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Copyright 2015 Fabio Armao
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To my son, remembering my father
Looking back over the centuries, or even if looking only at the present, we can clearly observe that many men have made their living, often a very good living, from their special skill in applying weapons of violence, and that their activities have had a very large part in determining what uses were made of scarce resources.
F. C. Lane, Profits from Power.
War makes states, I shall claim. Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum that I shall claim as well. For the historically limited period in which national states were becoming the dominant organizations in Western countries, I shall also claim that mercantile capitalism and state making reinforced each other.
C. Tilly, War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.
Introduction
War is a social construction. There is no greater artifact in its literal sense of a product of human genius than the planning and execution of a massacre. Infantry emerging from the trenches around the Somme River only to be mowed down in the tens of thousands by enemy machine guns, suicide terrorists who blow themselves up on the streets of Jerusalem or in the subways of London and Madrid, are all guided by an idea (and an order), not by instinct. Every type of society has developed within itself more or less sophisticated apparatuses composed of individuals specialised in the use of armed force. Human history is also the history of violence, its evolution and the attempts to limit it.
For the last five centuries, states, more than any other institution, have excelled in the art of war, showing an extraordinary capability to create military organisations that guaranteed sufficient obedience and were thus compatible with their own foundations of legitimacy. It is not a coincidence that absolute monarchs, whose power derived from God or tradition, demonstrated a marked predilection for mercenary troops and, when finances and the consolidation of the bureaucracies made it possible, for armies composed of professional soldiers. In the same way, only a revolutionary regime such as that of 1792 in France could have conceived of the idea of the nation arme and resort to mass conscription without fearing for its own survival as a political entity this is demonstrated by the fact that a few years later Prussia adopted the principle of universal conscription, but was careful not to maintain the policy once Napoleon had been defeated. This historical cycle reached its apex during the total wars of the early twentieth century, which saw the citizens of belligerent states involved first as soldiers and then in their capacity as civilians as well, as the targets of terror bombings in the cities. After that, the USA and the USSR in particular, engaged in the development of the largest arsenal in human history, accumulating thermonuclear weapons whose use was limited (thankfully for all involved) to strategy simulations or war games. The two superpowers certainly did not remain inactive, but rather utilised their immense conventional military resources in wars against third parties, or to feed proxy wars entrusted to their allies on the periphery of the international system.
Over these same centuries, none of this would have been possible if the state had not been able to count on the help of capitalism. The evolution of a military apparatus in the political sphere requires a similar capacity for innovation in the economic sphere: from the production and sale of weapons, to the collection and allocation of capital. Even with regard to war, the historical vicissitudes of the state and capitalism appear in reality to be inseparable. It is enough to reflect on the age of the first great transoceanic enterprises, when long distance trade in precious metals developed in order to satisfy the growing needs of powers such as Spain; or the later colonial adventures of England, France, and the Netherlands, when it seemed instead that it was the governments placing themselves at the service of private interests. Politics assumes the responsibility of determining who will be killed and why, of finding the just cause for war from the civilizing mission of colonialism to the Global War on Terror (GWOT). The market, on the other hand, occupies itself with supplying the instruments of slaughter. For centuries war has carried out a political, and therefore, public, function; but private actors have always claimed wide margins of manoeuvre, and profit, in all the activities connected to its management. Besides this, the military sector as such has revealed itself many times to be an extraordinary factor in progress, allowing for civilian applications of its inventions as well, once the need for secrecy has been eliminated or enemy adversaries have bridged the technological gap. The push given to civilian transport by successive arms races, first naval, then air and missiles comes to mind; or the role played by inventions such as radar or computers in the daily life of common citizens.
The year 1989 marks an unprecedented cleavage with the past. The international system has struggled since then to establish new rules of conduct and clear hierarchies. The fall of the USSR deprived the American administration of an enemy which, on an international level, had actually revealed itself to be an excellent governing partner. The two superpowers had succeeded, in fact, in constructing a vast network of patron-client relationships that allowed developing countries in particular to play their changing positions between the two blocks like a card for procuring ever greater resources. The immediate dismantling of that network damaged the USA capacity for leadership, and its pretense to continue to exercise authority over the entire planet. At least until the appearance of a new enemy gives new life to the strategy of alliances.
However, 1989 marked an even more significant cleavage in the relationship between politics and the market. The previously mentioned anomaly of the Cold War the fact that confrontation could not go beyond the threshold of the rhetoric of deterrence without risking the extermination of the human race shifts the competition from the military plane to the technological and industrial planes. And therefore the primary beneficiary was an economic system rather than a political system. The cleavage of 1989 owed far more to the competitive nature of American capitalism the author of the failure of the planned economy of the Soviet state than to the penetration of democratic values. This is further demonstrated by the fact that, while capitalism has not encountered obstacles to its own expansion since then, in many countries (and not only in those of the former Soviet block) democracy is a conquest more in form than in substance. Actually, capitalism has established itself often to the detriment of democracy, imposing extremely elevated social costs to a growing multitude of men and women.
