Jean Baechler Guerre, Histoire et Société Éléments de ...resmilitaris.net/ressources/10325/50/res_militaris...Guerre,Histoire et Société is one of those books that arouse admiration

Jean Baechler, Guerre, Histoire et Société : Éléments de

polémologie [War, History and Society : Elements of Polemology], Paris,

Hermann, 2019, 538 pp.

Reviewed by Bernard Boëne

A year ago, in this journal, the review of a previous book edited by Jean Baechler,

Figures de la guerre (2019),1 presented the conference from which it was drawn as the

culmination of a cycle of studies entitled “L'Homme et la guerre” (Man and War),

launched a decade earlier, which had led to the publication of no fewer than sixteen

collective volumes.

Little did one know that the same tireless author was putting the finishing touches

to a final opus on the question, published a few months later, before moving on. This new

volume, a general synthesis of the conclusions he has drawn from an anthropology of war

that kept him occupied for ten years (and preoccupied him for even longer), is the subject

of the present review.

Guerre, Histoire et Société is one of those books that arouse admiration tinged with

awe, and make one humble. Readers who, like this writer, have spent decades probing

things military, easily come to feel upon closing the volume that they have barely

scratched the topic’s surface : J. Baechler digs deeper, on a broader scale, and opens up

wider perspectives.

One reason may be that the author finds his starting point in the characteristics of

the human species – one that is free, because (alone in this case within the kingdom of life)

it is non-programmed and endowed with self-consciousness ; gregarious, but subject to

conflict and devoid of any innate mechanism for controlling violence ; task-oriented (the

human kingdom is written in strategic language) and rational in its search for solutions to

the problems of survival and meaning it faces ; but fallible : error with regard to the natural

ends of Man – the price paid for freedom as non-programming – is a distinct and often

attested possibility. Hence the magnitude of the task set and accomplished : this study of

the place and role of war in the evolution and history of the species covers millennia –

from the Paleolithic to the present day – and all civilizational areas. It is served by

unparalleled erudition, and the ability to mobilize “those who know” when it is lacking on

highly specialized subjects.

The book consists of 21 chapters organized into three parts respectively devoted to

the nature, dimensions and impacts of war. Some minor liberties will be taken with this

plan here in order to highlight some of the powerful theses that run through the whole.

The titanic scale of this undertaking no doubt accounts for a formal structure that

will surprise readers unfamiliar with the author’s previous writings : the text is devoid of

footnotes, and references are sparingly used (they are mostly reserved for the terminal

bibliography). However, even a slightly trained eye can easily detect throughout the text an

obvious mastery of the theoretical and empirical achievements and debates, both ancient

1 Béatrice Chéron, book review section, Res Militaris, vol.10, n°1, Hiver-Printemps 2020.

Published/ publié in Res Militaris (http://resmilitaris.net), vol.11, n°1, Winter-Spring/ Hiver-Printemps 2021

http://resmilitaris.net/

Res Militaris, vol.11, n°1, Winter-Spring/ Hiver-Printemps 2021 2

and recent, of all social science disciplines as well as philosophy. After a while, the

initially astonished reader comes to understand that a scholarly apparatus worthy of the

name – notes, detailed references, discussion of the probative value of the arguments

advanced – would have doubled the volume of an already very thick work.

The treatment of the subject consists in applying to war a resolutely hypothetico-

deductive general approach developed by the author over a long period of time.2 The

analysis begins by examining the concept defining the object of study – what it is, what it

is not –, specifying its various components, and by successive deductions delimiting a field

of possibilities. It continues with the statement of a central, plausible and logically non-

contradictory working hypothesis, which can then be validated or invalidated by

confronting the available factual information with the consequences that logically follow

from it. This is the philosophical phase, accompanied here by a series of fine distinctions

and a number of assumptions.

One is that human affairs are too complex to be explained away by general causes

or a single one in the last instance : the factors at play are numerous and in permanent

interaction. To escape the sterility of an “everything is in everything” type of conclusion,

an Archimedean point logically external to the systems to be analyzed, not disproved by

observation or invalidated by established knowledge, is necessary to serve as a support

point for a guiding idea. For want of it, the comparison of two or more attested cases can

serve the same purpose. Although its formulation and substance are apt to vary according

to the themes studied, the overarching guiding idea to which all the proposed variations

relate is ultimately that which results from the fundamental characteristics and problems of

the species. A second consideration is that human activity unfolds on three planes that need

to be clearly differentiated – knowing, which aims at the true in its generality and

accumulates in more or less linear fashion over time ; making (creation of objects, tools,

organizations, institutions or symbols) which, aiming at the useful and efficient within a

defined cultural framework, gives form to matter or materializes forms, and seems to

follow complex ∩-shaped parabolic evolutionary lines ; and acting, the mobilization in

given contexts of means in the service of ends, which under the influence of essentially

random, changeable and infinitely diverse circumstances – but also of human interactions

and their unanticipated consequences, immediate or deferred – generates chaotic

evolutions : it cannot give rise to any self-assured prediction as to outcomes – even if, once

accomplished, its sequence and effects are retrospectively intelligible. A remarkable

property is that though they have their own logic, knowing (generality) and making

(peculiarity) are dependent on acting (singularity), since they result from active

expressions of human will in context. This accounts for another central assumption :

among the various orders of human activity, the political has a higher valence than and

influences all others. Finally, human nature, non-programmed and therefore plastic, is

potential and only migrates towards the real when socialization allows it to be embodied in

a particular culture. In other words, as befits a gregarious species, we only become fully

2 Its most systematic presentation is to be found in his 1135-page-long Nature and History, published in 2000

and reissued by the same publisher in 2014.


human through a community that implements particular solutions to the fundamental

problems posed to the entire species.

Precisely, its cultural diversity and its historicity are the target of the second,

sociological, phase of the approach : the inventory, analysis and comparison of given

configurations and their evolutions through the identification among them of regularities,

similarities and differences. Finally, it is the historian’s task to analyze and interpret

unique, dated and localized, social objects on the basis of the facts observed and the

sequence of singular events that constitute them.

Concept and Working Hypothesis

With the epistemological framework in place, the conceptual definition adopted for

war is that it is a violent conflict between polities over a transpolity. Though fundamental,

the conflict dimension is not specific to it since it is among the primary traits of the species

as a consequence of the discord that freedom allows. Also cardinal, the violent component

is not specific either : it is present in many social phenomena that hardly qualify as war.

Unlike conflict, however, it is not inherent in the nature of Man, in the form of instinct or

drive : it is at best an ever-present recourse, especially if passions or ideology get involved.

Much more discriminating in this respect are the “polity” and “transpolity” components.

A polity is a coherent and cohesive human entity endowed with a structure and an

organization, self-sufficient in various respects, eager for its autonomy (sovereignty) and

seeking the affective allegiance of its members. It has two sides. Internally, it strives to

have all of its members live together without killing each other. The renunciation of

violence on their part has as its necessary counterpart the assurance that it will at least offer

them civil peace, which implies the mastery of passions that only an overhanging power

can impose on them, and justice, defined as the effort to give everyone their due through

law, right and equity. It is thus a space marked by a tendency towards pacification. Outside

of it, on the other hand, this pacification mechanism is lacking with respect to other

polities, and the risk exists of conflicts leading to violence that threatens its survival or

autonomy, an eventuality that requires it to organize and arm itself. This is precisely what

distinguishes the transpolity, which comes into being as soon as at least two polities enter

into interaction : without contact of any kind, there is no risk of war. The absence within it

of an effective constraint inhibiting the recourse of polities to violence against others

explains why transpolitical peace is not the fruit of justice : it is only non-war – perhaps, in

fact often, provisional.

Such a definition has a corollary : it reactivates the old opposition between polemos

and stasis – foreign war and civil war. J. Baechler recognizes that nothing distinguishes

them as regards the second (instrumental) and third (operational) dimensions of war. But

their meaning and modalities with regard to its primary (political) dimension diverge to the

point that it is appropriate to treat civil war separately (chapter III is entirely devoted to it3).

3 The author asks whether or not terrorism can be linked to war. If it is true that the fight against it is the

responsibility of the police rather than the armed forces, and that its chances of winning by itself are nil at the

military level, its motivations are ideological, and thus come under the heading of politics : “an attack

perpetrated against a polity or within a polity is a declaration of war or civil war” (p.73).


