Lecture 9: State, War, and Imperialism

Today I want to talk about state, war, and imperialism. I want to begin by reminding you that fighting and war, conquest, and plunder are part of human history, despite the advantages of the division of labor, about which I have talked extensively. And if we look for reasons for this deviationist behavior, we will find three factors. One is a lack of intelligence, and closely correlated with that is a very high time preference. High time preference and low intelligence are closely correlated phenomena, being just concerned with immediate effects, not being able to grasp the long-run advantages that result from the division of labor, but being tempted by the immediate advantages that you can gain by robbing and plundering and engaging in these sorts of activities. And the third factor that contributes to it is violent ideologies. There exist ideologies like ardent nationalism and things of that nature that have also mightily contributed to the fact of war. We just have to think of the current Iraq War the idea that some countries are simply superior to others, due to who knows what, obviously contributes to these types of wars.

Nonetheless, I want to emphasize before I get to the subject of war in history, that there has also been a peaceful spread of civilization. Just recall what I talked about very early in my lectures, the slow and gradual outward expansion of agricultural life from the Fertile Crescent, progressing from that area by about one kilometer per year, for several thousand years, gradually displacing the less civilized societies of hunters and gatherers and herders, and instituting more peaceful social relations than existed before. Or, think of examples of colonialism, which is something very different from imperialism. Colonialism was driven by the motive of scarcity of land, and also driven by various missionary ideologies, Christians wanting to spread the Christian belief to other areas.

Just to give you a few examples of relatively peaceful colonial adventures, such as Greek colonialism, without which we would not have had cities like Stagira, where Aristotle was born, or Pestamus, or Pergamon, or Efesus, or Agrigento, or Syracuse, all of which are Greek in origin, and places to which the Greek culture was exported. Similarly, we can say that, at least partially, primitive Rome also had a civilizing effect on the rest of Italy, carrying its superior culture to less developed places in Italy and also to less developed places in parts of the later Roman Empire. Without colonialism by the Bavarians, there would be no such thing as Austria, which was, at that time, on the eastern fringes of civilization, and Bavarians settled these regions and turned them into more or less civilized places. We should mention the efforts of Frederick the Great and Maria Theresia, who promoted the settlement of Germans in more eastern regions of Europe with the purpose of lifting cultural life in those regions. Or, coming to more modern times, New France, Canada: in 1754 there were 55,000 people from France who settled in Canada and created, so to speak, civilization out of nothing. After 1650, some 80,000 people settled in New England and more than 100,000 settled in Maryland and Virginia. All in all, some 2 million people left Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for colonial purposes, by and large peaceful ventures. Some 200,000 Germans left for America before 1800.

Let me give you some numbers of countries where people left and countries to which people went, from the mid-nineteenth century to about 1930. All in all, 52 million Europeans left Europe during that period of time. Five million Austrians left their country, 18 million Britons, less than 5 million Germans, 10 million Italians, about 5 million Spaniards, about 2 million Russians and slightly less than 2 million Portuguese. And where did they go? Six million of them went to Argentina, more than 4 million went to Brazil, more than 5 million went to Canada, 34 million went to the United States, slightly less than 3 million went to Australia, about half a million went to New Zealand, and slightly less than half a million went to South Africa. There’s also an interesting fact that close to 4 million people went to Siberia during the nineteenth century, that is, into an area that was basically nothing before. And last, but not least, by 1930 or so, some 8 million Chinese had left their country and gone to various Southeast Asian places and lifted up their cultures. Again, I’m not saying that all of these colonial movements were entirely peaceful, but overwhelmingly so; we can say that those were peaceful expansions of culture and civilization to places that were less civilized and less cultured before.

