Francis Harry Hinsley (1918-1998)
was a distinguished British historian who published, in 1963, one of the
classics in the history of international thought, Power and the Pursuit of
Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations Between States (Cambridge University Press, 1963), of which more below.
The following extract
comes from an essay in 1982 on “The Rise and Fall of the Modern International
System.” While it has been customary to date the emergence of “the modern
international system” to 1494 (the year of the French intervention in Italy) or
1648 (the date of the Treaty of Westphalia), Hinsley proposes a different and
later dating based on the transition from an age of constant but limited war (everything
up to the end of the eighteenth century) to one marked, concomitantly with the growth in
the destructiveness of war, by infrequent wars alternating with periods of long
peace. This in turn provokes the reflection—notable at a moment in
international history when nuclear fears were again sending people into the
streets in massive numbers—that a new international system, based on the
abstention from major war among nuclear armed states, had arisen since 1945: (1850
words)
* * *
In the history of relations between the world's leading
states since the end of the eighteenth century certain features stand out
prominently. One is that infrequent wars have alternated with long periods of
peace. From the 1760s to the 1790s these states were at peace; from the 1790s
to 1815 they were at war; from 1815 to 1854, peace; 1871 to 1914, peace; 1914
to 1918, war; 1918 to 1939, peace; 1939 to 1945, war; and since 1945 another 36
years of peace already. Another feature, no less pronounced, is that each of
these infrequent wars has been more demanding and devastating for all
participants, more nearly total, than that which preceded it. In these
respects, as also in a third on which I shall enlarge later on, international conduct
in the past 200 years has differed from international conduct in all earlier
times, when states were more or less continuously engaged in wars that remained
limited in scale — and so much so that the rise of the modern system may safely
be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century.
It is possible to exaggerate the distinctiveness of the
modern system; and it is certainly true that its defining characteristics have
become more prominent as it has aged. Thus, the years from 1854 to 1871 did not
witness unremitting war between the leading states, but several separate wars,
and from each of these wars to the next there was no escalation in the scale of
fighting. But this qualification, like others that might be made, pales into
insignificance when we contrast the modern pattern of conflict with conflict in
earlier conditions. Before the end of the eighteenth century it had commonly
been the case that war and peace had not been sharply differentiated — that
public war and private war, inter-state war and civil war, civil war and
rebellion, rebellion and crime had been barely distinguishable. At some times,
in some places, on the other hand, war had become a specialized activity,
organized by the state, undertaken after due preparation, engaging professional
forces. Yet even when it was so organized, war had remained a natural activity,
indulged in with great regularity, not to say seasonally. It had also remained
limited in scale. That escalation in the destructiveness of war which has
accompanied its almost every renewal since the end of the eighteenth century
had not set in.
We generally recognize that warfare even now retains these
characteristics in the extreme condition of relations between primitive
societies which we call tribes — that for such societies as the Papuan, for
example, it was till recently both central to the economy and akin to play, and
took the form of a universal seasonal competition. What we do not always
remember is that in conditions less extreme than these, far less removed from
our own, conflict conformed to the norms of Primitive societies rather than to
those of modern times until so comparatively recently as 200 years ago. During
the whole of the seventeenth century there were only seven years in which none
of the European states was at war. In the first two thirds of the eighteenth
century some or other of the European states were still at war during two out
of every three years, and of the individual states the United Kingdom, which
was not abnormally belligerent, was at war during two and a half years out of every five. As for the scale of
warfare, its very frequency reveals how restricted it was, what lack of
intensity marked its conduct, and there is no lack of detailed evidence to that
effect. . . .
Until the eighteenth century war was an undertaking for
which, like agriculture then or manufacturing now, large sections of society
were naturally organized. It was also an activity on which, appearances
notwithstanding, societies embarked with scant regard for the wishes or the
warnings of their states. Indeed, communications remained so negligible, and
state apparatuses so weak, that it may be questioned whether rulers did more
than merely reflect and express the social consensus that pressed for war until
men were tired or satisfied enough to press for peace. But if the impact of
science and technology was producing societies that were more integrated and
more capable of sustained and systematic warfare, it was also facilitating from
the end of the eighteenth century the rise of regulatory government — indeed,
it was necessitating it — and this at a time when the growing burden of being
prepared for war and the risks involved in increasingly destructive war were
forcing governments to apply their growing competence to the task of avoiding
war.
The states of the modern international system failed in this
task. If only at long intervals, peace between them continued to break down;
and in the fact that each next war was more catastrophic than the last lay one
reason why in the twentieth century the system itself became bankrupt and
declined. . . .
Strategic studies became a major academic industry in the
West in the early 1950s. Nor is this surprising; it was then that the nuclear
weapons were superseding the atomic bomb, that the missile was superseding the
bomber, that the submarine was emerging as the perfect moving missile platform
— and that the West's monopoly of these advantages was shattered by
developments in Soviet Russia. It is in no way suprising, either, that until
the middle of the 1960s the object of the studies was, as all the literature
proclaimed, to reintegrate strategy with policy — to restore to policy the
flexibility and the range of options that the latest weapons were taking away
from it. But the real, as opposed to the proclaimed objective of the literature
was to discover whether nuclear states could evolve strategies and weapons by
which they could preserve the options of threatening war with each other and of
going to war with each other despite the fact that they had become nuclear
states. Techniques of crisis management; theories for the control of
escalation; strategies of flexible retaliation; the development of tactical or
little nuclear weapons — these suggestions were all advanced in the hope that
by enabling nuclear states to evade the logical outcome of nuclear deadlock,
the strategy of 'the great deterrent', they would preserve for them the
possibility of more limited war.