As for the central working hypothesis, it can be stated as follows : the end of the

political, a polyvalent order, is peace ; peace therefore takes precedence over war ; war

signals the failure of the pacification of a conflict ; its end is victory, i.e. peace imposed by

the victor.

The Formation and Varieties of Polities

The behaviour of polities over a transpolity is predominantly, if not exclusively,

influenced by their morphology – the glue that holds them together, and the form, precisely

circumscribed or not, that is theirs. Morphologies come in a limited number of varieties.

Before the Holocene

The first societies, for thousands of years, were bands, hordes or ethnic groups,

which, thanks to their small numbers, settled their conflicts by the proximity of their

exchanges, or by swarming : they were cultures rather than polities. Due to a relative

demographic saturation of spaces in the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, tribes

gradually replaced them. Segmental, the tribal configuration did not yet precipitate the

constitution of real polities, in that tribes and chiefdoms of hunter-gatherers and nomadic

pastoralists did not create specialized political bodies in their midst. While they were

familiar with conflict and violence, tribes long remained alien to war, in the defined sense,

in part because the stakes of power, wealth or prestige were still low, but mostly because of

an original mode of conflict resolution : a fission-fusion mechanism, which sees friendly

segments come together in a conflict phase to balance power relationships between

coalitions, so that no one can easily prevail, and move away from each other as soon as the

need is no longer felt. For these ephemeral coalitions, victory and even more so

annihilating the vanquished are of little interest, which favours negotiation and moderation.

In other words, in this primitive segmental phase of humanity, the alternation of periods of

conflict and calm saw back-and-forth movements between barely sketched-out confederal

polities and transpolities whose potential violence was considerably attenuated. Things

began to change in this respect, noticeably if gradually, in the Neolithic period.

Worthy of note in passing is that war, in the accepted sense (polemos), has not

always existed – there is no trace of it in the millennia-long primitive phase of humanity –

and that it is therefore not an integral part of the human condition, but a historical and

cultural phenomenon. As a consequence, it could one day disappear : all it would take is

for humanity to unify politically, in other words, for transpolities to be replaced by a single

polity, either through imperial conquest or through the intensification of exchanges of all

kinds on a world scale, leading to an increased awareness of shared interests and a

common destiny. However, the possibility would remain of contesting this new planetary

political order by means of secession or world civil war (stasis).

After the Paleolithic

With neolithization, scattered changes that had shyly appeared on the scene in the

Mesolithic period slowly became widespread and systemic : transition from a predatory

(gathering, hunting, fishing) to an agro-pastoral economy, sedentarization, (hundredfold)

demographic growth. Transpolities were marked by growing opportunities for conflict as

the stakes in terms of wealth, power and prestige increased, leading to heightened interest


in predation between groups and the conquest of territories. Warfare appeared,4 while

polities solidified through the emergence of political bodies within them and morphologies

with less blurred territorial contours.

The first were cities, not unlike those in ancient Greece and in the European Middle

Ages : their existence in clusters sharing the same culture suggests that they originally

came from segments that were now politicised ; for them, morphology and politics

coincided perfectly. Outside of them, kingdoms proliferated on warlike transpolities whose

ultimate outcome – their usual attractor – was the continental empire formed by way of

successive conquests : all civilizational areas (Near Asia, India, China, Pre-Columbian

America, the Mediterranean) passed through this process, except one : post-Roman Europe,

which after the failure of the ephemeral Carolingian attempt to restore the Western Latin

Empire has resisted all subsequent efforts at imperialization. Empires usually maintain

internal peace as best they can, but they have a weakness : they live beyond their means

because of their sheer overextension and the military and administrative costs that the taxes

they levy are at pains to cover. They are sometimes destroyed from the outside, as was the

case in Amerindia, but their most frequent fate is wear and tear, less well-controlled

agitation in border regions, the rise of centrifugal forces, and final disintegration (only the

Chinese empire, better protected than others by its geography, was able to last 2000 years).

Imperial disintegration creates an anarchic situation from which other empires may

emerge upon completion of a new cycle of successive conquests. But in very rare cases–

Europe from the 10th

to the 13th

century, Japan from the 13th

to the 16th

– it also begets

feudal systems, i.e. fragmented and fluid morphologies, not unlike tribal segmentarity.

Feudalism consecrated aristocracies, both high and low, which usurped regal powers, but

tempered the general insecurity and made it bearable through interlocking fiefs and bonds

of personal allegiance between suzerains and vassals. Conflicts between initially tiny

seigniorial polities over chaotic transpolities nevertheless remained, leading over time to

concentrations of power and territory through war or dynastic alliances.

In Europe, and there only, such concentrations gave rise to a morphology other than

empire : nations, initially embodied in kingdoms. From the turn of the 15th

century

onwards, long confrontations (starting with the long Anglo-French rivalry on the continent)

sharpened identities on either side, leading over the centuries to a degree of cultural

unification within them. The nation, like the city before it, brings together morphology,

society, culture and politics. It devalues the groupings that stand between it and the

individual and, true to its original agonistic character, it is as a rule warlike (until the

disasters of the 20th

century made it lose its taste for war). The nation is a fragile

morphology, “at the mercy of any disruption of the conditions that made it possible”

(p.49), but resilient enough since it has survived for six centuries and still does today.

4 For J. Baechler, war thus has a date of birth, around 12-10,000 years BC : “archaeology does not produce

any unambiguous evidence of war before the Mesolithic” (p.113). In this, he relies on the works of Jean

Guilaine, Douglas Fry and Marylène Patou-Mathis, and takes issue with Lawrence Keeley’s thesis that

humanity was from the beginning a murderous species. At most, he concedes to Keeley that the first wars

may have been more deadly than many of those that followed, especially in the modern age, because the

capacity to control violence has increased in the meantime (p.119). He subsequently adds (p.471) that, should

new archaeological discoveries one day bring forward the date of the birth of war, the proposed

polemological theory would not be altered.


The Structure of Transpolities

If war is indeed a violent conflict between polities over a transpolity, the structure

of the latter matters. It varies, to begin with, according to the degree of homogeneity or

heterogeneity of the polities it brings into conflict. Moreover war, a great simplifier,

polarizes : it takes the form of a duel even if several polities are involved, because it invites

both sides to join forces. The duel is a game that dominates the players through a series of

more or less unpredictable actions-reactions, but always opening up the possibility of

successive escalations and a rise to the extremes of a struggle to the death. Hence the

further hypothesis that “transpolitics are the seat of an intrinsic logic” (p.77) that it is

important to explore.

On the first point, the author takes up and clarifies the distinction made by

Raymond Aron in War and Peace among Nations. Differences and similarities between

belligerent parties cannot be assessed globally : the findings may differ according to the

dimension considered.5 Homogeneity or heterogeneity is not enough to predict the

objectives or modalities of wars : some of the bitterest have taken place between polities

belonging to the same civilization and sharing similar cultures. This factor is therefore only

one among others, and its influence must be assessed in context.

The second point gives rise to familiar developments. If by definition a one-player

transpolity cannot be one, the coalescence of several transforms it into a polity, while it

becomes hegemonic if one polity overwhelmingly dominates a variable number of others.

Two-power (“dipolar”) games, or the three- or four-power games that come down to it

through coalitions (2 vs. 1, 2 vs. 2, 3 vs. 1), are unstable and can lead to a death struggle

involving to the elimination of the enemy, as between Rome and Carthage (at least until

the emergence in the 20th

century of mass destruction weapons that make this eventuality

suicidal for both sides – without eliminating the antagonism). It is a zero-sum game,

“deprived of an attractor allowing belligerents to aim at a fixed point of agreement and to

avoid the all-or-nothing alternative” (p.89) which imposes itself on the two powers or

coalitions however much they would like to escape it.

