Tag Archives: war

Is War Good for States?

17 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, War

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Randolph Bourne, an American pacifist, famously wrote during World War I:

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.

Was he right? Only some of the time.

Recall the context. America’s entry into World War I gave the Progressive movement of the day, led by Woodrow Wilson (our first totalitarian president, and a key influence on the development of Fascism), the opportunity to dramatically reshape the relationship between citizens and state. Before the war, American government had a light footprint, and states jealously guarded their powers from Federal intrusion. But during the war, the Federal government greatly expanded its powers due to the wartime emergency; and it set a precedent which would be eagerly seized on during the New Deal fifteen years later.

In early modern Europe, frequent war was a great spur to the development of powerful states, but also to the increasing role of popular representation in government and strong social-welfare policies. As the eminent political scientist Charles Tilly put it, “War made the state, and the state made war.” His thesis, briefly put, is that rulers desperate to raise soldiers and money to pay them had two options: ratchet up their control over the populace and squeeze them until they comply, or else offer them valuable rights and privileges to get their willing cooperation. (Or both.) The enduring effect was that the state’s power over citizens grew, but in some states frequent wars also laid the groundwork for expanded political rights.

The story gets more complicated, of course, but it seems to be a recurring pattern. Peter Turchin argued convincingly that most empires first developed under the pressure of frequent barbarian invasions, which forced the rapid growth of strong state structures to defend against them. More contemporary examples come easily to mind. So is that the end of the matter? Should all states be fomenting wars in order to extend their control over the populace?

Not quite. Miguel Centeno reminds us that not all states grow stronger during war. War is a tremendous stressor, and some states crack under the strain. States that began the war with weak institutions, with tenuous control over their populaces, may never achieve the longed-for unity in the face of the enemy. Instead, the desperate need for money and manpower may force states into bad deals, where they accept long-term problems for the sake of short-term survival. Different factions may harden among the people, undermining the development of healthy patriotism and breeding disloyalty for generations to come. Struggles over government power and taxation may hobble the state likewise.

The key question seems to be: is a state that is facing wartime stresses stable enough to survive them and thrive? If so, then its power will likely grow, justified by the emergency but lingering long after the war is over. If not, then state dysfunction may be the result.

(Of course, in real life you can get both outcomes, in different domains. The military-industrial complex is many things, but a rational exercise of government power is not one of them.)

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post is at the intersection of the planned second and third books in this series, working titles Tyranny for Worldbuilders and War for Worldbuilders. No idea when they will be finished, but they should be fun!)

Audiences for War

21 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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When you go to war, what are you trying to do?

You might think the answer is obvious: “Defeat the enemy.” But even setting aside that you can find victory through multiple avenues (battlefield victory, outlasting the enemy in a siege, outproducing the enemy in a war of attrition, diplomatic isolation, et cetera), sometimes warfighters seem to treat victory as a minor consideration. Sometimes they even try to prolong wars, rather than winning them.

Mary Kaldor, writing about the 1990s war in Bosnia, noted that the casualties suffered by civilians dwarfed those suffered by military forces by about 10 to 1. In one sense, the nominal belligerents in the Bosnian War were actually collaborating with each other against their true enemy: the multiethnic, tolerant civilian populace. Serb and Croat nationalists, and to some degree Bosniak jihadis, strove to drive the ethnic populations of the former Yugoslavia apart from each other. By reshaping the populace and creating single-ethnicity communities, who are forced to view each other as enemies, the armed groups justified their own illegitimate power—they presented themselves as “ethnic champions,” so to speak.

Insurgent groups often continue their fight against the state government long after the fight is obviously hopeless. They have failed to gain the support of their home communities, they don’t have the strength to defeat government forces, and continuing the fight achieves no larger political gains and just gets more people killed. Why, then? For one thing, insurgent leaders are often competing with each other for the loyalty of their followers. Taking hard-line positions are often a way to shore up one’s support among the rank and file against competing factions. (I have read one argument that the 9/11 attacks came about because Osama bin Laden was feeling pressure from other factions within the jihadi movement, and needed something spectacular to reinforce his claimed position as the Amir. The attacks were successful in the short term, and may have harmed America in the very long run as well; but in the medium term, they were a strategic disaster for Al Qaida and its allies.)

