Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (69 page)
During the Cold War many tyrants stayed in office with the blessing of the great powers, who followed the reasoning of Franklin Roosevelt about Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
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The Soviet Union was sympathetic to any regime it saw as advancing the worldwide communist revolution, and the United States was sympathetic to any regime that kept itself out of the Soviet orbit. Other great powers such as France tried to stay on the good side of any regime that would supply them with oil and minerals. The autocrats were armed and financed by one superpower, insurrectionists who fought them were armed by the other, and both patrons were more interested in seeing their client win than in seeing the conflict come to an end. Figure 6–3 reveals a second expansion of civil wars around 1975, when Portugal dismantled its colonial empire and the American defeat in Vietnam emboldened insurrections elsewhere in the world. The number of civil wars peaked at fifty-one in 1991, which, not coincidentally, is the year the Soviet Union went out of existence, taking the Cold War–stoked proxy conflicts with it.
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The Soviet Union was sympathetic to any regime it saw as advancing the worldwide communist revolution, and the United States was sympathetic to any regime that kept itself out of the Soviet orbit. Other great powers such as France tried to stay on the good side of any regime that would supply them with oil and minerals. The autocrats were armed and financed by one superpower, insurrectionists who fought them were armed by the other, and both patrons were more interested in seeing their client win than in seeing the conflict come to an end. Figure 6–3 reveals a second expansion of civil wars around 1975, when Portugal dismantled its colonial empire and the American defeat in Vietnam emboldened insurrections elsewhere in the world. The number of civil wars peaked at fifty-one in 1991, which, not coincidentally, is the year the Soviet Union went out of existence, taking the Cold War–stoked proxy conflicts with it.
Only a fifth of the decline in conflicts, though, can be attributed to the disappearance of proxy wars.
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The end of communism removed another source of fuel to world conflict: it was the last of the antihumanist, struggle-glorifying creeds in Luard’s Age of Ideologies (we’ll look at a new one, Islamism, later in this chapter). Ideologies, whether religious or political, push wars out along the tail of the deadliness distribution because they inflame leaders into trying to outlast their adversaries in destructive wars of attrition, regardless of the human costs. The three deadliest postwar conflicts were fueled by Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese communist regimes that had a fanatical dedication to outlasting their opponents. Mao Zedong in particular was not embarrassed to say that the lives of his citizens meant nothing to him: “We have so many people. We can afford to lose a few. What difference does it make?”
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On one occasion he quantified “a few”—300 million people, or half the country’s population at the time. He also stated that he was willing to take an equivalent proportion of humanity with him in the cause: “If the worse came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.”
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The end of communism removed another source of fuel to world conflict: it was the last of the antihumanist, struggle-glorifying creeds in Luard’s Age of Ideologies (we’ll look at a new one, Islamism, later in this chapter). Ideologies, whether religious or political, push wars out along the tail of the deadliness distribution because they inflame leaders into trying to outlast their adversaries in destructive wars of attrition, regardless of the human costs. The three deadliest postwar conflicts were fueled by Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese communist regimes that had a fanatical dedication to outlasting their opponents. Mao Zedong in particular was not embarrassed to say that the lives of his citizens meant nothing to him: “We have so many people. We can afford to lose a few. What difference does it make?”
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On one occasion he quantified “a few”—300 million people, or half the country’s population at the time. He also stated that he was willing to take an equivalent proportion of humanity with him in the cause: “If the worse came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.”
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As for China’s erstwhile comrades in Vietnam, much has been written, often by the chastened decision-makers themselves, about the American miscalculations in that war. The most fateful was their underestimation of the ability of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to absorb casualties. As the war unfolded, American strategists like Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara were incredulous that a backward country like North Vietnam could resist the most powerful army on earth, and they were always confident that the next escalation would force it to capitulate. As John Mueller notes:
If battle death rate as a percentage of pre-war population is calculated for each of the hundreds of countries that have participated in international and colonial wars since 1816, it is apparent that Vietnam was an extreme case.... The Communist side accepted battle death rates that were about twice as high as those accepted by the fanatical, often suicidal, Japanese in World War II, for example. Furthermore, the few combatant countries that did experience loss rates as high as that of the Vietnamese Communists were mainly those such as the Germans and Soviets in World War II, who were fighting to the death for their national existence, not for expansion like the North Vietnamese. In Vietnam, it seems, the United States was up against an incredibly well-functioning organization—patient, firmly disciplined, tenaciously led, and largely free from corruption or enervating selfindulgence. Although the communists often experienced massive military setbacks and periods of stress and exhaustion, they were always able to refit themselves, rearm, and come back for more. It may well be that, as one American general put it, “they were in fact the best enemy we have faced in our history.”
