Lecture
War is bound by its roots, its character and its very destiny to the epoch in which it is experienced. One cannot understand a war without understanding its epoch - this idea of Clausewitz has become an axiom of scholarly military thought. Today, however, from the vantage point of the third millennium, and especially for an understanding of the political prospects of war in the twenty-first century, an understanding of the correspondence between the content of war and the content of the epoch appears insufficient.
The conception of war that prevails today was engendered by industrial civilization. It arose in the era of machine production, of class and interstate antagonisms, in a period marked by the cult of armed violence and the dominance of mass armies raised on the basis of universal conscription.
The military events of the last third of the twentieth century give serious grounds for supposing that the world is entering a period of wars of a new generation, aimed not so much at the direct destruction of the adversary as at achieving the political aims of war without battles between mass armies. It is quite obvious that the time has come for a new understanding of the relationship between war and armed struggle, of the place and role of armed violence within the content of war, and of the significance of direct and indirect military actions in its course and outcome.
The "cold war" testifies to the coming of a new era of "non-belligerent" wars, in which political aims are achieved not through direct armed intervention but through the use of other forms of violence and the undermining of the adversary's power from within. Its outcome and results led to large-scale geopolitical shifts, a regrouping of forces, coalitions and alliances, the creation of new politically influential regions and the emergence of some 30 new states. And all of this without a single "hot" shot being fired.
The political character of a war takes shape long before it begins; its seeds lie hidden in past and present policy
World history teaches that no war ever arises suddenly out of nothing (out of a void), of itself, spontaneously. Wars mature, as a rule, over long years, or at least over several years. They are prepared by socio-economic and political groups (parties) and by states that have an interest in them.
An analysis of the political features of the past wars of the twentieth century and of those forecast for the twenty-first shows that in most cases they are conditioned by a number of circumstances:
the entry of the most developed countries into the information stage of development and a new information-technological stage in the development of military affairs;
the refinement of the theory and practice of "controlled armed struggle" and the development of the strategy of "indirect action" (the possibility of achieving military aims not by direct but by stand-off military or non-military actions has been confirmed);
the appearance of new long-range precision-guided weapons which approach nuclear weapons in effectiveness but whose use has no adverse ecological consequences, and the transformation of nuclear weapons into weapons of deterrence;
the appearance of new types of threat to military security, especially international terrorism.
The scholarly literature identifies three principal approaches to determining the sources of war, approaches that have taken shape historically and are constantly in evidence: the pluralist, the limited-pluralist and the monist. The pluralist approach, for example, is expressed in the recognition of what is essentially an unlimited number of diverse causes (a large complex, or system, of causes), whose "list" is moreover continuously being added to. According to this approach, the sources of wars may be virtually any differences between members or parts (groups) within a society, or between different societies and their coalitions: economic, political, geographical, anthropological, biological and so forth. One variety of the pluralist approach is the civilizational theory of the origin of wars, which has now become widespread.
Analysis of this approach shows that it essentially removes the question of preventing war, still less of eliminating it from the life of society, since in practice it is impossible to remove the substantial differences between civilizations, countries, peoples, social groups and so on. The history of world civilizations shows that differences, distinctive features and contradictions will exist for as long as humanity exists. Moreover, as scholars convincingly demonstrate, these differences, distinctive features, particularities and contradictions act as a most important factor of mutual enrichment, development and progress.
World history teaches that war is a socio-political phenomenon representing one of the forms of resolving socio-political, economic and ideological contradictions, as well as national, religious, territorial and other contradictions between states, peoples, nations, classes and social groups by means of armed violence. War is generated above all by deep-lying socio-political and socio-economic causes of an objective-subjective character. It leads to a qualitative change in the condition of every sphere of social life: the social, political, economic, military and spiritual. The principal and decisive means of waging war are the armed forces, together with other troops, military formations and bodies and irregular forces (militia formations and units, partisan detachments). It follows that, in regarding war as a socio-political phenomenon, one may assert that it is a creation of the human mind and hand. Man did indeed invent war, developed it, and brought it to the point where it became the chief threat to his existence as a species.
The history of man, in the view of scholars and analysts worldwide, is to a substantial degree the preparation and conduct of wars. The periods in which peace reigned across the whole Earth are so imperceptible that they may in practice be disregarded. Thus, for example, in the period from 1055 to 1462, 245 invasions of Rus were carried out. Of the 537 years that elapsed from the time of the Battle of Kulikovo to the end of the First World War, Russia spent 334 years in fighting. At the same time, the history of the Russian state testifies that the overwhelming number of wars waged against it fell in the period of the formation of its statehood, of its unstable international position, and in the Time of Troubles.