Second, many insurgent groups are dependent on outside patrons for their support; very often, these patrons are other states, hostile to the insurgent group’s government and seeking proxies to cause it grief. (For example, many armed groups active in the Congo civil wars of the 1990s and 2000s were basically cats-paws for neighboring Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda.) In such a case, your patron may demand that you keep fighting long after true victory is outside your grasp, and will give you money and weapons to keep you in the field. (This is one of the most difficult complications in trying to make peace deals between sides in a civil war.)

In other situations, warring sides may be looking beyond their immediate enemy to some other actor on the sidelines, which constrains the choices they can make. For example, American strategy in Vietnam was hobbled by the threat that China or even the Soviet Union would (overtly) join the war if North Vietnam were seriously threatened. On the flip side, American willingness to continue a war they were apparently losing, even with a senseless and wasteful strategy, was an important signal for nearby countries such as Indonesia who were threatened internally by powerful Communist movements.

Similarly, many NATO member countries contributed forces to the Afghanistan war—not necessarily because they felt threatened by the Taliban, but because they saw it as important to vindicate the Alliance, since in the future they might need the United States to protect them from aggression rather than the reverse.

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When setting up your fictional war, there are all kinds of juicy complications you can throw into the mix. Maybe that isn’t the kind of story you want to tell, and that’s fine. But if you do want something more complex than “Bad Guys are attacking Good Guys,” consider asking about the audiences for your warring sides. What are they trying to accomplish with the war? Who are they trying to impress, or frighten, or influence?

******

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. I am now moving my attention to the planned second and third books in this series; the subject matter of this post fits into the third book, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

War as Negotiation

21 Sunday Nov 2021

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Suppose that Country A and Country B are having some sort of crisis, and Country A threatens to invade unless it gets its way. (A common occurrence, sadly.) But wars are costly, even if you win. Mobilizing your army diverts resources away from other critical activities, such as harvesting crops for the year. Battle casualties represent huge losses of human talent and labor. And every time you fight a war, you run the risk of losing. That all being the case, why would anyone decide to fight a war? And when?

That is, we have to explain four things: the choice of Country A to threaten war, the choice of Country B not to submit, the choice of either country to actually start the war, and the choice of the other country not to simply surrender and save itself the trouble of fighting.

There are many ways of explaining this sequence. But one powerful model to use, because it is so flexible and easily covers a whole range of situations, is the bargaining model of war developed by James Fearon and others in that vein.

The key variables of this model are:

  • The cost of fighting, for each side;
  • The total potential benefits of winning; and
  • The likelihood of each side winning.

Essentially, if you know for a fact that you are likely to win, and that the benefits of winning exceed the cost of fighting, you are very likely to fight—and the other side is very likely to back down.

For example, suppose that you lead a company of 100 mercenaries, and you have the chance to attack a gold mine held by 30 opposing mercenaries. If you do, you expect to lose 15 of your troops, but you would gain the lucrative gold mine and you would very likely be able to keep it. Given that, chances are you’re going to attack the gold mine, even at the cost of some of your troops. And knowing this, the 30 mercenaries are likely to retreat or surrender before you attack, because it is pointless to fight and die when they know they would lose.

On the other hand, the losing mercenaries know that they could kill 15 of your troops if they do fight, and they know that you know it too. So they could negotiate with you for a settlement where they are allowed to take some amount of gold with them as they go—say, the equivalent of 10 mercenaries. So even though they would lose, the weaker side has an incentive to push for some share of the loot before they capitulate.

War thus becomes a bargaining process, where the two sides are essentially negotiating over how to split up the stakes of a war.

If so, why do people fight wars at all? Why not tally up opposing forces, figure out who would win and how much the net profit would be, negotiate some sort of settlement where the stronger party gets the same or greater profit and the weaker party is left with something, and avoid all the messy killing and burning and looting?

