back-bencher, who is just a name on a list and about whom nothing is known.

If one reverses the exercise and uses the psychopathological categories as a guide, then to seek is to find: but without much consequence. Any group is so rich in psychological diversity, especially at a time of crisis, that almost any hypothesis can be made to fit. That is hardly surprising, since it is the theory itself which governs the selection of the evidence. With unerring accuracy, the psychologist can hit the barn-door time after time after time.²³ What he can also do — as Brown does in the passage quoted above — is to provide the historian with a hypothesis whose terms allow him to describe a prevailing mood with greater precision. But it cannot be anything more than a hypothesis.

Their investigations of the human psyche have not made psychologists optimistic on the subject of war. If the fundamental cause is 'the timeless and ubiquitous urge to fight and kill' (Durbin and Bowlby) and if 'organised societies have always found something to fight about' (Jerome D. Frank), then there seems no reason why it should not continue ad infinitum.²⁴ The daunting nature of the assignment has not deterred some, however, from essaying a cure for war based on a psychological analysis of its causes. In a recent cooperative investigation supervised by Maurice Walsh, those causes were located in the father-mother-son triangle: 'The governing bodies and leaders of the nations of the world are made up predominantly of older males, who recurrently produce mass murder, in recurring 'wars', of younger males of each new generation. . . .This would strongly suggest an intense and murderous, albeit unconscious, hostility of older males for younger males.'²⁵

Allied to this is man's fatal propensity for choosing as his leaders at times of crisis 'aggressively perverted and psychiatrically abnormal men', all distinguished by their lack of conscious guilt feelings and by their unconscious homicidal/suicidal tendencies. Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Trujillo, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini are advanced as illustrations. This diagnosis has suggested to Dr Walsh a course of treatment in five parts: firstly, a world government backed by a world police force; secondly, the removal of the profit motive from the armaments industry; thirdly, 'the creation of a new economic system freed from the unconscious anal influence of wealth and power because of the close association of anality (money is related to faeces in the unconscious), and aggressiveness and destructiveness in present human society'; fourthly, the regular psychiatric examination of world leaders by a team of non-political psychoanalysts; and fifthly, 'massive and continuing multi-disciplinary research projects into such disruptive phenomena as malnutrition, overpopulation, racism and environmental pollution'. As Utopias go, this is on the ambitious side: only the final objective seems capable of realisation in this world. And one may doubt whether the pouring of even unlimited funds into the bottomless pits of the world's social science research councils would be anything more than a placebo.

Ethology and the Origins of Wars

So for the historian in pursuit of the causes of wars, the psychologists' diagnosis can be of only limited assistance. An alternative kind of explanation has been provided by an even more recent branch of science: ethology, defined by one of its leading practitioners as 'the precise study of innate behaviour patterns in animals'.²⁶ At first sight the ethological approach shares the psychologists' profundity but adds to it a chronological dimension which they so patently lacked. It is a young science (some would say 'pseudo-science') but already has formulated a set of common premises. Most important is the notion that man is an animal.²⁷ As such, he is fundamentally a creature of instinct, whose rational faculties occupy a decidedly subordinate status: 'instinct makes use of learning the way a furnace sucks in air.'²⁸ Indeed, human reason itself is not something unique and peculiar but essentially just another product of evolution: 'Are the qualities that we regard as uniquely human the consequence of being human beings, or have we evolved as human beings because of the earlier evolution of qualities that we regard as uniquely human?' Robert Ardrey supplies the answer to his own question in one of those pithy aphorisms of which he is so fond: 'Our humanity is not the consequence but the cause of becoming human beings.'²⁹

In both humans and animals, one of the strongest instincts is aggression. That is a natural consequence of evolution, for it has been only through a continuous process of struggle that the fittest have survived. Conflict between species ('inter-specific aggression') and conflict between members of the same species ('intra-specific aggression') have performed a number of important functions. Quite apart from providing basic security against predators, conflict has served to improve the quality of the species by sexual selection and to secure its even distribution over the habitat.³⁰ So this aggressive instinct is as old as the species itself and a necessary condition of its establishment and survival. Of no species is that more true than of the lord of the earth, of man himself. Only 10,000 years ago did peaceful agriculture begin to provide his livelihood and only 5,000 years ago did it become general. For most of his existence man has been a hunter, relying on killing to stay alive³¹:

From his beginnings in Miocene days through the deprivations of the desperate Pliocene and on into the vagaries, the glaciers, the pluvials of a Pleistocene blowing now hot, now cold, now wet, now dry, the evolution of man has brought him to his present estate: he is the world's most successful predator and the richest of all the world's prey.³²

Wars occur when this primeval aggressive drive collides with another equally deep-rooted instinct: sense of territory. Like all other higher animals, man is in constant need of identity, stimulation and security. Territory provides all three:

'This place is mine; I am of this place', says the albatross, the patas monkey, the green sunfish, the Spaniard, the great horned owl, the wolf, the Venetian, the prairie dog. the three-spined stickleback, the Scotsman, the Skua, the man from La Crosse, Wisconsin, the Alsatian, the little-ringed plover, the Argentine, the lung-fish, the lion, the Chinook salmon, the Parisian.³³

So when some other group intrudes, hackles are raised, teeth are bared and claws exposed. Although an apparent truism, it is important to recognise that war is essentially a two-way process, as dependent on the hostile response of the attacked as it is on the aggressive initiative of the attacker. The victim always has a choice between resistance and submission, it always takes two to tango. Almost invariably, he chooses to resist, because in doing so he satisfies his craving for identity, stimulation and security. That is why war has been such a recurrent and ubiquitous phenomenon: 'In ail the rich catalogue of human hypocrisy it is difficult to find anything to compare with that dainty of dainties, that sugared delicacy, the belief that people do not like war.'³⁴

Although they stress the constructive function of intra-specific aggression and the appeal it makes to basic instincts, the ethologists do not claim that modern human warfare is just the same as territorial disputes among red deer or robins. Korirad Lorenz, in particular, argues that at some point human aggression was 'derailed', losing its beneficial relationship with the environment. That fateful development probably occurred during the early Stone Age, by which time man had acquired weapons, clothing and social organisation. Now that the natural hazards of starvation, exposure and wild animals had been overcome, 'an evil intra-specific selection' began, unconnected with environmental demands. This relatively sudden conquest of nature found man unprepared to control the destructive tools now at the service of his aggressive instincts:

No selection pressure arose in the prehistory of mankind to breed inhibitory mechanisms preventing the killing of conspecifics until, all of a sudden, the invention of artificial weapons upset the equilibrium of killing potential and social inhibitions. When it did, man's position was very nearly that of a dove which, by some unnatural trick of nature, has suddenly acquired the beak of a raven.³⁵

To view warfare as the consequence of spontaneous instincts, deriving from an evolutionary process as old as mankind itself, is to be pessimistic about the durability of any peace. However stable the surface crust may seem, just below it there seethes an explosive brew, volatile, unstable, ready to erupt at a moment's notice and at the slightest provocation.³⁶ Man has become a victim of his own success. His conscious ingenuity has so outstripped his unconscious instincts that he now threatens himself with total extinction: 'An unprejudiced observer from another planet, looking upon man as he is today, in his hand the atom bomb, the product of his intelligence, in his heart the aggression drive inherited from his anthropoid ancestors, which this same intelligence cannot control, would not prophesy long life for the species.'³⁷

This analysis of war by the ethologists sidesteps some of the pitfalls into which the psychologists plunge but excavates several others equally deep. It has attracted criticism of a ferocity singularly appropriate to the subject-matter. Red in tooth and claw, academic predators have streamed out of the jungles to savage the herds of grazing ethologists: 'over-simplification . . . errors of reasoning . . . ill-defined terms . . . superficial extrapolations . . . anti-rational . . . uncritical ... a sort of intellectual pizza pie, with tasty tidbits of information embedded in a mass of partially baked ideas . . . scientific-sounding misinformation . . . noisy and foolish . . . very crude . . . completely false'.³⁸ One cannot help but suspect that some of this vehemence can be ascribed to the extraordinary commercial success enjoyed by their targets. Through best-selling books, television programmes and articles in the colour supplements of the Sunday newspapers, ethologists like Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris have reached a genuinely mass audience:. Attempts by the opposition to resort to unorthodox media — including Playboy magazine and a satirical review — have only served to emphasise the superior commercial acumen of the ethologists.³⁹