“Polypolar” games with many players none of whom is able to prevail over all the

others are rare in history : the examples cited are Madagascar in the 15th

-16th

centuries,

classical India, and European and Japanese feudalism. They are unstable and violent for

reasons other than in the dipolar case. The high cost of transactions among a large number

of polities makes it difficult or impossible to set common rules : the transpolity is anomic,

and provides a good approximation to what Hobbes called the state of nature – a war of all

against all. Uncertainty is radical, and advises the offensive : “attack, as soon as you feel

or believe yourself to be stronger, to avoid being attacked from a position of weakness. As

each player makes the same rational calculation and fluctuations in the balance of power

are inevitable, there are always attackers and attacked” (p.85). The absence of rules is 5 J. Baechler retient six critères : la fréquence des contacts (est homogène une transpolitie où les polities ont à

tenir compte des autres de manière permanente, et hétérogène celle où le contact est ponctuel ou épisodique) ;

l’appartenance ou non à une même culture ou civilisation ; le potentiel militaire, matériel, humain et moral

(symétrique ou non) ; le type de régime politique, et son degré de légitimité et de cohésion ; le type et le

degré de prégnance des idéologies ; enfin, l’attitude concordante ou divergente des belligérants vis-à-vis des

prescriptions du droit international de la guerre.


likely to give the modalities of warlike violence a savage character. The system has an

attractor : as the victor absorbs the vanquished and the process of conquest after conquest

is repeated over time, the most likely outcome is peace through forced political unification,

which is stable in relatively homogeneous kingdoms, or more fragile within a composite

empire.

Finally, the “oligopolar” game is characterized by a transpolity of 5-7 players, none

of whom can prevail over a coalition of all the others, and where the costs of forming

coalitions (or reversing alliances) are nil because of the small number of polities involved.

Coalitions therefore spontaneously come into being to force any hegemonic polity willing

to break them to abide by the transpolitical rules of the game that emerge through trial,

error and sorting, and are fortified by self-catalysis. Each polity is convinced that its

defection from the coalition would allow the candidate for hegemony to apply Horace's

tactics against the Curiatii and emerge victorious. Each is thus assured that they will not be

left alone against a cheat, which breeds confidence (where other games favour distrust).

The result is a dynamic equilibrium because the intrinsic logic of a configuration where “if

each polity acts rationally in its own interest, all will benefit” (p.96) is a positive-sum

game. All players have an interest in adopting a defensive strategy to maintain this balance,

which excludes passivity on their part.6 Opportunities for conflict are frequent, which if

poorly managed can upset the balance and lead to wars, either limited by low stakes, or

general if two coalitions clash. But the balance is eventually restored, so that all things

equal terms the oligopolar game can continue despite its fluctuations. The historical

illustrations can be divided into two classes : one is tribal segmentarity, the “founding

oligopoly”, which for millennia gave humanity transpolitical stability and equilibrium as its

normal state ; the other consists of three isolated cases – ancient Greek cities from the 6th

to

the 4th

century, Japan between 1600 and 1867, and Europe between the 15th

and the 20th

century. Such rarity is due to the fact that the rest of the world long remained subject to

more unstable logics with imperial attractors.

Oligopolarity therefore aims at peace through balance, restored by war if broken.

This is the regime formalized in Europe by the treaties of Westphalia of 1648. While

destabilized on several occasions by ideological upheavals such as the Reformation or the

French Revolution, equilibrium was eventually re-established (as, for example, after the

Congress of Vienna in 1815, which opened a century of relative peace on the continent).

This jus publicum europaeum was ruined by the human disaster of 1914-1918, which it

was unable to avert, and by the 1919 treaty of Versailles, which made the mistake of

punishing Germany rather than simply setting the conditions for a viable new balance as in

1815.

The Influence of Natural Milieux

Chapter VI, devoted to the physical contexts of warfare, the resources they provide

and the configuration of spaces, probes their influence on polities, transpolities, the ends as

well as the instrumental and operational dimensions of warfare. Agriculture and the

6 L’auteur notera dans le dernier chapitre que l’oligopolarité vérifie la maxime romaine si vis pacem, para

bellum, là où la dipolarité impliquerait plutôt si vis pacem, fac bellum.


capacity for autarchy, distance and transport, the naturally centrifugal or centripetal

character of spaces, climate, coasts, mountain ranges and river valleys, insularity,

demography – all influence the formation, delimitation and survival of polities, or the way

they originally overcame tribal segmentarity. Geographical configurations do the same

with transpolities. Some of them lend themselves quite well to the emergence of dipolar

transpolities destined to be unified by the victor : this was the case, for example, with

China in the High Period, ancient Egypt or classical India. But more generally,

transpolitical dipolarity is the most frequent configuration on the historical record, which

(even allowing for likely biases in counting cases) illuminates the dominant phenomenon

of the imperial attractor. In the opposite direction, contiguity constraints account for the

historical rarity of polypolarity. The case of oligopolarity is more complex, and involves

chance. In Europe, for instance, the natural environment favours centrifugal forces at the

continental level, and centripetal forces at the regional level. The polities were thus

regional, and chance had it that after feudal dispersion came to an end, none was able to

prevail over a coalition of all others : it could have been otherwise. For contingent reasons,

the kingdom that was likely to emerge in the centre of the continent failed to materialize :

“It so happened that between 1425 and 1450, the realignment resulted in a regional

oligopolistic system, the Germanies, and perpetuated their dispersion until the 19th

century and Bismarck, or even until 1989 !” (p.132).

Natural environments affect ends : they have conditioned imperial attraction and

the survival of empires. In China, a favourable geography made possible the exceptional

longevity of the pax sinica that imperial dynasties enforced as best they could both abroad

and at home. Imperial Rome, on the other hand, centred on the Mediterranean, at the

crossroads of three civilizational areas – Near Asia, North Africa and Europe –, united

portions of each by war, and was permanently confronted with enemies on all its borders.

It could not therefore escape an essentially military destiny : the pax romana only existed

in certain areas protected by their geographical location. Military costs proved ruinous in

the long run, leading to withdrawal and centrifugal forces, and finally to the dislocation of

the Latin Empire (with the Greek part surviving as Byzantium over a more easily

defensible area).

Examining the influence of natural environments on the instrumental dimension of

war is “less instructive”, as this dimension is “essentially institutional, organizational,

informational, intellectual, moral, technical...” (p.141). It nevertheless provides an

opportunity for developments on war and climate, the availability of resources,

inventiveness and the demographic factor.

The operational dimension is approached through the various objectives of war :

“Politically, three possibilities are on offer : to dissuade, to win, not to lose. Tactically,

they aim at a frontal attack, a pincer movement, encirclement, concentration of power,

concerted dispersion, surprise, ruse...” (p.144). The discussion of Clausewitizian themes

(strategic depth, centre of gravity, the contradiction between the concentration of forces

necessary to destroy the enemy and their dispersion to occupy the terrain, the strategic

superiority of defence over attack, etc.) in relation to the natural environment leads to

conclusions that should be pondered :


It seems as if the strategies of deterrence and non-defeat are winning in war and

that trying to win is a miscalculation. On the contrary, on the scale of centuries

and millennia, attack triumphs, as the irresistible political tendency towards

coalescence demonstrates (p.146).

[T]he historical record leaves no doubt that the ultimate victors were the

continental, not maritime, empires. The sea and navies did not play a significant

or even less a decisive role in China, India, Near Asia, Amerindia, for the

Mongols and the Russians. What is more, once the empire was completed, the

navy no longer played any part. The explanation is self-evident. Land provides

all the means of deterrence and non-defeat for those who want to win. On the

contrary, a maritime power hardly combines the advantages of land and sea, not

only because of the costs involved, but perhaps also for cultural and psychic

reasons : continental people have no sense of the sea, or only with difficulty, as

the example of Napoleon shows, and sailors have difficulty developing a sense

of the land and its traps. Britain and the United States seem to be exceptions,

like Portugal, Holland, Venice or Athens in the past. These are examples of

thalassocracy, but they are not empires, or only by abuse of language. They are

polities attached to the mastery of the seas for primarily economic reasons (ibid.).

The Dimensions of War

The second part (chapters VII through XII) focuses on the three main facets of war

– political, instrumental and operational.

