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The Abolition of Slavery and the End of International WarAuthor(s): James Lee RaySource: International Organization, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Summer, 1989), pp. 405-439Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706653 .Accessed: 15/10/2011 23:39

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The abolition of slavery and the end of international war James Lee Ray

In A Study of War, Quincy Wright observes that "war ... is found in nearly all existing groups, however primitive."'I The origins of slavery may well have involved a combination of warfare and economic incentives, as noted by Will Durant: "The rise of agriculture . . . led to the employment of the socially weak by the socially strong; not till then did it occur to the victor in war that the only good prisoner is a live one. Butchery and cannibalism lessened, slavery grew.... War helped to make slavery, and slavery helped to make war."2

In addition to this hypothesized connection between their origins, slavery and war have also shared an assumed common base in "human nature." That is, for thousands of years even many of those with the best minds assumed that war and slavery were natural and therefore inevitable. In this view, according to Kenneth Waltz, "Our miseries are ineluctably the product of our natures. The root of all evil is man, and thus he is himself the root of the specific evil, war. This estimate of cause . . . has been immensely influential. It is the conviction of St. Augustine and Luther, of Malthus and

An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, St. Louis, 29 March to 2 April 1988. Eimad Houry, Allen Joseph, Mihali Krassacopoulos, Patricia Morris, and Mi Yung Yoon made helpful comments on that version. I am especially grateful for the criticisms and suggestions of Gilbert Abcarian, Dale L. Smith, Stephen D. Krasner, and anonymous reviewers for International Organization.

1. Quincy Wright, A Study of War, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 36.

2. Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951), p. 20. See also L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, 4th ed. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1923), p. 272. "Two conditions," asserts Hobhouse, "suffice to insure the growth of slavery ... in the savage world. The first condition is a certain development of industrialization." (By this he means, it is obvious from the context, agriculture.) "In a hunting tribe, which lives from hand to mouth, there is little occasion for the services of a slave." Hobhouse then explains that the second condition is "warlike prowess," thus also pointing to war as the intervening variable, so to speak, between the rise of agriculture and the appearance of slavery.

International Organization 43, 3, Summer 1989 ?) 1989 by the World Peace Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

406 International Organization

Jonathan Swift, of Dean Inge and Reinhold Niebuhr. "93 Aristotle, the "greatest philosopher and scientist of the ancient world,"4 believed that some "'people are slaves by nature.... For a man who is able to belong to another person is by nature a slave (for that is why he belongs to someone else . . . )."15 Almost two thousand years later, John Locke was still defending the enslavement of foreign captives, and "no realistic leader" in the 1700s considered the abolition of slavery a reasonable possibility in the foreseeable future.6

Nevertheless, slavery was effectively abolished in the nineteenth century.7 Its disappearance renders plausible the possibility that within decades both slavery and international war will seem quaint and unthinkable in the modern age. Skepticism about such a proposition may be almost universal, but as Samuel Kim points out, "For centuries slavery was 'imagined' as an immutable part of the natural social order. Hence it was utopian to advocate its abolition."8 In a similar vein, Robert Axelrod observes that "'a major goal of investigating how cooperative norms in societal settings have been established is a better understanding of how to promote cooperative norms in international settings. This is not as utopian as it might seem because international norms against slavery . . . are already strong."9 The main implication (at least from the perspective of this article) of Axelrod's argument is clear. Slavery has disappeared because international norms against

3. Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 3.

4. Michael H. Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History (New York: A & W Publishing, 1978), p. 105.

5. Quote from Aristotle's Politics, cited in David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 3. See also Wayne Ambler, "Aristotle on Nature and Politics: The Case of Slavery," Political Theory 15 (August 1987), pp. 390-410; and Wylie Sypher, "Hutcheson and the 'Classical' Theory of Slavery," The Journal of Negro Slavery 24 (July 1939), p. 264. Ambler insists that Aristotle has been misinterpreted on this point and that Aristotle's standards for "natural" slavery were so demanding that in effect he was speaking out against slavery as it was actually practiced. If Ambler is correct, the following observation by Sypher is especially ironic: "For generations before Europe became aware of the barbarous treatment of Negro slaves in the New World colonies, jurists and philosophers accepted as a matter of course the 'classical' theory of slavery expounded in Aristotle's Politics."

6. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, pp. 107-8. In another work, Davis notes that Ben- jamin Franklin owned Negro slaves as late as 1750, and "it would appear that his desire to get rid of them was more a product of racial prejudice than humanitarianism." See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 426.

7. Admittedly, slavery has not been completely eradicated in modern or even contemporary times. "The institution was finally outlawed by Saudi Arabia in 1962 and by the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman in 1970," according to Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, p. 379. Fur- thermore, Stalin and Hitler both made massive use of slave labor, and even today there is a controversy about slavery in the Sudan. See Ushari Ahmad Mahmud and Suleyman Ali Baldo, Al Diein Massacre: Slavery in the Sudan (Khartoum: University of Khartoum, 1987).

8. Samuel Kim, The Quest for a Just World Order (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984), p. 81.

9. Robert Axelrod, "An Evolutionary Approach to Norms," American Political Science Review 80 (December 1986), p. 1110.

International war 407

it are strong; presumably, additional evils such as international war might also disappear, and for similar reasons.

In this article, I address the validity of an argument based on an analogy between the abolition of slavery and the demise of international war. I begin with a discussion of the rise and fall of slavery, placing special emphasis on the contending explanations of slavery's disappearance. Next, I analyze competing theoretical approaches to the role of ethical constraints in international politics. This discussion of slavery's demise and the theoretical consideration of the role of ethics in international politics then serves as the basis for an evaluation of the assertion that the fate of slavery portends the coming end of international war.

Explaining slavery's demise: moral progress or declining profitability?

Slavery was common in ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Greece, Rome, India, and China. The extent to which ancient Greece relied on slaves plays an important role in two controversies relevant to the focus of this article, possibly because the practice became prominent in Greece.'0 One controversy, cited by Moses Finley, involves the juxtaposition of the emergence of important "Western" or liberal values and the concomitant prevalence of slavery: "The cities in which individual freedom reached its highest expression-most obviously Athens-were cities in which chattel slavery flourished."" That the Greeks could formulate and espouse the values of individual freedom and democracy and simultaneously enslave so many in their midst suggests that moral values do not have a powerful deterrent effect on slavery as a social practice.

The extent to which ancient Greece depended on slavery is also important to an evaluation of a standard Marxist interpretation of history, which focuses on "conflicts of economic classes corresponding to specific modes of production, such as slavery, feudalism, or capitalism." 12 Ancient Greece, in the view of Friedrich Engels, was crucially dependent on slavery: "With- out slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery, no Roman empire . . . no modern Europe . . . no modern socialism." 13 Just

10. "Though actual slaves never formed a significant percentage of the population of China, or ancient Egypt, in Greece . . . the number kept increasing from the Persian Wars to the time of Alexander," according to Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 75.

11. See Moses I. Finley, "Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labor?" in Moses I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1960), p. 3; cited in Davis, The Problem of Slavery.

12. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders, eds., Socialist Thought (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1964), p. 278.

13. Quote from Friedrich Engels' essay, "Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science (Anti- Duhring)," cited in M. M. Bober, Karl Marx's Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 50.


how important slavery was in the Roman Empire is a question that has generated a controversy much like that concerning Greece. Marxist scholars agree that it was quite important and that a fundamental cause of Roman imperialism was the economy's need for slaves. But David Brion Davis, in a manner typical of critics of Marxist analyses, asserts that the Romans did not in fact establish an empire for the purpose of acquiring slaves, even though he does acknowledge that "the Roman empire . . . bequeathed to Christian Europe the juridical and philosophical foundations for modern slavery. "14

The practice of slavery became distinctly less prevalent as the Roman Empire declined, and for Marxists the reasons are clear. When slavery disappears, it does so because it is replaced by a more efficient and therefore more progressive mode of production. But Davis points out that "the problem of the decline of slavery in later Roman history is so entangled with the question of the decline of the Empire itself that one must be suspicious of any simple explanation."' 5 One can surmise that the "simple" explanation evoking the most suspicion in Davis's mind is the Marxist model, which suggests that slavery gave way to feudalism in a natural progression because of internal contradictions in the slave system. The details of this process are clearly debatable. "What are the productive forces liberated by slavery that unavoidably create a higher order . . . ? Does a slave mode of production inevitably produce circumstances which must result in feudalism?" asks M. M. Bober in Karl Marx's Interpretation of History. In Bober's opinion, at least, there is "no answer" to these questions.'6 Nevertheless, it is quite clear that in Western Europe "slavery declined and then virtually disappeared with the emergence of the feudal system." 17

Moral progress may have had something to do with this development. John Nef points out that "before Dante's time [1215-1321 A.D.], slavery had almost entirely disappeared among the Christian peoples of Western Europe, partly, as Montesquieu later assumed, 'because the law of the church made it inadmissable to reduce to servitude a brother in Christ.' "18 But slavery did not entirely disappear from Europe in the Middle Ages; slavery-like serfdom thrived in Europe for centuries; and most important, many powerful European states were on the verge of inaugurating the great transatlantic slave trade in the following centuries. It is therefore difficult to sustain an argument that the decline of slavery in medieval Europe was primarily the result of an emerging moral consensus that slavery was wrong. The reluc- tance of Christians to enslave other Christians can be seen as an important step in the direction of forming that consensus, but it seems that where

14. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, p. 27. 15. Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 37. 16. Bober, Karl Marx's Interpretation of History, p. 54. 17. Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 37. 18. John U. Nef, War and Human Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1950), p. 232.


slavery did disappear in Europe, it was largely because economic processes made it outmoded and less profitable. "The decline of slavery was not due to moral progress," asserts Durant in The Age of Faith (focusing on the Middle Ages), "but to economic change. Production under direct physical compulsion proved less profitable or convenient than production under the stimulus of acquisitive desire."19

Slavery in the New World

The discovery of the New World created powerful economic incentives that led to a resurgence of slavery on a grand scale-probably, in fact, the grandest of all time.20 In the period from 1502 to almost 1900, slaves were brought from Africa to the Americas by the millions. (Native Americans were used as slaves in the earlier years, but they proved "unsuitable" in several ways, one of which was a stubborn tendency to die.) Great Britain officially prohibited the slave trade in 1807 and played a role in bringing it to a virtual halt by the latter half of the nineteenth century. The British also legally ended slavery in territories under their control in 1833, while the Civil War brought it to an end in the United States by 1865. Cuba and Brazil were the last holdouts in the Western hemisphere; slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886, while Brazil officially terminated it in 1888.