The most common reason is uncertainty. In the real world, it is often difficult to know who would win a war. It is also difficult to know how costly a war would be, and even what the benefits would be of winning. As a result, says the theory, any factor that increases uncertainty would tend to make war more likely, because each side hopes that it will end up being worth it to fight. And even if one side knows it would lose, the other side might be so overconfident that it asks for far too much of the “loot”; the weaker party may then decide to fight anyway, in hopes of keeping at least some of what it has.

And any factor that increases certainty would tend to discourage war. If the costs and benefits of war are better known, both parties will recognize when a war would be wasteful—or when the benefits of fighting are so obvious that the winning side cannot be deterred. And of course, if it is obvious who would win a war, the weaker side is likely to capitulate to save itself greater loss; the stronger side, too, is unlikely to demand too much, since it knows the point at which the other side would fight regardless. So, many conflicts would be avoided because the game is not worth the candle, and many others would end with the sides negotiating some sort of settlement, without fighting.

A second reason for war is if the “loot” cannot be split up between the sides. For example, in a war of extermination, there is simply no option of a settlement; you win, or you die. Less drastically, if two countries are fighting over control of a strategic mountain pass, there is no way to share the pass; one side is going to end up in control, and the other side will be shut out. So the stakes are higher, and there is less opportunity to negotiate a settlement.

Finally, what if you should be able to negotiate a settlement, but you don’t trust the other side to keep it? Or you can’t convince the other side that you can be trusted? Then it becomes much harder to negotiate an end to the crisis, and much easier (so to speak) to go to war instead. For example, rebel forces negotiating with a government have a very hard time coming to an agreement. Each side fears that any concessions will simply make the other side stronger; and often, the rebel forces are being supported by a rival country, which will sometimes pressure the rebels to keep fighting even when they want to stop (or vice versa).

That’s the basic model. It can be elaborated on in many ways, such as adding concerns about reputation or honor in a repeated game. (If you surrender once, maybe countries can bully you into submission over and over again in the future. So the long-term costs of surrender may end up being much higher that the immediate costs of fighting, all things considered, even if you know you will lose.)

So in your fiction, if you want to set up the conditions for a jolly old war, these are the key points to adjust: the cost of fighting, the prize for winning and whether it can be shared, the relative strength of the sides, the ability of each side to commit to a settlement, and the uncertainty of each side about any of the foregoing. A relatively simple model, and quite powerful—my favorite kind of writing tool!

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. I am now moving my attention to the planned second and third books in this series; the subject matter of this post fits into the third book, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

War in Fantasy Fiction

08 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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The stories we write reflect our own beliefs of the world. If our beliefs change, that has the effect of changing the stories we write. This is particularly noticeable when thinking about how our stories handle war.

Nowadays, most fantasy or sci-fi stories feature only a few different types of wars:

  • The no-alternative war against some life-destroying calamity (such as Shai’tan in the Wheel of Time series, Ruin in the Mistborn series, or the Flood in Halo).
  • The defensive war against a ruthless invading empire, that has no reason for its invasion other than sheer lust for conquest.
  • The rebellion against an Evil Overlord who murders peasants for the lulz.
  • The seemingly noble war that was actually orchestrated by selfish interests, such as weapons dealers or oil companies (or their fantastical equivalents).

All four of these are based on the understanding that most wars are wrong and undesirable. To be heroic, it seems, a fictional war needs to be the last resort; where it is not, the protagonists are typically manipulated into war by the true villain, and the revelation of this perfidy sets off the true struggle, often featuring former enemies allying against their common foe. (This last category seems a particular favorite in American media, especially in the wake of Vietnam and Iraq.)

But the core understanding that these stories imply—that most war is wrong—would have baffled people living in earlier ages. Not very long ago, it was considered perfectly reasonable for Louis XIV to invade his neighbors for the sole purpose of magnifying his own glory, or for Napoleon to invade multiple continents for the same reason. In an earlier age, Aristotle assumed that wars were usually unjust when fought between fellow Greeks, but were always just when fighting against outsiders, for any reason.

