RR Phantom
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 |  Subject: Wars wane: is the world really falling into peace?  Tue Jan 31, 2012 4:19 am | |
| The awful images of Syria's regime killing its own people, of civil war atrocities in Sudan, of the soldiers and civilians dying in Afghanistan seem to confirm that no matter how civilised we think ourselves, the scourge of war will always be with us.
The Australian story seems a case study in war's persistence. Australia was fighting recently in two major wars at once, Iraq and Afghanistan. It has troops on years-long standby to prevent outbreaks in two more countries, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. And its long-range defence build-up is based on the need to hedge against the risk of future war with China.
Like many philosophers and statesmen through history, the former US Secretary of Defence and an architect of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, thought the urge intrinsic: "I'm not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war. We're not going to change human nature any time soon."
But the startling truth is that while war certainly has not been eliminated, it appears to be on the endangered list.
There has been a pronounced decline in the number of wars and the deadliness of war in the world. One expert, John Mueller, professor of political science at Ohio State University, writes: "We may be reaching a point where war - in both its international and civil varieties - ceases, or nearly ceases to exist, a remarkable development that has attracted little notice."
Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker says that it "may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history". He writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature: "We may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence."
So what is the evidence so far? Let's start with recent history, where the data is clearest.
The Human Security Report, an annual study compiled by researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada, spells out the changes since the end of World War II. In the 1950s, there was an average of just over six international wars being fought every year. In the new millennium, there has been an average of less than one. Even more remarkable, there has not been a single war between the major powers in more than 60 years. This is unprecedented. Historians call it "the Long Peace".
Not only are there fewer international wars, they have become less deadly. The average war of the 1950s caused 20,000 battle deaths a year. In the past decade it's fewer than 3000 per war.
But what of civil wars? The trend was ugly from the 1960s to the 1990s, when they trebled. A great many were proxy struggles by the superpowers. As soon as the Soviet Union gave up the fight, the Cold War ended and so did many civil wars. Their number halved from 1992 to 2003, when it reached 29. Last year there were 30 being waged.
But what about other types of war that are neither international nor civil? The struggles in Syria and Yemen, for instance, where an oppressive regime kills its own people - so-called one-sided conflicts? There were 20 under way last year. Quite a few, right? Yes, but it's still well down on 30 in 2003.
If the decline in war is so well established, why does it come as a surprise to just about everyone? The leader of the Human Security Report project, Andrew Mack, has a two-part answer. First, he tells me: "It's your fault. It's partly the media's news policy - 'if it bleeds, it leads'."
The media does an energetic job covering the outbreak of every war, and a desultory job covering its end, especially if it just peters out, as most do, says Mack, formerly at the Australian National University.
Second, many humanitarian NGOs talk up crises and atrocities, but are quiet about outbreaks of peace. "People don't like our message" that war is on the decline, Mack says. When he started, for the first time anywhere, collating and publishing annual and authoritative global war tolls, he met resistance. "Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, Oxfam, the International Crisis Group were all saying to us, 'Whoa, that's not good'.
''They are great organisations, but they're driven by a need to get resources, and to do that they need to tell donors it's worst-case."
So Australia's recent experience of war is unrepresentative. Mack compiled a list of the countries that have most often gone to war, including intervening in their colonies, since World War II. Top of the list are France and Britain, then America and Russia, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, followed by Australia at number eight.
Steven Pinker's book reaches much further into history, and much deeper into the human psyche. So its claims are, inherently, more debatable.
He shows that a human living in a traditional society - before the advent of the modern nation - had about a 15 per cent chance of dying violently. When the Leviathan, the modern state, arrived, it monopolised the use of force. The risk of a violent death fell to an average of just 3 per cent. Developments since, including the rise of market economies and democracies, drove it down to far below 1 per cent in modern rich countries, the safest societies known in human history.
Pinker posits that violence is not an intrinsic or "hydraulic" part of human beings but that we adopted it as a survival strategy. As it becomes less useful, he suggests, we are simply discarding it.
Still, we would be wise to remain vigilant. Andrew Mack warns of three risks to the trend of declining warfare. One is the rise of narco-war as a globalising drug trade confronts the power of states. Another is Islamist movements. Third is complacency.
We should consider a fourth. If China's rise occurs without conflict, it will be the first time in history that a new power has risen to rival the reigning hegemony without a war.
Perhaps the world is wise enough to manage this. It would be nice to be able to declare a new and permanent peace, but just now it could be a little hasty.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/wars-wane-is-the-world-really-falling-into-peace-20120130-1qplp.html#ixzz1l1fVvBBi
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