The Political Dimension

Chapter VII examines the relationship of political regimes to war, considering the

two basic varieties, autocratic and democratic. The former is based on coercion and fear,

unless it rallies the people to its cause on the basis of a higher ideological or religious

principle (“hierocracy”). It is suspicious of its own apparatus of power for fear it might

want to exercise or subvert it for its own benefit. A rational strategy would be to isolate

itself from other polities in order to constitute an impregnable fortress, and to abstain from

war, as its outcome is too uncertain. But it has no means of protecting itself from the

dangers of a transpolity it cannot possibly control, and opts either for a defensive strategy

(an external adventure can be fatal), or for a strategy of deterrence against a first assault

(or, today, of insuring its survival through possession of mass destruction weapons). But

the most likely slope leads to the imperial attractor, i.e. conquest and absorption by a more

powerful autocracy.

In a democratic system, the polity is embodied in the citizenry, the ultimate source

of power. Without democracy, it would be deprived of its assurance of civil peace and

justice, so that it would presumably be prepared to fight to defend it if attacked. If true to

its concept, democracy finds it difficult to engage in war because it assumes that conflicts

are resolved through negotiation and compromise. It can be slow to prepare for it. A

democratic politity in an inferior position has no reason to attack a more powerful one,

which would itself betray its principles by attacking it : the most likely outcome is the

satellization of the former. Faced with a powerful autocracy, its chances of survival were

long low or nil : this was the fate of many historical cities. It was not until the fruits of


Western modernization changed the equation that democracy demonstrated its greater

effectiveness even in war.

The stakes of war, i.e. the reasons for fighting, are the same for polities as for

individuals : quarrelsome moods, stubborn disputes, wealth, power, prestige, honour, glory.

Culture, religion, ideology can play a role, and through them so does a possible contagion

among polities. More interesting are the ends of war, understood as both ending and

outcome. War is “contingent, because dispersion into plural polities is not included in the

concept of humanity. On the contrary, pacification through justice conceptually requires a

polity extended to the whole of humanity” (p.173). The end of polities is to ensure

pacification and to face the risk of war, if possible by avoiding it through negotiation,

diplomacy, and transpolitical law. The latter, if densified and respected, insensibly

transforms the transpolity into a quasi-polity in a transition “whose horizon is a planetary

polity and whose stages are the setting up of common devices and procedures, in charge of

managing common problems. This may be the current situation of humanity and its

plausible political prospect”. Such an ultimate goal “in order to be realised, must face in

the meantime the infinitely probable risks of violent conflicts called wars. War is indeed

not an end of the polity, but an occurrence whose management falls to it, just as it falls to

it to pacify through justice” (ibid.).

The Instrumental Dimension

This is followed by a chapter (VIII) on the instruments of war : armed forces and

the techniques of all kinds that polities implement to win, avoid defeat, or deter. The few

pages on military institutions labour issues at the heart of what has come to be known as

military sociology : the purpose of armed forces (peace through victory) ; the military as

an organization (governed by warrior culture, and rational, though caught in the

contradiction of a preparation for war geared to the predictable despite the fact that chance

will likely govern action, so that the only worthwhile pedagogy must dwell on the ability to

improvise in the face of unforeseen events) ; the management of violence (aiming either at

the annihilation of the enemy, at conquest, or balance, with the risk of a rise to extremes) ;

and civil-military relations (premised on the need to avert the prospect of those in charge

of wielding arms taking power for their own sake – a problem that each regime solves in

its own way : democracy relies on the divide et impera principle ; autocracy, on terror and

corruption. The difficulty involved is to subordinate the military to those exercising

sovereign power without undermining its own operational effectiveness).

While very diverse, the techniques implemented all have efficiency as their goal.

They are not confined to armaments alone, but include mobilization, intelligence, secrecy,

ruse, information and propaganda, the organization of the economy and political powers in

wartime, the maintenance of morale and motivation to fight, etc. Few of them are

specifically military : they often come from the civilian world and predate the war or, if

they innovate on that occasion, many will give rise to civilian applications after it. The

only difference resides in the systematic nature of their use. There is no such thing as an

absolute weapon that alone would enable victory (weapons of mass destruction would


qualify for that description, but if present and used on both sides, they take away the

meaning of victory by ruining both camps), and an innovative technical advantage is

unlikely to remain so for long : it quickly spreads to all sides and gives rise to counter-

measures along the lines of age-old armour-and-sword dynamics. It remains true, however,

that “all empires were built by wars won by a polity that had maintained a certain

technical edge over others” (p.194).

The Operational Dimension

Two chapters (IX and X) deal with the third dimension, that which places the

instrumental dimension at the service of the political dimension. The first chapter is

devoted to strategy and its dilemmas (remain passive ?, attack ?, retaliate ?, for what

purpose – conquer, restore balance ?, by what means and with what risks ?). Strategy

involves momentous political decisions “because what is at stake is the polity’s very

survival and the shared conditions of the good life for everyone. This conclusion allows the

philosopher to set up war as the human condition’s most decisive factor, not only at the

political level, but also in all orders of the human reign : war is a total object” (p.203).

The soldier, for his part, moves on the uncertain terrain of singular chance events, and no

ready-made recipe can help him as circumstances are never entirely identical to others that

past experience may suggest. For him, the end of war is not peace but victory. It follows

that the reasoning of political and military actors, each in their own role, is apt to diverge

radically, and that in war the military point of view can prevail.

Clausewitz’s discussion of the enemy’s centres of gravity concludes that these are

diverse and direct strategy accordingly, but always involve the destruction of enemy

forces. The proposed analysis starts from morphologies, which define centres of gravity

that in turn invite dominant strategies, and suggest primary emphasis on such or such

modalities of warlike violence. By way of illustration, J. Baechler then studies four

systems of play : tribal segmentarity against empire ; city or nation against similar polities ;

insurrection against repression ; and apolity versus polity.

Empire versus Tribes

In the first case, if the empire attacks in force, the tribe will disperse, and defence

will enjoy a decisive advantage : as soon as the empire’s superior army starts occupying

territory, it disperses its forces and becomes vulnerable in many places to local power

ratios that are not in its favour. The tribe cannot win, but it can’t lose. The only losing

strategy for it would be to regroup its forces to attack, because then it is sure to be wiped

out. Its centre of gravity is the fusion-fission mechanism described above, while the

empire’s own centre of gravity is its power apparatus. Historical documentation indeed

shows that the dominant tribal strategy is to refrain from provoking the empire while it is

strong, and consent to its soft suzerainty until an attack in force to seize its decision-

making centres becomes possible, i.e. when its inevitable decline and the decomposition of

its power apparatus pass a certain threshold. This is exactly what Ibn Khaldun describes in

relation to Near Asia, or Lattimore (1967) in the context of Chinese history – and what has

been found for millennia in the Sahel region.


On the empire’s side, a first strategy consists in attacking in force and kill everyone

(as the Russians have done historically, including in Chechnya recently), deporting entire

populations (as the Assyrians did) or enslaving them (as was the Roman Empire’s custom).

A second, more subtle strategy is to divide the tribes by attacking some but not others in

order to block the fusion-fission mechanism (as illustrated by Julius Caesar’s strategy

against Gallic tribes, or the practice of more recent colonial empires). A third option is to

turn them into satellites through a gentle submission that preserves their habits and

customs, while waiting for them to integrate into the empire of their own accord. Their

work force can even be used to that end for economic or military purposes. But this

presupposes that the empire has the means and the will to punish any sign of

insubordination, under pain of perishing in its decline phase for having introduced the wolf

into the sheepfold, as the late Latin Empire was eventually to discover.

City against City, Nation against Nation

These morphologies’ shared characteristic is that they coincide with polities that

are parties to balanced transpolitical systems, none of them being able to prevail over a

coalition of all the others. This makes unification by force at the initiative of one of them

unlikely. (Yet they can succumb to external conquest, as was the case with ancient Greek

and medieval Italian cities). The dominant strategy is therefore defensive, and seeks to

preserve the balance within the transpolity. Participation in the game is required of each

polity, under pain of ruining the system’s balance. Thanks to the manageable number of

players, negotiation and diplomacy are elevated to the status of instruments for managing

relations between them, just like war. The centre of gravity for everyone is the willingness

to fight, primarily that of the leaders, regardless of the political regime. This is why the

aggressor will seek to destroy the forces of the aggressed in order to demoralize him and

force him to negotiate a return to peace. The aggressed party, on the other hand, must

maintain the morale of its troops and population at all costs, and if it fails, make the

occupation of the land as costly as possible by forcing the aggressor to disperse his forces.