Many of the most influential interpretations of the demise of slavery in the Western hemisphere have been "economistic,"s21 whether devised by classical or liberal theorists on the one hand or by Marxist, radical scholars on the other. As Davis indicates, both schools of thought convey "the comfortable assurance that slavery was doomed by impersonal laws of historical progress and that economic development ensured . . . social and moral betterment."22 In short, both liberals and radicals, in their analyses of slavery, typically exhibit a common faith in the rationality or utility- maximizing behavior of those involved in exploiting slave labor. When slavery disappears, in this view, it must have been forced out by a more efficient system of production.23

Classical analyses of the demise of slavery that focus on market forces date directly back to Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued

19. Will Durant, The Age of Faith (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950), p. 524. 20. Howard Temperley, "Capitalism, Slavery, and Ideology," Past and Present 75 (May

1977), p. 94. 21. Richard K. Ashley, "Three Modes of Economism," International Studies Quarterly 24

(December 1983), pp. 463-96. 22. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, p. xiv. 23. This similarity in the views of classicists and Marxists is arguably less anomalous than

it might appear at first glance. See George Soule, Ideas of Great Economists (New York: Mentor, 1952), p. 63. Soule points out that "the economic theory developed in Capital is almost wholly classical, much though the discovery may surprise both orthodox followers of Smith and Ricardo as well as orthodox socialists. Marx used no assumption not outlined by some writer of the classical school, and his method of reasoning was, like theirs, deduction from a few relatively simple postulates."


that slaves can have no interest but "to eat as much as possible and to labour as little as possible" and that work done by slaves is inevitably the "dearest of any" (that is, grossly inefficient) and thus bound to disappear if market forces are allowed to operate.24 Davis states that "Smith was certain," for example, "that economic causes explained the abolition of bondage in West- ern Europe. Landowners simply came to realize that their profits would increase by giving labor a share of the produce.' '25

If slave labor is in principle so relatively unproductive, why did it appear in the first place? Smith explained this anomaly for his theory with a rather obviously ad hoc modification: he asserted that slave owners engaged in the domination of inferiors out of a love of power, even to the detriment of their economic self-interest.26

Marxist analysts are usually more theoretically consistent. Slavery appears and disappears, in their view, as the result of market forces. Slavery must have been "rational"; otherwise the practice would not have been developed. Likewise, when it disappears, it does so because the dialectical process has reached the point at which a new mode of production has become more efficient.

One of the most noted contemporary analyses of the disappearance of slavery in the Western hemisphere is that of Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery, which focuses on the history of slavery in the British West Indies. Williams' thesis is straightforward: "When British capitalism depended on the West Indies, they ignored or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as a first step in the destruction of the West Indian monopoly. " 27

The thesis most cleary in contrast to the "economistic" arguments of Williams and others emphasizes the importance of moral progress in the process that brought about the elimination of slavery in the Western hemisphere. Crane Brinton, in A History of Western Morals, succinctly describes the heart of this debate:

The prize exhibit of those who can still believe in moral progress is the Western achievement of abolishing chattel slavery.... The Marxists, and not only the Marxists, never tire of insisting that slavery has always prevailed where it was economically profitable and has only been abolished after it has been demonstrated to at least most slave-owners ... that slavery is unprofitable.... The honest materialist would have to admit that the completeness of abolition can be explained only by

24. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Norton, 1937), p. 63. 25. Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 434. 26. Ibid. 27. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1944), p. 169.


the fact that the overwhelming majority of Westerners came in a few generations to feel that slavery is wrong.28

Economism versus idealism

The British, abolition in the West Indies, and the end of the Atlantic slave trade. The debate between adherents to economistic models on the one hand and defenders of moral progress on the other focuses on the motives of policymakers and other political and economic agents involved in the abolition of slavery, motives that were invisible and perhaps even obscured intentionally. Who knows what evil (or virtue) lurks in the hearts of men (or persons)? Nevertheless, there are differences in the empirical implications of these competing models which may allow at least a tentative evaluation of their relative validity. The economistic models, but not their competitors, suggest that at some point slave owners realized that slave labor had become relatively unprofitable and then more or less voluntarily gave up their slaves in order to move on to some more profitable mode of production. But, as Howard Temperley points out, "Virtually without exception the principal defenders of slavery were, in fact, the slaveholders themselves [and] . . . by contrast, those who spearheaded the attack on slavery were almost invariably men with no direct economic stake in the institution.' '29

Economistic models also suggest that once slave owners had done the right thing from an "expected utility" point of view, they reaped the benefits of their wisdom. Models emphasizing idealism and moral progress, in contrast, imply that abolition occurs even in the absence of an economic payoff and perhaps even in the face of economic costs, since profit and loss calculations have not been central, in this view, to the process that eliminated slavery.

In the key case of the West Indies, the economistic implication that abolition was profitable turns out rather clearly to be wrong. Sugar production in the wake of abolition dropped precipitously-by a third overall and by as much as 50 percent in specific cases, such as Jamaica.30 This hurt not only the former slave owners but also those who marketed and bought sugar in Great Britain. Partly as a result of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, sugar growers in Cuba and Brazil stepped up the importation of slaves and the export of sugar to Great Britain. Having effectively abolished slavery in their own colonial holdings, the British stepped up the pressure against the traffic in slaves to Cuba and Brazil. The economistic interpretation of this British policy is that it was a rational attempt by the British to prevent competitors from obtaining slave labor in order to protect the sugar producers

28. Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), pp. 435-36.

29. Temperley, "Capitalism, Slavery, and Ideology," p. 97. 30. Ibid., p. 103.


in their own colonies.31 But denying the Brazilians, for example, free access to slaves deprived the British of access to the cheap sugar and other commodities those newly imported slaves would have produced, and it also depressed the market for British exports that could have been created among slave owners and others in Brazil who might have reaped the economic benefits of selling those slave-produced commodities.32

The abolition of slavery and of slave trade, then, was not clearly an economically rational move by the British. Admittedly, the argument that abolition was based primarily on ethical considerations is weakened by the fact that abolitionists as well as their opponents made consistent attempts to conceal their motives.33 Furthermore, Temperley makes a convincing case for his assertion that abolitionists in Britain in the 1830s believed that ending slavery would bring economic benefits to Britain, thus creating doubts about the relative importance of the contributions of economic incentives and ethical constraints to the success of that movement.34 Nevertheless, evidence regarding the economically damaging effects of the abolition of both the slave trade and slavery is sufficient to undermine to an important degree economistic explanations of Great Britain's role in slavery's demise. Tem- perley, for example, concludes that Eric Williams' "own evidence fails to support his conclusions . .. [and] further evidence shows that the dominant economic interests in Britain, far from being impelled to weaken or destroy slavery, would have profited from strengthening and extending it."35 Simi- larly, David Eltis asserts that the slave trade in the Americas was "killed when its significance ... was greater than at any point in its history.... For [the] British, . . . there was profound incompatibility between economic

31. See, for example, Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 148. These authors point out that in 1826 "Britain got from Brazil a treaty commitment to end the slave trade by 1830. The British wanted this commitment for several reasons. One, usually stressed by modern day economic historians, is that Britain feared that slave-produced sugar from Brazil would prove cheaper in the world market than sugar from the British West Indies, where slavery had recently been abolished." Skidmore and Smith unwittingly undermine the economistic argument here, since slavery was not in fact abolished in the British West Indies until 1833, which was seven years after the date (1826) they obtained the commitment from Brazil to end the slave trade by 1830. They also explicitly support the "idealistic" or "moral progress" model, asserting that another reason for British action against the slave trade to Brazil was "pressure on the British government generated by British abolitionists" (p. 148).

32. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 12.

33. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, p. 170. See also Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975); and Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: Uni- versity of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).

34. Temperley, "Capitalism, Slavery, and Ideology," p. 118. 35. Howard Temperley, "Anti-Slavery as Cultural Imperialism," in Christine Bolt and Sey-

mour Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform (Hamden, Conn.: Anchor Books, 1980), p. 339. Temperley cites Drescher, Econocide, in support of his assertion. In a later volume, Capitalism and Antislavery (New York: Macmillan, 1986), Drescher maintains that 'most of the specifics of Williams' economic argument have ... been undermined" (p. 2).


self-interest and antislavery policy." Furthermore, Eltis has no doubt about why the antislavery policy was adopted: "The set of beliefs that branded slavery and the slave trade as evil prevented the continued incorporation of the slave trade and slavery into the British and indeed the world economic system at a time when the British economy had the greatest need of such institutions."36 Davis concurs: "Britain's dogged pursuit of foreign slavers was . . . contrary to the nation's immediate political and economic interests. The impetus behind British anti-slavery policies was mainly religious. 37

The American Civil War and abolitionism. Slavery in the United States was abolished as a result of the Union's victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War. The impact of that war on the practice of slavery can be integrated into quite disparate explanatory themes. One argues that slavery was not an important issue in that struggle, and so its disappearance after the war was a side effect that cannot be convincingly attributed to the ethical concerns of abolitionists in the North. Another interprets the Civil War as a competition between one system based on "wage slavery" and another based on chattel slavery, with the victory of the former representing the ascendance of a more efficient mode of production.38

But vital economic interests in the North, up to the time of the Civil War, profited handsomely from the toil of slaves in the South. According to Tem- perley, "Northern cotton manufacturers were dependent on Southern plan- tation agriculture for their raw materials. New York finance houses provided Southerners with much of their capital and reaped their reward in interest. New England shippers carried the South's cotton to the factories of Europe and the North."39

Granted, the clash of economic interests in the rapidly industrializing North and the primarily agricultural South created several issues, such as the focus on tariffs, to cite a prominent example, which made victory for the Union beneficial to the pocketbooks of many in the North. However, the predominant economic classes in the North were not necessarily well served by the abolition of slavery in the South. The antislavery position of the Union did bring clear political benefits, some of which were international in scope, and those benefits, arguably, flowed ultimately from the widespread feeling that slavery was indefensible on ethical grounds. Even the South was responsive to such considerations, as Eltis makes clear: "One of the first actions of the Montgomery (Alabama) Constitutional Convention of 1861,

36. Eltis, Economic Growth, pp. 15 and 28. 37. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, pp. xxviii and 236. See also Irving Kristol, " 'Human

Rights': The Hidden Agenda," The National Interest 6 (Winter 1986-87), p. 10. In this recent article on ethical issues in contemporary international politics, Kristol asserts that "probably the 'purest'-most moral, least self-interested-foreign policy action ever taken on behalf of 'human rights' was the British navy's suppression of the slave trade in the nineteenth century."

