I do not know if it is authors or the reviewer, but it seems like either or both really don't understand this topic well.
The Kellogg-Briand Pacts outlawed offensive war. They didn't outlaw war. The Pacts came about because Briand wanted an alliance with America and the US was opposed to alliances. Kellogg offered this instead.
The Pacts were highly opposed by the US Senate,
who thought it would interfere with American actions in the Americas under the Monroe Doctrine. Kellogg then assigned Undersecretary Clark to write a memo.
The Clark Memorandum detailed every use of force by America since the founding and framed them almost all as defensive. The Memorandum made it clear that the US could still go to war, as long as it alleged it was defending something. The Senate then supported the Pacts.
And that has been the story ever since. We moved from Just Cause to defense. Russia justified its invasion of Ukraine as a defensive measure to protect Russian speaking people in the Donbas.
I appreciate you sharing this (any source/article to read would also be appreciated). Across the comments I am seeing a lot of discrepancy towards the throughline and framing of much the book/review. I hope Scott or someone puts together a comprehensive addendum/clarifiations to this review. I can't pretend to have the historical and military background necessary for the task.
Thanks. I can't recommend a good source because I didn't find any good ones when I wrote a paper on the Clark Memorandum and the Kellogg-Briand Pacts during my PhD program, so I just went mostly to the primary sources. I never published my paper and may not even have a copy.
US Foreign Relations is an odd field. So much of it is wrapped up in domestic politics and propaganda that it can be quite the quagmire. Too many just want to celebrate America is good or condemn America as evil, when neither is fully true or false.
The historian Bret Devereaux argues that when most wealth was agricultural, a successful war paid for itself. As countries advanced to industrial and post-industrial economies, the destruction inherent in war meant that it no longer was profitable even for the victors. The norms against war followed this change.
Thank you for posting the link, it was fascinating!
He correctly points out that "the winning move is not to play" in WWI (which is basically what the US did), but that's very different from "WWI was a mistake". The problem with war is that if an enemy wants to have a war with you, you can't say "no thanks!"
It looks like Victoria II doesn't run long enough to simulate this, but the reason that Britain was willing to go to the mat for France, and France was willing to go to the mat for Russia, was that if you let Germany win a one-sided Great Power War without you, that sets up Germany (and its allies) to win a subsequent Great Power War against just you (offer needn't apply to the US, thanks to the Atlantic).
The sketch that out in a bit more detail:
Say Britain chose to remain completely out of WWI, so it's Germany+Austria against France+Russia.
The opening phase of the war goes badly for the French, with a pitched battle starting around Paris in September of 1914. Italy joins the war on the Germany's side, conquering Nice before being bogged down well short of Marseilles. The Ottoman Empire also joins the war on Germany's side (as in our timeline, but later since there would be no casus belli with Britain).
France falls in 1915. Germany annexes Belgium and the iron fields of northern France, as well as most of France's overseas possessions (except for a few seized by Japan, which joined the war on Germany's side since Britain stayed out of it). Italy annexes all of Provence including Marseilles. Victorious German forces wheel on Russia, defeating the Tsar's forces in mid 1916 (instead of early 1918). Germany gets terms similar to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of our timeline [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk#/media/File:Map_Treaty_Brest-Litovsk.jpg], annexing eastern Poland & Lithuania, making Finland, Ukraine, and Latvia/Estonia independent client states, giving the Ottomans and Austria sufficient territory to justify their involvement in the war, and letting Japan annex the entire Pacific coastline of Russia.
The war ends in 1917 with allied Austrian-Italian-Ottoman-German forces sweeping into Serbian from all sides, extinguishing that state. Austria annexes the lion's share of it, other territorial concessions are made to the Ottomans.
In 1918, Europe is again at peace. Germany leads a "League of Five Emperors" [German, Austrian, Ottoman, Japan, Italian] (the King of Italy was crowned "Emperor of the Italians and Provence" after the war by the pope) as the world's foremost power and resumes its shipbuilding programme with the massive war indemnity paid to it by France and Russia. Austria, Italy, and the Ottomans are busy reforming and modernizing their militaries to correct defects discovered during the course of the war. Japan's navy begins conducting quarterly joint fleet exercises with the German Pacific High Seas Fleet in the waters of the South China Sea near the border between Japanese and German Indochina.
With France felled and German, Italian, Austrian and Japanese administrators fanning out across new colonies across the globe, the League of Five Emperors starting drawing up plans to carve up Britain's overseas empire, plans which would be ready in the early 1920s. Britain, scrambling, tries to knit together an "Alliance of the Remaining" by reaching out to Qing China, Spain, and America...
I can see why Britain would be afraid of that, and it certainly is a big reason they went to the mat for France. In the actual event such a “super Germany” would have quickly split apart at the seams.
It depends on which territories the "Super Germany" annexed and how they did it. Germany's hold on majority-Polish but substantially-German-minority regions of modern-day-western-Poland was quite solid pre-WWI, so there would almost certainly have been scope for them to consolidate rule over more Polish territory (especially since Germany would have been a better imperial ruler than Russia).
This alternate timeline would have had a short victorious war for the imperial powers, which would have made nationalist rebellions less common and less potent. Also, if Russia avoided a Soviet takeover (likely, on this timeline), another source of anti-Imperial instability would have been weakened.
The pre-war German political elite found the Polish minority intensely problematic because the German Empire was a legislative democracy with universal male suffrage (unlike the UK). This meant Polish nationalist parties in the Reichstag which made working Reichstag majorities difficult, which meant governing the Empire was getting more and more difficult. Getting rid of that problem means getting rid of existing German democracy, which means doing away with the existing power sharing arrangement that kept social peace in the Empire and the Emperor on his throne. Remember that the Kaiser isn't Hitler, he doesn't lead a mass movement and can't do away with Parliaments with the backing of a mass movement. The Empire can somewhat curtail democracy in wartime on the grounds of emergency, but in peace time this problem re-emerges.
This was also why the Imperial government had to present their war as defensive against Russian Autocratic aggression. Their state doesn't function without some degree of consent and cooperation with liberal minded voters and the vast and powerful German labour movement.
Your scenario also widely inflates the degree that even a victorious Germany was a serious life and death threat to the British Empire. Even in victory, the Germany Empire is going to have permanent threats on land from whatever states are in power in France and the core of Russia and far more focused on them than the British, and the British have ample means to compete with even an victorious Germany in the naval sphere. Pre-war belief that the Germans were seriously trying to match Britain as a naval power was more about securing budget increases than a clear eyed look at respective capabilities. German naval builds were about deterrence, not matching the Royal Navy.
So the actual existing German political elite is profoundly unenthusiastic about annexations and pushing borders. Bigger borders, more minorities in the Reichstags, less functional empire. They end up thinking in terms that aren't that far from how modern America operates, militarily dependant and economically integrated minor allied states. The principle divide in German elite thinking is the military wants puppet states,while the diplomats and the Reichstag liberal majority is thinking in terms of setting up new friendly allied nation states in the East.
There are important differences between the German Empire and the Nazi State. Their elites don't have the same political or institutional means of
Do you maybe have a link explaining the influence of Polish minorities on Coalition-building and the difficulty of governing? Checking Wikipedia, it seems the Polish candidates had a very small share in the Reichstag (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstagswahl_1912 and clicking from there to earlier years).
I'm cribbing from a few books on the subject. With regards to the seat numbers, that's small in relation to the entire Reichstag, but in pre-war German politics it was dead seats that wouldn't be in anyone's governing coalition (like Sein Fein in the modern UK). It was manageable as 5% of the Reichstag, but keep adding minorities so that 5% becomes 20% that don't vote for the mainline German parties and the problem gets bigger and bigger. Eventually you might need to bring all the mainline German political parties into a grand coaltion to make governing workable and that would be very difficult.
That scenario presupposes that Austro-Hunagary was stable enough to survive as a coherent entity through Germany's victorious war and thereafter. I have doubts about that. You also expect Italy not to try any back-stabbing with its erstwhile allies and to be pleased with the crumbs off the table Germany would allow it. I don't see Germany and the Ottoman Empire settling down to be best buddies, were I the Ottomans I'd expect a victorious and ambitious Germany (the Kaiser still looking to make up for being second- and third-best in the Scramble for Africa) to turn on *us* next, seeking to take advantage of internal dissensions and war-weakness.
Your proposed "League of Five Emperors" I propose would dissolve into an attempt by Germany to create a League of One Emperor, with the Kaiser a renovated Holy Roman Emperor, and I expect all parties involved to know this and to start tearing at each other like vultures even if they are the victors of a continental war.
Winning quickly papers over a multitude of sins. I can't think of a single empire in history that ripped itself apart less than a generation after a significant military imperial expansion. That would suggest that winning WWI quickly would have bought Austro-Hungary ~20 years to get its shit together. For a view on what that would have looked like, see Matt Ylegias's Slow Boring piece on Austro-Hungary.
TL;DR Austro-Hungarian federalism looks a lot like the EU if you squint, so an alternate timeline where it had a bit more time and space to get itself together is possible. My scenario makes it even easier for them, since they get bonus legitimacy points from winning a major war and Serbian nationalism is crushed for a generation.
>Italy, back-stabbing, crumbs
All of Provence + Marseilles are hardly crumbs, and that's leaving aside that the French colonial empire was so large that there was enough overseas cake that it could be shared liberally. Plus, Italy in our timeline made a grab for Albania, that could have been part of the package. Albania only got its independence from the Ottomans in 1912, so if the Ottomans are being compensated with territories on the Black Sea, they might have been willing to let a troublesome territory go to Italy.
Geographically, Italy's natural allies are Austria & Germany (hence why Italy was in the Triple Alliance in the first place). They can't really fight eachother directly because the Alps are in the way (although Italy tried in WWI for some reason and was the only army that lost to the Austrians), and they all have undersize overseas colonial empires and so benefits from the status quo being shaken up. Italy has all sorts of places in Africa and on the Mediterranean it would like to expand into, and so if Germany is backstopping Austria's security in Trieste, the alliance would likely persist.
As for the Ottomans and the Germans, it depends. The Ottomans were willing to join Germany's side in WWI thanks to pre-war diplomatic efforts by Germany, as well as their natural enemy (and by far greatest threat to Istanbul) being Russia. Post-war Russia would be weakened but still strong enough to threaten the Ottomans, which prevents them from free-lancing.
Essentially, the overall pattern is that Germany would have weakened France and Russia enough that they wouldn't be threats to Germany post-war, but would still be strong enough to keep Germany's weaker allies (Italy, Austria, the Ottomans) largely onside.
Perfidious Albion might be able to peel off the Ottomans or the Italians to join an anti-German alliance with substantial effort, but doing so would mean giving up on allying with France and/or Russia since those powers would be unlikely to co-operate with a power holding large chunks of their territory.
Post-war, Germany is by far the strongest continental power, but Britain still has the largest overseas empire. If the victorious powers successfully divvied up the French colonial possessions among themselves, the prospect of doing the same thing to Britain's overseas possessions could well be a more enticing prospect than trying to defeat the strongest land army in the world on terrain favorable to it. Europe has historical precedent for having one power be the strongest power by far on the continent for generations (Hapsburg Spain in the late 1500s & early 1600s, to some degree Bourbon France in the 1700s). During that time, other powers default towards alliances of containment, but were very willing to team up with the reigning superpower if it gave them some advantage in a more pressing problem.
Also, think about the timeline. Austria, Italy, and the Ottomans all discovered during the war that their armies are dysfunctional and in dire need of top-to-bottom reforms. That's a process that takes 10-20 years, meaning in that time period they would be trying to avoid major conflict with Germany. If Germany was smart (not a guarantee with Wilhelm II) its allies would have (together) gained more out of the war than Germany did, so they would be willing to sign onto a mid-1920s conquest of the British empire as a way to expand their power since they still wouldn't be ready to fight Germany in Europe.
I agree with you that the League of Five Emperors would be a very unstable power grouping, but the gap between Germany and the other European powers would have been large enough the grouping could easily have persisted long enough to destroy the British Empire.
Winning might have papered over some cracks, but I think the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in much the same position as the Russian Empire; concessions were made too late and too few. Hungary was already champing at the bit to break away.
Were I Kaiser Bill with my victorious German Empire at the head of a coalition of weak losers dangling at my coat-tails, I might well feel like expanding into a Greater Germania and absorbing Austria. They are already in a bad way, the heir to the throne being assassinated was the casus belli and his morganatic marriage means that none of his family can succeed, instead it's his cousin Charles I who ends up Emperor of a state that is really coming apart into a handful of fragments. Franz Ferdinand was the military guy, Charles is much more pacific (he has been beatified as Blessed Karl of Austria by the Church):
Given how quickly the Hapsburgs were dethroned in our world, I see no reason why the alternate-world Hapsburgs would be in any stronger a position, and an ambitious Kaiser whose vanity has been flattered by a successful war might push for this being the perfect time to 'unite' the crowns; the Austro-Hungarian army, as you point out, is in bad shape, there are internal dissensions just barely covered over by the necessity of war-time unity, and the new Emperor is a princeling never destined to rule who only came to the throne by a series of coincindences and with little training. Absorb Austria into 'Greater Germany', and either pacify or re-conquer Hungary, which might be more amenable to being ruled by a good Protestant Emperor than a Catholic one ("[Charles] made two attempts to reclaim the Hungarian throne in 1921; but failed due to the opposition of Hungary's Calvinist regent Admiral Miklós Horthy.")
Italy is Italy and will bring about its own downfall due to natural squabbling and forming then overthrowing governments. They had already been secretly plotting against Austro-Hungary even in the days of the Triple Alliance precisely *because* they were not a completely unified nation, and wanted to get back territory in order to form, finally, a truly complete Kingdom of Italy. That's two out of your league of five (and Japan, here, doesn't count at all as their interests do not compete with those of Germany at the moment) ready to squabble, and Italy can be convinced to turn a blind eye if Germany 'absorbs' Austria, in the hopes of picking up those territories.
So if I'm Germany, I'm looking at:
(1) Japan - don't need to worry about this in the short term, whatever about the long run
(2) Austria - ready to fall into my grasp
(3) Italy - too weak and disunited to do anything, and will let me handle Austria in the hopes of scavenging on the margins
(4) The Sick Man Of Europe
Again, from the Ottoman side, they should be very worried about what is going to happen.
And this is without factoring in that England, France, Spain, etc. are going to be trying to capitalise on any weaknesses within the League; nobody wants a strong, centralised Germany but if they're engaged in fighting with their former allies, that suits the rest of Europe. Russia is probably in enough of a mess, as it was in our history, that the Revolution has happened and that empire has crumbled. Again, that will be enough to draw Germany's greedy attention to chewing up more of Europe/Central Asia than messing around with overseas territories in Africa, etc.
The USA is most likely staying well out of the entire European mess, if it's not looking to expand its own territorial conquests in South America, Cuba, the Phillipines, etc. because of the collapse of the European empires. Britain may be able to do something about an alliance with the appeal to the "Anglo-Saxon race" common heritage thing, but this is no guarantee the US will support Britain if it comes to a shooting war with Germany.
I'm not so confident for Germany, either. Look at Britain - after the First World War, it thought it was still the major world power, but already the cracks had started to show. The empire was beginning to fragment, even if they didn't know it - Ireland had gone, India was going, other countries were developing their own sense of nationalism and wanting to throw off colonial governments. The new power was the USA, even if Britain was slow to acknowledge it, and not one of its continental rivals. A triumphant Germany might find that things worked out for them, as for Britain, in this alternate time line: a gradual loss of Empire, increasing national sentiment in the territories under its rule, increasing upheaval and rebellion.
"Given how quickly the Hapsburgs were dethroned in our world, I see no reason why the alternate-world Hapsburgs would be in any stronger a position"
The Hapsburgs fell in 1918 after losing an extended and bloody war that also caused an economic collapse and famine (and the influenza outbreak didn't help). If the war had mostly wrapped up by 1916 and entirely wrapped up by 1917 (and been much less bloody overall), they would have been in a massively stronger position militarily, economically, prestigiously [sic], and legitimately [semi-sic].
Germany having defeated France (for the second time in 50 years) and Russia would know that it was still flanked by (weakened) enemies and not want to risk its southern flank by attacking Austria-Hungary. Kaiser Wilhelm II was stupid, but he wasn't THAT stupid. Or rather, his generals wouldn't have let him throw away Germany's last geographically-neighbouring alliance. Being handcuffed to a dying man is a drag, but it's less of a drag than having to fight a three front war when fighting a two front war already made you sweat.
IF Italy was in a position to offer Germany substantial military aid in partitioning Austria-Hungary, there's definitely a possibility that Germany, Hungary, and Italy would arrange to carve up the Austrians, but with the Italian army's poor showing I don't see the Germans being willing to risk that, especially since WWI was 2 years instead of 3 months and the Germans would want their troops home and back to the factories.
"Again, from the Ottoman side, they should be very worried about what is going to happen."
Worried what is going to happen, exactly? They'd come out of the war with their Balkan flank semi-secured (Serbia and Albania extinguished, Greece and Bulgaria put on notice assuming both sat out the war) and territorial gains in the Caucasus and Black Sea. Germany knows that it wants oil and doesn't have any, and the Caucasian oilfields were fought over in our timeline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Caucasus_expedition). If the Germans were realistic, they'd know that they couldn't hold Georgia / Azerbaijan on their own and having it in the hands of the Ottomans would be preferable to the Russians. Admittedly, the counter-argument to this is that in 1918 in our timeline the Germans were trying to secure an independent Azerbaijan as a client state.
"And this is without factoring in that England, France, Spain, etc. are going to be trying to capitalise on any weaknesses within the League; nobody wants a strong, centralised Germany but if they're engaged in fighting with their former allies, that suits the rest of Europe."
Oh, the British would love it if the Germans fought the Austrians and/or the Ottomans, I agree. Given that the Germans know that too, wouldn't they rather focus on breaking the power of the 2nd strongest European power (Britain) rather than fighting with their own allies? This would be another reason for the Germans to stay allied with the Italians and Austrians and Ottomans and Japanese-- dreadnaughts are extremely expensive, so building up a force capable of defeating the Royal Navy in the 1920s would have been much easier with allies, and the British overseas empires is enough of a prize to be worth trying for.
"Again, that will be enough to draw Germany's greedy attention to chewing up more of Europe/Central Asia than messing around with overseas territories in Africa, etc."
The Germans didn't have a route to Central Asia without securing Iran and/or India and/or the Causasus, and their prospects for European expansion would have been hemmed in by their ally to the south (Austria) and the client states that they themselves built in the treaty of Bresk-Livotsk. Incorporating Ukraine / Lativa / Estonia / Finland into a German-led mutual defense pact against Russia would have been the logical move on that frontier.
"The USA is most likely staying well out of the entire European mess, if it's not looking to expand its own territorial conquests in South America, Cuba, the Phillipines, etc. because of the collapse of the European empires. Britain may be able to do something about an alliance with the appeal to the "Anglo-Saxon race" common heritage thing, but this is no guarantee the US will support Britain if it comes to a shooting war with Germany."
Agreed, which is why Britain is in trouble. America's original alignment with Britain against Germany was trade-motivated in WWI. If Britain had stayed out of WWI, America would have kept trading with Germany and America's substantial German-speaking minority would have deepened those trade ties and had more time to climb the ladders of civic prestige in America. Frankfurters would still be frankfurters.
"I'm not so confident for Germany, either. Look at Britain - after the First World War, it thought it was still the major world power, but already the cracks had started to show. The empire was beginning to fragment, even if they didn't know it - Ireland had gone, India was going, other countries were developing their own sense of nationalism and wanting to throw off colonial governments."
Britain's European GDP probably had fallen behind Germany's by 1913 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)). If Germany annexed Belgium & a chunk of northern France & the rest of Poland & Lithuania, Germany in 1917 would have had a population of over 90 million (up from pre-war 67 million ... 7 million Belgians, perhaps 3 million French, 2 million Lithuanians, at least 11 million Poles). How strong Germany would have been would have come down to how well it could incorporate and integrate its new territories.
"The new power was the USA, even if Britain was slow to acknowledge it, and not one of its continental rivals."
America's population in 1920 was 106 million. Expanded Germany would have had a slightly smaller population (~90 million) and a lower GDP per capita (maybe 70% of the American level? Depends on how poor Russian Poland was), but still been substantially bigger and richer than counterfactual Britain, and with room for catch-up growth.
Also, most of the core scientists on the Manhattan project were Hungarian Jews. In the counterfactual timeline where they stayed in Austro-Hungary, the world's first bomb could easily have been a joint German-Austro-Hungarian project.
" A triumphant Germany might find that things worked out for them, as for Britain, in this alternate time line: a gradual loss of Empire, increasing national sentiment in the territories under its rule, increasing upheaval and rebellion."
It really depends on the degree of nationalist sentiment in the alternate timeline where Communism is weaker (because the Russian Revolution either fails or succeeds much later, only taking over a much weaker Russia) AND all the pre-WWI empires are still standing. Our timeline saw WWI as the graveyard of empires. This timeline would instead have seen WWI as the triumph of empires and the graveyard of French & Serbian democracy. That would have weakened anti-imperial pro-democratic pro-communist anti-colonial sentiment on the margin. The question is, was the fall of colonialism and the rise of European nationalism was overdetermined? Or would it have been possible to "skip forward" to a less nationalistic European structure (like today) but with the load-bearing pillars being multi-ethnic German and Austro-Hungarian empires?
The Kaiser and his people considered the actual existing Austro-Hungarian Empire to be far preferable to its dissolution for a multitude of reasons.
First it was a dependant ally with most of the capabilities of a modern great power.
Second, it maintained an Central Europe that was generally under the thumb of two culturally German governments, without any of the hassle in Berlin of stage managing various ethnic groups directly.
Third, a failing Hapsburg monarchy inevitably leads to union with the German speaking bits. That means the enlarged German Empire has to rejigger the power-sharing and political balance in the Empire with uncertain outcomes. The existing political situation was somewhat precarious but manageable for the Imperial monarchy and court, upending the applecart leads to more bad outcomes for them than good ones.
Also, an attempted reconquest of the Hungarians is right out. Large, politically organized ethnic minorities are very difficult for Berlin to manage in their system of government. The Hungarians are too be accommodated in some system, not ruled over at gun point because that creates more problems for them than it solves. This is very important, the German Empire isn't looking to paint the map Prussian blue, because that makes staying on the throne hard. Even when being grandiose, they think in terms of indirect rule.
>The problem with war is that if an enemy wants to have a war with you, you can't say "no thanks!"
You very much can give up the political objective of the attacker, even if it opens a whole new can of worms. France could have given up on retaking Alsace-Lorraine. Britain could have given up on maritime supremacy. Russia could have abandonned it's balkans objectives. Germany could have given up on dismantling it's neighbour powers & securing Ukraine. The Ottoman Empire could have given up the Balkans, the Russian Caucasus & Egypt. And so on, and so on.
You *can* give up the political objective of the attacker, but in many cases it would be a terrible idea to do so. Giving up the initial political objective of the attacker puts you on a worse footing for a subsequent conflict (all other things being equal) and so is only worth doing if the attacker's ultimate ambitions are limited.
Giving up the political objective of the attacker would not have saved any ancient kingdom from being conquered by the Romans, nor would it have saved Poland/France/Russia from armed conflict with Nazi Germany. Since the ultimate aims of an attacker are not knowable in advance, making concessions is generally a mistake. Britain fighting WWI without naval supremacy would have been a disaster that would have starved a few million British people to death.
If a government wants to avoid fighting ever, they have to be OK with ultimately dissolving their government and being ruled as a colony by someone else, since that's the risk they are running by refusing to ever fight and by being willing to make major concessions to avoid fighting.
That's the can of worm I was alluding to, but you're really overstating it's importance.
In fact, 1815-1914 was full of examples of countries conceding their opponent's goal, negociated or not, rather than go into open conflict. In some cases it led to some degree of loss of sovreignty (such as the Ottoman Empire or Qing China giving concessions to western powers), but not nearly enough to be considered "ruled as a colony", or enough to dissolve their government all by itself.
The example of Serbia is striking: if it was ready to concede every point except "Austrian involvement in the investigation", would Austrian involvement in a criminal investigation have turned Serbia into a puppet state? Would it have made a future war less winnable (which already wasn't, if I recall correctly, Serbia got entirely occupied before the central powers collapsed)
Giving up trivial things to avoid conflict is good & negotiating to avoid conflict where possible is good, but this doesn't change the central fact that if you want to be an independent nation you have to be ready and willing to defend yourself violently. Reality is complex and so there are errors in both directions (conflicts that could have been avoided, concessions that were disastrous and should have been conflicts).
Serbia probably should allowed "Austrian involvement in the investigation"
by contrast
Britain giving up maritime supremacy (an alternative suggestion you made earlier) would have compromised Britain's military abilities in a way that could have threatened Britain's future independence
The Ottomans kept giving things up until they gave up the Aegean coast of Anatolia and Istanbul, at which point they were deposed and Ataturk fought back to reclaim those just-lost territories (successfully). Do you object to the Turks fighting the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922?
The Qing Chinese kept giving things up until they fell, and then the new government kept giving things up until Japan declared war on them to seize territory. The 1933-1945 conflict killed over ten million Chinese people, mostly through starvation or disease. Japan was running a Lebensraum policy to claim land in China through ethnic cleansing. Were the nationalist Chinese mistaken to fight the Japanese and not surrender peacefully?
> Even more confusing to our modern expectations, before the Peace Pact there was no such thing as helping your friends while staying neutral.
Not sure if this is an issue added in the review, or if it's from the book itself; but this is *very* straightforwardly untrue. The passage quoted states that:
> Any unequal support provided by the United States to France would have been a casus belli, an act of belligerency warranting a military response.
This is *not* a statement that unequal support automatically used to imply immediate war; it is instead a claim that the grounds for what constituted a casus belli used to be lower. Countries could and did offer support to allies without fully entering a war; the reason the US did not do so in this case was not (only) a legalistic prohibition, it was that Britain would be likely to declare war in response, and the US was not in a position to bear that risk. See in particular Hamilton's analysis of the situation in Pacificus 3: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-15-02-0055
You can easily find historical examples of neutral parties providing unequal support; the closely-related example would be the support France supplied to the US in the Revolutionary War before it formally entered the war. This didn't lead to a war, not only because of legal reasons, but because Britain didn't want to expand the war- it didn't make military sense. That's the same reason Russia hasn't declared war on the US today. In cases where expanding the war may make military sense, that is still sometimes done- e.g. the US in Laos. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was (arguably?) the result of US sanctions.
***
> 5. Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact.
This both seems like the most important point, and don't seem to be justified at all?
On the related question of why territorial conquest declined, the other possibility besides norm changes is that territorial conquest has become either more difficult (it's plausible that insurgencies or guerilla warfare have become more common or more effective), or less useful (because the land itself is increasingly not what is valuable.)
I'm not sure there's as much disagreement here as you're making out. I'm sure the reviewer didn't mean to claim that any help provided by a neutral party auto-triggered their entry as a full belligerent- just that, as you say, it provided casus. It seems to me pretty obvious that the conspired-against party could choose not to declare war on the neutral third party; how could it possibly be otherwise? It just, unlike now, gave their war legitimacy if they chose to.
"One school of thought is that Putin will consider himself entitled to keep any gains won on the battlefield, or at least any that it would make sense to keep. Whereas Ukraine most definitely can’t agree to that any time soon. It also is highly contrary to the kind of history that Putin used to justify his invasion. You very much do not get to keep whatever you happen to occupy when there is a formal peace settlement, that has never been how this works. For a guy who lectures us for hours about events from Europa Universalis this would be a very poor understanding of war score and formal borders."
I'm going to be attacked for saying this; but if the above is a valid point, then when does NATO give back Kosovo to Serbia? Or Turkey give back northern Cyprus to the Republic of Cyprus? If you argue there are valid reasons for not doing so, like Serbia treating Albanian Kosovars badly, then surely that also applies to ethnic Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians who have been treated worse by the puppet regime in Kiev over the past eight years. Then there's the Moroccan occupation of most of the Saharan Arab Republic and the Chinese occupation of Tibet; the governments-in-exile have not surrendered themselves to the occupiers.
And who believes that Ukraine gets Crimea back? (except case where Russia falls apart in general)
> You very much do not get to keep whatever you happen to occupy when there is a formal peace settlement, that has never been how this works.
Is it going to imply that success in war is completely unrelated to how territory assignment goes? Because that would be wrong.
Yes, there is no 1:1 match between military success and occupied area (ask Germany in WW1 or USA in Iraq/Afghanistan), but this seems claiming that military success does not influence winning territory.
Sometimes you get more than you occupy, sometimes less, sometimes nothing. As for wrong or right; the only right way is through self-determination of the resident population, which is rarely the case.
It was almost always less though in the relevant period (from the end of the Middle Ages to 1914). E.g. Germany won the Franco-Prussian War and had Paris surrounded at the end of hostilities and could have easily occupied much more, but it took considerably less territory than it occupied (and Bismarck wanted to take even less). I can't think of a scenario where the reverse was really true, unless it was either:
1. An invader defeated or stalemated but the war ends with some territory still occupied, which they can't reasonably hold and agree to pull out of (e.g. the American Revolution).
2. A series of land swaps -- winner gives up some occupied territory to get more territory elsewhere (e.g. the Seven Years War)
The truth is that in modern times you actually DO have scenarios where a war ends with the two sides keeping exactly what they occupied, which would seem to be the exact opposite of what the author is trying to say. That is how the Korean peninsula is divided, for example, as well as the various frozen conflicts of the former USSR.
I think this is true largely BECAUSE war for conquest is no longer acceptable, so there's just no way to make a treaty happen where both sides reach a compromise on adjusting their borders in the hope of achieving a lasting peace. Instead, the only thing they're able to agree on is that shooting is happening and they'd like it to stop.
