Why do states go to war?

[kas]

That's the question I have to answer for my political science term paper.

I'm asking it here primarily in the hopes that people might have suggestions about good books which cover this topic in general or in regards to specific wars. If people would like to throw in their personal views for discussion, I certainly won't complain about that.

Thanks very much,

Kas.

 

[Infanteer]

Boil it down to human emotions - greed, envy, fear, arrogance, conviction.

 

[Kirkhill]

That's enemy motivation infanteer.

Own force motivation is a desire to do good for own family - preserve privileges, maintain access to food, water, wealth, good jobs, secure continuity of the family.

State's don't go to war.  People go to war and there hasn't been a mean spirited nasty dictator anywhere in the world at any time that at some level didn't think he or she was doing the right thing - for his family, his people, his nation, his country.  And a good chunk of their followers thought they were right.

 

[Infanteer]

Those are all the window-dressings - when you get to the root of it, it is all lower-brain stem instinct.  Fear, mistrust, jealousy....

 

[paracowboy]

in my opinion, Infanteer has it right: man's nastier emotions, specifically greed, on the leader's part, more than anything. The leader of one nation (or more) wants something another nation has, whether it be oilfields (a la Saddam), or liebenstraum (a la Hitler), or international prestige (a la Kaiser Wilhem), etc. The leadership then utilizes other base emotions to sway the populace - "Fear, mistrust, jealousy, greed, envy, arrogance, conviction...." - via propaganda. It goes thusly all the way back to Troy.

For reading, I'd recommend John Keegan's A History of Warfare to start with.

 

[Kirkhill]

Fear, mistrust, jealousy ..... oilfields, lebensraum, prestige... all true.  But whether Saddam, Hitler or the Kaiser, or any before them, all of them had to get up in the morning and look themselves in the mirror and convince themselves they were doing what they were doing for a purpose -  whether it is just for their sons and their tribe or the greater Volk.  They were trying to "save" their people from the "depredations" of other people.  Their "people" believed they were doing the right thing.  Just as we will always believe we do the right thing when we choose to act - excepting the psychotic amongst us but even they often believe they are acting according to instructions, voices in the head, personal interpretation of the Bible or the Joy of Cooking.

It comes down to this for me:  You think you are right.  I may even think you are right.  But I know that I am right. 

By the time it has reached that stage and we have a point of debate with no compromise possible then it doesn't take long before the bullets start flying.

By the way - this does not mean I subscribe to moral equivalency.  Both sides are not equally right.  As long as you keep agreeing with me then you can be sure that you are in the right.

Cheers.

 

[Michael Dorosh]

Kirkhill has it.   The answer is conflicting ideas of what is right.   Hitler genuinely felt that the world would be a better place without the Jews.   He wasn't evil, he didn't have a tail or horns growing from his head; he made what to him was the perfectly rational decision that the Jews were to society what fleas would be to a dog.   And he convinced a few million people to feel the same way.   A Christian is rightly aghast at this logic, so is a humanist.   A social darwinist or a nihilist would nod his head in agreement.

Canada thought that putting people in concentration camps based on their race was a good thing, so in that sense we were no better than the Nazis.   No one declared war on us because of it though.  

Men go to war because of our higher intellect, not in spite of it.   We have differing ideas and unfortunately haven't evolved a way to work them out.  To simply write off anyone who causes a war as unintelligent, greedy, or scared simply does a dis-service to everyone and ensures these problems keep perpetuating.

It's like calling the guys who flew the planes into the WTC "cowards."  It makes us feel better, but it isn't remotely true.  I wouldn't be brave enough to end my life in support of a cause, any cause, I firmly believed in. Those guys did it after much thought and deliberation - hell, they TRAINED for it for months.  That's much scarier than thinking only evil people do things we consider "bad".

 

[Michael Dorosh]

Boil it down to human emotions - greed, envy, fear, arrogance, conviction.

Conviction isn't an emotion; its an intellectual conclusion. Canada went to war in 1939.  Why?  Not greed, envy or arrogance (if you feel you can demonstrate that, please do so).  Fear?  It may have been a motivation; in fact, I'm reasonably sure there was fear involved.  I think conviction sums it up; conviction that the Nazis were performing acts in defiance of "good order" in the world, and a conviction that the British and its allies were the best hope for that desirable world order.  That's not an emotional response, it's an intellectual one.

