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Article Excerpt
International history is the record of interactions among states and peoples. It is the accounting of things that have happened when states and peoples encountered one another in times past. War remains a focal point of the study of international history. It is the large-scale, organized killing of human beings for political purposes. This essay is about war. It inquires into the seemingly perennial recurrence of war and it ponders what this recurrence and its effects tell us about the human condition.
When this essay was conceived in the spring of 2001, the World Trade Center still stood in New York City, the Pentagon Building was still whole; nearly four thousand Americans, now dead, were going about their daily business. An indeterminate, but assumedly large number of Afghan citizens, now dead, were also alive. Biological attacks on civilian populations were scenarios imagined in think tank studies, and except for peacekeeping assignments in places like Bosnia and Kosovo, the military forces of the United States were on their bases and in their barracks. There was even talk in some quarters of a new, peaceful world order that would follow upon the ending of the Cold War. However, all of this abruptly, dramatically, and painfully changed just as this essay was being composed, because the events of 2001 ominously promise that war will be as much, and as brutal, an element of our time as it has been of every other era in international history. This realization perhaps renders my essay more poignant because it is being written in a time of war, and some of the evil typically unleashed by war was unleashed in the United States. But the essay is also more trivial now because its concerns about historiography and interpretative methodology shunt us onto academic tangents that might be more interesting in less urgent settings.
Cause vs. Meaning in International History
Pablo Picasso's Guernica hangs massively in Madrid's Paseo del Prado, offering there a permanent, cubistic testimony to the horrors of war. Guernica was painted in 1937 to memorialize the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by fascist air forces during the Spanish Civil War. As there were no Republican soldiers in Guernica at the time of the attack, the victims were civilians: old men, women, and children. Picasso symbolically depicts the omnipresence of death, the suffering of the survivors, and the physical destruction of the city. Yet, depiction is not what Guernica is about, because Picasso's object in creating his masterpiece was to find meaning in the horrific events of April 1937. For Picasso in this particular instance, as for other artists working in their preferred media, finding and conveying meaning becomes tantamount to explaining. In Picasso's thinking perhaps, and certainly in the reflections of countless interpreters, Guernica explains by giving meaning to the Spanish Civil War, to Spain itself, to war itself, even to the human condition overall. (1) This work of art may also capture something of the meaning of international history.
Because of the well invested efforts of social scientists, a good deal is known about the causes of war--war in general, kinds of war in particular and specific wars specifically. (2) But attributing meaning has been of less concern to social scientists in part at least because their positivistic methodologies do not readily accommodate the search for meaning. This search is much more the forte of artists, poets, dramatists, novelists, and those historians who lean toward the artistic side of their professional calling. Artists attribute meaning, and audiences, readers, critics, and scholars search for it in their works. Picasso's Guernica, the etchings and paintings of Goya, the seventeenth-century engravings of Richter, Meyer, Franck and Collot, Homer's Iliad, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts neues, Jean Giraudoux's La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Vera Brittan's Testament of Youth, Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, even more his Eighth, and many, many other works of art attribute meaning to war: personal meaning, social meaning, mythical meaning, and moral meaning. In the same manner, interpretations that attribute historical meaning enrich the writings of many noted historians. Here I would call my readers' attention to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Cicely Wedgewood's masterful writings on the Thirty Years' War, the entire repertoire of British historian John Keegan, and the many similarly insightful works that I will recall later in this essay.
Moral Meaning and Tragic Plot
My particular odyssey into the history of war amounted to a search for moral meaning. My discovery was that war is morally offensive because it destroys conditions and objects that humans value. It destroys the milieux within which humans flourish, and most notably it destroys human life itself. This is hardly a world-shaking or indeed even a very original discovery. It does nevertheless fly in the face of opposite conclusions reached by Kant and Hegel, to say nothing of Neitzche, Trietsche, Meinke, and Marx, as well as many third-world intellectuals writing today about liberation, emancipation, resistance, struggle, jihad, the virtues of martyrdom, and the imperatives of violence. (3)
My broader, and perhaps more interesting finding, however, is that war contributes to making tragedy an inherent and indelible attribute of the human condition. By the human condition I mean the range of emotion and sensation that we as human beings can expect to experience, either individually or collectively, as we wend our way through life. Tragedy enters and affects the lives of all but a very fortunate few, and for...
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