In Our Time - New Wars

Episode Date: April 13, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of modern warfare. In the early nineteenth century the Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz seemed to define war for all time when he called it “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will” and “nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means”. But after the nuclear bomb, the Cold War and the brutal and perplexing recent wars in Africa and Eastern Europe does his definition still hold true? Or are we in a new era when the idea of a continuation of peacetime politics and the notion of a national will is increasingly irrelevant? Are the technologically billion dollar new wars, coupled with the wars on the ground which are more like crimes, revolutions or more organised violence than war, a way of following Clausewitz’s notion of war as a continuation of politics by other means or do they constitute something completely different?With Sir Michael Howard, Emeritus Professor of Modern History, Oxford University; Dr Mary Kaldor, Director of the Programme on Global Civil Society, London School of Economics; General Sir Michael Rose, former Commander of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia and author of Fighting for Peace: Lessons from Bosnia.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the early 19th century, the Prussian General Karl von Klauchfitz seemed to define war for all time when he called it an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will

and nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of others. the means. But after the nuclear bomb, the Cold War and the brutal and perplexing recent wars in Africa and Eastern Europe, does his definition still hold true? Or, are we in a new era when the idea of a continuation of peacetime politics and the notion of a national will is increasingly irrelevant? With me to discuss whether the conflicts today constitute something new in the history of warfare is the military historian Sir Michael Howard, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, the conflict analyst Dr. Mary Caldor from the London School of Economics, and also someone who's had direct experience of modern warfare, General Sir Michael Rose, former commander of the

United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia and author of Fighting for Peace Lessons from Bosnia. Let's start Michael Howard with von Klauchfitz. Would you define for us the concept of modern warfare that he described and tell us a little of how it developed? Well, what he was writing about was warfare in his time, which was war, war, between organized states. In his youth, he had been used to very limited warfare conducted by states, yes, but states under the strict control of princes using professional armies who were extremely expensive, and war as a result was conducted in a very limited and circumscribed way.

With the French Revolution, you do get involved, what Klausovets called the passions of the people, and that suddenly he saw warfare transform. by Napoleon and his predecessors by the unleashing of enormous armies backed by the entire will and support of a population, aroused by propaganda, and determined to, not simply to defeat, but if necessary to annihilate the enemy in the enemy system.

And modern warfare, if you care to call it that, certainly originated at that time and lasted through until the middle years of the last century. The two world wars were precisely modern war, in that Klausovician sense. But before the wars between the princes, that we had a different sort of warfare altogether, didn't we? Between the Pax Romana and the wars between the princes?

Well, you then were in so-called Middle Ages, a feudal age, when war was the norm, when the whole of society was organized for the conduct of war, and the ruling classes were the war leaders, the warlords, arranged in a nice hierarchy, in principle ending at the top, with the Holy Roman Empire, but further down, each warlord, various titles, calling upon their supporters to rally to them, and those supporters had supporters beneath them, and the whole of the structure of society, not simply military, but social and political, was predicated

on the fact that war was happening the entire time. With the organization of the state system, which happens in the early part of the 17th century, you do get a much more recognizable structure of society divided into states. At that stage, simply princely estate, states commanded by specific dynasties. That was what you then had between 1648, the Peace of Westphalia, and the French Revolution. And then with the French Revolution, the people take over the state.

The state becomes nationalized. And that is the world in which we were brought up, I at least was brought up, and the wars which were conducted were national wars culminating in the terrible two world wars. Thank you. Mary Caldor, you are Britain about new war. Could you distinguish your view of new war from what Sir Michael Howard has described about war from pre-Klauchvitz, Klaashevitz, and then after the French Revolution? Well, I think perhaps the most important difference between Klaus Fitsian war

and contemporary war, is that whereas these wars, modern wars, were very much linked to state building, these, if you like, are linked to the disintegration of states. So you have a blurring of the distinction between who's an internal actor, who's an external actor. But also, I think most importantly, there's a real change in strategy, whereas earlier war was aimed against an organized opponent, another state. Here most of the violence is directed against civilians and not against the other warring party at all. So Michael Rose, do you find yourself agreeing with Lord Mary Caldor, sir? Absolutely.