Many political scientists and analysts believe that war will never depart from the life of men. It remains to a considerable extent a mystery why, throughout almost the whole of history and right up to the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, man has been more occupied with "perfecting" war than with building a secure peace. War, accompanying the life of man, could not but exert an influence on his evolution, on his socio-political and spiritual-moral values.
This chapter will examine the relative weight of political factors among the other factors that have shaped man's qualities as a creator of wars. It will also consider how the development of war and of man are politically interconnected, how their mutual influence changes, what the trends are in man's attitude towards war, and what may be expected in this field in the twenty-first century and the third millennium.
In the current literature there are three groups of approaches in the context of the questions we have posed.
The first group comprises the approach based on the premise that man is by nature aggressive, bellicose and pugnacious, and that war arose from this. The English psychologist Storr, for example, argued in his works that there is a special physiological mechanism in the human brain that gives rise to aggressiveness.
A second group comprises the approach which, on the contrary, holds that by nature man is peaceable and good-natured, and that bellicosity is instilled in him by the conditions of life, by forcible involvement in wars and by the process of the socialization of individuals. Thus K. Lorenz and N. Tinbergen, in particular, advance and substantiate in their scholarly works the argument that man was originally a harmless omnivorous creature possessing no natural adaptations for hunting large animals (claws, fangs, a venomous sting and the like), nor for killing members of his own species. They emphasize at the same time that he also lacked biological mechanisms restraining him from lethal acts. Meanwhile the development of production placed in man's hands the weapons of killing and the means of rapidly improving them, which, in the absence of biosocial mechanisms of restraint, led to the unlimited development of military affairs and to the threat of a nuclear apocalypse.
A third group comprises the approach which proceeds from the premise that society consists both of genetically bellicose people and of people peaceable by nature, and that the numerical ratio between them and their influence on the life of society may be extremely varied: the predominance of one or other of these groups (absolute, large, substantial, insubstantial), an approximate parity, and so on. The attitude of society and of the state towards war and peace depends on the strength and influence of these groups. It should be noted, moreover, that throughout history the proportion of bellicose people has expanded rapidly.
Of particular interest are the differing views of scholars on the role of war in human evolution. These views may be generalized and grouped into several categories.
The first group singles out the positive effect of war on man's overall evolution. Charles Darwin, for example - the world-renowned naturalist and creator of the theory of man's descent from the ape - was one of the first to link the perfection of the human type with war. Many of his followers developed the idea that wars were the driving force of human evolution. The birth and development of the "idea of war" in the human mind, its realization in practice, the organization and conduct of military operations, the need for specialized implements and armed struggle itself changed man in a revolutionary way, produced a shift in his physiology and intellect, gave his thinking depth and spatial breadth, and awakened his resourcefulness, initiative and inventiveness. Moreover, in the works of certain thinkers of the past we find an emphasis on the exceptional role of war in developing such lofty moral and psychological qualities in man as courage, boldness, self-sacrifice, solidarity, esprit de corps, mutual assistance and the like. Thus the German philosopher M. Scheler, in particular, regarded war as the only specific sphere in which the heroic principle is formed in people, and considered that only fighting warriors could be heroes. C. Clausewitz wrote that only war gives birth to lofty spirit, valour and boldness in man, whereas peaceful conditions supposedly develop in people nothing but effeminacy, and that therefore the elimination of war from the life of society would lead to the moral degradation of humanity. R. Bigelow, R. Pitt and others argue in their works that wars improved human nature by promoting the survival of the most viable groups and individuals, brought about the appearance in man, in the course of anthropogenesis, of a disproportionately large and highly perfected brain, and established a spirit of solidarity and mutual assistance. F. Nietzsche wrote that humanity would become worse if it unlearned how to make war. He sought to measure and compare philosophically the effects of war and peace upon man, and held that war and courage had accomplished more in history than peace and love of one's neighbour. One of the theorists of German militarism, H. Treitschke, asserted: "It would be a mutilation of human society if we were to remove war from the world."
The second, opposing point of view consists in recognizing the absolutely negative role of war in human evolution. One of its principal representatives may be said to be P. Sorokin, who held, for example, that it is the healthiest, most capable and morally finest people who perish in the greatest numbers in wars, and that wars promote the survival of the physically and morally defective, of cynics, self-servers and criminals, and thereby degrade the gene pool of humanity. In his works he compared war to a gardener who weeds the best vegetables out of the beds and leaves the weeds to multiply. The scholarly works of this group place particular emphasis on the fact that in wars human life itself is devalued, that a spirit encouraging the mass killing of people prevails, and that criminal inclinations are cultivated - cruelty, bloodthirstiness, a propensity to annihilate and destroy material and spiritual values, a striving for plunder and the like. After every war humanity becomes worse in every respect, and especially in the moral one.