For most of human history, it also would have been technologically impossible to have a frozen conflict with borders decided by battle lines, but I think it would have been technologically possible in the 19th century and yet didn't happen.
WWI would be an example of the winning side taking more territory than they occupied. It ended with the Germans still mostly on the French side of the pre-war border I believe.
That's true (though I was intentionally trying to exclude WW1 with my dates). This peculiar circumstance is a big part of what formed the stab-in-the-back myth. It's easy to see how soldiers could feel betrayed by the fact that they sat deep in French territory for 4 years of war, and then found the politicians had agreed to a treaty in which France and its allies got to occupy the Rhineland.
I guess whenever the citizens of Kosovo decide to return. They can choose so today, or tomorrow, on in a hundred years, or possibly never.
I am not aware of Kosovo becoming a part of territory of any NATO member. This makes this example quite unlike Crimea, where the goal is explicitly to make the territory a part of Russia.
EDIT:
Maybe let me put it this way: Which specific NATO country is supposed to return Kosovo, and what specifically would you like them to do?
Now compare that to situation in Crimea, where the answer would be simply: "Russia, send your soldiers home."
Except the inhabitants of Crimea chose to return to Russia, from which they were separated in 1954. If Russia sent its soldiers home and the Ukraine was not allowed to occupy the Crimea, than that region would still be part of Russia because that is what most Crimeans want. As for Kosovo, I never said that they were annexed by NATO, only occupied by NATO; there is a difference. My question is why is self-determination not universally acceptable? Even today the citizens of Quebec and Scotland are allowed to vote on their future, but not the residents of Catalonia or northern Belgium.
> Except the inhabitants of Crimea chose to return to Russia
No, this is not true, and it's the official position of pretty much every country that this is not the case.
First, it's undeniable that the military annexation of Crimea happened before any expression of choice by the inhabitants of Crimea. Thus the choice of inhabitants can't possibly be a valid excuse for the invasion unless time travel was involved.
Second, it's a long established principle that "referendums at gunpoint" after de facto military control has occurrend are not considered a valid option for establishing the actual will of the people, and the referendum was declared by UN as not legitimate.
That seems a rather legalistic response. I've never seen anyone provide a convincing claim that annexation by Russia was not in fact popular in Crimea (and plenty to the contrary).
I haven't seen anyone claim that preference in Crimea is stronger than 60-40 one way or the other. I've seen some people claim it's close to 60-40 one way, and some people claim it's close to 60-40 the other, but everyone acknowledges that it's unclear.
I understand that these days taking a pro-Russian position in any Western venue is a fool's job, which in no small part is Russian fault, but the whole notion of "people" deciding to secede is obviously unworkable. Because this requires either the willingness of the central authority to consent to a referendum, or a superpower to intervene on their behalf, both of which are extraordinary circumstances.
The biggest difference between Kosovo and Crimea is that the US is a far stronger/popular superpower than Russia.
Borders don’t *change* any more, except when Israel or Russia do it. For anyone else in the past few decades, you sometimes get *new* borders as a result of a war, but all existing borders remain borders.
Give some examples of borders that have changed in the past few decades, that don’t involve Russia or Israel, or a country separating from or merging with another but otherwise keeping their borders the same. That used to be common, but not in the post World War II era.
Isn't that a country merging with another but otherwise keeping their borders the same? I believe Morocco claims *all* of Western Sahara, and that sort of thing definitely does happen (though in recent decades, more often in reverse, where a new country separates from a single existing one).
The only border of Israel’s that’s changed in the past few decades is their unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
Before that, Israel traded the Sinai for peace with Egypt in 1978, effected in 1982, ending the war Egypt started with Israel in 1948. When all was said and done, the entire Egypt-Israel conflict resulted in no substantial change in territory between the two nations. Egypt had conquered Gaza in 1948, but lost it in 1967. Israel conquered not only Gaza that year, but also the Sinai, and gave it back a decade later, and promised to figure out the Gaza situation with the Palestinians. So far, this deal seems to have worked.
Similarly, The Jordanian-Israeli conflict ended with no significant gain or loss of territory for either nation.
But Israel’s 2005 experiment of just handing Gaza over to the Palestinians has been such an abject failure that it’s hard to imagine them trying to trade land for peace again for decades.
Moreover, Israel doesn’t have any territory they took that they feel they can afford to give back to a neighboring power. The closest comparison to the Sinai would be the Golan Heights, but there is no reason to believe that transferring it back to Syria wouldn’t once again result in Syrians mortaring Israeli farmers.
> I'm going to be attacked for saying this; but if the above is a valid point, then when does NATO give back Kosovo to Serbia?
Balkanization is legal. Many states have split up since this time; in fact, this pact is part of what has caused the number of countries to go up - previously weak states are no longer able to be gobbled up and are protected.
Kosovo isn't owned by anyone else, it's owned by itself.
Indeed, the history of the world since 1945 has been one of balkanization.
> Or Turkey give back northern Cyprus to the Republic of Cyprus?
Turkey pretty much is supposed to do this and it is one of the ways in which Turkey violates norms that it has not.
> If you argue there are valid reasons for not doing so, like Serbia treating Albanian Kosovars badly, then surely that also applies to ethnic Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians who have been treated worse by the puppet regime in Kiev over the past eight years.
I mean, this is just flat-out Russian propaganda.
1) The Russians were not victims of genocide in Ukraine and were certainly not treated worse than the Kosovars.
2) The Russian government sent people to fight in Ukraine, which is where the conflict came from.
3) The Ukrainian government is not a puppet, it is elected by the people of Ukraine.
> Then there's the Moroccan occupation of most of the Saharan Arab Republic and the Chinese occupation of Tibet; the governments-in-exile have not surrendered themselves to the occupiers.
The PRC will likely be partitioned if it falls. The same applies to Russia; there have been recent articles about how the outlying parts of Russia are unhappy because they are bearing the cost of the war in Ukraine.
I just don't get the argument against nuclear deterrence being the main factor in the "new world order". Quoting from the relevant section,
> After 1948, the chance an average state would suffer a conquest fell from once in a lifetime to once or twice a millennium. (Chapter 13)
I mean, that's about the time nuclear weapons become a thing. It's absurd.
The previous example in the text about Russia/Ukraine, if anything, highlights it. Both the NATO and Russian sides have been pretty vocal about how absolutely evil the other is, and how basically anything is justified to subdue the enemy (including crippling sanctions that disproportionately hurt the Russian civil population, but also how the Russian foreign intelligence constantly tries to undermine and meddle with Western democracies in what would have totally been a casus belli a century ago) (*). All while flexing the muscles of their nuclear capabilities in some or another way. Which doesn't look like an innocent unrelated behaviour to me. ("I just really love displaying my ICBMs!")
(*) edit: not that this draws any moral equivalence between them, or even less justifies the initial agression. Just that the (current) lack of escalation to direct conflict is a result of deterrence.
I think the statistics about conquest are supposed to cover the whole world. Only a very small fraction of countries possess nuclear weapons. No African countries do, for example, and the borders in that continent are famously badly drawn. And yet very little actual conquest between African nations has been successful in the last 70 years.
There's an incredible amount of violence and attempted territorial conquest between groups within "states", it's rarely at an international level because as you mentioned the borders are idiotic.
I guess that's right, but if anything that's evidence for the thesis of the book. There's lots of violence but little conquest at the state level because X. "Because the borders are silly" doesn't seem like a brilliant explanation - a priori I'd expect silly borders to cause more international conflict, not less. The book apparently suggests that X is "because everyone believes it's not OK to invade and take another state's territory now," which at least is an explanation that pushes in the right direction.
I see it as 'the borders are silly so most people don't fight on national lines'. Ethnic conflicts are orthogonal to de jure political ones and take priority for militant groups, and few countries can build up enough strength and internal unity to be able to conquer its neighbors.
For a contrasting example, see Western Sahara where Morocco has enough stability to conquer most of the western Sahara region, despite the UN spending ~40 years unsuccessfully asking them not to.
If the borders are idiotic, what borders would you propose that are better? Do you want to give each ethnicity its own country? If so, take a look at this ethnicity map, which highly oversimplifies the real ethnic diversity of the continent, and tell me where you want the borders to be: https://www.vox.com/2015/11/10/9698574/africa-diversity-map
I'd say let them fight it out and hopefully they end up with a ceasefire over borders that make some sort of sense. We can't necessarily give every ethnicity its own country, but we also can't just tell an ethnicity that wants its own country not to go out and get it. Africa didn't have firm internal borders prior to colonization, and in my opinion there's no reason to think that it would be ready to have firm internal borders immediately after colonization.
It's awfully patronizing and white man's burdeny to demand they stop being violent and respect our arbitrary borders, better to encourage them to be as violent as they want to be and promise to recognize whoever is left when the dust settles.
If wanting to prevent ethnic cleansing and genocide--which is what fighting it out will lead to--is a manifestation of white man's burden, then the white man's burden is the best thing to ever happen to Africa.
It's still happening, though... witness the current massive genocidal civil war in Ethiopia (with Eritrean involvement), the Congo wars in the 2000s, the fighting between (broadly) muslim Hausa/Fulani and christian/animist Ibo and Yoruba in Nigeria, the Anglophone/Francophone fighting in other parts of west africa, or the ethnic strife in South Africa, etc. etc. ad nauseam
This probably takes the cake in terms of moral disregard for the fellow human of anything I ever read in the comments in this blog.
Have you considered that they can, you know, redraw those borders by mutual agreement, peacefully, if they really wanted, as the sovereign nation states they are? I mean, they probably won't, because national identities encroach once you draw the borders. But they could. And I'm not sure what "encouraging violence" really helps with here.
Don't think the borders that decide that Alsace and Savoy are French, that Braga is Portuguese, that Trieste is Italian, that Belfast is in the UK, that Ticino is Swiss, ... are in any way more "ethnically correct" or less determined by arbitrary past political events. For that matter, even then European nation-states themselves are the semi-random result of the disaggregation of the Roman Empire and then reaggregation via feudal family ties.
Sure, I'm not saying it is the only factor. But (from the review) the books seems to basically dismiss nuclear deterrence with a sleigh of hand.
It is specially striking since those that do have nuclear weapons are precisely the ones with the most aggressive recent past, and obvious (and previously very successful) imperial ambitions. I'd honestly like to see what this change in the "chance an average state would suffer a conquest" before/after 1948 was if you restrict yourself only to e.g. African countries. There may be still a difference, but I doubt it would be meaningfully large. For two main reasons
- I'm not even sure how the European-exported idea of the modern sovereign nation-state would map to pre-WWII. Specially when you factor in colonization. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization#After_1945:
"In 1945, Africa had four independent countries – Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa."
The Americas started earlier getting their independence, but then again it doesn't look like there was as much conquest-based border movement *before* 1945 as there was in European territories. South American borders have been very stable since decolonization. If anything this points to something that is obviously neither nuclear deterrence, nor an ideology/pact developed mid-way through the twentieth century.
- Following on that, the book itself appears to acknowledge this kind of constant shift in territorial dominance by way of aggression as a mostly European phenomenon. To quote just one of the ways this is mentioned:
"A brief aside - these norms were often confusing and initially incomprehensible (and often patently unfair!) to peoples outside the European sphere of intellectual influence."
There is also the fact that the immediate aftermath of WWII was for a large part of the world to get aligned with either side of the nuclear powers. Either willingly. or via coup d'état courtesy of those very nuclear powers, in what is kind of the post-colonial acceptable way of controlling an apparent "sovereign" country.
Finally, this 1928 Peace Pact follows, after all, the creation in 1919 of the Societé de Nations. For all we can discuss about the ways it failed, it was set up directly as a consequence of the horrors of WWI with a clear internationalist goal. Ironically it was set up by the treaty of Versailles, the effect of which on mid-century German politics we all know very well. After *that*, another internationalist organ was set up, the UN. I don't want to diminish the importance of having a "place to talk" for our attempt at a peaceful world. But every time there's a major conflict, attention focuses on a specific organ of the UN, the Security Council. And, what again, is the defining characteristic of the permanent states imbued with veto power in said Security Council?
Yes. The people of the Americas have been much less fond of conquest. It's also worth noting that the areas which were conquered in the Americas in recent times were mostly pretty sparsely populated; the US took a lot of Mexico, for instance, but there were only ~80,000 people who lived in the Mexican Cession.
That's because all African country leaders in practice require recognition from at least one country which does possess nuclear weapons, or will quickly get replaced by someone else, in a bloody coup if necessary. Imperialism is alive and well, it's just a bit more obfuscated these days.
Yeah, as Jacob said below, I think it's a mistake to assume that the legalistic borders accurately reflect the reality of what's happening on the ground in Africa, with the exception that one of the fastest ways to dry up the western foreign aid that keeps a lot of elites in power and comfort is to meddle with the formal legal borders and political arrangements overmuch; far easier to handle things informally or through militias.
OK... I think you're arguing for what the book says, then.
In your verson of events, rich western countries that provide aid apparently believe, for whatever reason, that existing national borders shouldn't be moved. That's what the book argued: that these days, for some reason, we all seem to have agreed that conquest of nation states (or even taking their territory) is not OK. And African people on the ground have bought into that belief - or perhaps more accurately "been bought" into that belief - because of the flows of money. From my reading of the book review, that's pretty much exactly what this book argues.
Well the "borders" (aka, the lines on a map) don't change. Who actually is holding the guns in some village in a not-well-mapped area that happens to be on one side of where a "border" would be...that does tend to change. Significantly. And often rapidly. And oftentimes the formal "government" of a "nation" are just book entities; fronts put up so that the westerners can make sense of everything and feel good about things, while the same old blood grudge matches (and sometimes new exciting ones over money or resources or ideology!) play out in the background.
I think what I'm arguing is that yes, the west has succeded in imposing a thin veneer of western-style legibility on African politics, but that it's just a veneer, and one often cynically manipulated in order to elicit certain reactions from westerners with little or no correspondence to what's actually going on in reality.
To some extent this is the blind leading the blind, because I don't know anything about Africa, and I haven't even read the book. So feel free to take this with a pinch of salt. But I think the response would be: but that veneer is really important. That veneer is the difference between all-out war with big guns, and lower-level guerrilla fighting. And I suspect that the lower-level civil wars have been less destructive... but I don't really have any evidence of this. I wouldn't know how to go about looking at casualty numbers to even start approaching this question.
But most states in the world don't have nuclear weapons. Why are the borders in Africa pretty much the same as they were after the Berlin conference in 1884? Why haven't the borders of South America changed since the 19th century?
Russian interference in Western democracies is a causus belli today. Literally the only reason why Russia hasn't been regime changed is because the West made the mistake of allowing the USSR to get nuclear weapons.
When writing a book review I think it's advisable not to write a book, even a small one. A book review should be a review not a summary, not a lesson, not a screed, not a Cliff notes version, not a history lesson, except to the degree that it helps me understand the subject matter of what it is a person is reviewing. Reading this review made me not want to read the review or the book.
Your "a book review should be a review not something else" opinion is generally good, but I've always been glad when a capable writer breaks it, like Scott has done numerous times, or like some of the other book review contestants have done. It's the whole https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ thing. I do agree with you that if it isn't done well, I wouldn't want to read it.
Scott is allowed to break that rule because it's his blog, and he's not in a contest. If there's a bicycling contest and I bring a motorcycle, that obviously makes the contest unfair for everyone else.
The right way to think about it is to interpret what Scott does as setting the "vibe" for this blog, so that matching it is a natural response. If there's a supposed "bicycle" race but the organizer races on a motorcycle, everyone else should naturally feel free to bring motorcycles. Handicapping yourself with a bicycle and complaining when others don't is odd isn't it? (:
And that's exactly why the SSC article is one of my least favorite posts. There's a very good reason to enforce seemingly arbitrary categories, and that is to facilitate communication across large numbers of people. If one person writes a 80-page history lesson tangentially related to the book while another writes a 3 page critique, those are not the same type of artistic creation. If the former wins the contest while the latter would have won had he known a 80-page history lesson counted as a book review, that is not a fair contest.
That said, I think this review is fine. It quotes the book and summarizes its points, in addition to giving the reviewer's own opinion on some issues. On the other hand, the reviews on "Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy" and "The Future Of Fusion Energy" are NOT fine because they barely mention the book at all.
Focusing on your brief aside rather than your main point, here, but I think you missed something in that essay.
Scott isn't saying not to have abitrary category boundaries; he's saying *recognise* them as arbitrary and allow them to change if it better serves communicative purposes. He's *definitely* not saying to underspecify in a way that makes communication more difficult.
I think if you show up to a book review contest Scott is running on his blog and are surprised to learn that the sort of thing Scott regularly posts on his blog and calls a book review is a valid entry, you only have yourself to blame.
Scott's behavior here is important because it sets a precedent in a way that's clearly applicable to the local culture. I think if someone followed the example of how Scott writes his book reviews and was punished for doing so because that's "not how a book review should be" that would be *more* unfair than the situation you describe.
That said I agree that if writers depart from book-review-ness in a way that doesn't follow Scott's example it's fair to hold that against them.
I think there's a difference between "book reviews" in the Goodreads sense and "book reviews" in the Scott sense. SSC/ACX book reviews are always at least half summary of the book's purportedly most interesting points, they don't just try to build an argument about whether the book is worth reading or not.
Yep, and in the last year's contest most of the reviews likewise were in the Scott's mold, and there weren't much complaints. It's strange that people are now suddenly starting to protest.
I agree and stopped reading. I'm still hoping for a ranked list of how we voted on all the book reviews. Or maybe just the top 50%... there is no reason to identify the person who wrote the lowest rated review.
I actually liked this review but I had some questions. I thought that several aspects of WWI - trench warfare, mustard gas, the very high death toll - traumatized not only the troops but also the combatant nations to the point that war was seen as a new worse thing. And that thing should be prevented. I did not see anything about this at all in the review which makes me think it was not in the book. Which seems odd.
And then the new revulsion against war caused a massive cultural rift through Europe in all the arts, humanities, and philosophy.
I'm partial to ACOUP's theory that industrialization made war destructive enough to no longer be profitable even for the victors, and it just took culture a few generations (and disastrous wars) to adjust.
I think the economic argument gains most of its force from the horrors-of-war one. If e.g. Germany or the UK suddenly gained colonial control of some new territory somewhere, it would be a huge windfall for them, today or in the 1900s. I think it became socially acceptable (not universal) to say that war is awful in WWI, and that that attitude underlay the Peace Pact and the reduction in war. It’s interesting to learn that not gaining territory in conquest, and imposing sanctions, arose out of the aftermath of that - I’m slightly surprised that they arose out of a specific treaty rather than a general process of discussion.
The American Civil War was pretty brutal, though that may not have influenced European culture much, and it wasn't a war of conquest in the first place.
I’m not really across Civil War literature. Was there much of literature / pamphlets / newspapers / anything popular presenting war itself as a bad thing in that period?
I mean, the majority of the Southern population didn't want to rebel. It's just that the black people didn't get to vote, so the white people who were against the war were outvoted.
However, there's also a general rule that balkanization usually requires consent of both parties, and, well, the South was evil.
These places had slavery on a much larger scale for a longer period of time than the US, and yet I've never heard anyone call these places "evil" for it.
Colonial control was mainly an economic drain, not a boon. Controlling India was a boon to England, but most 19th century colonies were an expensive means to enrich individuals and create national prestige (and bargaining chips in international relations) not overall economic gains.
Sharp-eyed observers in the 1910s had already noticed this and pointed out that thus peace was in everyone's collective economic rational self-interest. Notably none of the diplomatic conflicts in the run up to WW1 with regards to markets or colonies produced a war, those always got a negotiated settlement. It was a battle over strategic position in Europe, political stability and national pride that created the general war.
Exactly. Germany, with its only minimal colonial history (not to mention losing of two world wars, being much wealthier than Spain and portgual is a truly bizarre state of affairs if one believes that colonialism made Europe wealthy.
There's a common belief on this that seems just straight out wrong. The second European country to industrialize was Belgium, which spent most of its existence as a conquered possession of some great prince or another, and only got in the colonial game after it got rich.
The wealth produces the colonies far more than the other way around.
> If e.g. Germany or the UK suddenly gained colonial control of some new territory somewhere, it would be a huge windfall for them, today or in the 1900s
No, it probably wouldn't. European colonialism was rarely profitable. Britain spent far more creating and maintaining its African colonies than it ever got out of them.
This had some of the most interesting ideas of the reviews so far, but it really struggled with organization. A solid editor would have done wonders for him.
I liked the analogy about chess and basketball, then I thought about it for a moment and realised I had no idea how it connected to the topic at hand. Basketball is war and chess is... the game of having moral legitimacy?
I think poker represents non-war methods of resolving conflict, and basketball represents war. Those who start wars after 1928 are losers; they have failed in the game they're supposed to be playing.
I thought this review was quite well-written. Most of my knowledge of WWI came from one history textbook and my English texts. This review lost points with me because the author presumably had a different textbook and didn’t treat my textbook’s perspective as important (it didn’t mention the horrors of WWI, and it relegated imperialism to an addendum!) That naturally made it hard to write, but each section made its claim and presented its arguments clearly, and the whole piece fitted together well.
For some reason, of all the reviewers so far, I assumed this one was female (only really noticed when you used male pronouns here). Interesting! In any case, this is a reminder that we really don't know.
The American and French republics were much bigger than the traditional city-state republic. Brougham wrote on Representative Democracy after the fact, but I think he's right that there's a real change in quality due to the change in quantity.
And the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth didn't count because?
The final partition of Poland was only a few years away, but it still existed in 1793. The partitions were strongly resisted by an uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, who had been the best military engineer in the American Revolution.
When people tell the story of the birth of democracy from the Enlightenment, they often erase the medieval democracies: the Italian city-states, the German free imperial cities & city leagues, Poland, Iceland, Novgorod, ... . I think this is a shame.
Pre-partition Poland wasn't really a republic of equal citizens. The French revolution got started when the Third Estate told the other two bite dust with their privileges, and declared themselves the National Assembly. I think sejm had only aristocrats.
Franz Ferdinand was not assassinated in a foreign country (like Diana in France), but in a province of his own.
It was normal for a country defeated in a war to loses territory and pay concessions, but multiple imperial dynasties during WW1 ceased to exist. The political instability following the decline of royalist legitimism meant that subsequent governments could rise up without any respect for the treaties in territory had previously been lost. And the losers of WW2 still lost territory (why is Kaliningrad part of Russia again?). In the comments of this blog I have mentioned how countries like Israel, India & Indonesia (all starting with "I" for some reason) are all counter-examples to the claim that countries didn't acquire territory by force after WW2.
War in Europe was not quite that normal prior to WW1. Rather the Congress of Vienna had managed to prevent similarly huge fights from breaking out again after the end of the Napoleonic wars. There is a reason WW1 was regarded as something of an aberration rather than the same-old-same-old at the time (even in the form of people perversely excited for a big war after all that peace). I'm not claiming here that war was unheard of or hard to imagine, but the outbreak of war was a breakdown in a system intended to preserve peace. The rise of nationalism as a basis for governmental legitimacy erodes the ability of a government to hang onto conquered territory even without any such pact (unless there's ethnic cleansing, as happened with the Volkdeutsch after WW2). Nationalism plays a role in David Friedman's paper A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations* and along with industrialism contributes to Steve Sailer's "dirty theory" of war being less profitable than it used to be**.
There is an alternate view of European history in "Vampire of the Continent" that perfidious Albion eternally tries to prevent unity in continental Europe and attacks the nearest rival, going from Spain to France to newly-united Germany. It's WW1 German propaganda, but Anglo-Americans like myself & many blog readers could benefit from the contrary perspective. Note that after the second war with united Germany (after which it was divided in two and military occupied) the big geopolitical conflict moved east again, this time with the USSR as the evil empire and the US (allied with the UK) as the dominant western power not actually located on the continent. We did not immediately go to war again with the USSR, fitting Peter Turchin's cycle of giant wars making the generation that experienced them reluctant for more. By the time of the next generation, the USSR also had nukes and open war between the two blocs would have been much more dangerous. If you've read Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" you'll now that the world got significantly more peaceful after the demise of the USSR (as it had after WW2), and it wasn't because Kellog-Briand 2.0 declared war extra-super-illegal.
Sergey Brin is not analogous to John Milton. He is not a popular author (at least in natural rather than computer language). And Milton was known for his political writings, like Areopagitica. If you'd read Unqualified Reservations you'd probably be citing Dante's defense of the HRE instead.
The USSR didn't take territory merely because Stalin was a bad guy. It was the USSR that drove out the Germans, not some French resistance fighters (who needed the US to invade). The US was the dominant power on the other side and located an ocean away without interest in grabbing European territory.
Grotius also thought that civilians should be distinguished from soldiers. The idea that a power should intervene to protect foreign civilians was the justification Hitler used regarding the Volkdeutsch and Putin is using now for ethnic Russians. The US uses it when we feel like it because we can. The authors of the Geneva Convention are his heirs, not his opposites.
I agree that Islamists like Qutb reject the Western order, but this is not an order that only goes back to the World Wars but instead further to the Peace of Westphalia.
>There is an alternate view of European history in "Vampire of the Continent" that perfidious Albion eternally tries to prevent unity in continental Europe and attacks the nearest rival, going from Spain to France to newly-united Germany. It's WW1 German propaganda, but Anglo-Americans like myself & many blog readers could benefit from the contrary perspective.
This narrative survives on the continent in some form to this very day, in that the uk entered the eu mostly to control and stop the integration project. (And it kind of succeded with the eastward expansion)
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world."
The Heartland is essentially Central Asia and Russia, the World-Island is Eurasia + the African continent, and ruling the World-Island allows you to rule the world by dint of already controlling more than 50% of the world's resources (land, population, industry, and the like). Mackinder included a helpful diagram illustrating the regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heartland.png
In the modern day, the CCP seems to be interested in trying out Mckinder's thesis with its Belt and Road initiative, presumably in internal tension with those who want to try out Mahan's thesis that controlling the sea is the best way to gain power and victory. A very old dilemma, really, land or sea: it was the dilemma facing Japan during its period of Imperial expansion (Northern Expansion Doctrine or Southern?), Germany in the lead up to WW1 (continue the Dreadnought Arms Race or fold to Britain and focus on the army?), France in the 1700s, Athens and Sparta in ancient Greek history...
Anyways, you may be interested in this discussion of Mckinder's thesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL8TLiOcF6c (Examining Mackinder's Heartland Thesis, by Strategy Stuff).
Isn't this a pretty mainstream view of British geopolitical strategy, just with a little extra negative affect? My understanding was that for most of the modern era Britain's primary goal has been maintaining a balance of power in continental Europe so no rival can consolidate enough power to threaten them.
Assassination conspiracies always seem to involve the zaniest methods. I have no idea whose idea it was to kill Diana by running her giant powerful S-Class Mercedes off the road using a tiny Fiat Uno, but I'm amazed that it worked so well.
It's been years since I dipped into any of the conspiracy theories, but one was that she was pregnant by Dodi Fayed, her companion in the car, and the Royal family did not want a non-white* half-sibling to the heir to the throne (Prince William) so they arranged this 'accident'. I don't know if it is a separate conspiracy or linked to it, that she could have survived her injuries (she was conscious at the scene) but they had her killed in hospital.
*This makes the whole Meghan Markle disruptions doubly ironic and of course it's the same allegations of racism. Had she been pregnant at the time, the big scandal would have been the pregnancy outside of marriage with another man, not whatever colour the baby might be. Part of her public image was "the wronged victim" and if she was having boyfriends and affairs after splitting up, she would have ceded that ground to Charles - pot and kettle, as it were.
I think the "war is less profitable" is not an idea that originates with Sailer. Historians usually cite Azar Gat: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40060125
I find myself utterly unconvinced by this review that Kellogg-Briand or any such ideas or pacts actually changed the reality of war. My belief going into the essay is that any change in the frequency or severity of warfare in the last hundred years is almost entirely due to the Cold War and the shrinking of the globe. After WWII, you can’t just invade your neighbor without it becoming a proxy war between the USA and the USSR. Win or lose, you’ll probably be less independent than before. And if you are aligned with one of the great superpowers, why start a war within your alliance? That, and not any pact of peace, seems like the obvious reason the oft-warring nations of Western Europe haven’t started any new conflicts lately. And of course, you don’t want to go to war with the other side because of the threat of nuclear MAD. So the only actors left with the effective freedom to wage war are the superpowers, who may do so as long as they don’t come to open war with each other. Now, this seems to me to be a model entirely in line with observation. Neither the US nor Russia has shown any hesitancy to wage war constantly over the last century. It’s not that anyone cares about peace, it’s that most nations are too weak to wage war.
The strongest point in the essay is that wars no longer are for conquest—borders don’t change as much. Here I’ll concede that the modern zeitgeist of the Peace Pact clade is to install a friendly government rather than outright absorb; but even this in many cases is largely because the territory is sufficiently distant geographically, ethnically, or culturally. Easier to rule the conquered with one of their own people who does as you say than with your own countryman, who is easier to hate. Perhaps even this new behavior is simply an evolutionary adaptation rather than an idealistic advancement.
And when Russians see war on Ukraine as unjust, I see that not as the spirit of the Peace Pact but as a victory for US propaganda and culture, disseminated through Hollywood and HTTP. When the US invades a country, no one says it’s unjust like that, because US propaganda doesn’t tel them so.
Perhaps I get too much of my political thought from the Machiavellian direction, but that’s how it all seems to me.
It does seem that nowadays, countries who fish in troubled waters by oppressing inconvenient ethnics, backing terrorism and bribing foreign politicians seem to have better luck than countries that openly go to war. Consider Ukraine's returns on bribing the Bidens, ethnic cleansing Russian ethnics in Ukraine, and a little shelling of the Donbas versus- Putin's Panzer slog.
Presumably they meant promotion of Ukrainian language at expense of Russian/Hungarian with some rules being dubious and crossing into oppressive.