And the problems that we confront in the military or in the political world are enormous because if the object of the conflict is the destruction of a civilian population or the driving out of a civilian population, then immediately the objectives, the old traditional war-fighting objectives, no longer prevail, and your emphasis should remain the safeguarding of a population, the sustaining of a population, the diminishing of conflict, all things that are very far removed from the mass application of force, an overwhelming victory. I think there's been a misunderstanding, and there's been a lag between the thinking by the international community, NATO in particular,

and the realities of trying to stabilize areas which are broken out into disorder and chaos and violence and brutality. There's been a lag in the thinking as to how we should address these sorts of problems and the old applications of military force, as we've seen, don't always succeed. Marikold, are you talking about a blurring of distinctions? Could you develop that a little? Well, I certainly think these wars are a kind of mixture of war, massive violations of human rights and organised crime.

But I think it's important to call them war because they are wars for political objective. But at the same time, because the violence is directed against civilians, there are also massive violations of human rights. And because you're in a context where the state is disintegrating, there's very low tax revenue. The warring parties are dependent on loot and pillage, on all kinds of illegal trading.

in order to finance themselves. So you need organised crime as well. So Michael Howard. Just a footnote about war against civilians, there is unless nothing new about that. But the war against civilians, where the civilians being deliberately targeted, was in the past,

ultimately directed against military and political leaders. You brought pressure to bear on the civilians to stop them supporting their leaders, and if possible, rise them against their leaders. And that was something which we were attempting to do against the Germans in World War II and the Germans against us. We bombed civilians in order to destroy their morale in order to undermine the support which were getting by the Nazi regime and vice versa. That was one kind of war against civilians, but it was still within a framework of, as it were orthodox military war, that civilians were means to an end.

The other kind of war against civilians is what has become known as ethnic cleansing. Now that, alas, has got a very, very old disrepresent. reputable history, indeed. Europe emerged in the 7th and 8th centuries as a result of massive ethnic cleansing in those days. Can I ask you, as Michael Howard, since professional armies developed in European nations, there's been a distinction between the civil and the military. Do you think that's broken down now? Well, I think it broke down during the two world wars. There had been a great distinction between the civil and the military in the 18th and in the early power. of the 19th centuries. But with the French Revolutionary Wars, virtually everybody, whether they were in uniform or not, began to see themselves as part of the war effort. I think what has now

broken down has been that sense of homogeneous support and integration and dedication to a national ideal for which you were, if necessary, prepared to fight. With the advent of nuclear weapons, the peoples cease to be part of a war effort, they became hostages, an entirely different role, and became completely alienated from the warmakers themselves. And this is the kind of problem which soldiers of Generation of Michael Rose have had to deal with, that you are increasingly a group of specialists in violence within a society, which looks on you with rather ambiguously, is not particularly enthusiastic about you,

and is not terribly enthusiastic to join up with her and even less enthusiastic to remain. So I think that that is a new development, or rather a harkback, that the military now are dedicated specialists in violence of particularly professional and expert orientation, who are no longer seen as being simply the sharp edge of a nation in arms as they were a generation ago. I don't think one can only regard soldiers as specialists in violence. and I think the contribution they make to society as I hope is obviously much, much greater.

And as we've now moved into this sort of humanitarian conflict, of course, the job that is being done by soldiers on the ground are those that should be done by civilians but can't be because of the breakdown of the infrastructure. And indeed, the very dangers which people have to exist under. And we can get carried away by this talk of humanitarian conflict and all armies should therefore focus their efforts and energies on that. I think one has to be very careful that old-fashioned classic war is still about, it's still here, we still have to prepare and train for it at the high-tech end of the spectrum of conflict. We can downshift for these lesser forms of conflict. What we cannot do is train only for these lesser forms of conflict

and then expect to be able to fight at these more violent ends of the spectrum of conflict. So I think we've got to be very careful here, not to think that general war has gone away. It has not. And if we thought that, there'll be someone out there who will see an opportunity and use it. I'd like to disagree with Sir Michael Rose. because I do think at least that general war is on the way out. And I think World War II was the most horrendous destructive war.

