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Michael Howard, ‘The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order’, London, 2000, 113 Pages

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, (Trans. Jefferson Chase), ‘The Culture of Defeat: On National, Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery‘, London, 2003, 294 pages

Reviewed by Martin D. Brown

In an age when much is made of the sanctity of human rights, democracy and the supposed rule of international law many people are reluctant to acknowledge the contribution that war has made in shaping the modern world.Instead we prefer to linger on the influence of philosophers, grand ideas, and the unstoppable march of progress; all of which apparently led us to the ‘End of History’ – which Francis Fukuyama unilaterally announced had arrived in 1989.

Fifteen years later, in the wake of the violence in the Balkans, the Middle East, Rwanda, and the terrorist attacks on America only the most deluded of ideologues would now accept that he was right.

Liberal democracy has not triumphed quite as effectively as we might like to think; more to the point democracy is a novel and fragile invention, no more than a hundred years old and there is little evidence to suggest that it is the cure-all solution to the world’s problems. Indeed it could well be argued that the democratic utopia is no more likely to prevail than did the socialist utopia once championed by the Soviet Union and will one day be superseded by some other political system – as yet unknown.

History is littered with the remains of civilisations and ideas that once seemed unassailable: The Assyrians gave way to the Persians and then to the Hellenes; Rome to the barbarians; the universality of Latin Christendom to Protestant fragmentation; Absolutism to Nationalism; Monarchy to the State; Liberalism to Fascism and Communism; Totalitarianism to Democracy and so on it goes…

On one level this is the greatest lesson than history has to offer; the memory of pasts now past frees the mind from the tyranny of the present. All ages believe their views to be pre-eminent and that they are bound to prevail for eternity; but all great civilisations eventually decline and fall – usually, although not always, in violent circumstances.

But the idea that it has been war which has been the main engine of change and progress in human society is one most people find uncomfortable, yet there is plenty of evidence to support this hypothesis.

In his slim volume entitled the ‘Invention of Peace’ Professor Michael Howard, one of Britain’s foremost military historians sets out a persuasive argument in support of this idea. Based on his plenary lecture to the Anglo-American Conference on War and Peace, held at the Institute of Historical Research in July 2000, he outlines a refreshingly cynical version of the last 1000 years of European development.

The central thesis of Howard’s work is that although war is as old as mankind peace is a modern invention that first emerged during the Enlightenment; most directly from the works of Immanuel Kant and his concept of the ‘League of Nations’. However the originality of this insight lies in the fact that it was war that spread these concepts of ‘peace’ – indeed Kant’s ‘League’ was only established as a result of the utter devastation of the First and Second World Wars.

While ideas and philosophy have undoubtedly played a vital role in society’s development this raises the question of how these views were actually disseminated: Was the success of the Enlightenment solely the result of the recorded musings of Rousseau, Kant and Voltaire or were their thoughts actually spread by France’s revolutionary armies marching across Europe?

More to the point, the State itself, the primary actor in international affairs for the last four hundred years, was a product of the religious violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that destroyed Latin Christendom and culminated in the Westphalian settlement of 1648. The State needed to establish an effective, centralised, bureaucracy – not least for tax collection – in order to more effectively preserve its hard won autonomy through the establishment of a professional, and costly, military force.

Quite simply Howard argues that war and its accruements have been the primary catalyst for change in European history and thus by extension throughout the world. Advances have undoubtedly been made, but often these have also led to a parallel increase in the severity of warfare; culminating in the pitiless slaughter of the twentieth century.

Howard concludes by noting,

“…so although it is tempting to believe that as the international bourgeois community extends its influence a new and stable world order will gradually come into being, we would be unwise to expect anything of the kind.

This was what Norman Angell [winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933] and others believed in 1914: war had become so irrational a means of settling disputes that sensible people would never again fight one. But alas, they did…” (Howard, 200, p113).

Conflict, in all its forms over the ages, usually results in winners and losers. Common sense would seem to dictate that ‘history is written by the victors’; but Wolfgang Schivelbusch subverts this simplistic axiom in his recent mediation on the effects of defeat on society and the nation’s consciousness.

Instead defeat would seem, at least in Schivelbusch’s view, to have a transformative effect on the defeated that can lead to a thirst for revenge, national rejuvenation, and further conflict. In essence it’s an argument that compliments, rather than subverts, Howard’s position.

Schivelbusch has produced a detailed taxonomy of defeat, based upon three case studies; of the Southern states of America in 1865, France after its defeat by Prussia in 1871 and Germany in 1918.