Of the substantive criticisms which lurk behind the abusive epithets, some can be dismissed without further ado. Whatever the nature of Konrad Lorenz's relationship with National Socialism, it has no bearing on the validity, or otherwise, of his theories.⁴⁰ Equally irrelevant is the objection that offensive inferences may be drawn from the ethologists' examination of aggression and submission/resistance: for example, that if all Negroes were Uncle Toms, there would be no racial violence; that if all states submitted to an invader, there would be no war; that if trade unions accepted what they were offered, there would be no class war; and so on.⁴¹ That kind of criticism reveals an attitude to truth not so very far removed from the double-think of the totalitarian regimes the ethologists' critics are so eager to denounce. Indeed, there is an unappealing political edge to much of their invective, which at times seems more concerned with American policy in Vietnam than with what may or may not have happened in the Pleistocene Age.⁴²

Other criticisms are best described as 'not proven'. If it really could be demonstrated that the very notion of instincts is untenable, then of course the ethological case would collapse at once. But as a large number of scholars continue to maintain the opposite, and as the very nature of the phenomenon does not lend itself to conclusive refutation or confirmation, the question must remain open. For the time being, the debate seems to have stuck at the 'Yes there are instincts/No there aren't' stage. So long as one camp asserts 'Instinct exists and we cannot dismiss it from our doorstep just because we do not know where it lives' and the other camp asserts with equal confidence that 'In spite of periodic attempts to revive the idea of the existence of instincts in man, the notion has no scientific validity whatsoever', the non-specialist can only suspend judgement.⁴³

On certain specific issues, however, the ethologists' opponents appear to have gained the upper hand. Particularly telling has been their attack on the over-facile comparisons made between animal and human behaviour. An analogy, they point out, is just that: useful in illustrating a logically coherent truth, but no substitute for proof. Even if it could be shown that aggression were innate in animals, it would not follow that it was innate in humans. And even if it could be shown that it was innate in humans, it would not follow that it was innate in states.⁴⁴ If it be rejoindered in best ethological style that 'Man is no exception to the animal world' (Herbert Friedmann),⁴⁵ then one can only reply that when it comes to the conduct of state policy, human behaviour is demonstrably different in numerous important respects:

Animal behaviour as compared with that of human beings has at least the benefits of relative simplicity and frankness of exposure, but until I see the counterpart in animal life of government bureaucracies, of customs and traditions by which foreign policy and other objectives are determined and pursued, and the ability to predict easily certain gross consequences from the reciprocal use of such gadgets as nuclear weapons, we are clearly wrong in pressing analogies too far.⁴⁶

This sort of argument raises of course the intractable problem of instinct versus learning. If it is difficult to follow Ashley Montagu and his followers in their almost total rejection of heredity — 'Allowing for whatever idiosyncratic contribution the genes may make, everything a human being does as such he has to learn from other human beings'⁴⁷ —it is equally difficult to follow their opponents down the opposite road. If one or other has to be chosen, then for the historian the choice seems clear. Man's ability to communicate symbolically, his consequent development of culture, his awareness of past, present and future, his self-awareness and corresponding capacity for reflection — all these peculiarly human attributes make him a creature apart. As John G. Kennedy, one of the ethologists' most effective critics, has pointed out, only man can hate and seek revenge: 'animals kill but men murder'. It is not animals but men who wage war.⁴⁸

For the student of the causes of war, this distinction exemplifies the limitations of the ethological approach. Even if all those ambitious hypotheses and imaginative analogies could be sustained, problems would remain. In particular, the generous time-span, reaching back to the very origins of Homo sapiens and even beyond, ensures that ethological explanations are so general as to be little more valuable than the psychological equivalents discussed in the previous section. When Robert Ardrey writes: 'Why did Finland fight [in 1939]? No explanation less than ten million years old can provide a significant answer',⁴⁹ one can only reply that such an indiscriminate explanation is not worth having. The jump from prehistoric man hunting to stay alive to a war between two states involving well over a million men (as the Russo-Finnish War did) is just too wide. The ethologist cannot explain why fighting between two men became fighting between groups, or why some groups are more aggressive than others, or why some groups fight differently from others.⁵⁰ Nor is he any better able to handle the awkward problem of peace than is the psychologist (see p. 3). All he can do is to argue that peace is inherently unstable because it is unexciting and to advance the lame if not fatuous conclusion that 'the history of war is in large part the story of peoples who will risk all for release from boredom'.⁵¹ As this reveals, he is just as populist as the psychologist, obliged by the very nature of his discipline to address man per se and unable to deal with specific groups — most notably, decision-making elites. What he has done, however, is to show that war is essentially a two-way process, that 'it takes two to tango': 'the principal cause of modern warfare arises from the failure of an intruding power correctly to estimate the defensive resources of a territorial defender.'⁵² As we shall see later, that is an insight of real significance (see below, p. 26).⁵³

Anthropology and the Origins of Wars

The case against the ethologists has been put with special force and eloquence by anthropologists. Indeed, Ashley Montagu has led something approaching a crusade against what he regards as dangerous error. It is not hard to appreciate why this should be so, for all of anthropology's most cherished axioms are threatened by ethological subversion. Learning is challenged by instinct, culture by evolution, environment by genes, free will by determinism, perfectibility by incorrigibility — and so on, in an apparently endless contrapuntal sequence.

For the student of the causes of war, most important is the anthropologists' rejection of aggression as a basic impulse. In their view, it is essentially derived: either from the interruption of some basic biological function (such as breathing, eating or copulation), or from the frustration of some culturally created objective (such as ownership, ambition or ideology). Consequently, aggressive feelings such as hatred or desire for revenge are culturally, not biologically, deter-mined.⁵⁴ The implications for an understanding of war are clear: war is not the ineluctable consequence of an ineradicable instinct, but a human invention 'like any other of the inventions in terms of which we order our lives, such as writing, marriage, cooking our food instead of eating it raw, trial by jury or burial of the dead, and so on'.⁵⁵ Human beings do not go to war because they have to; they go to war because they are taught to: 'They fight and organise for fighting because, through tribal tradition, through teaching of a religious system, or of an aggressive patriotism, they have been indoctrinated with certain cultural values which they are prepared to defend, and with certain collective hatreds on which they are ready to assault and kill.'⁵⁶ In the context of the twentieth century, that means propaganda. Sheep rather than wolves, servile cannon-fodder rather than aggressive predators, the basically pacific humans are induced to take the field of battle by the manipulations of their masters.⁵⁷

This anthropological analysis has a good deal to recommend it. In particular, it makes a clearer — and more convincing — distinction between the various forms of fighting. Bronislaw Malinowski, for example, identified six, ranging from private anger to full-scale interstate warfare. It had been failure to establish these differences, he argued, which had led to a crude short-circuiting of two essentially separate phenomena: the psychological fact of pugnacity and the cultural fact of fighting. In reality, there was a 'complete dysjunction' between the two.⁵⁸ His own more precise definition of war — 'an armed contest between two independent political units, by means of organised military force, in pursuit of a tribal or national power' — allowed him to identify a further flaw in the view that it was biologically (or psychologically) determined. As it can be shown that war is of relatively recent origin and, moreover, that it is not practised by all peoples even today, it must follow that it is an artificial creation.⁵⁹

All of this is helpful. As the anthropologists draw their inductions from material which is both concrete and human, they manage to avoid the snares set by the psychologists' abstract individualism or by the ethologists' speculative animalism. Significantly, however, their services have been mainly of a negative, destructive variety. While proficient at exposing the weaknesses of their opponents, they have been less adept at constructing a more satisfactory alternative. It is in the nature of the beast. Their vast chronological scale demands generalisations of equally accommodating dimensions, with predictably nebulous results when it comes to explaining historical phenomena. With a stupefying lack of precision, Keith Otterbein, for example, has concluded that 'wars are caused by military organisations which go to war in order to obtain certain goals . . . wars are caused by the decisions of men as members of organisations, whether they are military organisations or governing bodies.' Any hope that a discussion of those goals might stiffen this flaccid observation is dashed by the further qualification that they vary from time to time and from war to war. Nor is the multiple categorisation of those goals under the headings of subjugation and tribute, land, plunder, trophies and honours, defence and revenge, any more penetrating.⁶⁰ None of his colleagues are any more precise.