When we think back on it, we think back on it with pride, but if we think that maybe in a single night in Tokyo or Hamburg, the same number of people were killed as the whole of the Bosnian War, I think that kind of war is completely unacceptable. And we can never really get involved in another war of that time. hype. Michael Hines. I mean, I agree up to a point with Mary, but I've heard to say this before, and I've heard

other people say this before, and I remember it being said in 1914, that war now is so terrible that it's completely unacceptable, and nobody in their senses is going to get involved in it. This was being said 1912, 1913, up till July 1914, it happened. I remember in my youth, very, very large numbers of people in Britain and elsewhere saying, war, we've seen this kind of war, it is terrible, we're never going to get involved in it again. We did. All I can say is never say never in history. Can I turn to the point of, in a sense, motivation, although perhaps that's not quite the right word.

Michael Rose, people listening will know about people dying for their country, either reluctantly or gloriously or despite themselves doing it, of fighting for their country. Is the idea of what you're fighting for when you go in with international forces, sorry, is the idea of what you're fighting for now very confused and inhibiting? Well, in a way not. Clearly war, classic war is very black and white. The issues are clear, and motivation is easy if your nation is fighting for its survival. I find it very surprising that in a multinational force, which had 23,500 young men and women who had voluntarily gone to, Bosnia in order to risk their lives

say that others could live better or indeed live at all. I find it extraordinary the high levels of motivation. They were going out night after night helping to deliver food or medical supplies or try and restore power lines, being shot out by the very people that they were supposedly helping, being abused

in the international media for being the capes in a Nazi concentration camp, etc., etc. Being told that they were failing in their mission. And yet they never relented in their task. It was an extraordinarily high level of commitment. and the reason is that the rewards of seeing children coming out of the cellars and playing in the streets and the sunshine,

having been in those cellars for two years, is enormous. And it is a self-motivating activity. It's a very rewarding activity. Or a humanitarian motivated. Sorry. In human terms. It's often said that the new wars are a consequence of the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War is the end of the Old War.

And there's a vacuum there which these new conflicts are rushing in to fill. What's your reaction to that, Mary? Well, it's partly true and partly not true. I mean, I think a lot of what we see as new wars began before the end of the Cold War. The new wars in Eastern Europe began after the end of the Cold War, but very similar wars were already taking place in Africa. And so I think the causes of this were much deeper. What I do think was important about the end of the Cold War were two factors.

One was the collapse of socialism and the collapse of a kind of all-embrose. emancipatory idea so that nationalism became populace. The other, of course, was the huge availability of weapons, which I think is often underestimated. And I suppose the final point about the end of the Cold War is I emphasize very much globalization and increased interconnectedness in the world. And the end of the Cold War was the breaching of the last bastion of closed society. So Eastern Europe suddenly became opened up.

to the whole world and all of these links that we see between national groups, between arm supply lines, all of that opened up and made possible a lot of the new wars. Michael Howard, do you think the end of the Cold War will be seen as a major turning point? You mentioned the Treaty of Westphalia 1848, the French Revolution 1789, is. And do you think the Cold War is of equal importance now? Yes, so I think that 1989 will be seen as a turning point, not unlike 1919. Well, certainly not unlike 1945, possibly not unlike 1789. Because if it wasn't the beginning of New World Order, as George Bush said it was going to be, it was certainly the end of an old order. And an order which, however unjust it was, did preserve a very considerable degree of stability in the world as a whole from 1945 onwards.

It was a stability which did involve an enormous amount of injustice, but stability quite often in the short run of these stars. and with the dissolution of the Soviet Empire on the one side and the American hegemony on the other, then all bets were off, as it were, no whole holds of board. And a new kind of world order is one who gradually developing, though one can't quite see what its structure is going to be. Michael Rose, does the globalization of war,

does that make a qualitative difference to the way war is undertaken now? It certainly does, and he married. Calder's made that point earlier on when she said it was more today about people's attitudes, not merely within the theatre of conflict, but the international attitudes that are generated and the support you can get from getting the sympathy of the world behind you, depending which warring faction you're in. And so everybody is out there trying to manipulate the media. Now, the media, obviously a tremendous force for good. They will expose problems.