But in flood of utterly bogus Russian claims it is hard to find something high-quality on this topic.
Though maybe they also meant war started by Russia, with deaths impacting primarily Russian speakers concentrated in East? Like for example in Mariupol.
Or reaction of many Ukrainians who given the war prefer to focus on anything not connected to Russia? There were several reports about people deciding to not teach children Russian/adults deciding to learn Ukrainian, or deciding to abandon Russian heritage and so on.
The decline of use of Russian language is in my opinion something that would happen even in a perfectly peaceful and friendly situation. Previously, Russian was mandatory to learn. Now it is not. A change from 100% to any other value, is by logical necessity a decline.
I meant a bunch of Ukrainian Russian ethnics forcefully encouraged to move to Crimea in 2014 when Ukraine ethnics stole the good jobs back. Is that crazy Russian propaganda?
Might it be also be that settler-conquest (as Germany tried with Ukraine and the US succeeded with tribal lands) makes little sense with minimal population growth? Wars over resources still make sense, but generally, with open global markets, purchasing resources costs less than winning them in war. Now that markets are fragmenting, we might see more resource wars.
"That, and not any pact of peace, seems like the obvious reason the oft-warring nations of Western Europe haven’t started any new conflicts lately"
There is also the European Union, which started off with the ideals of no more European wars and the brotherhood of all nations. Whatever your opinion of the idealism, the practical effect is to reduce the likelihood that France and Germany are going to go at it again and drag everyone else along.
"According to the French academic Dominique Reynié, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war.[1]
In the United States, even though pro-war demonstrators have been quoted as referring to anti-war protests as a "vocal minority",[4] Gallup Polls updated September 14, 2007 state, "Since the summer of 2005, opponents of the war have tended to outnumber supporters. A majority of Americans believe the war was a mistake."[5]"
The *domestic* protests against the Vietnam War nearly destabilized the United States, and were a key element in the counterculture revolution of the 1960s.
I'm afraid you've swallowed far too much propaganda.
The notion that the US is simply installing puppet regimes is not only false, but obviously, blatantly false. The US wants self-rule, not to lord over some sort of colonial empire; this is blatantly obvious from the behavior of the US, which will let leaders take power who do things like ask the US to pull out of their country - something the US complies with. The US pulled out of Iraq at the request of the democratically elected Iraqi government. The Shah of Iran embargoed the US.
The US has gone to war with who, exactly?
Let's look at the major military conflicts the US has been involved in since WWII:
Korean War - The North Koreans are blatantly cartoonishly evil and despotic.
Vietnam War - The North Vietnamese murdered over 200,000 civilians and installed the Khemer Rogue in Cambodia, who murdered millions.
Gulf War and Iraq War - Saddam Hussein was a brutal genocidal dictator who killed on the order of 200,000 civilians in Iraq and invaded Kuwait to seize control of it.
Afghan War - The Taliban hosted a group of terrorists who murdered 3,000 Americans, and the Taliban themselves are a repressive bunch of religious fanatics.
Compare this to Ukraine, which is a democracy who elected a comedian as their president.
This is false equivalence and whataboutism.
It's really completely different situations.
The US installed democracies in Japan, Germany, Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Yes, at some point people who say the US installs puppet rulers should mention a single case of an abject running dog of America who obeys us in everything.
I think you are overcorrecting: puppets states might not be part of the US playbook, but sabotaging democratically elected leaders and supporting coups definitely is, and the end result is a much more US-friendly leadership. Latin America in the Cold War is the clearest example of that - current consensus is that the supposed Soviet in was overblown and that covert US support was a major driving force in many coups.
The reality is that we know that, for instance, Allende was propped up by the Soviet Union and that the Chilean coup was not run by the CIA, but by Chileans.
We actually know, thanks to the end of the first Cold War and the declassification of a lot of materials and opening up of a lot of the Soviet archives, that a lot of the people in Latin America who were accused of being propped up by the Communists were, in fact, being propped up by the Communists.
Moreover, we also learned from the archives and declassified materials that the CIA was much less involved in many coups that they had supposedly been involved in, and not at all involved in a number of them. Mostly, the US took advantage of pre-existing reactionary counterattacks against communist block backed Marxists rather than generating them out of whole cloth themselves.
Of course, all of this is pretty obvious if you think about it; many of these nationalists very clearly had their own interests and agendas, not those of the US, and the "symbol" of these revolutions was the Soviet-made AK47.
On top of that, it is objectively the case that places where socialists took over are all very poor and terrible, whereas Chile, where the socialists were removed from power by an internal coup after Allende called for a "revolution" against his enemies after only narrowly avoiding being impeached, is the richest country in South America on a per-capita basis.
The only actual case of the US government overthrowing a democratic government in Latin America was in Guatemala in the 1950s, after the cartoonishly evil UFC convinced the US that the government there was secretly being run by the Soviets. It was a huge embarrassment at the time.
Was there really a time when countries could just keep whatever they conquered? Sure, but you'd have to go far further back than 1928.
The Peace Pact wasn't a one-off. It was just the third step in a trilogy of European peace agreements, and the first agreement was two centuries earlier.
Starting from the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, conquerors were expected to facilitate other great powers getting "compensation" elsewhere on the map. Not everybody played along, but most did, and the kings who didn't had to survive nasty coalitions against them.
After the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, "compensations" were no longer enough: conquests could only be kept if they fit a stable balance of European power. Germany occupied half of France in 1871, but gave back all except Alsace-Lorraine. Russia took the Ottoman Balkans up to the gates of Constantinople only to disgorge much of that right back again, to avoid war with the other great powers.
So the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 wasn't a unique event; the pacification of Europe by the later 1900s wasn't unprecedented. European leaders had been working to limit the profits of European war since at least two centuries earlier.
Of course the declining economic use of war was probably even more important, as democracy and industrialization advanced. And you could argue that even Utrecht's norm had its own precedent in Westphalia 1648. And to be fair, neither Utrecht nor Vienna declared their new norms with the bold language of 1928 - I'm pointing out the change in accepted practice, more than any official signed code of conduct.
But the Peace Pact was a climax event, not a unique event. While the Renaissance kings got pretty high-handed in taking whatever they could, you can see real limitations to war for conquest accruing no later than the 1700s.
It doesn't seem that way to me - the use of it as an example in the review felt kind of weak: for the argument that "countries used to just take whatever they wanted, and claim whatever land they happened to occupy at the end", the Mexican-American war actually feels more like a counter-example.
If "countries just conquer and keep whatever they want" was the norm, why all the cover story about debts? There was a clear effort (successful or not, left up to you) to frame America's actions not as "strong taking from the weak" but as an international case of foreclosure: "you aren't paying your debt so we're going to take property as compensation".
That seems to be strong evidence that there was already a strong norm against just rolling over your neighbors to take their stuff, not evidence of its absence.
Mexico isn't in Europe. Mexico wasn't important to the European balance of power. So Mexico didn't get any protection from the 1815 norm.
The 1815 norm only restricted (and even then didn't wholly outlaw) territorial gains in Europe. "Lesser" states like Mexico outside Europe were "fair game" to whichever great power got there first.
This culminates in the famous Scramble for Africa, where the European powers race to formally annex half the African continent in a single generation.
The "unwritten rules" don't get extended to limit conquest of non-European weak states until about 1900, and then only in a few key places.
China, in particular, shows the norm against conquest finally beginning to extend past Europe. By the 1901 end of the Boxer Rebellion, China was put under a host of annoying treaties, and lost key ports. But its heartland wasn't seized and carved up like Africa's. So China's leaders actually got much more respectful treatment than the Mexicans or Nigerians - although that was likely zero consolation to the outraged Chinese. And the Chinese were right to be outraged, since the "respect" wasn't for them but for preserving the international balance among the great powers - a group they were not included in.
For all the massive amount of territory involved in the Mexcian Cession, it only involved about 80,000 Mexicans.
Moreover, it wasn't in Europe, so it wasn't really something that Europe had any reason to particularly care about - or ability to contest, for that matter.
The Crimean War (1853-1856) is a perfect example of one country (Russia) trying to seize a lot of territory, despite international norms against it, and so everyone else teamed up to stop them.
Thanks for this comment. I for one feel dumb for not noticing my confusion when I read it as saying nations used to keep the land they conquered. I didn’t know those specific examples, but I knew someone beat Napoleon and I knew France remained French, so I should have suspected something more complicated was happening.
> Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 ... and twenty years later, in 1875, Japan conquered Korea
Minor issue, but this isn't true. Japan did not secure Korea until 1905 with the end of the Russo-Japanese War.
I believe the point being made in the book was that in 1875, Japan performed its own version of gunboat diplomacy against South Korea, which resulted in an unequal 1876 treaty that mirrored the ones Western powers like the United States had with Japan, establishing trade ports and extraterritoriality.
Reads like someone who knows nothing about the subject but decided to start learning about it with this book instead of any kind of proper history book or broad survey. Sounds like a bad book about a dumb subject.
> Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact.
which was supposed to be discussed then is flatly ignored.
This is completely missing one of main reasons! War, especially between great nuclear powers, simply is not really beneficial anymore. Nearly nothing is worth nuclear war and definitely not war of conquest.
Even Ukraine-Russia war started because Russia expected Ukraine to collapse quickly. With knowledge how it will go Putin would not start that mess (or at least do it drastically differently).
Claiming that some irrelevant pact caused massive changes in how humans act is silly. That pact was part of recognition that war has become beneficial to nearly noone.
Trying to dismiss nuclear weapons while ascribing any importance to a forgotten piece of paper is simply wrong.
To quote ACOUP:
> As Gat notes, the industrial revolution changed this, breaking the agricultural energy economy. Suddenly it was possible, with steam power and machines, to use other kinds of energy (initially, burning coal) to do work (more than just heating things) – for the first time, societies could radically increase the amount of energy they could dispose of without expanding. Consequently – as we’ve seen – returns to infrastructure and other capital development suddenly became much higher. At the same time, these new industrial technologies made warfare much more destructive precisely because the societies doing the warfare now had at their disposal far larger amounts of energy. Industrial processes not only made explosives possible, they also enabled such explosives to be produced in tremendous quantities, creating massive, hyper-destructive armies. Those armies were so destructive, they tended to destroy the sort of now-very-valuable mechanical infrastructure of these new industrial economies; they made the land they acquired less valuable by acquiring it. So even as what we might term ‘returns to capital’ were going wildly up, the costs of war were also increasing, which mean that ‘returns to warfare’ were going down for the first time in history.
(...)
> In pre-industrial societies, returns to capital investment were very low. They could – and did – build roads and infrastructure, irrigation systems and the like, but the production multiplier for such investments was fairly low. For antiquity, the Roman Empire probably represents close to the best that could be achieved with such capital investments and one estimate, by Richard Saller, puts the total gains per capita at perhaps 25% over three centuries (a very rough estimate, but focus on the implied scale here; the real number could be 15% or 30%, but it absolutely isn’t 1000% or 100% or even probably 50%).
> But returns to violent land acquisition were very, very high. In those same three centuries, the Romans probably increased the productive capacity of their empire by conquest 1,200% (note that’s a comma, not a dot!), going from an Italian empire of perhaps 5,000,000 to a Mediterranean empire in excess of 60,000,000 (and because productivity per capita was so relatively insensitive to infrastructure investments, we can on some level extrapolate production straight out of population here in a way that we couldn’t discussing the modern world). Consequently, the ‘returns to warfare’ – if you won – were much higher than returns to peace. The largest and most prosperous states tended to become the largest and most prosperous states through lots of warfare and they tended to stay that way through even more of it.
I probably should not even read the third review, seems to be an utter waste of time given contents of #7 and #8. No idea what went wrong with review selection, but something went horrifically wrong.
Maybe next time run some prediction market on "book review X will be widely considered as terrible/plagiarism?"?
Or select things differently? Both this and previous review are horrific waste of time. Something went badly here with review selection for public presentation.
Re: Selection process. I can see a few ways for this to go bad. Hopefully there was no stuffing of the ballot box. But I wonder if those of us awarding higher grades to most reviews skews the results. If I give out 6-10's and someone else is mostly 3-7's, then my reviews count more. Maybe less choice in rating? A two or three tier rating system? (Good, mediocre, and bad.)
To make ballot-stuffing more difficult, selection of the top 10 could be limited to paying subscribers (given 3 months to do it), and voting could be limited to accounts of a certain age.
As I recall, Wikipedia elects arbitrators somewhat along these lines despite anonymity.
It was a public vote so blame us, the electorate. I agree that I didn't like the previous review and this one was boring, but that's the whole point of this: clearly, enough people voted for this one to be included as a finalist that *they* thought it was good.
When/if we get the data on what was voted for and which books weren't included, then we'll have a better view. But you can't blame Scott for the choice of the readers.
I agree with the general scepticism about the book's thesis, and with the fact that the reviewer never does get around to discussing the role of deterrence. Possibly this reflects the book!
I do think that there has been a real cultural shift with real world implications for policy etc and that this shift is _not_ shared by the whole world, perhaps not even a majority.
What I thought this book needed to make a more credible argument was a discussion as to the changing modes of conquest. Most obviously economic and political conquest: if a country joins the EU then in a pretty substantive way, from the perspective of a Grotius, and even of anyone alive in 1900, they have been conquered. If America changes one's government and the new government trades with America, then perhaps one has not been conquered, but America, and perhaps even oneself (and other countries!) have certainly gained something of material benefit.
And this at, as Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate, at far lower cost than actual conquest. Which returns us again to the point about deterrence: modern weaponry also introduces a much greater deterrent potential for civilian populations.
> if a country joins the EU then in a pretty substantive way, from the perspective of a Grotius, and even of anyone alive in 1900, they have been conquered
Good point! They would be likely also quite confused by EU itself and its massive limitations compared to a standard empire.
One thing that a lot of people don't get about Putin is that he does not feel bound by these implicit rules, or by any formalistic rules at all.
I have heard well-read people say things like "a no-fly zone would mean that NATO airplanes shoot Russian ones, and that would mean that Russia declares was on NATO". I don't want to downplay the danger of escalation, but there is a wrong assumption here: that Putin has a legible set of formal rules "if NATO does X, then this gives him a formal reason to declare war". But he doesn't play by these rules. He will declare war on another country if it is favorable to him, and not do that otherwise. Not if any legalistic rule is satisfied.
He does know that the OTHER side thinks differently. That is why he keeps spamming the press with logical implications like "if XYZ then I will declare war on NATO/Poland/Lithuania/...". These statements make sense in the logic of NATO states, and he has enough experience to know that they help preventing the West from doing XYZ. But this is not the way he acts. If he thinks that it is in his favor to attack Estonia and that he will get away with it, he will do it. Otherwise not. It doesn't matter whether Estonia follows the logical rules that he sets out.
In fact, he has pretty carefully tested out for a decade which things are tolerated by other nations, and which are not. His action have become more ruthless (but carefully and always step-by-step) because he has not experienced severe pushback even when he crossed lines that were declared sacred. Like annexing crimea, using barely concealed propaganda and misinformation in other countries, or also when Assad used chemical weapons in Syria.
> NATO tries to force its adversaries to abide by rules that it does not hold to itself.
How about the rule "do not annex new territory"?
(Though I suppose Putin would say that the scenario "Finland decides to join NATO" is equivalent to a hypothetical scenario "Russia invades Finland, kills everyone who resists, then makes Finland a part of Russian territory". If NATO is allowed to expand, so is Russia.)
Look, the "no-fly zone" discourse happened really recently, I still remember it very well, and the people trying to dismantle that misleading buzzword didn't argue that it "...would mean that Russia declares war on NATO", they argued (to vastly simplify what was often pretty detailed explanations of what this kind of operation would involve) that it "...would mean that they start shooting back, duh".
But even if anyone at any point did actually use the literal phrase "declare war", even a minimally wider context still causes it to make no sense to interpret that as genuinely caring about formal rules. Genuinely caring about formal rules should cause one to breathe a sigh of relief and start reassuring everyone that there's nothing to worry about, Putin didn't declare war on Ukraine after all, it's just a "special operation".
Essentially, I think this is mostly just you. I think you're hearing people argue that "X leads to Y" and interpret it as them arguing from formalistic rules, when they're actually arguing from rules of cause and effect. Rules of cause and effect may be much easier to misinterpret and misidentify and much harder to logically follow to the right conclusion, but on the other hand it's pretty safe to assume that Putin is, in fact, bound by them.
Interesting review, but I'd like to post on 19th century antecedents to this idea, which suggest that the K-B pact wasn't as radical a break as suggested in the book review.
1) The decline in intra-European warfare occurs immediately after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, not later in the century. See this figure for the frequency of inter-state war in Europe over time:
The main exceptions to this century of European peace before WW1 were two types of wars that we'd call borderline acceptable today - wars of national unification/independence in Italy and Germany.
2) One of the foundations of the regime that established peace in Europe was the "Holy Alliance" -- a contract between 3 of the 5 great powers signed in 1815, that was potentially open for the UK and France as well to join as well. The text of the Holy Alliance has the following sentiments, that directly anticipate the KB pact:
"THEIR Majesties the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia, and the Emperor of Russia... solemnly declare... to take for their sole guide the precepts of that Holy Religion, namely, the precepts of Justice, Christian Charity, and Peace, which, far from being applicable only to private concerns, must have an immediate influence on the councils of Princes, and guide all their steps, as being the only means of consolidating human institutions and remedying their imperfections... Conformably to the words of the Holy Scriptures, which command all men to consider each other as brethren, the Three contracting Monarchs will remain united by the bonds of a true and indissoluble fraternity, and considering each other as fellow countrymen, they will, on all occasions and in all places, lend each other aid and assistance; and, regarding themselves towards their subjects and armies as fathers of families, they will lead them, in the same spirit of fraternity..."
More deeply K-B seems to build on the idea of a Pax Christianity under just international guardianship -- an idea promoted by both Popes and Holy Roman Emperors at various times.
As an aside, I am under the impression that the framing "Germany was the villain in WWI" is mostly an anglosaxon thing. In italy (and I think most of europe?) we definitely don't reframe it as a morality play and it seems to me that this is just another instance of american exceptionalism, where america must be the good guy.
So focus in on how Poles used opportunity to recover own country, and if anything WW I has significant positive associations for that reason, which seems fairly different how it may be interpreted in other places.
Interesting, i see. Now that I think about it, i would have to expect that in many countries in central and eastern europe the narrative about WWI has the independence twist.
During WWI, the U.K. hated Germany so much that everyone with a German last name changed it. The U.S., on the other hand, spent most of the war debating which side to support. I think Americans today see Germany as the villain in WWI because they were the villain in WWII.
It may be a generational thing but in the UK, the view that Germany was the bad guy in WWI is basically dead. The consensus view is that it was all a terrible tragedy caused by a web of alliances, and punishing Germany too harshly and without any justification is what caused WWII.
I think a big part of this is the fact that the Central Powers were much more authoritarian in general, whereas the Allies at the end of the war were mostly democracies. Russia, the main authoritarian ally, collapsed during the war.
I enjoyed this review, and learned new things about the Peace Pact (I did not know that they tried to include enforcement mechanisms) and its afterlife, and I want to separate the enjoyable review from the pretty egregiously lack of objectivity in the book.
This book under review has the sense of stubbornly trying to be a "great person" book in a context where the explanation of "it's a convergence of many complicated phenomena" is literally staring you in the face. It's almost admirable to have the chutzpah to try to monocausally explain a large, complex sociopolitical change in diplomacy and cultural attitudes by this one idealistic conference in the 20's. And even for a popular history book, its historical accuracy seems particularly bad.
At the same time the question posed is interesting, and it's nice to poke holes in the various standard explanations for the decline of war in the 20th Century. In particular it's really good to point out that the explanation of nuclear deterrence is very incomplete, and that attitudes towards war were (at least among the educated elite) converging towards the modern ones significantly before nuclear weapons. I would love to see a more historically literate and less monocausal attempt at doing this, and I would be particularly interested in a "Respectability Cascade" point of view, because I think that the idea that war is illegal would fit well into this framework (with the Kellogg-Briand pact being a step in this cascade).
If I were to venture a guess right now as to the main factors behind the rise of pacifism, I would guess that they would include the following.
*World War I itself. Nothing like an atrocious war to show that war is atrocious (this is probably the big one).
*economic globalization, through both the growth of international markets and a gradual rollback of protectionism.
*new, faster, and more global forms of media, and especially the rising popularity of the telegraph (compare to how tv visibility made the public horrified about Vietnam)
*Interestingly (and I'm surprised the book doesn't bring this up, given the name), Marxism, Communism and relatives.
The last one needs a little explanation. From what I understand Marx (as well as early Anarchists) thought that in a benevolent and well-organized society (essentially "True Communism") war is redundant, since without oppression and class rivalry everyone will just embrace brotherly love. In part because of this, Marxism was always very international and pacifist (their big conferences were literally called "Internationals"). There was even a movement to encourage conscientious objection to conscription in WWI (*massively* counter to the mainstream and even elite attitudes of Europe of the time, which was an honor/nationalism culture). In part because of this (and in part because of a secret deal with the Kaiser), Lenin noped out of WWI when the revolution gathered steam -- again, this unpatriotic move was massively unpopular among the educated elite of the time and cost Lenin many potential allies.
Fast forward 20-30 years and Marxism/Communism and even Leninism are becoming the leading currents in the Western academic and intellectual vanguard. Suddenly there's an explosion of explicitly international movements: anti-colonialism, feminism, and later, the anti-nuclear movement, (and even Esperanto!) all try to cut through national and class boundaries, and all are deeply influenced by Marxism in one way or another. I suspect that pacifism also fits in this category (though I should point out that it also has an independent history, and its links with Communism might be largely incidental).
Your timing seems wrong with regards to Esperanto.
Esperanto was constructed in 1887. In 1920 it was proposed as the international language for the League of Nations... and vetoed by France.
During Stalin's rule, Esperanto speakers were one of the many groups designated for extermination in gulags, although it was technically never made illegal.
You're right about Esperanto's origin - thank you for the correction! I confused its creation and its popularization, which I think was done in the idealistic mood of the 20's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sennacieca_Asocio_Tutmonda
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about Stalin, which seems irrelevant? I want to be clear that I wasn't trying to defend or make any non-neutral statements about Communism as an ideology. I personally think the existence of Communism has had a strong net negative effect on the 20th Century, but it would be a conflict culture move to then disallow tracing out the strong effects of Marxist and even Leninist thought on many other (often pro-social) social and intellectual developments.
I definitely liked this review. It was a bit too long, and judging from the other comments, perhaps left out some nuances/context, but it definitely also presented interesting explanations of things that I’ve always been confused about (I never really did get why WW1 happened).
> Even more confusing to our modern expectations, before the Peace Pact there was no such thing as helping your friends while staying neutral.
I think something's been missed here. That is not confusing to modern expectations; it's fully in line with them. That's why there's so much commentary about how stupid it is to consider the US "neutral" in a war where it directly provides Ukraine's weapons, equipment, and targeting coordinates.
What's confusing to modern expectations is the idea that now there is such a thing as helping your friends while staying neutral.
As an analogy, in a civilized society, if someone attacks you, the cops will defend you... but it doesn't mean that the cops are "on your side". If in turn you decided to steal the thief's purse (because hey, the thief is defeated, this is a convenient moment), now the cops would defend the former thief against you. That is what I understand as neutrality in this context.
By the old rules, if USA supported Ukraine against Russia, it would automatically mean that if they ultimately win the war, both will take a part of current Russian territory. This is obviously not happening. (Except maybe in Russian internal propaganda, I don't know.)
One should consider that not all countries are supporting Ukraine, nor participating in the US and EU sanctions against Russia.
I think it is more useful to think about "neutrality" in terms of hegemonic power and proxy wars between them. During Vietnam and Korean War the USSR discreetly supported the communist side (it was blatantly obvious, but did not declare war de jure, the diplomatic fiction was accepted by the US), and they certainly were not neutral. The non-aligned countries were much more neutral in the old sense.
I think the statistics are a bit confusing, because a large number of states that would have waged war under the old rules have played the second fiddle to the US hegemony post-WW2, and the US enforces the rule of no conquest within its sphere. And the US itself (int its wars) has a preference to establish a client state instead of outright annexation.
>By the old rules, if USA supported Ukraine against Russia, it would automatically mean that if they ultimately win the war, both will take a part of current Russian territory.
Status quo ante bellum was not unknown before. And if the US -Ukraine alliance would ultimately win the war (ignoring the nuclear weapons, which ought to be not ignored), it is certain there would be consequences intended to neutralize Russian power projection capability (as victor's right). Previously, this included taking land and people living there. The far more important thing is nationalism, which makes it impossible to imagine anyone annexing Russian territory with Russian population. (Improbable but theoretically possible options include taking mlitary bases in Königsberg.) Ultimately, in modern industrialized economy it is less important to directly own farmland.
> if someone attacks you, the cops will defend you... but it doesn't mean that the cops are "on your side". If in turn you decided to steal the thief's purse (because hey, the thief is defeated, this is a convenient moment), now the cops would defend the former thief against you. That is what I understand as neutrality in this context.
But the US is not even neutral under this standard. Aiding an offensive war is an even more standard part of the playbook than aiding a defensive war.
I think that the weakest part of this review is the Old World Order. The description seems to be primarily based on a single author, Hugo Grotius, who wrote in 1625. This is claimed to represent the "biblical model of war", which presumably was predominant in most of Christian history until 1928. I have not read Grotius and cannot say whether his work is typical for his time period. Looking at the Wikipedia page, the book seems to be most famous for the phrase "even when God were assumed not to exist", which would make this a weird choice for a book that's meant to represent biblical warfare.
While I can't comment on Grotius, I will say that the Early Modern Period (1500s-1700s) is the period of European history with the weakest norms against war since the Migration Period. Other people here have described the norms after this period, especially from the Congress of Vienna. I will focus on the norms before this period. There were major pacifist movements during the High Middle Ages: the Peace and Truce of God. I describe this as a contest between the pacifist Church and military aristocracy for simplicity. Real history is more complicated: while these movements were often led by members of the clergy with broad popular support, there were plenty of militarist bishops and pacifist aristocrats.
The Peace of God originally granted protection from violence to the clergy & religious property. It then expanded to peasants, women & children, and merchants & their goods. While there are some precedents in Ireland as early as 700, the movement really got going shortly before 1000 in what is now western France. The Peace of God is recognizable as the ancestor of modern norms against killing non-combatants.
The Truce of God was the belief that fighting shouldn't occur on holy days. This belief is common in many ancient societies: there are plenty of instances in Classical literature of battles being delayed to not offend a god on her day. What is unusual is how the Church used this Truce. They massively increased the number of holy days, including entire seasons (from the beginning of Lent until after Pentecost and all of December). In its strongest form, the Truce of God only allowed 80 days a year for fighting. If the military aristocrats didn't keep track of all of them, it allowed a priest to object to a battle whenever he wanted.
These movements were not very well enforced and you can find plenty of historical examples of people violating them, although the same could be said of modern war crimes. Importantly, since these were based on religion, they only really applied to Christians fighting against other Christians. Extreme violence could still used against non-Christians: in the Crusades, the Cathar heresy, and the Reconquista.
During the Early Modern Period, these norms fell apart for multiple reasons: (1) As armies became increasingly centralized and professional / mercenary, using ideals of personal honor became harder to enforce norms, especially when the soliders weren't paid on time. (2) Colonialism meant that there were a lot of conflicts with non-Christians, where the norms did not apply. (3) The Reformation shattered the religious unity of Western Europe. The key event that showed that the norms were dead was the Sack of Rome of 1527 by the mutinying army of the Holy Roman Empire. Afterwards, warfare in Europe became a lot more destructive.
After the Early Modern Period, anti-war activists had a lot of work to do to recover and improve on the medieval norms. They could no longer use a unifying religion to support their efforts. Instead, liberalism and state sovereignty became the principles to resist war.
I should also mention that Thomas Aquinas's theory of just war does not include the right of territorial conquest.
"Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault. Wherefore Augustine says (Questions. in Hept., qu. x, super Jos.): "A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly.""
Aquinas is far from the most pacifist thinker in the High Middle Ages. All four of the objections he responds to are some form of "It would seem that it is always sinful to wage war."
As a rule of thumb, I take it that when someone refers to "biblical warfare" or "biblical anything", they are in general not sympathetic to Biblical anything 😀
(And before anyone starts in with "but spelling it with small-b bible/biblical is modern customary usage!", exactly. Same way as "common era and before common era" to replace Christian Era which replaced BC and AD).
Thank you for this and the subcomment. It was baffling to me that the review made virtually no mention of the very long history of attempts to discourage and stigmatize wanton warmaking in the Christian west as well as in other civilizations around the world.
I am unconvinced. We have a very good explanation for why WWI style wars don’t happen again, which is that the war was orders of magnitude more destructive than any of its participants expected it to be, which drastically changed the calculus about whether or not going to war would be a successful foreign policy strategy.
The reason the authors needed to discuss the Islamic world is because if you don’t accept some fundamental difference, the American attack on Afghanistan looks a lot like the start of WWI in terms of casus belli. A terrorist movement conducted an attack on the soil of a major state while being not-so-secretly supported by the government of a smaller state for ideological reasons. The larger state demands that the smaller one effectively cede its sovereignty or go to war.
The difference is that we go to war in different ways, not that we go to war over different things. And that can be explained pretty convincingly by technology.
"American attack on Afghanistan looks a lot like the start of WWI in terms of casus belli" I had never thought of this before, but the analogy actually fits very tightly. We're lucky Afghanistan wasn't embedded in a bunch of alliance networks!
This review seems to gloss over a lot of history. There are lots of good reasons to believe this obscure treaty is an effect and not a cause. The nature of war had been changing because of a number of factors. That changed how states engaged in armed conflict.
