The Worth of War (29 page)

The Athenians subjected their officials to the
euthyna
because, without a public audit of their actions in office, how would anyone know whether they deserved praise or censure. Surely officials could not be trusted to judge their own performance and give an accurate account of their activities. This seems quite reasonable, but the government
of the United States, while practicing secrecy and concealment, exhorts its citizens to show trust.

SURVEILLANCE, SECRECY AND POPULAR GOVERNMENT

Popular government requires transparency on the part of the government and privacy for the citizenry. Citizens can hardly exercise influence over a government whose actions are hidden from them. And, as the authors of the Fourth Amendment knew, citizens are inhibited from criticizing or working against officials who monitor their political activities. Unfortunately, the government of the United States has reversed this democratic formula of governance in favor of secrecy for itself and transparency for its citizens. How appropriate that the government currently views as the worst of all possible traitors an individual whose actions had the effect of exposing this new formula of governance in action. By revealing the government's secret program of surveillance, Edward Snowden's leaks to the media illustrated the manner in which secrecy and surveillance, two of the chief antitheses of popular government, are closely intertwined in the current American state. In so doing, Snowden has also shown the extent to which America has turned its wars inward, eroding political freedom. It is difficulty to miss the irony of Snowden's subsequent flight to freedom—to Russia.

War is terrible, but it has also been a major engine of human progress. War has contributed to technology, economic development, more humane governance, and, perhaps most important, has helped humans learn to think rationally. As I observed at the outset, societies dominated by irrational modes of thought have seldom survived the rather harsh audit of war. The Lakota “Ghost Shirt” of the 1880s turned out not to stop bullets. Similarly, Nazi “Aryan Science” of the 1930s was shown to be rather inferior to what might be called the applied
Judenphysik
of the Manhattan Project.

The modern-day equivalent of the ghost shirt is the idea that war can somehow be organized or legislated out of existence—that philosophy and rhetoric can stop bullets and that enlightened individuals will study war no more. As I have argued elsewhere, these contemporary ghost dancers adhere to two main schools of thought, the Hobbesian and the Kantian. For Hobbes, the solution to the problem of war was the creation of a powerful sovereign authority that would put an end to strife and violent conflict.
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For Kant, the solution was an increase in the number of republican governments, a type of regime that, in his view, was extremely reluctant to engage in acts of armed aggression.
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Modern-day neo-Hobbesians like political scientist Joshua Goldstein favor the construction and empowerment of supranational organizations.
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Modern-day neo-Kantians like Bruce Russett count upon the spread of liberal democracy to bring about a “democratic peace.”
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Each of these solutions is questionable. Let us first consider the Hobbesian case.

Hobbes famously wrote that in the state of nature, the life of man was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” and constantly afflicted
by insecurity and violence. The solution was submission to a government with absolute power. Hobbes wrote, “The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners and the injuries of one another…is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will.”
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In the Hobbesian Commonwealth, war and violence were to be eliminated by the complete subordination of the wills of members of the populace to the will of the sovereign. The possibility of strife was then foreclosed by the sovereign's absolute authority.
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This sovereign must, indeed, be absolute according to Hobbes, since any limitations upon its power would open the way to disputes which might, in turn, lead to violence. Thus, the Hobbesian solution to the problem of violence was, in effect, acceptance of tyranny. For Hobbes, tyranny was to be preferred to anarchy and violence. “Sovereign power is not so hurtful as the want of it,” he averred.
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The Hobbesian solution to the problem of war and violence is problematic in at least two ways. To begin with, it is not clear that tyranny is to be preferred to violence and disorder. The prevalence of popular revolution in the contemporary world might suggest that large numbers of individuals prefer violence to tyranny. In recent years, thousands of Libyans, Syrians. Tunisians, Egyptians, and so forth seemed to choose the former over the latter, even in the face of tanks and machine guns. In a similar vein, the former German Democratic Republic (DDR) was a very orderly place but during its four decades as a nation, hundreds of thousands of its citizens risked their lives leaving the DDR for the disorder and uncertainty of life in the West.