In all cases, a fight to the death threatens, although the nature of the game favours

moderation as all players have in mind a viable new equilibrium.

Insurrection versus Repression

The case of a population that takes up arms to obtain or maintain its independence

against a superior power comes in three varieties, depending on whether the dominant

power is an empire, a nation or a polity that intervenes in another to impose a regime,

leaders or a decision that the population strongly rejects. The first two contrast an actual

polity with a virtual one, the third alone classically responding to the concept of war as

polemos. (The case of a population that resorts to collective violence against its own

leaders, on the other hand, falls within the logic of civil war or revolution. It is nevertheless

a fourth variety, different from the others along the political dimension but similar as

regards its instrumental and operational dimensions). On both sides, the centre of gravity is

again the will to fight. The insurgents are unlikely to win militarily, but can win politically

if the subjugated population (into which they often blend) supports them and if the cost of

repression is high for the dominant party. For the latter, everything depends on the value in


its eyes of the issue at stake, and on the acceptability of a political defeat even though it

cannot lose militarily, in which case public opinion plays a key role. Democracy is more

sensitive to it than an autocracy, the latter more determined to repress because a defeat in

the face of insurrection can destabilize it. The insurgent strategy is the same as in the case

of tribe versus empire, with the addition of guerrilla warfare and terrorism. The unity of the

organization is of paramount importance to it, and it is inclined to severely repress those

who cause political dissension within. It is also important for the organization to appear as

a victim, especially in the eyes of impartial outside spectators, so as to incite them to put

pressure on the dominant party.

The latter’s strategy is first to win or at least not to lose, to create divisions among

the insurgents and their supporters, and to entrust the police with the task of tracking down

the leaders of the insurgency. Intelligence is vital to it if faced with the risk of ambush or

terrorism, and the temptation is strong to obtain it by any means, including torture,

cordoning off the population so as to keep a close eye on the activists in its midst – all of

which, in a democratic regime, carries the risk of putting off part of its own public opinion

from the forced pacification effort under way, but which an autocratic regime is quite

happy to accommodate.

Polity versus Apolity

“This is an unprecedented case (...), which pits a set of existing polities against a

non-polity, to which the neologism ‘apolity’ can aptly be applied” (p.223). This refers to

organized groups such as Al-Qaeda and Daesh, whose political end is “a transpolitical

utopia aiming to go beyond political divisions and found a planetary polity (...) defined as

a religious, or rather ideological, community made up of all adherents to the same faith

and belief, and eventually of all humans”. Their action is closer to piracy than to war,

though it is not aimed at illicit profits but at conquests paving the way for an

unprecedented polity in which unbelievers would be eliminated, enslaved or subjected to

an inferior status. It is reminiscent of the Arab conquests of the 7th

century and those of the

Mongols in the 13th

century. “It can be argued that this innovation has something to do

with the meeting of modern globalization and the traditional sociability of islam” (ibid.).

These groups cannot win militarily (there is no likelihood that the umma can be imposed

by force on the whole world), and their situation is similar to that of insurgents facing

intrapolitical repression as discussed earlier. The centre of gravity on both sides is the will

to fight and its maintenance over time. The strategy of the apolity is not to lose, and seek a

capacity for nuisance (attacks, propaganda) that aims to tire and tilt public opinion when

facing democracies, and to increase of the costs of repression in the eyes of autocracies.

Indeed, because autocracies can afford to use extreme violence, the apolity primarily

targets democratic polities, because they are subject to public opinion attitudes that it seeks

to sway through terror and victimization. To do this, it needs to deny defeat, and continue

to recruit followers, made fanatical by despair and humiliation, and thus willing to die for

the cause. When defeat becomes obvious, this reservoir eventually dries up. On the side of

the attacked polities, which cannot lose, prudence and discernment are required in order

not to risk enlarging the pool of fanatics and seeing the terrorist nuisance increase.


Democracies must recognize that this is not a war, and rely on intelligence and police

tracking to curb terror and make the victimization of virtual fanatics implausible.

Factors in Tactical Effectiveness

If preparation for a violent confrontation is placed under the sign of “knowing” and

“making” in the form of war aims assigned to armed forces, doctrines and plans, the

commitment of forces entirely belongs in the “acting” category and its circumstantial

singularity. Clausewitz had clearly seen that in the face of uncertainty, particular qualities

are required of military leaders : situational awareness, vision, resolution, presence of

mind, energy, firmness, perseverance, strength of character and spirit.

The author goes on to discuss the moral forces that are essential for effectiveness in

a tactical engagement, and the factors that underpin them : first and foremost, the courage

of combatants, who on this occasion suspend their instinct for self-preservation and are

willing to risk their lives and physical or mental integrity in the name of the collective

mission assigned to them. Courage is itself reinforced by esprit de corps, i.e. “the

conversion of individual sensibilities, intelligence and will into a collective will,

intelligence and sensibility” – ideally without impeding the capacity for individual

initiative. This is always threatened by entropy and is at best a matter of degrees (p.248).

At the level of the psyche, it requires the minimization of relative deprivation (a

calculation based on the fair distribution of personal risks and costs among combatants of

the same function and rank), through the degree of trust in leaders, and the hope of being

able to emerge from combat unscathed. It is affected by the military’s organizational

structure and the modalities of combat, the quality of the command and junior cadres, the

probability of being on the winning side or, on the contrary, the energy of despair in the

face of a coming defeat, with all its foreseeable consequences, both positive and negative

depending on the case, in terms of prestige, power and sometimes wealth.

A sense of duty and honour hovers in the background of the motivation to fight.

The first is based on three calculations : humanistic (sensitivity to a sense of human

dignity), utilitarian (if all behave cowardly, defeat is certain) and “legalistic” (punishment

for failing to fight may be worse than the danger from the enemy). The second is indexed

on self-esteem, the estimation of others and even of humanity, which one cultivates for fear

of losing it and with a view to the prestige that accrues from combat experience. The

relative importance of both is powerfully modulated by cultures, the position of the

combatant, and circumstances. The aspiration to glory, i.e. the search for admiration and

immortality, tilts honour towards the esteem of others. Though the glorious may survive

battle, glory is often posthumous and favours great military and/or political leaders, like

Alexander, Caesar, Frederick and Napoleon in Europe. But it can also be anonymous and

collective in episodes of warlike prowess (unexpected victories, feats of arms with military

panache, heroic defeats), as illustrated by of those who fought the battle of Thermopylae,

in which case it benefits the entire armed force and even the polity as a whole. The

surrounding culture strongly modulates it, and it is apt to give rise to ideological

perversions.


Participation in War

Chapter XII asks the question : “What makes people active, passive or non-

committed in war ?”. To answer it, it hypothesises that political and morphological factors

play a role in the first, political, dimension of war ; that economic and technical factors

play a part in the second, instrumental, dimension ; and that cultural factors are present

through the operational dimension. The author adds that the relationship between women

and war deserves separate treatment.

If the polity is a homogeneous, isotropic and centred whole, participation is

restricted to those who take part in the decisions, take care of the resources to be

mobilized, and who actually fight : the passive rest are possible victims. However, cities

and nations at war mobilize widely, as do the polities involved in polypolar transpolities. A

plural polity, for example a federal one, is likely to favour participation through emulation

among federated components, unless a strong dissensus emerges among them. The empire,

because it is composite, is the least favoured because of possible centrifugal forces,

although examples of full solidarity are attested. The type of political regime is by no

means irrelevant. Democracy invites the widest participation : since citizens are the

ultimate source of power and war threatens the common good, it is everybody’s business.

But it is possible for citizens assured of not being affected by it to lose interest and be

content to leave the war to those who are willing to take care of it, or for those who feel

disadvantaged or excluded from society to refuse participation. Hierocratic regimes, where

autocracy is legitimized by religion or ideology, hardly encourage participation, except in

cases where cultural homogeneity and a clear and present danger make the subjects

supportive of their ruler. Pure autocracy discourages the participation of its citizens, whom

it does not like to see armed (to the point that it prefers external peace, less destabilizing

than war, in order to better concentrate on internal political repression).

