War and Peace as Social Systems
It is rather a question of relevance.
To put it plainly, all these program, however detailed and well developed, are abstractions. The most carefully reasoned disarmament sequence inevitably reads more like the rules of a game or a classroom exercise in logic than like a prognosis of real events in the real world. This is as true of today’s complex proposals as it was of the Abbe de St. Pierre’s "Plan for Perpetual Peace in Europe" 250 years ago.
If this were true, it would be wholly appropriate for economists and political theorists to look on the problems of transition to peace as essentially mechanical or procedural - as indeed they do, treating them as logistic corollaries of the settlement of national conflicts of interest. If this were true, there would be no real substance to the difficulties of transition.
For it is evident that even in today’s
world there exists no conceivable conflict of interest, real or
imaginary, between nations or between social forces within nation,
that cannot be resolved without recourse to war - if such resolution
were assigned a priority of social value. And if this were true, the
economic analyses and disarmament proposals we have referred to,
plausible and well conceived as they may be, would not inspire, as
they do, an inescapable sense of indirection.
Although war is "used" as an instrument of national and social
policy, the fact that a society is organized for any degree of
readiness for war supersedes its political and economic structure.
War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary
modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system
which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today.
At the same time, some of the puzzling superficial contradictions of modern societies can then be readily rationalized.
Economic systems, political philosophies,
and corpora jures serve and extend the war system, not vice versa.
Only in comparatively recent times has it been considered politically expedient to euphemize war budgets as "defense" requirements.
The necessity for governments to
distinguish between "aggression" (bad) and "defense" (good) has been
a by-product of rising literacy and rapid communication. The
distinction is tactical only, a concession to the growing inadequacy
of ancient war-organizing political rationales.
The capacity of a nation to make war expresses the
greatest social power it can exercise; war-making, active or
contemplated, is a matter of life and death on the greatest scale
subject to social control. It should therefore hardly be surprising
that the military institutions in each society claim its highest
priorities.
These are the visible, or
ostensible, functions of war. If there were no others, the
importance of the war establishment in each society might in fact
decline to the subordinate level it is believed to occupy. And the
elimination of war would indeed be the procedural matter that the
disarmament scenarios suggest.
And it is the unwillingness or inability of the writers of disarmament scenarios and reconversion plans to take them into account that has so reduced the usefulness of their work, and that has made it seem unrelated to the world we know.
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