I have a hard time believing that governments act on emotion, though if you have a one-person government, sometimes that might happen.  Look at Germany's declaration of war on the United States after Pearl Harbor; I would submit that was an emotional decision made by their ringleader, as foregone as it may seem to us now that Germany and the US would end up at war with each other.

 

[Infanteer]

Kirkhill, I fully agree with what you're saying - it is sort of a different "part" of the equation.  Since I don't believe in evil, I fully agree with you - justification is in the eye of beholder.  I'm just saying that there are more base emotions going into the leadup to conflict.

Michael:  I guess conviction wasn't the proper word - maybe passion is a better one.  As for governments don't act on emotion, Kirkhill summed it up best by saying that "Governments don't go to war, People go to war".  Unless it is some quick Cabinet War, you need the support of the populace to send youth to die in the mud.  WWII was most likely out of fear, fear of Germany.  With that fear was resentment for the losses of WWI - WWI was jealousy (with some more fear) and most likely greed on all players parts (give Niall Fergusson's Pity of War a read - look at the crowds lining up in WWI and WWII to see the troops off (and the difference in attitude in these crowds); that is your emotion that drives conflict.  All the politics leading up to the war are usually good indicators of what base emotion is driving to conflict.  Today's "snake" wars strip away the veneer of civility that national politics provides and makes it really easy to see the base emotions that still guide human decisions.

One guy once said that there were three types of conflict: wars of power, wars of gain, and wars of ideas.  I forgot who it was, but it was interesting - I'll have to flip through some old university notes to find it.

 

[tomahawk6]

Unfortunately warfare has been around since pre-historic time. As technology improved so did the lethality and scope of war. War has been fought for all the reasons that have been outlined previously. Insult has been one cause - the war of Jenkins Ear. The pressing of US citizens by the British was a cause of another war. In short if a country wants to go to war then it will it do so - all it needs was an excuse. The Spanish American War was initiated by the sinking of the USS Maine. The US was attacked by Japan which provided the means to enter what until then was not popular with the American people.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Quote from Michael Dorosh,
Canada thought that putting people in concentration camps based on their race was a good thing, so in that sense we were no better than the Nazis.

Michael,
Do you purposely put friggin' moronic lines into otherwise good posts just to see if anybody is reading?
There is a huge difference and you know it, or you SHOULD. We didn't just say, "OK all Mennonites and ...ummm, Metis report to camps", we went after those who we were either at war with or the chance of going to war with.

Sometimes you should just stick to being a very good historian instead of an insufferable jerk......

 

[Bert]

From my perspective, the basic human elements (the basics of life, plus love, hate, fear and greed) provide
the motivations for what we do individually.  In a chaotic pre-historic environment, this factured heavily.  Since
the dawning of civilization, the rule of law whether its was found in a constitution, a religious document, a
corporate charter, or its many forms governed how humans dealt with these motivations. 

However, since many states do not have the same rule of law, more complex forms of the basic human
elements motivate states to solve problems with war.

Examples of this may be that Alberta has not declared war on Ontario.  A democracy has never made
war against another democracy. 

Communist and or authorian rule has been in conflict with democracies.  The Roman Empire may have
begun out of a state of fear.  Japan sought resources, invaded a region, and attacked the US during
WW2. 

Im loosing my train of thought so I'll stop here.

 

[Michael Dorosh]

Quote from Michael Dorosh,
Canada thought that putting people in concentration camps based on their race was a good thing, so in that sense we were no better than the Nazis.

Michael,
Do you purposely put friggin' moronic lines into otherwise good posts just to see if anybody is reading?
There is a huge difference and you know it, or you SHOULD. We didn't just say, "OK all Mennonites and ...ummm, Metis report to camps", we went after those who we were either at war with or the chance of going to war with.

Sometimes you should just stick to being a very good historian instead of an insufferable jerk......

You should probably google the Japanese-Canadians, Bruce.  If you think that stealing all their worldly possessions just because "we might go to war with them" is acceptable, then I guess I won't win you over.  I'm guessing you're not familiar with their story, but some of the Japanese-Canadians that were stripped of their dignity, marched into camps, and never compensated for their treatment included soldiers who fought with the CEF, including many who had been decorated for valour.

I think it's a little "jerky" to state that it is ok to "go after" (your words) those we have a "chance of going to war with."

I hope you didn't mean to put it in terms like that.