1. When monarchies that feared to arm their own populace went to war, they often fielded smaller armies. This shifted dramatically with the French and American republics. Napoleon seemed impossible to defeat by successive coalitions formed to fight against him and restore the monarchy to the throne. He armed his populace and threw men into the meat grinder of war. Yes he had tactics, but he also had a large enough force to fight with that he could employ those tactics. The American Civil War was a precursor to WWI, showing people how bloody a conflict could be when your recruiting base expanded due to democratic rule. This lesson had failed to be fully understood by the time WWI came around, but there was a sense that war is costly.
2. The review seems to think war before the PP was a different kind of idea than after, but attitudes had already been changing. The feeling in Europe prior to WWI was that a general European war was impossible. People were too interdependent to do something as stupid as start a war. It was economic suicide! They were past those kinds of idiotic pursuits in modern Europe. This is partly how the war took many in Europe by surprise, despite many indications that a European war was inevitable.
3. The Germans didn't like the pre-WWI arrangement for economic reasons. They'd missed out on colonialism (as the review correctly points out), but they had also recently lost a naval arms race with the British. This led the British into the war, believing that they would likely have to face off with the Germans at some point. Better while they were still the weaker party.
4. Except why go to war against the Germans, when (at that time) they were such an obvious natural ally? Because the Germans started the war by marching through neutral territory with the intent of menacing the populations to lie down and take it. The German (and French, and British) attitude toward war was that it was a great way to distinguish yourself on the glorious field of battle. The German army wanted to be feared, but this backfired because journalism (another unforeseen development) had progressed to the point where this could be used against them. Instead of frightening the neutral countries they were trying to march through on their way to France, it brought the British into the war on the opposing side - the opposite of the feeling many in pre-war Britain would have espoused. (German conduct in this part of the war also helped solidify the image of the invading "Hun", and the "Germans are evil" ideas.)
5. This "war is glorious" feeling died in the trenches of WWI. The subsequent PP was more of an expression of an already-changing global sentiment than a force causing that change. This was solidified in the interwar period with the Spanish Civil War.
6. The rise in air warfare, specifically in bombing, can't be ignored as a major factor changing the nature of war. HG Wells hypothesized that a city could be taken under siege by dirigibles stealthily flying over a city and threatening to bomb it into submission. By WWI, this technology wasn't possible, but it stayed in the imagination of war planners through the Spanish Civil War (cf Guernica) and into WWII. It required a rebalancing of tactics away from strategic bombing - a goal that was espoused at the time, even if 'precision' bombing wasn't possible, especially at night - toward total warfare and bombing of cities. Notably, this idea that it was okay to indiscriminately bomb civilian targets WASN'T the norm before the war. Hitler was outraged when the British first did it to him, and he responded by refocusing the Luftwaffe from the (more effective) military targets toward civilian targets.
7. This led to development of firebombing and nuclear bombs. These were extensions of the shift (back) toward total war, but especially in the case of nuclear bombs it changed the nature of conflict between great powers. As others in this post have pointed out, this wasn't addressed to any satisfaction in the review.
I feel like I could go on for a long time. So many factors contributed to the changing nature of war, and to how people and nations responded to those changes. From the new political invention of sovereignty by the people, to advances in weaponry that changed the nature of conflict and removed the personal bravery aspect, to advances in journalism and photography that allowed the public to see the horrors of war first-hand, to inventions of air bombing, to nuclear weapons. All of these changes, and more, changed the nature of warfare over the course of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The failure of nations to understand the rapidly changing nature of war was evident in the blunders on both sides of each of these conflicts. THAT is a history worth reading and trying to understand in depth. The review (and/or the book it's based on) appears to either be ignorant of most of that history, or dismissive of all the causes in favor of a pet theory that this one treaty was more than an expression of public feelings developed through sad experience.
> Notably, this idea that it was okay to indiscriminately bomb civilian targets WASN'T the norm before the war. Hitler was outraged when the British first did it to him
I think a lot of that had to do with Hitler's view that Slavic people didn't really count at 'people'. The British were to be respected, and owed him respect in turn ... until that fantasy ended.
This is another example of changing norms, from the eugenics-based racism from before the Wars to a gradual recognition that thinking of people and nations as inferior wasn't justified. (Like when the Russians were embarrassed by the Japanese). A lot of the analysis in the review was an egalitarian interpretation of a period that was nothing like egalitarian.
Yes, it's interesting how aerial bombardment progressed from ostensibly strategic to overtly indiscriminate, inversely proportional to the precision of bombing technology. Dan Carlin has a great overview of the development of bombing theory and practice through this period: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-extra-logical-insanity/ (sorry it's behind a paywall, but it's $3 well spent)
Tying into whether there's less war post-pact, and in my view undermining the book's whole thesis, is a general understanding of what wars were being fought and why:
Pre-1648: Religious Wars between Catholics and Protestants, up until 1648 when a general consensus agrees that religion is an internal matter for individual monarchs to decide on in their own realms; also the tail-end of wars to stop Ottoman expansion in Europe (these go on until Karlowitz in 1699, but aren't central to the European understanding of war).
1648-1789: Princely territorial wars. These are the classic wars that Vattel is talking about. "States" are the territory controlled by a given monarch, they can fight wars on little to no pretext ("I begin by taking, then I find scholars to demonstrate my right"). At the end of the war, everyone keeps whatever they're currently occupying, unless the peace treaty says otherwise (uti posidestis). In practice, people start wars when they think they can gain more than they'll lose, but making concessions to avoid war isn't really something that occurs to people so war is a necessary condition for territory to change hands, rather than a fail-state caused by imperfect information.
1789-1815: French revolution and Napoleon. This is a weird hybrid of the previous and subsequent versions of war.
1815-1914: Nationalism and colonialism: European countries basically stop going to war over territory in the old-fashioned sense. There's some pointless mucking around in the Crimea, but other than that the only real wars are post 1860, with Prussia trying to take German territory, Piedmont trying to take Italian territory, and nationalist revolts in the Ottoman Empire that suck other countries in. Crucially, no-one tries to take any territory that isn't inhabited by their countrymen; the old pre-1789 idea of just taking whatever territory you can get away with, regardless of who lives there, is dead. There are also colonial wars, which is why you'll see a lot of territorial expansion happening on paper, but these don't really count because the people doing the conquering don't think the countries being conquered really count. Part of the reason this breaks down is the Ottomans existing in this weird superposition of European/colonial. The Mexican-American war is also a colonial war - the US takes all the broadly empty bits of Mexico, but not the bits that are full of Mexicans.
1914-1918: WWI. The real causes of WWI are a bunch of unsettled issues within the paradigm of nationalism, most importantly Alsace-Lorraine making a Franco-German war unavoidable, and Britain wanting to prevent the German hegemony in Europe that would result from them winning. France ends the war by taking a largely German-speaking chunk of land on the basis that it last owned 50 years ago. France and Britain take all Germany's colonies. The result is that the Entente (soon to be the Allies) don't want anything that any other countries still have, other than Italy wanting Dalmatia (I'm ignoring the Saarland, because I think it's demonstrative that the norm had been established that non-nationalistic conquest wasn't ok).
1918-1939: New post-WWI borders cause even more people to be in the "wrong" country for their nationality - hence Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria want war to change borders, but Britain and France think war to change borders is bad. Kellogg-Briand is just a policy statement by what's left of the Entente that Germany shouldn't be allowed to change borders. No wars are fought because of fatigue from WWI (Entente), and Germany being the only Axis country that can stand up to the Britain and France so they're the ones to set the timetable. There are no more colonial wars, and hence no territorial changes, because everything's already been colonised (other than China, which Japan still takes a run at).
1939-1945: WWII. There are no territorial changes in the West, because the side that already had everything they wanted won. In other words, anywhere that spoke French was already part of France. However, Poland still took a massive chunk of Germany, and Yugoslavia took a slice of Italy. All the nationality issues are solved by mass deportations though, so there aren't a bunch of Germans living in Poland, or even that many Hungarians in Slovakia or Bulgarians in Romania.
1945-1991: Cold War. There are essentially only 2 empires dominating the entire Earth, with other countries barely controlling their own foreign policy. They avoid full-scale war because nukes, so have to resort to proxy wars. Decolonisation also happens, but this is because the US wants decolonisation for Cold War reasons, forces Britain into it, and the other European countries have spent six years only existing on paper and aren't in a position to oppose it. The exception, Portugal, holds on until it collapses.
1991-present: US hegemony. The US can easily conquer any country other than Russia or China. Its only constraints are its own political culture, although in Iraq it demonstrated that it can act on the flimsiest casus belli without worrying about the UN. Russia has limited freedom of action due to its nuclear arsenal, so can invade neighbouring countries that the US hasn't specifically declared off-limits through NATO.
The Internationalists seems to be based on taking the 18th century view of war and saying it extends to 1928. This is fundamentally flawed, because that sort of war is based on a kind of non-national monarchy that no longer existed (even in Austria). The real historical break is with Robespierre and Fichte, when everyone wants to start living in their own nation-state; WWII is an extension of this, but solves it with deportations. After that, the Cold War plus everyone living in the right country for their nationality prevents war. Africa, where the borders are all wrong, is an exception, but that's got much more to do with the 1964 OAU declaration than the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
Even at the apex of the religious wars political and economic considerations were just as important as religious ones. The very Catholic French monarchy was not very reluctant to ally itself with Protestant or Muslim countries if it supported their political aims against Spain and Austria.
Oh absolutely - I think there's a good argument to be made that the real reason religious wars stop is that the number of mainland (not British/Scandinavian) Protestants declined to the point that France and the German Catholics were more concerned about the Habsburgs than the now-peripheral Protestants. It's faintly funny to think of the birth of liberalism as just a temporary expedient of French foreign policy, but it's possibly not wrong (especially given Grotius was also just a tool of French foreign policy).
One nitpick is that "Economic" considerations probably aren't that important at this point - there's definitely an attitude that more land and people is better, but not a lot of understanding of economic power beyond that. Otherwise, the Spanish would probably have come to more of an accommodation with Antwerp.
The Netherlands got Elten, Britain took Heligoland, Poland was moved a hundred miles to the left, taking Hinterpommern and Silesia, France made a solid pass at the Saarland
The Franz Ferdinand/Diana comparison is just odd. Gavrilo Princip wasn't, at least primarily, ideologically an anarchist; he was rather a radical Serbian nationalist, working as a part of a radical Serbian nationalist group for Serbian nationalist goals, with this group having extensive ties to the Serbian establishment which was also working towards those nationalist goals. Franz Ferdinand was not just any random royal celebrity, he was Austria-Hungary's heir apparent and held a governmental role. I don't believe anyone has claimed the paparazzi whose actions led to Diana's death had ties to the Italian government, all Diana-related conspiracy theories have rather tended to point back to the British crown.
Perhaps a somewhat better comparison would be if it had turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald was not just a random communist-oriented gadfly but really a member of a radical cell within CPUSA and that this cell really had extensive contacts with the government of Cuba. In that instance chances would really have been non-zero that the assassination would have initiated processes that might have left to WW3.
Israel did cede a lot of the territory it took in the Six Day War, but I think countries that have zero strategic depth would plausibly be a special case. I don't know where you'd look for other examples, you might need to convince Singapore to start conquering its neighbors.
The current situation is the leftover from a grudging compromise attitude in 1967. Back then, Israel was seen as a rule breaker, but its opponents seemed much worse.
At the time, demanding Israel return the 1967 gains looked like it would just be exploited by Syria and Egypt. They still fantasized about conquering Israel, and made one more serious invasion in 1973.
So "make Israel give back that land" looked a lot like "allow that land to be used to conquer Israel." That was three steps too far for America, never mind Europe.
So, the West went with "tolerate but don't officially recognize the 1967 conquests." That's now been awkwardly enshrined as the status quo, because enforcing any further change would be such a headache.
Compare: is Taiwan a country of its own or not? And on what conditions should we go to war over the point?
Principles aren't worthless. But practicalities always get the last word.
Moral of the story? If you want to get away with breaking the rules, make sure your enemy's reputation is even worse.
Israel didn’t invade an Arab Palestine; no such country was ever established. (Where was its capital? Who was its first leader? What were its laws?)
Israel took territory from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967, in a war the Arab League started in 1948. A strict reading of the laws of war does not forbid taking land in defensive wars, although it is considered gauche. The anti-war advocates of the 1920s-1940s assumed that weaker powers would not attack stronger ones, and particularly had Nazi Germany in mind when writing some of the rules. Israel’s survival in 1948 was as surprising to the world then as Ukraine’s survival was in 2022, and unintentionally exposed an edge case in the rules as written.
I'm sorry, but I stopped. I agree with some other commenters that the author of the review isn't qualified for the task. The minimum qualification here would be to have read other books about World War 1 and the history of war, in order to compare the book's claims with something instead of just saying "this sounds convincing, TIL".
(Edit: I would *at minimum* recommend having read "The Guns of August", as well as any general history of World War 1, and would further strongly recommend reading about the Russian revolution, the 19th century European revolutions, and the industrial revolution, to get a sense of what a once-in-history confluence of events World War 1 really was.)
Again, I'm sorry. I know this comment isn't nice, but I claim it's true and necessary.
I find the argument pretty unpersuasive. I would ascribe to gradualism and this not being some particularly noteworthy moment, but gradualism makes for a boring book.
I also think a lot of the change in attitudes really is just about nuclear weapons.
I learned a few things from this review, and enjoyed the read, but I think several historical parallels (and some facts) are off.
About WWI, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is downplayed. But Franz Ferdinand was not a prince like princess Diana, and not even like prince Charles. He was almost like MBS of Saudi Arabia - heir to the throne, and de facto ruler given the old age of the father (the Hapsburg Empire was a constitutional, federal monarchy unlike saudi arabia but the emperor was still quite important to government). And saying that the assassination was not the cause of the war because Serbia accepted most of the ultimatum is like saying that 9/11 was not the cause of the war in Afghanistan because the Talibans were willing to hand over bin Laden. Of course, the war extended to everyone else for other reasons, but still...
About sanctions, they were used before WWII, most notably against Italy for the war against Ethiopia.
They put some conditions on it that were not acceptable to the US, but strictly speaking they were.
Now, it makes perfect sense that the US were unwilling to assemble evidence to prove bin Laden's culpability in front of a Taliban court (the initial Taliban offering) or to have him extradited to through a third country (their later suggestion). And the Talibans were willing to disband/outlaw al-quaeda, but refused to allow American soldiers into Afganistan in order to dismantle the organization to US satisfaction. The US could not accept these conditions, and the emotional situation did not allow lengthy negotiations to push the Talibans towards a different offer.
But my point is that the conditions posed by the Talibans were almost the mirror to the points of the ultimatum rejected by Serbia, which were (1) allowing the investigation to be manged by Austria and (2) allowing Austrian representatives (read: police or soldiers) to "suppress subversive movements" on Serbian territory.
So, they weren't actually willing to hand him over until the war started, and even then were only willing to put him on trial. I do agree about the parallels.
I really did not like this review. It fits the technical specs of a book review better than some other entrants, but...I dunno, maybe there's only so much one can do with such an apparently galaxy-brained book. The following is A Dozen Criticisms Assortment, in rough chronological order:
1) My gosh, that's a lot of really long, sentences broken up in strange places, by commas. Bit challenging to read, formatting could be more friendly.
3) >the current world, where we expect war to be illegal, back into the time before the Peace Pact, when war was expected and normal
That "we" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Pretty sure the majority worldwide consensus expectation these days is closer to the latter than the former. Even No Foreign Adventures-ists concede it's a Necessary Evil sometimes. Resolute pacifism is a dead letter in a world with nukes.
4) >ours is a world in which war has already been outlawed
Same general mischaracterization of actual norms in practice permeates whole review..."most people", "those of us", "our". I don't know whether to call it idealism or naivete, but it feels very...Francis Fukuyama End of History-ish. Do lots of people really still think this way? Did we forget realpolitik, or how the USA is at war somewhere about as often as California is on fire? (That is, basically always?) It sure seems like "illegal" wars happen all the time and no one much notices, cares, and/or has any ability to do anything about it anyway.
5) Too many asides, explicitly declared or otherwise. Distracting, didn't add much.
6) Not to speak for Zvi, who is perfectly capable of defending himself, but I read that paragraph with an implicit understanding that "never" meant "in modern history". Not "never" like "since humans first began warfare". Seems like an overly literal interpretation.
7) Ukraine take is...bad. Credulous, ill-informed. Surprised to see a claim that No, Really, Sanctions Are Powerful And Work Well given all the recent compelling skepticism going other direction. [Citation Needed]!
8) Section 1: "if you want more persuasion that people viewed war differently, I’d suggest you pick up the book." Okay, look, I know it's a long review already...but that's Kind Of A Big Deal, like a huge load-bearing part of the entire book's thesis. The review fails to persuade me of this claim's veracity (failure mode: Beware The Man Of One Study), and I'm not gonna pick up the book if I already find it dubious from the review.
9) Core Objection/Wished-For Section 6: thanks for including, wish it were a bigger part of the review. Very obvious weakness in book's argument, feels No True Scotsman-y to handwave away as "nonquests". Ongoing small-scale wars and failed states are...the Peace Pact working as intended? It sounds like a false dichotomy that one can either have Constant Conquest, or low-grade permanent militancy that never quite reaches the Good Old Days levels. The obvious alternative of Humane Conquest Only Against Failing States is not raised.
10) Six meaty Addendums means...a lot of material that could probably have been worked into the main body of the review somehow, or more concisely explained by just linking to references. Or even left out entirely?
11) >Reading it provides a useful exercise in trying to push yourself out of assuming that other people everywhere have the same cultural assumptions that you do
This could be the summary of the entire book, imo.
12) Got all the way through and didn't see a single mention of Soft Power/Hard Power. I'm confused how these very real diplomatic tools are supposed to work if the Peace Pact really shifted global norms so much that any form of "iron fist in velvet glove" is unthinkably close to a casus bellini. (Warmongering cocktail.) Maybe I'm really misunderstanding US history, but aren't most of our suggestions/threats extra-credible because we've got such a powerful military, and typically are willing to follow through with force when pushed hard enough?
To nitpick, the review completely misses the point of the quote "You very much do not get to keep whatever you happen to occupy when there is a formal peace settlement, that has never been how this works." they criticize by "Prior to the Peace Pact, you absolutely did get to keep territory you took in war." - the assertion is not about keeping what you took in a war, but rather acknowledging that territory you "take in a war" (when a peace is established) is not the same as the territory you happen to occupy at the moment where the war ends.
Not only prior to the Peace Pact but even in premodern times it was very, very common that the victorious side did not take the territory they held (e.g. sacking enemy capital but taking over only contested lands), and it was also common to take some colonies they did not conquer (or even contest) on the battlefield; thus the assertion that the eventual peace treaty is what determines who will control the territory, it is influenced by the current de facto control but not solely determined by it.
"Why didn't the death of Princess Diana in France because of a car chase with a paparazzo cause Italy to go to war with Canada?"
It's a nice, snappy, sound-bite example but it doesn't really fit in with the thesis. Diana was not the heir(ess) to the throne, she was now more akin to the Duchess of Windsor (and the Duke and Duchess were more nearly involved in murky war-time shenanigans), adn this wasn't a politically motivated assassination (despite the rash of conspiracy theories). Had Diana still been Charles' wife, there was no (overt) scandal associated with her, she wasn't travelling in a car with her new lover, and she had been deliberately killed by, say, a member of ETA for political reasons, then yes, a critical international diplomatic incident would have resulted.
Probably not war, for the reasons cited in the rest of the review. Which brings me on to this:
"I leave out Kellogg and Briand, who read as largely opportunists seeking to use these ideas for their own benefit. Kellogg in the end received the Nobel Prize. As an aside, I often think a history of all the times a Nobel went to the wrong person, or someone else could have reasonably contested it, would be a fascinating and very long book. "
I vaguely remember learning about the Kellog-Briand Peace Pact, and I want to know more about these two. If they weren't the onlie begetters, how did their names get entangled with it? Why did they jump aboard a bandwagon like 'no more war' for opportunistic reasons? You may be disappointed that your favourite guy didn't get the credit, but simply brushing aside the two names associated with this pact as "they don't count" sounds more like pique than measured judgement. If Kellog and Briand were rogues and cads, *tell me about them* because now you have made them sound more interesting, frankly, than the milk-and-water rest of this piece.
This is a well-written, interesting, engaging review on an important topic. The only real problem with it is that it's comprehensively mistaken.
Thanks to Bret Devereaux's great blog posts on Victoria II (and to a lesser extent Europa Universalis) I was skeptical of the thesis from the start. Treating World War I as Old World Older business as usual without noting the "balance of power" system that made 1820-1910 almost as quiet within Europe as 1950-2020 is a mistake. So is giving New World Order a pass on World War II and various colonial wars / Cold War proxy conflicts. And Devereaux's account of how the growing costs and shifting technologies of war have changed its use is a persuasive contrast to this review's dismissiveness.
But I also found some real howlers in the review that torpedoed its credibility for me. Anyone who did the 30 seconds of Googling to learn that Europa Universalis covers the 15th-19th centuries should understand that the review's critique of Zvi is flat-out wrong. Anyone remotely familiar with the US-Mexican War will know that it was started by the US pressing a specific territorial claim along the southern border of freshly-annexed Texas-- a claim whose weakness as a casus belli was noted by none other than Abraham Lincoln in opposition to the war. And anyone with the slightest awareness of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory-- what it stipulates and when it developed-- would bring more to the subject of war's historical legal status than this reviewer does.
There's a grain of truth to the review's argument-- war has tended to become less accepted over time-- but the shift has been much smaller and more gradual than it's willing to consider. War in the medieval period (perhaps more so than the Grotius era, due to the growing influence of colonialism and nationalism!) absolutely had rules about just causes. Yes, it often broke them, but you can't just compare historical practice with modern aspiration-- if war's been outlawed what are we supposed to make of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq? Do we really think the pretexts for wars of royal succession felt flimsier to contemporaries than that for Iraq does to us? And was what the (almost universally accepted) justification for the US invasion of Afghanistan but an application of the Old World Order understanding of neutrality to the Taliban's aid of Al-Qaeda?
I don't know how much of the wrongheadedness was there in The Internationalists to begin with, but in any case I still fault the reviewer for failing to engage critically. I enjoyed the review and even learned from it, but I can't give my vote to something this glaringly mistaken. As always, many thanks for contributing!
Agree whole-heartedly. It's a negative review-of-the-review but comes across as balanced and fair. The outright low effort dismissals (and I've written one myself) can get tiresome.
"Anyone who did the 30 seconds of Googling to learn that Europa Universalis covers the 15th-19th centuries should understand that the review's critique of Zvi is flat-out wrong. "
I don't really understand that sentence. In which way does that show that the review's critique of Zvi is wrong?
Zvi's reference to "war score and formal borders" is a reference to the mechanics of Europa Universalis, which limit what one can legitimately conquer in a war to much less than the territory one actually occupies. The reviewer appears to think that such limits only exist in the New World Order and that Zvi is projecting them backwards onto earlier times. But in fact they're mechanics in Europa Universalis precisely because they were a standard feature of 15th-19th century war norms.
WW1 was the turning point where empires were dismantled. It began with Spain during the Napoleonic Wars but that could be written off as an anomaly at the time, WW1 is when the impact really started to be felt. Germany, Russia, and Austria all lost there empire status really. Although two of them world get it back this did not last. Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, and France lost most of their colonies. The Soviet Union ended.
By 1992 only the United States remained as an empire, that's why it is the only one going around engaging in random wars. China and India are emerging into empire status now, although India will probably fracture by itself before it can engage in serious wars. That leaves just two empires: US and China.
Without empires there are no high-tech (serious) wars. Nation-states don't really start them (unless, like Russia, it is because it thinks another state's people are actually its own people).
The mindset of the empire is autarchy, they must be self-sufficient, and going to war to secure resources, to restore pride, or weird reasons, makes sense. A nation-state doesn't care about self-sufficiency and instead focuses on increasing its own prosperity, mainly via trade.
I believe there is better predictive power in this than a mindset shift brought about by one treaty.
"Our current economic sanctions against Russia and our providing weapons to Ukraine would have been, in the 19th century, considered plenty of reason for Russia to declare war on us."
They haven't declared war on us because they are afraid of global thermonuclear war. We haven't declared war on them because we are afraid of global thermonuclear war. If Vladimir Putin were restrained by an international norm against aggressive war, he wouldn't have invaded Ukraine twice (three times, depending on how you define it) in the last decade.
> You very much do not get to keep whatever you happen to occupy when there is a formal peace settlement, that has never been how this works ...
> Except this has only been true since the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Prior to the Peace Pact, you absolutely did get to keep territory you took in war.
Not true at all. In the example by the reviewer of the Mexican-American war, supposedly showing that before the Pact you did indeed keep occupied territory, the US occupied Mexico City but didn't keep it after the formal peace settlement. Exactly like the quoted guy was saying.
Yes you keep *some* of the territory, maybe, but usually a small amount of the overall conquest, for reasons that vary between "not wanting" the territory (meaning difficult to administer, likely to have continued resistence), no deal and continued fighting by the losing side (note this is similar to "not wanting" in effect), international opprobium, internal political concerns/war goals etc
I wonder how tightly it would be possible to overlap Qutb's specific form of the Islamic conception of governance with a generic AI-optimist conception of governance. Someone with more of a grasp of the science fiction history would have to weigh in, but I'm fairly certain that "humans are clearly not good at governance, wouldn't it be nice to have a suprahuman intelligence running things?" goes back in AI form far before Asimov and MULTIVAC.
I.e. everyone agrees with Qutb on the problem, but not having a belief in his god we cannot agree with his solution.
Under the heading Addendum 2, there does not seem to be a second thing that is being assumed after "both that states could go to war", so the "both" seems incorrect.
> the death of an Austro-Hungarian Prince, in Serbia
Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, which is and was in Bosnia. Bosnia had been unilaterally annexed by Austro-Hungary several years before the event.
It's very weird to see Zvi's claim about Ukraine 'refuted' in a context that then explicitly discusses German unification. Because German unification is a perfect analogy. War was fought, ceasefire was initiated, partial territorial changes were agreed, much less than "keep what you take" but substantial. A few years later, war was fought again, and the most likely peace agreement still seems like it will be a partial territorial change; the conquered recognizing some claims of the conqueror for peace, and the conqueror giving up some land they have taken to forestall local rebellion and acquire international legitimacy from third parties. And if the conqueror is too aggressive in trying to keep everything they took (Alsace-Lorraine, the on-paper plans to decapitate Kyiv and take all of Ukraine at once), they pay a realpolitik cost in domestic unrest, resentful neighbors eager to take it back, and perception that they are an unreliable ally who may drag others into unwise wars.
I do not know if it is authors or the reviewer, but it seems like either or both really don't understand this topic well.
The Kellogg-Briand Pacts outlawed offensive war. They didn't outlaw war. The Pacts came about because Briand wanted an alliance with America and the US was opposed to alliances. Kellogg offered this instead.
The Pacts were highly opposed by the US Senate,
who thought it would interfere with American actions in the Americas under the Monroe Doctrine. Kellogg then assigned Undersecretary Clark to write a memo.
The Clark Memorandum detailed every use of force by America since the founding and framed them almost all as defensive. The Memorandum made it clear that the US could still go to war, as long as it alleged it was defending something. The Senate then supported the Pacts.
And that has been the story ever since. We moved from Just Cause to defense. Russia justified its invasion of Ukraine as a defensive measure to protect Russian speaking people in the Donbas.
I appreciate you sharing this (any source/article to read would also be appreciated). Across the comments I am seeing a lot of discrepancy towards the throughline and framing of much the book/review. I hope Scott or someone puts together a comprehensive addendum/clarifiations to this review. I can't pretend to have the historical and military background necessary for the task.
Thanks. I can't recommend a good source because I didn't find any good ones when I wrote a paper on the Clark Memorandum and the Kellogg-Briand Pacts during my PhD program, so I just went mostly to the primary sources. I never published my paper and may not even have a copy.
US Foreign Relations is an odd field. So much of it is wrapped up in domestic politics and propaganda that it can be quite the quagmire. Too many just want to celebrate America is good or condemn America as evil, when neither is fully true or false.
The historian Bret Devereaux argues that when most wealth was agricultural, a successful war paid for itself. As countries advanced to industrial and post-industrial economies, the destruction inherent in war meant that it no longer was profitable even for the victors. The norms against war followed this change.
You can read his essay at https://acoup.blog/2021/08/20/collections-teaching-paradox-victoria-ii-part-ii-the-ruin-of-war/
Start from "…Beneath the Crosses, Row on Row…" for the main part and to skip framing device (which may or may not be interesting to you).
Thank you for posting the link, it was fascinating!
He correctly points out that "the winning move is not to play" in WWI (which is basically what the US did), but that's very different from "WWI was a mistake". The problem with war is that if an enemy wants to have a war with you, you can't say "no thanks!"
It looks like Victoria II doesn't run long enough to simulate this, but the reason that Britain was willing to go to the mat for France, and France was willing to go to the mat for Russia, was that if you let Germany win a one-sided Great Power War without you, that sets up Germany (and its allies) to win a subsequent Great Power War against just you (offer needn't apply to the US, thanks to the Atlantic).
The sketch that out in a bit more detail:
Say Britain chose to remain completely out of WWI, so it's Germany+Austria against France+Russia.
The opening phase of the war goes badly for the French, with a pitched battle starting around Paris in September of 1914. Italy joins the war on the Germany's side, conquering Nice before being bogged down well short of Marseilles. The Ottoman Empire also joins the war on Germany's side (as in our timeline, but later since there would be no casus belli with Britain).
France falls in 1915. Germany annexes Belgium and the iron fields of northern France, as well as most of France's overseas possessions (except for a few seized by Japan, which joined the war on Germany's side since Britain stayed out of it). Italy annexes all of Provence including Marseilles. Victorious German forces wheel on Russia, defeating the Tsar's forces in mid 1916 (instead of early 1918). Germany gets terms similar to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of our timeline [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk#/media/File:Map_Treaty_Brest-Litovsk.jpg], annexing eastern Poland & Lithuania, making Finland, Ukraine, and Latvia/Estonia independent client states, giving the Ottomans and Austria sufficient territory to justify their involvement in the war, and letting Japan annex the entire Pacific coastline of Russia.