Another drawback of the anthropologists' approach to war is their espousal of what can be called the 'puppetmaster' view of the relationship between rulers and ruled. So anxious are they to avoid the populist heresy of the psychologists and ethologists that they fall over backwards into an equally unsatisfactory extreme which veers close to a conspiracy theory of historical causation. Typical is the following assertion by Ashley Montagu: 'Wars are usually made by a few individuals in positions of great power, "great leaders", "thoughtful" and "respected" statesmen, generally advised by "the best and the brightest", almost always with calm and deliberation, and the pretence if not the conviction of complete moral rectitude.'⁶¹ As the shrill insistence and heavy sarcasm of this and many other passages reveals, much anthropological writing about civilised societies is marred by a reductionist lack of nuance. A good example is Montagu's liturgical repetition of the adjective 'artificial' in his description of the role of the state: 'A state is not a natural creation but an artificial entity, and it is as such artificial entities that states wage war, with artificial weapons from artificial motives for artificial purposes, conducted for artificial ends.'⁶²

At this point, the suspicion begins to harden that an understandable desire to counteract the fatalism of the ethologists is leading to distortion. To depict international conflict in terms of an artificial squabble between a handful of leaders is so much at odds with what is known about the origins of specific wars as to cast doubt on the whole methodology.⁶³ Even if this élitist interpretation were acceptable, it would not explain why those leaders behaved as they did and, more specificially, why sometimes they chose to wage war — and why sometimes they chose to keep the peace. Moreover, it carries the arresting implication that to explain the origins of wars what is required is a concentration on high politics. That is a fine paradox, for it may be assumed with some confidence that Ashley Montagu did not set out with the intention of providing an anthropological rationale for the work of Mr Maurice Cowling.

Quantitative Explanations of War

To write of anthropologists, ethologists and psychologists as if they were united armies of course is to distort. That unavoidable penalty, imposed by the need to be concise, afflicts doubly any discussion of sociological approaches to the origins of war. So numerous are the studies, so various the methods, so conflicting the conclusions that the wretched historian can only emerge bemused from even a brief encounter with this multi-faceted discipline. Much of that bewilderment derives from the new and inaccessible language invented by its practitioners to convey their findings to each other. After wrestling with such concepts as 'systemic tightness', 'dummy profit analysis', 'parity-fluidity models', 'lock-in effects', 'Walker-Lev tests' and many many more of the same stamp, one has to agree with Bernard Brodie's exasperated verdict: 'Social science has the great disadvantage that its insights are conveyed by the use of words, sometimes many words, and usually badly written ones.'⁶⁴ In actual fact, he was only half-right, for many of those insights are conveyed in mathematical symbols of even more baffling opaqueness. Not at all untypical is the following brief extract from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's recent article 'Systemic polarisation and the occurrence and duration of war':

Y = a + b₁ D₁ + b₂ D₂ + b₃ Δ T + b₄ (ΔT) (D₁) + b₅ (ΔT) (D₂)

Where

D₁ = a dummy variable coded one for the years 1900 through 1914 and zero for 1915 through 1965. D₂ = a dummy variable coded zero for 1900 through 1945, and one for 1946 through 1965.⁶⁵

Uncomfortably aware that my own quantitative data input threshold is low — that I am not good at sums —I find it difficult to respond to this kind of explanation with more than a helpless shrug of the shoulders. Even the barely numerate, however, can grasp that this sort of approach has drawbacks other than incomprehensibility. The insistence that all evidence — or 'data' — must be quantifiable, so that it can be handled by the computers, requires a definition of war which is highly arbitrary: for example, 'To qualify for this designation [war], a sustained military conflict has to array at least one sovereign member of the interstate system against another member, or an independent non-member, or a colony, and result in at least 1,000 battle deaths to the system member participant(s)' or 'A war is any military action for a particular country in which the number of its soldiers involved equal or exceed 0.02% of its population.'⁶⁶ It is never explained why 1,000 is more appropriate than 500 or why 0.02 per cent is more appropriate than 0.01 per cent, for the very good reason that no such explanation is possible: the essential quality of any isolated figure is its arbitrariness.

Even when the international conflicts have been identified, their components quantified and the data programmed, the results disgorged on the print-outs are perplexingly and - it has to be said gratifyingly contradictory. After an investigation of the correlation between domestic and foreign conflict in no fewer than seventy-seven different nations, Rudolph J. Rummel concluded that: 'foreign conflict behaviour is generally completely unrelated to domestic conflict behaviour'.⁶⁷ That seems unambiguous enough, but, alas, only five years later Jonathan Wilkenfeld reprocessed the same data and came up with a diametrically opposed conclusion.⁶⁸ The road to scientific certainty, it seems, is paved with disappointment. After a lengthy investigation of the sources of international conflict, Michael Haas had to conclude that no general explanation can be made to fit: 'In correlating variables indicating warlike behaviour of states with some 200 societal characteristics, very few of the correlation coefficients have exceeded the level of + 0.40.'⁶⁹ His findings are, however, vastly if unintentionally entertaining. It is impossible to resist the temptation to quote the following piece of sublime nonsense:

In our quest to determine sources of international violence at various levels of analysis, three scenarios emerge. The prototypic dove decision-maker is seen as a middle-aged Jewish negress who has received a college education to attain the status of physician or college professor, who resides outside a big city but not too far from the nation's capital; she is non-authoritarian, nonethnocentric, flexible, achievement-oriented, uncynical, nonalienated, optimistic, and an intellectual with much tolerance of ambiguity; her political views are neither conservative nor nationalist; she participates politically, does not anticipate war, does not expect her country to survive or be victorious in war, and takes few risks. Her decisions are peaceful when the information inputs are neither perceptually complex nor cognitively simple and made when mutual trust, friendliness and communications are maintained at high levels (though short of communications overload). Peace is more likely to emerge if the prototypic decision-maker is in possession of accurate information, advisers are in disagreement over alternatives, while stereotypic decoding of inputs and provocative encoding of outputs is absent; there is concern for long-term implications and longer time for making a decision and drawing up contingency plans.⁷⁰

The obsessive concern with abstract categorisation and quantification also affects the kind of evidence employed. It has to be quantifiable, of course, but it also has to be universal (common to all states under consideration) and it has to be eternal (common to all periods under consideration). To reverse Goethe's dictum, 'universum est ineffabile'. A good example of the genre is provided by Alan Ned Sabrosky's study of the origins of the First World War.⁷¹ It consists mainly of graphs (illustrating, for example, 'Military Expenditure Shares (MES)'), diagrams (illustrating, for example, 'Major Power Alliance Configurations') and tables (illustrating, for example, 'Disaggregated Rank-Order Correlations on Nonamicable Perceptual and Behavioural Variables'). Some of this information is both valid and helpful, notably that relating to the military budget. But when one finds such elusive imponderables as the respective desire of the Dual Alliance and the Triple Entente to change the status quo not just quantified but reduced to three decimal points, one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry. In spite of all this spurious precision, the net result is very modest and curiously old-fashioned. Professor Sabrosky's only substantive conclusion is that between 1900 and 1914 the position of Germany and Austria-Hungary relative to France, Russia and Great Britain deteriorated.⁷² It is rather as if a fully automated, robot-controlled — and extremely expensive — assembly-line had been constructed to turn out a Model 'T' Ford. Although first published as recently as 1975, the article contains no reference to any of the work of Fritz Fischer, Imanuel Geiss, Volker Berghahn, Hans-Ulrich Wehler — or any of their opponents. But of course Sabrosky's main purpose is not to explain the origins of war, but to establish guide-lines for the present, to demonstrate the uncontroversial if unexciting maxim 'that moderation and prudence are more than proverbial virtues'.⁷³

This admirable concern to create a world free of war is shared by all social scientists who study the subject. Some of them have invented solutions decidedly more ingenious than Sabrosky's modest recipe. James Miller has argued that the cause of peace would be advanced if a thousand social scientists disguised as Russians could be infiltrated into the Soviet Union to conduct public opinion surveys which would establish just what its citizens were thinking. Less hazardous is Gordon Allport's proposal that the entrances to the United Nations General Assembly, Security Council and Unesco be so arranged that delegates would have to pass through the playground of a nursery school before starting work. The prospect of Mr Gromyko dandling a baby on his knee prior to approaching the negotiating table is certainly arresting. More simple was J. Cohen's suggestion that all men in government be replaced by women — that was made, of course, before the Falklands War.⁷⁴ Following Alexander Pope's celebrated advocacy of enlightened self-interest — 'That reason, passion, answer one great aim;/That true SELF-love and SOCIAL are the same' —a group of social scientists mustered by Unesco called for 'the cooperation of social scientists on broad regional and international levels, the creation of an international university and a series of world institutes of the social sciences under international auspices'.⁷⁵

As these solutions to the problems of war indicate, underpinning the social scientists' analysis of its causes is a concern for contemporary relevance, often overtly political in character. This sense of commitment often lends a welcome vigour to their analysis but also has other less satisfactory consequences. So evil is war, especially nuclear war, that the assumption is made that its causes must be evil too. For the Unesco group just quoted, they are social injustice, economic inequality, national pride, propaganda, colonial exploitation and the oppression of ethnic minorities within a country.⁷⁶ For Stanislav Andreski, they are poverty and despotism.⁷⁷ For Richard J. Barnet, they are the concentration of power in a national security bureaucracy, the nature of the capitalist system and the business creed which sustains it, and the vulnerability of the public to manipulation on national security issues.⁷⁸ Not for the first or last time, the problem of peace now intrudes. If any or all of those evils were responsible for war, their opposites would be responsible for peace. Yet most if not all of them are greatly intensified by war, so, logically, wars should be infinite in duration. One cannot help but suspect that the social scientists are approaching the problem from the wrong angle, misled by their contemporary polemical purpose. Whether consciously or not, they select certain institutions or phenomena of which they disapprove (racialism, capitalism, the Pentagon, or whatever), hold them responsible for the absolute evil — war — which now threatens the very existence of mankind and then use the relationship to promote a programme of social and/or political change. And it all stems from a reluctance or inability to recognise that unequivocally evil consequences can result from ethically neutral forces.

