The End of War

This is Gwynne Dyer on the hope for a transformation from the world as a collection of independent states to the world as a global village

The End of War
Our Task Over the Next Few Years is to Transform the World of Independent States into a Genuine Global Village

by Gwynne Dyer

The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained. And if baboons can do it, why not us?
— Frans de Waal, Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University

About 20 years ago, a disaster struck the Forest Troop of baboons in Kenya. There was a tourist lodge within their range, and the biggest and toughest males in the troop would regularly go to the garbage dump there to forage for food. Subordinate males, however, did not go — so when the brutal and despotic alpha males of Forest Troop all ate meat infected with bovine tuberculosis at the dump and promptly died, the less aggressive 50 per cent of the group's males survived. And the troop's whole culture changed.

Male baboons are so obsessed with status that they are always on a hair-trigger for aggression — and it isn't just directed at male rivals of equal status. Lower-ranking males routinely get bullied and terrorized, and even females (who weigh half as much as males) are frequently attacked and even bitten. You really would not want to live your life as a baboon.

Yet after the biggest, baddest males of Forest Troop all died off at once, the whole social atmosphere changed. When it was first studied by primatologists in 1979-82, it was a typical, utterly vicious baboon society, but after the mass die-off of the bullies the surviving members relaxed and began treating one another more decently.

The males still fight even today — they are baboons, after all — but they quarrel with other males of equal rank rather than beating up on social inferiors, and they don't attack the females at all. Everybody spends much more time in grooming, huddling close together, and other friendly social behavior, and stress levels even for the lowest-ranking individuals (as measured by hormone samples) are far lower than in other baboon troops. Most important of all, these new behaviors have become entrenched in the troop's culture.

Male baboons rarely live more than 18 years: The low-status survivors of the original disaster are all gone now. All the current adult males of the Forest Troop are baboons who joined it as adolescents after 1982, so by now the range of male personalities in Forest Troop must have returned to the normal baboon distribution. But the level of aggression has not returned to baboon-normal.

"We don't yet understand the mechanism of transmission," said Robert Sapolsky, a biology and neurology professor at Stanford University who co-authored the 2004 report on the Forest Troop phenomenon, "but the jerky new guys are obviously learning: We don't do things like that around here.'"

Human beings are less aggressive and more co-operative than baboons or even chimpanzees, and a thousand times more flexible in our cultural arrangements: Most of us now live quite comfortably in pseudo-bands called nations that are literally a million times bigger than the bands our ancestors lived in until the rise of civilization.

War is deeply embedded in our history and our culture, probably since before we were even fully human, but weaning ourselves away from it should not be a bigger mountain to climb than some of the other changes we have already made in the way we live, given the right incentives. And we have certainly been given the right incentives: The holiday from history that we have enjoyed since the early '90s may be drawing to an end, and another great-power war, fought next time with nuclear weapons, may be lurking in our future.

The "firebreak" against nuclear weapons use that we began building after Hiroshima and Nagasaki has held for well over half a century now. But the proliferation of nuclear weapons to new powers is a major challenge to the stability of the system. So are the coming crises, mostly environmental in origin, which will hit some countries much harder than others, and may drive some to desperation.

Add in the huge impending shifts in the great-power system as China and India grow to rival the United States in GDP over the next 30 or 40 years and it will be hard to keep things from spinning out of control. With good luck and good management, we may be able to ride out the next half-century without the first-magnitude catastrophe of a global nuclear war, but the potential certainly exists for a major die-back of human population.

We cannot command the good luck, but good management is something we can choose to provide. It depends, above all, on preserving and extending the multilateral system that we have been building since the end of World War II. The rising powers must be absorbed into a system that emphasizes co-operation and makes room for them, rather than one that deals in confrontation and raw military power. If they are obliged to play the traditional great-power game of winners and losers, then history will repeat itself and everybody loses.

Our hopes for mitigating the severity of the coming environmental crises also depend on early and concerted global action of a sort that can only happen in a basically co-operative international system.

When the great powers are locked into a military confrontation, there is simply not enough spare attention, let alone enough trust, to make deals on those issues, so the highest priority at the moment is to keep the multilateral approach alive and avoid a drift back into alliance systems and arms races. And there is no point in dreaming that we can leap straight into some never-land of universal brotherhood; we will have to confront these challenges and solve the problem of war within the context of the existing state system.

The solution to the state of international anarchy that compels every state to arm itself for war was so obvious that it arose almost spontaneously in 1918. The wars by which independent states had always settled their quarrels in the past had grown so monstrously destructive that some alternative system had to be devised, and that could only be a pooling of sovereignty, at least in matters concerning war and peace, by all the states of the world. So the victors of World War I promptly created the League of Nations.

But the solution was as difficult in practice as it was simple in concept. Every member of the League of Nations understood that if the organization somehow acquired the ability to act in a concerted and effective fashion, it could end up being used against them, so no major government was willing to give the League of Nations any real power.

Instead, they got World War II, and that war was so bad — by the end the first nuclear weapons had been used on cities — that the victors made a second attempt in 1945 to create an international organization that really could prevent war. They literally changed international law and made war illegal, but they were well aware that all of that history and all those reflexes were not going to vanish overnight.

