Trying to Explain War

It is puzzling to read in the preface to this book that ". . . historians have been conspicuously absent when it comes to answering the larger question of why humans make war." It ain’t so. To take just a selection of the anglophone literature, one that can be very readily expanded, and in several languages, Arthur Ferrill’s The Origins of War. From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great (1985), was followed by Tim Blanning’s The Origins of The French Revolutionary Wars (1986), which includes an important essay reviewing the literature as a whole, and then by ten contributors in my (ed.), The Origins of War in Early Modern Europe (1987), Donald Kagan’s On the Origins of War (1995), Erik A. Ringmar’s Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden’s Intervention in the Thirty Years War (1996), my Why Wars Happen (1998), Jan Glete’s War and the State in Early Modern Europe (2001), and my War and its Causes (2019), etc. Now, no one author can cover all, and Overy has much, very much to offer in this book, but, hopefully, in a further edition, he can ditch the claim that ‘history is almost always absent.’

The book is organised thematically. An explanatory Prologue is followed by chapters on Biology, Psychology, Anthropology and Ecology, in all of which Overy moves with success to introduce arguments and evidence from these fields. He is properly concerned with human agency and this offers a way to consider these subjects, notably by assessing the relationships between social psychology, collective identity and the psychological satisfaction of being a warrior against the Out-group. Human agency also provides an emphasis on choice and a related denial of determinism.

In the second part, there are again four chapters, on Resources, Belief, Power, and Security. In the first, Overy is critical of Marxist interpretations of warfare, discusses enslavement and oil, and suggests, in a more generally valid point, that "...the chief difficulty in describing warfare as the consequence of material ambition is separating out the desire for gain from the other motives that prompt conflict." Belief enables Overy to discuss religious warfare including the Crusades, the Aztecs, World War Two, and the recent ‘revival of the ancient jihad’, which, in fact, was never dead, as shown for example in West Africa in the early nineteenth century. Overy concludes that Belief ‘can be a primary driver.’

Power becomes the pursuit of power by ambitious leaders, which is overly reductive, and this chapter could do with a reconsideration: there is too much on Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler, before a discussion of power transition theory, notably in the case of America and China. Overy is correctly critical of Lawrence Freedman’s 2019 argument that great-power war has become redundant. Any assessment of moves or measure of resources that suggests, to scholars and other outsiders, misunderstandings that produce inaccurate calculations of interest and response, is best put aside to focus on the acceptance of different interest and values, and also the conviction that they can be best resolved through the use of force.

In Security, Overy considers frontiers, migrations, the precarious nature of agreed borders and the security dilemma of how to be secure while avoiding conflict. The Conclusion is all too brief and offers disappointingly little.

Much of course is missing, notably a detailed discussion of civil wars and a coherent account of change through time. I was worried that the book would be overly twentieth century and too much focused on the West. Not so for either, but Overy fails adequately to address differences across time and space. This, of course, is a serious problem with systematic work on the causes of war: it tends to lack chronological, geographical and, indeed, cultural specificity, and, linked to that, an adequate discussion of the interplay of contextual and contingent factors. As a result, although interesting, Overy offers an incomplete introduction to an important field, one that is particularly relevant today and, moreover, challenging due to the number and range of perspectives on offer. These, in turn, can be considered to assess the significance of changes across time and space in the framework for the analysis of conflict.

So, where do we turn? I would put the emphasis on war as organised large-scale violence, and thus as a phenomenon that cannot be seen simply through the foci of social sophistication, economic development and state formation. As a consequence, moreover, of the definition I have offered, it is valid to note that the use of violence varies, as do the societal responses to it, whether civil or international. These responses are a key aspect of the story, and a part of the ‘total history’ from which the causes of war cannot readily be abstracted. Cultures are themselves far from fixed or uniform categories; and this is also true of the analytical concept advanced since the 1970s of strategic cultures, which themselves are contested. Separately, in civil wars, issues of governability that are cultural as well as practical repeatedly come to the fore.

More generally, the relationship between bellicosity and what can be regarded as ‘rational’ strategies should not be seen in terms of polar opposites, but rather of the complexities and contingencies of particular circumstances, which downplays the idea of general rules in the sense of predictive models. In most cases, when considering the causes of war, both historically and in the present, it is possible to accumulate reasons for war, but without that accumulation necessarily explaining the drive or establishing priorities. Indeed, it is the very ability of humans and human society to encompass differing values and drives that helps give complexity to the causes of war.

Hopefully, Overy will return to the topic as his book essentially scratches the surface. It is more in the nature of a set of introductory lectures, but, even at that level, too much is left out.

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