No more secure are the empirical foundations of this evil causes-evil consequences interpretation. Certainly some of the former can be identified in any pre-war period — and just as certainly in any post-war period too. Some of them are sometimes conspicuously absent: neither of the world wars of this century, for example, was preceded by pauperisation. During the last four decades since the last of them, the USA has fought two major wars, in Korea and Vietnam, while the incontestably poorer and more despotic USSR has confined itself to minor punitive expeditions. Such poverty-stricken dictatorships as Franco's Spain, Peron's Argentina or Duvalier's Haiti were very models of pacifism in their foreign policy. Even Scandinavia, in Andreski's view the only peaceful part of the world on account of its liberty and prosperity,⁷⁹ will not fit the theory. For Denmark, Norway and Finland were all involved in war between 1939 and 1945. That they were the invaded rather than the invaders is neither here nor there, for what is to be explained is not aggression but war. That Sweden remained at peace during that period had nothing to do with any superiority of its economic and constitutional arrangements.

The social scientists who adopt this position are heirs to a long tradition of naive liberalism. In a speech at Leeds in 1849, Richard Cobden anticipated Stanislav Andreski by more than a hundred years when he blamed war on despotism and predicted that the advance of popular representation would put an end to it. Only eight years later, his own constituents gave the lie to this optimistic forecast by turning him out of his parliamentary seat as a penalty for his opposition to the Crimean War.⁸⁰ Cobden moreover had had his own precursor: in the late 1780s Jeremy Bentham had written in his Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace: 'Europe . . . would have had no wars but for the feudal system, religious antipathy, the rage of conquest and the uncertainties of succession. Of these four causes, the first is happily extinct everywhere, the second and third almost everywhere — at any rate in France and England — and the last might, if not already extinguished, be so with great ease.'⁸¹ Bentham was certainly a clever man, but he was no historian — and consequently had little understanding of the causes of wars. The same — or at least the second part — could be said of many social scientists today.

The Primacy of Domestic Policy?

The influence of sociology is not confined, however, to its own discipline. Especially in the last two or three decades it has colonised large tracts of historians' territory as well. No area has been more affected than the study of war and its origins. Since controversy erupted over Fritz Fischer's book on Germany's aims in the First World War,⁸² first published in 1961, there has been a broad and constant flow of books and articles on the subject based on models drawn from the social sciences. The leitmotiv of this new approach was summed up with admirable if rare conciseness in the title of a collection of essays by Eckart Kehr: Der Primat der Innenpolitik (the primacy of domestic policy).⁸³ Kehr had died at the age of thirty in 1933, leaving an ceuvre of necessarily modest dimensions and little immediate impact. It was not until after 1945 that his use of sociological concepts (drawn mainly from Max Weber but with a dash of Karl Marx added), in combination with a radical critique of German politics past and present, began to command a following.⁸⁴ Thanks in part to the tireless advocacy of the prolific Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Der Primat der Innenpolitik has become established as virtually axiomatic for the younger generations of German historians.

The implications of this principle for the origins of wars hardly need explaining. If foreign policy is determined by domestic forces, the place to look for those origins is at home. The history of international relations ceases to be of any consequence. What is now required is an investigation of economic development, the social structures it produced and the groups which inhabited them. All the old concerns —negotiations, conferences, diplomatic incidents, military expeditions, Mr A. J. P. Taylor's railway timetables —can be abandoned as so much superficial lumber. Into their place move such concepts as social imperialism, negative integration, organised capitalism and Sammlungspolitik.⁸⁵ The benefits of this new approach have been considerable. To answer the new questions, new material has been unearthed, forgotten forces have been rediscovered, neglected phenomena have been rescued from obscurity. Whatever response to their findings seems appropriate, it has to be agreed that they have changed decisively the perspective of Wilhelmine Germany. Never again will it be possible to write about the origins of the First World War simply in terms of what one statesman said to another.

Whether the Primal der Innenpolitik is an adequate analytical tool for the investigation of the origins of wars is a different matter. Its main defect is its Germanocentric perspective. As Golo Mann pointed out, of the 856 pages of Fritz Fischer's seminal work, 855 are devoted to German war aims, with those of the other powers dismissed on a single page.⁸⁶ Consequently, the conflicts and problems of Wilhelmine Germany are manifestly exaggerated and are assigned a degree of peculiarity which they patently did not possess. This is a defect inherent to the method, for as soon as a comparative element is readmitted, the exercise reverts to being international relations, albeit of a social or economic rather than diplomatic variety. Correspondingly one-sided is the definition of what is thought to be the opposite position. In particular, Leopold von Ranke is credited with a dogmatic attachment to the Primal der Aussenpolitik (the primacy of foreign policy) which he did not possess.⁸⁷ While he certainly did believe in the predominance of a state's foreign interests, in both a normative and a practical sense, he was also at pains to stress the interaction of foreign and domestic conditions and the importance of the latter: 'Strange how the conditions of society infuse their predominating traits into each separate institution. . . .All states that count in the world and make themselves felt are motivated by special tendencies of their own. . . . There is a living, unique, inherent principle in each of our great states, by which all its foreign affairs and internal developments are shaped. '⁸⁸

If Ranke was too much a creature of his times to conceive that principle in any but metaphysical terms, at least he was aware of the need to examine both intra-state and inter-state relations. It is the remorseless insistence of the Primal der Innenpolitik school on the former which makes their method so one-sided. With a candour amounting to self-condemnation, Hans-Ulrich Wehler has defiantly asserted the value of partiality: 'no objection could be raised a limine against even a consciously monocausal use of the concept [Primat der Innenpolitik], for the insertion of a sharp instrument may be made at the cost of a certain one-sidedness which can then be differentiated and in the course of the second incision.⁸⁹ The obvious reponse to that, of course, is that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: one cannot expect to be taken seriously if one first condemns Ranke for one-sided monocausality and then announces that one is going to employ the same method oneself!

The fiercely polemical tone of Wehler's writing stems trom nis desire to turn the study of history into a 'vital, political, critical social science'.⁹⁰ He is quite frank about the teleological and didactic nature of the exercise, which can be summarised as follows: in the Federal Republic of Germany we need to build a democratic state and society, therefore we must eliminate any residual loyalty to older rival models, especially to the Wilhelmine Empire; therefore we must demonstrate the essential continuity of the period 1871-1945 and destroy the notion that the period before 1914 represented 'the good old days.'⁹¹ This is a method with success built-in, for the criteria select the evidence which justifies the criteria: 'Ask, and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you' (Matthew 7: 7). It is not, however, a method which commends itself for the investigation of the origins of wars.