A third group of scholars, overcoming the extremes of the two preceding ones, proceeds from the contradictory socio-political effect of war on human evolution: in some respects it stimulates man's progress, in others it brings about his degradation. In their view, for example, the revolution in military affairs, which has engendered a qualitatively new material and technical basis of war, stimulates man's intellectual and technical abilities, while the growing lethal and destructive power and range of modern weapons blunts his humane and ethical feelings. Many scholars who proceed from the contradictory socio-political effect of war on man link that effect with the character of the war: whether it is just or unjust, lawful or criminal, defensive or aggressive and predatory. Here, for example, is what the well-known nineteenth-century philosopher V. S. Solovyov wrote on this subject: "War was a direct means to the external unification of humanity and an indirect means to its internal unification. Reason forbids us to discard this instrument while it is still needed, but conscience obliges us to strive to make it cease to be needed, and to ensure that the natural organization of a humanity divided into warring parts should genuinely pass over into its moral, or spiritual, organization."
World history teaches that every war is a consequence of the interest taken in it by influential and powerful socio-political groups and strata. Without the determination of these groups to fight there can be no military clashes. In other words, there are social groups and strata of society that act as a kind of parent to wars. A society that strives for peace must be able to identify these "parents" and must develop the necessary instruments for doing so. For they share common signs and characteristics: a striving to achieve their aims by any means and methods, regardless of the social cost; a readiness to solve their own problems at the expense of others, by robbing, suppressing, subjugating or annihilating them; an unwillingness to take account of the legitimate interests of other social groups; a readiness to destroy everyone along with themselves rather than compromise their own values; a life lived by such principles as "better dead than red (or white)," and so on.
In these circumstances it must be noted that the negative impact of wars is felt above all in the size and quality of the population. History shows that losses of human life in wars have grown continuously, especially in the wars of the modern era. Losses grew particularly rapidly in the world wars of the twentieth century. The greatest surge in wars in the twentieth century is explained by the rapid degradation of secular culture and the loss of values as a restraining force. "There is not a single value," P. Sorokin wrote, "that binds Hitlerites and anti-Hitlerites, communists and capitalists, poor and rich, believers and unbelievers alike... Force and deception are becoming the principal norms of conduct."
At the same time, as history shows, it is precisely political factors that are called upon to play the decisive role in overcoming war, even though it is they that also contain the grounds for its preservation - for example: the existence of political communities and institutions with an interest in preserving war as a real or potential instrument of policy; the prevalence among the political elites and statesmen now in power of traditional power-based thinking and power politics; the orientation of states towards strengthening their military might, improving their armies and weapons, military-technical rivalry, and enhancing their leading role by means of a powerful coercive potential. As long ago as 1986 it was declared for the first time in Soviet military doctrine that the prevention of war is the supreme aim, the very core of military doctrine and the principal function of the Soviet state and its Armed Forces.
An analysis of foreign and domestic state normative legal acts in the sphere of national security shows that much that was characteristic of the era of confrontation between West and East is preserved in contemporary military development. In addition, it should be noted that a certain tradition has now taken shape which is closely connected with the works of the well-known American sociologist of Russian origin P. Sorokin. In particular, he identifies a number of indicators of the impact of wars on society, namely: changes in the size and quality of the population, the state of the economy (the country's national economy), of moral and legal relations, of education, science and culture. Each indicator, moreover, has a highly "granular" structure. Thus the changes in the size and quality of the population caused by the First World War and the Civil War are examined by him from various standpoints: direct losses (those killed, maimed and dead of wounds at the front - one quarter of all those who perished); indirect losses (increased mortality, a falling birth rate, deaths from hunger, hardship, epidemics and the like - three quarters of all those who perished); the loss of territories together with their populations, the deterioration of health, and the biological, neuro-cerebral and creative degradation of the nation and the degeneration of man in general. "Changes in the structure of the social aggregate" are discerned in the sharpening contrast between wealth and poverty: a decline in the living standards of the majority of people, restrictions on the rights and freedoms of citizens, the displacement of enormous masses of people, the militarization of public life, and the expansion of state intervention in every sphere of life, including the family.