As active participation in warfare (except for isolated cases) has until recently only

concerned males between adolescence and 50 years of age, their mobilization could hardly

exceed a maximum of one quarter of the population. The instrumental dimension, which

places its material, organizational and moral support capacities at the service of the

wartime polity, potentially affects a larger part of the population. The latter is involved

through its productive contributions, but also as a possible collateral victim when weapons

are less discriminating or when war is a source of famine or epidemics, or as a deliberate

target for the enemy (as during the massive strategic bombings of the Second World War,

which blurred the line between civilians and military personnel in terms of war risks).

Another aspect of participation in war is the financing of the costs incurred. There

are several solutions. One is to make the vanquished pay for it, through levies in kind or

tributes in various forms (cash, territory, slaves, abduction of women). In this case, the

population of the victorious polity is inclined to support the war since it benefits from it, as

in the case of Roman citizens exempted from taxes thanks to the victories and conquests of

the Roman armies. Another is to finance it through taxation or borrowing. The attitude

adopted by the population then depends on its attachment to the polity as well as on the


answer to the question : “what will be my fate, if my polity is defeated for lack of sufficient

financing ?” (p.284).

An examination of cultural factors shows that in all civilizational areas, some

peoples are warlike while others are more inclined to peacefulness. These are not genetic

dispositions, but traditions that arise from circumstances when warlike initiatives were

crowned with success, were subsequently emulated, and became the norm. The nature of

the transpolity also plays a role, as does religion if it is perverted into an ideology covering

non-religious reasons for war. The case of Christian yet warlike Europe is surprising in this

respect, since Christianity is a universalist religion of love for one’s neighbour : the

explanation is conducted in terms of the history of European transpolities after the collapse

of the Western Roman Empire, a history made up of feudal polypolarity, slow national

unifications through conquest, and the oligopolarity that followed and took hold due to the

lack of success of later attempts at imperialization.

Women and War

Women’s participation in war is the subject of developments showing that war has

been a crucial factor in the relationships between the sexes. For a long time, females were

excluded from it for natural reasons (muscle mass, childbirth and motherhood), which as

always were hardened or attenuated by particular cultures. As long as physical strength

alone was a determining factor in success or failure in war, it was rational to reserve it for

those most capable of it (and, in the alternative, to preserve the chances of demographic

survival or development by leaving women out of it). Sexual dimorphism was increased in

the process.

Women were in fact only excluded from actual operations : the instrumental

dimension has always been open to them, and they have been among the victims of war,

often in a specific way through rape and slavery. Since women have been consistently and

universally excluded from the political dimension despite the absence of any natural reason

for it, the conclusion can only be that such exclusion is cultural, and that cultures have

been shaped by war. As a result, men were able to keep power to themselves : they long

monopolized the public space, dominated private spaces, and left women in charge of

intimate spaces. War thus goes far to explain the traditionally inferior status of women

compared to men.

Things began to change with modernity, and the advent of firearms that require less

muscle to serve, until the moment, in the late 20th century, when grey matter now

prevailed over muscle mass in combat itself, and rarer wars involved smaller numbers.

From then on, the traditional mechanisms went into reverse gear, breaking with millennia

of the species’ history, and opening the way for the anthropological mutation underway

today through the emancipation of women in all domains of activity, including the military

sphere. The groundwork had actually been laid earlier : the great wars of the 20th century

paradoxically helped to enhance the status of women by making them active outside the

home to replace men assigned to the frontlines. The scale of the disasters they caused

symbolically devalued war activities. Democratization did the rest by breaking the lock on

women's access to the public space.


The Centrality of War

Other chapters deal with the relationship between law and war (XI), probed as part

of its dimensions (contrary to appearances, war is a source of internal and external legal

normativity), its various impacts on the psyche (XIV), religion (XVI), the economy and

techniques (XVII), health (XVIII) and art (XIX) – and conversely with the way these impact

it in return. Despite their intrinsic value, in the interests of economy it is best not to dwell

on them, and concentrate instead on two other chapters which in their own way at least in

part synthesize them.

War and the Political

The first (XIII) bears upon the centrality of war. That war can be at the centre of the

human condition is surprising at first sight, since it is not one of the fundamental traits of

the species and has a date of birth, in the Neolithic period. The demonstration starts from

the fact that it is part and parcel of the political domain. It is enough for the political to be

at the centre of the human condition for war to become so too in a subordinate role. Not

that it is always central to the political : the heart of it is pacification through justice. But

“as long as the species is not united in a single circle, any conflict between different circles

can trigger a war” (p.304).

It is not the political that analytically implies war, but the plurality of circles

applied to the political. The latter is constitutive of the human condition, not

war, which has an attested date of birth and a putative date of death. Thus, if

war is to be central, it can only be in the interval between the two dates, i.e. for

the stage of human history emerging from neolithization, which we can agree to

call “traditional” (p.304).

The programme for this chapter is thus set : “check historical evidence for the

centrality of war in the political during the traditional era”, then “test it on the cultural,

social and historical” impact of war (ibid.). However, some misunderstandings are to be

avoided. Since the existence of war seems to contradict the idea that the end of the political

is peace, one may be tempted to reverse the formula and make war the political end of

Man. This is what certain ideologies based on a transposition of the biological to the

political have done. One argues that the struggle between species in nature is the law of the

living : in so doing, it confuses cultural particularization with speciation, and comes to

deny the unity of the human species in the name of a racism that has no biological basis.

Another, derived from social Darwinism, postulates a selection of the fittest defined by

their superior capacity for violence, which would amount to advocating the law of the

jungle, and would abolish the species by guaranteeing that no human end can be achieved.

In reality,

The reasoning leads to the logical and true conclusion that peace is indeed the

end of the political and that it can be pursued directly through justice or

indirectly by war, insofar as the latter can both pacify transpolities and

configure polities capable of ensuring justice (p.305).

War and the Cultural


The role of war in cultural particularizations is primordial, even exclusive. Its

contribution is made through the political processes already described : the area covered by

a civilization is a transpolity promised to imperialization by war. But also through the

political regime and its apparatus of power, which end up doing business with a religious

or moral authority that ideologizes religion or wisdom in its behalf (a fate shared by

Confucianism in China, Stoicism under the Antonines, and Christianity after Constantine).

This apparatus, in the hands of elites mainly selected on warlike criteria, formulates

cultural (literary, philosophical, cognitive, pictorial, decorative, architectural, etc.)

demands, which stimulate supply. War is therefore central to the initiation of the process.

Moreover, on all scales, the logic of culture is sheer reproduction of memes, likely to lead

to an evolutionary dead end. War and its aftermath, by intensifying contacts (through

practices borrowed from opponents, prisoners turned into slaves, abduction of women,

etc.), facilitate inflections, ultimately mutations, and particularize according to the

particular history of each polity. (Conversely, pre-Holocene humanity, which did not

experience war, is unlikely to have been the scene of strongly marked cultural

particularisms). Finally, war presided over the initial spread of the great universalist

religions : Buddhism was imposed on India by the armies of Ashoka, Christianity in

Europe by Rome, Charlemagne and chivalric orders, and the expansion of Islam was

almost entirely warlike.

War and the Social

The impact of war on the social composition of societies is addressed from three

perspectives : who (what part of the general population) wages war, and with what social

effects ; how does it affect stratification ; with what consequences for the status and

condition of various strata and socio-demographic categories ?

The answer to the first question is that the recruitment of warriors varies infinitely

across societies and cultures, and depends on the type of war, the equipment and skills

required, the nature of the techniques used, etc. The most that can be said is that children,

women and the elderly are generally excluded. And “Aristotle taught us that cavalry

favours aristocracies, because the cost of maintaining horses is high and can only be met

by social elites. (...) Smart weapons must be served by technicians and engineers. And we

cannot exclude the possibility of future armies made up of robots, which would almost

eliminate humans from the operational dimension of war, concentrating them on its

political and instrumental dimensions” (p.321).