As war is a conflict between two or more countries, the relations between them must be of central concern. Of course their internal conditions — economic, social, political and ideological - need to be examined, and of course the formation and conduct of foreign policy are strongly influenced by those conditions. But to elevate them to sole primacy, without reference to the international dimension, is an act of wilful self-mutilation. If one's concern is to establish what happened and why — rather than to seek support for a contemporary political cause — it is difficult to see why either foreign or domestic policy should be always elevated at the expense of the other.⁹² Their relative strength depends not on some internal dynamic but on concrete circumstances. If the state in question is exposed to danger from outside, then foreign policy will be predominant, both in a normative and a formative sense. If the state in question is exposed to danger from within and/or is secure against foreign interference, then domestic policy will be predominant: indeed a wholly autarchic and isolated state will have no foreign policy at all.⁹³ Always a very rare bird, such a state became extinct at about the same time as the dodo and for similar reasons. For most people in most ages, foreign policy and international relations have been a matter of vital concern. Anyone familiar with — say — the history of Poland since the late Middle Ages will understand why and will agree with Richard Cobb's maxim: 'foreign policy is at all times more important than domestic matters, for it is a matter of life and death.'⁹⁴

That paraphrase of Ranke from the greatest exponent of 'history from below' would be a fitting, if paradoxical conclusion to this section. But something has to be said about what appears to be a near relative of the Primat der Innenpolitik school: Marxism-Leninism. While the founding fathers had little to say about the causes of war per se, Lenin returned to the subject again and again, usually with the same form of words. Typical is the following passage from 'War and revolution' of May 1917:

War is a continuation of policy by other means. All wars are inseparable from the political systems that engender them. The policy which a given state, a given class within that state, pursued for a long time before the war is inevitably continued by that same class during the war, the form of action alone being changed. War is a continuation of policy by other means.⁹⁵

The causes of war are therefore fundamentally economic: war is part of politics, politics is part of the superstructure, so war is determined by the socio-economic base:

The determinant position of the relations of production stems from the fact that they represent the basic component of socio-economic life, that they determine the social class content of all the superstructure components, such as politics, states and law, morals, ideology, war and peace, and that these superstructure components play a role in the service of the base. In the final analysis, the major causes of war are determined by the nature of the economy, although the immediate causes may lie or may appear to lie in another sphere, since economic causes very often enter the picture in a mediated form.⁹⁶

This characteristically reductionist argument is only formally domestic in character. The arena may be the state but the essential unit is the class and the essential motor is class struggle, neither of which knows national frontiers. Moreover, 'domestic and foreign policy are parts of the overall policy pursued by the ruling class of the state' and cannot be understood in isolation from each other. So both normatively and analytically, the Marxist-Leninist view of war has more in common with the primacy of foreign policy than with the primacy of domestic policy. 'Workers of the world unite!' is, it need hardly be said, a call for international action. Marx and Engels positively welcomed war as a means of accelerating the historical process: 'The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance.'⁹⁷ So far as analysis is concerned, Marxists are too well trained in dialectics to suppose that essentially international phenomena can be studied nationally. That is why so many Marxist historians — Eric Hobsbawm, V. G. Kiernan and George Rude spring at once to mind — write such good international history and why the study of international relations flourishes nowhere in greater abundance than in the Soviet Union. Despite certain misleading resemblances, Fritz Fischer's analysis of the origins of the First World War is about as far removed from Marxism as it is possible to imagine.

The Marxist approach to the causes of war has certain virtues, a clear understanding of the dialectical nature of a state's national interest and international position being the most important. Also illuminating —usually — is the stress laid on the economic motivation of the belligerents. But while this concern with the material forces at work can often supply a fresh perspective or uncover fresh evidence, its essential monocausality leaves part of the picture unpainted and crams the rest into what is often an anachronistic frame. Symptomatic is the need felt to identify each state by means of a social adjective.⁹⁸ That sort of exercise works well enough when 'bourgeois' France is pitted against 'feudal' Austria and Prussia, but begins to show signs of strain when the latter bloc is joined by 'bourgeois' Great Britain and the United Provinces.

The teleological nature of the Marxist approach also causes problems. With all history set on its inevitable course, ware can — and should — be categorised in terms of censure and approval. So Lenin, for example, made a distinction between just wars waged by the oppressed (the wars of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of France, for example) and unjust wars (the wars of imperialist exploitation waged by the decrepit bourgeoisie of late-nineteenth-century Europe, for example).⁹⁹ Lenin might well have remembered one of his own aphorisms — 'History is more cunning than any of us' — at this point, for too many wars turn out to be too complex for this kind of classification. For example, particular difficulties are caused by the need to attach the label 'just' to Russia's war of 1812 — 'the great liberation war of the fatherland'. As 'war is a continuation of the policies of a class' and 'to change the character of the war, one must change the class in power',¹⁰⁰ it is very difficult to see how that seal of approval can be justified. For whatever else may have changed between 1799 and 1812, it was not the social structure of France and Russia.¹⁰¹

The Origins of Great Wars

This necessarily lightning review of general explanations of war has been depressingly negative. Exposure of flaws in the structures of others is, of course, a far easier exercise than the construction of an alternative. At least, however, it has uncovered some of the more obvious requirements of a satisfactory theory. It must be able to explain peace as well as war. It must be able to explain the decisions of the élites as well as the impulses of the masses. It must not rely on analogies for its justification. It must be able to explain wars and not just fighting. It must be able to explain geographical and chronological variations. It must be explicable in comprehensible prose, not in some private sectarian language, verbal or mathematical. It must not allow distaste for its subject to introduce the fallacy that evil phenomena must have evil causes. It must allow for the interaction of domestic and foreign policy. It must not be reductionist - for example in reducing all causation to economics. Whether those requirements can be met, remains to be seen: it is highly improbable, but it should not disqualify at least an attempt.

It is important to concede at the outset that this is an exercise conducted by a historian for historians. Just as he derives little benefit from psychologists' investigation of the mind, so he can expect little interest from that quarter. The premises, point of departure and ultimate destination are too different. This caveat has been expressed with especial — and characteristic — cogency by Marc Bloch:

A graduated classification of causes, which is really only an intellectual convenience, cannot safely be elevated to an absolute. Reality offers us a nearly infinite number of lines of force which all converge together upon the same phenomenon. The choice we make among them may well be founded upon characteristics which, in practice, fully merit our attention; but it is always a choice. Notably, there is something extremely arbitrary in the idea of a cause par excellence, as opposed to mere 'conditions'. Even Simiand, who was so possessed by the idea of precision, and who had begun with an attempt (a vain one, I believe) for stricter definitions, seems to have ended by recognising the entirely relative character of such distinctions. 'For a doctor', he wrote, 'the cause of an epidemic would be the multiplication of a microbe and its conditions the dirt and ill health occasioned by poverty; for the sociologist and philanthropist, poverty would be the cause, and the biological factors, the condition.' This is in all honesty to acknowledge the subordination of the perspective to the peculiar angle of the inquiry.¹⁰²

This sage warning is also of value because it raises the important question of whether there are two separate levels of causation: 'the given conditions that make war possible, or even quite likely to occur, and the events and the decisions that immediately lead to it'.¹⁰³ A particularly graphic image of what this distinction can mean with regard to a specific case was provided by A. J. P. Taylor in The Origins of the Second World War:

Wars are much like road accidents. They have a general cause and particular causes at the same time. Every road accident is caused, in the last resort, by the invention of the internal combustion engine and by men's desire to get from one place to another. In this sense, the 'cure' for road accidents is to forbid motor-cars. But a motorist, charged with dangerous driving, would be ill-advised if he pleaded the existence of motor-cars as his sole defence. The police and the courts do not weigh profound causes. They seek a specific cause for each accident — error on the part of the driver; excessive speed; drunkenness; faulty brakes; bad road surface. So it is with wars. . . .Both enquiries make sense on different levels. They are complementary; they do not exclude each other. The Second World War, too, had profound causes; but it also grew out of specific events, and these events are worth detailed examination.¹⁰⁴

This is a striking metaphor, but its vivacity should not be allowed to obscure the weakness of the argument. Like the opponents of the ethologists, we should be on our guard against any explanation of war which relies on analogy. Vigilance is rewarded when the two-level theory founders on the old obstacle of peace. What distinguishes the 'given conditions' or 'profound causes' of war from 'the particular causes' is their permanence. What the internal combustion engine is to driving, economic circumstances (for example) are to war. If that permanence be replaced by a temporary quality — if the internal combustion engine be replaced by a special kind of combustion engine —then the cause gains promotion from profound to particular. The internal combustion engine plus man's desire for mobility are held to be responsible for road accidents. But they are equally responsible for the opposite phenomenon: for safely completed journeys. So they cannot be held responsible for either. Equally, if the fundamental causes of war are also fundamental causes of peace, they cannot be causes of either:

What is the use of dwelling upon nearly universal antecedents? They are common to too many phenomena to deserve a special niche in the genealogy of any of them. I am well aware, from the outset, that there would be no fire if the air contained no oxygen: what interests me, what demands and justifies an attempt at discovery, is to determine how the fire started. The laws of trajectories are as valid for defeat as for victory: they explain both; therefore, they are useless as a proper explanation for either.¹⁰⁵

The motoring analogy also breaks down because accidents are often caused by wholly unpredictable and uncontrollable mechanical defects. For most of recorded history there is no equivalent in war. Until very recently, and the invention of weapons systems which might conceivably be triggered by computer malfunction, no such possibility of a fortuitous outbreak existed. Of course most wars take a course and have results different from those intended by the combatants, but no war has ever begun by accident — yet. Finally and more generally, it must be doubted whether the two levels of causation can be made sufficiently autonomous to justify their separation:

If the profound causes do not explain the occurrence of war without the particular ones, or the particular without the profound ones, how can we really speak of two different, but compatible levels of explanation? Is not what we have really two parts of a single explanation which recognises the necessity both of certain predisposing conditions and the actions of certain individuals? The conclusion which suggests itself, in fact, is that historians working at the diplomatic and geopolitical levels simply make different selections from a single set of explanatory conditions — perhaps on no more significant criterion than that certain conditions happen to interest them more than others.¹⁰⁶

With this methodological red herring consigned to the deeps, we can proceed to the central problem. For a definition, the place to go is still Carl von Clausewitz's On War, 'not simply the greatest but the only truly great book on war'.¹⁰⁷ Notwithstanding the celebrity of his maxim that war is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means, Clausewitz identified at an even more fundamental level the two essential characteristics of war — reciprocity and force; 'War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale . . . War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.'¹⁰⁸ That war is violent is perhaps a truism, that war requires at least two participants is most certainly not so obvious, or at least has not been so obvious to certain historians (see p. 20). But it is certainly important. Once the reciprocal nature of war is grasped, the way is clear to a general explanation of its causes. However brutal it may sound, the fact of the matter is that every victim of a predator has two choices: he can resist or he can submit. If he chooses the latter course, there is no war.¹⁰⁹ The German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 did not result in war; the German invasion of Poland in 1939 did result in war: the difference lay in the different reactions of the victims. In Michael Howard's more concrete formulation of Clausewitz's twin insights, war 'is simply the use of violence by states for the enforcement, the protection or the extension of their political power'.¹¹⁰

This concept of political power supplies the organising principle tor the specific objectives of states. At first sight, they comprise such a welter of variations that the temptation to relapse into positivist resignation is almost overwhelming. Another admirer of Clausewitz —Lenin — seemed to succumb when he exclaimed in a letter in January 1917: 'Wars are a supremely varied, diverse, complex thing. One cannot approach them with a general pattern.¹¹¹ However he then buckled down to devising a tripartite categorisation: oppressed nations versus oppressors, oppressors versus other oppressors, conflicts between nations possessing equal rights.¹¹² What he failed to point out was that all three were essentially concerned with power: the ability to determine or influence the behaviour of others. However generously conceived, concentration on specific war aims can only set a trap, for they are so variable. In particular, they are notoriously prone to inflation once a war has commenced. As Geoffrey Blainey, the author of the most penetrating study of the causes of war yet written, has pointed out:

One generalisation about war aims can be offered with confidence. The aims are simply varieties of power. The vanity of nationalism, the will to spread an ideology, the protection of kinsmen in an adjacent land, the desire for more territory or commerce, the avenging of a defeat or insult, the craving for greater national strength or independence, the wish to impress or cement alliances — all these represent power in different wrappings . . . .The explanations that stress aims are theories of rivalry and animosity and not theories of war. They help to explain increasing rivalry between nations but they do not explain why the rivalry led to war.¹¹³

The assertion of power lies at the very heart of the state: the word itself derives from the Latin status in its sense of standing or position.¹¹⁴ No state, however small its confines or humble its aspirations, can fail to perform that elemental function. It ceases to do so only at the moment of its extinction. Indeed, every identifiable group develops a conception of power — as soon as it comes into contact with another group with similar and therefore competing interests.¹¹⁵ All that varies is the currency of power, the way in which it is measured. Football teams use goals, nomadic tribes use grazing land and water-holes, states use territory, population, wealth, armed strength or a permutation of the same. Of course, for states war is not a permanent or even necessary mode of expression of power. Political intercourse between most states in most periods is conducted peacefully. When two states are geographically adjacent or when they pursue their perceived interests in the same area, disputes are bound to arise: over territory, over commerce, over the control of other states, and so on. More often than not, such conflicts can be resolved by negotiation. What has to be determined is why certain states at certain times resort to war. If the dual concepts of reciprocity and force are kept in mind, the answer is clear: because the states concerned decide that they have more to gain by going to war than by staying at peace.¹¹⁶ That conclusion is simple to the point of banality, but it leads to another: the decision to prefer war to peace is taken by the two parties concerned because they have different assessments of their respective power. When they can agree about their power relationship, they can also agree to settle their differences peacefully. When they cannot, they go to war.¹¹⁷ War is the most direct, the most effective means of testing that relationship, and when it has allowed agreement to be reached, peace will break out. Consequently, decisive wars are followed by long periods of peace and indecisive wars by the reverse. It was not the superior wisdom of the peacemakers of 1945 which has made their efforts so much more durable than those of their predecessors of 1919 but the more decisive quality of the preceding war.

It follows, therefore, that the investigator of the origins of war should concentrate on those considerations which influence decision-makers' assessments of their power-relationship. Blainey has summarised them as follows:

i. Military strength and the ability to apply that strength efficiently in the likely theatre of war;

ii. Predictions of how outside nations will behave if war should occur;

iii. Perceptions of whether there is internal unity or discord in their land or in the land of the enemy;

iv. Knowledge or forgetfulness of the realities and sufferings of war;

v. Nationalism and ideology;

vi. The state of the economy and also its ability to sustain the kind of war envisaged;

vii. The personality and experience of those who shared in the decision.¹¹⁸

When a potential enemy's capability is underestimated and when one's own assets are overrated, then war comes near. When that potential enemy has made a similar miscalculation, then war is unavoidable. This kind of reciprocal error is particularly common during periods of ideological upheaval, for accurate intelligence is hard to obtain and the two sides are using different criteria to assess their relative strength. As we shall see, the French revolutionary wars are a case in point (see p. 123). In short, it is the repeated inability of decision-makers to get their sums right which leads to repeated wars: 'This recurring optimism is a vital prelude to war. Anything which increases that optimism is a cause of war. Anything which dampens that optimism is a cause of peace.'¹¹⁹

Paradoxically, that positive, optimistic drive to war is often accelerated and intensified by its apparent opposite: the pessimistic fear that the power of one's state is threatened by the growth of a rival. Both Michael Howard and Martin Wight have taken the same simple sentence from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War to make the point: 'What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear this caused in Sparta.'¹²⁰ There is no contradiction here; short-term optimism and long-term pessimism not only coexist, they combine to encourage the same calculation: 'We can win now, but we shall lose later, so let us go to war at once.' A particularly clear example was provided by General Helmuth von Moltke on the eve of the First World War,¹²¹ but it is a very common phenomenon. Another good illustration is provided by the French revolutionary wars.¹²² As most statesmen at most times fear that in the long run the international position of their states will deteriorate, most wars can be called 'defensive' or 'preventive' - by both sides. Truly preventive wars — when one state takes pre-emptive action in the certain knowledge that attack is imminent - are very rare. Frederick the Great's attack on Austria through Saxony in August 1756 is the only case that springs immediately to mind. Frederick had miscalculated — but so had his enemies. That, alas, is the way with war. Instead of the slick precision instrument for the continuation of policy by other means, it turns out to be clumsy, uncontrollable, ruinously expensive and very, very slow. It is less a sniper's rifle than a blunderbuss, with an alarming propensity for blowing up in the firer's face. In modern times, only Bismarck (and perhaps Mrs Thatcher) have had the satisfaction of seeing short, sharp, decisive wars running roughly according to plan. As Clausewitz put it, 'Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.'¹²³

Wars are about power. As Raymond Aron wrote: 'The stakes of war are the existence, the creation or the elimination of states.¹²⁴ Any attempt to subdivide them into different kinds of wars can only set up contrasts which further investigation reveals to be unjustified. So when A. J. P. Taylor writes that 'wars in fact have sprung more from apprehension than from a lust for war or for conquest',¹²⁵ he seems to be unaware that the two impulses are not just compatible but two sides of the same coin. Martin Wight's support for Hobbes' trilogy of wars of gain, fear and doctrine is open to the same objection.¹²⁶ All wars for gain - Frederick the Great's invasion of Silesia, Hitler's invasion of Poland, for example - are also wars for security. The reverse formulation is usually, if not invariably applicable too. To elevate wars of ideology to a separate category is also unhelpful. Every war that ever was fought has had an ideological quality, in that the belligerents have justified their participation by appealing to general principles. So far as I am aware, no state has ever announced: 'We are going to war to obtain this objective because we believe we are the stronger and can get away with it.' Even Frederick the Great in 1740 took his stand on treaties, the law of the Empire and even Protestantism. Of course he did not believe all or even much of it, but neither, one suspects, have many others who have trumpeted their ideological justification. As we shall see, even the fervour of the French revolutionaries, who provide Wight's 'classic example' of a war of doctrine¹²⁷, was not unalloyed with more material considerations (see pp. 98-104).

