War and History: Methodological Debates

WAR and HISTORY: METHODOLOGICAL DEBATES Erhan BUYUKAKINCI  Professor of international relations at Galatasaray University. Le mort saisit le vif. (translation: the dead controls the alive) A French expression “War is a rare event in world politics, but it is always with us.” D.S. Geller & J.D. Singer, in Nations at War Introduction Many studies at various levels have been realised on the concept of “war”, which constitutes the principal starting point of the discipline of international relations. Within the framework of all these works, “history” has been used as a key instrument to shape empiric patterns with the outputs of inductive methods or to present the chronological cycles of the great powers’ politics at international system level with deductive interpretations. Is it possible to comment the continuity of the conflicts (transforming into war) during the history as an intellectual outcome of the “fatalism” in literal meaning within the realist paradigm based on the Sun Tzu and Clausewitzian traditions? Is it possible to consider the war as a recurrent phenomenon within this framework or as an important result of the systemic anarchy? On their side, the idealist school before the Second World War, the behaviouralism, and its derivatives since 1950s have aimed to emphasise the importance of “peace” by analysing the reasons of war. Most of the initiatives to conceptualise war and its modelling based on causality have tried to minimise the “chance” within these international phenomena by quantitative methods. It is possible to assume that these two main paradigms with their own assumptions, methods and outputs, though being in methodological debates for several times, have a common point of interrogation for this special topic: the consideration of “history” as a sole instrument to demonstrate the continuity of the arguments on war within the international politics. Could the causal explanation of war or its qualitative interpretation be concealed behind the historical realities? The methodological use of history to analyse or to understand the concept of war should be considered as a unique way in comparison with other topics in international relations. Is it possible or not to develop an alternative method to analyse the war beyond “history”? Theoretical discussions on the definition of “War” The field of international relations (IR) made significant progress since its emergence by the end of World War II as an autonomous discipline. The studies of IR became more explicitly theoretical in their general orientation, more rigorous in theory construction, more attentive to the match between theory and research design, more sophisticated in the use of statistical methods, and more methodologically self-conscious in the use of qualitative methods. However, the discipline of IR has few “normative/formal” propositions, limited predictive capacities, and enormous divisions within its fields of specialisation. There is no consensus as what are the causes of war, which methodologies are most useful to discover and validate those causes, whether it is possible to generalise about anything as complex and contextually dependent as war. This enormous diversity of theoretical, methodological and epistemological perspectives on the study of war complicates the task of providing a concise assessment of the field. War is a very complex subject, in part because it does not result from a single set of causes. Grotius did not simply define war as it appeared historically in his days, but defined it as an institutional fact within the existing system. For many philosophers, war is a product of history, of the beliefs, formal and informal laws, and customs of a particular period. This emphasises that war can be considered as a social invention. The conception of war that places the goal and purpose of war at the centre of its emphasis is that of Clausewitz who provided two famous definitions of war: “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means” and “war therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our wills.” For Clausewitz, war is a political act of force. (Clausewitz, Chapters 1 and 2) Coming from the Prussian militarist tradition against the Napoleonic period in Europe, Clausewitz underlines in his works that there is a very big difference between the real and absolute wars; the “real war” covers all the tactical attempts and operations to realise the struggle against the enemy forces, while the “absolute war” is formulated at the logical level and can be achieved just when the substantive target would be reached. (Clausewitz, Chapter 8) For his part, H. Bull offers a theoretical definition of war, which was generally accepted because its explicit content: “War is organised violence carried on by political units against each other.” (Bull, 1977, p. 184) This definition was generally admitted by the realist authors of international relations, because it possible to consider here the role of the sovereign actors which are also able to organise the structural violence each against other. By that way, this term can be limited within the framework of state-nation actors. IR theorists generally define war as large-scale organised violence between political units. (Vasquez, 1997, pp. 21-29) To differentiate war from lesser levels of violence, they generally follow the defitinition of the Project of Correlates of War - COW’s operational requirement of a minimum of 1000 battle-related fatalities. (Singer&Small, 1972, pp. 37, 39) In their work, Singer and Small decided to collect data on wars from 1816 on by combining lists of wars and deadly quarrels of Wright and Richardson who considered every instance of military combat as a potential datum. (Wright, 1969; Small&Singer, 1982, p. 37) Analysts traditionally distinguish international wars from civil wars, and inter-state wars from imperial, colonial ones. However, the “great powers” and “euro-centric approach” in the war studies is decreasing in response of the end of the Cold War, the shift in warfare away from the great powers, and the rise of “low-intensity conflicts” and “identity wars” (or inter-ethnic or inter-religion conflicts). (Holsti, 1996; Thompson) Most of the IR scholars focus on explaining variations in war and peace, by leaving the question of why the war occurs to philosophers and biologists and leaving the question of why a “particular war” to historians. Within this context, it is possible to remind as an exception to this focus the argumentation by Waltz (Waltz, 1959/2001 and 1979) and other neo-realists that the fundamental cause of war is the anarchic structure of the international system. Defined