Can there be world peace? If yes, how? These with an array of other questions related to peace and conflict, have been of interest to various philosophers, statesmen and even the common man. Kenneth Waltz's Man, the State and War, brings forth these questions and aims to provide perspective on whether peace can be achieved in this war-torn world. Waltz splits the cause of war, the antithesis of peace into three categories. “ Within man, within the structure of the separate states, within the state system.”
Beginning with the first the cause of war being man itself. Classical realists have always pinned down man as the inherent cause of war in this world. Human nature for them is egoistic and selfish. As Kenneth Waltz states in his text “ The root of all evil is man, and thus he is himself the root of the specific evil war.” Hence, is the prescription required for peace changing the supposed evil nature of man? Even if the very core of man is changed to fit what is necessary to avoid war would that change relations between states? Waltz brings forth another perplexing question “Does man make society in his image or does his society make him?” According to Rousseau, man’s behavior is a product of the society he is part of. This leads to the second cause of war highlighted by Waltz, the structure of the states.
Democracies don’t fight democracies. Woodrow Wilson was a strong proponent of this, he made “sharp distinctions between peaceful and aggressive states.” Assigning democratic states to peace and authoritarian states to aggressive. Changing the structure of the states to more peaceful or democratic states can be said to the second prescription of peace.Many quote the example of Germany and world war 2, “the authoritarian character of the state prompted it to seek the war that spread to most of the world.” However, it would be naive to blame the entirety of the war to Germany alone. There were various other factors that played a vital role. Moreover, the democratic nature of the state does not mean that they are inherently peaceful. There have been several cases where democracies have waged war against democracies for example the Kargil War. Furthermore, monadic peace, that democracies are peaceful in general is clearly ridiculous. The US the self proclaimed democracy has been part of several wars across time. Why is that? Is it because although democracy preaches liberty and liberty is considered synonymous to freedom and peace? However, these liberties need to be safeguarded and in order to do so states need to go to war or protect themselves from war.
The third cause of war maintained is the state system itself. The nature of the state system is inherently anarchic and this determines the actions of the state. G. Lowes Dickinson’s proposed this outside in approach and was not met with open arms by the liberals and socialists during his time. Anarchy instills and breathes fire to this thought amongst states that everyone is out to get them, thus resulting in conflict. Some liberals believe that this problem of anarchy can be done away with, with the establishment of a global institution. However, history has proven that these International Organizations seldom succeed. For example, the League of Nations ,and today the UN.
There is no one set prescription for peace. We need to employ a combination of the prescriptions mentioned above and more to achieve what man has been on a quest for for centuries.
I agree that there is no formula for peace in this war torn world. I also find the first cause of war - man, himself - a very intriguing concept. However, calling human nature egoistic and selfish seems like an over-generalization. Even if all humans were egoistic and selfish, trying to change this so called inherent quality would not be possible.
ReplyDeleteI competely agree that this is a generalization made by Classical Realists and changing it would be impossible but there are others who believe that this can be done.
DeleteThank you for the thoughtful response.
ReplyDeleteOn your section about man and man's nature, Waltz attempts to grapple with the theories about what really makes up man's nature and does come down on the Hobbesian side of the debate. When classical realists project alleged traits of human nature onto states this causes a myriad of problems, as you've noted and as we saw in Hoffmann's piece last week.
One point of clarification on the democratic peace issue. The theory is that democracies don't fight other democracies. However, it leaves room for democracies to fight non-democracies. But, as we shall see when we evaluate the democratic peace literature, defining what a democracy actually is - and how people like Wilson changed their definition of it over time - may in fact be entirely subjective.
Finally, assigning blame to the anarchic international system is a bit simplistic, but Waltz actually tackles this issue with somewhat more precision in his subsequent work entitled Theories of International Politics. In that book, he proposes a revision of classical realism in favor of what he termed structural (or neo-) realism. Structural realism identifies the anarchic structure of the international system as the cause of conflict, not human nature or other factors. Just as with the democratic peace literature, we'll explore this topic more later on in the course.