In many tribal societies, fighting neighbors was the traditional way to gain respect or take plunder; often, such fighting had elements of a sports contest, with ceremonial weapons and rules that rewarded personal bravery rather than sheer killing efficiency. (In the Iliad, Paris was seen as effeminate and dishonorable because he used a bow, rather than fighting enemies face-to-face with spear and sword. Many American Indian societies would honor warriors who “counted coup” on their enemies—touching them in battle without killing them.)

Our modern dislike of war is obviously preferable to the older glorification of it, in the real world. But for fantasy or sci-fi writers, it is worth thinking about how people in your worlds might view war differently. Otherwise, you might unthinkingly base your story on a view of war that doesn’t really fit with the rest of your worldbuilding, and would seem anachronistic.

Thucydides, the famous chronicler of the Second Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, writes that while some wars are justified on noble grounds, such as enforcing justice against enemies who break oaths or otherwise violate norms, most wars are ultimately motivated by three things: fear, honor, and interest.

Fear is fairly easy to understand. You fear that your enemy will harm you now or in the future; so you either defend against an immediate attack, or you begin a preventative war on your own terms while your enemy has not reached its full strength. The tricky bit here is that fear is based on your perceptions; among the reasons that preventative war is frowned on today is that sometimes, countries assume that a neighbor poses a threat when the neighbor actually had no intention of harming them.

Interest too is not difficult to see. Many countries seek to build empires, to plunder their neighbors and enrich themselves. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in order to seize its rich oilfields; Japan invaded Indonesia, in part, to secure its oilfields since Japan had little domestic oil production. Individuals too have interests, as we know.

Honor, on the other hand, is perhaps the hardest concept for us moderns to understand, or appreciate why people would fight and die for it. Yet most wars in history probably were motivated by honor more than concrete interests.

Why did Alexander the Great feel driven to conquer the world? And why would his army follow him? Because they sought glory that would last throughout the centuries (and it worked, since we still remember them today!). But remember that glory was important for the Greeks; their version of the afterlife, Hades, was a place of pale shades with little reward and punishment for moral behavior (as most of us today are used to). The Greeks believed that enduring glory, kleos, was perhaps the most worthwhile thing to strive for in life, since that was all that would last once you were dead. Glory was worth dying for, and more importantly was worth killing for.

More concretely, honor can have practical importance. In dangerous settings, a nation that does not fight to defend its honor will soon be bullied into subservience by its neighbors. Displaying your willingness to fight even over trivial offenses can sometimes prevent wars, because it signals to hungry neighbors that you will not be cowed.

For authors, remembering that people have many reasons to fight wars, depending on the moral and political calculations of the setting, can open up space for fresh and interesting stories. If you don’t want to write stories featuring amoral war, there’s nothing forcing you to do so; but people have all sorts of motives for everything they do, war is no exception, and the stories that can emerge from that can be fun.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. I am now moving my attention to the planned second and third books in this series; the subject matter of this post fits into the third book, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Conflict in Politics and Fiction

18 Monday Feb 2019

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

What is politics? And why does it matter for fiction?

If you were to google “politics definition,” many of the dictionary entries focus on the mechanics of running a government or a society; these are not wrong exactly, but are not terribly useful. When we say “office politics,” for example, what we mean is often the exact opposite of a smooth-running office!

Early political scientists, when they were in a pedantic mood, might have used a definition like this: “The authoritative allocation of scarce goods.” This is not very good either, but it does focus our attention on a few points:

  • “Scarce goods” implies that some people will get less than they want, or do without entirely. By definition, some people will be unhappy with the “authoritative allocation,” and want it to change.
  • “Authoritative” highlights the importance of authority, the sense that some people or some commands ought to be followed. In other words, a key part of politics is about leadership and obedience, and how that comes about.