If we read these elaborations today we bring away from them
one unmistakable impression. They possess all the cogency, all the intellectual
rigour and all the irrelevance of the scholastic writings of the middle ages.
And whence their irrelevance? The answer lies partly in the fact that they did
not pause to ask whether disciplines accepted by one nuclear state would be
accepted by another, or whether disciplines accepted by all nuclear states
before the outbreak of hostilities would be observed by all after hostilities
had broken out. But it lies mainly in the fact that since the mid-1960s, no
doubt as a result of deeper reflection, the response of strategic thinkers had
undergone a fundamental change.
Their message since then has been that should provocation
lead to war between the world's most developed states — or should accident or miscalculation
do so—there is no reasonable hope of avoiding massive nuclear exchanges and no
possibility of providing civil defence against them; that if it is thus
imperative to avoid war, then, far from trying to avoid dependence on the great
deterrent of massive retaliation, it is imperative to ensure against
provocation and miscalculation by seeing to it that all nuclear states shall be
able to rely on deterring each other; and that they will be deterred by the
risk of massive retaliation if all possess a retaliatory nuclear armoury that
is invulnerable to a nuclear first attack. They have concluded — to put this
message in other words — that whereas the chief purpose of military
establishments has hitherto been to fight wars, from now on their chief purpose
is to avert war, and that the advance of technology has at last made it
possible for them to fulfil it.
You may grant the interest and the significance of these
developments and yet remain apprehensive lest they prove to be reversible. The
initiative which produced the establishment of the League of Nations was
significant; but the League was ineffective and short-lived. It was already a
feature of the modern international system before 1945 that its leading states
contrived to enjoy long periods of peace; and the fear that the present period
of peace between the leading states will break down in its turn is
understandable at a time when the world economy is again in serious disarray,
détente is again under strain and some voices, however few, are again suggesting
that nuclear war would not in the event be total and devastating. There is much
force in these points; it would indeed be unwise to assume that the advances to
which I have drawn attention cannot be reversed. But I derive some comfort from
the belief that the conjunction of circumstances which proved fatal to the
international system in 1914 and again in 1939 is unlikely to be repeated. The
modern international system collapsed on those occasions because states
continued to hold the view that they had the legal right to go to war. It also
collapsed because states holding this view were confronted with massive shifts
in their relative power which persuaded them in the last resort that war was a
reasonable means of defending or advancing their interests. States hold this
view no longer, and in the wake of the great acceleration of scientific and
technological development that has taken place in the last forty years and that
has ensured that even conventional war between developed states would produce insupportable
damage, they are unlikely ever again to make this judgment. Indeed, they are
unlikely, such of them as have been caught up in this acceleration, to be
confronted ever again with shifts in their relative power that will disturb the
equilibrium between them. That shifts of power will continue to take place —
this goes without saying, as does the fact that interests will continue to
conflict. But these states have passed so far beyond a threshold of absolute
power that changes in relative power can no longer erode their ability to
uphold the equilibrium which resides in the ability of each to destroy all.
Such are the grounds for suggesting that we are now
witnessing the formation of an international system which will be even more
different from the modern system than that system was from all its precursors,
and which will be so because its leading states will abstain from war with each
other. But since it will also be a system in which conflict and confrontation
continue, between those states as between the others, let me conclude by
reminding you that Immanuel Kant, he who first foresaw that precisely such a
system would one day materialize, allowed that it would remain subject to
constant danger from 'the law-evading bellicose propensities in man' but judged
that, once constructed, it would survive for that very reason.
* * *
F.H. Hinsley, The Rise and Fall of the Modern International
System,” Review of International Studies
8 (1982): 1-8. This extract is about a third of the original essay, available
online at the Martin Wight Memorial Trust.
The “equilibrium which
resides in the ability of each to destroy all” was clearly disrupted by the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Though Russia, as heir to the Soviet nuclear
arsenal, continues to maintain a rough balance of power at the nuclear level,
the distribution of forces has had a different political meaning since the evisceration
of Russian power following the Soviet collapse. An important question to ask,
however, is whether Hinsley’s self-described “Kantian” take on the nuclear
stalemate continues to hold good. So long as the image held in the mind of the “nuclear
armed states” consisted primarily of the Soviet Union and the United States,
the logic of deterrence, and of the transcendence of major war, seemed virtually
axiomatic to most observers, but anxieties over nuclear weapons continued to
rise in the few years after Hinsley’s article appeared and, after a brief lull
in the 1990s, rose again to war-provoking dimensions in the first decade of the
twentieth century.
Hinsley's masterwork in the history of international thought, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, is not an easy book for students to read, but well worth the effort. Part I offers an examinations of central figures in the history of internationalism, including Henry IV, Penn, Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant. Then he turns from the philosophers to the diplomats, examining the history of the modern states’ system to the end of the nineteenth century. In Part III, he considers the course of international relations and international organizations in the twentieth century. Though Hinsley wrote two other well regarded works in the same vein—Sovereignty (1986) and Nationalism and the International System (1973)—his major scholarly effort was as editor and primary author of the multi-volume official history, British Intelligence in the Second World War.
Hinsley's masterwork in the history of international thought, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, is not an easy book for students to read, but well worth the effort. Part I offers an examinations of central figures in the history of internationalism, including Henry IV, Penn, Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant. Then he turns from the philosophers to the diplomats, examining the history of the modern states’ system to the end of the nineteenth century. In Part III, he considers the course of international relations and international organizations in the twentieth century. Though Hinsley wrote two other well regarded works in the same vein—Sovereignty (1986) and Nationalism and the International System (1973)—his major scholarly effort was as editor and primary author of the multi-volume official history, British Intelligence in the Second World War.
