20th century how many wars

The era of wars ending in unconditional surrender will not return in the foreseeable future. The role of existing international bodies, notably the UN, must also be rethought. Always present, and usually called upon, it has no defined role in the settlement of disputes. Its strategy and operation are always at the mercy of shifting power politics. The absence of an international intermediary genuinely considered neutral, and capable of taking action without prior authorisation by the Security Council, has been the most obvious gap in the system of dispute management.

Since the end of the Cold War the management of peace and war has been improvised. At best, as in the Balkans, armed conflicts have been stopped by outside armed intervention, and the status quo at the end of hostilities maintained by the armies of third parties. This sort of long-term intervention has been applied for many years by individual strong states in their sphere of influence Syria in Lebanon, for instance. As a form of collective action, however, it has been used only by the US and its allies sometimes under UN auspices, sometimes not.

The result has so far been unsatisfactory for all parties. It commits the interveners to maintain troops indefinitely, and at disproportionate cost, in areas in which they have no particular interest and from which they derive no benefit. Poor and weak countries may resent this kind of intervention as a reminder of the days of colonies and protectorates, especially when much of the local economy becomes parasitic on the needs of the occupying forces.

Whether a general model for the future control of armed conflict can emerge from such interventions remains unclear. The balance of war and peace in the 21st century will depend not on devising more effective mechanisms for negotiation and settlement but on internal stability and the avoidance of military conflict. With a few exceptions, the rivalries and frictions between existing states that led to armed conflict in the past are less likely to do so today.

There are, for instance, comparatively few burning disputes between governments about international borders. On the other hand, internal conflicts can easily become violent: the main danger of war lies in the involvement of outside states or military actors in these conflicts. States with thriving, stable economies and a relatively equitable distribution of goods among their inhabitants are likely to be less shaky — socially and politically — than poor, highly inegalitarian and economically unstable ones.

A dramatic increase in economic and social inequality within, as well as between, countries will reduce the chances of peace. The avoidance or control of internal armed violence depends even more immediately, however, on the powers and effective performance of national governments and their legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of their inhabitants. No government today can take for granted the existence of an unarmed civilian population or the degree of public order long familiar in large parts of Europe.

No government today is in a position to overlook or eliminate internal armed minorities. Yet the world is increasingly divided into states capable of administering their territories and citizens effectively — even when faced, as the UK was, by decades of armed action by an internal enemy — and into a growing number of territories bounded by officially recognised international frontiers, with national governments ranging from the weak and corrupt to the non-existent.

These zones produce bloody internal struggles and international conflicts, such as those we have seen in Central Africa. There is, however, no immediate prospect for lasting improvement in such regions, and a further weakening of central government in unstable countries, or a further Balkanisation of the world map, would undoubtedly increase the dangers of armed conflict.

A tentative forecast: war in the 21st century is not likely to be as murderous as it was in the 20th. But armed violence, creating disproportionate suffering and loss, will remain omnipresent and endemic — occasionally epidemic — in a large part of the world.

The prospect of a century of peace is remote. This is also the case, by definition, where individual states accept international humanitarian law and unilaterally assert the right to apply it to citizens of other countries in their national tribunals — as, notably, the Spanish courts, supported by the British House of Lords, did in the case of General Pinochet.

Read More. For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions. Newsletter Preferences. This site requires the use of Javascript to provide the best possible experience. Please change your browser settings to allow Javascript content to run. The size of the British population in was somewhat larger than that of the United States in , so the percentage of loss in the two countries differed: about 1. But to think of these two wars in terms of the similar numbers of foreshortened lives, and of the resulting circles of mourners and bereaved, was revelatory.

So let us take these numbers as a starting point, as a shared foundation of loss, and as a way into exploring two wars through the lens of two nations, two societies that have come to regard them as defining moments. The death toll was both stunning and unanticipated by combatants who, in both the North and the South, had at the outset expected the conflict to be of short duration and little human cost.

In Britain, the losses of the Great War were similarly staggering and relentless, averaging four hundred and fifty-seven dead a day through the war, and reaching an apogee on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, in July, , still the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army, with more than nineteen thousand dead and nearly forty thousand wounded or missing.

This scale of death, and the pervasive grief it inflicted, resulted from significant innovations in warfare. So many people died partly because so many were mobilized to fight.

These were mass armies—as many as two million Americans in arms in the eighteen-sixties and 5. In both conflicts, nationalism spurred the participation of hundreds of thousands of civilian soldiers, who created armies quite unlike any that had preceded them.

The American North was fighting to preserve a nation, the Confederacy to establish one, Britain to defend one. In both wars, however, enthusiasm proved insufficient to sustain the necessary manpower supply, and both Britain and America would, for the first time, introduce conscription. In the Civil War, the Confederacy adopted an initial conscription bill in April, , and the Union followed eleven months later. About fifty-seven per cent of those who served were drafted, a far higher percentage than had been the case in the United States half a century earlier.

Over all, about a quarter of the adult male population in Britain entered the military, compared with three-quarters of white men of military age in the South and forty per cent in the Union. But, in both Britain and America, the many millions of men who joined the military created the conditions for a new kind of warfare, as well as the necessity for a new understanding of citizenship and its privileges in the aftermath of such widespread sacrifice.

Similar expansions of the franchise were enacted across Europe after the Great War. Mass mobilization was inseparable from another innovation that appeared for the first time in America during the Civil War and, later, in the British military experience in warfare, like the society that produced it, had become industrialized.