The war ends in 1917 with allied Austrian-Italian-Ottoman-German forces sweeping into Serbian from all sides, extinguishing that state. Austria annexes the lion's share of it, other territorial concessions are made to the Ottomans.
In 1918, Europe is again at peace. Germany leads a "League of Five Emperors" [German, Austrian, Ottoman, Japan, Italian] (the King of Italy was crowned "Emperor of the Italians and Provence" after the war by the pope) as the world's foremost power and resumes its shipbuilding programme with the massive war indemnity paid to it by France and Russia. Austria, Italy, and the Ottomans are busy reforming and modernizing their militaries to correct defects discovered during the course of the war. Japan's navy begins conducting quarterly joint fleet exercises with the German Pacific High Seas Fleet in the waters of the South China Sea near the border between Japanese and German Indochina.
With France felled and German, Italian, Austrian and Japanese administrators fanning out across new colonies across the globe, the League of Five Emperors starting drawing up plans to carve up Britain's overseas empire, plans which would be ready in the early 1920s. Britain, scrambling, tries to knit together an "Alliance of the Remaining" by reaching out to Qing China, Spain, and America...
I can see why Britain would be afraid of that, and it certainly is a big reason they went to the mat for France. In the actual event such a “super Germany” would have quickly split apart at the seams.
It depends on which territories the "Super Germany" annexed and how they did it. Germany's hold on majority-Polish but substantially-German-minority regions of modern-day-western-Poland was quite solid pre-WWI, so there would almost certainly have been scope for them to consolidate rule over more Polish territory (especially since Germany would have been a better imperial ruler than Russia).
This alternate timeline would have had a short victorious war for the imperial powers, which would have made nationalist rebellions less common and less potent. Also, if Russia avoided a Soviet takeover (likely, on this timeline), another source of anti-Imperial instability would have been weakened.
The pre-war German political elite found the Polish minority intensely problematic because the German Empire was a legislative democracy with universal male suffrage (unlike the UK). This meant Polish nationalist parties in the Reichstag which made working Reichstag majorities difficult, which meant governing the Empire was getting more and more difficult. Getting rid of that problem means getting rid of existing German democracy, which means doing away with the existing power sharing arrangement that kept social peace in the Empire and the Emperor on his throne. Remember that the Kaiser isn't Hitler, he doesn't lead a mass movement and can't do away with Parliaments with the backing of a mass movement. The Empire can somewhat curtail democracy in wartime on the grounds of emergency, but in peace time this problem re-emerges.
This was also why the Imperial government had to present their war as defensive against Russian Autocratic aggression. Their state doesn't function without some degree of consent and cooperation with liberal minded voters and the vast and powerful German labour movement.
Your scenario also widely inflates the degree that even a victorious Germany was a serious life and death threat to the British Empire. Even in victory, the Germany Empire is going to have permanent threats on land from whatever states are in power in France and the core of Russia and far more focused on them than the British, and the British have ample means to compete with even an victorious Germany in the naval sphere. Pre-war belief that the Germans were seriously trying to match Britain as a naval power was more about securing budget increases than a clear eyed look at respective capabilities. German naval builds were about deterrence, not matching the Royal Navy.
So the actual existing German political elite is profoundly unenthusiastic about annexations and pushing borders. Bigger borders, more minorities in the Reichstags, less functional empire. They end up thinking in terms that aren't that far from how modern America operates, militarily dependant and economically integrated minor allied states. The principle divide in German elite thinking is the military wants puppet states,while the diplomats and the Reichstag liberal majority is thinking in terms of setting up new friendly allied nation states in the East.
There are important differences between the German Empire and the Nazi State. Their elites don't have the same political or institutional means of
Do you maybe have a link explaining the influence of Polish minorities on Coalition-building and the difficulty of governing? Checking Wikipedia, it seems the Polish candidates had a very small share in the Reichstag (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstagswahl_1912 and clicking from there to earlier years).
I'm cribbing from a few books on the subject. With regards to the seat numbers, that's small in relation to the entire Reichstag, but in pre-war German politics it was dead seats that wouldn't be in anyone's governing coalition (like Sein Fein in the modern UK). It was manageable as 5% of the Reichstag, but keep adding minorities so that 5% becomes 20% that don't vote for the mainline German parties and the problem gets bigger and bigger. Eventually you might need to bring all the mainline German political parties into a grand coaltion to make governing workable and that would be very difficult.
That scenario presupposes that Austro-Hunagary was stable enough to survive as a coherent entity through Germany's victorious war and thereafter. I have doubts about that. You also expect Italy not to try any back-stabbing with its erstwhile allies and to be pleased with the crumbs off the table Germany would allow it. I don't see Germany and the Ottoman Empire settling down to be best buddies, were I the Ottomans I'd expect a victorious and ambitious Germany (the Kaiser still looking to make up for being second- and third-best in the Scramble for Africa) to turn on *us* next, seeking to take advantage of internal dissensions and war-weakness.
Your proposed "League of Five Emperors" I propose would dissolve into an attempt by Germany to create a League of One Emperor, with the Kaiser a renovated Holy Roman Emperor, and I expect all parties involved to know this and to start tearing at each other like vultures even if they are the victors of a continental war.
>Austro-Hungary surviving as a coherent entity
Winning quickly papers over a multitude of sins. I can't think of a single empire in history that ripped itself apart less than a generation after a significant military imperial expansion. That would suggest that winning WWI quickly would have bought Austro-Hungary ~20 years to get its shit together. For a view on what that would have looked like, see Matt Ylegias's Slow Boring piece on Austro-Hungary.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-the-austro-hungarian
TL;DR Austro-Hungarian federalism looks a lot like the EU if you squint, so an alternate timeline where it had a bit more time and space to get itself together is possible. My scenario makes it even easier for them, since they get bonus legitimacy points from winning a major war and Serbian nationalism is crushed for a generation.
>Italy, back-stabbing, crumbs
All of Provence + Marseilles are hardly crumbs, and that's leaving aside that the French colonial empire was so large that there was enough overseas cake that it could be shared liberally. Plus, Italy in our timeline made a grab for Albania, that could have been part of the package. Albania only got its independence from the Ottomans in 1912, so if the Ottomans are being compensated with territories on the Black Sea, they might have been willing to let a troublesome territory go to Italy.
Geographically, Italy's natural allies are Austria & Germany (hence why Italy was in the Triple Alliance in the first place). They can't really fight eachother directly because the Alps are in the way (although Italy tried in WWI for some reason and was the only army that lost to the Austrians), and they all have undersize overseas colonial empires and so benefits from the status quo being shaken up. Italy has all sorts of places in Africa and on the Mediterranean it would like to expand into, and so if Germany is backstopping Austria's security in Trieste, the alliance would likely persist.
As for the Ottomans and the Germans, it depends. The Ottomans were willing to join Germany's side in WWI thanks to pre-war diplomatic efforts by Germany, as well as their natural enemy (and by far greatest threat to Istanbul) being Russia. Post-war Russia would be weakened but still strong enough to threaten the Ottomans, which prevents them from free-lancing.
Essentially, the overall pattern is that Germany would have weakened France and Russia enough that they wouldn't be threats to Germany post-war, but would still be strong enough to keep Germany's weaker allies (Italy, Austria, the Ottomans) largely onside.
Perfidious Albion might be able to peel off the Ottomans or the Italians to join an anti-German alliance with substantial effort, but doing so would mean giving up on allying with France and/or Russia since those powers would be unlikely to co-operate with a power holding large chunks of their territory.
Post-war, Germany is by far the strongest continental power, but Britain still has the largest overseas empire. If the victorious powers successfully divvied up the French colonial possessions among themselves, the prospect of doing the same thing to Britain's overseas possessions could well be a more enticing prospect than trying to defeat the strongest land army in the world on terrain favorable to it. Europe has historical precedent for having one power be the strongest power by far on the continent for generations (Hapsburg Spain in the late 1500s & early 1600s, to some degree Bourbon France in the 1700s). During that time, other powers default towards alliances of containment, but were very willing to team up with the reigning superpower if it gave them some advantage in a more pressing problem.
Also, think about the timeline. Austria, Italy, and the Ottomans all discovered during the war that their armies are dysfunctional and in dire need of top-to-bottom reforms. That's a process that takes 10-20 years, meaning in that time period they would be trying to avoid major conflict with Germany. If Germany was smart (not a guarantee with Wilhelm II) its allies would have (together) gained more out of the war than Germany did, so they would be willing to sign onto a mid-1920s conquest of the British empire as a way to expand their power since they still wouldn't be ready to fight Germany in Europe.
I agree with you that the League of Five Emperors would be a very unstable power grouping, but the gap between Germany and the other European powers would have been large enough the grouping could easily have persisted long enough to destroy the British Empire.
Winning might have papered over some cracks, but I think the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in much the same position as the Russian Empire; concessions were made too late and too few. Hungary was already champing at the bit to break away.
Were I Kaiser Bill with my victorious German Empire at the head of a coalition of weak losers dangling at my coat-tails, I might well feel like expanding into a Greater Germania and absorbing Austria. They are already in a bad way, the heir to the throne being assassinated was the casus belli and his morganatic marriage means that none of his family can succeed, instead it's his cousin Charles I who ends up Emperor of a state that is really coming apart into a handful of fragments. Franz Ferdinand was the military guy, Charles is much more pacific (he has been beatified as Blessed Karl of Austria by the Church):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_Austria
Given how quickly the Hapsburgs were dethroned in our world, I see no reason why the alternate-world Hapsburgs would be in any stronger a position, and an ambitious Kaiser whose vanity has been flattered by a successful war might push for this being the perfect time to 'unite' the crowns; the Austro-Hungarian army, as you point out, is in bad shape, there are internal dissensions just barely covered over by the necessity of war-time unity, and the new Emperor is a princeling never destined to rule who only came to the throne by a series of coincindences and with little training. Absorb Austria into 'Greater Germany', and either pacify or re-conquer Hungary, which might be more amenable to being ruled by a good Protestant Emperor than a Catholic one ("[Charles] made two attempts to reclaim the Hungarian throne in 1921; but failed due to the opposition of Hungary's Calvinist regent Admiral Miklós Horthy.")
Italy is Italy and will bring about its own downfall due to natural squabbling and forming then overthrowing governments. They had already been secretly plotting against Austro-Hungary even in the days of the Triple Alliance precisely *because* they were not a completely unified nation, and wanted to get back territory in order to form, finally, a truly complete Kingdom of Italy. That's two out of your league of five (and Japan, here, doesn't count at all as their interests do not compete with those of Germany at the moment) ready to squabble, and Italy can be convinced to turn a blind eye if Germany 'absorbs' Austria, in the hopes of picking up those territories.
So if I'm Germany, I'm looking at:
(1) Japan - don't need to worry about this in the short term, whatever about the long run
(2) Austria - ready to fall into my grasp
(3) Italy - too weak and disunited to do anything, and will let me handle Austria in the hopes of scavenging on the margins
(4) The Sick Man Of Europe
Again, from the Ottoman side, they should be very worried about what is going to happen.
And this is without factoring in that England, France, Spain, etc. are going to be trying to capitalise on any weaknesses within the League; nobody wants a strong, centralised Germany but if they're engaged in fighting with their former allies, that suits the rest of Europe. Russia is probably in enough of a mess, as it was in our history, that the Revolution has happened and that empire has crumbled. Again, that will be enough to draw Germany's greedy attention to chewing up more of Europe/Central Asia than messing around with overseas territories in Africa, etc.
The USA is most likely staying well out of the entire European mess, if it's not looking to expand its own territorial conquests in South America, Cuba, the Phillipines, etc. because of the collapse of the European empires. Britain may be able to do something about an alliance with the appeal to the "Anglo-Saxon race" common heritage thing, but this is no guarantee the US will support Britain if it comes to a shooting war with Germany.
I'm not so confident for Germany, either. Look at Britain - after the First World War, it thought it was still the major world power, but already the cracks had started to show. The empire was beginning to fragment, even if they didn't know it - Ireland had gone, India was going, other countries were developing their own sense of nationalism and wanting to throw off colonial governments. The new power was the USA, even if Britain was slow to acknowledge it, and not one of its continental rivals. A triumphant Germany might find that things worked out for them, as for Britain, in this alternate time line: a gradual loss of Empire, increasing national sentiment in the territories under its rule, increasing upheaval and rebellion.
"Given how quickly the Hapsburgs were dethroned in our world, I see no reason why the alternate-world Hapsburgs would be in any stronger a position"
The Hapsburgs fell in 1918 after losing an extended and bloody war that also caused an economic collapse and famine (and the influenza outbreak didn't help). If the war had mostly wrapped up by 1916 and entirely wrapped up by 1917 (and been much less bloody overall), they would have been in a massively stronger position militarily, economically, prestigiously [sic], and legitimately [semi-sic].
Germany having defeated France (for the second time in 50 years) and Russia would know that it was still flanked by (weakened) enemies and not want to risk its southern flank by attacking Austria-Hungary. Kaiser Wilhelm II was stupid, but he wasn't THAT stupid. Or rather, his generals wouldn't have let him throw away Germany's last geographically-neighbouring alliance. Being handcuffed to a dying man is a drag, but it's less of a drag than having to fight a three front war when fighting a two front war already made you sweat.
IF Italy was in a position to offer Germany substantial military aid in partitioning Austria-Hungary, there's definitely a possibility that Germany, Hungary, and Italy would arrange to carve up the Austrians, but with the Italian army's poor showing I don't see the Germans being willing to risk that, especially since WWI was 2 years instead of 3 months and the Germans would want their troops home and back to the factories.
"Again, from the Ottoman side, they should be very worried about what is going to happen."
Worried what is going to happen, exactly? They'd come out of the war with their Balkan flank semi-secured (Serbia and Albania extinguished, Greece and Bulgaria put on notice assuming both sat out the war) and territorial gains in the Caucasus and Black Sea. Germany knows that it wants oil and doesn't have any, and the Caucasian oilfields were fought over in our timeline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Caucasus_expedition). If the Germans were realistic, they'd know that they couldn't hold Georgia / Azerbaijan on their own and having it in the hands of the Ottomans would be preferable to the Russians. Admittedly, the counter-argument to this is that in 1918 in our timeline the Germans were trying to secure an independent Azerbaijan as a client state.
"And this is without factoring in that England, France, Spain, etc. are going to be trying to capitalise on any weaknesses within the League; nobody wants a strong, centralised Germany but if they're engaged in fighting with their former allies, that suits the rest of Europe."
Oh, the British would love it if the Germans fought the Austrians and/or the Ottomans, I agree. Given that the Germans know that too, wouldn't they rather focus on breaking the power of the 2nd strongest European power (Britain) rather than fighting with their own allies? This would be another reason for the Germans to stay allied with the Italians and Austrians and Ottomans and Japanese-- dreadnaughts are extremely expensive, so building up a force capable of defeating the Royal Navy in the 1920s would have been much easier with allies, and the British overseas empires is enough of a prize to be worth trying for.
"Again, that will be enough to draw Germany's greedy attention to chewing up more of Europe/Central Asia than messing around with overseas territories in Africa, etc."
The Germans didn't have a route to Central Asia without securing Iran and/or India and/or the Causasus, and their prospects for European expansion would have been hemmed in by their ally to the south (Austria) and the client states that they themselves built in the treaty of Bresk-Livotsk. Incorporating Ukraine / Lativa / Estonia / Finland into a German-led mutual defense pact against Russia would have been the logical move on that frontier.
"The USA is most likely staying well out of the entire European mess, if it's not looking to expand its own territorial conquests in South America, Cuba, the Phillipines, etc. because of the collapse of the European empires. Britain may be able to do something about an alliance with the appeal to the "Anglo-Saxon race" common heritage thing, but this is no guarantee the US will support Britain if it comes to a shooting war with Germany."
Agreed, which is why Britain is in trouble. America's original alignment with Britain against Germany was trade-motivated in WWI. If Britain had stayed out of WWI, America would have kept trading with Germany and America's substantial German-speaking minority would have deepened those trade ties and had more time to climb the ladders of civic prestige in America. Frankfurters would still be frankfurters.
"I'm not so confident for Germany, either. Look at Britain - after the First World War, it thought it was still the major world power, but already the cracks had started to show. The empire was beginning to fragment, even if they didn't know it - Ireland had gone, India was going, other countries were developing their own sense of nationalism and wanting to throw off colonial governments."
Britain's European GDP probably had fallen behind Germany's by 1913 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)). If Germany annexed Belgium & a chunk of northern France & the rest of Poland & Lithuania, Germany in 1917 would have had a population of over 90 million (up from pre-war 67 million ... 7 million Belgians, perhaps 3 million French, 2 million Lithuanians, at least 11 million Poles). How strong Germany would have been would have come down to how well it could incorporate and integrate its new territories.
"The new power was the USA, even if Britain was slow to acknowledge it, and not one of its continental rivals."
America's population in 1920 was 106 million. Expanded Germany would have had a slightly smaller population (~90 million) and a lower GDP per capita (maybe 70% of the American level? Depends on how poor Russian Poland was), but still been substantially bigger and richer than counterfactual Britain, and with room for catch-up growth.
Also, most of the core scientists on the Manhattan project were Hungarian Jews. In the counterfactual timeline where they stayed in Austro-Hungary, the world's first bomb could easily have been a joint German-Austro-Hungarian project.
" A triumphant Germany might find that things worked out for them, as for Britain, in this alternate time line: a gradual loss of Empire, increasing national sentiment in the territories under its rule, increasing upheaval and rebellion."
It really depends on the degree of nationalist sentiment in the alternate timeline where Communism is weaker (because the Russian Revolution either fails or succeeds much later, only taking over a much weaker Russia) AND all the pre-WWI empires are still standing. Our timeline saw WWI as the graveyard of empires. This timeline would instead have seen WWI as the triumph of empires and the graveyard of French & Serbian democracy. That would have weakened anti-imperial pro-democratic pro-communist anti-colonial sentiment on the margin. The question is, was the fall of colonialism and the rise of European nationalism was overdetermined? Or would it have been possible to "skip forward" to a less nationalistic European structure (like today) but with the load-bearing pillars being multi-ethnic German and Austro-Hungarian empires?
The Kaiser and his people considered the actual existing Austro-Hungarian Empire to be far preferable to its dissolution for a multitude of reasons.
First it was a dependant ally with most of the capabilities of a modern great power.
Second, it maintained an Central Europe that was generally under the thumb of two culturally German governments, without any of the hassle in Berlin of stage managing various ethnic groups directly.
Third, a failing Hapsburg monarchy inevitably leads to union with the German speaking bits. That means the enlarged German Empire has to rejigger the power-sharing and political balance in the Empire with uncertain outcomes. The existing political situation was somewhat precarious but manageable for the Imperial monarchy and court, upending the applecart leads to more bad outcomes for them than good ones.
Also, an attempted reconquest of the Hungarians is right out. Large, politically organized ethnic minorities are very difficult for Berlin to manage in their system of government. The Hungarians are too be accommodated in some system, not ruled over at gun point because that creates more problems for them than it solves. This is very important, the German Empire isn't looking to paint the map Prussian blue, because that makes staying on the throne hard. Even when being grandiose, they think in terms of indirect rule.
>The problem with war is that if an enemy wants to have a war with you, you can't say "no thanks!"
You very much can give up the political objective of the attacker, even if it opens a whole new can of worms. France could have given up on retaking Alsace-Lorraine. Britain could have given up on maritime supremacy. Russia could have abandonned it's balkans objectives. Germany could have given up on dismantling it's neighbour powers & securing Ukraine. The Ottoman Empire could have given up the Balkans, the Russian Caucasus & Egypt. And so on, and so on.
You *can* give up the political objective of the attacker, but in many cases it would be a terrible idea to do so. Giving up the initial political objective of the attacker puts you on a worse footing for a subsequent conflict (all other things being equal) and so is only worth doing if the attacker's ultimate ambitions are limited.
Giving up the political objective of the attacker would not have saved any ancient kingdom from being conquered by the Romans, nor would it have saved Poland/France/Russia from armed conflict with Nazi Germany. Since the ultimate aims of an attacker are not knowable in advance, making concessions is generally a mistake. Britain fighting WWI without naval supremacy would have been a disaster that would have starved a few million British people to death.
If a government wants to avoid fighting ever, they have to be OK with ultimately dissolving their government and being ruled as a colony by someone else, since that's the risk they are running by refusing to ever fight and by being willing to make major concessions to avoid fighting.
That's the can of worm I was alluding to, but you're really overstating it's importance.
In fact, 1815-1914 was full of examples of countries conceding their opponent's goal, negociated or not, rather than go into open conflict. In some cases it led to some degree of loss of sovreignty (such as the Ottoman Empire or Qing China giving concessions to western powers), but not nearly enough to be considered "ruled as a colony", or enough to dissolve their government all by itself.
The example of Serbia is striking: if it was ready to concede every point except "Austrian involvement in the investigation", would Austrian involvement in a criminal investigation have turned Serbia into a puppet state? Would it have made a future war less winnable (which already wasn't, if I recall correctly, Serbia got entirely occupied before the central powers collapsed)
Giving up trivial things to avoid conflict is good & negotiating to avoid conflict where possible is good, but this doesn't change the central fact that if you want to be an independent nation you have to be ready and willing to defend yourself violently. Reality is complex and so there are errors in both directions (conflicts that could have been avoided, concessions that were disastrous and should have been conflicts).
Serbia probably should allowed "Austrian involvement in the investigation"
by contrast
Britain giving up maritime supremacy (an alternative suggestion you made earlier) would have compromised Britain's military abilities in a way that could have threatened Britain's future independence
The Ottomans kept giving things up until they gave up the Aegean coast of Anatolia and Istanbul, at which point they were deposed and Ataturk fought back to reclaim those just-lost territories (successfully). Do you object to the Turks fighting the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922?
The Qing Chinese kept giving things up until they fell, and then the new government kept giving things up until Japan declared war on them to seize territory. The 1933-1945 conflict killed over ten million Chinese people, mostly through starvation or disease. Japan was running a Lebensraum policy to claim land in China through ethnic cleansing. Were the nationalist Chinese mistaken to fight the Japanese and not surrender peacefully?
My preferred explanation is also economic. Such a pact would have had no power in a time when interests were better served by war.
> Even more confusing to our modern expectations, before the Peace Pact there was no such thing as helping your friends while staying neutral.
Not sure if this is an issue added in the review, or if it's from the book itself; but this is *very* straightforwardly untrue. The passage quoted states that:
> Any unequal support provided by the United States to France would have been a casus belli, an act of belligerency warranting a military response.
This is *not* a statement that unequal support automatically used to imply immediate war; it is instead a claim that the grounds for what constituted a casus belli used to be lower. Countries could and did offer support to allies without fully entering a war; the reason the US did not do so in this case was not (only) a legalistic prohibition, it was that Britain would be likely to declare war in response, and the US was not in a position to bear that risk. See in particular Hamilton's analysis of the situation in Pacificus 3: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-15-02-0055
You can easily find historical examples of neutral parties providing unequal support; the closely-related example would be the support France supplied to the US in the Revolutionary War before it formally entered the war. This didn't lead to a war, not only because of legal reasons, but because Britain didn't want to expand the war- it didn't make military sense. That's the same reason Russia hasn't declared war on the US today. In cases where expanding the war may make military sense, that is still sometimes done- e.g. the US in Laos. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was (arguably?) the result of US sanctions.
***
> 5. Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact.
This both seems like the most important point, and don't seem to be justified at all?
On the related question of why territorial conquest declined, the other possibility besides norm changes is that territorial conquest has become either more difficult (it's plausible that insurgencies or guerilla warfare have become more common or more effective), or less useful (because the land itself is increasingly not what is valuable.)
Totally agree on your point about #5. Going to have to put my thoughts on it together but it’s a horribly weak point.
I'm not sure there's as much disagreement here as you're making out. I'm sure the reviewer didn't mean to claim that any help provided by a neutral party auto-triggered their entry as a full belligerent- just that, as you say, it provided casus. It seems to me pretty obvious that the conspired-against party could choose not to declare war on the neutral third party; how could it possibly be otherwise? It just, unlike now, gave their war legitimacy if they chose to.
"One school of thought is that Putin will consider himself entitled to keep any gains won on the battlefield, or at least any that it would make sense to keep. Whereas Ukraine most definitely can’t agree to that any time soon. It also is highly contrary to the kind of history that Putin used to justify his invasion. You very much do not get to keep whatever you happen to occupy when there is a formal peace settlement, that has never been how this works. For a guy who lectures us for hours about events from Europa Universalis this would be a very poor understanding of war score and formal borders."
I'm going to be attacked for saying this; but if the above is a valid point, then when does NATO give back Kosovo to Serbia? Or Turkey give back northern Cyprus to the Republic of Cyprus? If you argue there are valid reasons for not doing so, like Serbia treating Albanian Kosovars badly, then surely that also applies to ethnic Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians who have been treated worse by the puppet regime in Kiev over the past eight years. Then there's the Moroccan occupation of most of the Saharan Arab Republic and the Chinese occupation of Tibet; the governments-in-exile have not surrendered themselves to the occupiers.
And who believes that Ukraine gets Crimea back? (except case where Russia falls apart in general)
> You very much do not get to keep whatever you happen to occupy when there is a formal peace settlement, that has never been how this works.
Is it going to imply that success in war is completely unrelated to how territory assignment goes? Because that would be wrong.
Yes, there is no 1:1 match between military success and occupied area (ask Germany in WW1 or USA in Iraq/Afghanistan), but this seems claiming that military success does not influence winning territory.
That is simply wrong.
Sometimes you get more than you occupy, sometimes less, sometimes nothing. As for wrong or right; the only right way is through self-determination of the resident population, which is rarely the case.
It was almost always less though in the relevant period (from the end of the Middle Ages to 1914). E.g. Germany won the Franco-Prussian War and had Paris surrounded at the end of hostilities and could have easily occupied much more, but it took considerably less territory than it occupied (and Bismarck wanted to take even less). I can't think of a scenario where the reverse was really true, unless it was either:
1. An invader defeated or stalemated but the war ends with some territory still occupied, which they can't reasonably hold and agree to pull out of (e.g. the American Revolution).
2. A series of land swaps -- winner gives up some occupied territory to get more territory elsewhere (e.g. the Seven Years War)
The truth is that in modern times you actually DO have scenarios where a war ends with the two sides keeping exactly what they occupied, which would seem to be the exact opposite of what the author is trying to say. That is how the Korean peninsula is divided, for example, as well as the various frozen conflicts of the former USSR.
I think this is true largely BECAUSE war for conquest is no longer acceptable, so there's just no way to make a treaty happen where both sides reach a compromise on adjusting their borders in the hope of achieving a lasting peace. Instead, the only thing they're able to agree on is that shooting is happening and they'd like it to stop.
For most of human history, it also would have been technologically impossible to have a frozen conflict with borders decided by battle lines, but I think it would have been technologically possible in the 19th century and yet didn't happen.
WWI would be an example of the winning side taking more territory than they occupied. It ended with the Germans still mostly on the French side of the pre-war border I believe.
That's true (though I was intentionally trying to exclude WW1 with my dates). This peculiar circumstance is a big part of what formed the stab-in-the-back myth. It's easy to see how soldiers could feel betrayed by the fact that they sat deep in French territory for 4 years of war, and then found the politicians had agreed to a treaty in which France and its allies got to occupy the Rhineland.
I've read the entire essay; his point is precisely that the territory you gain is not the same as the territory you occupy when peace is agreed on.
Of course being more militarily successful allows you to take more territory.
> when does NATO give back Kosovo to Serbia?
I guess whenever the citizens of Kosovo decide to return. They can choose so today, or tomorrow, on in a hundred years, or possibly never.
I am not aware of Kosovo becoming a part of territory of any NATO member. This makes this example quite unlike Crimea, where the goal is explicitly to make the territory a part of Russia.
EDIT:
Maybe let me put it this way: Which specific NATO country is supposed to return Kosovo, and what specifically would you like them to do?
Now compare that to situation in Crimea, where the answer would be simply: "Russia, send your soldiers home."
Thanks for answering. I'm getting tired to reply to those Putin apologetics.
Except the inhabitants of Crimea chose to return to Russia, from which they were separated in 1954. If Russia sent its soldiers home and the Ukraine was not allowed to occupy the Crimea, than that region would still be part of Russia because that is what most Crimeans want. As for Kosovo, I never said that they were annexed by NATO, only occupied by NATO; there is a difference. My question is why is self-determination not universally acceptable? Even today the citizens of Quebec and Scotland are allowed to vote on their future, but not the residents of Catalonia or northern Belgium.
> Except the inhabitants of Crimea chose to return to Russia
No, this is not true, and it's the official position of pretty much every country that this is not the case.
First, it's undeniable that the military annexation of Crimea happened before any expression of choice by the inhabitants of Crimea. Thus the choice of inhabitants can't possibly be a valid excuse for the invasion unless time travel was involved.
Second, it's a long established principle that "referendums at gunpoint" after de facto military control has occurrend are not considered a valid option for establishing the actual will of the people, and the referendum was declared by UN as not legitimate.
That seems a rather legalistic response. I've never seen anyone provide a convincing claim that annexation by Russia was not in fact popular in Crimea (and plenty to the contrary).
I haven't seen anyone claim that preference in Crimea is stronger than 60-40 one way or the other. I've seen some people claim it's close to 60-40 one way, and some people claim it's close to 60-40 the other, but everyone acknowledges that it's unclear.