But this definition seems sterile. We are given an image of some central bureaucrat sitting in an office and punching numbers into a calculator, thusly to apportion out the chocolate ration. Yet politics is about more than material goods (or even status, which is also a “scarce good” of a sort; but see below). So the definition is often modified to include “The authoritative determination of values.” Here we get into more interesting ground:

  • Rather than focusing on what we want, “values” instruct us in what we should want.
  • Often, this gets to the core of our identities as people. The stakes are thus very high.
  • When two different people disagree on values—say, whether cocaine use is a personal matter or a harmful vice—often they are proceeding from very different principles, which prevent agreement altogether.
  • Without a way to authoritatively settle the question, such disagreements are thus likely to persist for a long time.

Still, this definition assumes that there is a way to authoritatively determine values, and have them stick. Sometimes it can happen, for example in a unified theocracy; but very often, people who disagree with the authority’s values will deny that the authority even has the right to impose them. Religious wars are but a single example; the conflict between Capitalism and Communism would be another.

Notice that both examples also involve “the allocation of scarce goods”; and in many cases, one’s choice of values is heavily influenced by whether you will benefit from them. Of course peasants will want redistribution of capital, and of course industrialists will want state protection of property—whether or not either side could defend its position on moral grounds (and perhaps they can). As they say, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” Values direct behavior, but they also justify behavior.

Which brings us to Lenin’s Trotsky’s cynical definition of politics: as “the question of who and whom.”

In other words, politics is about which actor or group of actors can enforce its will on another group. This needn’t even be about who gets more “scarce goods,” though that often plays a role. Rather, it’s about power—in the worst case (as Orwell so bleakly depicted in 1984), power for its own sake. Policy analysis, discussion of values, appeals to shared humanity or morality or whatever, all of these things are mere rationalizations for the will to power.

This also brings the role of conflict to the fore. Conflict was implied in the other two definitions, as we saw; but Lenin gives it center stage. Politics, for Lenin, is unending conflict.

A full definition of “politics” involves aspects of all three, but conflict remains at the heart. And that is why stories involving politics can be so powerful in fiction.

Authors are constantly admonished that stories must be about a conflict; the protagonist wants or needs something, and must struggle to get it. Political conflicts thus make for a compelling setting for stories, by definition. And each dimension of politics can add another delicious layer to the story. Conflict over possessions, or conflict over status, or right and wrong, or personal beliefs, or even about sheer will to power—as Milton’s rendition of Satan put it, it’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven—all of these things can interact and build off each other.

A clear understanding of politics can provide another tool to creating strong stories. And perhaps, with luck, truly insightful stories can improve our politics in real life as well.

When Do Societies Face Unrest?

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics, Revolution, Self-Promotion, War, Writing

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I have just read a recent journal article by the brilliant scholar Peter Turchin, in which he elaborates on his theory of the dynamics of social instability over time and tests it on the United States from 1780 to 2010. Put briefly, his theory holds that one can expect a society to suffer greater social violence (such as riots or lynchings, as opposed to routine crime) in a relatively predictable cycle. The larger “secular” cycle occurs every 150 years; a smaller cycle of violence occurs roughly every 50 years, superimposed on the secular cycle. Thus in the United States, we had peaks of societal violence near the years 1870, 1920, and 1970, with the Civil War being the peak of the secular cycle. Turchin forecasts that the next secular peak should hit sometime around the year 2020. Turchin’s previous work has detected the same sorts of cycles in societies from ancient China to revolutionary France.

Of course, detecting a pattern does not tell you what has caused it. Turchin’s theory for when violence intensifies depends on two major factors. Both of these factors might derive from excessive population growth; in the early version of Turchin’s work, he was focusing on agrarian societies in which population growth leads directly to food shortages. But now that he is considering Industrial societies, Turchin is focusing more on the immediate causes laid out below.

First, whether from excessive population growth or technological disruption or whatever, there emerges a labor glut. The average wage drops in response, leading to diminished standards of living. Thus you see larger segments of the populace who are in a precarious situation, with the potential for violent outbreaks such as labor struggles, or ethnic competition with minorities, or political upheaval.