In addition, many historians and political scientists, analysing the wars waged by the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, note that their cruelty and aggressive character are inconsistent with genuine democracy. It is also well known that American democracy is highly «authoritarian» in matters of unleashing wars, issuing threats and other uses of force, and that it leaves ample room for arbitrariness. Prominent academic experts and political scientists write, for example, that the main reason for J. Kennedy's decision to begin the war in Vietnam was the desire to restore the shaken prestige of the United States after the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Human lives in the name of prestige - such is the price of American-style democracy (the events in the Persian Gulf, Grenada, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and elsewhere).
History teaches that aggressive invasions, and the desire of many states to profit at Russia's expense, to push it back and weaken it, to remove it as an obstacle on the path to expanding their own influence and power, have entrenched in the mass consciousness of Russians a sense of wariness towards everything that has happened and is happening near their borders. Distrust, suspicion and vigilance regarding the behaviour of other states, especially the strongest and most active on the world stage, accumulated. These moods and feelings fed the aspiration to be on a par with the largest states in military strength, unconditional support for increasing the military budget and for strengthening the army and the navy. For many centuries it was customary to single out real or potential military adversaries in the surrounding world, as well as to search intensively for allies, to take part in blocs created by other countries and to build one's own, and to assist other peoples in waging predominantly wars of liberation. Nevertheless, because of their trustfulness and complacency, society and the country often found themselves unprepared in the face of sudden invasions.
At the same time, it must be noted that as wars developed, the significance of political factors grew - not only as factors sustaining the high morale of the people and the army, or as one of the means of struggle against enemies, but also as a relatively independent sphere of confrontation. Russian thinkers predicted that in time material wars, with their horrors, blood and killing, would give way to spiritual wars, a «war of spirits». Struggle, movement and historical rivalry would remain in them. But the methods of struggle would be subtler and more inward compared with the excessively crude and outward methods of material wars. Even then, however, the pain of movement and the struggle would persist. Happy repose, a blessed equilibrium, would not come. Good spirits would fight evil spirits with subtler and more perfect weapons. It is noted, moreover, that the sources of spiritual wars are the aggressive, coercive, messianic cultures of expansionist civilisations and states. The «Cold War» between the USSR and the USA in the second half of the twentieth century is named as the prototype of such wars.
Under these circumstances it is worth recalling the words of Allen Dulles, the former head of the US CIA, which he wrote during the first stage of the "Cold War", when defining the tasks of the struggle against Russia and outlining the most optimal and effective way of accomplishing them. In particular, he wrote: "Having sown chaos in Russia, we shall imperceptibly substitute false values for their values and force them to believe in those false values. How? We shall find our like-minded people, our helpers and allies within Russia itself. Episode by episode, a tragedy grandiose in its scale will be played out - the destruction of the most unruly people on earth, the final and irreversible extinction of its self-awareness. From literature and art, for example, we shall gradually expunge their social essence. We shall wean artists away from it, we shall kill their appetite for depicting and exploring those processes that take place in the depths of the popular masses. Literature, theatre, cinema - all will portray and glorify the basest of human feelings. We shall do everything to support and elevate the so-called creators who will implant and hammer into human consciousness a cult of sex, violence and betrayal - in a word, of every kind of immorality. Honesty and decency will be ridiculed and will be of no use to anyone, they will turn into a relic of the past. Boorishness and insolence, lies and deceit, drunkenness and drug addiction, an animal fear of one another and shamelessness, betrayal, nationalism, enmity among peoples, and above all enmity and hatred towards the Russian people - all of this we shall cultivate deftly and imperceptibly. And only a few, very few, will guess or understand what is happening. But such people we shall place in a helpless position, we shall turn them into a laughing stock. We shall find a way to slander them and to declare them the refuse of society».
As a result of the «Cold» War, a substantial change in the balance of forces took place in the world, and a fundamentally new world order was established. The bipolar world was destroyed. The socialist centre of power left the historical stage. The socialist system and its military organisation collapsed with a groan. The Soviet Union broke up into separate states. As a result, only one centre remained in the world - the West, led by the USA. Despite the assertions of many political scientists, the world order became unipolar. Today Russia is receding into third place among US priorities. It should be noted that the American political elite continues to be dominated by the views formulated as early as the first half of the twentieth century by the classics of Anglo-Saxon geopolitical theory, H. Mackinder and N. Spykman. According to these views, the Atlantic forces led by the USA must control the so-called Rimland, comprising all of Europe west of Smolensk, the Near and Middle East, the Transcaucasus, South and partly Central Asia and the western coast of the Pacific Ocean, as well as Lenaland - a geopolitical term denoting the sparsely populated territories of the Russian Far East, the Baikal region, Yakutia and the autonomous districts of the Far North. Control over the Rimland and Lenaland, according to this design, will secure for the Atlanticists domination over the Heartland - European Russia and Siberia - which in turn will mean world domination for the Western financial oligarchy.
