Gain, Fear and Glory

This paper analyses the three causes of war identified by Thucydides and his most eminent translator, Thomas Hobbes. Looking beyond the circumstantial occasions through which wars begin, the chief motives of belligerents have been to pursue material gains, to respond to fears, and to obtain glory and prestige for a doctrine. Wight calls ‘simple Thucydidean fear … the prime motive in international politics’ because it involves ‘a rational apprehension of contingent evil’, not simply ‘some unreasoning emotion’. Wight discusses how fear may be a cause of preventive war, and he labels the great difficulty of building trust between former adversaries ‘the Hobbesian predicament’. Wight defines this predicament as follows: ‘communities of honest and decent men, when they have suffered a long series of mutual injuries, and have a rational apprehension each that its own existence is at stake, and when moreover they live in inescapable juxtaposition, cannot transpose themselves into an attitude of mutual trust’. He also explores the tension between freedom and necessity: the circumstances at hand may seem to be tractable, with choices available between possible decisions and their likely consequences; yet the factors leading to war may prove inescapable.

The Causes of War

This essay focuses on the various motives of decision-makers responsible for state policy. While smaller and weaker powers often choose to capitulate to threats, states prepared to use force have been inspired by distinct combinations of motives. These have included winning independence, imposing domination, promoting allegiance to an ideology, gaining economic advantages, and resisting the rise to supremacy of a political-military competitor. Fear of the loss of security and autonomy may lead to preventive war or intervention to maintain a favourable balance of power. While leaders as prominent as Napoleon and Bismarck have referred to deterministic models of causation in some circumstances, ‘the motive of mutual fear’ may predominate. Compared to their important role in medieval litigation, irredentist wars intended to settle legal and territorial claims have become vestigial, but they may be regarded as modern versions of wars for rights.

On the Abolition of War

In this essay Wight advanced four main criticisms of the proposal by Walter Millis for the abolition of what Millis called ‘the war system’. First, the proposal disregards ‘the positive or constructive functions of war in international society’, such as bringing about ‘desirable change’, gaining independence, preserving independence, and maintaining the balance of power. Second, the proposal to abolish war understates ‘the intractability of international conflicts’ and exaggerates the role of armaments and military formations in causing war. The true causes of war reside in ‘human passions and conflicting interests’, not weapons. Third, the proposal to eradicate war fails to recognize the price that must be paid to defeat aggression and establish order. Fourth, no effective alternative institution has been found to replace ‘the war system’ as a means to perform certain functions, including the prevention of detrimental change. The vision of an ‘international government’ ruling the world without war ultimately implies ‘a monopoly of power’, including nuclear arms, perhaps under ‘an American–Russian dyarchy’, despite ‘the intrinsic instability of dyarchy’ and its ‘disagreeableness’ for the rival powers, such as China and France.

International Relations and Political Philosophy

This book collects Martin Wight’s works on the theory and philosophy of international politics. It includes classic works, such as “Why Is There No International Theory?” and “Western Values in International Relations,” as well as previously unpublished works such as “The Communist Theory of International Relations” and “Gain, Fear and Glory: Reflections on the Nature of International Politics.” These works encompass four categories: (a) traditions of thinking about international politics since the sixteenth century, (b) the causes and functions of war, (c) international and regime legitimacy, and (d) fortune and irony in international politics. Wight identifies and analyzes three major traditions of thinking about international politics in the West since the sixteenth century: Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism, also known as the Machiavellian, Grotian, and Kantian approaches. Wight examines the causes of war highlighted by Thucydides and Hobbes (material interest, fear, and reputation), and considers the functions of war in international politics (such as winning and retaining national independence and upholding the balance of power). Wight reviews the history of dynastic and popular legitimacy as well as post-1945 concepts of international and domestic legitimacy. Finally, Wight considers fortune and irony, including the decision-maker’s frequent rediscovery of the recalcitrance of events. Unintended, unexpected, and ironical consequences abound in international politics. This volume also features eight book reviews by Wight, including his assessments of works by Raymond Aron, E. H. Carr, Friedrich Meinecke, and Hans Morgenthau.

Una aproximación geopolítica a las causas de la guerra

This paper discusses different geopolitical approaches to the causes of war. It starts by setting forth the historical relationship between geopolitics and warfare through different authors’ contributions to introduce the main explanations of this matter. In this way, we analyze the role of geography in warfare and its impact on conflicts. That leads us to the organicist perspective, which considers the expansion of the State a natural phenomenon that engenders war. Besides, physical geography also influences war outbreak. The second approach is the disposition of emerged land, which argues that specific places are prone to warfare due to their strategic location. The third approach is the accidental view. Its authors contend that war depends on the geographical distance between countries and border conflicts. Finally, we develop a new perspective based on geopolitical fragmentation to explain the war in modern Europe. This view explores the importance of fragmentation in the formation of the modern State and the shaping of an anarchical environment with the birth of the State’s system. Warfare became a trait of the international system because the modern State was born to wage war, and it became the dominant institution. Therefore, geopolitical fragmentation is the root cause behind violence between States in modern Europe.