I understand that these days taking a pro-Russian position in any Western venue is a fool's job, which in no small part is Russian fault, but the whole notion of "people" deciding to secede is obviously unworkable. Because this requires either the willingness of the central authority to consent to a referendum, or a superpower to intervene on their behalf, both of which are extraordinary circumstances.
The biggest difference between Kosovo and Crimea is that the US is a far stronger/popular superpower than Russia.
Borders don’t *change* any more, except when Israel or Russia do it. For anyone else in the past few decades, you sometimes get *new* borders as a result of a war, but all existing borders remain borders.
Seriously? Borders change, variously, as a result of war, revolt and negotiation.
Give some examples of borders that have changed in the past few decades, that don’t involve Russia or Israel, or a country separating from or merging with another but otherwise keeping their borders the same. That used to be common, but not in the post World War II era.
Western Sahara being annexed by Morocco.
Isn't that a country merging with another but otherwise keeping their borders the same? I believe Morocco claims *all* of Western Sahara, and that sort of thing definitely does happen (though in recent decades, more often in reverse, where a new country separates from a single existing one).
Sounds like a distinction without a difference.
The only border of Israel’s that’s changed in the past few decades is their unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
Before that, Israel traded the Sinai for peace with Egypt in 1978, effected in 1982, ending the war Egypt started with Israel in 1948. When all was said and done, the entire Egypt-Israel conflict resulted in no substantial change in territory between the two nations. Egypt had conquered Gaza in 1948, but lost it in 1967. Israel conquered not only Gaza that year, but also the Sinai, and gave it back a decade later, and promised to figure out the Gaza situation with the Palestinians. So far, this deal seems to have worked.
Similarly, The Jordanian-Israeli conflict ended with no significant gain or loss of territory for either nation.
But Israel’s 2005 experiment of just handing Gaza over to the Palestinians has been such an abject failure that it’s hard to imagine them trying to trade land for peace again for decades.
Moreover, Israel doesn’t have any territory they took that they feel they can afford to give back to a neighboring power. The closest comparison to the Sinai would be the Golan Heights, but there is no reason to believe that transferring it back to Syria wouldn’t once again result in Syrians mortaring Israeli farmers.
> I'm going to be attacked for saying this; but if the above is a valid point, then when does NATO give back Kosovo to Serbia?
Balkanization is legal. Many states have split up since this time; in fact, this pact is part of what has caused the number of countries to go up - previously weak states are no longer able to be gobbled up and are protected.
Kosovo isn't owned by anyone else, it's owned by itself.
Indeed, the history of the world since 1945 has been one of balkanization.
> Or Turkey give back northern Cyprus to the Republic of Cyprus?
Turkey pretty much is supposed to do this and it is one of the ways in which Turkey violates norms that it has not.
> If you argue there are valid reasons for not doing so, like Serbia treating Albanian Kosovars badly, then surely that also applies to ethnic Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians who have been treated worse by the puppet regime in Kiev over the past eight years.
I mean, this is just flat-out Russian propaganda.
1) The Russians were not victims of genocide in Ukraine and were certainly not treated worse than the Kosovars.
2) The Russian government sent people to fight in Ukraine, which is where the conflict came from.
3) The Ukrainian government is not a puppet, it is elected by the people of Ukraine.
> Then there's the Moroccan occupation of most of the Saharan Arab Republic and the Chinese occupation of Tibet; the governments-in-exile have not surrendered themselves to the occupiers.
The PRC will likely be partitioned if it falls. The same applies to Russia; there have been recent articles about how the outlying parts of Russia are unhappy because they are bearing the cost of the war in Ukraine.
I just don't get the argument against nuclear deterrence being the main factor in the "new world order". Quoting from the relevant section,
> After 1948, the chance an average state would suffer a conquest fell from once in a lifetime to once or twice a millennium. (Chapter 13)
I mean, that's about the time nuclear weapons become a thing. It's absurd.
The previous example in the text about Russia/Ukraine, if anything, highlights it. Both the NATO and Russian sides have been pretty vocal about how absolutely evil the other is, and how basically anything is justified to subdue the enemy (including crippling sanctions that disproportionately hurt the Russian civil population, but also how the Russian foreign intelligence constantly tries to undermine and meddle with Western democracies in what would have totally been a casus belli a century ago) (*). All while flexing the muscles of their nuclear capabilities in some or another way. Which doesn't look like an innocent unrelated behaviour to me. ("I just really love displaying my ICBMs!")
(*) edit: not that this draws any moral equivalence between them, or even less justifies the initial agression. Just that the (current) lack of escalation to direct conflict is a result of deterrence.
I think the statistics about conquest are supposed to cover the whole world. Only a very small fraction of countries possess nuclear weapons. No African countries do, for example, and the borders in that continent are famously badly drawn. And yet very little actual conquest between African nations has been successful in the last 70 years.
There's an incredible amount of violence and attempted territorial conquest between groups within "states", it's rarely at an international level because as you mentioned the borders are idiotic.
I guess that's right, but if anything that's evidence for the thesis of the book. There's lots of violence but little conquest at the state level because X. "Because the borders are silly" doesn't seem like a brilliant explanation - a priori I'd expect silly borders to cause more international conflict, not less. The book apparently suggests that X is "because everyone believes it's not OK to invade and take another state's territory now," which at least is an explanation that pushes in the right direction.
I see it as 'the borders are silly so most people don't fight on national lines'. Ethnic conflicts are orthogonal to de jure political ones and take priority for militant groups, and few countries can build up enough strength and internal unity to be able to conquer its neighbors.
For a contrasting example, see Western Sahara where Morocco has enough stability to conquer most of the western Sahara region, despite the UN spending ~40 years unsuccessfully asking them not to.
If the borders are idiotic, what borders would you propose that are better? Do you want to give each ethnicity its own country? If so, take a look at this ethnicity map, which highly oversimplifies the real ethnic diversity of the continent, and tell me where you want the borders to be: https://www.vox.com/2015/11/10/9698574/africa-diversity-map
I'd say let them fight it out and hopefully they end up with a ceasefire over borders that make some sort of sense. We can't necessarily give every ethnicity its own country, but we also can't just tell an ethnicity that wants its own country not to go out and get it. Africa didn't have firm internal borders prior to colonization, and in my opinion there's no reason to think that it would be ready to have firm internal borders immediately after colonization.
It's awfully patronizing and white man's burdeny to demand they stop being violent and respect our arbitrary borders, better to encourage them to be as violent as they want to be and promise to recognize whoever is left when the dust settles.
If wanting to prevent ethnic cleansing and genocide--which is what fighting it out will lead to--is a manifestation of white man's burden, then the white man's burden is the best thing to ever happen to Africa.
It's still happening, though... witness the current massive genocidal civil war in Ethiopia (with Eritrean involvement), the Congo wars in the 2000s, the fighting between (broadly) muslim Hausa/Fulani and christian/animist Ibo and Yoruba in Nigeria, the Anglophone/Francophone fighting in other parts of west africa, or the ethnic strife in South Africa, etc. etc. ad nauseam
> better to encourage them to be as violent
> end up with a ceasefire
This probably takes the cake in terms of moral disregard for the fellow human of anything I ever read in the comments in this blog.
Have you considered that they can, you know, redraw those borders by mutual agreement, peacefully, if they really wanted, as the sovereign nation states they are? I mean, they probably won't, because national identities encroach once you draw the borders. But they could. And I'm not sure what "encouraging violence" really helps with here.
Don't think the borders that decide that Alsace and Savoy are French, that Braga is Portuguese, that Trieste is Italian, that Belfast is in the UK, that Ticino is Swiss, ... are in any way more "ethnically correct" or less determined by arbitrary past political events. For that matter, even then European nation-states themselves are the semi-random result of the disaggregation of the Roman Empire and then reaggregation via feudal family ties.
Sure, I'm not saying it is the only factor. But (from the review) the books seems to basically dismiss nuclear deterrence with a sleigh of hand.
It is specially striking since those that do have nuclear weapons are precisely the ones with the most aggressive recent past, and obvious (and previously very successful) imperial ambitions. I'd honestly like to see what this change in the "chance an average state would suffer a conquest" before/after 1948 was if you restrict yourself only to e.g. African countries. There may be still a difference, but I doubt it would be meaningfully large. For two main reasons
- I'm not even sure how the European-exported idea of the modern sovereign nation-state would map to pre-WWII. Specially when you factor in colonization. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization#After_1945:
"In 1945, Africa had four independent countries – Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa."
The Americas started earlier getting their independence, but then again it doesn't look like there was as much conquest-based border movement *before* 1945 as there was in European territories. South American borders have been very stable since decolonization. If anything this points to something that is obviously neither nuclear deterrence, nor an ideology/pact developed mid-way through the twentieth century.
- Following on that, the book itself appears to acknowledge this kind of constant shift in territorial dominance by way of aggression as a mostly European phenomenon. To quote just one of the ways this is mentioned:
"A brief aside - these norms were often confusing and initially incomprehensible (and often patently unfair!) to peoples outside the European sphere of intellectual influence."
There is also the fact that the immediate aftermath of WWII was for a large part of the world to get aligned with either side of the nuclear powers. Either willingly. or via coup d'état courtesy of those very nuclear powers, in what is kind of the post-colonial acceptable way of controlling an apparent "sovereign" country.
Finally, this 1928 Peace Pact follows, after all, the creation in 1919 of the Societé de Nations. For all we can discuss about the ways it failed, it was set up directly as a consequence of the horrors of WWI with a clear internationalist goal. Ironically it was set up by the treaty of Versailles, the effect of which on mid-century German politics we all know very well. After *that*, another internationalist organ was set up, the UN. I don't want to diminish the importance of having a "place to talk" for our attempt at a peaceful world. But every time there's a major conflict, attention focuses on a specific organ of the UN, the Security Council. And, what again, is the defining characteristic of the permanent states imbued with veto power in said Security Council?
Yes. The people of the Americas have been much less fond of conquest. It's also worth noting that the areas which were conquered in the Americas in recent times were mostly pretty sparsely populated; the US took a lot of Mexico, for instance, but there were only ~80,000 people who lived in the Mexican Cession.
That's because all African country leaders in practice require recognition from at least one country which does possess nuclear weapons, or will quickly get replaced by someone else, in a bloody coup if necessary. Imperialism is alive and well, it's just a bit more obfuscated these days.
Yeah, as Jacob said below, I think it's a mistake to assume that the legalistic borders accurately reflect the reality of what's happening on the ground in Africa, with the exception that one of the fastest ways to dry up the western foreign aid that keeps a lot of elites in power and comfort is to meddle with the formal legal borders and political arrangements overmuch; far easier to handle things informally or through militias.
OK... I think you're arguing for what the book says, then.
In your verson of events, rich western countries that provide aid apparently believe, for whatever reason, that existing national borders shouldn't be moved. That's what the book argued: that these days, for some reason, we all seem to have agreed that conquest of nation states (or even taking their territory) is not OK. And African people on the ground have bought into that belief - or perhaps more accurately "been bought" into that belief - because of the flows of money. From my reading of the book review, that's pretty much exactly what this book argues.
Well the "borders" (aka, the lines on a map) don't change. Who actually is holding the guns in some village in a not-well-mapped area that happens to be on one side of where a "border" would be...that does tend to change. Significantly. And often rapidly. And oftentimes the formal "government" of a "nation" are just book entities; fronts put up so that the westerners can make sense of everything and feel good about things, while the same old blood grudge matches (and sometimes new exciting ones over money or resources or ideology!) play out in the background.
I think what I'm arguing is that yes, the west has succeded in imposing a thin veneer of western-style legibility on African politics, but that it's just a veneer, and one often cynically manipulated in order to elicit certain reactions from westerners with little or no correspondence to what's actually going on in reality.
To some extent this is the blind leading the blind, because I don't know anything about Africa, and I haven't even read the book. So feel free to take this with a pinch of salt. But I think the response would be: but that veneer is really important. That veneer is the difference between all-out war with big guns, and lower-level guerrilla fighting. And I suspect that the lower-level civil wars have been less destructive... but I don't really have any evidence of this. I wouldn't know how to go about looking at casualty numbers to even start approaching this question.
But most states in the world don't have nuclear weapons. Why are the borders in Africa pretty much the same as they were after the Berlin conference in 1884? Why haven't the borders of South America changed since the 19th century?
See the reply to Phil H above -> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists/comment/7530848
Russian interference in Western democracies is a causus belli today. Literally the only reason why Russia hasn't been regime changed is because the West made the mistake of allowing the USSR to get nuclear weapons.
My favorite one-liner from this review:
> Culture changes slowly, and then quickly, and then often forgets that it has changed.
When writing a book review I think it's advisable not to write a book, even a small one. A book review should be a review not a summary, not a lesson, not a screed, not a Cliff notes version, not a history lesson, except to the degree that it helps me understand the subject matter of what it is a person is reviewing. Reading this review made me not want to read the review or the book.
Your "a book review should be a review not something else" opinion is generally good, but I've always been glad when a capable writer breaks it, like Scott has done numerous times, or like some of the other book review contestants have done. It's the whole https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ thing. I do agree with you that if it isn't done well, I wouldn't want to read it.
Scott is allowed to break that rule because it's his blog, and he's not in a contest. If there's a bicycling contest and I bring a motorcycle, that obviously makes the contest unfair for everyone else.
Nah, that's oddly self-handicapping. Remember, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
The right way to think about it is to interpret what Scott does as setting the "vibe" for this blog, so that matching it is a natural response. If there's a supposed "bicycle" race but the organizer races on a motorcycle, everyone else should naturally feel free to bring motorcycles. Handicapping yourself with a bicycle and complaining when others don't is odd isn't it? (:
The organizer isn't competing.
And that's exactly why the SSC article is one of my least favorite posts. There's a very good reason to enforce seemingly arbitrary categories, and that is to facilitate communication across large numbers of people. If one person writes a 80-page history lesson tangentially related to the book while another writes a 3 page critique, those are not the same type of artistic creation. If the former wins the contest while the latter would have won had he known a 80-page history lesson counted as a book review, that is not a fair contest.
That said, I think this review is fine. It quotes the book and summarizes its points, in addition to giving the reviewer's own opinion on some issues. On the other hand, the reviews on "Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy" and "The Future Of Fusion Energy" are NOT fine because they barely mention the book at all.
Focusing on your brief aside rather than your main point, here, but I think you missed something in that essay.
Scott isn't saying not to have abitrary category boundaries; he's saying *recognise* them as arbitrary and allow them to change if it better serves communicative purposes. He's *definitely* not saying to underspecify in a way that makes communication more difficult.
I think if you show up to a book review contest Scott is running on his blog and are surprised to learn that the sort of thing Scott regularly posts on his blog and calls a book review is a valid entry, you only have yourself to blame.
Scott's behavior here is important because it sets a precedent in a way that's clearly applicable to the local culture. I think if someone followed the example of how Scott writes his book reviews and was punished for doing so because that's "not how a book review should be" that would be *more* unfair than the situation you describe.
That said I agree that if writers depart from book-review-ness in a way that doesn't follow Scott's example it's fair to hold that against them.
What about the reviews in LRB?
I think there's a difference between "book reviews" in the Goodreads sense and "book reviews" in the Scott sense. SSC/ACX book reviews are always at least half summary of the book's purportedly most interesting points, they don't just try to build an argument about whether the book is worth reading or not.
Yes, but there was also something about book itself. Not only summary of book or simply writing on the subject.
Yep, and in the last year's contest most of the reviews likewise were in the Scott's mold, and there weren't much complaints. It's strange that people are now suddenly starting to protest.
I agree and stopped reading. I'm still hoping for a ranked list of how we voted on all the book reviews. Or maybe just the top 50%... there is no reason to identify the person who wrote the lowest rated review.
Well, I liked it.
I actually liked this review but I had some questions. I thought that several aspects of WWI - trench warfare, mustard gas, the very high death toll - traumatized not only the troops but also the combatant nations to the point that war was seen as a new worse thing. And that thing should be prevented. I did not see anything about this at all in the review which makes me think it was not in the book. Which seems odd.
And then the new revulsion against war caused a massive cultural rift through Europe in all the arts, humanities, and philosophy.
I'm partial to ACOUP's theory that industrialization made war destructive enough to no longer be profitable even for the victors, and it just took culture a few generations (and disastrous wars) to adjust.
I think the economic argument gains most of its force from the horrors-of-war one. If e.g. Germany or the UK suddenly gained colonial control of some new territory somewhere, it would be a huge windfall for them, today or in the 1900s. I think it became socially acceptable (not universal) to say that war is awful in WWI, and that that attitude underlay the Peace Pact and the reduction in war. It’s interesting to learn that not gaining territory in conquest, and imposing sanctions, arose out of the aftermath of that - I’m slightly surprised that they arose out of a specific treaty rather than a general process of discussion.
The American Civil War was pretty brutal, though that may not have influenced European culture much, and it wasn't a war of conquest in the first place.
I’m not really across Civil War literature. Was there much of literature / pamphlets / newspapers / anything popular presenting war itself as a bad thing in that period?
I'm pretty sure that the South didn't see it that way, but the narrative is written by the victors.
I mean, the majority of the Southern population didn't want to rebel. It's just that the black people didn't get to vote, so the white people who were against the war were outvoted.
However, there's also a general rule that balkanization usually requires consent of both parties, and, well, the South was evil.
>and, well, the South was evil.
Was the arab world evil? Africa?
These places had slavery on a much larger scale for a longer period of time than the US, and yet I've never heard anyone call these places "evil" for it.
Colonial control was mainly an economic drain, not a boon. Controlling India was a boon to England, but most 19th century colonies were an expensive means to enrich individuals and create national prestige (and bargaining chips in international relations) not overall economic gains.
Sharp-eyed observers in the 1910s had already noticed this and pointed out that thus peace was in everyone's collective economic rational self-interest. Notably none of the diplomatic conflicts in the run up to WW1 with regards to markets or colonies produced a war, those always got a negotiated settlement. It was a battle over strategic position in Europe, political stability and national pride that created the general war.
Exactly. Germany, with its only minimal colonial history (not to mention losing of two world wars, being much wealthier than Spain and portgual is a truly bizarre state of affairs if one believes that colonialism made Europe wealthy.
There's a common belief on this that seems just straight out wrong. The second European country to industrialize was Belgium, which spent most of its existence as a conquered possession of some great prince or another, and only got in the colonial game after it got rich.
The wealth produces the colonies far more than the other way around.
> If e.g. Germany or the UK suddenly gained colonial control of some new territory somewhere, it would be a huge windfall for them, today or in the 1900s
No, it probably wouldn't. European colonialism was rarely profitable. Britain spent far more creating and maintaining its African colonies than it ever got out of them.
This had some of the most interesting ideas of the reviews so far, but it really struggled with organization. A solid editor would have done wonders for him.
I liked the analogy about chess and basketball, then I thought about it for a moment and realised I had no idea how it connected to the topic at hand. Basketball is war and chess is... the game of having moral legitimacy?
It was poker, not chess.
I think poker represents non-war methods of resolving conflict, and basketball represents war. Those who start wars after 1928 are losers; they have failed in the game they're supposed to be playing.
Except when the US invades Grenada, or Panama, or...
I thought this review was quite well-written. Most of my knowledge of WWI came from one history textbook and my English texts. This review lost points with me because the author presumably had a different textbook and didn’t treat my textbook’s perspective as important (it didn’t mention the horrors of WWI, and it relegated imperialism to an addendum!) That naturally made it hard to write, but each section made its claim and presented its arguments clearly, and the whole piece fitted together well.
For some reason, of all the reviewers so far, I assumed this one was female (only really noticed when you used male pronouns here). Interesting! In any case, this is a reminder that we really don't know.
Fair enough! Not even sure why I used male pronouns; usually I default to they/them in cases like this.
> Many people in both countries viewed the other as a sister nation, the only other Republic in the world.
Were there not Italian urban republics then?
The American and French republics were much bigger than the traditional city-state republic. Brougham wrote on Representative Democracy after the fact, but I think he's right that there's a real change in quality due to the change in quantity.
And the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth didn't count because?
The final partition of Poland was only a few years away, but it still existed in 1793. The partitions were strongly resisted by an uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, who had been the best military engineer in the American Revolution.
When people tell the story of the birth of democracy from the Enlightenment, they often erase the medieval democracies: the Italian city-states, the German free imperial cities & city leagues, Poland, Iceland, Novgorod, ... . I think this is a shame.
Pre-partition Poland wasn't really a republic of equal citizens. The French revolution got started when the Third Estate told the other two bite dust with their privileges, and declared themselves the National Assembly. I think sejm had only aristocrats.
Distinct difference is that in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the threshold for nobleman was quite low.
There are estimates that about 5% to 10% of population qualified.
Definitely not full democracy, but definitely step in that direction.
Franz Ferdinand was not assassinated in a foreign country (like Diana in France), but in a province of his own.
It was normal for a country defeated in a war to loses territory and pay concessions, but multiple imperial dynasties during WW1 ceased to exist. The political instability following the decline of royalist legitimism meant that subsequent governments could rise up without any respect for the treaties in territory had previously been lost. And the losers of WW2 still lost territory (why is Kaliningrad part of Russia again?). In the comments of this blog I have mentioned how countries like Israel, India & Indonesia (all starting with "I" for some reason) are all counter-examples to the claim that countries didn't acquire territory by force after WW2.
War in Europe was not quite that normal prior to WW1. Rather the Congress of Vienna had managed to prevent similarly huge fights from breaking out again after the end of the Napoleonic wars. There is a reason WW1 was regarded as something of an aberration rather than the same-old-same-old at the time (even in the form of people perversely excited for a big war after all that peace). I'm not claiming here that war was unheard of or hard to imagine, but the outbreak of war was a breakdown in a system intended to preserve peace. The rise of nationalism as a basis for governmental legitimacy erodes the ability of a government to hang onto conquered territory even without any such pact (unless there's ethnic cleansing, as happened with the Volkdeutsch after WW2). Nationalism plays a role in David Friedman's paper A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations* and along with industrialism contributes to Steve Sailer's "dirty theory" of war being less profitable than it used to be**.
* http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Size_of_Nations/Size_of_Nations.html
** https://reason.com/2006/09/01/i-need-dirt-and-i-dont-care/
There is an alternate view of European history in "Vampire of the Continent" that perfidious Albion eternally tries to prevent unity in continental Europe and attacks the nearest rival, going from Spain to France to newly-united Germany. It's WW1 German propaganda, but Anglo-Americans like myself & many blog readers could benefit from the contrary perspective. Note that after the second war with united Germany (after which it was divided in two and military occupied) the big geopolitical conflict moved east again, this time with the USSR as the evil empire and the US (allied with the UK) as the dominant western power not actually located on the continent. We did not immediately go to war again with the USSR, fitting Peter Turchin's cycle of giant wars making the generation that experienced them reluctant for more. By the time of the next generation, the USSR also had nukes and open war between the two blocs would have been much more dangerous. If you've read Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" you'll now that the world got significantly more peaceful after the demise of the USSR (as it had after WW2), and it wasn't because Kellog-Briand 2.0 declared war extra-super-illegal.
Sergey Brin is not analogous to John Milton. He is not a popular author (at least in natural rather than computer language). And Milton was known for his political writings, like Areopagitica. If you'd read Unqualified Reservations you'd probably be citing Dante's defense of the HRE instead.
The USSR didn't take territory merely because Stalin was a bad guy. It was the USSR that drove out the Germans, not some French resistance fighters (who needed the US to invade). The US was the dominant power on the other side and located an ocean away without interest in grabbing European territory.
Grotius also thought that civilians should be distinguished from soldiers. The idea that a power should intervene to protect foreign civilians was the justification Hitler used regarding the Volkdeutsch and Putin is using now for ethnic Russians. The US uses it when we feel like it because we can. The authors of the Geneva Convention are his heirs, not his opposites.
I agree that Islamists like Qutb reject the Western order, but this is not an order that only goes back to the World Wars but instead further to the Peace of Westphalia.
>There is an alternate view of European history in "Vampire of the Continent" that perfidious Albion eternally tries to prevent unity in continental Europe and attacks the nearest rival, going from Spain to France to newly-united Germany. It's WW1 German propaganda, but Anglo-Americans like myself & many blog readers could benefit from the contrary perspective.
This narrative survives on the continent in some form to this very day, in that the uk entered the eu mostly to control and stop the integration project. (And it kind of succeded with the eastward expansion)
That was even in an episode of the UK TV show "Yes, Minister".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU
Oh I really need to watch that show
Is there a version without laugh track?
Unlikely: it was filmed in front of a live audience.
The US is probably terrified of one power controlling all of Eurasia.
Ah, Mackinder's Heartland Thesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History. In short, as Mackinder put it,
"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world."
The Heartland is essentially Central Asia and Russia, the World-Island is Eurasia + the African continent, and ruling the World-Island allows you to rule the world by dint of already controlling more than 50% of the world's resources (land, population, industry, and the like). Mackinder included a helpful diagram illustrating the regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heartland.png
In the modern day, the CCP seems to be interested in trying out Mckinder's thesis with its Belt and Road initiative, presumably in internal tension with those who want to try out Mahan's thesis that controlling the sea is the best way to gain power and victory. A very old dilemma, really, land or sea: it was the dilemma facing Japan during its period of Imperial expansion (Northern Expansion Doctrine or Southern?), Germany in the lead up to WW1 (continue the Dreadnought Arms Race or fold to Britain and focus on the army?), France in the 1700s, Athens and Sparta in ancient Greek history...
Anyways, you may be interested in this discussion of Mckinder's thesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL8TLiOcF6c (Examining Mackinder's Heartland Thesis, by Strategy Stuff).
Isn't this a pretty mainstream view of British geopolitical strategy, just with a little extra negative affect? My understanding was that for most of the modern era Britain's primary goal has been maintaining a balance of power in continental Europe so no rival can consolidate enough power to threaten them.
Well, I agree with you, I just didn't know how mainstream it is
Well Diana was not assassinated at all, she died in a car crash.
I'm sure there are some conspiracy theories about that :)
There 100% are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theories_about_the_death_of_Diana,_Princess_of_Wales
Assassination conspiracies always seem to involve the zaniest methods. I have no idea whose idea it was to kill Diana by running her giant powerful S-Class Mercedes off the road using a tiny Fiat Uno, but I'm amazed that it worked so well.
It's been years since I dipped into any of the conspiracy theories, but one was that she was pregnant by Dodi Fayed, her companion in the car, and the Royal family did not want a non-white* half-sibling to the heir to the throne (Prince William) so they arranged this 'accident'. I don't know if it is a separate conspiracy or linked to it, that she could have survived her injuries (she was conscious at the scene) but they had her killed in hospital.
*This makes the whole Meghan Markle disruptions doubly ironic and of course it's the same allegations of racism. Had she been pregnant at the time, the big scandal would have been the pregnancy outside of marriage with another man, not whatever colour the baby might be. Part of her public image was "the wronged victim" and if she was having boyfriends and affairs after splitting up, she would have ceded that ground to Charles - pot and kettle, as it were.
I think the "war is less profitable" is not an idea that originates with Sailer. Historians usually cite Azar Gat: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40060125
I find myself utterly unconvinced by this review that Kellogg-Briand or any such ideas or pacts actually changed the reality of war. My belief going into the essay is that any change in the frequency or severity of warfare in the last hundred years is almost entirely due to the Cold War and the shrinking of the globe. After WWII, you can’t just invade your neighbor without it becoming a proxy war between the USA and the USSR. Win or lose, you’ll probably be less independent than before. And if you are aligned with one of the great superpowers, why start a war within your alliance? That, and not any pact of peace, seems like the obvious reason the oft-warring nations of Western Europe haven’t started any new conflicts lately. And of course, you don’t want to go to war with the other side because of the threat of nuclear MAD. So the only actors left with the effective freedom to wage war are the superpowers, who may do so as long as they don’t come to open war with each other. Now, this seems to me to be a model entirely in line with observation. Neither the US nor Russia has shown any hesitancy to wage war constantly over the last century. It’s not that anyone cares about peace, it’s that most nations are too weak to wage war.
The strongest point in the essay is that wars no longer are for conquest—borders don’t change as much. Here I’ll concede that the modern zeitgeist of the Peace Pact clade is to install a friendly government rather than outright absorb; but even this in many cases is largely because the territory is sufficiently distant geographically, ethnically, or culturally. Easier to rule the conquered with one of their own people who does as you say than with your own countryman, who is easier to hate. Perhaps even this new behavior is simply an evolutionary adaptation rather than an idealistic advancement.
And when Russians see war on Ukraine as unjust, I see that not as the spirit of the Peace Pact but as a victory for US propaganda and culture, disseminated through Hollywood and HTTP. When the US invades a country, no one says it’s unjust like that, because US propaganda doesn’t tel them so.
Perhaps I get too much of my political thought from the Machiavellian direction, but that’s how it all seems to me.
It does seem that nowadays, countries who fish in troubled waters by oppressing inconvenient ethnics, backing terrorism and bribing foreign politicians seem to have better luck than countries that openly go to war. Consider Ukraine's returns on bribing the Bidens, ethnic cleansing Russian ethnics in Ukraine, and a little shelling of the Donbas versus- Putin's Panzer slog.
An excellent point!
> ethnic cleansing Russian ethnics in Ukraine
[citation needed]
Presumably they meant promotion of Ukrainian language at expense of Russian/Hungarian with some rules being dubious and crossing into oppressive.
But in flood of utterly bogus Russian claims it is hard to find something high-quality on this topic.
Though maybe they also meant war started by Russia, with deaths impacting primarily Russian speakers concentrated in East? Like for example in Mariupol.
Or reaction of many Ukrainians who given the war prefer to focus on anything not connected to Russia? There were several reports about people deciding to not teach children Russian/adults deciding to learn Ukrainian, or deciding to abandon Russian heritage and so on.
I was expecting something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucified_boy
The decline of use of Russian language is in my opinion something that would happen even in a perfectly peaceful and friendly situation. Previously, Russian was mandatory to learn. Now it is not. A change from 100% to any other value, is by logical necessity a decline.