The railroad was central to both conflicts, enabling unprecedented rapid resupply and movement of armies, and reducing the decisiveness of battle. The telegraph revolutionized battlefield communication. And industry was essential to the production of new weaponry that shaped the character and deadliness of both wars. As Herman Melville wrote in a poem about the Union ironclad Monitor, a ship that seemed to change the very heart of naval conflict:.

The South Carolina planter and former U. Senator James Henry Hammond similarly understood the implications of the U. Virginia, formerly the Union ship Merrimack. Horrible Warfare! The role played by naval blockades in both conflicts was testimony to both the centrality and the vulnerability of economies in shifting patterns of warfare. In both the Civil War and the Great War, increased firepower exposed men to enhanced and extended peril, and rendered prevailing tactical thinking obsolete.

Although ninety-four per cent of battlefield deaths in the Civil War were caused by the rifle, in the Great War it was artillery that inflicted sixty per cent of British fatalities—with an inhumanity that the London Times war correspondent Lt.

Increases in firepower created a changed tactical environment and, we can now say in hindsight, changed tactical requirements. A British military instruction manual issued in took little apparent account of these transformations.

Fewer than one per cent of Civil War casualties resulted from bayonet wounds. Soldiers reported the bayonet more useful for opening tin cans or drying clothes than as a weapon against enemy fire. When they caught on at last, armies in the Civil War moved to entrench, though we so closely associate the appearance of the trench in modern warfare with what famously occurred on the Western Front a hundred years ago.

Both the Civil War and the Great War evolved into wars of attrition. War was supposed to be between combatants. Non-combatants should, as far as possible, be protected in wartime. It was always understood that these conventions did not cover all civil and international armed conflicts, and notably not those arising out of the imperial expansion of western states in regions not under the jurisdiction of internationally recognised sovereign states, even though some but by no means all of these conflicts were known as "wars".

Nor did they cover large rebellions against established states, such as the so-called Indian mutiny; nor the recurrent armed activity in regions beyond the effective control of the states or imperial authorities nominally ruling them, such as the raiding and blood-feuding in the mountains of Afghanistan or Morocco.

Nevertheless, the Hague conventions still served as guidelines in the first world war. In the course of the 20th century, this relative clarity was replaced by confusion. First, the line between inter-state conflicts and conflicts within states - that is, between international and civil wars - became hazy, because the 20th century was characteristically a century not only of wars, but also of revolutions and the break-up of empires.

Revolutions or liberation struggles within a state had implications for the international situation, particularly during the cold war. Conversely, after the Russian revolution, intervention by states in the internal affairs of other states of which they disapproved became common, at least where it seemed comparatively risk-free. This remains the case. Second, the clear distinction between war and peace became obscure. Except here and there, the second world war neither began with declarations of war nor ended with treaties of peace.

It was followed by a period so hard to classify as either war or peace in the old sense that the neologism "cold war" had to be invented to describe it.

The sheer obscurity of the position since the cold war is illustrated by the current state of affairs in the Middle East.

Neither "peace" nor "war" exactly describes the situation in Iraq since the formal end of the Gulf war - the country is still bombed almost daily by foreign powers - or the relations between Palestinians and Israelis, or those between Israel and its neighbours, Lebanon and Syria. All this is an unfortunate legacy of the 20th-century world wars, but also of war's increasingly powerful machinery of mass propaganda, and of a period of confrontation between incompatible and passion-laden ideologies which brought into wars a crusading element comparable to that seen in religious conflicts of the past.

These conflicts, unlike the traditional wars of the international power system, were increasingly waged for non-negotiable ends such as "unconditional surrender". Since both wars and victories were seen as total, any limitation on a belligerent's capacity to win that might be imposed by the accepted conventions of 18th- and 19th- century warfare - even formal declarations of war - was rejected.

So was any limitation on the victors' power to assert their will. Experience had shown that agreements reached in peace treaties could easily be broken. In recent years the situation has been further complicated by the tendency in public rhetoric for the term "war" to be used to refer to the deployment of organised force against various national or international activities regarded as anti-social - "the war against the Mafia", for example, or "the war against drug cartels".

In these conflicts the actions of two types of armed force are confused. One - let's call them "soldiers" - is directed against other armed forces with the object of defeating them. The other - let's call them "police" - sets out to maintain or re-establish the required degree of law and public order within an existing political entity, typically a state. Victory, which has no necessary moral connotation, is the object of one force; the bringing to justice of offenders against the law, which does have a moral connotation, is the object of the other.

Such a distinction is easier to draw in theory than in practice, however. Homicide by a soldier in battle is not, in itself, a breach of the law. But what if a member of the IRA regards himself as a belligerent, even though official UK law regards him as a murderer? Were the operations in Northern Ireland a war, as the IRA held, or an attempt in the face of law-breakers to maintain orderly government in one province of the UK?

Since not only a formidable local police force but a national army was mobilised against the IRA for 30 years or so, we may conclude that it was a war, but one systematically run like a police operation, in a way that minimised casualties and the disruption of life in the province.

Such are the complexities and confusions of the relations between peace and war at the start of the new century. They are well illustrated by the military and other operations in which the US and its allies are at present engaged.

There is now, as there was throughout the 20th century, a complete absence of any effective global authority capable of controlling or settling armed disputes.

Jewell, Nicholas P. Broadberry, Stephen, and Mark Harrison, editors. The Economics of World War I. Cambridge University Press, Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance.

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