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Ho Chi Minh was correct when he prophesied, “Kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end, it is you who will tire.” The American democracy was willing to sacrifice a tiny fraction of the lives that the North Vietnamese dictator was willing to forfeit (no one asked the proverbial ten men how they felt about this), and the United States eventually conceded the war of attrition despite having every other advantage. But by the 1980s, as China and Vietnam were changing from ideological to commercial states and easing their reigns of terror over their populations, they were less willing to inflict comparable losses in unnecessary wars.
A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed. After Georgia lost a five-day war with Russia in 2008 over control of the tiny territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili explained to a
New York Times
writer why he decided not to organize an insurgency against the occupation:
New York Times
writer why he decided not to organize an insurgency against the occupation:
We had a choice here. We could turn this country into Chechnya—we had enough people and equipment to do that—or we had to do nothing and stay a modern European country. Eventually we would have chased them away, but we would have had to go to the mountains and grow beards. That would have been a tremendous national philosophical and emotional burden.
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The explanation was melodramatic, even disingenuous—Russia had no intention of occupying Georgia—but it does capture one of the choices in the developing world that lies behind the New Peace: go to the mountains and grow beards, or do nothing and stay a modern country.
Other than the end of the Cold War and the decline of ideology, what led to the mild reduction in the number of civil wars during the past two decades, and the steep reduction in battle deaths of the last one? And why do conflicts persist in the developing world (thirty-six in 2008, all but one of them civil wars) when they have essentially disappeared in the developed world?
A good place to start is the Kantian triangle of democracy, open economies, and engagement with the international community. Russett and Oneal’s statistical analyses, described in the preceding chapter, embrace the entire world, but they include only disputes between states. How well does the triad of pacifying factors apply to civil wars within developing countries, where most of today’s conflicts take place? Each variable, it turns out, has an important twist.
One might think that if a lot of democracy is a good thing in inhibiting war, then a little democracy is still better than none. But with civil wars it doesn’t work that way. Earlier in the chapter (and in chapter 3, when we examined homicide across the world), we came across the concept of anocracy, a form of rule that is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic.
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Anocracies are also known among political scientists as semidemocracies, praetorian regimes, and (my favorite, overheard at a conference) crappy governments. These are administrations that don’t do anything well. Unlike autocratic police states, they don’t intimidate their populations into quiescence, but nor do they have the more-or-less fair systems of law enforcement of a decent democracy. Instead they often respond to local crime with indiscriminate retaliation on entire communities. They retain the kleptocratic habits of the autocracies from which they evolved, doling out tax revenues and patronage jobs to their clansmen, who then extort bribes for police protection, favorable verdicts in court, or access to the endless permits needed to get anything done. A government job is the only ticket out of squalor, and having a clansman in power is the only ticket to a government job. When control of the government is periodically up for grabs in a “democratic election,” the stakes are as high as in any contest over precious and indivisible spoils. Clans, tribes, and ethnic groups try to intimidate each other away from the ballot box and then fight to overturn an outcome that doesn’t go their way. According to the
Global Report on Conflict, Governance, and State Fragility
, anocracies are “about six times more likely than democracies and two and one-half times as likely as autocracies to experience new outbreaks of societal wars” such as ethnic civil wars, revolutionary wars, and coups d’état.
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Anocracies are also known among political scientists as semidemocracies, praetorian regimes, and (my favorite, overheard at a conference) crappy governments. These are administrations that don’t do anything well. Unlike autocratic police states, they don’t intimidate their populations into quiescence, but nor do they have the more-or-less fair systems of law enforcement of a decent democracy. Instead they often respond to local crime with indiscriminate retaliation on entire communities. They retain the kleptocratic habits of the autocracies from which they evolved, doling out tax revenues and patronage jobs to their clansmen, who then extort bribes for police protection, favorable verdicts in court, or access to the endless permits needed to get anything done. A government job is the only ticket out of squalor, and having a clansman in power is the only ticket to a government job. When control of the government is periodically up for grabs in a “democratic election,” the stakes are as high as in any contest over precious and indivisible spoils. Clans, tribes, and ethnic groups try to intimidate each other away from the ballot box and then fight to overturn an outcome that doesn’t go their way. According to the
Global Report on Conflict, Governance, and State Fragility
, anocracies are “about six times more likely than democracies and two and one-half times as likely as autocracies to experience new outbreaks of societal wars” such as ethnic civil wars, revolutionary wars, and coups d’état.