Second, the Hobbesian solution to the problem of violence would seem to require a great deal of violence for its implementation. Hobbes indicates that men might “agree amongst themselves to submit” to the sovereign. If not, however, they must be compelled to submit “by natural force” or “by war.” And, once a Hobbesian Commonwealth is established, considerable violence is likely to be required to maintain its power. The DDR kept the peace by a program of surveillance,
intimidation, and punishment that enrolled nearly a quarter of the populace in the regime's various security forces or as informers. Behind an orderly facade was a very violent place.

Perhaps there are cases where a Hobbesian “agreement” might be reached peacefully, but these would seem most likely to be instances in which states or other entities already have few or relatively manageable antagonisms toward one another and see submission to a single authority as a means of advancing their mutual interests. The thirteen American states in 1789 or the economically advanced Western European states today are examples. The imposition of some sort of sovereign authority over mutually antagonistic states and political forces would seem likely to require considerable violence and a continuing regime of coercion. In other words, it would entail an imperial project that seems more a recipe than a cure for violence.

Now, as to the neo-Kantians, there is some support for the idea that democracies are less likely than other sorts of states to go to war, especially with one another. The statistical evidence, however, is far from conclusive.
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Moreover, the world's premier liberal democracy, the United States of America, is among the most bellicose nations on the face of the earth. Since the Civil War, American forces have been deployed abroad on hundreds of occasions for major conflicts as well as minor skirmishes. And, of course, America's military arsenal and defense budget dwarfs those of the other nations of the world. Ironically, America has justified many of its wars, including the 2002 Iraq War, by the claim that its goal was to transform its adversary into a peaceful liberal democracy. This might cause some concern that Kant's democratic peace might require a good deal of bloodshed to compel unwilling states to become liberal democracies.

There is, of course, a diffuse but hopeful school of thought that views war and violence as moral problems that can be addressed through proper moral education and example. No doubt, moral education can be effective and, certainly, if all could be persuaded of the desirability of converting their swords into plowshares, peace would prevail. However, even those who would like to reject violence should
be wary of others not as enlightened as themselves. The Moriori of the Chatham Islands remained true to their pacifist principles when attacked by the Taranaki Maori. The result, though, was that most of the Moriori were enslaved or killed, even eaten, by the Maori invaders.

We might also remember that most groups and nations that avow strong commitments to peace are somewhat less principled than the unfortunate Moriori. Indeed, several forms of pacifism are less peaceful than might meet the eye. Though professing a commitment to peace, some practitioners of nonviolent protest count upon the violence of their opponents to bring intervention by even more powerful, and potentially more violent forces. Hence, nonviolence might be seen as a tactic of fomenting, rather than engaging in, violence. Also quite common is what might be called “contingent pacifism.” Often, political actors denounce the use of force by some groups or nations while casting a tolerant eye at the use of violence by others. Politically progressive elements typically denounce military actions by the United States while accepting the need for third-world regimes to resort to violence. Politically conservative groups generally take the opposite view. Finally worth noting is what might be called liberal pacifism. Tolerant, politically liberal individuals shrink from using violence under almost any circumstance. Most, however, accept the protection of the government and its military and police forces, paying taxes to support the systemic violence that preserves their often-comfortable lives. And, in the international realm, by opposing war and violence they are effectively condemning many peoples to live under tyranny.

