A NOTE ON CAUSALITY

 

In this work I have described a recurring pattern: long periods of over a century in which the international order of states is stable, broken by an abrupt shift to epochal war that puts the constitutional basis of the warning states in play, followed by the renovation of the international order as states copy the constitutional order of the winning states, and the ratification of this new order by international congresses of peace. I have traced these patterns from the Renaissance into the twenty-first century. But I do not believe that I have discovered an historical law of general application.

Far from it. Rather I believe that at each juncture, things might have gone differently. It is the decisions of those persons who guide the State that determine whether stability or innovation will ensue. True, these deci-sions are confined by the “genetic material” of the State: its culture and resources. But within these constraints many real choices are possible with respect to the two dominant, mutually affecting dimensions of the State, law and strategy. The society of states we have today has been brought into being by countless acts of decision making that were not compelled by larger structures, but rather that constituted those structures. It is precisely because these choices could have been different that legitimacy is conferred—or withdrawn—by their outcome. History is the name we put to choices made.

I came across this manifesto by Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwil that seems to me very largely right on this issue. They write:

Domestic and international actors reproduce or alter systems through their actions. Any given international system does not exist because of immutable structures, but rather the very structures are dependent for their reproduction on the practices of the actors. Fundamental change of the international system occurs when actors, through their practices, change the rules and norms constitutive of international interaction…. Fundamental changes in international politics occur when beliefs and identities of domestic actors are altered thereby also altering the rules and norms that are constitutive of their political practices. To the extent that patterns emerge in this process, they can be traced and explained, but they are unlikely to exhibit predetermined trajectories to be captured by general historical laws, be they cyclical or evolutionary.1

 

Causes of war will vary with particularity, owing to the local historical context, and yet will also be, very broadly, the same as ever. My claim is that the strategic innovations that prove decisive in epochal wars (most recently, the advances in international telecommunications, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction that won the Long War) interact with the struggle over the constitutional order (most recently, as the decaying nation-state is superseded by the emerging market-state), creating new forms of government (for example, the virtual, multinational nonterritorial regime, like the terrorist Al Qaeda) and new tactics (such as asymmetrical warfare using the latest communications technology, cartel-like coalitions, daring weapons of mass destruction that match the lucrative targets amassed by the market-state, like the World Trade Center towers, with manned cruise missiles such as fuel-fire commercial airliners).

War is inevitable not because of this interaction but because of the nature of the State, which operationalizes and magnifies a group's ability to wage conflict, and the nature of man in groups. Given that wars will occur, this historical interaction—more descriptive than causal—can manifest itself in many different events. This is a matter of human agency. Epochal wars could be great power cataclysms, or coalitional low-intensity conflicts, or high-technology nonexplosive attacks that induce economic and social collapse. This book tries to help us make choices, not forecasts.