Second, there emerges “an oversupply of elites.” This can happen for a few reasons, and Turchin focuses on the economic one. The low cost of labor means that it is easier for those on the top to become far wealthier than they might have done in a more normal setting, leading to the accumulation of vast fortunes and a polarization of society. A consequence of this is that there is much more competition for the leadership positions in society, such as control of government offices. Politics becomes more nasty and partisan, leading in extreme cases to violent rivalries between elite factions struggling to secure their hold on power. Such violence is made easier by the larger number of poor, desperate people in society who can serve as a demagogue’s muscle.

In Turchin’s research, he finds that oversupply of elites has the strongest association with societal violence. This is easy to understand when one looks at places like the Philippines, in which politicians routinely employ armed militias to attack competitors (a horrifying example was the Maguindanao Massacre of 2009), or the Congo, which has been wracked with coup after coup. But even in the United States, a surplus of would-be leaders will tend to produce extreme ideologies, such as militant unionism in the 1920s, or the present upsurge in eco-terrorism.

I think many people, writers among them, mistake the relationship between cheap labor and exploitative rich. Often, a super-wealthy class emerges as a result of lots of poor people, who make it easier to be rich—that is, to benefit from the production of lots of other people. This is not to say that an exploitative class won’t try to keep everyone else poor, once it emerges. But the dynamics are complex here, and societal violence is one of the things keeping them in check.

(How might such violence be averted? Full discussion will have to wait for another post, but I find it rather interesting that the Biblical institution of Jubilee, in which land was returned to its ancestral owners and debts forgiven, follows a 50-year cycle.)

(Have I mentioned lately that my new book is available on Amazon Kindle? It’s called The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. You can read the first story for free here, and then buy it if you like. Enjoy!)

On Sovereignty, Trust, and Protectorates

04 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics, State Formation, Writing

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I recently read a journal article by Peter Haldén titled A Non-Sovereign Modernity: Attempts to Engineer Stability in the Balkans 1820-90. He writes to correct the conventional view that international relations in modernity is all about sovereign, independent states, and that the earlier era of protectorates, vassal states, or other such semi-autonomous regions ended with the arrival of nationalism. Indeed, the rationalist, modern Concert of Europe deliberately used non-sovereign zones several times in the Balkans area in order to control the outbreak of political crises.

The topic remains important for us readers today for a few reasons. First, understanding history is always good (particularly for budding fiction writers, who have a tendency to assume that all stories must be set in modern states or in absolutist monarchies, and thus impoverish their stories.) Second, non-sovereign states never really went away; they were just sleeping. Understanding the dynamics of non-sovereign states gives us a fresh lens to understand places like Kosovo, Chechenya, or even international organizations such as the European Union or the United Nations.

The power politics of the 19th century were marked by several themes, but two of the most important were the decline of the Ottoman Empire as a great power, and the rise of Russia which aspired to take its place. The fundamental problem facing the European powers was how to manage the fragmentation of Ottoman authority, which expressed itself in events like the Greek revolution, without causing a full-blown war between the Great Powers over the spoils.

Briefly, the favored solution was to take outlying provinces of the Empire and turn them into non-sovereign states, under the aegis of the Concert of Europe. These provinces would still nominally be subject to the Turkish Caliph and would pay tribute, and they would be prohibited from having free diplomatic relations with other states as an independent state would, or from having a military. But they would have civil militias and police forces for defense, they would be self-governing, and they could have diplomatic relations with the Concert of Europe as a body. Importantly, the Ottoman Empire would be forbidden to maintain troops in these non-sovereign states.

How does this help? In modern International Relations, states often try to set up buffer zones between them and some potentially hostile neighbor. These zones typically take the form of other, smaller, states. For example, China uses the totalitarian hell state of North Korea as a buffer between it and South Korea, or Japan. The “Low Countries” of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg were used as a buffer between France and Germany, to their periodic detriment.

The idea is that if you don’t share a border with a potential foe, then there are fewer opportunities for friction that might escalate into a full-blown war. After all, it is hard to distinguish between positioning troops to defend your borders, and positioning troops to attack your neighbor. So the buffer state helps to cool down the temperature. The only problem is that when a buffer state is independent, it can rely only on its own force of arms to maintain itself. The history of the Low Countries graphically demonstrates how easily this can fail; moreover, the potential for a buffer state to become a full-blown military ally of one side or the other ensures that the situation remains tenuous.