Now, to the topic. I will return to the West as the ultimately superior civilization and I want to begin first with pre-state conflicts, that is, conflicts as they existed during the feudal age, essentially before 1500. In order to set the stage, remember that Europe—and that was one of the reasons for the uniqueness and for the development of Europe—was a highly decentralized place at this time, with tens of thousands of smaller or larger lords, princes, and kings. There existed at this time tens of thousands of people who owned a castle or a fortress and could say no to whomever wanted to plunder them or oppress them or tax them or whatever it was, because for a long time castles were indeed a very effective means of protecting yourself against any kind of enemy. And this protection that fortresses and castles constituted only gradually disappeared with the development of artillery, which appears for the very first time in 1325, but does not become a really relevant factor of warfare until about two hundred years later, that is in the 1500s. The fighting forces during this feudal age consisted, by and large, of mounted knights, which were quite expensive at this time. Horses, after all, compete with men for food and it was an expensive thing to own a horse and armor and weapons, and what all, to equip a fighting knight. And in addition, there were archers used in warfare. And from 1300 on, until about 1500, an important role was also played by pikemen. That was a strategy—developed in particular by the Swiss—of assembling large groups of people (in German they were called Spießer Gewalthaufen, “piker violence clusters” would be the translation), and these groups of pikemen were the first development that could stand up to mounted knights. Before this, mounted knights were the non plus ultra in terms of weaponry, until these massive groups of pikemen came into existence and they could take care of the mounted knights. These groups sometimes were three, four, or five thousand people in size, and they simply eliminated the horses. The fighters themselves were either the vassals of the lords, or the tenants of the lords. You recall during the feudal time there existed some sort of contractual relationship between the lords who owned the fortresses and offered protection, and the various tenants that they had for mutual assistance in cases of conflict.

Somewhat later, mercenary groups appeared, that is, groups that could be hired by whomever needed them for defensive or aggressive purposes. Fights were quite frequent at that time, but they were, as you can imagine, on a comparatively small scale and typically they were some sort of inheritance disputes. Who owns this place? Who owns this piece of land? And so forth. No army at that time exceeded 20,000 people, and most armies were significantly smaller than this. But what is important is that there existed certain rules about how to fight. Despite the fact that these fights were bloody, there existed something like knightly honor, and the knightly honor prescribed certain ways of proceeding and outlawed other ways. I want to read you a quote to this effect, by Stanislav Andreski, who I mentioned a few times before. He writes here that

[a]t the height of the medieval civilization the wars were almost sporting matches: bloody, to be sure, but just as restricted by conventions. Let us look at one of the many examples of such a spirit. At the beginning of the fifteenth century Jagiello, the king of Poland and Lithuania, was fighting the Order of the Teutonic Knights. On one occasion, he found their army when it was crossing a river, and, although many of his warriors were eager to pounce upon the enemy, he restrained them because he thought that it was unworthy of a knight to attack the enemy who was not ready. When both armies finally met upon a fair ground they first engaged in parlays, during which the envoys of the Teutonic knights gave Jagiello two swords, thus mocking the inferior armament of his troops. Having slept overnight, each side celebrated a mass in its camp. When both sides were ready they signalled to each other by trumpeting, and then rushed into battle. As a rule, the medieval knights considered it unworthy of their honour to attack by surprise or pursue the defeated enemy. The knights who fell from their horses were usually spared and released for ransom.1

When mercenaries became used as soldiers, wars likewise were mostly bloodless battles. The mercenaries were a bunch of adventurers, international men. They were not united by any kind of ideology and their general attitude was that my enemy today might be my employer tomorrow, so I had better watch out to protect myself from being killed. Wait until those people who are my enemies maybe go bankrupt and have to give up, but in any case, avoid massive amounts of casualties. Again, to this effect, a quote from J.F.C. Fuller, a military historian who writes on mercenary warfare in fourteenth-century Italy. He writes,

In Florence and in Milan and other ducal principalities, in their factional contests, their tyrants relied on highly trained professional mercenaries hired out by their condottieri, or contractor captains. These soldiers fought solely for profit; one year they might sell their services to one prince, and to his rival the next. For them war was a business as well as an art, in which the ransom of prisoners was more profitable than killing their employer’s enemies. Because war was their trade, to prolong a war rather than to end it was clearly to their advantage.2

Hence, the historian Guicciardini writes:

They would spend the whole summer on the siege of a fortified place, so that wars were interminable, and campaigns ended with little or no loss of life, and by the end of the fifteenth century, such noted soldiers as the condottieri Paolo Vitelli and Prospero Colonna declared that “wars are won rather by industry and cunning than by the actual clash of arms.”3