38. Argument set forth by A. M. Simons in Class Struggle in America, a 1903 publication cited in Temperley, "Capitalism, Slavery, and Ideology," pp. 101-2.

39. Temperley, "Capitalism, Slavery, and Ideology," pp. 101-2.


as the new Confederacy strove for international acceptance, was to prohibit slave importations from any foreign source. "40 In short, both the Union's position against slavery and the South's official position against the slave trade were evoked in part to take advantage of domestic and international political support based on an increasingly accepted international norm that slavery was unacceptable.

Furthermore, one point that the exceedingly controversial study by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross, does seem to have established quite convincingly is that slavery in the Confederacy was not an incredibly inefficient economic institution on its last legs in a region suffering from great deprivation as a result of its stubborn resistance to the more economically rational forces of abolition: "Far from being poverty stricken, the South was quite rich by the standards of the antebellum era. If we treat the North and the South as separate nations and rank them among the countries of the world, the South would stand as the fourth richest nation of the world in 1860.''41 As one review of Time on the Cross concludes, "The slavery system [in the South] was not economically dead or even near death as the Civil War approached; in fact, there was little indication that the system would ever collapse of its own weight.' '42 In sum, the abolition of slavery by the victorious Union did not merely bring about that which was about to happen anyway because the slave system had become economically unviable. And since the North's victory was inspired in some measure, perhaps, by abolitionists, and even more important, since the Union's antislavery stance was formulated to cultivate domestic and international political support based on the belief that slavery was wrong, the demise of slavery in the South can be seen as a result, in part, of moral progress.43

40. Eltis, Economic Growth, p. 209. 41. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross (Boston: Little,

Brown, 1974), p. 249. Fogel and Engerman also observe that "the South was richer than France, richer than Germany, richer than Denmark, richer than any of the countries of Europe except England" (p. 249) and that "per capita income was actually growing 30 percent more rapidly in the South than the North. The South's rate of growth was so rapid . .. that it constitutes prima facie evidence against the thesis that slavery retarded southern growth" (p. 251).

42. Wilson Record and Joan Cassells Record, "Review Symposium," Contemporary Soci- ology 4 (July 1975), p. 361.

43. Cases can be made for the importance of moral progress as a factor in bringing an end to slavery in Brazil and Cuba, which I will describe briefly here to conserve space. With regard to the ending of the slave trade in Brazil, Eltis asserts that "developments within Brazil cannot be ignored, [but] the major pressures for suppression came from outside the importing regions. The most generalized of these by mid-nineteenth century was the international opprobrium in which the slave trade was held. As the Brazilian foreign minister conceded, . .. his country could no longer 'resist the pressure of the ideas of the age in which we live.' " See Eltis, Economic Growth, p. 209. The abolition of slavery itself in Brazil came much later, in 1888. It was inspired in part by an abolitionist campaign, by the spreading turbulence and flight of slaves, and by the fact that soldiers and officers charged with catching and returning fugitive slaves reached the point at which they refused such missions on the grounds that they were morally repugnant. See Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, pp. 151-52; and Robert Brent Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (New York: Atheneum, 1972), pp. 225-46. In Cuba, Spain decreed an end to slavery in 1886, under pressure and influence from abolitionists


A cautious conclusion

The evidence that slavery was a productive, apparently efficient mode of production in most places in the New World up to the time it was abolished and the additional indications that the demise of slavery entailed economic costs for slave owners and others who had benefited from the labor of slaves (including abolitionists themselves) enhance the plausibility of the case in favor of the importance of moral progress in bringing an end to slavery. Ethical considerations may not have always been of primary importance to those who were responsible for ending slavery. And some actions against slavery were cynical, designed to reap political benefits. But those political benefits would not have been realizable had it not been for the increasingly common idea that slavery was immoral. At the very least, it can be said with some confidence that competing arguments to the effect that slavery disappeared only when abolition clearly became the economically rational thing to do are not compelling.

Moral values and international politics

The basic idea that "might makes right" runs through the entire history of political thought and should not be attributed to any single political thinker. Nevertheless, in modern times the notion that political actions are and should be independent from ethical considerations, especially in the international arena, is virtually synonymous with the name of Machiavelli.44 Machiavelli's claim that international politics in particular must be divorced from "normal" ethical constraints can be traced from Renaissance Italy to Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche and, in contemporary times, to Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations elaborated on the basic assertion that "statesmen think and act in terms of power" by warning against "equating the foreign policies of a statesman with his philosophic or political sympa- thies" and by insisting that "moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states."45 Such views have been so influential for so long that, according to Charles Beitz, "for many years, it has been impossible to make moral arguments about international relations to its American students without encountering the claim that moral judgments have no place in discussions of international affairs or foreign policy. "46

in Spain, the United States, Great Britain, and Cuba as well as in response to a wide range of additional political and economic incentives. See Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, pp. 285-91.

44. Daniel Donno, "Introduction," Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1966), p. 7.

45. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 4th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967), pp. 5-10.

46. Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 15.


"Realists" such as Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, Raymond Aron, and Robert Strausz-Hupe were and are staunchly anticommunist in orientation, but on the relationship between ethics and political action, their thinking shares some important similarities with Marxist perspectives. Realists and Marxists warn against taking the statements of political leaders about the ethical bases of their actions at face value. Realists argue that such statements are at best rationalizations (or tactics), while Marxists assert that ideological justifications for political acts are part of the "superstructure" and represent tools in class warfare designed to defend class interests.47 Trotsky, for example, in Their Morals and Ours, warns that "the appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophical mistake but a necessary element in the mechanisms of class deception.' '48 Realists conclude that it is the duty of leaders to do what is necessary to defend the interests of the state. Marxists (or at least some Marxists, such as Trotsky) come to analogous conclusions about their preferred political agent: "To a revolutionary Marxist there can be no contradiction between personal morality and the interests of the party, since the party embodies in his consciousness the very highest tasks and aims of humanity."49

Moral skepticism versus idealism

In opposition to the realists and Marxists, who express moral skepticism, are the "idealists" (or idea-lists), who express confidence in the independent role that ideas as well as ideals do and should play in international (and domestic) politics. World War II rather severely depleted the ranks of idealists among American international relations scholars; that war was interpreted by many as indicative of fatal weaknesses (literally as well as intel- lectually) in the legalistic approach that dominated the field for most of the interwar period, leaving a relatively hardy few to combat the realistic tide in the 1950s.

But idealism resurfaced in the 1970s, at least in the eyes of some. Perhaps its most important incarnation was Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye's Power and Interdependence,50 which according to Stanley Michilak "may well become the Politics Among Nations of the 1970s." 51 Power and Interde- pendence is explicitly antirealist in some important respects, de-emphasizing

47. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The German Ideology," in Lewis S. Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959), p. 247. See also Marshall Cohen, "Moral Skepticism and International Relations," in Charles R. Beitz et al., eds., International Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 12. Cohen notes that "in defending his claim that all politics is 'power' politics, Morgenthau offers . .. quasi-Marxist arguments."

48. Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p. 22. 49. Ibid., p. 44. 50. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown,

1977). 51. Stanley Michilak, Jr., "Theoretical Perspectives for Understanding International Inter-

dependence," World Politics 32 (October 1979), p. 150.


the role of states and downplaying the significance of military force. It also emphasizes the impact of "regimes" on state behavior. From the perspective of this article, it is most useful to stress that "regimes can be defined as ... norms" and that norms are in turn "standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations." As Stephen Krasner acknowledges, "Regime- governed behavior must not be based solely on short-term calculations of interest.... [It] must embody some sense of general obligation."52 Donald Puchala and Raymond Hopkins are even more explicit about the idealistic implications of regime analysis. "Statesmen nearly always perceive themselves," they assert, "as constrained by principles, norms, and rules that prescribe and proscribe varieties of behavior."53

Interdependence or regime analysis, then, does emphasize, at least by fairly clear implications, the impact of ethical constraints and moral values. This strikes John Spanier, for example, as "unrealistic": "The argument for interdependence reflects an attempt to escape power politics into a calmer, more decent and humane world.... [It] represents a deeply felt utopian streak . . . in American thinking in international politics."54 There is, in short, enough idealism in interdependence/regime analysis to make it a tempting target for moral skeptics from various points on the ideological spectrum, such as Spanier and Susan Strange.55

Obscured areas of agreement

But upon inspection, what is striking about the debate between the moral skeptics (such as the realists and Marxists) on the one hand and the idealists (both old and new) on the other is a considerable degree of agreement on the impact of ethical constraints and moral values as motivating factors in international politics, along with virtual unanimity regarding the concurrent prevalence of self-interested, utility-maximizing behavior in the global political system. Even Machiavelli acknowledged that there are times when "the prince" should refrain from his capacity to be "other than good" and that it is often true that "morality pays."56 Politics Among Nations includes a chapter entitled "International Morality," and the conclusion is not that moral principles do not matter. On the contrary, Morgenthau declares that "if we ask ourselves what statesmen and diplomats are capable of doing to further the power objectives of their respective nations and what they ac-

52. Stephen D. Krasner, "Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Inter- vening Variables," International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), pp. 186-87.

53. Donald J. Puchala and Raymond F. Hopkins, "International Regimes: Lessons from Inductive Analysis," International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), p. 270.

54. John Spanier, Games Nations Play, 6th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1987), p. 670.

55. Susan Strange, "Cave! Hic Dragones: A Critique of Regime Analysis," International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), p. 441.

56. Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 56.


tually do, we realize that they do less than they probably could and less than they did in other periods of history .... Moral values do not permit certain policies to be considered at all. . . . Certain things are not being done on moral grounds, even though it would be expedient to do them."57

Such sentiments are not that unusual in realist writings. In Peace and War, Aron observes that "the realist who asserts that man is a beast of prey and urges him to behave as such, ignores a whole side of human nature. Even in the relations between states, respect for ideas, aspirations to higher values and concern for obligation have been manifested. Rarely have col- lectivities acted as if they would stop at nothing with regard to one another. "58 Kenneth Thompson, sufficiently close to Morgenthau to have been selected to prepare a posthumous edition of Politics Among Nations, asserts that "4even those statesmen who have scoffed at . . . higher principles ... have been obliged to amend their harsh criticisms. For man is at heart a moral being."59 Even Spanier, the acerbic critic of the "utopian" interdependence/regime analysts, argues that although "the United States had an atomic monopoly until late 1949,. . . using this atomic monopoly was never seriously considered, for a 'Pearl Harbor' on Soviet Russia was contrary to American tradition and morality."60 In general, realists regularly attribute significance to the impact of moral considerations on political decisions.6'

A similar point can be made about the role of moral values in Marxist analysis. The "superstructure" is dialectically related to the economic struc- ture of society, which does not imply that it is without important effect. As Harry Targ states, "A point that interpreters of Marx forget is that the superstructure, politics, and dominant ideas, for example, have a reciprocal

57. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 225. 58. Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (New York: Praeger,

1967), p. 609. 59. Kenneth W. Thompson, The Moral Issue in Statecraft (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1966), p. 4. 60. John Spanier, American Foreign Policy Since World War II, 10th ed. (New York: Holt,

Rinehart, & Winston, 1985), p. 29. Spanier's interpretation of American policy from 1945 to 1949 may in fact exaggerate the impact of ethical constraints. See George Quester, Nuclear Diplomacy (New York: Dunellen, 1970), p. 7. Quester argues persuasively that in the years immediately following World War II, the Americans did not have a large number of atomic weapons and lacked confidence in aerial bombardment because of studies showing its lack of effectiveness in World War II. He concludes that "the Soviet capability for occupying Western Europe, and the American capability for air attack, thus might seem to be of the same order of magnitude, and hence mutually deterrent.'"

61. In "Theoretical Perspectives," pp. 146 and 148, Michilak points out that "nowhere.. does Morgenthau argue that . . . morality [is] devoid of influence in abating and curtailing international conflict or regularizing relations among states. In fact, he repeatedly makes statements to the contrary." He concludes that in general the "realist" model as presented in Power and Interdependence is a "straw man." The same point is made by K. J. Holsti, "A New International Politics? Diplomacy in Complex Interdependence," International Organization 32 (Spring 1978), pp. 513-30.


effect on the economic base" (emphasis mine).62 Trotsky saw bourgeois moral precepts as rationalizations and instruments of class warfare, but he did not deny that political actors may be inspired by ethical values. For example, he noted about Lenin that his " 'amoralism,' . . . his rejection of supra-class morals, did not hinder him from remaining faithful to one and the same idea throughout his whole life; from devoting his whole being to the cause of the oppressed." He concludes his discussion on this point with a rhetorical question: "Does it not seem that 'amoralism' in the given case is only a pseudonym for higher human morality?"63 Even as conservative and skeptical a critic of Marxism as Thomas Sowell acknowledges that "Marxian materialism in no way precludes idealism in the popular sense of unselfish thought and action in the service of higher concerns."64 Marxists, moral skeptics though they are, do not deny that ideas and ideals have an important impact on political behavior.

If the general impression created by realist and Marxist analyses leads commonly to the belief that they are more "amoral" in their theoretical approach than they really are, then at least some discussions of idealists and interdependence/regime analysts which suggest that they are utopian are equally misleading. As Keohane and Nye argue in a recent retrospective discussion of Power and Interdependence, rather than viewing realist theory as an alternative to "interdependence" theory, "we regarded the two as necessary complements to one another."65 In After Hegemony, Keohane asserts that regimes should not be interpreted as elements of a new international order "beyond the nation-state" and that they "should be chiefly comprehended as arrangements motivated by self interest.... This means that, as Realists emphasize, they will be shaped largely by their most powerful members, pursuing their own interests. "66

Not all regime analysts have such a "neorealistic" view of regimes. As J. Martin Rochester has pointed out, "regimes" have been adopted by scholars with quite different overall approaches to international politics. "For globalists," he asserts (and globalists by his description seem legitimate heirs

62. Harry Targ, International Relations in a World of Imperialism and Class Struggle (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing, 1983), pp. 147-48. In his introduction to Marx and Engels, p. xiii, Feuer asserts that "Marxism endures as a contribution to our political ethics. This may seem a strange thing to say, for ... Marx ridicule[s] ethical language as nonsense.... Nevertheless, despite his contemptuous rejection of ethical terms, Marx stands out as among the imposing ethical personalities of modern times. His action was more expressive than his word. He became the symbol of the intellectual who has not succumbed to either class or organizational pressures."

63. Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours, p. 45. 64. Thomas Sowell, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (New York: William Morrow,

1985), p. 49. 65. Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., " 'Power and Interdependence' Revisited,"

International Organization 41 (Autumn 1987), p. 72. 66. Robert 0. Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984),

p. 127.


to the classical idealist tradition), "the concept of regime fit nicely into a framework that stressed the nonfungibility of power across various issue areas. For neorealists, it provided a handy vehicle for exploring the limits of cooperation in an inherently conflictual world."67 The diversity within the regime-minded scholarly community is captured nicely by a comparison of the statement of Puchala and Hopkins cited above ("Statesmen nearly always perceive themselves as constrained by principles, norms, and rules... .") with a more recent assertion by Krasner: "Actors are rarely constrained by international principles, norms, rules, or decision-making procedures."68 Neorealists tend to see regimes as having an impact in situations in which "morality pays," even if short-run gains must be sacrificed for the sake of long-term payoffs. Globalists emphasize the potential for regimes to evoke even self-sacrificing behavior. But neither the neorealists and globalists nor the classical idealists such as Quincy Wright are oblivious to the harsh realities of life. Wright acknowledges that there are sharp dis- agreements among scholars about the importance and proper role of ethical considerations in international politics, but he concludes that "none of these antinomies seems necessary. Ethics and expediency are separated by no such sharp lines. Ethics is long-run expediency and expediency is short- term ethics.'"69

In sum, the differences between these schools of thought in the field of international politics, although admittedly sharp in some respects, are relatively subtle when it comes to the role of ethical considerations and moral constraints. Ultimately, realists, radicals, idealists, and interdependence/regime analysts all concede that while self-interested behavior predom- inates, behavior inspired by norms and ethical standards or constrained by moral values is by no means absent. The moral skeptics do not deny the potential importance of normative values, and those who emphasize the impact of values are not such giddy optimists that their opinions regarding the importance of ideas and ideals deserve to be ignored.

Some regime analysts argue that "morality pays" and stipulate that norms can be expected to have an impact when adherence to them involves some reward, at least in the long run. But behavior of this kind is quasi-moral at best. As Beitz points out, "The idea that considerations of advantage are distinct from those of morality, and that it might be rational to allow the latter to override the former, seems to be at the core of our intuitions about morality."70 Although moral skeptics and idealists both allow for the pos-

67. J. Martin Rochester, "The Rise and Fall of International Organization as a Field of Study," International Organization 40 (Autumn 1986), pp. 799-800.

68. Stephen D. Krasner, Structural Confict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 60.

69. Quincy Wright, A Study of International Relations (New York: Appleton, 1955), p. 448. 70. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 16. See also William K. Frankena,

Ethics, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 19. Frankena makes the same point: "Prudentialism or living wholly by the principle of enlightened self-love just is not a kind of morality."


sibility that moral values can have an important impact on political behavior, neither specifies the circumstances under which such values may evoke truly altruistic or group-oriented behavior (as opposed to egotistic behavior) or under which we can expect ethical constraints to override egotistic calculations.

William Nelson asserts that the best argument against egoism (and in defense of the possibility of altruism) was written by Joseph Butler in 1726.71 And yet models based on assumptions of rationality and egotistic "expected utility" calculations do confront quite persistent anomalies. Howard Mar- golis asks, for example, "Why should the voter accept anything more than trivial inconvenience to vote when even in a very close election, the chance that his particular vote would make a difference in the outcome is itself trivial?" and then observes, "Yet most people do vote, and in general the propensity to vote increases with education.' '72 Analogous anomalies exist regarding contributions to public radio and television stations; volunteers for military service, especially in times of war; and, internationally, the outpouring of contributions from governments as well as private individuals when famine occurs (such as in Ethiopia) or when hurricanes or earthquakes hit distant countries. Such anomalies are sufficiently numerous for Margolis to conclude that "no economist would deny the possibility of altruism in rational choice.... In recent years, efforts to incorporate altruistic pref- erences within the conventional framework have become fairly common."73 The argument here is that the disappearance of slavery and recent trends in international warfare suggest that ethical constraints and moral progress have had an important impact on international politics. Despite some appearances to the contrary, this argument is not fundamentally incongruent with any of several important diverse approaches to international politics. Like economists, the adherents to these approaches to international politics make efforts to incorporate the impact of ethical constraints into their frameworks. In fact, these efforts are sufficiently consistent that they can accurately be described as "fairly common."

The demise of slavery and the coming end of war?

Ending slavery, at least within a given state, is a fundamentally different problem than ending war. A state's decision makers can choose to end slavery within state borders. In this case, it is unlikely that another state

71. William Nelson, "Introduction: Moral Principles and Moral Theory," in Kenneth Kipnis and Diana T. Meyers, eds., Political Realism and International Morality (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987), p. 7. Joseph Butler's work was entitled Fifteen Sermons upon Human Nature.

72. Howard Margolis, Selfishness, Altruism, and Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1982), p. 17.

73. Ibid., p. 11.


would be motivated to compel the abolitionist state to change its position. But because of the security dilemma in the international system and because of the lack of a central authority to enforce adherence even to widely agreed upon norms, an "aggressive" state could, if it chose, put its "peace-loving" counterpart in situations in which it has only the choice between fighting a war and ceasing to exist. For this reason, there is no developing consensus thatfighting an international war is ethically unacceptable. In fact, the emergence of such a consensus might well be interpreted as regression, rather than moral progress, if it led to "good" states (and people) meekly submitting to domination by "bad" states that established a permanent peace based on tyranny and perhaps on social and cultural bigotry (anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and the like).

