The states
113
damage’ of aerial bombardment. It was the beginning of the process that in the
wars fought after the First World War has seen the ratio of civilians’ casualties vs.
the fighters’ more and more reversed in comparison to previous wars, thus
de facto
voiding the distinction of combatant and non-combatant, the pillar of
ius in bello.
The step further was the massive re-entering of
ideology into politics and war, in a
dimension and depth unattained in the religious wars of early modernity. The Span-
ish Civil War of 1936–1939 was the prologue to the following world war clashes
between Fascism, Nazism, Communism and democratic doctrine, which made the
war bloody and cruel well beyond any former example. The
Shoah (destruction)
of the Jews, or Holocaust, went
far beyond any military logic, and is a watershed
moment in the history of civilisation rather than an event in war history – along
with the extermination of Slavs, Roma and Sinti, gays and Jehovah’s Witnesses in
Hitler’s death camps. The
Shoah cannot just as easily be regarded as political con-
flict, because it includes dynamics of paranoid identification or invention of the
‘enemy’ and industrial destruction of human beings deprived of all human dignity
that escapes the usual categories of politics. On the other hand the prevention of
similar events by all possible cultural and administrative tools has become after 1945
an elementary task of all politics.
The Second World War ended in August 1945 with the atomic bombings on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a step that opened a new era in human history and to
which politics has not yet provided an adequate response. The Third World War
indeed did not come about and was replaced by the Cold War, but in any case we
know that at stake is now not victory, but the survival of humankind. In a nuclear
war, which is always an implied potentiality in the deterrence regime, the
instru-
ment of war turns against its owner, since starting a nuclear war or participating
in it is suicidal beyond being omnicidal; the weapon is no longer a means for a
political goal and becomes the element dominating the outcome of the game well
beyond the intentions of the players. Although never fully experienced,
8
already the
perspective of nuclear war put an end to Clausewitzian war as the war in which
deadly violence remains under the control of political actors and their finality. We
will come back to nuclear war and deterrence in Chapter 7.
The transformation of war has gone further after the invention of nuclear weap-
ons. Beyond interstate war fought with conventional weapons, which after the
Falklands War of 1982 has become a rarity, and nuclear war, which has never been
fought (otherwise we would not be here writing or reading about it), the actually
fought wars fall into the category ‘wars of the third kind’,
9
which comprise ethnic,
tribal, religious, secession, civil, and drug wars presently fought by actors that can
be states, parties, movements, sects, terrorist groups and criminal gangs. A war of this
kind can hardly be neatly attributed to just one of these types and is rather likely
to result from a mix of them and to be ‘asymmetric’ in the tactics chosen (laser-
guided bombs from supersonic fighter-bombers
on the one hand, suicide terrorists
with explosive belts on the other). In either case, asymmetric conventional warfare
of the third kind has made big advances in destructiveness even if remaining under
the nuclear threshold.
114 World politics and the future of politics
This is all tantamount to the collapse of the picture of international order as
found in international relations classics from Hobbes to Waltz. It is not easy, for
example, to readapt the latter’s authoritative framing, some sixty years ago, of the
phenomenon of war in three ‘images’ to the later evolution – authoritative because
it shaped the language of international theory for decades and is still worth being
learned (Waltz 1959). In the first image the roots of war are seen in human behav-
iour, as it results from ‘selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulses, from stu-
pidity’ (Waltz 1959, 16), or in other words, from human nature as seen through
optimistic or pessimistic lenses. In the second image or level of analysis it is the
internal regime of states to determine their bellicose or peaceful attitude. The third
image places the
cause of war in
international anarchy, in the terms seen above. This
is regarded as a permissive cause of war: the international system makes it possible.
Image One and Two, in whatever version or combination, provide the efficient
causes, which make the possibility of war an actuality based on a given occasion.
Neither image taken by itself can explain any war.
Having enriched our view on international affairs and war, let us now briefly
recapitulate by linking this chapter to the general categories of politics as defined
in the previous chapters. Politics here too can be seen as the re-allocation of mate-
rial and relational resources by means of power, as we saw in its first definition in
Chapter 1; and
power in the international arena does not appear to coincide with sheer
economic or military force, because a mighty actor still needs political skills (alli-
ances, inclusive management of one’s own points of strength, soft power) in order
to not misuse and disperse its elements of superiority. Even in the conduct of a
war – history teaches – diplomatic ability remains a
fundamental asset along armies,
fleets and healthy budgets.
What lacks – at least
prima facie – in the anarchical society is another basic ele-
ment of our definition of politics and power:
legitimacy. Power among nations is
primarily
de facto power, building on the pillars mentioned above; it does not need
to correspond to models of good governance that peoples and their elites may have
in mind. Neither does – except in the EU – a region-wide or worldwide covenant
exist, similar to a domestic constitution, under whose rules the legitimacy of old or
new powers can be discussed and evaluated. The only universally accepted category,
national sovereignty, goes in the opposite direction of justifying only (formal, legal)
equality among nations. This is however no longer the whole truth: to begin with,
a formal mechanism of legitimation of international behaviour has been introduced
in 1945 with the UN Charter, which we will come back to in the following sec-
tion. Second, a weak form of legitimacy pops up when peoples (or their majorities)
which are not high on the ladder of international politics approve – perhaps willy-
nilly rather than enthusiastically – of a regime of relative peace, prosperity
and stabil-
ity guaranteed by an overwhelming leader or imperial country or bloc. In their best
days, Rome with the
Pax Romana, the USA with the
Pax Americana of the decades
following the Second World War and the European Community or (since 1993)
Union with the peace and prosperity it contributed to on the continent until 2008,
are examples of what the (weak or second-grade and half-hidden) legitimacy of
The states
115
power in international politics means. It must be noted that we are now speaking of
the effective legitimacy of international power in history and presently. A fairly dif-
ferent question regards the criteria of legitimacy for a hoped-for transformation or
regeneration of government/governance in the international realm; we will briefly
touch upon this area of questions in Chapter 9 under the heading of ‘global justice’.
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