They will demonstrate where suffering is happening around the world and bring it into your drawing rooms. What they cannot do is provide any of the same. solutions, i.e. they will get you the entry strategy. They will never deliver the exit strategy. And I think military commanders, politicians, even aid workers on the ground are very aware of this new dimension in their activities that they must try and win the information battle because if they don't, all their other efforts are very likely to be undermined. It's a major part. Did you have difficulties in Bosnia dealing with the media, particular difficulties? Considerable difficulties, because a large body of the media in Bosnia felt that the

world should be fighting a just war on behalf of the Bosnian government, the victim state, as they were called. And that we weren't doing that, and that peacekeepers were going to freeze the situation by succeeding in their peacekeeping efforts, and it would be an unjust compromise peace. And they worked very hard to undermine that peace process because they wanted the world to be engaged in a war. Now, what they never asked themselves was, was the world prepared to come and fight a war there? The answer was, a resounding no. So how did you personally cope with that? I used to engage in debate endlessly with them. I found that the United Nations Public Relations machinery that was more used to walking the carpeted corridors in New York were quite unable to either read the tactical

situation, trying to interpret some of the terrible things that were happening against the long-term strategies that were being sought by the United Nations. And in the end, I had to do it myself, I had to get military officers to do it, because they were able to. to explain much more clearly what was happening and actually withstand the rigours. I'm not saying all the media were appays. A number of people in the end saw that it was better to, for the UN to hold the ring,

prevent the state of Bosnia going under. And we started to change the public image of the United Nations mission there. But it was a very, very hard slogging effort on the media front to deliver any sort of positive image for the United Nations Peacekeeping Force, who, after all, were delivering A to 2.5,000, and seven million people who were daily dependent on that

in the midst of a three-sided bloody civil war, and yet they were being accused of presiding over genocide on occasions. As a military historian, Sir Michael Howard, do you see the penetrative power of the media being a very important factor in the way that wars are now waged? Certainly. One goes back to dear old Klosovitz and what he said about the passions of the people getting involved.

in the first and second Balkan wars which were fought in much the same part of the world and for very much the same reasons there were a few correspondence on the ground from rather august papers like the Times which were read in august places like the Atheneum but I doubt whether the British public either knew or cared very much what was going on

if they had they would have been as shocked and appalled as they are today so what was then a local and limited and in international terms controllable war. And there wasn't the United Nations, there was something called the Concert of Europe, which intervened in very much the same kind of way. Now everything immediately becomes escalated,

and everybody within reach of television with any kind of conscience becomes passionately involved, saying that something must be done without very much idea about what actually ought to be done. So how do you see this new factor playing in the mix, Mary Golda? Well, I think first of all, I think it can be very positive.

It was Emmanuel Kant, who said in 1795 that the world has reached a point. The global community has shrunk to the point where a right violated in any part of the world is felt everywhere. And I think

today the media really do draw our attention to terrible things that are happening. I think in Bosnia, it was critical that ITN showed us the pictures of the concentration camps that we saw what was happening and that public pressure was generated for intervention. I do think that humanitarian intervention ought to be a very important feature of the future. At the moment, in my view, it's too little, wrong thinking, not enough effort, not enough weapons, not enough men, not sufficient training.

but I do think that it needs to be an important feature of the future if we don't want to return to a world where war and peace become constant features of our lives. Of course the media sometimes are distorting, but nevertheless I think the global media is terribly important in raising our attention to these issues. Michael Rose. It isn't just the distortions from within the theatre.

It's where the media is reporting from. I had 23.5,000, as I've said, peacekeepers for having one of the biggest peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, and it costs $5 billion. And yet when General Dallaire in Rwanda, a Canadian UN peacekeeper, asked for 3,000 soldiers, he got nobody. And we had a genuine genocide there where over a million people were killed. The reason is that the press were bored with Africa. They weren't there.

