The Long March: Ceremonial soldiers parade during the 79th anniversary of the Victory Day at the Red Square in Moscow Photo: Getty Images The Long March: Ceremonial soldiers parade during the 79th anniversary of the Victory Day at the Red Square in Moscow Photo: Getty Images

This contemporary world picture stands in sharp contrast with Western post-Cold War imaginings of a long peace, brought about by the end of great power rivalry, globalisation of capitalism and the spread of liberal-democratic political frameworks.

Francis Fukuyama famously and quite erroneously proclaimed the “end of history” and the definitive historical triumph of western liberalism. “Soft Power”, a nebulous concept coined by Joseph Nye, became all the rage in academic and journalistic circles. Some scholars announced the coming end of wars of conquest.

This story was published as part of Outlook Magazine's 'War And Peace' issue, dated January 11, 2025. To read more stories from the Issue, click here.

According to evolutionary psychologist Stephen Pinker, war was “going out of style”, evidenced in what appeared to be a long-term decline of institutionalised mass violence. Three factors explained the supposed trend: the futility of war under conditions of deepening global interdependence (war “does not pay”); the “emergence of an international community regulated by norms and taboos”; and, most significantly, a “growing (moral) repugnance towards institutionalised violence”.

A similar argument had been made a hundred years earlier by the British liberal writer Norman Angell, a few years prior to the outbreak of the First World War. In his well-known 1910 essay, The Great Illusion, Angell—who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933—contended that militarism and war belonged “to a stage of development out of which we have passed”. He wrote: “Military power is socially and economically futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity of the people exercising it … it is impossible for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of another—to enrich itself by subjugating, or imposing its will by force on another. In short, war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which peoples strive.” The rationalist assumption was that self-interest should lead statespersons and peoples to eschew the relative gains of war in favour of the absolute gains of peace through commerce.

War can be defined as the organised use of armed violence by one collective against another. A long line of thinkers have argued that aggression is hard-wired into human beings.

Alas, current world history has disconfirmed liberal post-Cold War visions, much like 1914 tragically disconfirmed Angell’s pre-war arguments. Interstate wars and furious mass violence are back in style, in Ukraine, the Middle East, and parts of Africa (Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo). We have entered a new perilous era of competition between “great powers” that is fuelling an intense international arms race. Global military expenditure reached $2,443 billion in 2023—the highest level ever recorded by the Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute (SIPRI). While a general war between the United States (US) and China (P.R.C.)—the two largest defence spenders followed by Russia, India and Saudi Arabia—is nearly unthinkable, the potential for shocks in the South China Sea or around Taiwan has significantly increased, threatening a major incident. Even if that is avoided, gigantic resources are being and will be spent preparing for conflict, rather than for sustainable development.

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War can be simply defined as the organised use of armed violence by one collective against another, but it cannot be simply explained. A long line of thinkers have argued that aggression is hard-wired into human beings, reflecting the evil competitive drive of “human nature”.

In western philosophical tradition, these include Augustine (345 CE) Machiavelli, Hobbes and Freud, to mention some major figures. Looking back at the bloodletting of the First World War, and writing while fascism was rising in Europe, Freud said, “…human beings are not gentle creatures in need of love, at most able to defend themselves if attacked; on the contrary, they can count a powerful share of aggression among their instinctual endowments…Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]. Who, after all that he has learnt from life and history, would be so bold as to dispute this proposition?” (Civilisation and its Discontents, 1930).

Hans Morgenthau, the influential mid-twentieth-century “human nature realist”, shared this sentiment. Writing soon after the Second World War, he maintained (Scientific Man versus Power Politics, 1946) that humans are driven not only by the need to survive but also—when existential needs are met—by a limitless “lust for power”. Polities in this Hobbesian view are akin to individuals competing lawlessly in the pre-civil “state of nature”, unconstrained by a higher authority to tame their primordial drives. Freud thought that science and rationality might, over time, civilise humanity, containing the aggressive “instinct”, and Morgenthau believed rational leaders had some freedom to behave prudently and choose the “lesser evil”. But having experienced limitless violence in their lifetimes both were pessimistic about those prospects.