Incidentally, some 22,000 people were relocated in that manner, just counting the Japanese.  There was no evidence found after the war that any of them would have been saboteurs or spies, and their forced relocation had been purely based on their race.

 

[Infanteer]

A democracy has never made war against another democracy.

Give it some time - they're quite new and they've spent all their time and energy fighting others.

 

[Infanteer]

You should probably google the Japanese-Canadians, Bruce.   If you think that stealing all their worldly possessions just because "we might go to war with them" is acceptable, then I guess I won't win you over.

You should quit trying to put things in a black-and-white perspective in an attempt to create controversy.   That above statement is so blatantly simplistic that it ignores so many factors.   This is not an apologist statement as what happened was wrong - but you are being an oaf if you are comparing Lemon Creek Internment Camp to Treblinka.... :

 

[Michael Dorosh]

You should quit trying to put things in a black-and-white perspective in an attempt to create controversy.  That above statement is so blatantly simplistic that it ignores so many factors.  This is not an apologist statement as what happened was wrong - but you are being an oaf if you are comparing Lemon Creek Internment Camp to Treblinka.... :

You keep missing the point, and I think you're trying to derail the conversation further.  You put forth the faulty idea that emotion is what causes wars; I am suggesting that - in the 20th Century at least - the decision is an intellectual one.  As large a mistake as putting the Japanese into concentration camps was, it was an intellectual decision, not an emotional response.  It was probably considered by many people, and it was done with the honest belief that it was the right thing to do.  Which was Kirkhill's point.  It wasn't done because 'the Canadians are evil' or because we had reason to hate the Japanese-Canadians.  We didn't.  They were hard working and many fought for us in WW I - and fought well.

Are you seeing the point now?  We didn't do it to be "mean" we did it because - as I indicated earlier - fear probably played a part.  It was a world wide battle for survival.  We knew that.  We didn't want to take chances, and we made hard choices.  But it wasn't simple fear - if we made all our decisions based on fear, we would simply have surrendered.  We took a hard line and thought it was for the best.

For what it is worth, I think Hitler and his cronies felt they were doing exactly the same thing.  They wanted Europe to be Judenfrei - Jew Free.  Their decisions were fuelled be fear, just as much as ours were, but they weren't knee jerk. The Nazis thought about forced relocation to Madagascar, for example, and considered other alternatives to extermination.  They turned to extermination as a cost effective method, also because Madagascar remained out of reach.  Extermination was stumbled onto by accident.

They had no religion; we, as a nominally Judeo-Christian society, wouldn't make the same kinds of decisions; and thank God for that.  But we pretty intimidated by Axis successes by the end of 1941, and felt that quite literally the future of the world was at stake. 

I've always said we can't judge them in hindsight.  We executed people too - deserters in World War One, who in later years would be called Battle Exhaustion cases and today would be properly diagnosed as PTSD cases.  Times change.  Choices are made.  But we didn't kill our own soldiers in World War One because of emotion, and we didn't declare war on Germany either time for that reason either, nor greed, or for conquest, or for love of money.  We did it because we decided it the right thing to do.

We even debated the declaration of war in 1939 for a week.  If that doesn't represent sober thought, I don't know what does.  And for his part, Hitler debated invading Poland - at the very least, the timing of it - for quite a while also.  His generals - as you well know, Infanteer, - were aghast.  If they could have debated it for longer, they would have.  And in the end, they clicked their heels and decided to do their duty.  It had nothing to do with desire for glory, or pay raises, or hatred of the Poles.  They thought it would be for the greater good of their country. 

Which, I think, makes wars all the more tragic. I certainly believe the Germans were the "bad guys" in WW II and deserved to be beaten, but I don't feel they were "evil" in the comic book sense of the word.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Mr. Dorosh,
Those are exactly the words I wanted to say, if you can compare that with marching people into camps that they had no chance of coming out of, after some torture and experiments thrown in for good measure, then you are a loon......

I weary of those who compare us in any way to Nazi's and thier attrocities, it disrupts everything my forefathers and mother put thier lives on the line for......and those who do won't be on this site for long.