And of these soldiers Sir Charles Oman writes,

The consequence of leaving the conduct of war in the hands of the great mercenary captains was that it came often to be waged as a mere tactical exercise or a game of chess, the aim being to manoeuvre the enemy into an impossible situation and then capture him, rather than to exhaust him by a series of costly battles. It was even suspected that condottieri, like dishonest pugilists, sometimes settled beforehand that they would draw the game. Battles when they did occur, were often bloodless affairs....Machiavelli cites cases of general actions in which there were only two or three men-at-arms slain, though the prisoners were to be numbered by the hundreds.4

From the sixteenth through the seventeenth century, essentially until the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, we see a change in warfare. We might call this period the period during which we do not have states fighting each other, but instead wars are conducted in order to create states. Remember, when I talked about the origin of the state, I explained how kings frequently tried to create the Hobbesian situation of war of all against all, in order to come out of this war as a state rather than as a feudal king who had to rely on voluntary contributions from his various vassals. These wars from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries were quite brutal. And just to document the thesis that these wars were wars that were used as instruments to the formation of states, here is a quote from a German historian, who writes,

The years between 1500 and 1700 according to a recent study of the incidence of war in Europe, were “the most warlike in terms of the proportion of years of war under way (95 per cent), the frequency of war (nearly one every three years), and the average yearly duration, extent, and magnitude of war.”5

This was the most warlike Europe had been up to this point; in 95 percent of the years, there was some war; on the average, every three years a new war was started, whereby the duration and the extent increased over time. In this case, up to the Thirty Years’ War, these wars were not interstate wars, but they were state formation wars.

And these state formation wars fall right in the period of the Protestant Revolution. As I explained, the Protestant Revolution was precisely the event used by various princes to combine earthly and religious power and to establish themselves as state rulers rather than feudal kings. During this period, from 1500 to 1648, for the first time the wars take on an ideological connotation. What I mentioned before was that mercenaries had no ideology to fight for. The various feudal nobles fighting each other typically also had no ideological purposes in mind behind their fighting, but their reasons for fighting were more or less inheritance disputes, which tend to be settled by occupation; once you have occupied a certain territory, then the war’s basically over. But these religious wars were ideologically motivated wars, and ideologically motivated wars (I’ll come back to that later on when I talk about democratic wars) tend to be far more brutal than professional wars because they involve the participation of the masses.

Also, for the first time during this period, muskets were used. These had a range of about 200 meters, slightly more than 200 yards, but they were only able to shoot about once per minute. And artillery was used now, to a larger extent. In addition, from the seventeenth century on, a combination of the piking strategy with the shooting musket was introduced by using bayonets. The ability to use artillery and muskets made it possible for the first time to defeat clusters of pikemen. Before then it was basically impossible to break them up. Now, through artillery fire and through the use of muskets, you could break up and spread out these clusters of pikemen and then be able to attack them. And also, the fortifications which, for a long time, had offered solid protection, became less and less protective because of the development of artillery. In response to the development of artillery, new types of fortifications were developed either in the form of triangles or in the form of stars and with some sort of water moats in front of them, in order to force the artillery to be placed at greater distances and to make the artillery less effective in crushing the walls of the fortifications.

The religious uprisings, which were initially stimulated by people like Luther and the various Protestant reforms, and the social chaos that resulted from them, as I said, was used by the various princes as a springboard for state formation and for forcing the smaller nobility into submission and accepting the rule and the taxing power of the larger lords. In addition, these religious wars were used by the princes to grab the substantial amounts of property that the Catholic Church owned; in some countries up to 30 percent of cultivated land was owned by the churches. Kings formed new alliances with national religions, and the old-style separation between church and state increasingly broke down and became more direct alliances between these two forces. At the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, the German territories, for instance, which had about 20 million people at the outset, had lost 8 million people as a result of this period of permanent state-formation wars. The modern state came into existence in Europe at the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

Typically now, standing armies came into existence. Standing armies were, of course, far more expensive than hiring mercenaries here and there and then dismissing them again. So, the formation of standing armies requires, already, a certain amount of centralization of power and requires that taxing power exists on the part of the lords or kings. During the Thirty Years’ War, for instance, there still existed some 1,500 independent condottieri, army leaders. All of these were now consolidated into standing armies. Either the independent mercenary companies were dissolved, or they were simply taken over as a state army and then had to be paid, of course, both during peacetime and wartime, which made them quite expensive. Nonetheless, even at this time, Europe remained highly decentralized. To give you an indication of this, even after the Thirty Years’ War, Germany consisted of 234 countries, 51 free cities, and about 1,000 independent large manors owned by significant noble people.