It would be depressing to catalogue the many failures of the United Nations, but it would also be misleading. The implication would be that this was an enterprise that should have succeeded from the start, and has failed irrevocably. On the contrary; it was bound to be a relative failure at the outset. It was always going to be very hard to persuade sovereign governments to surrender power to an untried world authority which might then make decisions that went against their particular interests. In the words of the traditional Irish directions to a lost traveler: "If that's where you want to get to, sir, I wouldn't start from here."

But here is where we must start from, for it is states that run the world.

The present international system, based on heavily armed and jealously independent states, often exaggerates the conflicts between the multitude of human communities in the world, but it does reflect an underlying reality: We cannot all get all we want, and some method must exist to decide who gets what. That is why neighboring states have lived in a perpetual state of potential war, just as neighboring hunter-gatherer bands did 20,000 years ago.

If we now must abandon war as a method of settling our disputes and devise an alternative, it only can be done with the full co-operation of the world's governments. That means it certainly will be a monumentally difficult and lengthy task: Mistrust reigns everywhere and no nation will allow even the least of its interests to be decided upon by a collection of foreigners.

Even the majority of states that are more or less satisfied with their borders and their status in the world would face huge internal opposition from nationalist elements to any transfer of sovereignty to the United Nations.

The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained. And if baboons can do it, why not us?

The U.N. as presently constituted is certainly no place for idealists, but they would feel even more uncomfortable in a United Nations that actually worked as was originally intended.

It is an association of poachers turned game-keepers, not an assembly of saints, and it would not make its decisions according to some impartial standard of justice.

There is no impartial concept of justice to which all of mankind would subscribe and, in any case, it is not "mankind" that makes decisions at the United Nations, but governments with their own national interests to protect.

To envision how a functioning world authority might reach its decisions, at least in its first century or so, begin with the arrogant promotion of self-interest by the great powers that would continue to dominate U.N. decision-making and add in the crass expediency masquerading as principle that characterizes the shifting coalitions among the lesser powers in the present General Assembly: It would be an intensely political process.

The decisions it produced would be kept within reasonable bounds only by the need never to act in a way so damaging to the interest of any major member or group of members that it forced them into total defiance, and so destroyed the fundamental consensus that keeps war at bay.

There is nothing shocking about this.

National politics in every country operates with the same combination: a little bit of principle, a lot of power, and a final constraint on the ruthless exercise of that power based mainly on the need to preserve the essential consensus on which the nation is founded and to avoid civil war.

In an international organization whose members represent such radically different traditions, interests, and levels of development, the proportion of principle to power is bound to be even lower. It's a pity that there is no practical alternative to the United Nations, but there isn't.

If the abolition of great-power war and the establishment of international law is truly a hundred-year project, then we are running a bit behind schedule but we have made substantial progress.

We have not had World War III, and that is thanks at least in part to the United Nations, which gave the great powers an excuse to back off from several of their most dangerous confrontations without losing face. No great power has fought another since 1945, and the wars that have broken out between middle-sized powers from time to time — Arab-Israeli wars and Indo-Pakistani wars, mostly — seldom lasted more than a month, because the U.N.'s offers of ceasefires and peacekeeping troops offered a quick way out for the losing side.

If you assessed the progress that has been made since 1945 from the perspective of that terrifying time, the glass would look at least half-full.

The enormous growth of international organizations since 1945, and especially the survival of the United Nations as a permanent forum where the states of the world are committed to avoiding war (and often succeed), has already created a context new to history.

The present political fragmentation of the world into more than 150 stubbornly independent territorial units will doubtless persist for a good while to come. But it is already becoming an anachronism, for, in every other context, from commerce, technology, and the mass media to fashions in ideology, music, and marriage, the outlines of a single global culture (with wide local variations) are visibly taking shape.

It is very likely that we began our career as a rising young species by exterminating our nearest relatives, the Neanderthals, and it is entirely possible we will end it by exterminating ourselves, but the fact that we have always had war as part of our culture does not mean that we are doomed always to fight wars.

Other aspects of our behavioral repertoire are a good deal more encouraging. There is, for example, a slow but quite perceptible revolution in human consciousness taking place: the last of the great redefinitions of humanity.

At all times in our history, we have run our affairs on the assumption that there is a special category of people (our lot) whom we regard as full human beings, having rights and duties approximately equal to our own, and whom we ought not to kill even when we quarrel.

Over the past 15,000 or 20,000 years we have successively widened this category from the original hunting-and-gathering band to encompass larger and larger groups.

First it was the tribe of some thousands of people bound together by kinship and ritual ties; then the state, where we recognize our shared interests with millions of people whom we don't know and will never meet; and now, finally, the entire human race.

There was nothing in the least idealistic or sentimental in any of the previous redefinitions. They occurred because they were useful in advancing people's material interests and ensuring their survival. The same is true for this final act of redefinition: We have reached a point where our moral imagination must expand again to embrace the whole of mankind.

It's no coincidence that the period in which the concept of the national state is finally coming under challenge by a wider definition of humanity is also the period that has seen history's most catastrophic wars, for they provide the practical incentive for change.

But the transition to a different system is a risky business: The danger of another world war which would cut the whole process short is tiny in any given year, but cumulatively, given how long the process of change will take, it is extreme. That is no reason not to keep trying.

Our task over the next few generations is to transform the world of independent states in which we live into some sort of genuine international community.

If we succeed in creating that community, however quarrelsome, discontented, and full of injustice it will probably be, then we shall effectively have abolished the ancient institution of warfare. Good riddance.