Since neolithization set in, social stratification has been subject to a universal

invariant : a ternary distribution of strata into elites, the majority population and excluded

groups, whose composition and relative proportions alone are apt to vary. It is governed by

the distribution of life chances, in which war is only one factor among others (albeit not a

negligible one). Social elites are warlike where and when conflicts between polities can

turn violent, while civilian elites rise in proportion as transpolities become more peaceful

(as in Europe in the 18th

and 19th

centuries, or in imperial China from the Han onwards). In

the first case, the excluded are recruited from among the defeated and the categories unfit

for war. The majority who can be mobilized in case of need were for a long time free


peasants, poor though not wretchedly destitute, clients of an aristocracy (as in the Indo-

European tradition) or exploited by a warrior class or caste that monopolized power,

wealth and prestige (as in Near Asia and India).

The status and condition of population categories is under the direct influence of

war. The fate of women is a good illustration of this : sexual dimorphism was “barely

perceptible among gatherer peoples, became more in evidence among big game hunters,

and deepened with the birth of war, to impose itself continuously until the current

expressions of modernization” (p.323). But the type of political regime is not indifferent :

autocracies tend to widen the gap between (warrior) elites and the people (reduced, as in

Russia after Ivan the Terrible, to the status of muzhiks, i.e. serfs paying taxes and obliged

to serve under arms if necessary).

War and History

The role of war in the evolution of the human species can be detected first of all

from the mutations it has undergone so far and may witness in future : its emergence

during the Neolithic period marked a major watershed, and its putative disappearance by

way of world political unification promises a similar break. But history also contains

decisive turning points, of which war is in many cases the origin. Many battles have

changed the course of history in profound and intelligible ways. The crushing defeat of the

Muslims at Constantinople in 718 allowed the Byzantine Empire to survive for more than

seven centuries, an outcome that was reversed with immense consequences when the

Ottomans finally took the city in 1453. The battle of Qadisiya in 635 converted Persia to

Islam. The battle of Poitiers (732) preserved the chances of an independent European

development, which, given the part Europe later played in the history of other civilizations,

gave it universal resonance. The same applies to the Greek victories over the Persians

(Marathon, Salamis, Plataea, between 490 and 479 BC) because of the contribution of

ancient Greece to European civilization. But also to the battle of Castillon (1453), which

drove the English out of the continent at the end of the Hundred Years’ War, to the extent

that it determined England to embrace the open seas and become a thalassocracy,

eventually to found a planetary empire, serve as a laboratory for liberalism, and above all

to adopt a strategy, which has been unshakeable since then, of active but indirect

opposition to any imperial unification of Europe. The two world wars of the 20th

century

and their aftermath imposed an eight-decade-long freeze period on the globalization

movement (and gave rise to disastrous totalitarian experiments in the meantime). Similarly,

the US Civil War, whose issue was not slavery but the perpetuation of the United States as

a polity, created the conditions for its rise as a hegemonic world power in the following

century. The list is not exhausted (the reader can easily imagine that Hastings, Lepanto,

Waterloo, Stalingrad or Diên Biên Phu would figure prominently in a longer one), but J.

Baechler attributes the prize for the most decisive battle in universal history to that of

Teutoburgerwald, in the year 9 AD, which saw three Roman legions under the command of

Varus annihilated by the forces of Arminius, a Germanic tribal chief. This defeat decided

Augustus to stop trying to conquer the whole of Europe, and his successors imposed

respect of the limes centred on the Rhine and Danube. How could this event have played

such a decisive role ? The author’s answer closes this chapter :


...a very solid argument can be made that the non-imperialization of Europe was

the first condition of possibility for the modernization that began a thousand

years later, because it paved the way for the second condition, an oligopolar

transpolity, which guaranteed the third condition, namely regulated competitions,

favourable to inventiveness. Modernity emerged in Europe, not in the Chinese

empire, and it could not have emerged in a European empire, unborn thanks to

Arminius and a battle ! (p.330).

Matrix Changes

Chapter XV opens with the assertion that the universal history of the species is

divided into three major phases, or matrices : primitive, traditional and modern.

neolithization marks the transition from the first (which did not know war) to the second

(where it was central). Modernization, the transition from the latter to the third (where war

is at its height, but starts to recede), began in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, and

very slowly spread elsewhere, until its uneven extension to the world at large in the last

century. How can these transitions be interpreted ?

One mistake to avoid is to give in to the temptation of a Spencer-style

evolutionism, which identifies an evolutionary line (the march towards differentiation and

complexity) and assigns degrees and stages to it, between which the steps are automatic. In

other words, “the evolutionary line evolves under the pressure of its evolution !”. The

author, for his part, identifies five evolutionary lines, between which the transitions are

intelligible but not necessary since they result from aggregate collective action. Since it has

been admitted that politics is the order of human activity whose valence is the highest, that

its external department can prevail over the internal one in influence and consequences,

and that war can be central to it, war provides a good candidate for the role of engine in

these transitions.

Neolithization

The path from the primitive to the traditional matrix is characterized by five

innovations : the passage from segmentarity to the consolidation of polities ; the auto- and

hierocratization of political regimes ; the differentiation of religion, its institutionalisation,

and the thematization of fundamental metaphysical choices ; the multiplication by at least a

hundred of demographic densities ; the passage from a predatory to an agrarian economy,

marked among other things by the management of space (irrigation, laying out of roads to

facilitate exchanges), the development of crafts, and the imposition of taxation.

While the products of this neolithic transition were diverse, their common origin is

much less so. In the transition from the band, horde or ethnic group to the tribal segmental

morphology, war was not involved : it was only later, when fully-sketched polities

emerged, that it could become a driving force, and that the structure of transpolities

imposed itself on their actors. The paths taken were varied, and the weight of war was

unequal : strong between cities, weak between chiefdoms, exclusive in the overcoming of

segmentarity through polarization between tribal confederations, opening the way to wars

of conquest.


Wars between polities led to the concentration of power, resulting in autocracies,

which, in order to perpetuate themselves, substituted a superior divine or ideological

principle of legitimacy for force, transforming them into hierocracies. These are either

absolute, in the sense that power is exercised without constraint, or tempered, where power

comes up against counter-powers independent of the central apparatus. The former are

favoured by dipolar transpolities, the latter by poly- or oligopolarity for different reasons

(weak polities in one, balanced transpolities and defensive moderation in the other). If the

link between war and autocracy is direct, it is only indirect and subject to other influences

in the case of hierocratization.

War has contributed to reinforcing the weight of religion, whether it be

monotheism (dominant west of the Indus), immanentism (in India), secularism, i.e. civic

religion (in China and Ionia). This is because of the need for a collective identity in war –

one that religion fulfils better than other principles ; but also on account of the urge of

autocracies to legitimize themselves by a higher, ideally sacred, principle ; and finally

because of the combatants’ need to give meaning to the possible early sacrifice of their

lives.

The marked demographic growth that accompanied neolithization was not the

result of human irrationality (greed, sexual licence), nor of a technological leap that would

have made it possible (domestication of plants and animals) – theses that the author

endeavours to refute in the light of existing documentation. This growth is, in all cases –

from the late segmentarity converted to war to the first circumscribed polities – the rational

response to the need for large numbers of young men that war created (as evidenced by the

cult of fecundity attested by female statuettes with oversized sexual attributes that

archaeologists have found in a number of places).

As for war’s economic impact, the explanation lies either in a demand economy,

where resources are proportionate to stable needs, or in a supply economy, where new

resources create new needs. Despite undeniable innovations likely to increase needs, it

seems that the demand economy is the explanation to be favoured. The apparent

contradiction is resolved when social stratification, itself a result of neolithization, is

brought into play. The monopolization by elite groups of wealth, prestige and above all

power, for reasons of social ostentation and emulation with elites in rival polities, but also

investments with a direct or indirect military purpose, were such that neither the people (70

to 80% of the population as a whole), nor a fortiori the excluded, actually benefited from

an increase in production of which they were nonetheless the agents. War was therefore

also a driving force, directly through its specialized needs and the investments required to

satisfy them, and indirectly through the hierocratic regimes and the kind of social

stratification it favoured.

Modernization

The modernity that succeeded the traditional matrix is characterized by five

interacting fundamental dimensions : democracy, individuation, science, differentiation of

orders of activity, and economic development. It emerged from the 14th

-15th

centuries


onwards, in a partly contingent manner, in Europe – not in China, India, Near Asia, or

(pre-Columbian) America, whose turn came much later.