I meant a bunch of Ukrainian Russian ethnics forcefully encouraged to move to Crimea in 2014 when Ukraine ethnics stole the good jobs back. Is that crazy Russian propaganda?
I am not aware about this one, sorry :(
You are seriously using "They took our jobs"?
Yes, jobs are money and clout. Seriously. The 2014 color revolution was bad for Russian ethnics in Ukraine. Seriously.
Might it be also be that settler-conquest (as Germany tried with Ukraine and the US succeeded with tribal lands) makes little sense with minimal population growth? Wars over resources still make sense, but generally, with open global markets, purchasing resources costs less than winning them in war. Now that markets are fragmenting, we might see more resource wars.
Good insights!
Yes, the atrocity stories about Putin stealing Ukrainian children are plausible.
"That, and not any pact of peace, seems like the obvious reason the oft-warring nations of Western Europe haven’t started any new conflicts lately"
There is also the European Union, which started off with the ideals of no more European wars and the brotherhood of all nations. Whatever your opinion of the idealism, the practical effect is to reduce the likelihood that France and Germany are going to go at it again and drag everyone else along.
"When the US invades a country, no one says it’s unjust like that, because US propaganda doesn’t tel them so."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
"According to the French academic Dominique Reynié, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war.[1]
In the United States, even though pro-war demonstrators have been quoted as referring to anti-war protests as a "vocal minority",[4] Gallup Polls updated September 14, 2007 state, "Since the summer of 2005, opponents of the war have tended to outnumber supporters. A majority of Americans believe the war was a mistake."[5]"
The *domestic* protests against the Vietnam War nearly destabilized the United States, and were a key element in the counterculture revolution of the 1960s.
I'm afraid you've swallowed far too much propaganda.
The notion that the US is simply installing puppet regimes is not only false, but obviously, blatantly false. The US wants self-rule, not to lord over some sort of colonial empire; this is blatantly obvious from the behavior of the US, which will let leaders take power who do things like ask the US to pull out of their country - something the US complies with. The US pulled out of Iraq at the request of the democratically elected Iraqi government. The Shah of Iran embargoed the US.
The US has gone to war with who, exactly?
Let's look at the major military conflicts the US has been involved in since WWII:
Korean War - The North Koreans are blatantly cartoonishly evil and despotic.
Vietnam War - The North Vietnamese murdered over 200,000 civilians and installed the Khemer Rogue in Cambodia, who murdered millions.
Gulf War and Iraq War - Saddam Hussein was a brutal genocidal dictator who killed on the order of 200,000 civilians in Iraq and invaded Kuwait to seize control of it.
Afghan War - The Taliban hosted a group of terrorists who murdered 3,000 Americans, and the Taliban themselves are a repressive bunch of religious fanatics.
Compare this to Ukraine, which is a democracy who elected a comedian as their president.
This is false equivalence and whataboutism.
It's really completely different situations.
The US installed democracies in Japan, Germany, Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Yes, at some point people who say the US installs puppet rulers should mention a single case of an abject running dog of America who obeys us in everything.
I think you are overcorrecting: puppets states might not be part of the US playbook, but sabotaging democratically elected leaders and supporting coups definitely is, and the end result is a much more US-friendly leadership. Latin America in the Cold War is the clearest example of that - current consensus is that the supposed Soviet in was overblown and that covert US support was a major driving force in many coups.
That is the consensus amongst the far left.
The reality is that we know that, for instance, Allende was propped up by the Soviet Union and that the Chilean coup was not run by the CIA, but by Chileans.
We actually know, thanks to the end of the first Cold War and the declassification of a lot of materials and opening up of a lot of the Soviet archives, that a lot of the people in Latin America who were accused of being propped up by the Communists were, in fact, being propped up by the Communists.
Moreover, we also learned from the archives and declassified materials that the CIA was much less involved in many coups that they had supposedly been involved in, and not at all involved in a number of them. Mostly, the US took advantage of pre-existing reactionary counterattacks against communist block backed Marxists rather than generating them out of whole cloth themselves.
Of course, all of this is pretty obvious if you think about it; many of these nationalists very clearly had their own interests and agendas, not those of the US, and the "symbol" of these revolutions was the Soviet-made AK47.
On top of that, it is objectively the case that places where socialists took over are all very poor and terrible, whereas Chile, where the socialists were removed from power by an internal coup after Allende called for a "revolution" against his enemies after only narrowly avoiding being impeached, is the richest country in South America on a per-capita basis.
The only actual case of the US government overthrowing a democratic government in Latin America was in Guatemala in the 1950s, after the cartoonishly evil UFC convinced the US that the government there was secretly being run by the Soviets. It was a huge embarrassment at the time.
Was there really a time when countries could just keep whatever they conquered? Sure, but you'd have to go far further back than 1928.
The Peace Pact wasn't a one-off. It was just the third step in a trilogy of European peace agreements, and the first agreement was two centuries earlier.
Starting from the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, conquerors were expected to facilitate other great powers getting "compensation" elsewhere on the map. Not everybody played along, but most did, and the kings who didn't had to survive nasty coalitions against them.
After the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, "compensations" were no longer enough: conquests could only be kept if they fit a stable balance of European power. Germany occupied half of France in 1871, but gave back all except Alsace-Lorraine. Russia took the Ottoman Balkans up to the gates of Constantinople only to disgorge much of that right back again, to avoid war with the other great powers.
So the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 wasn't a unique event; the pacification of Europe by the later 1900s wasn't unprecedented. European leaders had been working to limit the profits of European war since at least two centuries earlier.
Of course the declining economic use of war was probably even more important, as democracy and industrialization advanced. And you could argue that even Utrecht's norm had its own precedent in Westphalia 1648. And to be fair, neither Utrecht nor Vienna declared their new norms with the bold language of 1928 - I'm pointing out the change in accepted practice, more than any official signed code of conduct.
But the Peace Pact was a climax event, not a unique event. While the Renaissance kings got pretty high-handed in taking whatever they could, you can see real limitations to war for conquest accruing no later than the 1700s.
It doesn't seem that way to me - the use of it as an example in the review felt kind of weak: for the argument that "countries used to just take whatever they wanted, and claim whatever land they happened to occupy at the end", the Mexican-American war actually feels more like a counter-example.
If "countries just conquer and keep whatever they want" was the norm, why all the cover story about debts? There was a clear effort (successful or not, left up to you) to frame America's actions not as "strong taking from the weak" but as an international case of foreclosure: "you aren't paying your debt so we're going to take property as compensation".
That seems to be strong evidence that there was already a strong norm against just rolling over your neighbors to take their stuff, not evidence of its absence.
Mexico isn't in Europe. Mexico wasn't important to the European balance of power. So Mexico didn't get any protection from the 1815 norm.
The 1815 norm only restricted (and even then didn't wholly outlaw) territorial gains in Europe. "Lesser" states like Mexico outside Europe were "fair game" to whichever great power got there first.
This culminates in the famous Scramble for Africa, where the European powers race to formally annex half the African continent in a single generation.
The "unwritten rules" don't get extended to limit conquest of non-European weak states until about 1900, and then only in a few key places.
China, in particular, shows the norm against conquest finally beginning to extend past Europe. By the 1901 end of the Boxer Rebellion, China was put under a host of annoying treaties, and lost key ports. But its heartland wasn't seized and carved up like Africa's. So China's leaders actually got much more respectful treatment than the Mexicans or Nigerians - although that was likely zero consolation to the outraged Chinese. And the Chinese were right to be outraged, since the "respect" wasn't for them but for preserving the international balance among the great powers - a group they were not included in.
Yes, but almost no one lived there.
For all the massive amount of territory involved in the Mexcian Cession, it only involved about 80,000 Mexicans.
Moreover, it wasn't in Europe, so it wasn't really something that Europe had any reason to particularly care about - or ability to contest, for that matter.
The Crimean War (1853-1856) is a perfect example of one country (Russia) trying to seize a lot of territory, despite international norms against it, and so everyone else teamed up to stop them.
Thanks for this comment. I for one feel dumb for not noticing my confusion when I read it as saying nations used to keep the land they conquered. I didn’t know those specific examples, but I knew someone beat Napoleon and I knew France remained French, so I should have suspected something more complicated was happening.
> Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 ... and twenty years later, in 1875, Japan conquered Korea
Minor issue, but this isn't true. Japan did not secure Korea until 1905 with the end of the Russo-Japanese War.
I believe the point being made in the book was that in 1875, Japan performed its own version of gunboat diplomacy against South Korea, which resulted in an unequal 1876 treaty that mirrored the ones Western powers like the United States had with Japan, establishing trade ports and extraterritoriality.
Reads like someone who knows nothing about the subject but decided to start learning about it with this book instead of any kind of proper history book or broad survey. Sounds like a bad book about a dumb subject.
And yet, even the era around WWI was peaceful compared to the previous millennia. It’s important for me to maintain that perspective.
ctrl+f nuclear finds
> Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact.
which was supposed to be discussed then is flatly ignored.
This is completely missing one of main reasons! War, especially between great nuclear powers, simply is not really beneficial anymore. Nearly nothing is worth nuclear war and definitely not war of conquest.
Even Ukraine-Russia war started because Russia expected Ukraine to collapse quickly. With knowledge how it will go Putin would not start that mess (or at least do it drastically differently).
Claiming that some irrelevant pact caused massive changes in how humans act is silly. That pact was part of recognition that war has become beneficial to nearly noone.
Trying to dismiss nuclear weapons while ascribing any importance to a forgotten piece of paper is simply wrong.
To quote ACOUP:
> As Gat notes, the industrial revolution changed this, breaking the agricultural energy economy. Suddenly it was possible, with steam power and machines, to use other kinds of energy (initially, burning coal) to do work (more than just heating things) – for the first time, societies could radically increase the amount of energy they could dispose of without expanding. Consequently – as we’ve seen – returns to infrastructure and other capital development suddenly became much higher. At the same time, these new industrial technologies made warfare much more destructive precisely because the societies doing the warfare now had at their disposal far larger amounts of energy. Industrial processes not only made explosives possible, they also enabled such explosives to be produced in tremendous quantities, creating massive, hyper-destructive armies. Those armies were so destructive, they tended to destroy the sort of now-very-valuable mechanical infrastructure of these new industrial economies; they made the land they acquired less valuable by acquiring it. So even as what we might term ‘returns to capital’ were going wildly up, the costs of war were also increasing, which mean that ‘returns to warfare’ were going down for the first time in history.
(...)
> In pre-industrial societies, returns to capital investment were very low. They could – and did – build roads and infrastructure, irrigation systems and the like, but the production multiplier for such investments was fairly low. For antiquity, the Roman Empire probably represents close to the best that could be achieved with such capital investments and one estimate, by Richard Saller, puts the total gains per capita at perhaps 25% over three centuries (a very rough estimate, but focus on the implied scale here; the real number could be 15% or 30%, but it absolutely isn’t 1000% or 100% or even probably 50%).
> But returns to violent land acquisition were very, very high. In those same three centuries, the Romans probably increased the productive capacity of their empire by conquest 1,200% (note that’s a comma, not a dot!), going from an Italian empire of perhaps 5,000,000 to a Mediterranean empire in excess of 60,000,000 (and because productivity per capita was so relatively insensitive to infrastructure investments, we can on some level extrapolate production straight out of population here in a way that we couldn’t discussing the modern world). Consequently, the ‘returns to warfare’ – if you won – were much higher than returns to peace. The largest and most prosperous states tended to become the largest and most prosperous states through lots of warfare and they tended to stay that way through even more of it.
https://acoup.blog/2021/08/20/collections-teaching-paradox-victoria-ii-part-ii-the-ruin-of-war/ (start from "…Beneath the Crosses, Row on Row…" - entire article is interesting but with kind of specific framing)
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I probably should not even read the third review, seems to be an utter waste of time given contents of #7 and #8. No idea what went wrong with review selection, but something went horrifically wrong.
I do think people living more comfortable lives has greatly decreased support for war. War has always sucked, but it sucks even more nowadays.
But yeah, ignoring the role of nukes and democracy seems silly.
@Scott
Maybe next time run some prediction market on "book review X will be widely considered as terrible/plagiarism?"?
Or select things differently? Both this and previous review are horrific waste of time. Something went badly here with review selection for public presentation.
Also the fusion one. That was just a puff piece, not a book review, and not a particularly well argued one either.
Yeah these three have been poor.
Re: Selection process. I can see a few ways for this to go bad. Hopefully there was no stuffing of the ballot box. But I wonder if those of us awarding higher grades to most reviews skews the results. If I give out 6-10's and someone else is mostly 3-7's, then my reviews count more. Maybe less choice in rating? A two or three tier rating system? (Good, mediocre, and bad.)
To make ballot-stuffing more difficult, selection of the top 10 could be limited to paying subscribers (given 3 months to do it), and voting could be limited to accounts of a certain age.
As I recall, Wikipedia elects arbitrators somewhat along these lines despite anonymity.
It was a public vote so blame us, the electorate. I agree that I didn't like the previous review and this one was boring, but that's the whole point of this: clearly, enough people voted for this one to be included as a finalist that *they* thought it was good.
When/if we get the data on what was voted for and which books weren't included, then we'll have a better view. But you can't blame Scott for the choice of the readers.
I agree with the general scepticism about the book's thesis, and with the fact that the reviewer never does get around to discussing the role of deterrence. Possibly this reflects the book!
I do think that there has been a real cultural shift with real world implications for policy etc and that this shift is _not_ shared by the whole world, perhaps not even a majority.
What I thought this book needed to make a more credible argument was a discussion as to the changing modes of conquest. Most obviously economic and political conquest: if a country joins the EU then in a pretty substantive way, from the perspective of a Grotius, and even of anyone alive in 1900, they have been conquered. If America changes one's government and the new government trades with America, then perhaps one has not been conquered, but America, and perhaps even oneself (and other countries!) have certainly gained something of material benefit.
And this at, as Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate, at far lower cost than actual conquest. Which returns us again to the point about deterrence: modern weaponry also introduces a much greater deterrent potential for civilian populations.
> if a country joins the EU then in a pretty substantive way, from the perspective of a Grotius, and even of anyone alive in 1900, they have been conquered
Good point! They would be likely also quite confused by EU itself and its massive limitations compared to a standard empire.
Yes that would be neither the beginning nor the end of the confusion 😆
I don't think the relationship between the EU and its 27 states is that much more complex than between the HRE and its 1800 constituent polities.
I agree, in fact doubtlessly more simple in many ways (the framework/parameters are much more clearly defined in the EU27).
But it would be unrecognisable due to that same supranational framework.
One thing that a lot of people don't get about Putin is that he does not feel bound by these implicit rules, or by any formalistic rules at all.
I have heard well-read people say things like "a no-fly zone would mean that NATO airplanes shoot Russian ones, and that would mean that Russia declares was on NATO". I don't want to downplay the danger of escalation, but there is a wrong assumption here: that Putin has a legible set of formal rules "if NATO does X, then this gives him a formal reason to declare war". But he doesn't play by these rules. He will declare war on another country if it is favorable to him, and not do that otherwise. Not if any legalistic rule is satisfied.
He does know that the OTHER side thinks differently. That is why he keeps spamming the press with logical implications like "if XYZ then I will declare war on NATO/Poland/Lithuania/...". These statements make sense in the logic of NATO states, and he has enough experience to know that they help preventing the West from doing XYZ. But this is not the way he acts. If he thinks that it is in his favor to attack Estonia and that he will get away with it, he will do it. Otherwise not. It doesn't matter whether Estonia follows the logical rules that he sets out.
In fact, he has pretty carefully tested out for a decade which things are tolerated by other nations, and which are not. His action have become more ruthless (but carefully and always step-by-step) because he has not experienced severe pushback even when he crossed lines that were declared sacred. Like annexing crimea, using barely concealed propaganda and misinformation in other countries, or also when Assad used chemical weapons in Syria.
> NATO tries to force its adversaries to abide by rules that it does not hold to itself.
How about the rule "do not annex new territory"?
(Though I suppose Putin would say that the scenario "Finland decides to join NATO" is equivalent to a hypothetical scenario "Russia invades Finland, kills everyone who resists, then makes Finland a part of Russian territory". If NATO is allowed to expand, so is Russia.)
Stalin's dictum; where you encounter mush advance, where you encounter steel, withdraw.
Look, the "no-fly zone" discourse happened really recently, I still remember it very well, and the people trying to dismantle that misleading buzzword didn't argue that it "...would mean that Russia declares war on NATO", they argued (to vastly simplify what was often pretty detailed explanations of what this kind of operation would involve) that it "...would mean that they start shooting back, duh".
But even if anyone at any point did actually use the literal phrase "declare war", even a minimally wider context still causes it to make no sense to interpret that as genuinely caring about formal rules. Genuinely caring about formal rules should cause one to breathe a sigh of relief and start reassuring everyone that there's nothing to worry about, Putin didn't declare war on Ukraine after all, it's just a "special operation".
Essentially, I think this is mostly just you. I think you're hearing people argue that "X leads to Y" and interpret it as them arguing from formalistic rules, when they're actually arguing from rules of cause and effect. Rules of cause and effect may be much easier to misinterpret and misidentify and much harder to logically follow to the right conclusion, but on the other hand it's pretty safe to assume that Putin is, in fact, bound by them.
Interesting review, but I'd like to post on 19th century antecedents to this idea, which suggest that the K-B pact wasn't as radical a break as suggested in the book review.
1) The decline in intra-European warfare occurs immediately after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, not later in the century. See this figure for the frequency of inter-state war in Europe over time:
https://mobile.twitter.com/SBenzell/status/1204854825546063872/photo/1
The main exceptions to this century of European peace before WW1 were two types of wars that we'd call borderline acceptable today - wars of national unification/independence in Italy and Germany.
2) One of the foundations of the regime that established peace in Europe was the "Holy Alliance" -- a contract between 3 of the 5 great powers signed in 1815, that was potentially open for the UK and France as well to join as well. The text of the Holy Alliance has the following sentiments, that directly anticipate the KB pact:
"THEIR Majesties the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia, and the Emperor of Russia... solemnly declare... to take for their sole guide the precepts of that Holy Religion, namely, the precepts of Justice, Christian Charity, and Peace, which, far from being applicable only to private concerns, must have an immediate influence on the councils of Princes, and guide all their steps, as being the only means of consolidating human institutions and remedying their imperfections... Conformably to the words of the Holy Scriptures, which command all men to consider each other as brethren, the Three contracting Monarchs will remain united by the bonds of a true and indissoluble fraternity, and considering each other as fellow countrymen, they will, on all occasions and in all places, lend each other aid and assistance; and, regarding themselves towards their subjects and armies as fathers of families, they will lead them, in the same spirit of fraternity..."
https://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/diplomatic/c_alliance.html
More deeply K-B seems to build on the idea of a Pax Christianity under just international guardianship -- an idea promoted by both Popes and Holy Roman Emperors at various times.
As an aside, I am under the impression that the framing "Germany was the villain in WWI" is mostly an anglosaxon thing. In italy (and I think most of europe?) we definitely don't reframe it as a morality play and it seems to me that this is just another instance of american exceptionalism, where america must be the good guy.
> In italy (and I think most of europe?) we definitely don't reframe it as a morality play
I can confirm that for Poland, with a twist that Poland recovered independence after 123 of partitions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland ).
So focus in on how Poles used opportunity to recover own country, and if anything WW I has significant positive associations for that reason, which seems fairly different how it may be interpreted in other places.
Interesting, i see. Now that I think about it, i would have to expect that in many countries in central and eastern europe the narrative about WWI has the independence twist.
And WW II is likely to have this focus in many formerly colonial countries (as mentioned in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists#%C2%A7addendum-4-de-colonization )
During WWI, the U.K. hated Germany so much that everyone with a German last name changed it. The U.S., on the other hand, spent most of the war debating which side to support. I think Americans today see Germany as the villain in WWI because they were the villain in WWII.
Even the royal family changed their last name because of anti-German sentiment.
Funny how the Battenburg family got permanently Freedom Fry'ed but the cakes didn't.
It may be a generational thing but in the UK, the view that Germany was the bad guy in WWI is basically dead. The consensus view is that it was all a terrible tragedy caused by a web of alliances, and punishing Germany too harshly and without any justification is what caused WWII.
I think a big part of this is the fact that the Central Powers were much more authoritarian in general, whereas the Allies at the end of the war were mostly democracies. Russia, the main authoritarian ally, collapsed during the war.
I enjoyed this review, and learned new things about the Peace Pact (I did not know that they tried to include enforcement mechanisms) and its afterlife, and I want to separate the enjoyable review from the pretty egregiously lack of objectivity in the book.
This book under review has the sense of stubbornly trying to be a "great person" book in a context where the explanation of "it's a convergence of many complicated phenomena" is literally staring you in the face. It's almost admirable to have the chutzpah to try to monocausally explain a large, complex sociopolitical change in diplomacy and cultural attitudes by this one idealistic conference in the 20's. And even for a popular history book, its historical accuracy seems particularly bad.
At the same time the question posed is interesting, and it's nice to poke holes in the various standard explanations for the decline of war in the 20th Century. In particular it's really good to point out that the explanation of nuclear deterrence is very incomplete, and that attitudes towards war were (at least among the educated elite) converging towards the modern ones significantly before nuclear weapons. I would love to see a more historically literate and less monocausal attempt at doing this, and I would be particularly interested in a "Respectability Cascade" point of view, because I think that the idea that war is illegal would fit well into this framework (with the Kellogg-Briand pact being a step in this cascade).
If I were to venture a guess right now as to the main factors behind the rise of pacifism, I would guess that they would include the following.
*World War I itself. Nothing like an atrocious war to show that war is atrocious (this is probably the big one).
*economic globalization, through both the growth of international markets and a gradual rollback of protectionism.
*new, faster, and more global forms of media, and especially the rising popularity of the telegraph (compare to how tv visibility made the public horrified about Vietnam)
*Interestingly (and I'm surprised the book doesn't bring this up, given the name), Marxism, Communism and relatives.
The last one needs a little explanation. From what I understand Marx (as well as early Anarchists) thought that in a benevolent and well-organized society (essentially "True Communism") war is redundant, since without oppression and class rivalry everyone will just embrace brotherly love. In part because of this, Marxism was always very international and pacifist (their big conferences were literally called "Internationals"). There was even a movement to encourage conscientious objection to conscription in WWI (*massively* counter to the mainstream and even elite attitudes of Europe of the time, which was an honor/nationalism culture). In part because of this (and in part because of a secret deal with the Kaiser), Lenin noped out of WWI when the revolution gathered steam -- again, this unpatriotic move was massively unpopular among the educated elite of the time and cost Lenin many potential allies.
Fast forward 20-30 years and Marxism/Communism and even Leninism are becoming the leading currents in the Western academic and intellectual vanguard. Suddenly there's an explosion of explicitly international movements: anti-colonialism, feminism, and later, the anti-nuclear movement, (and even Esperanto!) all try to cut through national and class boundaries, and all are deeply influenced by Marxism in one way or another. I suspect that pacifism also fits in this category (though I should point out that it also has an independent history, and its links with Communism might be largely incidental).
Your timing seems wrong with regards to Esperanto.
Esperanto was constructed in 1887. In 1920 it was proposed as the international language for the League of Nations... and vetoed by France.
During Stalin's rule, Esperanto speakers were one of the many groups designated for extermination in gulags, although it was technically never made illegal.
You're right about Esperanto's origin - thank you for the correction! I confused its creation and its popularization, which I think was done in the idealistic mood of the 20's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sennacieca_Asocio_Tutmonda
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about Stalin, which seems irrelevant? I want to be clear that I wasn't trying to defend or make any non-neutral statements about Communism as an ideology. I personally think the existence of Communism has had a strong net negative effect on the 20th Century, but it would be a conflict culture move to then disallow tracing out the strong effects of Marxist and even Leninist thought on many other (often pro-social) social and intellectual developments.
I definitely liked this review. It was a bit too long, and judging from the other comments, perhaps left out some nuances/context, but it definitely also presented interesting explanations of things that I’ve always been confused about (I never really did get why WW1 happened).
> Even more confusing to our modern expectations, before the Peace Pact there was no such thing as helping your friends while staying neutral.
I think something's been missed here. That is not confusing to modern expectations; it's fully in line with them. That's why there's so much commentary about how stupid it is to consider the US "neutral" in a war where it directly provides Ukraine's weapons, equipment, and targeting coordinates.
What's confusing to modern expectations is the idea that now there is such a thing as helping your friends while staying neutral.
As an analogy, in a civilized society, if someone attacks you, the cops will defend you... but it doesn't mean that the cops are "on your side". If in turn you decided to steal the thief's purse (because hey, the thief is defeated, this is a convenient moment), now the cops would defend the former thief against you. That is what I understand as neutrality in this context.
By the old rules, if USA supported Ukraine against Russia, it would automatically mean that if they ultimately win the war, both will take a part of current Russian territory. This is obviously not happening. (Except maybe in Russian internal propaganda, I don't know.)
One should consider that not all countries are supporting Ukraine, nor participating in the US and EU sanctions against Russia.
I think it is more useful to think about "neutrality" in terms of hegemonic power and proxy wars between them. During Vietnam and Korean War the USSR discreetly supported the communist side (it was blatantly obvious, but did not declare war de jure, the diplomatic fiction was accepted by the US), and they certainly were not neutral. The non-aligned countries were much more neutral in the old sense.
I think the statistics are a bit confusing, because a large number of states that would have waged war under the old rules have played the second fiddle to the US hegemony post-WW2, and the US enforces the rule of no conquest within its sphere. And the US itself (int its wars) has a preference to establish a client state instead of outright annexation.
>By the old rules, if USA supported Ukraine against Russia, it would automatically mean that if they ultimately win the war, both will take a part of current Russian territory.
Status quo ante bellum was not unknown before. And if the US -Ukraine alliance would ultimately win the war (ignoring the nuclear weapons, which ought to be not ignored), it is certain there would be consequences intended to neutralize Russian power projection capability (as victor's right). Previously, this included taking land and people living there. The far more important thing is nationalism, which makes it impossible to imagine anyone annexing Russian territory with Russian population. (Improbable but theoretically possible options include taking mlitary bases in Königsberg.) Ultimately, in modern industrialized economy it is less important to directly own farmland.
> if someone attacks you, the cops will defend you... but it doesn't mean that the cops are "on your side". If in turn you decided to steal the thief's purse (because hey, the thief is defeated, this is a convenient moment), now the cops would defend the former thief against you. That is what I understand as neutrality in this context.
But the US is not even neutral under this standard. Aiding an offensive war is an even more standard part of the playbook than aiding a defensive war.
Disclaimer: I am at most an amateur historian.
I think that the weakest part of this review is the Old World Order. The description seems to be primarily based on a single author, Hugo Grotius, who wrote in 1625. This is claimed to represent the "biblical model of war", which presumably was predominant in most of Christian history until 1928. I have not read Grotius and cannot say whether his work is typical for his time period. Looking at the Wikipedia page, the book seems to be most famous for the phrase "even when God were assumed not to exist", which would make this a weird choice for a book that's meant to represent biblical warfare.
While I can't comment on Grotius, I will say that the Early Modern Period (1500s-1700s) is the period of European history with the weakest norms against war since the Migration Period. Other people here have described the norms after this period, especially from the Congress of Vienna. I will focus on the norms before this period. There were major pacifist movements during the High Middle Ages: the Peace and Truce of God. I describe this as a contest between the pacifist Church and military aristocracy for simplicity. Real history is more complicated: while these movements were often led by members of the clergy with broad popular support, there were plenty of militarist bishops and pacifist aristocrats.
The Peace of God originally granted protection from violence to the clergy & religious property. It then expanded to peasants, women & children, and merchants & their goods. While there are some precedents in Ireland as early as 700, the movement really got going shortly before 1000 in what is now western France. The Peace of God is recognizable as the ancestor of modern norms against killing non-combatants.
The Truce of God was the belief that fighting shouldn't occur on holy days. This belief is common in many ancient societies: there are plenty of instances in Classical literature of battles being delayed to not offend a god on her day. What is unusual is how the Church used this Truce. They massively increased the number of holy days, including entire seasons (from the beginning of Lent until after Pentecost and all of December). In its strongest form, the Truce of God only allowed 80 days a year for fighting. If the military aristocrats didn't keep track of all of them, it allowed a priest to object to a battle whenever he wanted.
These movements were not very well enforced and you can find plenty of historical examples of people violating them, although the same could be said of modern war crimes. Importantly, since these were based on religion, they only really applied to Christians fighting against other Christians. Extreme violence could still used against non-Christians: in the Crusades, the Cathar heresy, and the Reconquista.
During the Early Modern Period, these norms fell apart for multiple reasons: (1) As armies became increasingly centralized and professional / mercenary, using ideals of personal honor became harder to enforce norms, especially when the soliders weren't paid on time. (2) Colonialism meant that there were a lot of conflicts with non-Christians, where the norms did not apply. (3) The Reformation shattered the religious unity of Western Europe. The key event that showed that the norms were dead was the Sack of Rome of 1527 by the mutinying army of the Holy Roman Empire. Afterwards, warfare in Europe became a lot more destructive.
After the Early Modern Period, anti-war activists had a lot of work to do to recover and improve on the medieval norms. They could no longer use a unifying religion to support their efforts. Instead, liberalism and state sovereignty became the principles to resist war.
I should also mention that Thomas Aquinas's theory of just war does not include the right of territorial conquest.
"Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault. Wherefore Augustine says (Questions. in Hept., qu. x, super Jos.): "A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly.""
Aquinas is far from the most pacifist thinker in the High Middle Ages. All four of the objections he responds to are some form of "It would seem that it is always sinful to wage war."