The Phonostate at the End of History: Language, Nation, and a Scheme for World Peace in Edwardian South Africa

This article tells the story of the eccentric and unknown writer Albert William Alderson (1880–1963), a British South African office clerk whose father had helped found the De Beers diamond mining corporation with Cecil Rhodes. Alderson, despite having no academic background, wrote two books and several pamphlets arguing that world peace could be achieved by eliminating all the languages in the world other than English; he buttressed this claim with an elaborate account of the causes of war taken from his reading in world history, but also with extraordinary statements on the relation of language to personal agency. Although Alderson's arguments cannot be taken seriously, they are illuminating as an example of “naïve” liberalism pushed to its limit; that is, as a case-study in heterodoxy comparable to Carlo Ginzburg's Menocchio. I conclude by suggesting that his work helped inspire one influential reader—C. K. Ogden, the founder of Basic English.

Making the Paris Agreement: Historical Processes and the Drivers of Institutional Design

After a decade-long search, countries finally agreed on a new climate treaty in 2015. The Paris Agreement has attracted attention both for overcoming years of gridlock and for its novel features. Here, we build on accounts explaining why states reached agreement, arguing that a deeper understanding requires a focus on institutional design. Ultimately, it was this agreement, with its specific provisions, that proved acceptable to states rather than other possible outcomes. Our account is multi-causal and draws methodological inspiration from the public policy and causes of war literatures. Specifically, we distinguish between background, intermediate, and proximate conditions and identify how they relate to one another, jointly producing the ultimate outcome we observe. Our analysis focuses especially on the role of scientific knowledge, non-state actor mobilization, institutional legacies, bargaining, and coalition-building in the final push for agreement. This case-based approach helps to understand the origins of Paris, but also offers a unique, historically grounded way to examine questions of institutional design.

2. The European Convention on Human Rights

Without assuming prior legal knowledge, books in the Directions series introduce and guide readers through key points of law and legal debate. Questions, discussion points, and thinking points help readers to engage fully with each subject and check their understanding as they progress and knowledge can be tested by self-test questions and exam questions at the chapter end. This chapter explores the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. It also tackles the general idea of legally protected human rights, which gained momentum towards the end of the Second World War. The United Nations was an inspiration, specifically the organisation’s Charter that adopted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. After 1945, the goal was reconstruction, removing the causes of war, and providing protection from any threat a totalitarian government potentially poses. In this regard, two main solutions were adopted: the European Union and the Council of Europe. The chapter aims to distinguish between these two solutions. The principal focus of the chapter is on the Convention system and the obligations of the states which have agreed to its requirements. The nature of the Court and the process of taking a claim through its procedures is explored, as is the system of enforcement.

Diversionary Theories of Conflict: The Promises and Challenges of an Opportunities Approach

Since the early 1990s, a significant amount of research has been dedicated to refining the causal mechanisms that lead to the diversionary use of force and the various conditions under which such diversionary actions are most likely. This article focuses specifically on the latter—highlighting the research on the various conditions that create opportunities for states to utilize diversionary tactics—while also emphasizing how these opportunities are connected to specific causal processes for diversionary conflict. While significant attention has been paid to the domestic factors that provide additional opportunities for or constraints on actors to utilize diversionary force, less research has considered the international and dyadic opportunities for diversionary force and the interaction and interplay of these domestic and international, or dyadic, factors. These international and dyadic factors specifically focus on those related to the potential target of diversionary conflict and are an important part of fully understanding the decision-making process of leaders contemplating diversionary tactics. Both the domestic and international opportunities for diversionary force identified in the literature will be considered, specifically those focusing on advancements made in understanding the international and dyadic dimensions of these opportunities and the characteristics of potential target states. While the movement toward identifying various opportunities for diversionary behavior, both domestic and international, or dyadic, is an important pathway in diversionary research, this approach comes with some significant challenges. First, diversionary motivations are extremely hard to “prove” since leaders have incentives to hide these motives. This problem is compounded as more opportunities for diversionary force are added to the mix—as these opportunities may, in themselves, provide motives for war. For example, rivalry and territorial disputes are shown as international opportunities for diversionary force, yet these factors are also known to be two of the most prominent causes of war between states. Thus, parsing out diversionary motives from other fundamental national security motives becomes increasingly difficult. While quantitative studies can help uncover broad patterns of potential diversionary behavior, they are less equipped to fully explain the ways that various domestic and international opportunities might interact. Nor can these studies demonstrate whether diversion was actual present within specific cases. Case studies can help fill these gaps by allowing more in-depth analysis of these potential diversionary opportunities. Overall, quantitative studies that help uncover patterns and qualitative studies that investigate diversionary tactics in a single case or set of cases are both important parts of the puzzle. To best understand diversionary conflict, researchers need to rely increasingly on both approaches.