After 1648, the next period of warfare begins, which we might call the period of monarchical warfare. And before I come to characterize this period of monarchical warfare, let me present some theoretical arguments that help us understand the development that results now, after the Thirty Years’ War. First, we should recognize that institutions such as states show a natural aggressiveness. The explanation is very simple. If you have to fund your own aggressive ventures yourself, out of your own pocket, that will somewhat curtail your natural inclination to fight other people, because you have to pay for it yourself. On the other hand, if you imagine that if I want to fight some of you guys and I can tax him or him or him and ask them to support me in my fighting endeavors, then whatever my initial aggressive impulses might be, are certainly stimulated because I can externalize the cost of war onto other people. I don’t have to bear the cost myself. Other people have to bear the cost. This explains why institutions that have the power to tax, and also institutions that have the power to print money, in later ages, have financial abilities that make it more likely that they go to war than you would go to war if the power to tax was lacking or the power to print money was lacking on your part.

We can also see that states, because they compete with each other for population, do not like to see people moving from one state to another state. After all, every individual that moves from one place to another means there is one taxpayer less here, and your opponent gets one taxpayer more. The high degree of decentralization that existed in Europe went hand in hand with a high degree of regional mobility, people moving from territories that were more oppressive to territories that were less oppressive, and this then causes automatic rivalries between the different states and leads frequently to war. And we can say that this competition between states, in contrast to the competition of General Motors against Ford or Toyota against Honda or whatever, that the competition between states is an eliminative competition. It is possible that Ford and Toyota and Honda and GM can live side-by-side, coexist side by side until the end of history. However, there can, in any given territory, be only one institution that is entitled to tax and pass laws. There cannot be free competition in a territory in terms of taxing power and legislative power. If everybody could tax everybody, there would be nothing left to be taxed, and if everybody could make laws, chaos would break out.

The competition between states is eliminative in the sense that in any given territory, there can only exist one taxing authority and one monopolist of legislation and we should expect that wars will by and large lead to a tendency to concentration. That is, more and more of these small states are eliminated and the territories of states become gradually larger and larger.

And we can also quickly address and resolve the question as to who is about to win and who is about to lose in these types of battles. If you assume that states were initially of roughly equal size with roughly equal populations, then we recognize some sort of paradox, that is, that those states that treat their populations nicer, more liberal states, so to speak, are the states that have a more prosperous civil society than those states that mistreat their populations, because if you are liberal to your population, less oppressive to your population, they tend to be more productive. And after all, in a war, in order to conduct a war, especially a war that lasts for a while, that requires that you have a productive population. People have to continue working, have to continue making weaponry and feeding the soldiers, etc., and those territories, those state territories that oppress their population, tend to be also poor places that have fewer resources on which to draw in the conduct of war. We would expect that as a tendency, more liberal states will, at least in the long run, defeat less liberal states, wiping them out and enlarging their territory at the expense of these less liberal states.

You can see, however, that there is a limitation to this tendency. That is, the larger the territories become, the more difficult it becomes for people to move from one territory to another. At the conceivable end point of the process of concentration we have a one world state, the possibility for people to vote with their feet entirely disappears. Wherever you go, the same tax and regulation structure applies. The implication of that is with larger and larger territories, the initial reason for state rulers to be comparatively moderate in their taxing and regulation policy to their own population, in order to be successful in wars, this initial motive disappears more and more, the larger the territories become, and the more difficult voting with your feet becomes. So, we can recognize some sort of dialectic process. Initially, you want to be relatively liberal in order to expand your territory. The more successful you become in expanding your territory, the less important becomes the motive to be liberal to our own population, because voting with your feet becomes ever more difficult.

