We live in interesting times, where "change" has become a political powerword and diplomacy has become an extended version of Monopoly.
I would like to ask you to analyze a simple sentence my history teacher uttered only recently - "you all will grow up in times of atrocious wars".
War - where? I always hear people talk about tensions between Iran and Israel growing, or how China will soon be able to overcome the US as a global power, or how South Korea and Iran will launch nukes in the future. But how big is the chance of this actually happening? Can you imagine this to be a realistic forecast? If so, what would the implications be? And above all, how can we expect the political map of the world to change in the future?
Best regards,
Michael N., Germ
Dear Michael,
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you that 'change' has now joined the list of hollow 'powerword's used by politicians to garner the support of their constituents. Apparently the almost equally vague word 'progressive' was overly specific in its implications for the supposedly liberal left, and therefore needed replacing with something more abstract and harder to pin down into commitments.
But its easy to miss the positive side of this development. Even if meaningful political terms are still rarely used, except as dismissive insults, the invention of 'Change' reflects an increased dissatisfaction with politics-as-usual, combined with a sense of open-mindedness and optimism about alternative societal possibilities. This combination of traits is exactly what is needed to create a politically engaged population, and in the long term, a better social system. That the powerful have had to start making appeals to 'change', rather than just 'conservatism' and nationalism, is an encouraging development, even if its short term result has been the placation of the public.
Look at that. Two paragraphs in and I've managed to cover your first introductory sentence. I'll skip forward to your request and its subsequent questions.
Lets look at your history teacher's statement - 'You will all grow up in times of atrocious wars'.
The first thing to do is to recognise the redundancy of the word 'atrocious' when referring to war. He seems to be implying, perhaps unconsciously, that war could be anything other than atrocious. This implication is clearly absurd when referring to the use of assault and murder against people. All war is atrocious. The only question is how atrocious it is, and to who.
As a history teacher, it is hardly surprising that he drew his conclusion. War occurs throughout the historical record with such monotonous regularity that historical precedent makes it appear inevitable. After all, the only significant change to war over the past seventy years or so has been the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and its subsequent effects. This development has changed warfare forever, but it hasn't made it go away. Nuclear weapons may have stopped nuclear states from attacking each other, but they have also led to an explosion of proxy wars, state-funded terrorism, increased civil unrest, and the global dissemination of small arms.
But on to your question -'War - where?' My answer is 'War - everywhere.'
This might seem like an unusual answer to give, considering the apparent peace throughout the industrialised western world. But this feeling of peace is not at all reflective of reality. All that it demonstrates is how well war is hidden by our everyday ideological constructs, and how under-reported it is in the news.
To proceed with this answer, I need a reliable definition of war. War's nature is ever-changing, and due to war being a social construct, it is difficult to pin down. For instance, it is practically impossible to define the difference between war and terrorism. But just as Max Weber was able to provide the a reliable definition of the state (as any entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence), it is possible to define war using equally expansive terms. The best definition of war that I could come up with was this: The use of violence by one or more groups to achieve political ends.
Bad. Ass.
Open military conflict is now very unlikely between the world's nuclear powers, and as such, you are rightly sceptical of claims about war between North Korea and South Korea, or Israel and Iran. Aside from nuclear war (which is still an unlikely, but possible event), peace will continue between the governments of the United States, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. It would be excellent if that meant peace could continue, but the majority of war no longer occurs between the standing armies of nation-states.
Bad. Ass.
Which brings me to my next point. Your surprise about your teacher's statement reflects two problems with the way that our society treats war. Firstly, the chronic lack of news coverage related to war, and secondly, the narrowness of war's perception.
The only vaguely well-covered war in recent history has been the Vietnam War. Since then, war-reporting has become sanitised and lazy, resulting in a strange and contradictory style of coverage, prioritising statements by politicians and bland footage of soldiers on patrol. Missing are the pictures - of coffins, of victims, of executions. It is hardly surprising, then, that despite British and American occupying troops fighting two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it still seems strange that you are growing up in a time of war.
War is not the sole domain of western civilisation. Just because things have been relatively calm in the west since the Balkans, doesn't mean that peace is here. A glance around the wider world reveals a litany of violent group struggles: The North-West Pakistani independence conflicts, the Somali civil war, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Mexican drug war, the Sudanese nomadic conflicts, the Columbian insurgency, the North-East Indian insurgency, the Indian Maoist revolution, the Zapatista revolution in Mexico, the Maghreb regional insurgency, the Turkish Kurdish separatist movement, just to name a few.
There may soon even be civil war within the EU, if and when Russia joins. In a country next door to Germany, Chechnyan nationalists are fighting Russian troops. Come to think of it, there already is a civil war within the EU. The Real IRA killed two British soldiers in 2009, which means that the Irish nationalist rebellion is still technically continuing. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7930995.stm)
But this is not what I mean by 'the narrowness of war's perception'. All of the above are conflicts conventionally considered 'war', in the sense of military and paramilitary personnel waving flags and attacking each other. What I'm referring to is all of the socially normalised group violence used to exercise power.
War - where? War in our own countries.
The first example that I'll use is criminal organisations. When a group of criminals wish to exercise power, they employ violence. At the furthest extreme, this violence becomes gang war, but for gangs to effectively function it has to be business-as-usual for internal matters.
Then there's the police, a group which constantly uses violence against groups of criminals. The 'war on crime' might be a stupid propaganda term, but the police and criminal organisations using violence against each other to exercise power is war. There's even flags, and an us verses them mentality.
While we're on the subject of the police, let's revisit Max Weber's definition of the state - A monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. If the state's existence is fundamentally reliant on violence, then there must necessarily be constant low-level war between the state and the people it rules over. That might seem like an unusual claim, but just look at the constantly recurring phenomena of police brutality and citizen rioting, even within representational democracies. It's just that this subset of war is normalised, because the special rights to steal, murder and kidnap granted to the state are referred to as taxation, lethal force and detention.
Now to your last question. How can we expect the political map of the world to change in the future?
I don't feel particularly qualified to answer that. Technology and politics change so quickly that its hard to say. I could make a fairly confident guess that the world will become increasingly regionalised and globalised, as it has been heading in that direction for hundreds of years.
I would hope that with the world being better informed about politics via the internet and cheaper education, authoritarianism will become less prevalent.
That car sure wont be oppressing anyone now.A lot of the world's political future is dependent on how quickly fusion energy progresses. Without it, mass resource wars look likely. That is, if they haven't already arrived in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I can't predict what's going to happen, but if this century is anything like the last, then I can guarantee that it will certainly be interesting. Going by historical trends, technology and culture should accelerate in their rate of change, bringing us unimaginable horrors and wonders. Ecology and overpopulation are emerging as the greatest global challenge (I would argue that they already are), but politicians are remaining eerily silent on both matters. States around the world are still rewarding their citizens for having children, and the amount of effort spent on protecting the environment is tiny next to the multitude of sustainability problems heading our way. It seems that politicians are not keen to upset the believers of certain faiths who oppose family planning, and short term employment levels which rely on a growing economy. Unfortunately, these are two flaws in representational democracy that get worse the more children that are born. But more on that subject in another post.
I hope that you found something of value in that.
All the best,
That Guy With the Pretentious Name
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