as the absence of a legitimate authority to regulate disputes and enforce agreements between states, anarchy causes war in the sense that there is no governmental enforcement mechanism in the internationals system to prevent wars. Waltz argued that “although neo-realist theory does not explain why particular wars are fought, it does explain war’s dismissal recurrence through the millennia.” (Levy, 1998, p. 142; Schroeder, 1994) To conclude on the discussions of definition, we like to quote the works of J. Vasquez on war. In his excellent book on the studies of war, Vasquez presents six theoretical assumptions (Vasquez, 1997, pp. 40-50): War is learned; it could be studied as a set of lessons that people developed by fighting the other ones. In this way, war is invented and re-invented and it becomes learned as part of a culture of behaviour. Because of its costs and of normative/moral prohibitions, war has never been historically the means of first choice, but has been resorted to only after other acceptable practices (normal politics and diplomacy) have failed. War results from a long-term process. Within this context, Vasquez tries to understand if there is a pattern according to which a war situation develops and evolves. Here the war situation is conceived as a relationship between two political collectivities, which has a history, present and future that affects the nature of their interaction and the likelihood of war. War is a product of interaction, not simply a result of systemic conditions. Here, war is considered as the outcome of the foreign policy practices of states. War becomes likely, when the sequence of diplomatic actions fails to resolve highly salient issues, resulting in an increase in the level of both conflictive actions and psychological hostility. This produces the kind of relationship between two or more countries that is prone to a conflict atmosphere. In order to explain war, it is necessary to uncover the causal dynamics that make such a relationship emerge. War is a way of making political decisions. At this point, Vasquez reminds Clausewitz’ analysis, which pretends that war is a political phenomenon. Power is used to put certain issues on the agenda rather than others, and then to resolve those issues in one way rather than another. This suggests that war, as an institution, is a form of force that has evolved within the global political system as a unilateral allocation mechanism; war is not simply an act of violence, but an allocation mechanism which is resorted because of the failure of normal politics. War is multi-causal phenomenon. There are a variety of factors and causes that can bring about war. The variety of factors associated with war and the changing nature of war through history suggests that war can be brought about by any number of sufficient conditions. If there appear to be many causes of a given phenomenon, then it may be the case that the phenomenon under question is not a single entity, but a variety of phenomena that must be distinguished. There are different types of war, because the typology depends on the system and actor levels. The quality of actors (minor or major actors) can affect the environment in which the conflicting process would be extended. Methodological debates on the relationship between the disciplines of history and international relations Can history or historical methods be used as analytical tools for understanding international developments? In historical researches, there has traditionally been great interest in studying relations between states. In fact, historical studies and international relations seem to cover the same fields of research. Social scientists came to believe that history was too descriptive as a discipline because of its idiographic nature. By particularising through the description of singular, unique phenomena, historians are against the idea of recurrence of social facts. (Goldthorpe) Historians content to find the evidence from among a stock of relics to expose the facts as narratives. The theorists of international relations often complain about the atheoretical orientation of much historiography, while historians often complain about the abuse of history by the political scientists. The debate on the theoretical orientations is shaped mostly by the framework in which historical events will be analysed by generalisation or particularisation. Political scientists are more interested in “explaining” general patterns than individual events, by basing them on theoretical models. It should be important to emphasise that the discipline emerged as the study of “statecraft” and the conducts of foreign policy at the state level. (Lustick, 1996) As it is often called in the United States, the practice of historical studies in international relations is defined within the diplomatic history, which includes the study of international treaties, diplomatic documents, and correspondences between governments that had provided the general itinerary of world politics. As the nature of the source material accessible for the researchers restricted the development of academic perspectives, this kind of material favoured the analyses of motives at subjective levels and so that, the cumulated information collected within these archives could be considered as the presentation of narrow perspectives. Comparing with other fields of history, diplomatic history has been less affected by methodological fads of the discipline, from the new quantitative history to the rise of post-modernism. It has been consistent in its insistence on the empirical validation of its interpretations and in the utility of narratives and primary sources for that purpose. Diplomatic history is a much a technique of inquiry as the study of past international relations. Political and diplomatic historians often look at the political systems that we call “international systems”, a systemic conception based on the interactions of political units whose sovereignty and legitimacy are recognised mutually by each other. As H. Butterfield argued, history is the study of the changes of things that change; for history, the phenomenon to be explained is “change” in human life, society, institutions, and so on over time. The human character leads by his own nature to the concept of “change”, which could be defined as the recognition of fixed limits and conditions within which the change occurs and as a result, the continuity becomes such a reality as the unavoidable side of change. (Schroeder, 1997) Differences between history and international relations vary over time as a function of trends within each, which further complicates any comparison. In the 1950s and 