Jumping ahead for a moment, this sort of paradox, that is, that liberal states tend to be more aggressive in their foreign policy, is nicely illustrated, in a way, by comparing the United States and the former Soviet Union. There’s no doubt that the former Soviet Union was an extremely oppressive state internally, with the result being that they had a basket case economy, and the United States, on the other hand, being a comparatively nice country, was a very prosperous economy. And if we now look at the foreign policy of these two countries, we find what some people consider to be a curious result, but which I think can be easily explained. We find that the Soviet Union engaged in comparatively few imperialist ventures. And those imperialist ventures that they engaged in were usually in second-, third-, and fourth-rate places because they knew precisely that their economy was so weak that they could not take on a highly developed country, due to lack of resources needed in the conduct of war. Keep in mind that the main territorial gains that the Soviet Union achieved were territorial gains that were granted to it by the United States as a result of various agreements during World War II. All of Eastern Europe was given to the Soviet Union by the Americans; it would not have been possible for the Soviet Union to take over all of these places if they had to fight the United States to the hilt. The leadership of the United States actually ordered some of the generals, like General Patton, to withdraw, and prevented him from marching further to the east, from taking over places like Prague and so forth, to prevent communism from spreading to the West. So, the main territorial gains of the Soviet Union can hardly be described as the result of their internal imperialist desires.

But if you compare this with the foreign policy of the United States, you find that the United States has, in fact, in every single year, been engaged in various sorts of imperialist ventures. And the explanation for this is precisely that the United States did that because they knew as a result of their internal resources, because of their internal wealth, they would likely become winners, whereas the Soviet Union full well knew that they would not be capable of waging a successful war against highly industrialized countries. That was not the result of the goodness of the hearts of Gorbachev and Brezhnev and their other leaders. Quite to the contrary, I admit that these were evil people and that the Soviet Union was, so to speak, the Evil Empire, all of this is perfectly correct. Nonetheless, there is a rational explanation for why they were reluctant in their imperialist desires and why the United States, precisely because it is more liberal internally, was more aggressive as far as its external policy is concerned.

Now, back to monarchical wars, before the backdrop of these theoretical considerations. Recall that kings, princely rulers, regard their country as their own property. Even in wars which are typically motivated by inheritance disputes, that is, which are non-ideologically motivated wars, even during these wars, kings and princes have incentive to preserve the territories that they try to take over—because after all, they regard themselves as the owner of the capital stock represented by these provinces and this then leads to a relatively civilized form of warfare during the monarchical age. And again, some quotes, to this effect, referring to monarchical state wars and showing the moderation of these types of non-ideological, territorially motivated wars. First, a quote from a military historian, Arne Røksund. He says,

On the continent, commerce, travel, cultural and learned intercourse went on in wartime almost unhindered. The wars were the King’s wars; the role of the good citizen was to pay his taxes, and sound political economy dictated that he should be left alone to make the money out of which to pay those taxes. He was required to participate neither in the decisions out of which wars arose, nor to take part in them once they broke out, unless prompted by a spirit of useful adventures. These matters were purely royal matters and the concern of the sovereign alone.6

And a Swiss-Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, writes of the wars during the eighteenth century:

War became limited and circumscribed by a system of precise rules. It was definitely regarded as a kind of single combat between the two armies, the civil population being merely spectators. Pillage, requisitions and acts of violence against the population were forbidden in the home country as well as in the enemy country. Each army established depots in its rear in carefully chosen towns, shifting them as it moved about....Conscription existed only in rudimentary and sporadic form....Soldiers being scarce and hard to find, everything was done to ensure their quality by long, patient and meticulous training, but as this was costly, it rendered them very valuable, and it was necessary to let as few be killed as possible. Having to economize their men, generals tried to avoid fighting battles. The object of warfare was the execution of skillful maneuvers and not the annihilation of the adversary; a campaign without battles and without loss of life, a victory obtained by a clever combination of movements, was considered the crowning achievement of this art, the ideal pattern of perfection....It was avarice and calculation that made war more humane....War became a kind of game between sovereigns. A war was a game with its rules and its stakes—a territory, an inheritance, a throne, a treaty. The loser paid, but a just proportion was always kept between the value of the stake and the risks to be taken, and the parties were always on guard against the kind of obstinacy which makes a player lose his head. They tried to keep the game in hand and to know when to stop.7

We come back, on a slightly larger scale, to the form of warfare that existed during the age of knights. The difference being here essentially that the armies are, of course, of far larger size than they were at this earlier age.