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These arguments do not stand up to scrutiny, however, since human nature cannot be rigorously defined, much less reduced to a single determinant. Humans, as Rousseau points out, are born neither “good” nor “evil”, we can be aggressive, selfish and cruel, peaceful, altruistic and compassionate. If anything, the latter would be the “natural” inclination of humankind. Who wouldn’t spontaneously try to save a child drowning in a pond or—to paraphrase a famous example from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments—sacrifice their little finger if, by doing so, they could save one hundred million people on the other side of the earth? This elemental fellow-feeling doesn’t govern the State—that “coldest of cold monsters” (Nietzsche)—or drive international politics, but that hardly means that aggression is the “natural” condition of humankind.

To a great extent, the mass violence of the present reflects the failure of imagination and will of the political leaders who presided over the end of the Cold War.

Once we abandon unfounded assumptions about human nature, as we must, we need to search for other causes. “Structural realists” such as Kenneth Waltz (1924-2013) or John Mearsheimer point instead to the anarchic structure of the international system. In the absence of world government or empowered supranational authority, states are caught in a “security dilemma” and seek to optimise survival through power maximisation. This leads invariably to arms races, friction, and frequently, to armed conflict. War-avoidance (which is not synonymous with peace) is obtained through a balance of power between the most powerful states. In this mechanical model of international politics, domestic politics does not factor into the sources of war and peace, since all states respond in like manner to meet the same security task.

This reading substitutes one determinism (innate aggressive drives) with another (the pressures of anarchy). Both frameworks are ahistorical: while the actors on stage constantly change, the drives or the structure are said to be timeless. Neither is satisfying to those of us, who believe in individual and collective moral and political choice. Of course, our freedom and ability to change the course of events is limited. To paraphrase Marx, we make our own history even though we don’t do so under the conditions we choose, which are inherited from the past. We cannot simply will into being just and inclusive domestic socio-political orders or a cooperative and fair international system. But we can work and struggle towards them with a little help of alternative thinking.

To pull out of the “permanent crisis of a divided mankind” (to cite the historian Istvan Hont) we need to define the pathways towards what Richard Falk has called “humane global governance”, through the gradual emergence of an accountable global polity that would be inclusive, democratic, pluralistic and founded on human solidarity. This may seem an impossible cosmopolitan task, given our current terrible world disorder, but as Falk points out, “the impossible happens rather frequently”, referencing instances such as the end of chattel slavery, decolonisation, the American civil rights movements, or the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. Immanuel Kant had made a more general argument in the late 18th century, when he argued that the current impracticability of a moral aim in no way demonstrates its impossibility.

War is not the inevitable condition of humankind. To a great extent, the mass violence of the present reflects the failure of imagination and will of the political leaders—who presided over the end of the Cold War and who missed the historic opportunity to build a renovated international system firmly based on international law, multilateral cooperation and a fairer and more sustainable distribution of resources and wealth. Although the United Nations system erected in 1944-45 is very imperfect, it represented and still constitutes a step out of the Hobbesian world—a historic advance towards the constitutionalising of world politics. The aim going forward must be to achieve greater fairness among nations as well as among individuals and social classes at the world level, and to democratise decision-making by ending the monopoly of the five permanent members to make the institution better reflect universal interests.

Today, the UN system and international human rights law is being actively and dangerously challenged by unscrupulous “leaders”, seeking to remove all restraints on their sovereignty. If all is not to be lost, we must reaffirm and expand the basic principles of the Charter on universal social, economic and human rights.

(Views expressed are personal)

Philip Golub is professor of political science and international relations, American University of Paris. He is the author of Power, Profit and Prestige and East Asia’s Reemergence

(This appeared in the print as 'The Zone Of Interest') k9win

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