WELCOME TO WILSON'S WORLD :

Violence, Terror, and Politics as Usual : America's "new war" reflects an epochal change in the nature of collective violence. (Charles Tilly, Boston Review)

Since World War II, then, we have witnessed increased deployment of violence not by officially constituted national armed forces but by paramilitary forces, guerrilleros, death squads, secret police, and other irregulars, and increased direction of state-sponsored and state-seeking violence against civilians, especially whole categories of the population stigmatized for their religious, ethnic, and/or political identities. These trends greatly exceed population growth and the multiplication of independent states; they constitute an enormous increase per capita and per state. Paradoxically, a world war characterized by immense armies, elaborate technologies, centralized planning, and weapons of mass destruction generated a shift away from the efficiently segregated military activity that Clausewitz analyzed and advocated as the essence of rational modern warfare. The result is a series of decisive, frightening steps away from painfully-achieved distinctions between armies and civilian populations, war and peace, international and civil war, lethal and non-lethal applications of force.

Why?

From the seventeenth century to World War II, violence generally moved in two directions across the world: toward increasing deadliness of international war, but also toward increasing security and peacefulness of domestic life, including declines in both large-scale and small-scale killing. Both trends resulted from states' increasing monopolization and perfection of coercive means. To be sure, Western powers continued their forceful conquest of non-Western areas through most of the period, and usually put down resistance to their rule ruthlessly. Yes, in times of war the distinction between international and domestic killing is often blurred, and if we include the effects of state actions on famine and disease the reversal will look earlier and less dramatic. Yet even with these qualifications, the period since World War II stands out for the prevalence of civil war, genocide, and politicide. How and why did these dramatic changes occur? Some of the causes are fairly clear:

More targets. With international backing, decolonization and separatist movements roughly doubled the number of formally independent countries, and therefore the number of governments over which dissidents and opportunists could try to seize control.

Weaker states. Absent support from colonial armies, many post-colonial regimes lacked the means of controlling their territories effectively.

External support. Throughout the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States often subsidized domestic opponents of those regimes that aligned against them.

More weapons. Both Western countries and members of the Soviet bloc greatly increased their shipments-legal and illegal-of arms to the rest of the world.

Financial support. The enormous expansion of international trade in cocaine, heroin, sexual services, illegal migrants, dirty money, rubber, oil, diamonds, and other minerals provided sources of support for rebels, intervening forces from adjacent countries, and merchants who profited from weak and corrupt governments; note that markets for the contraband in rich countries, notably the United States, sustained much of this trade.

Emigrant support. In an era of improved communications and relatively inexpensive travel, increasing numbers of emigrants maintained contact with their home countries, and either supported opposition movements, provided outlets for contraband, or both.

In short, a larger number of weak states faced increasingly well-financed and well-armed opponents.

One of the central tenets of conservatism is that ideas have consequences. So a conservative must notice the complete absence of ideas in Mr. Tilly's list of the causes of increased collective violence since WWII. The main idea that is missing, it would seem, is that of self-determination as the basis for political sovereignty. This idea, unleashed upon an ill-prepared world by Woodrow Wilson after WWI, when carried to its logical extreme, as it has been with great frequency, provides the basis for the demand that political entities be no larger than necessary to contain a homogeneous group of people, while essentially entitling every heterogeneous group within a given state to demand their own brand-spanking new state. Playing, as it does, into ancient and visceral prejudices, it can be little surprise that this idea has proven so powerful and has become the driving force behind most conflicts in the world.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 6, 2002 8:30 AM