And one cannot allow the media to hijack the international agenda. There was great moral questions. Just a second. And I suggest... Issues raised. I used to suggest, well, a lot of the press were challenged you that they are bored with Africa. But let's take that as a working thesis for the purpose of this conversation. But if that is true that they were bored with Africa,

you think that that is the reason for the genocide in Rwanda? Because the press were bordered it? Of course not. But I think had more resources being put into Rwanda, instead of them all being focused on Bosnia, we cannot allow priorities to be set by the specific picture as we see on a particular television set. It's got to be much more universal than that.

Michael Hyde, we know a bit about the Pax, well, a lot about the Pax Romana and about the Pax Britannica. Do you think out of these new organisations now, they will come a similar umbrella, global peacekeeping force, either an amalgamation of countries or the undisguised power of America. Do you think that is possible?

Well, I think it's possible, but I don't think it should look at the Pax Romano or the Pax Britannica as analogies was they were imposed and sustained by force. Well, is there going to be any other way? I thought Mike Rose said about the one. If there were to be a comparable Pax, it would be a Pax Americana, which is the only country which has got the force to sustain it. But it does not have the will to sustain such it, because its own population is a democratic one, not particularly interested in the outside world, except very, very occasionally and spasmodically.

and the United States finds just as much difficulty in arising sort of popular support for its interventions, if not more so, as all the rest of us do. So, quite frankly, I do not see Apex anything of that kind emerging. If it does emerge, as I very much hope it will, it would be through an entirely different process, which would be the slow development of what Mary has called the civil society, that is to say, educated public opinion in every country in the world, thinking the right way that we think is concerned about human rights as we do.

But that is a very, very slow process of old-fashioned word, which I hate to use, civilisation. That is a very slow process. And from where you said Michael Rose, do you think that that kind of force, worried to come together could have an impact, could stop the worst of the atrocities? Sure.

I mean, if NATO had gone to Bosnia in 1992 when President Izabegovic, you could see the war coming to Bosnia, if they had understood that their future row was likely to be in peace support operations and peace stabilising operations, if they had deployed a very powerful military force, albeit working as peacekeepers, then I think the war would not have happened in Bosnia. They just misunderstood what their future role was likely to be at the end of the Cold War. and therefore I think there is always going to be an element, a military element in any peacekeeping mission.

There's always going to be an aid element. But the thing that rarely let the United Nations down in Bosnia was the failure of the politicians internationally to come to an agreed position about what we should be doing. Should we be using more force or should we be using less force? What's interesting now is that you do have something that you could call global civil society or transnational civil society,

you have all kinds of links among NGOs, human rights groups. And those people do represent a political alternative to the extreme nationalists or religious fanatics or whatever it is that are fighting in these areas. And I think what is terribly important when thinking about humanitarian intervention,

what soldiers can do in this new role, which is not war fighting, it's defending civilians, is helping to support those groups of people who are trying to build an alternative society. And that's absolutely critical in thinking about their role, because in the end they can't solve the problem politically. Only people on the ground can solve the problem politically. And it's these people who are squeezed, who get killed, who are expelled during these kinds of wars.

These people are often the first targets. It was the human rights activists who were the first to be killed in Rwanda, for example. And I think that's terribly important to draw attention to and to think about not just a military strategy in these wars, but a political strategy. I mean, listeners could think that your view, as Michael Howard, though informed by all your enormous scholarship and authority, is something which is likely to happen. It's nevertheless bleak that if one has to wait until the world becomes a civilized place, civilized enough so that right-thinking people right round the world. the world think in the same way and are aligned to the same liberal concepts, then we have to wait till beyond doomsday. My view may be bleak, but it is nonetheless the view of Emmanuel Kant, which Mary has

quoted, who did say in all his works, we are gradually moving towards a world of peace. It will take a very long time, but seeing that mankind is made of such warped wood, as put it, you cannot expect anything very substantial, very rapidly, but from each conflict is suggested, a germ of enlightenment will involve and one will move onwards

from each to something further and something better. So I see this a problem continuing certainly throughout all our lifetimes and into the foreseeable future, but each problem, if solved, it creates further problems, but nonetheless, mankind is

it is our job to go on dealing with these problems and remain hopeful of the conclusions. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Dr. Merikolder. Thank you, Sir Michael Howard. Thank you, Sir Michael. Rose, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.