It is high time to turn to those revolutionaries and their wars. Even as formidable a theorist as Clausewitz was aware of the need to avoid too much abstraction: 'Just as some plants bear fruit only if they don't shoot up too high, so in the practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned and the plant kept close to its proper soil —experience.'¹²⁸ It is with a sense of relief that this amateur theorist reaches for his secateurs. Whether the modest growths he has tended in this chapter can be planted out to any purpose in what follows he rather doubts. At least a few obvious weeds have been pulled out and the ground prepared. Before Clausewitz's horticultural metaphor goes to seed, it should be picked. The final chapter will be the place for a harvest festival.

References and Notes

1. (London 1978) p. 53.

2. Dorothy F. La Barr and J. David Singer, The Study of International Politics (Santa Barbara and Oxford 1976).

3. Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics, (London 1916) pp. 395-6, 599.

4. Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, 'Why war?', The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 22 (London 1964) pp. 199-215.

5. E.F.M. Durbin and John Bowlby, Personal Aggressiveness and War London 1939).

6. Ibid., p. 21.

7. Ibid., p. 23.

8. Ibid., p. 38.

9. Ibid., p. 41.

10. Ibid., p. 25.

11. Ibid., p. 28.

12. Pryns Hopkins, The Psychology of Social Movements. A Psycho-Analytic View of Society (London 1938) p. 117.

13. Durbin and Bowlby, Personal Aggressiveness and War, pp. vii, 28.

14. Hopkins, The Psychology of Social Movements, p. 117.

15. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York 1959) p. 28.

16. For further discussion of this point, see Morris Ginsberg, 'The causes of war', The Sociological Review, 31 (1939) pp. 139-40.

17. Franz Alexander, 'The Psychiatric Aspects of War and Peace', The American Journal of Sociology, 46 (1941), pp. 505-6.

18. Hopkins, The Psychology of Social Movements, pp. 129-31.

19. Arno J. Mayer, Dynamics of Counter-Revolution in Europe, 1870-1956. An Analytic Framework (New York 1971) p. 135.

20. Werner Levi, 'On the Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace', Towards a Theory of War Prevention, eds Richard A. Falk and Saul H. Mendlovitz (New York 1966) p. 152.

21. Quoted in Waltz, Man, the State and War, p. 28.

22. William Brown, War and the Psychological Conditions of Peace (London 1942) pp. 74—5. For another similarly helpful example, see Z. Barbu, 'Nationalism as a source of aggression', Conflict in Society, eds Anthony DeReuck and Julie Knight (London 1966).

23. For some perceptive remarks on this point, see Waltz, Man, theStateand War, p. 28.

24. Durbin and Bowlby, Personal Aggressiveness andWar, p. vii. Jerome D. Frank, Sanity and Survival; Psychological Aspects of War and Peace (London 1968) p. 287.

25. Maurice N. Walsh, 'Summary and conclusions', War and the Human Race, ed. Maurice N. Walsh (New York 1971) p. 93.

26. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (London 1967) p. 33.

27. 'If we are to understand the nature of our aggressive urges, we must see them against the background of our animal origins' - Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (London 1967) p. 146.

28. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, p. 41.

29. Robert Ardrey, The Hunting Hypothesis (London 1977) pp. 27, 69.

30. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (London 1966) pp. 30-1.

31. Ardrey, The Hunting Hypothesis, pp. 26-7.

32. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, p. 285.

33. Ibid., p. 362.

34. Ibid.

35. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 207.

36. Herbert Friedmann, 'Animal aggression and its implications for human behaviour', Walsh, War and the Human Race, p. 37.

37. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 40.

38. This small but representative sample of abusive epithets is drawn from a collection of essays edited by Ashley Montagu and specifically designed to discredit the views of Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz — Man and Aggression, 2nd edn (New York 1973).

39. The article and review in question are to be found in the Montagu collection cited in the previous note.

40. The charge is made by Leon Eisenberg in his contribution to the Montagu collection, pp. 57-8. For a frank appraisal of Lorenz's links with the Nazis, see Alec Nisbett, Konrad Lorenz (London 1976) ch. 6.

41. John Lewis and Bernard Towers, Naked Ape or Homo Sapiens?, 2nd edn (London 1972) p. 25.

42. See, for example, Montagu, Man and Aggression, p. 174.

43. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, p. 41; Montagu, Man and Aggression, p. xiv. It is now forty years since Mark A. May claimed victory over believers in instincts, but the latter refuse to concede — A Social Psychology of War and Peace (New Haven 1943) p. 3.

44. John Burton, 'The nature of aggression as revealed in the atomic age', The Natural History of Aggression, eds J.D. Carthy and F.J. Ebling (London and New York 1964) pp. 146-8.

45. Friedmann, 'Animal aggression', p. 35.

46. Bernard Brodie, 'Theories on the causes of war', Walsh, War and the Human Race, p. 19.

47. Montagu Man and Aggression, p. xvii.

48. John G. Kennedy, 'Ritual and intergroup murder: comments on war, primitive and modern', Walsh, War and the Human Race, pp. 40-1.

49. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, p. 259.

50. Keith F. Otterbein, 'The anthropology of war', Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed. John J. Honigmann (Chicago 1973) p. 928.

51. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, p. 364.

52. Ibid., p. 257.

53. For reasons of space, I have omitted a discussion of another and even more recent branch of science closely akin to ethology: sociobiology, or the systematic study of the biological basis of social behaviour. Convenient recent summaries can be found in David Barash, Sociobiology: The Whisperings Within (London 1980) and Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology, The New Synthesis (London 1975). Sociobiologists are concerned less with the results of evolution than with extrapolating the principle on which it has been based — 'the maximisation of fitness' — and applying it to human phenomena. They differ from the ethologists by not seeing aggression as an instinct. In their view, man engages in aggression because he is told that it is cost effective, a message which comes partly from his genes and partly from his environment. So the causes of war —and of most other forms of fighting too - are to be found in 'resource competition'. These views have attracted just as vehement criticism as those of the ethologists. See, for example, Ashley Montagu (ed.), Sociobiology examined (Oxford 1980). For the latest word, see Stephen Jay Gould, 'Sociobiology goodbye', The New York Review of Books, 30(11) (30 June 1983), which is a review of Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson's Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind (Cambridge, Mass, 1983). Despite the optimistic title of Gould's review, it is almost certainly 'Au revoir', not 'Adieu'.

54. Bronislaw Malinowski, An anthropological analysis of war', American Journal of Sociology, 46 (1941) pp. 526-7.

55. Margaret Mead, 'Warfare is only an invention — not a biological necessity', War: Studies from Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, eds Leon Bramson and George W. Goethals (New York 1964) p. 270.

56. Malinowski, 'An anthropological analysis', p. 533.

57. Ashley Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression (New York 1976) pp. 271-2.

58. Malinowski, 'An anthropological analysis', pp. 532, 541. See also his 'War — past, present and future', War as a Social Institution: The Historian's Perspective, eds J. Clarkson and T. Cochran (New York 1941) p. 24. His criticisms were directed against psychologists such as Durbin and Bowlby, but they could be applied equally well to the ethologists.

59. Ibid., pp. 22-3. See also Mead, 'Warfare is only an invention', pp. 270-1. For an earlier version of this argument, see Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Causes of International War, new edn (New York 1972) pp. 15-16. This book was first published in 1920.

60. Otterbein, 'The anthropology of war', p. 936.

61. Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression, p. 271.

62. Ibid., p, 273.

63. For a specific example, see the main section of this book, especially pp. 99-123 and 135-57.

64. Brodie, 'Theories on the causes of war', p. 15. For a further baffling selection of sociological jargon, see Dean G. Pruitt and Richard C. Snyder (eds), Theory and Research on the Causes of War (Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1969) pp. 301-2.

65. In J. David Singer and Associates, Explaining War. Selected Papers from the Correlates of War Project (Beverly Hills and London 1979) pp. 132-3.

66. Marvin Small and J. David Singer, 'Conflict in the international system, 1816-1977', Singer and Associates, Explaining War, p. 62; Rudolph J. Rummel, 'Dimensions of conflict behaviour within and between nations', General Systems, 8 (1963) p. 27.

67. Ibid., p. 24.

68. Jonathan Wilkenfeid, 'Domestic and foreign conflict behaviour of nations', Journal of Peace Research, 5(1) (1968) p. 68.

69. Michael Haas, 'Sources of international conflict', The Analysis of International Politics: Essays in Honour of Harold and Margaret Sprout (New York 1972) pp. 263-4'

70. Ibid., p. 271.

71. Alan Ned Sabrosky, 'From Bosnia to Sarajevo. A comparative discussion of interstate crises', Singer and Associates, Explaining War, pp. 139-57.