 

[Infanteer]

You keep missing the point, and I think you're trying to derail the conversation further.   You put forth the faulty idea that emotion is what causes wars; I am suggesting that - in the 20th Century at least - the decision is an intellectual one.   As large a mistake as putting the Japanese into concentration camps was, it was an intellectual decision, not an emotional response.   It was probably considered by many people, and it was done with the honest belief that it was the right thing to do.   Which was Kirkhill's point.   It wasn't done because 'the Canadians are evil' or because we had reason to hate the Japanese-Canadians.   We didn't.   They were hard working and many fought for us in WW I - and fought well.

Are you seeing the point now?

Well, if you look at alot of the literature, you'll see that racism was a big factor in the lead up to the Pacific War - I think it was called "yellow fever"; I remember Glorified Ape talking about it.  Government and the standard of intellectual debate within a society certainly act as filters on the actions states take on behalf of their citizenry - this is why we only interred Japanese while the Germans burned Jews and other untermench to ashes.  But these filters don't exclude the fact those same base emotions led to the outcomes being considered in the first place.  Why else would Canadians approve of wholesale lockup of Canadian citizens based upon their race?  Because they quite simply saw all "Japs" as a threat; we dropped our convictions in the act of giving into fear.  For the good of the Aryan race, the Germans accepted their course - in this case, the voice of reason was overwhelmed by base hatred, fear and scapegoating.

I believe that, in the end run, humans can be a pretty sad lot and that states are usually an amplification of this trait.  With the "war of the snakes" where the state is losing its monopoly on representing personal/family/tribal interest, we're going to see alot more of these emotions rising to the top.

It still doesn't change the fact that your comparison of the 1940 Liberals to the National Socialists was wrong on so many levels - how Canada chose to execute its feelings towards those who were of Japanese ancestry was on a far different level than the anti-semitism of the Germans.  Thanks for invoking Godwin's Law by the way....

 

[Michael Dorosh]

Mr. Dorosh,
Those are exactly the words I wanted to say, if you can compare that with marching people into camps that they had no chance of coming out of, after some torture and experiments thrown in for good measure, then you are a loon......

I weary of those who compare us in any way to Nazi's and thier attrocities, it disrupts everything my forefathers and mother put thier lives on the line for......and those who do won't be on this site for long.

You can use the bright glowing font all you want, Bruce, your time is better spent by going back and reading my last post.  I apologize if I stated things a bit abruptly, I've expanded my line of thinking in the edited version - missed some grammar and spelling but hopefully it is more clear. 

And if you don't immediately grasp my point, don't condemn me for your inability to understand or make idle threats.  The point, once more, is that hard choices are made by people who think they are doing the right things.  We did it.  We executed people - in small numbers, in both world wars (and in the same prison system you work for, until a few dozen years ago), for example, and forcibly relocated others.  The point being that if Canada - the best country in the world, if you ask me - can do these things, there is no point demonizing those who perform similar acts.  Because the number of certifiably insane people out there is low, and the number of entire nations that are "insane" or "evil" are zero.  Everyone acts in their own best interests and interprets the acts of others through their own lens.

What Germany did in the 1940s are rightly called crimes against humanity. I'm not trying to say Canada is in any way similar, but our thought processes - as sick as it may seem to you - were probably the same.  They wouldn't have committed these actsif they honestly saw them as criminal.  And you'll never wade through all the post-war guilt and coming-to-terms in order to establish what they did or didn't think. 

Or would you argue that Canada saw its actions against the Japanese, or against all those we executed in prisons, as criminal?

It's always "the other guy" that is the criminal, is it not?  You see it every day - everyone in prison is innocent, right?

 

[Michael Dorosh]

It still doesn't change the fact that your comparison of the 1940 Liberals to the National Socialists was wrong on so many levels - how Canada chose to execute its feelings towards those who were of Japanese ancestry was on a far different level than the anti-semitism of the Germans.  Thanks for invoking Godwin's Law by the way....

I didn't compare the Liberals to the National Socialists; I compared their thought processes.  Godwin needs to make allowances for those times that Nazi Germany provides an interesting and useful comparison.  I do believe we had the "moral" high ground in WW II and wouldn't argue that we didn't.  But I also don't think that Germany and Japan felt they were doing wrong.  How could entire nations feel that way?

You accuse me of thinking in black and white, but it's you who - apparently - would write off German and Japanese aggression as merely attributable to greed, lust or human failing and disregard the role that intellect played.  You may be many things, Infanteer, but intellectually dishonest is not one of them.

Now come on - slowly and with feeling - why did Germany and Canada fight each other in the Second World War?