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Figure 5–23 in the preceding chapter shows why the vulnerability of anocracies to violence has become a problem. As the number of autocracies in the world began to decline in the late 1980s, the number of anocracies began to increase. Currently they are distributed in a crescent from Central Africa through the Middle East and West and South Asia that largely coincides with the war zones in figure 6–5.
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The vulnerability to civil war of countries in which control of the government is a winner-take-all jackpot is multiplied when the government controls windfalls like oil, gold, diamonds, and strategic minerals. Far from being a blessing, these bonanzas create the so-called resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty and fool’s gold. Countries with an abundance of nonrenewable, easily monopolized resources have slower economic growth, crappier governments, and more violence. As the Venezuelan politician Juan Pérez Alfonzo put it, “Oil is the devil’s excrement.”
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A country can be accursed by these resources because they concentrate power and wealth in the hands of whoever monopolizes them, typically a governing elite but sometimes a regional warlord. The leader becomes obsessed with fending off rivals for his cash cow and has no incentive to foster the networks of commerce that enrich a society and knit it together in reciprocal obligations. Collier, together with the economist Dambisa Moyo and other policy analysts, has called attention to a related paradox. Foreign aid, so beloved of crusading celebrities, can be another poisoned chalice, because it can enrich and empower the leaders through whom it is funneled rather than building a sustainable economic infrastructure. Expensive contraband like coca, opium, and diamonds is a third curse, because it opens a niche for cutthroat politicians or warlords to secure the illegal enclaves and distribution channels.
44
A country can be accursed by these resources because they concentrate power and wealth in the hands of whoever monopolizes them, typically a governing elite but sometimes a regional warlord. The leader becomes obsessed with fending off rivals for his cash cow and has no incentive to foster the networks of commerce that enrich a society and knit it together in reciprocal obligations. Collier, together with the economist Dambisa Moyo and other policy analysts, has called attention to a related paradox. Foreign aid, so beloved of crusading celebrities, can be another poisoned chalice, because it can enrich and empower the leaders through whom it is funneled rather than building a sustainable economic infrastructure. Expensive contraband like coca, opium, and diamonds is a third curse, because it opens a niche for cutthroat politicians or warlords to secure the illegal enclaves and distribution channels.
Collier observes that “the countries at the bottom coexist with the 21st century, but their reality is the 14th century: civil war, plague, ignorance.”
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The analogy to that calamitous century, which stood on the verge of the Civilizing Process before the consolidation of effective governments, is apt. In
The Remnants of War
, Mueller notes that most armed conflict in the world today no longer consists of campaigns for territory by professional armies. It consists instead of plunder, intimidation, revenge, and rape by gangs of unemployable young men serving warlords or local politicians, much like the dregs rounded up by medieval barons for their private wars. As Mueller puts it:
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The analogy to that calamitous century, which stood on the verge of the Civilizing Process before the consolidation of effective governments, is apt. In
The Remnants of War
, Mueller notes that most armed conflict in the world today no longer consists of campaigns for territory by professional armies. It consists instead of plunder, intimidation, revenge, and rape by gangs of unemployable young men serving warlords or local politicians, much like the dregs rounded up by medieval barons for their private wars. As Mueller puts it:
Many of these wars have been labeled “new war,” “ethnic conflict,” or, most grandly, “clashes of civilizations.” But in fact, most, though not all, are more nearly opportunistic predation by packs, often remarkably small ones, of criminals, bandits, and thugs. They engage in armed conflict either as mercenaries hired by desperate governments or as independent or semi-independent warlord or brigand bands. The damage perpetrated by these entrepreneurs of violence, who commonly apply ethnic, nationalist, civilizational, or religious rhetoric, can be extensive, particularly to the citizens who are their chief prey, but it is scarcely differentiable from crime.
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Mueller cites eyewitness reports that confirm that the infamous civil wars and genocides of the 1990s were largely perpetrated by gangs of drugged or drunken hooligans, including those in Bosnia, Colombia, Croatia, East Timor, Kosovo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and other countries in the African-Asian conflict crescent. Mueller describes some of the “soldiers” in the 1989–96 Liberian Civil War:
Combatants routinely styled themselves after heroes in violent American action movies like
Rambo, Terminator,
and
Jungle Killer
, and many went under such fanciful noms de guerre as Colonel Action, Captain Mission Impossible, General Murder, Young Colonel Killer, General Jungle King, Colonel Evil Killer, General War Boss III, General Jesus, Major Trouble, General Butt Naked, and, of course, General Rambo. Particularly in the early years, rebels decked themselves out in bizarre, even lunatic attire: women’s dresses, wigs, and pantyhose; decorations composed of human bones; painted fingernails; even (perhaps in only one case) headgear made of a flowery toilet seat.
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