If international war is to disappear as a result of moral progress (as, arguably, slavery did), ethical constraints will need to become sufficiently effective that political leaders will refrain from initiating (rather than fighting) wars. The most important barrier to the elimination of international war will be the absence of a legitimate central authority to enforce antiwar norms, even if they do become widespread. However, as moral progress continues, one can logically expect a decline in the number of political leaders who will be inclined to develop deceptive strategies and rationalizations in defense of war initiation, as well as a decline in the number of those who will be inclined to accept those rationalizations. This will not totally eliminate the possibility that wars will be initiated in genuine attempts at preemption. But in a world in which ethical norms against war initiation are very strong (strong enough to provide a basis for a regime, perhaps), suspicions that one's state is about to be the victim of an attack will eventually lose their logical base, and accusations regarding imminent attacks will lose their credibility. For the sake of argument, let's say that I am a national leader. If I know that my counterparts sincerely believe that it is ethically unacceptable to initiate an international war and if I also know that they know that I feel the same way, reciprocal fears of surprise attack will be much less likely to escalate uncontrollably. On the other hand, if I do not feel personally bound by ethical constraints regarding war initiation, my charges that my opponent is about to attack will lack plausibility if I am extraordinarily unusual in my rejection of those constraints. Lacking a plausible defense of my actions, I will be likely to decide that the onus on a war initiator is so great that no gain from starting a war will compensate for the political costs involved.

Connections between the demise of slavery and the end of war

Although slavery was ultimately an intrastate matter, it did also, like international war, involve interstate relations. The slave trade, as we have seen, especially in the Western hemisphere, was an issue in international


politics. Slavery, then, and its demise were (like war) affected by foreign policies and by relationships between states within the international political arena.

More important, there are logical connections between the practice of slavery and the philosophical rationalizations developed in its defense on the one hand and the practice of war and its associated philosophical defense on the other, and these connections suggest that if one comes to seem outmoded because of developments in ethical thought, the other might soon suffer the same fate. Slavery and international war both involve the use of brute force to control behavior and extract benefits. If it is no longer ethically acceptable for one human being to use brute force to extract economic benefits from another, then a decreasing tolerance for states that "enslave" their counterparts by means of military conquest can be expected to follow. (Indeed, it already has to some degree.) Slave systems often rested to an important extent on invidious comparisons between groups of human beings. Centuries before slavery was abolished, Christians generally refrained from enslaving each other, and Moslems typically enslaved only infidels. Ration- alizations of slavery in the New World were based on the assumption that the black race was inferior. Rationalizations in defense of international wars, too, often depend on invidious comparisons between groups of human beings, on "us versus them" distinctions. Colonial wars of conquest, for example, were justified as necessary for the purpose of spreading civilization (or re- storing law and order) to inferior peoples. Even international wars between "modern" states have been based on invidious comparisons, those devised by Adolf Hitler being the most infamous.

Ultimately, the notion from the Enlightenment that all men are created equal undermined the credibility of the invidious comparisons between cat- egories of human beings on which slave systems were based. Related notions about the value of human life have, in contemporary times, undermined rationalizations for legal killing. Currently, for example, South Africa and the United States are the only industrialized Western countries in which some criminals are executed. (Dueling has disappeared even in these two states.) Egalitarian ideals, perhaps, will likewise ultimately render untenable the roughly analogous invidious comparisons and rationalizations for legal killing which serve as justifications for the initiation of international war.74

Evidence regarding trends in attitudes about international war

If analyzed over a period of centuries or even within the confines of the current century, important changes about the extent to which, and against whom, war is justified can be clearly identified. Evan Luard, for example,

74. Fred Riggs brought to my attention this potential logical connection between the demise of slavery and the possible coming end of war.


in his analysis of War in International Society, observes that from 1400 to 1559, war was "not only seen as a glorious enterprise but as a reliable source of material reward.... War was everywhere regarded as a normal activity in which all the rulers of the age might take part and if possible excel." In the next epoch (1559-1648), war was considered ".an essentially normal feature of human existence which must be expected to continue." In the "age of nationalism" (1789-1917), "there began to be . . . almost for the first time, a sense that . . . war was increasingly required to be justified."'75

Concerning the current century in particular, Morgenthau notes the following:

The attitude toward war itself has reflected an ever increasing aware- ness on the part of most statesmen that certain moral limitations restrict the use of war as an instrument of foreign policy. . . . The student of the different collections of diplomatic documents concerning the origins of the First World War is struck by the hesitancy on the part of almost all responsible statesmen, with the exception perhaps of those of Vi- enna and St. Petersburg, to take steps that might irrevocably lead to war. This hesitancy and the almost general dismay among the statesmen when war finally proved to be inevitable contrasts sharply with the deliberate care with which, as late as the nineteenth century, wars were planned and incidents fabricated for the purpose of making war inevitable and placing the blame for starting it on the other side.76

The decision makers involved in the crisis leading to World War I were showing the signs of being affected by a significant change in ethical attitudes about war. Michael Howard notes that "before 1914 war was almost uni- versally considered an acceptable, perhaps an inevitable and for many people a desirable way of settling international differences."77 John Mueller argues that World War I created a revulsion against wars and that, suddenly, "'peace advocates were a decided majority."78

Despite this obvious change in attitudes about war, World War II occurred. Mueller feels that "after World War I the only person left in Europe who was willing to risk another total war was Adolf Hitler. He had a vision and carried it out with ruthless and single-minded determination."79 Surely this is carrying a "great man" theory to an unnecessary and implausible extreme. If Hitler had been the only person left with the determination to initiate a major war, peace would have been preserved. His country supported him,

75. Evan Luard, War in International Society (London: I. B. Taurus, 1986), pp. 330 and 336. 76. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 231. 77. Michael Howard, "The Causes of War," Wilson Quarterly 8 (Summer 1984), p. 92; cited

in John Mueller, "The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons," International Security 13 (Fall 1988), p. 75.

78. Mueller, "The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons," p. 75. 79. Ibid., pp. 75-76.


despite widespread doubts among his fellow citizens. What can be argued more plausibly is that his country had suffered a concatenation of events that is unlikely to be repeated. Germany had lost World War I, had been officially blamed for starting it, and was presented with a large bill for rep- arations. In the early 1920s, Germany suffered one of the worst bouts of inflation of any major power in the history of the world. The economy had just about recovered from that trauma when the Great Depression occurred. Only under those extremely unusual and extraordinarily trying circumstances did the Germans turn to a man like Hitler and take the steps leading to another world war. If the preceding events had not occurred, World War I might have been the last, in which case the world would be in its sixth straight decade of peace among major powers.

As things have turned out, two world wars have solidified a clear "trans- formation" of traditional attitudes about war. In the current era, according to Luard, for the first time, there is "an almost universal sense that the deliberate launching of a war could now no longer be justified."80 Morgen- thau, the quintessential realist, expresses similar sentiments. It is only in the last half of this century, he observes, that "the avoidance of war itself- that is, of any war, has become an aim of statecraft." There has been, he concludes, a "fundamental change in the attitude about war. "81

Evidence regarding trends in the incidence of war

It is relatively easy to establish, then, that "moral progress" has brought about a change in attitudes about international war. It is more difficult to demonstrate that this change has had an impact on the incidence of war. In fact, it must be admitted that some historical data are not supportive of the idea that international war is on the verge of disappearance. World Wars I and II create an impression that the current century is extraordinarily war- prone, and in some respects that impression is accurate. The world wars involved more battle deaths than did any previous international wars (since 1495): seven million and thirteen million soldiers were killed in World Wars I and II, respectively, and civilian losses were also in the millions. According to Jack Levy, the first "Great Power war" to result in at least one million battle deaths was the "Thirty Years' War-Swedish-French" from 1635 to 1648. No other Great Power war in modern history, until the world wars, resulted in as many as two million battle deaths.82 Moreover, Melvin Small and J. David Singer report that not only were World Wars I and lI the two most lethal wars in modern times, but the third and fourth most deadly

80. Luard, War in International Society, p. 365. 81. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, pp. 228-32. 82. Jack Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975 (Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 88.


international wars in terms of battle deaths-namely, the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam-have also occurred in this century.83

Nevertheless, the impression that the world is getting progressively more war-prone may be mistaken. Although the world wars were extremely lethal, Levy asserts that "there has been a relative absence of Great Power war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it has been underway only about one-sixth of the time. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, by contrast, Great Power war was underway about 80 percent of the time."84 When Small and Singer examined the 165 years from 1816 to 1980 to determine whether "war [is] on the increase, as many scholars as well as laymen of our generation have been inclined to believe," they stated that "the answer would seem to be an unambiguous negative. Whether we look at the number of wars, their severity, or their magnitude, there is no significant trend upward or down over the last 165 years. ' 85 Even more striking in light of the thrust of this article is the absence of wars between major powers since World War II. As K. J. Holsti noted in 1986, "By historical standards a forty-one year period without an intra-Great Power war is unprecedented."86 Similarly, Robert Jervis has observed that "the most striking characteristic of the postwar world is just that-it can be called 'postwar' because the major powers have not fought each other since 1945. Such a lengthy period of peace among the most powerful states is unprecedented. "87

The accuracy of such assertions is debatable. The United States fought against China in the Korean War, and if that is counted as a Great Power

83. Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1982), p. 102. See also Charles Gochman and Zeev Maoz, "Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816-1976," Journal of Conflict Resolution 28 (December 1984), p. 613; and J. David Singer, "Normative Constraints on Hostility Between States," Journal of Peace Research 23 (Sep- tember 1986), p. 211. Gochman and Maoz point out that "the years since 1976 appear to have been highly disputatious. There have been seven interstate wars and a large number of very volatile subwar conflicts." It is this kind of evidence that leads to conclusions such as Singer's: "Premises of unbridled sovereignty clearly remain in the saddle, and when allegedly 'vital interests' are at stake, it is difficult to observe much evidence of adherence to the more constraining principles embodied in either 'positive' law-as expressed in the Charter of the United Nations, the statute of the International Court of Justice and the hundreds of conventions and treaties now on the books-or the 'natural' law found in the more scholarly literature on the subject."

84. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, p. 130. 85. Small and Singer, Resort to Arms, p. 141. This statement is based in part on analyses of

data which are "normalized" to take into account the number of people and the number of states in the international system. However, even the non-normalized data reveal no clear trend. The Iran-Iraq war might change the outcome of such analyses.

86. K. J. Holsti, "The Horsemen of the Apocalypse: At the Gate, Detoured, or Retreating?" International Studies Quarterly 30 (December 1986), p. 369.

87. Robert Jervis, "The Political Effects of Nuclear Weapons," International Security 13 (Fall 1988), p. 80. See also Mueller, "The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons," p. 76, in which a similar point is made: "Since 1945, . . . warfare of all sorts seems to have lost its appeal within the developed world. With only minor and fleeting exceptions (the Falklands War of 1982, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia), there have been no wars among the 48 wealthiest countries in all that time."


war,88 the current period of peace (from 1953 to 1989) is only thirty-six years long. If the war between Russia and Japan in 1904-1905 is not counted as a Great Power war,89 then the current period of peace among great powers is not "unprecedented." The forty-three years (1871-1914) between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I were also free of Great Power wars. That is an ominous precedent, culminating as it did in the bloodiest war in history up to that time. Might the current hiatus between wars among great powers be a prelude to an analogous, even more catacylsmic confrontation?

The earlier prolonged period of peace among great powers after the Franco- Prussian War may have inspired Norman Angell in his famous (or notorious) The Great Illusion to declare (in a manner reminiscent of interdependence analysts) that "not only is man fighting less, but he is using all forms of physical compulsion less . .. because accumulated evidence is pushing him more and more to the conclusion that he can accomplish more easily that which he strives for by other means." Military force, in Angell's view, had become anachronistic: "Piracy was magnificent, doubtless, but it was not business. We are prepared to sing about the Viking, but not to tolerate him on the high seas.... Some of us who are quite prepared to give the soldier his due place in poetry and legend and romance . . . are nevertheless in- quiring whether the time has not come to place him (or a good portion of him) gently on the poetic shelf with the Viking."*

In 1981, thirty-six years after World War II, Werner Levi in The Coming End of War expressed similar sentiments. "Developed states," according to Levi, "are unlikely to engage in modern war with each other directly. The mutually reinforcing reasons are that their wars are too costly and that they need each other for the fulfillment of important interests which can be most adequately achieved by nonviolent methods." Levi continues in this vein by pointing out that when developing states have become more like their richer counterparts, they too will refrain from war for the same reasons. He concludes that the likelihood of modern war is nearing the vanishing point because "peaceful cooperation is no longer a luxury. It is now a matter of selfish national interests."91

In 1913 (the year the fourth edition of The Great Illusion was published), Angell's optimism about the obsolescing of international war was based in part on an argument pointing out the possible relevance of the demise of

88. Both Levy in War in the Modern Great Power System and Small and Singer in Resort to Arms categorize the Korean War as a conflict between "great" or "major" powers.

89. It was not a Great Power war according to War in the Modern Great Power System, but it was a war between major powers according to Resort to Arms.

90. Norman Angell, The Great Illutsion, 4th ed. (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1913), pp. 268-69 and 294-95.

91. Werner Levi, The Coming End of War (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1981), pp. 15 and 94. Similarly, in "The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons," p. 78, Mueller declares that "as a form of activity, war in the developed world may be following once fash- ionable dueling into obsolescence."


slavery.92 There are several reasons, in addition to Angell's tragically pre- mature conclusion about international war based on the analogy involving slavery, to be cautious about the potential impact of moral progress on international war. For example, it is certainly possible that the period of peace among major powers following World War II is merely a predictable oasis of stability in the "long cycle" of world leadership within the global political system. In this view, World War II produced a high concentration of power and a new world leader (the United States) that had sufficient resources at hand to provide the "public goods" that serve as a basis for stability. (There were, for example, thirty-eight years of peace among major powers after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.) However, in previous phases, as George Modelski points out, the long cycle has always involved a period of change and deterioration in the position of the world's leader, culminating in another global war.93

In a similar vein, Charles Kegley and Gregory Raymond have found that norm-based regimes may in fact have a visibly constraining impact on the incidence of war in the global system, but this hopeful phenomenon, too, is marked by periodicities and impermanence: "The historical evidence indicates that . .. the formation of . .. international security regimes is ephem- eral and is governed by a cyclical process."94

Furthermore, it is certainly possible that the major powers of the contemporary era have avoided wars against each other not because of the impact of norms (however temporary) but because nuclear weapons make the potential costs of wars unacceptable on more rational, self-interested grounds. Even the rather idealistically inclined Small and Singer observe in their study of militarized disputes from 1816 to 1977 that "the fact that the 20 major versus major confrontations since V-J Day have gone to neither conventional nor nuclear war . .. strongly suggests that the nuclear deterrent, as clumsy and fragile as it is, seems to exercise an inhibiting effect."95 The fact that

92. See Angell, The Great Illusion, p. 270, in which the author states: "Even the great minds of antiquity could not believe the world would be an industrious one unless the great mass were made industrious by the use of physical force-i.e., by slavery. . . . Had they been told that the time would come when the world would work very much harder under the impulse of ... economic interest, they would have regarded such a statement as that of a mere sentimental theorist. "

93. George Modelski, "The Long Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation-State," Compar- ative Studies in Society and History 20 (April 1978), pp. 214-35. See also George Modelski, ed., Exploring Long Cycles (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987).

94. Charles W. Kegley, Jr., and Gregory A. Raymond, "Normative Constraints on the Use of Force Short of War," Journal of Peace Research 23 (September 1986), p. 213. See also Charles W. Kegley, Jr., and Gregory A. Raymond, "International Legal Norms and the Pres- ervation of Peace, 1820-1964: Some Evidence and Bivariate Relationships," International Interactions 8 (July 1981), p. 183, in which the authors also report that "the evidence clearly shows that although there has been a steady change in attitudes about war, there has been no change in the amount of war."

95. Melvin Small and J. David Singer, "Conflict in the International System, 1816-1977: Historical Trends and Policy Futures," in J. David Singer, ed., Explaining War (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1972), p. 77.


formal allies of the superpowers between 1962 and 1980 did not fight wars or even engage in low-level military conflict with one another96 and the fact that no two formal allies of states with nuclear weapons and not allied to each other fought wars against each other from 1945 to 198697 may be further testimony to the inhibiting effect of nuclear weapons rather than moral progress.

Nuclear weapons and contemporary peace

A counterargument might begin with the observation that terrible dev- astation and "total war" had occurred long before the advent of nuclear weapons. The Romans, for example, totally destroyed Carthage in the Third Punic War. The Mongol invasion of the world of Islam in the thirteenth century brought "the end of civilization" as the Moslems knew it. The city of Merv and its inhabitants were captured, and the subsequent slaughter resulted in a reported 1.3 million deaths.98 Hugalu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, entered Baghdad in 1258 A.D. and killed a reported 800,000 inhabitants. Describing this Mongol invasion, Durant observes that, in general, "never in history had a civilization suffered so suddenly so devastating a blow.... When [the Mongols'] bloody tide ebbed, it left behind it a fatally disrupted economy, canals broken or choked, schools and libraries in ashes ... and a population cut in half.... [This] turned Western Asia from world leadership to destitution, from a hundred teeming and cultured cities in Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Caucasus, and Transoxiana into the poverty, dis- ease, and stagnation of modern times."99

Despite such long-standing evidence that war has long been deadly on an absolutely catastrophic scale, the contemporary idea that the destructive power of nuclear weapons has caused war to be avoided since World War II has many precedents, all of which, we now know, were mistaken. For example, Alfred Nobel predicted in the 1860s that his dynamite would "sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions, [since] as soon as men will find that in one instant whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they will surely abide in golden peace." Jules Verne asserted in 1904 that "the sub- marine may be the cause of bringing battle to stoppage altogether, for fleets will become useless, and as other war material continues to improve, war will become impossible." '?? Levy notes that "history provides a number of optimistic forecasts of the end of war due to the development of the 'ultimate'

96. Erich Weede, "Extended Deterrence by Superpower Alliance," Journal of Conflict Resolution 27 (June 1980), pp. 231-54.

97. James Lee Ray, "The Impact of Nuclear Weapons on the Escalation of International Conflicts," paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, March 1986.

98. Durant, The Age of Faith, p. 339. 99. Ibid., pp. 340-41. 100. Cited in Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, The Experts Speak: The Definitive

Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 254-55.


weapon, the very power of which renders it unusable. This argument has been made with respect to artillery, smokeless powder, the machine gun, and poison gas." 101 Mueller, with perhaps the most germane example, points out that after 1918 there was a widespread belief that the next war might well destroy the human race.'02 Surely, then, Luard is correct when he concludes: "There is little evidence in history that the existence of supremely destructive weapons alone is capable of deterring war. If the development of bacteriological weapons, poison gas, nerve gases, and other chemical armaments did not deter war before 1939, it is not easy to see why nuclear weapons should do so now." 103 In light of these previous errors regarding the war-inhibiting effect of the "latest" in military technology, why should we believe those who currently attribute peace among major powers to the destructive capability of nuclear weapons?

A close examination of crises in which states with nuclear weapons have been involved since 1945 will only serve to reinforce skepticism about the alleged peace-producing effect of nuclear weapons. The analyses by A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler of several post-World War II crises lead them to conclude that "non-nuclear powers [have] defied, attacked, and defeated nuclear powers" and that "when we compared the behavior of countries in conflicts where nuclear weapons were available with those of countries in conflicts where nuclear powers could not possibly have been involved, we found no evidence at all that countries are more cautious when conflicts have the potential to escalate to nuclear war."' 04 Kugler's subsequent analysis of extreme crises since 1945 shows that conventional supe- riority, rather than nuclear capability, has been a better predictor of the outcome of those conflicts. 105 Paul Huth and Bruce Russett conclude on the basis of an analysis of twenty-five cases in the nuclear era that possession of nuclear weapons made only a "marginal contribution" to successful deterrence.106 Finally, Charles Gochman and Zeev Maoz, having analyzed some 960 serious militarized disputes that occurred between 1816 and 1976, assert that "during the nuclear era, major power participation in militarized disputes has actually increased, relative to the proportion of interstate mem- bership that they constitute" and that "it is not appropriate to view the nuclear era as somehow unique with regard to conflict interactions between

101. Jack Levy, "Military Power, Alliances, Technology: An Analysis of Some Structural Determinants of International War Among Great Powers," Ph.D. diss., University of Wiscon- sin, 1976, p. 552.