A demilitarized nonsovereign territory, on the other hand, is not guaranteed by force of arms, but by the cooperation of the potential rivals under color of an international agreement. There is less likelihood of miscalculation or escalating tensions, and more opportunity for creative institutional design (read the article for some great examples); not all peoples are ready for statehood, after all, even aside from the objections of their current rulers. And there would be less competition between rivals such as Britain and Russia as there would be (and were) over who would dominate the policy of newly independent states, if the territories could only have relations with the international body as a unit and not with other states bilaterally.

For a modern parallel, we can look to the European Union, which began as the European Coal and Steel Community—a project to strip West Germany’s ability to produce war armaments without the cooperation of France, and vice versa. By effectively tying their own hands, the member states hoped to foreclose on the possibility of war between them, so they could focus on the vital task of withstanding the Soviet Bloc. Henceforth, relations between member countries would be based on partnership and negotiation, not power politics.

However, in the case of the Balkans, the stability of the protectorate arrangements for Greece and elsewhere depended crucially on the degree to which the Great Powers trusted each other. In the three cases that Haldén considers, the initial attempts to institute a nonsovereign territory broke down once Russia violated the terms of the agreement, and Britain could no longer trust the Russians to play nice. (I am oversimplifying grossly.) Indeed, the creation of new independent states from the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire was, in Haldén’s telling, a suboptimal outcome, forced on the Great Powers by the breakdown of cooperation and the increasing worry over Russia’s growing power. The independent states would have to fend for themselves, without the aegis of a Concert of Europe which was growing ever-less-concerted over time. No surprise that World War I kicked off in the Balkans; Serbia was one of these formerly nonsovereign states.

Similarly, arrangements such as the EU or the UN are hampered by the lack of trust between member states. Many predict that the current economic crisis may spell the end of the Euro currency, or of the EU altogether, because Germany will grow tired of footing the bill for its more spendthrift neighbors forever. Early aspirations for the UN to become a true world government, meanwhile, have run aground on the cold reality that Americans do not trust a body made up mostly of dictatorships to act with the public interest in mind.

Haldén also draws a fascinating parallel with the old free-markets/interventionism debate in economics. He writes that creating new independent states who would rely on their own armies for defense, and hoping that they can contribute to international stability, is comparable to the intent of the free market. Conversely, a managed protectorate under the oversight of an international body is similar to government control of the economy, under the theory that such control will lead to more manageable outcomes. Whether or not you believe that government control can lead to better outcomes in the abstract, it is clear that you will not desire actual government control unless you trust the government to play nice. If you do not trust the government, you will accept even the putatively suboptimal outcomes of the free market in exchange for keeping a measure of control over your own destiny.

Haldén apparently wrote a book exploring some of these themes, which I may want to read. For our purposes, we should remember that what we are familiar with is not everything that is possible. As well, if we want to build a new world, it is crucial that we trust the main players; otherwise, the world may turn out to be not what we expected.

The Social Effects of Weapon Technology (and How to Use in Writing)

22 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, History, Military, Politics, State Formation, War, Weapons, Writing

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Mao said that power flows from the barrel of a gun.  He also said (and this is less remembered) that therefore, the Party must control the gun, and the gun must not control the Party. In other words, the brute facts of violence are important, but so are the social arrangements that control them.

This has been true throughout most of history. Whoever has control of violence will tend to gain political power. In several times and places, the military did not actually rule, but submitted to a legitimate authority—the United States is a decent example of this, or most the the European powers in the last few decades. But more frequently, those with the means of violence make the rules. Recent events in Egypt and elsewhere bear this out, as if we needed more examples.

That said, it makes a huge difference what the state of military technology is. For that will determine if weapons are available to the mass of people, or if they are restricted to only an elite few. Samuel Finer argued that his monumental History of Government (now out of print, and sadly hard to get—inexcusable on the part of Oxford Press in this time of print-on-demand!) that when weapons were widely available, politics tended to feature mass participation and broad egalitarianism, if not outright democracy as in the case of ancient Greek city-states and their hoplites. (Or, one might add, early America.)