1960s, leading schools of thought in each discipline were quite confident in the feasibility of scientific knowledge of socio-political behaviour and in the utility of quantitative methods for discovering that knowledge. On their side, the scientific understandings of social science, which mandate the search for causal mechanisms, have provided an environment for a useful interdisciplinary conversation. Who makes the history? Who makes the wars? Who is the main actor for the historians? The man himself? The narrative-based historians prefer considering the heroism of the great men within the historical events. The classical approach in the redaction of historical texts has a general conviction on the fact that the great statemen are the main conductors of the human history. On the other side, the conception of social history has conflicted with this classical approach, by studying the social movements and changes, as a reaction against the relationship between the rulers and citizens. The use of history as analytical instrument for understanding and explaining the present presupposes an explicit reasoning about what kind of knowledge is relevant. For S. Johnson, the historian is contented with immobility to explain the events and facts and needs no creation and fiction, but careful comprehension. The Rankean school considers that, beyond the historical facts, there is no other factor than the “divine hand”, which determines the way of destiny and the “national spirit”, which shapes the political process and institutions. (Carr) For Gramscian school, history is a discipline that studies the human beings living and fighting within the society, but its scope should cover all the people around the world as feasible as possible. As historians have been always sceptical of ideological and normative profile of peace researches, they seem to be against the search for strategic utility and to hesitate to use history to develop political strategies for conflict resolutions. However, many historians prefer to use different accents or tones of interpretation or styles of event-categorisation. As maintains K.J. Holsti (1985, p. 131), there is a general tendency among social scientists in the field of international politics to develop theoretical innovations on the basis of recent diplomatic developments. Central concepts in the field of international relations were mainly formulated to describe the general lines of world affairs and the international system. However, when we insist on the definition of the current situation of world politics by taking into consideration the present as the normal state of international affairs, we risk confronting with the perils of ahistorical perspectives. If we strive for generalisations or deductions, we ought to reconsider studies on a longer period at acceptable level. When the tendency to construct theories predicated on the explanation of the existing international system, the unpreparedness for the developments of today or future becomes a big reality to surmount. Methodological debates: the use of history in the studies on war The scientific research on war and peace in the last forty years has demonstrated that induction can bear important fruit. Many of these studies conducted by political scientists have relied on the work of diplomatic historians. Large statistical data sets such as those produced by the Correlates of War (COW) project have used the work of historians. The concept of war is central to historical studies of international relations; because much of the researches focus on power struggles, conflicts and diplomatic negotiations. The starting point for historical studies seems to be similar with that of international relations on the observation of the human suffering and violence throughout the time and of the evolution of general values to guide the relations between the peoples on the world. As history does not aim to criticise the presence of violence in world affairs, by reporting, observing and presenting only the events, the rejection of human suffering should not be also seen as an objective. However, international relations cover many fields of research and have the advantages of benefiting from a wide variety of methods to apply. As international relations aim to analyse the problematic of violence and human suffering by qualitative ways or by quantitative methods, they could seek the chance to build the peace process. At this point, we should underline that peace was never presented unfortunately as a process by the great part of scholars of international politics. Because the idea of “change” seems to become less preferable than the “continuity”, as the assignment of priority to the issue of peace within the problem-formulating phase of the research process would prevent the ideological superiority of power politics that are not in favour of the reduction of maximal gains. With the appearance of the modern inter-state system, war becomes completely a reality of the system itself. As the international society is historically shaped by the anarchical quality of the system itself (Bull, 1977), the lack of a supra-national force can be seen as a reason of the general disorder and the state-nations define their rules within the framework of balance of power by fighting between themselves or by the diplomatic means. For the realist authors, “to insist that all nations within an anarchic system practice self-help (seek their survival) strikes us as a little like saying that fish within water must learn to swim.” (Gaddis, 1997; Schmidt, 2000) The pronouncement of this terminology (anarchy, self-help, system) describes rather the context on which all the asked questions to predict depend. Even though the peace process seems to be preferable for all of us, it is not too easy to manage it and to guarantee the continuity of equitable/fair distribution of benefits within the international system. Although everything could be foreseeable during the peace process as the networks of information and diplomatic means function more explicitly, it is necessary to emphasise that it also limits the ambitions for change and domination and that becomes so hard to negotiate with the existing instruments as the right of sharing the benefits of the international system is presented as a general value. On the other side, the major concern for objectivity constitutes the source of the scepticism of the behaviouralism. As the scientific confidence toward the narrative-based methodology of history remains limited, the expectations of documentation and argumentation for empirical evidence become shifted to sources accepted as likely to be objective. This question is also linked to