He writes,

“…every society experiences defeat in its own way. But the varieties of response with vanquished nations – whether psychological, cultural, or political – conform to a recognisable set of patterns or archetypes that recur across time and national boundaries. A state of unreality – or ‘Dreamland’ – is invariably the first of these.” (Schivelbusch, 2003, p10)

This dream-like revelry (often accompanied by dance crazes, bizarrely enough) begins the process of cocooning defeat in comforting myths.   This in turn gives way to a period of ‘Awak
ening’ more often than not accompanied by ’stab-in-the-back’ legends, which emerged in Germany in 1918 and America in the 1970s after her defeat in Vietnam.

From this period emerges the concept of the ‘Unworthy Victory’; in essence that defeat was the consequence of  ’unsoldierly’ techniques, that the victor ‘cheated’, their success was therefore illegitimate and will be overturned in the future. Such beliefs sit comfortably with the ancient fears of being overrun by barbarian hoards, the negative connotations of which are then used to demonise the victorious forces.

Defeat thus becomes ‘moral purification’ and the vanquished take solace in the concept of the ever turning wheel of fate (today’s losers are tomorrow’s victors); best summed up by the phrase ‘Vae victoribus’ [Woe to the victors!].

It is understandable that these feelings then give rise to desires for ‘revenge or Revanche’. But he argues that this longing to ’settle the score’ will only emerge after defeat by a single opponent; defeat by a coalition can led to more complex reactions that often result in a conscious association with the strongest power in the alliance. Yet again this process is designed to salve the loser’s battered ego and obfuscate the real reasons for their original humiliation.

In nationalistic conflicts, from the 1800s onwards, the victor strove not for the classical concept of honourable surrender, the laying down of arms and the acquisition of trophies, but for ‘unconditional surrender’ –the utter subjugation of one’s foe.

Failure to secure this result further encourages this mythological cycle: Any victory that does not involve the total submission of the enemy sparks further resentment by both sides.  If the spiritual and moral backbone of the enemy is not broken (as it was in Germany and Japan in 1945) then they will resist the will of the victor (as happened in 1865, 1871 and 1918). This is a situation that seems to be now developing in modern day Iraq.

Schivelbusch argues that these primary reactions to defeat are subsequently translated into a desire for renewal. He writes, “After the initial shock has passed and defeat is seen no longer as a national catastrophe but as a kind of liberation and salvation, its forward looking, aspect missionary aspect comes of the fore” (Schivelbusch, 2003, p29). The subjugated nation transforms itself, through a paradoxical effort of mental dexterity, into the ’standard-bearer’ of a new enlightened era.

The American South revised her support for slavery into a new form of white supremacy; French imperialism became resistance to Prussian scientific barbarism; post-1918 Germany transformed itself into a bulwark against Bolshevism and American commercialism, treading a ‘third way’ between Communism and Capitalism. Each carved out a new role for themselves from the twisted bough of capitulation.

But perhaps the most insightful opinion Schivelbusch has to offer is the way in which the defeated take on the attributes of the victor. As such it was perhaps no accident that two of the leading proponents of American intervention in the First World War, Woodrow Wilson and Walter Hines Page, were sons of the vanquished southern states, “…the opportunity arose to transfer the moral blight incurred by the South onto the contemporary world enemy Germany” (Schivelbusch, 2003, p33). West Germany did much the same after 1945 as did East Germany after 1989.

In a process of intellectual ‘borrowing’ from the victor the loser hopes to bankrupt the creditor in order to facilitate his own revitalisation and reverse the stigma of the earlier catastrophe, “To invoke Karl Marx, one could almost say that the task of the downtrodden is to rescue innovation from its masters, delivering it from alienation (Schivelbusch, 2003, p34). But this progression ultimately leads to new tensions and problems that spark further conflicts and a new series of winners and losers.

Over the last few years a number of newly defeated nations have joined the historical examples Schivelbusch describes; Serbia, Afghanistan and of course Iraq. It remains to be seen quite how closely these states will follow his ‘culture of defeat’ thesis over the coming decades.

Schivelbusch’s text offers a complex and thoughtful investigation of an under-researched issue that would seem to reinforce, if only in an oblique way, Howard’s own views on the persistency of war in human affairs. War, like it or not, is good for something according to this perspective. As such it is the progenitor of progress that Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ viewed with such alarm.

A more concise explanation of the processes described by Howard and Schivelbusch can actually be found in Carol Reed’s 1949 film ‘The Third Man’. Set in a recently defeated, devastated and occupied Vienna with a script by the novelist (and occasional English spy) Graham Greene, the main character Harry Lime, played with malicious intent by Orson Wells, describes it thus:

“…remember what the fellow said. In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?

The cuckoo clock.”

Martin D. Brown is an historian, writer, and a lecturer in History and International Relations at Richmond, the American International University in London, and member of the European advisory board of BlueEar.com.