Breaking the world war cycle

By Gwynne Dyer


The Second World War ended on May 6 sixty years ago when Germany surrendered unconditionally. Japan held out for three more months before being hammered into surrender by atomic bombs, but that was just a postscript. The real center of the war was in Europe, where at least 30 million people were killed - and maybe as many as 50 million, if you believe post-Soviet estimates of Russian losses in the war.


Sixty years without a world war. We can't be doing all that badly, then, because the Second World War happened only twenty-one years after the First World War. Still, aren't we living on borrowed time by now? When is the next one due?

It's the name that misleads, as if there had only been two world wars. As if they were twentieth-century aberrations that we have now left far behind us. As if.

The bad news is that world wars are not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. They are a consistent feature of modern history, recurring on average about every fifty years since the seventeenth century.

They didn't have atomic bombs in the seventeenth century, or even machine-guns, so the killing was much less efficient than it is nowadays. But if by "world war'' you mean a war in which all the great powers of the time got involved, in two giant alliances, and fought it out for years all over the world until one side caved in, then there have been about six of the things.

The Thirty Years War, 1618-1648: all the great powers involved, many millions of dead, famine and cannibalism in Germany by the end.

The War of the Spanish Succession, 1702-1714: all the great powers involved, fighting on every continent, maybe a million dead.

The Seven Years War, 1756-63: all the great powers involved, Britain gets Canada and India, probably not even a million dead.

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1792-1814: all the great powers involved, Napoleon invades Egypt and Britain conquers Argentina (briefly) and South Africa, four million dead.

There is a pattern here. The death toll isn't as high as the 20th century, because smoothbore muskets were a really inefficient way of killing people, but the politics of the alliances looks very familiar. Some countries switch sides, but it's the same great powers fighting in much the same places, war after war after war, including the two that we call the First World War (1914-18) and the Second World War (1939-45).

We are the heirs of four centuries during which all the great powers have gone to war with one another in two great alliances around every fifty years. If recurrent world wars between the great powers are actually an integral part of the international system, and not just an extraordinarily long series of random accidents, then we are in deep trouble. But there is hope.

The twentieth-century world wars were deeply shocking to the people who went through them, because the human and financial cost of fighting such wars was suddenly far greater than any benefit that they could hope to gain even if their side won. They came from cultures that had always seen war as a noble and potentially profitable enterprise, but they actually changed their minds. They were no wiser than their ancestors, but by 1945 they had had a genuinely new experience: if nuclear weapons can't change your mind about the usefulness of war, then maybe you haven't got one.

We are now sixty years into an experiment designed to change the international system and break the pattern of recurrent world wars. In 1945, the survivors of the worst war in history changed international law and made war illegal. They also created a new institution whose main purpose was to oversee that law and ensure that the great powers never went to war again. They called it the United Nations.

The United Nations has some eloquent enemies, but they never explain how the world can break out of this cycle of world wars without actually changing the international system - and that is precisely what the UN represents: a break with the system. Its enemies generally promise security through military strength, and they can often deliver on their promises in the short term. But in the long run, if we don't break the cycle, then the great powers will slide back into war again as they have so many times in the past, and next time hundreds of millions will die.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based, independent journalist and the author of "Future: Tense - The Coming World Order.

Copyright 2005 The Cincinnati Post, 05-07-2005

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