72. Ibid., pp. 154-7.

73. Ibid., p. 157.

74. AH these proposals are recorded in Waltz, Man, the State and War, p. 46.

75. Hadley Cantril (ed.), Tensions that Cause War (Urbana 1950) p. 20.

76. Ibid., pp. 18-19.

77. Stanislav Andreski, 'Origins of war', The Natural History of Aggression, eds J. D. Carthy and F. J. Ebling (London and New York 1964) p. 132.

78. Richard J. Barnet, Roots of War. The Men and Institutions behind US Foreign Policy (Harmondsworth 1973) p. 339.

79. Andreski, 'Origins of war', p. 132.

80. Waltz, Man, the State and War, p. 8.

81. Quoted in F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace. Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge 1963) p 83. For a very similar observation from the same period, see Tom Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins (Harmondsworth 1969) p. 290.

82. Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschlands 1914-1918 (Diisseldorf 1961). It was published in an English translation in 1967 with the title Germany's Aims in the First World War. For a fuller discussion of the controversy aroused by the 'Fischer thesis', see the volume in this series by James Joll on the origins of the First World War.

83. Eckart Kehr, Der Primat der Innenpolitik. Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur preufiisch-deutschen Sozialgeschichte im 19. und 20 Jahrhundert (Berlin 1965). For an interesting early attack on the Primat der Aussenpolitik as a normative principle, see Rudolf Goldscheid, Das Verhaltnis der dusseren Politik zur inneren (Vienna and Leipzig 1914). In a pathetic preface, dated September 1914, Goldscheid recorded that originally it had been intended as a lecture to the World Peace Congress, which had been scheduled to meet in Vienna in the autumn of 1914.

84. For Fritz Fischer's acknowledgement of the Primat der Innenpolitik school's debt to Kehr, see his preface to Helmut Bohme, Deutschlands Weg zur Grofimacht. Studien zum Verhaltnis von Wirtschaft und Stoat wahrend der Reichsgrundungszeit 1848-1881 (Cologne and Berlin 1966) pp. 1-2.

85. A brief but clear and critical discussion of these concepts can be found in the introduction to Richard J. Evans, Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London 1978).

86. Golo Mann, 'Der Griff nach der Weltmacht', Deutsche Kriegsziele, ed. Ernst Wilhelm Graf Lynar (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin 1964)p. 187.

87. Contrary to popular belief, Ranke did not coin the phrase 'Primat der Aussenpolitik' — it was the invention of Wilhelm Dilthey — Karl Dietrich Bracher, 'Kritische Betrachtungen iiberden Primat der Aussenpolitik', Faktoren der politischen Entscheidung. Festgabe fur Ernst Fraenkel zum 65. Geburstag, eds Gerhard A. Ritter and Gilbert Ziebura (Berlin 1963) p. 115.

88. 'A dialogue on polities', The Theory and Practice of History, eds Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (Indianapolis and New York 1973) pp. 110,118,123.

89. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, 'Moderne Politikgeschichte oder "GroBe Politik der Kabinette"?', Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 1 (1975) p. 354. For a cogent critique of the arguments advanced in this article, see Klaus Hildebrand, 'Geschichte oder "Gesellschaftsgeschichte"? Die Notwen-digkeit einer politischen Geschichtsschreibung von den internationalen Beziehungen', Historische Zeitschrift, 223 (1976) and Georg G. Iggers, Neue Geschichtswissenschaft. Vom Historismus zur Historischen Sozial-wissenschaft (Munich 1978) pp. 143-4.

90. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs 1871-1918 (Gottingen 1970) p. 9. In a particularly trenchant rejoinder. Thomas Nipperdey has pointed out that Wehler's polemics and view of the historian as both prosecutor and judge have made him 'Treitschke redivivus' —'Wehlers "Kaiserreich". Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung', Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 1 (1975) p. 542.

91. Wehler, Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs, pp. 10-12.

92. Andreas Hillgruber, 'Politische Geschichte in moderner Sicht', Historische Zeitschrift, 216 (1973) pp. 533-9.

93. H. Oncken, 'Uber die Zusammenhange zwischen ausserer und innerer Politik', Vortrage der Gehe-Stiftung, vol. 9 (Leipzig and Dresden 1919) p. 18. This point is also well made in two more recent works on the subject: Rudolf L. Bindschedler, 'Zum Primat der Aussenpolitik', Innen- und Aussenpolitik. Primat oder Interdependenz? Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Walther Hofer, eds Urs Altermatt and Judit Garamvoigyi (Bern 1980) and Wilhelm G. Grewe, Spiel der Krafte in der Weltpolitik. Theorie und Praxis der internationalen Beziehungen (Diisseldorf and Vienna 1970) p. 255.

94. Richard Cobb, 'To Germany with love', The Sunday Times, 21 Sept. 1980, p. 43.

95. V. I. Lenin, 'War and revolution. A lecture delivered May 14 (27) 1917', Collected Works, vol. 24: April-June 1917 (Moscow 1964) p. 400.

96. Karel Kara, 'On the Marxist theory of war and peace', Journal of Peace Research, 5 (1) (1968) p. 8. See also V. Kubalkova and A. A. Cruickshank, Marxism-Leninism and Theory of International Relations (London 1980) p. 104.

97. Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, ed. David Fernbach (Harmonds-worth 1973) p. 109.

98. For example, Joachim Streisand, Deutschland von 1789 bis 1815, 2nd edn (Berlin 1961) p. 23.

99. V. I. Lenin, "The collapse of the Second International' Collected Works, vol. 21: August 1914-December 1915 (Moscow 1964) p. 221.

100. V. I. Lenin, 'Concluding remarks in the debate concerning the report on the present situation, April 14 (27) (1917)', Collected Works, vol. 24: April-June 1917 (Moscow 1964) p. 151.

101. For a recent example of this sort of problem, see L. G. Beskrovny, Otechestvennaya Voyna 1812 goda (Moscow 1962) pp. 4-5, 43, 59. For Lenin's own views, see 'The Junius pamphlet', Collected Works, vol. 22 (Moscow 1964) pp. 309-10.

102. Marc Bloch, 'Historical causation', The Historian's Craft (Manchester 1976) pp. 192-3.

103. A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London 1961)pp. 102-3.

104. Ibid.

105. Bloch, 'Historical causation', p. 192.

106. W. H. Dray, 'Concepts of causation in A. J. P. Taylor's account of the originsof the Second World War', History and Theory, 17(1978)p. 173.

107. Bernard Brodie, 'The continuing relevance of On War', Carl von Clausewitz. On War, eds Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton 1976) p. 53.

108. Clausewitz, On War, p. 75.

109. 'A war is always an alternative to some other course and is always known to be so', Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, p. 331.

110. Michael Howard, 'Military power and international order', Theories of Peace and security, ed. John Garnett (London 1970) p. 41.

111. V. I. Lenin, Letters. February 1912-December 1922, Collected Works, vol. 35 (Moscow 1964) p. 273.

112. Ibid.

113. Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (Melbourne 1977) pp. 149-50. Potential readers of this consistently cogent work should not be deterred by the legend emblazoned on the cover: 'One of Australia's most brilliant authors'.

114. Sir Ernest Barker, Introduction to The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford 1952) p. lxiii.

115. R. G. Hawtrey, Economic Aspects of Sovereignty, 2nd edn (London 1952) p. 72.

116. 'Whatever may be the underlying causes of international conflict, even if we accept the role of atavistic militarism or of military-industrial complexes or of socio-biological drives or of domestic tensions in fuelling it, wars begin with conscious and reasoned decisions based on the calfculation, made by both parties, that they can achieve more by going to war than by remaining at peace' — Michael Howard, The Causes of War (Oxford 1983) p. 22.

117. Blainey, The Causes of War, pp. 241, 270.

118. Ibid., p. 270.

119. Ibid., p. 53.

120. Howard, The Causes of War, p. 10. Martin Wight, Power Politics, eds Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (Harmondsworth 1979) p. 138.

121. Imanuel Geiss, 'Origins of the First World War', The Origins of the First World War, ed. H. W. Koch (London 1972) pp. 70-1.

122. Clausewitz, On War, p. 119.

123. Ibid.

124. Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (London 1966) p. 7. Also quoted in Howard, The Causes of War, p. 14. See also Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 2nd edn (New York 1954) p. 491.

125. A, J. P. Taylor, How Wars Begin (London 1980) p. 15.

126. Wight, Power Politics, p, 138.

127. Ibid., p. 140.

128. Clausewitz, On War, p. 61.