102. John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, forthcoming); cited in Mueller, "The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons."

103. Luard, War in International Society, p. 396. 104. A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1980), p. 176. 105. Jacek Kugler, "Terror Without Deterrence," Journal of Conflict Resolution 28 (Sep-

tember 1984), p. 479. 106. Paul Huth and Bruce Russett, "What Makes Deterrence Work? Cases from 1900 to

1980," World Politics 36 (July 1984), p. 523.


states."107 If we add to all this relatively systematic evidence Morton Hal- perin's more intuitively based conclusion that in nineteen key cases since 1945, "nuclear weapons have never been central to the outcome of a cri- SiS," 108 the case in support of the idea that nuclear weapons have been the key element in preserving peace among major powers since 1945 stands revealed as shaky at best.

If, nevertheless, we make a special effort to be fair to proponents of the "peace through nuclear weapons" model and admit for the sake of discussion that the possibility of a nuclear holocaust has made the major power decision makers more cautious, we could still argue, plausibly, that moral progress in the form of a rising aversion to war has been a necessary intervening variable between the existence of those horrible weapons and the peaceful outcome of all crises among major powers since 1945. This is to say that the aversion to war based on moral principles is not merely epiphenomenal or spuriously related to those peaceful outcomes. In other words, if moral progress had not occurred, there is historical evidence to suggest that nuclear weapons would have been used again since 1945. As John Lewis Gaddis has pointed out, "A pattern of caution in the use of nuclear weapons did not develop solely . . . from the prospect of retaliation. As early as 1950, at a time when the Soviet Union had only just tested an atomic bomb and had only the most problematic methods of delivering it, the United States none- theless effectively ruled out the use of its own atomic weapons in Korea because of the opposition of its allies and the fear of an adverse reaction in the world at large." Gaddis also reports that when aides to President Ei- senhower suggested the use of atomic weapons at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, his reaction was: "You boys must be crazy. We can't use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God." 109 Hugalu might not have been so squeamish.

Finally, the existence of nuclear weapons fails to account fully for peace in the modern era because those weapons are only tangentially relevant, at most, to two important dimensions of that peace: (1) the end of colonialism and (2) the complete absence of war, in the modern era as well as historically, between "democratic" states.

Ethical inhibitions against "colonialism"

Colonialism, at least of the old-fashioned, straightforward, formal type, has gone out of style. Powerful states no longer set out to conquer new colonies, nor for the most part do they fight wars to hold on to them. There are obvious exceptions. The invasion by the United States of Grenada in

107. Gochman and Maoz, "Militarized Interstate Disputes," pp. 613 and 615. 108. Morton Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987), p. 46. 109. John Lewis Gaddis, "The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International

System," International Security 10 (Spring 1986), p. 137.


1983 might be labeled a colonialist venture; it could also reasonably be said to have represented a "collapse of legal norms."'110 The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, French interventions in Africa, steps by the Chinese to solidify their hold on Tibet, and the proxy wars staged by the United States against the Sandinistas and by the Soviet Union against Kampuchea might all be categorized as "colonialism." But the almost universal recognition that the U.S. operation in Grenada did violate norms, as well as the relatively quick withdrawal of American troops, the failure of even the lengthy and zealous campaign by the United States to dislodge the Sandinistas, and the more or less analogous frustration produced by the prolonged Soviet effort in Af- ghanistan are all straws in the wind, suggesting that Axelrod is justified in his conclusion that "international norms against . .. colonialism are strong." " ' I Puchala and Hopkins elaborate on this point that a change in values has been at the heart of this modification in the behavior of strong states in their relationships with weaker ones: "By the 1970s dominance-subordination was considered an illegitimate mode of international relations, alien rule had become anathema, [and] economic exploitation was condemned and attacked.... Colonization is no longer considered internationally legitimate, and current norms of behavior prescribe decolonization just as emphatically as earlier norms prescribed colonization.""112

In this era of massive international debts in many Third World countries, it may also be relevant to point out in attempt to assess the strength of norms against "colonialism" (and the use of military force by the strong against the weak) that "the most powerful states today have the same interest as their predecessors in the nineteenth century in ensuring the prompt payment of their inter-state debts" but that, according to Luard, "armed action to secure such payments, which was relatively common a century ago, is today unknown.' " 3 In some cases, such as Brazil, debtors today may have sufficient military strength to render them relatively invulnerable to intimida- tion, and this (rather than ethical constraints) may account for the absence of military attempts by strong states to forcibly collect payments from Third World countries. But many debtor nations are neither so militarily imposing nor so invulnerable to relatively painless (for the prospective collector of debts) military tactics such as a blockade, which was also quite commonly used a century ago. In such cases, the absence of attempts to use military tactics to intimidate Third World states that fall behind in their payments might plausibly be attributed to the decreasing legitimacy of such actions now as opposed to a century ago.

In general, there are numerous opportunities for the powerful states to take advantage of their military might against the large number of smaller,

110. Maurice Waters, "The Invasion of Grenada, 1983, and the Collapse of Legal Norms," Journal of Peace Research 23 (September 1986), pp. 229-46.

111. Axelrod, "An Evolutionary Approach," p. 1110. 112. Puchala and Hopkins, "International Regimes," p. 257. 113. Luard, War in International Society, pp. 393-94.


weaker states in the system today, opportunities which go unexploited so consistently that it is easy to forget they exist. "Decolonization in parts of the Third World and particularly Africa," Robert Jackson argues, "has resulted in the emergence of 'quasi-states,' which are independent largely by international courtesy. . This bias in the constitutive rules of the sovereignty game today and for the first time in modern international history arguably favors the weak. If international theory is to account for this novel situation it must acknowledge the possibility that morality and legality can ... be independent of power in international relations.""14

Modern communications may reinforce this bias in favor of the militarily weak, as well as the relevant ethical norms. Wars covered by the news media and shown on television might be more difficult to fight and win (and therefore may even be less likely to occur). Spanier has noted that "big Western democratic nations have tended to lose small wars since 1945." The reason, he feels, is that "when democracies use force, they cannot do so as they did a hundred years ago. The press and the television report on every facet of hostilities, no matter how embarrassing or politically damaging it may be to the government. ""15 Perhaps the media are not quite that zealous to embarrass governments in democratic states, but the barring of media per- sonnel from the U.S. operations in Grenada in 1983 suggests that American decision makers, at least, do see television coverage of invasions and fighting as a problem. It is a problem that probably could not be avoided in more extended and extensive military actions.

The Soviets have not apparently had to deal with television-generated opposition to their war in Afghanistan, even though their fate there is increasingly reminiscent of that met by the Americans in Vietnam. (If, as is widely anticipated, the government they leave behind falls after their de- parture, their experience will be similar in another important respect.) How- ever, even if "perestroika" does not create pressures leading to "democracy" in the Western sense of the word, is it Panglossian to expect that "glasnost" will develop to the point that the Soviet government will be unable to keep any future prolonged conflicts of the Afghan type out of the public eye?

In any case, the technologies associated with television are becoming progressively less expensive and more widely accessible. They will surely permeate the globe with greater intensity in the coming decades, making it likely that wars will be more visible and more difficult to keep out of sight everywhere. And wars between large, powerful states fighting obviously smaller, weaker ones can be counted on to look particularly unappealing on television.

114. Robert H. Jackson, "Quasi-States, Dual Regimes, and Neoclassical Theory: Interna- tional Jurisprudence and the Third World," International Organization 41 (Autumn 1987), Abstract.

115. Spanier, Games Nations Play, p. 277.


Distance may well have been crucial to the maintenance of slavery in the New World long after strong norms against it developed within Europe. "A 'Braudelian' sense about the difficulty of overcoming spatial distance is ... necessary to understanding the smooth functioning of the slave system," according to Seymour Drescher. "By the mid-seventeenth century, when English subjects began systematically to buy and sell other human beings on a large scale, neither chattel slavery nor inherited bondage existed any longer within the boundaries of their own land.... The world was made safe for Northwest colonial slavery by the tyranny of distance." 116

If Drescher is correct, we might infer that televised coverage, say, of slaves in the fields of the New World, broadcast in the Old World, would have hastened slavery's demise, eliminating in effect the element of distance that was necessary to its survival. Televised newscasts of wars in the future could conceivably reduce their viability as instruments of policy. The contribution that modern communications technologies can make to decreasing the "distance" between the citizenry and what a country's soldiers are doing (and having done to them) on battlefields could significantly augment the potential impact that ethical constraints can have on the incidence of international war in the future.

Democratic values and international war

A pocket of peace, so to speak, in the contemporary global system which seems rather clearly unrelated to any hypothetical inhibiting effect that nuclear weapons may have encompasses all the industrialized "democratic" countries in the world. Virtually all of Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand "contain a population of over 800 million, spread over a geographic area equal to nearly half of the land of the Northern Hemisphere." Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr declare that "not only has there been no war among [these] countries, but there has been little expectation or preparation for war among them, either.... It is a larger 'zone of peace' than has ever existed before." 117 Not only have these countries not fought wars in the contemporary era, but as R. J. Rummel points out, "wars simply have not occurred between libertarian systems" (by which he clearly means democratic, open, liberal, or pluralistic systems)."18 Similarly, as a result of their analysis of the relationship between regime types and international conflict between 1816 and 1976, Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdolali conclude that "there is a significant relationship between the regime characteristics of a dyad and the probability of conflict involve-

116. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, pp. 27-29. 117. Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr, World Politics (New York: Freeman, 1985), pp. 409-10. 118. R. J. Rummel, Understanding Conflict and War, vol. 4 (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage

Publications, 1979), p. 279.


ment of that dyad: democracies rarely clash with one another, and never fight one another in war.""19

Even if it is true that there has never been an international war between democratic states, it is difficult at best to establish that this zone of peace results from a systematic tendency for democratic states to be less war- prone. As Michael Howard indicates, "The transition to democracy, as Clausewitz was the first thinker to recognize, so far from abolishing war, brought into it an entirely new dimension of violent passion. . . . Democra- cies from France at the end of the eighteenth century up to the United States in the middle of the twentieth, have failed to live up to the expectations of eighteenth century liberal thinkers." 120 Democratic states have been involved in a lot of wars, and they have not always been the passive victims of aggressive, dictatorial states, either.