On the other hand, when specialized weapons gave advantages to those wealthy enough to afford them, power tended to be concentrated in the hands of a few. For example, the rise of powerful kings in Europe had much to do with the advent of cannon—fantastically expensive to make, requiring a large specialized infrastructure of foundries. Furthermore, with cannon French kings were able to reduce the fortresses of their rebellious nobles, consolidating their own power.

In an earlier age, the armored knight was the undisputed master of the battleground, able to crush unarmored opponents with ease. Thus, power tended to be held by the armored warlords of the feudal era, whose rule depended on their use of naked force. Then the free Swiss militias developed their famous style of pike warfare, which completely nullified the advantages of the knight.

So weapons technology played a large role in politics. When considering a given era, we must ask: how common are weapons? Are they easy to use, or do they require specialized training? Do the wealthy gain any particular advantage from their wealth, or can mass armies defeat them?

This line of argument is one of the bases of the American gun-rights movement (examples can be found here, here, or here, but there are many others). It was also argued by Max Weber that the rise of the Israelite kings (over a previously egalitarian society) was the result of advanced armor, which gave a significant battlefield advantage to those wealthy enough to buy such armor.

This reasoning can also help explain the rise of child soldiers. P.W. Singer argues that child soldiers are now more feasible because small arms are becoming more advanced and lighter. Children can now use weapons effectively on the battlefield in spite of their small size and physical weakness, which has not been true for hundreds of years if ever. As a result, child soldiers are becoming a frequent sight in war-torn areas, since it is relatively easy for a brutal would-be warlord to coerce children into fighting for him (or her, I suppose).

Similar issues are beginning to arise because of drone technology. Robots have often been used for fun by hobbyists; but it is only a matter of time before these can be weaponized, and made available off the shelf. Governments will be unable to stop the spread of drone weapons into the general populace, and the social effects of this shift are likely to be extreme.

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So as a writer, how do you use this?

First of all, when you are world-building, be careful to compare the state of weapons technology with the social system. Kings and castles are unlikely when no one wears armor or carries swords, or if everyone does. Magic can also be a weapon, in this sense, so if powerful magic is rare, it should generally translate into considerable power (unless there are social reasons otherwise).

You can write an interesting story about social upheavals caused by changing technology. For example, I’m presently messing around with a story where magic previously relied on using decades-long mental training to draw sigils of power in your mind; but then someone figured out how to get the same effects with sigils carved into physical media, such as discs of wood, and then everything collapsed into chaos as weapons technology exploded into the populace.

A great example of this concept is in the early installments of the excellent webcomic Schlock Mercenary. A new means of transport allowing for functional teleportation is rapidly weaponized, and bombs are teleported into government offices across the galaxy. Chaos and war break out on hundreds of planets, and things only die down when scientists figure out how to block teleportation into protected areas.

I hope this piece proves useful. At any rate, it should be food for thought.

Random Fiction Excerpt #2

02 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by in Military, NaNoWriMo, Politics, Writing

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In honor of Camp NaNoWriMo, here’s the beginning of another of my short stories:

“Well, Mr. Keegan,” Colonel Joe Ramirez said, leaning across his ornate desk intently. “Have you made your decision?”

For answer, Keegan smiled, took out his checkbook, and wrote out a check of $300,000 to the 512th Los Angeles Regiment, LLC. Ramirez grinned in return, took the check, and took out a small cherry insignia box from the cabinet behind hin. The box was empty, except for a pair of captain’s bars. Ramirez slid the box toward Keegan. “Welcome to the regiment, Captain Keegan. We’ll have your stock shares transferred to you by Tuesday.”

“One percent of the regiment’s outstanding equity, you said, sir?” Keegan spoke with a thick Cockney accent. As he spoke, he pinned his new rank insignia to the collars of his blank olive-drab uniform.

“Indeed, Captain.” Ramirez chuckled. “We want to make sure that our officers can share in the unit’s success.”