the invisible antagonism between the scientific logic and the idea of fatalism. As claim the scientific school, for most phenomena, there is some determining antecedent. Within this aspect, the categorisation of dependent and independent variables could be interpreted with the logic of modelling the behaviours of political actors in the environment. The scientific conception of war as a process The conceptualisation of IR and war as a sequence of choices, which has long been common in the qualitative literature, is also reflected in much of the quantitative empirical literature. Early studies in the COW tradition looked for simple empirical associations between systemic structures and the frequency and severity of war; this research tradition has evolved such that it now conceptualises international conflict as a process or series of steps from background conditions to the occurrence and evolution of militarised disputes to the outbreak and evolution of international wars. (Singer, 1979) This more dynamic conceptualisation led to the development of new data sets on militarised interstate disputes and international crisis. These data sets have further facilitated analyses of the sources, dynamics, and consequences of international dispute and crisis behaviour. The more dynamic character of theorising about war is reflected in the literature on long cycles, power transitions, enduring rivalries. (Geller & Singer) The quantitative and comparative analysis of the effects of national attributes on conflicts and war necessitates an extensive range of independent variables, which are generally defined as “capabilities” (population, economic development, national culture, regimes, power status, etc.). There exist many data sources such as the COW (Correlates of War), the DON (Dimensionality of Nations), the WEIS (World Events Interaction Survey), the CREON (Comparative Research on the Events of Nations) to evaluate the sets of national attributes, the COPDAB (Conflict and Peace Data Bank) and the MID (Militarized Interstate Dispute) by collecting data within the framework of periodical classifications; many of the state-level findings are based on comparative foreign policy studies. (Geller&Singer, 1998) However, serious methodological problems tend to inhibit the substantive interpretation of the findings of this research orientation. Specifically, the CREON, WEIS, COPDAB and DON databases utilise highly restricted temporal periods, which may produce unrepresentative results. Within this perspective, the extensive findings relate mostly to capabilities and war. (Bremer & Cusack) Two different approaches may be taken to the construction of typologies of war; the first one is nomothethic and behavioural and strives to explain war regardless of time and space, while the second one is an approach that sees the specific time and place (historical conditions) in which war occurs as the most critical factor in explaining war. Most behavioural approaches tend to base their typologies on the nature of participants rather than the number of participants. The COW project is typical of this approach, by distinguishing between inter-state and extra-systemic wars. (Diehl & Goertz) A major criticism of nomothetic approaches is that they are ahistorical. Like most positivist efforts, they can be faulted for assuming that wars, regardless of previous history, are caused by the same set of variables. However, for some scholars such as Modelski, Organski, Kugler and Gilpin, the historical perspective makes them see war as natural and periodic (Gilpin, 1999); unlike Richardson and other more behaviourally oriented peace scientists, who try to identify the conditions of war and peace so that the latter may be encouraged while preventing the former. By that way, many authors from the scientific approach defend that the history should be analysed as a database for comparative analyses. The definition of the term “datum” should be clarified and well-instrumentalised. “Any item of factual or existential truth may be a datum… without such criteria for coding and classifying, we cannot generate a set of data, and therefore cannot make a scientifically useful descriptive statement about … the facts” (Singer&Diehl, 1990, p. 5) The datum is the matter of quantification, however if quantification is not essential for identifying a datum, it is always essential for describing the data set into which the case falls. Conclusion Karl W. Deutsch formulated the basic idea simply, but clearly in a foreword: “War, to be abolished, must be understood. To be understood, it must be studied.” (Wright, 1969) Since Waltz classified the causes of war in terms of their origins in the individual, the nation-state, and the international system, IR theorists have agreed on the utility of the levels-of-analysis framework as an organising device for the study of war. By that way, the use of the history as methodological tool vary with the aim of the researchers. History is ever present in our age, which makes it possible to identify historical processes that are significant for future developments. The past is both constructive and potentially destructive; it does not only create solidarity, but also justifies the reality of war. A central task of historical research in the study of international relations is therefore to expose the destructive tendencies in the past and to assert the constructive ones. The scientific explanation of history aim to understand the “order” of the human life in which the concepts of “continuity” and “change” seem to be confronted, however they are complementary each to other in a mutual interaction. From their point of view, the case-study research is more methodologically sophisticated, because it has become more historical, but we can say now that it has also more analytical and comparative with the critics of the scientific school. The main problematic of the social sciences is based on how the human being as the product of his environment could change it. In the social sciences, it is possible to underline the importance of the search for objectivity and moderate scepticism in history, conceptualisation through the concreteness and unification of different analyses at unit levels and comparison in time and space. For Hegel, the only thing that we learned from history is the fact that the humankind has learned nothing from it. Bibliography Bremer, Stuart A. and Cusack, Thomas, 1995. The Process of War. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers. Bull, Hedley, 1977. The Anarchical Society. NYC: Columbia Univ. Press. Carr, Edward H., 1996. Tarih nedir? (What is History?) 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