For those who find these considerations insufficiently depressing, let me conclude with one more dispiriting thought. War reveals truths—and one of these is an unpleasant truth about America. When the United States is not fighting others, it often turns on itself. As I observed above, the late historical sociologist Charles Tilly—one of the world's most perceptive analysts of the growth and evolution of government—famously characterized the state as an entity built for the purpose of warfare. He said, “war makes states and states make war,” and went on to characterize the warlike state as a “protection racket,”
offering its citizens protection from foreign foes in exchange for their taxes and service.
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There is a good deal of truth to Tilly's quip and his characterization. Everywhere we look, ruling groups working to guard or expand their territorial domains seek to build governments with sufficient administrative, extractive, and coercive capabilities to ward off internal and external rivals. Today's states are the survivors of millennia of culling in which their weaker rivals were defeated or absorbed. Many of these states added to their power by persuading most if not all of their ordinary subjects that they were citizens with some stake in the state's welfare and, moreover, that only the state could protect them from the hostile foreigners across the border.

While derived from the European experience, this account seems, in some ways, especially relevant to the United States. Americans are divided, not united, by race, religion, and ethnicity; their history as a nation is brief; and their dominant political ideology questions the need for government. Tens of millions of Americans, even today, believe in individual self-help and the minimalist state. How does a state establish itself in such an unpromising setting? How does it sink its taproots into such a barren soil? Part of the answer is that it emphasizes protection. It becomes, as historian Geoffrey Perret observed, “a country made by war.”
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That is, America is a country whose citizens are connected to one another and to their government less by the blood in their veins than the blood they have shed—their own and that of others. Americans have, at various times, responded to pleas to remember the Alamo, the day of infamy, the events of 9/11, and other days when the nation came under attack and looked to the protection of the state.

So far, so good. But, what happens if a state is, like the United States, so adept at its chosen task of war making that it periodically defeats, however temporarily, its various rivals? What happens to a state built around war making if there is no war to fight? How does such a state convince its citizens that they still need its protection? The danger, at least hypothetically, is that such a state may turn its power inward, using what might be called excess administrative capacity for domestic
purposes and using now-superfluous coercive capacity against its own citizens. Lacking external enemies, moreover, such a state may seek internal threats to persuade its citizens that they still need its protection. As we saw, both these phenomena are apparent in American history and contemporary American politics. The US government's electronic surveillance programs were products of multiple wars and were honed to perfection during the war on terror. Interestingly, most of the external expressions of this particular war have ground to a halt. American combat forces have been withdrawn from Iraq. Most American forces have been withdrawn from Afghanistan. America's program of targeted killings employing drone strikes has been stepped back. Consistent, however, with the historic pattern, government agencies seem loathe to surrender wartime powers and, possessing now-superfluous capabilities, they seem inclined to turn them inward in search of new foes.

PROTECTION

Tilly, as noted above, characterized the state as a large-scale “protection racket,” extracting resources and services from the citizenry in exchange for the promise of protection from foreign threats. In actual times of war, states are often able to build a considerable amount of heartfelt popular support and solidarity among their citizens. The idea of shared danger and shared sacrifice in wartime can build a sense of national community and purpose. During World War II, as journalist Tom Brokaw shows in his well-known book
The Greatest Generation
, most Americans came to believe that they had a common goal and purpose toward which they needed to work as a nation.
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Americans willingly undertook their assigned military duties, and those too old to fight volunteered to serve in such organizations as the Civil Air Patrol and the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Women volunteered to work for the Red Cross, the USO, and other agencies aimed at bolstering soldiers' morale. Millions of Americans participated in scrap collection and recycling. Similarly, In Britain, according to historian
Robert Mackay, most citizens “became actively committed to the project their leaders put before them, who cooperated with the drastic reordering of daily life this entailed and who, on the whole, did so in a spirit of stoical endurance that did not exclude good humour.”
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For better or worse, foreign threats are usually plentiful but, here too, the absence of overt external dangers generally does not lead states to declare that their citizens no longer need protection. Instead, states may identify internal enemies to substitute for the temporarily absent foreign foes. In the 1950s, the United States made war on domestic “subversives.” Today, the government conducts wars on crime, on drugs, and on corporate malefactors, as well as the domestication of the war on terror. As law professor Jonathan Simon has forcefully argued, these wars have redefined Americans as victims or potential victims, a terminology made explicit in the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act.
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This terminology is very significant.