You can find the relevant section starting on page 4690/9453 here: http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1225-1274,_Thomas_Aquinas,_Summa_Theologiae_%5B1%5D,_EN.pdf
As a rule of thumb, I take it that when someone refers to "biblical warfare" or "biblical anything", they are in general not sympathetic to Biblical anything 😀
(And before anyone starts in with "but spelling it with small-b bible/biblical is modern customary usage!", exactly. Same way as "common era and before common era" to replace Christian Era which replaced BC and AD).
Thank you for this and the subcomment. It was baffling to me that the review made virtually no mention of the very long history of attempts to discourage and stigmatize wanton warmaking in the Christian west as well as in other civilizations around the world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory
I am unconvinced. We have a very good explanation for why WWI style wars don’t happen again, which is that the war was orders of magnitude more destructive than any of its participants expected it to be, which drastically changed the calculus about whether or not going to war would be a successful foreign policy strategy.
The reason the authors needed to discuss the Islamic world is because if you don’t accept some fundamental difference, the American attack on Afghanistan looks a lot like the start of WWI in terms of casus belli. A terrorist movement conducted an attack on the soil of a major state while being not-so-secretly supported by the government of a smaller state for ideological reasons. The larger state demands that the smaller one effectively cede its sovereignty or go to war.
The difference is that we go to war in different ways, not that we go to war over different things. And that can be explained pretty convincingly by technology.
"American attack on Afghanistan looks a lot like the start of WWI in terms of casus belli" I had never thought of this before, but the analogy actually fits very tightly. We're lucky Afghanistan wasn't embedded in a bunch of alliance networks!
This review seems to gloss over a lot of history. There are lots of good reasons to believe this obscure treaty is an effect and not a cause. The nature of war had been changing because of a number of factors. That changed how states engaged in armed conflict.
1. When monarchies that feared to arm their own populace went to war, they often fielded smaller armies. This shifted dramatically with the French and American republics. Napoleon seemed impossible to defeat by successive coalitions formed to fight against him and restore the monarchy to the throne. He armed his populace and threw men into the meat grinder of war. Yes he had tactics, but he also had a large enough force to fight with that he could employ those tactics. The American Civil War was a precursor to WWI, showing people how bloody a conflict could be when your recruiting base expanded due to democratic rule. This lesson had failed to be fully understood by the time WWI came around, but there was a sense that war is costly.
2. The review seems to think war before the PP was a different kind of idea than after, but attitudes had already been changing. The feeling in Europe prior to WWI was that a general European war was impossible. People were too interdependent to do something as stupid as start a war. It was economic suicide! They were past those kinds of idiotic pursuits in modern Europe. This is partly how the war took many in Europe by surprise, despite many indications that a European war was inevitable.
3. The Germans didn't like the pre-WWI arrangement for economic reasons. They'd missed out on colonialism (as the review correctly points out), but they had also recently lost a naval arms race with the British. This led the British into the war, believing that they would likely have to face off with the Germans at some point. Better while they were still the weaker party.
4. Except why go to war against the Germans, when (at that time) they were such an obvious natural ally? Because the Germans started the war by marching through neutral territory with the intent of menacing the populations to lie down and take it. The German (and French, and British) attitude toward war was that it was a great way to distinguish yourself on the glorious field of battle. The German army wanted to be feared, but this backfired because journalism (another unforeseen development) had progressed to the point where this could be used against them. Instead of frightening the neutral countries they were trying to march through on their way to France, it brought the British into the war on the opposing side - the opposite of the feeling many in pre-war Britain would have espoused. (German conduct in this part of the war also helped solidify the image of the invading "Hun", and the "Germans are evil" ideas.)
5. This "war is glorious" feeling died in the trenches of WWI. The subsequent PP was more of an expression of an already-changing global sentiment than a force causing that change. This was solidified in the interwar period with the Spanish Civil War.
6. The rise in air warfare, specifically in bombing, can't be ignored as a major factor changing the nature of war. HG Wells hypothesized that a city could be taken under siege by dirigibles stealthily flying over a city and threatening to bomb it into submission. By WWI, this technology wasn't possible, but it stayed in the imagination of war planners through the Spanish Civil War (cf Guernica) and into WWII. It required a rebalancing of tactics away from strategic bombing - a goal that was espoused at the time, even if 'precision' bombing wasn't possible, especially at night - toward total warfare and bombing of cities. Notably, this idea that it was okay to indiscriminately bomb civilian targets WASN'T the norm before the war. Hitler was outraged when the British first did it to him, and he responded by refocusing the Luftwaffe from the (more effective) military targets toward civilian targets.
7. This led to development of firebombing and nuclear bombs. These were extensions of the shift (back) toward total war, but especially in the case of nuclear bombs it changed the nature of conflict between great powers. As others in this post have pointed out, this wasn't addressed to any satisfaction in the review.
I feel like I could go on for a long time. So many factors contributed to the changing nature of war, and to how people and nations responded to those changes. From the new political invention of sovereignty by the people, to advances in weaponry that changed the nature of conflict and removed the personal bravery aspect, to advances in journalism and photography that allowed the public to see the horrors of war first-hand, to inventions of air bombing, to nuclear weapons. All of these changes, and more, changed the nature of warfare over the course of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The failure of nations to understand the rapidly changing nature of war was evident in the blunders on both sides of each of these conflicts. THAT is a history worth reading and trying to understand in depth. The review (and/or the book it's based on) appears to either be ignorant of most of that history, or dismissive of all the causes in favor of a pet theory that this one treaty was more than an expression of public feelings developed through sad experience.
> Notably, this idea that it was okay to indiscriminately bomb civilian targets WASN'T the norm before the war. Hitler was outraged when the British first did it to him
This is quite hilarious, even given the topic. Germans started WW II in Europe by indiscriminately bombing civilian targets in Poland (for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Wielu%C5%84 ).
> The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them
( https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Travers_Harris )
I think a lot of that had to do with Hitler's view that Slavic people didn't really count at 'people'. The British were to be respected, and owed him respect in turn ... until that fantasy ended.
This is another example of changing norms, from the eugenics-based racism from before the Wars to a gradual recognition that thinking of people and nations as inferior wasn't justified. (Like when the Russians were embarrassed by the Japanese). A lot of the analysis in the review was an egalitarian interpretation of a period that was nothing like egalitarian.
Yeah, it was self-consistent with what Hitler believed.
Nevertheless, there is a quite significant irony here.
Also, aerial bombing of civilians was very much a thing in WW1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_I
Yes, it's interesting how aerial bombardment progressed from ostensibly strategic to overtly indiscriminate, inversely proportional to the precision of bombing technology. Dan Carlin has a great overview of the development of bombing theory and practice through this period: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-extra-logical-insanity/ (sorry it's behind a paywall, but it's $3 well spent)
Tying into whether there's less war post-pact, and in my view undermining the book's whole thesis, is a general understanding of what wars were being fought and why:
Pre-1648: Religious Wars between Catholics and Protestants, up until 1648 when a general consensus agrees that religion is an internal matter for individual monarchs to decide on in their own realms; also the tail-end of wars to stop Ottoman expansion in Europe (these go on until Karlowitz in 1699, but aren't central to the European understanding of war).
1648-1789: Princely territorial wars. These are the classic wars that Vattel is talking about. "States" are the territory controlled by a given monarch, they can fight wars on little to no pretext ("I begin by taking, then I find scholars to demonstrate my right"). At the end of the war, everyone keeps whatever they're currently occupying, unless the peace treaty says otherwise (uti posidestis). In practice, people start wars when they think they can gain more than they'll lose, but making concessions to avoid war isn't really something that occurs to people so war is a necessary condition for territory to change hands, rather than a fail-state caused by imperfect information.
1789-1815: French revolution and Napoleon. This is a weird hybrid of the previous and subsequent versions of war.
1815-1914: Nationalism and colonialism: European countries basically stop going to war over territory in the old-fashioned sense. There's some pointless mucking around in the Crimea, but other than that the only real wars are post 1860, with Prussia trying to take German territory, Piedmont trying to take Italian territory, and nationalist revolts in the Ottoman Empire that suck other countries in. Crucially, no-one tries to take any territory that isn't inhabited by their countrymen; the old pre-1789 idea of just taking whatever territory you can get away with, regardless of who lives there, is dead. There are also colonial wars, which is why you'll see a lot of territorial expansion happening on paper, but these don't really count because the people doing the conquering don't think the countries being conquered really count. Part of the reason this breaks down is the Ottomans existing in this weird superposition of European/colonial. The Mexican-American war is also a colonial war - the US takes all the broadly empty bits of Mexico, but not the bits that are full of Mexicans.
1914-1918: WWI. The real causes of WWI are a bunch of unsettled issues within the paradigm of nationalism, most importantly Alsace-Lorraine making a Franco-German war unavoidable, and Britain wanting to prevent the German hegemony in Europe that would result from them winning. France ends the war by taking a largely German-speaking chunk of land on the basis that it last owned 50 years ago. France and Britain take all Germany's colonies. The result is that the Entente (soon to be the Allies) don't want anything that any other countries still have, other than Italy wanting Dalmatia (I'm ignoring the Saarland, because I think it's demonstrative that the norm had been established that non-nationalistic conquest wasn't ok).
1918-1939: New post-WWI borders cause even more people to be in the "wrong" country for their nationality - hence Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria want war to change borders, but Britain and France think war to change borders is bad. Kellogg-Briand is just a policy statement by what's left of the Entente that Germany shouldn't be allowed to change borders. No wars are fought because of fatigue from WWI (Entente), and Germany being the only Axis country that can stand up to the Britain and France so they're the ones to set the timetable. There are no more colonial wars, and hence no territorial changes, because everything's already been colonised (other than China, which Japan still takes a run at).
1939-1945: WWII. There are no territorial changes in the West, because the side that already had everything they wanted won. In other words, anywhere that spoke French was already part of France. However, Poland still took a massive chunk of Germany, and Yugoslavia took a slice of Italy. All the nationality issues are solved by mass deportations though, so there aren't a bunch of Germans living in Poland, or even that many Hungarians in Slovakia or Bulgarians in Romania.
1945-1991: Cold War. There are essentially only 2 empires dominating the entire Earth, with other countries barely controlling their own foreign policy. They avoid full-scale war because nukes, so have to resort to proxy wars. Decolonisation also happens, but this is because the US wants decolonisation for Cold War reasons, forces Britain into it, and the other European countries have spent six years only existing on paper and aren't in a position to oppose it. The exception, Portugal, holds on until it collapses.
1991-present: US hegemony. The US can easily conquer any country other than Russia or China. Its only constraints are its own political culture, although in Iraq it demonstrated that it can act on the flimsiest casus belli without worrying about the UN. Russia has limited freedom of action due to its nuclear arsenal, so can invade neighbouring countries that the US hasn't specifically declared off-limits through NATO.
The Internationalists seems to be based on taking the 18th century view of war and saying it extends to 1928. This is fundamentally flawed, because that sort of war is based on a kind of non-national monarchy that no longer existed (even in Austria). The real historical break is with Robespierre and Fichte, when everyone wants to start living in their own nation-state; WWII is an extension of this, but solves it with deportations. After that, the Cold War plus everyone living in the right country for their nationality prevents war. Africa, where the borders are all wrong, is an exception, but that's got much more to do with the 1964 OAU declaration than the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
TL;DR: The real historical break is in 1806 and the shift to nation-states, not 1928. The statistics are warped by colonialism.
Even at the apex of the religious wars political and economic considerations were just as important as religious ones. The very Catholic French monarchy was not very reluctant to ally itself with Protestant or Muslim countries if it supported their political aims against Spain and Austria.
Oh absolutely - I think there's a good argument to be made that the real reason religious wars stop is that the number of mainland (not British/Scandinavian) Protestants declined to the point that France and the German Catholics were more concerned about the Habsburgs than the now-peripheral Protestants. It's faintly funny to think of the birth of liberalism as just a temporary expedient of French foreign policy, but it's possibly not wrong (especially given Grotius was also just a tool of French foreign policy).
One nitpick is that "Economic" considerations probably aren't that important at this point - there's definitely an attitude that more land and people is better, but not a lot of understanding of economic power beyond that. Otherwise, the Spanish would probably have come to more of an accommodation with Antwerp.
An excellent comment! Much more worthwhile than the book review.
Thanks so much for this comment. I’ve read a lot of history and this is the best summary I remember reading.
>"The Soviet Union took territory after World War II, the only one of the Allies to do so."
Minor nitpick. The United States took the Northern Marianas Islands from Japan after WWII, despite not having controlled them before the war.
The Netherlands got Elten, Britain took Heligoland, Poland was moved a hundred miles to the left, taking Hinterpommern and Silesia, France made a solid pass at the Saarland
It looked for a long time as though the United States was going to keep Okinawa as well.
The Franz Ferdinand/Diana comparison is just odd. Gavrilo Princip wasn't, at least primarily, ideologically an anarchist; he was rather a radical Serbian nationalist, working as a part of a radical Serbian nationalist group for Serbian nationalist goals, with this group having extensive ties to the Serbian establishment which was also working towards those nationalist goals. Franz Ferdinand was not just any random royal celebrity, he was Austria-Hungary's heir apparent and held a governmental role. I don't believe anyone has claimed the paparazzi whose actions led to Diana's death had ties to the Italian government, all Diana-related conspiracy theories have rather tended to point back to the British crown.
Perhaps a somewhat better comparison would be if it had turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald was not just a random communist-oriented gadfly but really a member of a radical cell within CPUSA and that this cell really had extensive contacts with the government of Cuba. In that instance chances would really have been non-zero that the assassination would have initiated processes that might have left to WW3.
"get to keep territory you took in war." How does the Israeli occupation of Palestine fit in here? Is it just a special case?
Israel did cede a lot of the territory it took in the Six Day War, but I think countries that have zero strategic depth would plausibly be a special case. I don't know where you'd look for other examples, you might need to convince Singapore to start conquering its neighbors.
The current situation is the leftover from a grudging compromise attitude in 1967. Back then, Israel was seen as a rule breaker, but its opponents seemed much worse.
At the time, demanding Israel return the 1967 gains looked like it would just be exploited by Syria and Egypt. They still fantasized about conquering Israel, and made one more serious invasion in 1973.
So "make Israel give back that land" looked a lot like "allow that land to be used to conquer Israel." That was three steps too far for America, never mind Europe.
So, the West went with "tolerate but don't officially recognize the 1967 conquests." That's now been awkwardly enshrined as the status quo, because enforcing any further change would be such a headache.
Compare: is Taiwan a country of its own or not? And on what conditions should we go to war over the point?
Principles aren't worthless. But practicalities always get the last word.
Moral of the story? If you want to get away with breaking the rules, make sure your enemy's reputation is even worse.
Taiwan is a country of its own. Everyone acts exactly like it was a country, except they pretend like it isn't one.
Israel didn’t invade an Arab Palestine; no such country was ever established. (Where was its capital? Who was its first leader? What were its laws?)
Israel took territory from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967, in a war the Arab League started in 1948. A strict reading of the laws of war does not forbid taking land in defensive wars, although it is considered gauche. The anti-war advocates of the 1920s-1940s assumed that weaker powers would not attack stronger ones, and particularly had Nazi Germany in mind when writing some of the rules. Israel’s survival in 1948 was as surprising to the world then as Ukraine’s survival was in 2022, and unintentionally exposed an edge case in the rules as written.
Thanks for hosting the essay; it inspires some ideas about what the United States could have been doing over the last twenty years if we'd not invaded Iraq: https://jakeseliger.com/2022/07/02/the-internationalists-and-making-war-illegal/
I'm sorry, but I stopped. I agree with some other commenters that the author of the review isn't qualified for the task. The minimum qualification here would be to have read other books about World War 1 and the history of war, in order to compare the book's claims with something instead of just saying "this sounds convincing, TIL".
(Edit: I would *at minimum* recommend having read "The Guns of August", as well as any general history of World War 1, and would further strongly recommend reading about the Russian revolution, the 19th century European revolutions, and the industrial revolution, to get a sense of what a once-in-history confluence of events World War 1 really was.)
Again, I'm sorry. I know this comment isn't nice, but I claim it's true and necessary.
I find the argument pretty unpersuasive. I would ascribe to gradualism and this not being some particularly noteworthy moment, but gradualism makes for a boring book.
I also think a lot of the change in attitudes really is just about nuclear weapons.
I learned a few things from this review, and enjoyed the read, but I think several historical parallels (and some facts) are off.
About WWI, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is downplayed. But Franz Ferdinand was not a prince like princess Diana, and not even like prince Charles. He was almost like MBS of Saudi Arabia - heir to the throne, and de facto ruler given the old age of the father (the Hapsburg Empire was a constitutional, federal monarchy unlike saudi arabia but the emperor was still quite important to government). And saying that the assassination was not the cause of the war because Serbia accepted most of the ultimatum is like saying that 9/11 was not the cause of the war in Afghanistan because the Talibans were willing to hand over bin Laden. Of course, the war extended to everyone else for other reasons, but still...
About sanctions, they were used before WWII, most notably against Italy for the war against Ethiopia.
>the Talibans were willing to hand over bin Laden
Were they?
Yes.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80482&page=1
They put some conditions on it that were not acceptable to the US, but strictly speaking they were.
Now, it makes perfect sense that the US were unwilling to assemble evidence to prove bin Laden's culpability in front of a Taliban court (the initial Taliban offering) or to have him extradited to through a third country (their later suggestion). And the Talibans were willing to disband/outlaw al-quaeda, but refused to allow American soldiers into Afganistan in order to dismantle the organization to US satisfaction. The US could not accept these conditions, and the emotional situation did not allow lengthy negotiations to push the Talibans towards a different offer.
But my point is that the conditions posed by the Talibans were almost the mirror to the points of the ultimatum rejected by Serbia, which were (1) allowing the investigation to be manged by Austria and (2) allowing Austrian representatives (read: police or soldiers) to "suppress subversive movements" on Serbian territory.
So, they weren't actually willing to hand him over until the war started, and even then were only willing to put him on trial. I do agree about the parallels.
I really did not like this review. It fits the technical specs of a book review better than some other entrants, but...I dunno, maybe there's only so much one can do with such an apparently galaxy-brained book. The following is A Dozen Criticisms Assortment, in rough chronological order:
1) My gosh, that's a lot of really long, sentences broken up in strange places, by commas. Bit challenging to read, formatting could be more friendly.
2) The pokerball analogy really lost me. Unless it's meant as a sort of Scheherazade thing: https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/details.aspx?printed=true&name=shahrazad
3) >the current world, where we expect war to be illegal, back into the time before the Peace Pact, when war was expected and normal
That "we" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Pretty sure the majority worldwide consensus expectation these days is closer to the latter than the former. Even No Foreign Adventures-ists concede it's a Necessary Evil sometimes. Resolute pacifism is a dead letter in a world with nukes.
4) >ours is a world in which war has already been outlawed
Same general mischaracterization of actual norms in practice permeates whole review..."most people", "those of us", "our". I don't know whether to call it idealism or naivete, but it feels very...Francis Fukuyama End of History-ish. Do lots of people really still think this way? Did we forget realpolitik, or how the USA is at war somewhere about as often as California is on fire? (That is, basically always?) It sure seems like "illegal" wars happen all the time and no one much notices, cares, and/or has any ability to do anything about it anyway.
5) Too many asides, explicitly declared or otherwise. Distracting, didn't add much.
6) Not to speak for Zvi, who is perfectly capable of defending himself, but I read that paragraph with an implicit understanding that "never" meant "in modern history". Not "never" like "since humans first began warfare". Seems like an overly literal interpretation.
7) Ukraine take is...bad. Credulous, ill-informed. Surprised to see a claim that No, Really, Sanctions Are Powerful And Work Well given all the recent compelling skepticism going other direction. [Citation Needed]!
8) Section 1: "if you want more persuasion that people viewed war differently, I’d suggest you pick up the book." Okay, look, I know it's a long review already...but that's Kind Of A Big Deal, like a huge load-bearing part of the entire book's thesis. The review fails to persuade me of this claim's veracity (failure mode: Beware The Man Of One Study), and I'm not gonna pick up the book if I already find it dubious from the review.
9) Core Objection/Wished-For Section 6: thanks for including, wish it were a bigger part of the review. Very obvious weakness in book's argument, feels No True Scotsman-y to handwave away as "nonquests". Ongoing small-scale wars and failed states are...the Peace Pact working as intended? It sounds like a false dichotomy that one can either have Constant Conquest, or low-grade permanent militancy that never quite reaches the Good Old Days levels. The obvious alternative of Humane Conquest Only Against Failing States is not raised.
10) Six meaty Addendums means...a lot of material that could probably have been worked into the main body of the review somehow, or more concisely explained by just linking to references. Or even left out entirely?
11) >Reading it provides a useful exercise in trying to push yourself out of assuming that other people everywhere have the same cultural assumptions that you do
This could be the summary of the entire book, imo.
12) Got all the way through and didn't see a single mention of Soft Power/Hard Power. I'm confused how these very real diplomatic tools are supposed to work if the Peace Pact really shifted global norms so much that any form of "iron fist in velvet glove" is unthinkably close to a casus bellini. (Warmongering cocktail.) Maybe I'm really misunderstanding US history, but aren't most of our suggestions/threats extra-credible because we've got such a powerful military, and typically are willing to follow through with force when pushed hard enough?
To nitpick, the review completely misses the point of the quote "You very much do not get to keep whatever you happen to occupy when there is a formal peace settlement, that has never been how this works." they criticize by "Prior to the Peace Pact, you absolutely did get to keep territory you took in war." - the assertion is not about keeping what you took in a war, but rather acknowledging that territory you "take in a war" (when a peace is established) is not the same as the territory you happen to occupy at the moment where the war ends.
Not only prior to the Peace Pact but even in premodern times it was very, very common that the victorious side did not take the territory they held (e.g. sacking enemy capital but taking over only contested lands), and it was also common to take some colonies they did not conquer (or even contest) on the battlefield; thus the assertion that the eventual peace treaty is what determines who will control the territory, it is influenced by the current de facto control but not solely determined by it.
"Why didn't the death of Princess Diana in France because of a car chase with a paparazzo cause Italy to go to war with Canada?"
It's a nice, snappy, sound-bite example but it doesn't really fit in with the thesis. Diana was not the heir(ess) to the throne, she was now more akin to the Duchess of Windsor (and the Duke and Duchess were more nearly involved in murky war-time shenanigans), adn this wasn't a politically motivated assassination (despite the rash of conspiracy theories). Had Diana still been Charles' wife, there was no (overt) scandal associated with her, she wasn't travelling in a car with her new lover, and she had been deliberately killed by, say, a member of ETA for political reasons, then yes, a critical international diplomatic incident would have resulted.
Probably not war, for the reasons cited in the rest of the review. Which brings me on to this:
"I leave out Kellogg and Briand, who read as largely opportunists seeking to use these ideas for their own benefit. Kellogg in the end received the Nobel Prize. As an aside, I often think a history of all the times a Nobel went to the wrong person, or someone else could have reasonably contested it, would be a fascinating and very long book. "
I vaguely remember learning about the Kellog-Briand Peace Pact, and I want to know more about these two. If they weren't the onlie begetters, how did their names get entangled with it? Why did they jump aboard a bandwagon like 'no more war' for opportunistic reasons? You may be disappointed that your favourite guy didn't get the credit, but simply brushing aside the two names associated with this pact as "they don't count" sounds more like pique than measured judgement. If Kellog and Briand were rogues and cads, *tell me about them* because now you have made them sound more interesting, frankly, than the milk-and-water rest of this piece.
Review-of-the-review: 7/10
This is a well-written, interesting, engaging review on an important topic. The only real problem with it is that it's comprehensively mistaken.
Thanks to Bret Devereaux's great blog posts on Victoria II (and to a lesser extent Europa Universalis) I was skeptical of the thesis from the start. Treating World War I as Old World Older business as usual without noting the "balance of power" system that made 1820-1910 almost as quiet within Europe as 1950-2020 is a mistake. So is giving New World Order a pass on World War II and various colonial wars / Cold War proxy conflicts. And Devereaux's account of how the growing costs and shifting technologies of war have changed its use is a persuasive contrast to this review's dismissiveness.
But I also found some real howlers in the review that torpedoed its credibility for me. Anyone who did the 30 seconds of Googling to learn that Europa Universalis covers the 15th-19th centuries should understand that the review's critique of Zvi is flat-out wrong. Anyone remotely familiar with the US-Mexican War will know that it was started by the US pressing a specific territorial claim along the southern border of freshly-annexed Texas-- a claim whose weakness as a casus belli was noted by none other than Abraham Lincoln in opposition to the war. And anyone with the slightest awareness of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory-- what it stipulates and when it developed-- would bring more to the subject of war's historical legal status than this reviewer does.
There's a grain of truth to the review's argument-- war has tended to become less accepted over time-- but the shift has been much smaller and more gradual than it's willing to consider. War in the medieval period (perhaps more so than the Grotius era, due to the growing influence of colonialism and nationalism!) absolutely had rules about just causes. Yes, it often broke them, but you can't just compare historical practice with modern aspiration-- if war's been outlawed what are we supposed to make of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq? Do we really think the pretexts for wars of royal succession felt flimsier to contemporaries than that for Iraq does to us? And was what the (almost universally accepted) justification for the US invasion of Afghanistan but an application of the Old World Order understanding of neutrality to the Taliban's aid of Al-Qaeda?
I don't know how much of the wrongheadedness was there in The Internationalists to begin with, but in any case I still fault the reviewer for failing to engage critically. I enjoyed the review and even learned from it, but I can't give my vote to something this glaringly mistaken. As always, many thanks for contributing!
Agree whole-heartedly. It's a negative review-of-the-review but comes across as balanced and fair. The outright low effort dismissals (and I've written one myself) can get tiresome.
"Anyone who did the 30 seconds of Googling to learn that Europa Universalis covers the 15th-19th centuries should understand that the review's critique of Zvi is flat-out wrong. "
I don't really understand that sentence. In which way does that show that the review's critique of Zvi is wrong?
Zvi's reference to "war score and formal borders" is a reference to the mechanics of Europa Universalis, which limit what one can legitimately conquer in a war to much less than the territory one actually occupies. The reviewer appears to think that such limits only exist in the New World Order and that Zvi is projecting them backwards onto earlier times. But in fact they're mechanics in Europa Universalis precisely because they were a standard feature of 15th-19th century war norms.
WW1 was the turning point where empires were dismantled. It began with Spain during the Napoleonic Wars but that could be written off as an anomaly at the time, WW1 is when the impact really started to be felt. Germany, Russia, and Austria all lost there empire status really. Although two of them world get it back this did not last. Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, and France lost most of their colonies. The Soviet Union ended.
By 1992 only the United States remained as an empire, that's why it is the only one going around engaging in random wars. China and India are emerging into empire status now, although India will probably fracture by itself before it can engage in serious wars. That leaves just two empires: US and China.
Without empires there are no high-tech (serious) wars. Nation-states don't really start them (unless, like Russia, it is because it thinks another state's people are actually its own people).
The mindset of the empire is autarchy, they must be self-sufficient, and going to war to secure resources, to restore pride, or weird reasons, makes sense. A nation-state doesn't care about self-sufficiency and instead focuses on increasing its own prosperity, mainly via trade.
I believe there is better predictive power in this than a mindset shift brought about by one treaty.
"Our current economic sanctions against Russia and our providing weapons to Ukraine would have been, in the 19th century, considered plenty of reason for Russia to declare war on us."
They haven't declared war on us because they are afraid of global thermonuclear war. We haven't declared war on them because we are afraid of global thermonuclear war. If Vladimir Putin were restrained by an international norm against aggressive war, he wouldn't have invaded Ukraine twice (three times, depending on how you define it) in the last decade.
> You very much do not get to keep whatever you happen to occupy when there is a formal peace settlement, that has never been how this works ...
> Except this has only been true since the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Prior to the Peace Pact, you absolutely did get to keep territory you took in war.
Not true at all. In the example by the reviewer of the Mexican-American war, supposedly showing that before the Pact you did indeed keep occupied territory, the US occupied Mexico City but didn't keep it after the formal peace settlement. Exactly like the quoted guy was saying.
Yes you keep *some* of the territory, maybe, but usually a small amount of the overall conquest, for reasons that vary between "not wanting" the territory (meaning difficult to administer, likely to have continued resistence), no deal and continued fighting by the losing side (note this is similar to "not wanting" in effect), international opprobium, internal political concerns/war goals etc
I wonder how tightly it would be possible to overlap Qutb's specific form of the Islamic conception of governance with a generic AI-optimist conception of governance. Someone with more of a grasp of the science fiction history would have to weigh in, but I'm fairly certain that "humans are clearly not good at governance, wouldn't it be nice to have a suprahuman intelligence running things?" goes back in AI form far before Asimov and MULTIVAC.
I.e. everyone agrees with Qutb on the problem, but not having a belief in his god we cannot agree with his solution.
Typo thread? I didn't see one already.
Under the heading Addendum 2, there does not seem to be a second thing that is being assumed after "both that states could go to war", so the "both" seems incorrect.
> the death of an Austro-Hungarian Prince, in Serbia
Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, which is and was in Bosnia. Bosnia had been unilaterally annexed by Austro-Hungary several years before the event.
It's very weird to see Zvi's claim about Ukraine 'refuted' in a context that then explicitly discusses German unification. Because German unification is a perfect analogy. War was fought, ceasefire was initiated, partial territorial changes were agreed, much less than "keep what you take" but substantial. A few years later, war was fought again, and the most likely peace agreement still seems like it will be a partial territorial change; the conquered recognizing some claims of the conqueror for peace, and the conqueror giving up some land they have taken to forestall local rebellion and acquire international legitimacy from third parties. And if the conqueror is too aggressive in trying to keep everything they took (Alsace-Lorraine, the on-paper plans to decapitate Kyiv and take all of Ukraine at once), they pay a realpolitik cost in domestic unrest, resentful neighbors eager to take it back, and perception that they are an unreliable ally who may drag others into unwise wars.