Now comes the next transformation in the conduct of war, and that is the transformation from monarchical wars to democratic wars, to national wars. I spoke about this transition from monarchy to democracy previously. This transition begins with the French Revolution, is then interrupted, to a certain extent, after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, until 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, and it resumes in World War I and after up to the present. But, the first new experience is indeed the French Revolution.

The French Revolution represents, in a way, a return to these religious types of wars that I mentioned earlier. It is an ideologically motivated event. The king is killed and instead, some high-floating ideals become prominent: liberty, fraternity, and the glory of the nation and things of this nature. The right to vote is introduced, and as people could not vote before and always said, “If the king goes to war, we have nothing to do with the state, this is the king’s state, we don’t get involved in the king’s wars,” now the argument was turned around, saying, “Now all of a sudden we give you a stake in the state, you participate in the state, you elect, you have the right to elect representatives, etc., and as a consequence you also have to serve in the state’s wars.” Revolutionary France now introduces for the first time what had existed in rudimentary form in the past, but in very rudimentary form—kings had tried to introduce a draft, but were typically unsuccessful. For the first time was seen now, during the French Revolution, and in particular after Napoleon comes to power, the draft, a mass draft. All the people of the French population are somehow made participants in the war. There exists no clear-cut distinction anymore between combatants and noncombatants; the resources of the entire nation are put at the disposal of the warring armies.

Since it is no longer inheritance disputes that motivate wars, but ideological differences (i.e., the hatred against monarchs, the desire to spread liberty, whatever that means), it becomes extremely difficult to stop wars. If you have nonideologically motivated wars with territorial objectives, then once you have reached your territorial objective, the reason for the war is over. Once you have ideological motives, you want to make the world safe for liberty or nowadays for democracy, you are never quite sure if you actually reached your goal. Maybe these people just pretend that they have become democrats or Catholics or Protestants, and the only way that you are really sure that you succeeded in your conversion is, of course, to kill as many as possible. Then you know for sure that they don’t adhere to their old wrong beliefs anymore.

And, of course, there are no borders. How far should you extend your war? If you liberate Germany and turn to make that a free country, what about Poland? They have not been freed yet and if you win Poland, then what about Russia? Russia needs to be freed as well. Then you turn to the South, Egypt needs to be freed and Spain needs to be freed. The world is a wide place and all of them are yearning for freedom, of course, so it becomes impossible to ever end a war. So, war becomes total war. And then there is the size of the armies: the biggest armies before Napoleon were about 400,000 under Louis XIV, which was considered a huge army. The armies under Napoleon were well above a million. Now I quote, from Fuller and from Howard, to illustrate this change in warfare that began with the French Revolution. First, Howard. He says,

Once the state ceased to be regarded as the “property” of dynastic princes…and became instead the instrument of powerful forces dedicated to such abstract concepts as Liberty, or Nationality, or Revolution, which enabled large numbers of the population to see in that state the embodiment of some absolute Good, for which no price was too high, no sacrifice too great to pay; then the temperate and indecisive contests of the rococo age appeared as absurd anachronisms.8

And another quote,

Truly enough, a new era had begun, the era of national wars, of wars which were to assume a maddening pace; for those wars were destined to throw into the fight all the resources of the nation; they were to set themselves the goal, not a dynastic interest, not of the conquest or possession of a province, but the defense or the propagation of philosophical ideas in the first place, next of the principles of independence, of unity, of immaterial advantages of various kinds. Lastly they staked upon the issue the interests and fortune of every individual private. Hence, the rising of passions, that is the elements of force, hitherto in the main unused.9

And another set of quotes, very revealing, from J.F.C. Fuller.