Building on these pseudo-scientific postulates, contemporary American geopolitical thought injects into the ideological and military-political practice of Western countries a considerable measure of Russophobia, aggravated by the action of subjective factors. In particular, by the circumstance that the leading ideologists of US policy towards our country are not native-born Americans but cosmopolitically oriented individuals, for whom even the USA is no more than a mechanism for carrying out geopolitical experiments and historical revenge. What is meant here is a group of first-generation emigrants from the countries of Eastern Europe, predominantly of Jewish nationality, such as H. Kissinger, M. Albright, Z. Brzezinski and others, distinguished by a visceral hatred of everything Russian.
In this situation a question inevitably suggests itself: "How lasting and stable will the unipolar world prove to be?" In Russian and foreign scholarly and popular literature, the most widespread view has become the one according to which the unipolar world will be a transitional stage towards a multipolar world order. Today, and for the immediate future, the USA unquestionably remains the world hegemon. Its superiority in the basic indicators of power over any single country, and even over possible groupings of countries, is too great. A challenge to the USA in this sense could in the near term be mounted by a united Europe, but given their strategic commonality this is unlikely.
At the same time, it must be remembered that the contemporary world is not only unipolar but also multi-tiered and hierarchical. Besides the one superpower, it contains several «great» powers (second-tier countries). These include Japan, China, Germany, England, France and, with certain reservations, Russia. Apparently such a world order will persist for the foreseeable future. It is not excluded, however, that such an alignment of forces may be destroyed and that the world will once again become bipolar. The most probable contender for the role of a second centre of power is China. It has for a long time now sustained a high rate of growth, turning into a demographic, economic and military giant.
China's potential allies may be the countries of South-East Asia. Given that the USA and China possess nuclear weapons, it is logical to expect a prolonged confrontation between them. To be sure, such a turn of events is only one of the real possibilities. Another would not involve China's struggle for the position of hegemon. Having weighed the pros and cons (including the price of acquiring superpower status, as shown by the experience of the USSR), China may confine itself to obtaining a special place within a unipolar world under the aegis of the USA.
At the same time, Zb. Brzezinski, a politician influential in the West, never tires of repeating that, after the crushing of communism in Russia, the main task is to destroy Orthodoxy.
Thus it may be concluded that among the principal political factors of war are culture, art, and the spiritual and moral values of the human being.
Many outstanding thinkers, among them N. Berdyaev, V. Solovyov, I. Ilyin and others, believed that peace between states and peoples, as well as within them, would be achieved only when the fragmentation, opposition and confrontational character of cultures had been overcome, when their convergence had led to the creation of a single worldwide culture. The present peace (as a set of real relations) must be the consequence of an inner spiritual, moral and cultural peace, of people's peace-loving convictions. This requires a spiritual and cultural regeneration of humankind, a moral condemnation of war by all people. In this connection, many scholars today, proceeding from the universal threats to the very existence of humanity in the twenty-first century, are raising ever more insistently the question of creating a new culture - a «culture of survival» - and of so-called innovative education of the human being, so that humanity does not perish.
The degradation of culture now under way makes Russia more vulnerable to the existing military dangers. To explain the persistent moral and psychological expansion of a number of Western states against Russia, many world analysts frequently employ the civilisational approach. Thus, for example, analysing the causes of the «terrible pressure from the Western world, which took the painful form of military blows against Russia», the outstanding twentieth-century historian A. Toynbee held that this was a consequence of the expansiveness inherent in all civilisations (the drive to extend borders, to replenish the labour force, to assimilate neighbours), which manifested itself most strongly in Western civilisation by virtue of its exceptional economic, scientific-technical, military and demographic dynamism». At the same time, it should be noted that under the slogan of «civilising» Russia what is now being carried out is its «Westernisation», with the Western model of the socio-political organisation of the state, along with fashions, mores and customs - and especially the American way of life - being forcibly implanted.
Under these conditions it must not be forgotten that states which failed to care for the preservation and enhancement of the culture, education and spiritual and moral strength of their people, or which looked on indifferently as these were destroyed, doomed themselves to ruin. Unfortunately, something of the sort is happening in present-day Russia.
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