Small and Singer report that democratic states were involved in nineteen interstate wars between 1816 and 1965 and that they either initiated or were involved on the side of the initiator in eleven of those conflicts.'2' Small and Singer, Steve Chan, and Erich Weede all find that the rate of war involvement of democratic states does not differ markedly from that of other kinds of states. 122 But evidence regarding the rate of war involvement for democracies does not detract from the potential significance of the apparent lack of war that democracies have experienced in their interactions with each other. In fact, if democracies in general are not less war-prone than other types of states, that makes the absence of war between democratic states more re- markable because it is less likely to have happened by chance.

Small and Singer argue that it is a relative lack of geographic contiguity between democratic states that accounts for the absence of war between them.'23 The argument was credible for the time period covered by their data, that is, up to 1965. But since then, there has been a substantial growth in the number of democratic states, with many of them now bordering upon each other and with several of them emerging from among the traditionally war-prone and most powerful and important states in the world.'24 Literally

119. Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdolali, "Regime Types and International Conflict, 1816-1976," Journal of Conflict Resolution 33 (March 1989).

120. Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (London: Temple Smith, 1978), p. 131.

121. Melvin Small and J. David Singer, "The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1816-1965," Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 1 (Summer 1976), p. 66.

122. See Steve Chan, "Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall ... Are the Freer Countries More Pacific?" Journal of Conflict Resolution 28 (December 1984), pp. 617-48; and Erich Weede, "Democracy and War Involvement," Journal of Conflict Resolution 28 (December 1984), pp. 649-64. R. J. Rummel disagrees with this view; see, for example, his article "A Test of Libertarian Propositions on Violence," Journal of Conflict Resolution 29 (September 1985), pp. 419-55.

123. Small and Singer, "The War-Proneness," p. 67. 124. See Michael Doyle, "Liberal Institutions and International Ethics," in Kipnis and

Meyers, Political Realism and International Morality, pp. 192-94. By Doyle's count, there are currently some forty "liberal" states in the world, and he excludes such admittedly debatable cases as Brazil, the Philippines, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and South Korea.


thousands of democratic-dyad-years have passed without a war or even the anticipation of or preparation for war.

As Russett and Starr acknowledge, these peacful relationships may have developed because the democratic states are extremely rich, because they trade extensively with each other, or because they have united in opposition to a common enemy, the communist states.'25 But the richest states in past epochs have always been the most powerful and the most war-prone, and the fact that Europe contained most of the richest states in the world certainly did not make it a relatively peaceful continent before 1945. Both the classical liberals and the modern interdependence analysts are prone to argue that the more economic contact there is between nations, the more likely it is that their relationships will be peaceful. But, as Gaddis has pointed out, "These are pleasant things to believe, but there is remarkably little historical evidence to validate them," since the ten bloodiest interstate wars in the last century and a half "grew out of conflicts between countries that either directly adjoined one another or were involved actively in trade with one another."''26 Furthermore, Russett and Starr have analyzed economic relationships between democratic industrial states up to 1985 and have dis- covered that "international trade and investment seem high by the standards of recent decades but not especially high by historical standards." And so, logically enough, they have concluded that "the current level of such ties is not so high, according to the standards of other times or with other countries, that we can cite it as a major cause of peace in recent decades. "127

Finally, if having a common enemy is a key to peace, why has the opposition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Central Treaty Or- ganization (CENTO), and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) plus several bilateral alliances not prevented war (and other lower-level military conflict) between socialist states, such as that between the Soviet Union and Hungary, Czechoslovakia, China, and Afghanistan, between China and Vietnam, between Vietnam and Kampuchea, and so forth? (And, one might add, why has it not prevented conflict between the United States and the Dominican Republic, Turkey and Greece, and the United Kingdom and Argentina?)

Possibly, then, it is shared democratic values, or norms, that form an important part of the basis for peace among democratic states; one might even go so far as to suggest that there exists an international security regime among these states. Democratic states may avoid war against one another

125. Russett and Starr, World Politics, pp. 416-37. 126. Gaddis, "The Long Peace," pp. 11 1-12. Gaddis also cites Kenneth Waltz's Theory of

International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 138, in which Waltz observes that "the fiercest civil wars and the bloodiest international ones are fought within arenas populated by highly similar people whose affairs are closely knit."

127. Russett and Starr, World Politics, pp. 426-27.


because attacks on each other are perceived by their citizens (and perhaps even their leaders) as inherently and inevitably unjustified and unethical. Immanuel Kant, in his 1975 essay entitled "Perpetual Peace," predicted "the ever-widening pacification of the liberal pacific union," which was "guaranteed . . . to result from humans fulfilling their ethical duty." 128 More recently, Russett and Starr have stated that "perhaps our elites cannot persuade us to fight another people who we imagine, like us, are self-deter- mining.' '129

Pessimistically speaking, even though the democratic "zone of peace" is rather large, a tendency for democratic states alone to avoid war against each other will not make war obsolete, since it seems unlikely that a majority, much less an overwhelming preponderance, of states in the world will become democratic. This is especially true if, as Michael Doyle suggests, democratic states are both more likely to maintain peace among themselves and more likely to find reasons to become embroiled in conflicts with "non- republics. "130 Optimistically speaking, as Russett and Starr point out, the proportion of the globe ruled by democratic states is already sufficiently large to make a noticeable contribution to a trend toward the obsolescence of war. A recent story in The New York Times declared (and not while quoting President Reagan) that "it is democracy that is on the ideological march-from Manila to Rangoon to Tunis and even Budapest."' 3' It is by now rather commonplace to observe that the concepts of "perestroika" and "glasnost" might be applied to current events in Mexico as well as the Soviet Union. Analogous observations could be made about recent developments in Algeria, Chile, Turkey, Hungary, South Korea, Taiwan, Yu- goslavia, and Pakistan, for example. Perhaps, ultimately, much of the rest of the world will imitate Western European democracy, since the whole world has already imitated that region's invention of the modern nation- state. Maybe it is not an accident that the area in the developing world containing those states with the longest history of formal political indepen- dence, Latin America, is also the area most populated with democratic regimes; in time, the recent trend toward democracy in that region may be duplicated. Perhaps, as Doyle notes, "The increasing number of liberal states announces the possibility of global peace this side of the grave or world conquest." 132

128. Cited in Doyle, "Liberal Institutions and International Ethics," pp. 195-97. 129. Russett and Starr, World Politics, p. 434. In Understanding Conflict and War, vol. 4,

p. 278, Rummel attributes the lack of war between libertarian states in part to a "compatibility of basic values."

130. Michael Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review 80 (December 1986), pp. 1151-70.

131. James M. Markham, "The Idea That Democracy Pays Helps Reshape East-West Ties," The New York Times, 25 September 1988, section 4, p. 1.

132. Doyle, "Liberal Institutions and International Ethics," p. 191.


Conclusion

In 1987, according to William Eckhardt, there were twenty-two wars underway in various parts of the world, but only one was clearly an "international" war.'33 Although Small and Singer found after controlling for system size that there was no upward trend from 1816 to 1977 in the incidence of civil wars, they also reported that " 13 of the most severe civil wars were fought in the 20th century, eight of the 13 were fought since 1946, and three of those occurred since 1965." ''34 In light of the evidence showing rather consistently that international politics is in fact less violent and productive of deaths than is domestic politics,135 perhaps any optimism about the coming end of international war must realistically be held in check when contem- plating the future of civil wars.

The concept of sovereignty, as much as it may encourage "self-help" leading to international war, also offers protection for small, weak political entities, as noted above. There is no comparable legitimacy or protection for vulnerable subnational or transnational social entities. Nation-states have proliferated since 1945; very few have disappeared. That is why Jews have strived so mightily for a state of their own, having suffered so horrendously without the protection of sovereignty during World War II. The Palestinians, in contrast, have been battered around by one state after another (not just Israel) in their stateless condition. That is why, needless to say, they too would like a state of their own. Subnational groups and transnational groups (such as the Kurds) can be attacked and even obliterated with relative im- punity and without evoking the restraints that breaches of sovereignty usually produce.

Civil wars may also be more likely in the future because differences between groups that provide a basis for "us versus them" distinctions will in general be more tolerable and tolerated if "they" live across a boundary. Although Angell and Levi have demonstrated quite convincingly that the economic rationality of one country conquering another is usually an un- certain proposition at best, there are indisputable benefits, political as well as economic, to the winner in a civil war. Then, too, any conflict-inhibiting effects that nuclear weapons have (as well as the ethical aversion to war that they can produce) seem more likely to come into play with respect to conflicts between states than to wars within them. In short, the suspicion here is that most of the factors (including, perhaps paradoxically, those related to moral progress) that have the potential to decrease the incidence of international war in the future will be less potent in their impact on the incidence of civil war.

For thousands of years, slavery was thought to be an immutable part of

133. William Eckhardt's data are presented in Ruth Leger Sivard, ed., World Military and Social Expenditures, 1987-88, 12th ed. (Washington, D.C.: World Priorities, 1987), p. 28.

134. Small and Singer, "Conflict in the International System," pp. 69-70. 135. Rummel, Understanding Conflict and War, vol. 4, p. 53.

[nternational war 439

human nature. Yet it was abolished, and there is substantial historical evidence that moral progress, or changes in ideas about ethics and morality, played an important role in bringing about the demise of slavery. The practice of slavery and the philosophical rationalizations made in defense of it share enough similarities and logical connections to international war and its rationalizations that the elimination of the first provides reason to expect the disappearance of the second. There have been clear changes in attitudes about war over the last few centuries, and post-World War II patterns in warfare provide evidence that these changes have had an impact. There has not been a war between major powers since 1945; traditional colonialism is dead; and no conflict between states since 1945 (or before) has ever escalated to war unless at least one of the states was not democratic. Alternative explanations of these patterns, based on fears engendered by nuclear weapons or on economic interdependence, for example, are not entirely persua- sive. Moral progress and, in some cases, regimes based on evolving norms inhibiting the initiation of international war may have already made wars between the richest and most powerful states in the world, as well as some forms of depradation by the strong against the relatively weak states, relics of the past.

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