The influence of the spirit of nationality, that is, of democracy, on war, was profound.…[It] emotionalized war and, consequently, brutalized it.…In the eighteenth century, wars were largely the occupation of kings, courtiers and gentlemen. Armies lived on their depots, they interfered as little as possible with the people, and as soldiers were paid out of the king’s privy purse they were too costly to be thrown away lightly on mass attacks. The change came about with the French Revolution, sanscoulottism replaced courtiership, and as armies became more and more the instruments of the people, not only did they grow in size but in ferocity. National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like, the first obey a mob—always demented, the second a king—generally sane.…All this developed out of the French Revolution, which also gave to the world conscription—herd warfare, and the herd coupling with finance and commerce has begotten new realms of war. For when once the whole nation fights, then is the whole national credit become available for the purposes of war.10

And further on the same topic:

Conscription changed the basis of warfare. Hitherto, soldiers had been costly, now they were cheap; battles had been avoided, now they were sought, and however heavy were the losses, they could rapidly be made good by the muster-roll....From August (of 1793, when the Parliament of the French Republic decreed universal compulsory military service) onward, not only was war to become more and more unlimited, but finally, total. In the fourth decade of the twentieth century, life was held so cheaply that the massacre of civilian populations on wholesale lines became as accepted a strategic aim as battles were in previous wars. In 150 years conscription had led the world back to tribal barbarism.11

Now, there was, as I said, a small pause after the defeat of Napoleon. The wars that were fought in Europe during the nineteenth century after Napoleon’s defeat, such as the war, for instance, of Germany against France in 1870–71, was again, a traditional monarchical war, almost harmless. The German officers resided in French hotels and paid their bills whereas the French military asked the hotel to wait for payment until later dates. There was practically no involvement of the civilian population whatsoever. The only major exception in the nineteenth century from this return to civilized warfare, if we can call warfare civilized at all, was the American War of Southern Independence. And this, again, was a typical democratic war; so much for the thesis that democracies do not fight each other and democracies are somehow better suited to creating peace. The only democratic war in the nineteenth century was, again, the only ideologically motivated war and the American Civil War was, up until this point, unsurpassed in terms of brutality. It was at least as brutal as the religious wars had been many centuries before and as you all know, more Americans were killed in that war than all the Americans who died in World War I and in World War II as well.

This war, for the first time, brings to bear all modern weaponry: machine guns and telegraphs and railroads and steamships and rifles of great accuracy over some 1,000 meters. And then, this type of warfare, of which the American war was a typical example, and the French one, the Napoleonic wars before, this type of warfare then continues with World War I, particularly after the entry of the United States, which was much earlier than the official entry.

The United States was, from the very beginning, due to British propaganda, on the side of the Western forces. The entry of the United States into the war was much facilitated by two of our most beloved institutions, one of which was the introduction of the income tax in 1913 and the other one is the founding of the Federal Reserve System in the same year, both of which, of course, facilitated greatly the possibility of a country like the United States carrying on a war far away from its own shores. Just to give you some ballpark idea, for instance, the reserve requirements for the central bank during the war were lowered from 20 percent before the war to 10 percent during the war, which basically implies a doubling of the money supply, which, of course, enables greatly the financing of adventures such as this. And again, with the entry of the United States early on, what began as some sort of traditional European monarchical war and could have ended easily by 1916—there were various peace initiatives underway, one by the pope and another by the Austrian emperor Karl—this war then became an ideological war, as you know, the war to “make the world safe for democracy.” As my friend Kuehnelt-Leddihn noted, it would be more appropriate to say, “We should not make the world safe for democracy. We should make the world safe from democracy.”

And as a result of this ideologically motivated war, the war ended, of course, not with a mutually face-saving compromise peace, but ended with a completely ridiculous demand for total and complete and unconditional surrender, and forcing the Germans and the Austrians to accept sole exclusive guilt for the war, despite the fact that even nowadays, there are very few historians who would maintain that the war was exclusively caused by Austria or Germany. If anything, the most guilty parties, in my judgment, were the Russians, by encouraging the Serbs not to give in to the relatively moderate demands of the Austrians—and the Russians would not have done that, if they had not had some sort of alliance with the British encouraging the Russians to behave the way they did. So, not being an historian, just being an amateur historian, I would blame Russia and England more so than Austria and Germany for the war. But in any case, this war ended with a disastrous peace treaty, which then implied already the seeds for World War II. In many ways, World War II can be considered to be just the continuation of the first one, with a brief interlude. As a matter of fact, one of the better-known German historians, Hans Nolte, has written a book with the title that this was another Thirty Years’ War, that is, describing history as if World War I almost automatically led up to World War II.

And of World War II, we know that the exact same thing happened. It was an ideologically motivated war, with America siding with Stalin. Stalin, who was a bigger killer than Hitler by far, and not only no longer respected in any way the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, wiping out huge masses of the civilian population at points when the outcome of the war was long decided, just for the mere purpose of instilling terror in the population, and then handing over all of middle and Eastern Europe to Communist rule.

I want to end with a long quote from Mises, which does not deal directly with the question whether societies’ natural orders can defend themselves against enemy states, but it can be read as an indirect statement on this question. Can free societies defend themselves against hordes of barbarians trying to occupy them? And the upshot of this longer quotation is, yes, it is precisely the internal coherence, the integration economically and monetarily of highly civilized societies that can withstand the onslaught of even the most barbarian invasions. Mises says here this:

We must reject a priori any assumption that historical evolution is provided with a goal by any “intention” or “hidden plan” of Nature, such as Kant imagined and Hegel and Marx had in mind; but we cannot avoid the inquiry whether a principle might not be found to demonstrate that continuous social growth is inevitable. The first principle that offers itself to our attention is the principle of natural selection. More highly developed societies attain greater material wealth than the less highly developed; therefore, they have more prospect of preserving their members from misery and poverty. They are also better equipped to defend themselves from the enemy. One must not be misled by the observation that richer and more civilized nations were often crushed in war by nations less wealthy and civilized. Nations in an advanced stage of social evolution have always been able at least to resist a superior force of less developed nations. It is only decaying nations, civilizations inwardly disintegrated, which have fallen prey to nations on the upgrade. Where a more highly organized society has succumbed to the attack of a less developed people the victors have in the end become culturally submerged, accepting the economic and social order and even the language and faith of the conquered race.

The superiority of the more highly developed societies lies not only in their material welfare, but also quantitatively in the number of their members and qualitatively in the greater solidity of their internal structure. For this, precisely, is the key to higher social development: the widening of the social range, the inclusion in the division of labor of more human beings and its stronger grip on each individual. The more highly developed society differs from the less developed in the closer union of its members; this precludes the violent solution of internal conflict and forms externally a close defensive front against any enemy. In less developed societies, where the social bond is still weak, and between the separate parts of which there exists a confederation for the purposes of war rather than true solidarity based on joint work and economic cooperation—disagreement breaks out more easily and more quickly than in highly developed societies. For the military confederation has no firm and lasting hold upon its members. By its very nature it is merely a temporary bond which is upheld by the prospect of momentary advantage, but dissolves as soon as the enemy has been defeated and the scramble for the booty sets in. In fighting against the less developed societies the more developed ones have always found that their greatest advantage lay in the lack of unity in the enemy’s ranks. Only temporarily do the nations in a lower state of organization manage to cooperate for great military enterprises. Internal disunity has always dispersed their armies quickly. Take for example the Mongol raids on the Central European civilization of the thirteenth century or the efforts of the Turks to penetrate into the West. The superiority of the industrial over the military type of society, to use Herbert Spencer’s expression, consists largely in the fact that associations which are merely military always fall to pieces through internal disunity.12

• 1Stanislaw Andreski, The Uses of Comparative Sociology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), p. 111.
• 2J.F.C. Fuller, The Conduct of War 1789–1961: A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and Russian Revolutions on War and Its Conduct (1961; London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 2015), p. 1.
• 3Cited in ibid., p. 2.
• 4Cited in ibid., pp. 2–3.
• 5Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West,  1500–1800, 2d. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 1.
• 6Arne Røksund, “The Jeune École,” in Rolf Hobson and Tom Kristiansen, eds., Navies in Northern Waters (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 139.
• 7Guglielmo Ferrero, Peace and War (Freeport, NJ: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), pp. 5–7.
• 8Michael Howard, War in European History (1976; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chap. 5.
• 9Ferdinand Foch, The Principles of War (1903), cited in J.F.C. Fuller, The Conduct of War, 1789–1961, p. 34.
• 10J.F.C. Fuller, War and Western Civilization, 1832–1932 (London: Duckworth, 1932), p. 26.
• 11J.F.C. Fuller, The Conduct of War, 1789–1961, pp. 33, 35.
• 12Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), pp. 306–07.