“The ultimate reason for European precedence was the absence of imperial

unification of the continent and the creation, in its place, of an original transpolitical

scene”. Rivalries among polities (competition, emulation, conflict, war) pushed them to

cultivate efficiency in all fields. Moreover, Europe (until the liberal revolutions that

followed the Enlightenment) preserved aristocracies, lineages and bloodlines enjoying

positions of wealth, power and prestige autonomous from those exerting political power at

the centre, and effectively functioning as counter-powers. “One result was temperate

political regimes, which allowed the spontaneous creativity of individuals and groups to

escape from sterilizing monopolies ; another was the perpetuated preservation of

autonomous networks, so that any innovation spontaneously gave rise to competitive

explorations among creators. In a word : the political structure favoured freedom, which

supported creativity” (p.380).

Democratization

Democracy is a political system in which the ultimate source of power within the

polity resides in those who, though free, consent to obey. The result is a public space,

animated by the holders of power, dedicated to the common good that matters to all, first

and foremost civil peace, ensured by justice at home, and external security. This public

space leaves room for private and intimate spaces, in which the freedom of individuals

pursuing the achievement of particular and personal interests is embodied. Baechler argues

on this occasion, as he has done elsewhere, that democracy is the regime “natural to the

human species, in the precise sense that it best suits its nature, and that tends to impose

itself spontaneously if the appropriate conditions of possibility exist (...). These conditions

were generally met, more or less, in primitive societies, only to disappear entirely in the

traditional world, with the exception of a few cities” (p. 381).

Democratization is the rediscovery of this natural regime, reflected in the gradual

and chaotic establishment of its constituent elements. It was favoured by the absence in

Europe (except in its easternmost parts) of peasant serfdom, and the emergence in cities

and towns, from the 11th

century on, of merchant or artisanal bourgeoisies that

spontaneously practised it in the interstices of the feudal and post-feudal world. Warfare

played a part in this : medieval polypolarity led, as described above, to successive

concentrations which in the long term led to national unifications. Concentrated power

then sought to transform the old socially and politically autonomous aristocracies into

nobilities made docile to the central power (notably through curialization). A bifurcation is

observed in the 17th century : the process led either to an absolute hierocracy with

autocratic tendencies (as in France), or to a constitutional hierocracy brought about by

revolutions (as in England). The author adds :

The English model eventually triumphed throughout Europe. Now, this model

is democratizable, because though it initially reserved citizenship, understood as


the capacity to delegate responsibility for the common good, to the well-born

and the rich, it is likely to widen its recruitment gradually to all (p.382).

War dominated European history until the 19th century, only to precipitate it

into the catastrophe of 1914. To achieve this result, monarchs needed the

military support of the aristocrats and the fiscal support of the peasants and

bourgeoisie. This strengthened the negotiating capacity of civil society, as well

as its resistance to the natural rise of power to the extremes of unchecked

monopoly. War thus contributed to the perpetuation of counter-powers (p.383).

Europe thus fulfilled the four conditions for the possibility of a democratization that

was unlikely to occur elsewhere. Fate spared it the empire, an absolute hierocratic regime

concentrating power by eliminating autonomous elites and subjugating the people, and

unlikely to democratize : it can only harden or collapse. In its place, it established a

transpolitical regime of oligopolar equilibrium, which until 1914 resisted all fluctuations in

the balance of power, and various ideological commotions. Its polities within it proved

stable enough to survive internal political upheavals and to serve as a framework for slow

developments towards democracy. Its societies remained structured by strong counter-

powers with low coalition costs, and benefited from the patriotic virtues of dedication to

the common good, pride in their cultures, and willingness to defend them. To all of these

developments, war contributed powerfully.

Individuation

Distinguished from individualism, which is its ideological corruption, individuation

was nourished by the emergence of the nation and a sense of common belonging based on

free membership. The turn in this direction was taken in the 14th

and 15th

centuries, which

happened to be among the most tragic in European history. The king’s subjects were not

entirely deprived of rights, but not yet full citizens. They saw the nation as the primordial

community of destiny, symbolized by a dynasty, serving as a framework for a society

consisting of material and moral contracts within multiple secondary organizations that had

in common a culture gradually homogenized by shared experiences. The subjective nature

of free adherence resulted in the enhancement of the individual.

The European transpolity, forged and marked by war and its vagaries, had a

weakness : there was no reason why polities should spontaneously coincide with nations in

the process of formation, either because a latent nation did not meet the right polity, or

because the polity harboured several. The constant reshaping of the European trans-

political map accounts for five centuries of wars that have strengthened national

sentiments. The absence of a Germanic polity gave the age-old Anglo-French rivalry a

central role, which only came to an end in 1904, after German unification. This rivalry

perfected, on both sides, the model of the nation-polity (ethnically-based in England,

culturally-based in France), which was soon to be imitated throughout the continent.

J. Baechler concludes : “War induced the nation, which imposed individuation !” (p.386).

Science

The hypothetico-deductive method that characterizes scientific knowledge contrasts

with the more common empirical type of knowledge which proceeds by observation,


enumeration, classification, induction and ad hoc inference. Science had a timid beginning

in the Hellenistic period. It was reborn in a stronger and more durable manner, after a very

long parenthesis, in 17th

century Europe, and there only : the other civilizations remained

anchored in empirical knowledge. It spread to the rest of the world in the 20th

century.

This new beginning is in many ways an enigma. It was not a simple crossing of a

threshold based on an accumulation of empirical knowledge (in which case China, India or

Near Asia would have been better placed to effect it). The Renaissance saw a revival of

interest in geometry and physics through the writings of Euclid and Archimedes, which

printing enabled to be disseminated in learned circles. In addition, late Scholasticism had

been interested in the question of motion and rest. The subject took a practical turn when

artillery appeared on the scene, which led to questions about the trajectory of cannonballs –

a direct link between science and war. It was long considered, in line with Aristotle and the

medieval metaphysics of Being inherited from Greek thought, that rest was primary since

movement required an external impulse. Explorations of the issue continued until, in the

first half of the 17th

century, Galileo and then Newton finally reversed the perspective : the

principle of inertia made motion the first principle, and rest a relative special case.

Summed up in Galileo’s intuition that nature is written in mathematical and

geometrical language, this first exploration of the real through back-and-forth movements

between theory and observation proved paradigmatic. The process was generalized through

the study of other sectors of reality within communities of scholars communicating with

each other throughout the continent, on the model of the networks that had existed among

medieval universities. It snowballed, corroborating Bacon’s view that the progress of

knowledge would become a linear function of time. It was protected from religious and

political dogmatism by the pluralism of Churches and States, which allowed thinkers and

scholars to escape persecution in their own countries by placing themselves under the

protection of authorities better disposed towards them elsewhere.

The absence of imperial-type monopolies produced effects that long remained

unparalleled outside Europe. Competing polities on an oligopolar transpolity soon learned

that they could not ignore newly acquired knowledge if its practical applications meant

increasing their wealth and power. Now aware of the validity of the Baconian aphorism on

knowledge and power, they encouraged scientific work by financing it or by paying

attention to projects proposed by scientists or engineers, anxious as they were to precede

others, or to imitate those ahead of them, not least in terms of military applications. This

was eventually to generate a multiplication of research institutes, in universities or

elsewhere, and then lead to the building of upstream education systems for ever larger

populations. The author concludes : “Through innumerable channels, the cognitive, the

political and the military have not ceased to collaborate since the enigmatic birth of

science in the 17th

century” (p.389).

The Differentiation of Orders of Activity

Science, through the rationalization it brought about, was the main factor in the

increasing differentiation of the political, economic, religious, technical and other orders of


human activity. But the political, in this case the process of democratization, also played a

role in allowing private and intimate spaces to escape full control of the public space, i.e.

civil society to exist and flourish, and social roles to become specialized. The democratic

regime also allowed freedom of opinion and expression, fostering the exploration of

possibilities. In return, all these contributions to rationalization and specialization had an

impact on the external influence of the polity (“soft power”), but also on its capacity to

strengthen its military power through innovation.

Economic Development

Where pre-modern economies were based on circumscribed and stable needs to

which they sought to match adequate resources, the modern economy “produces resources

in search of needs” (p.392). A healthy economy rests on the guarantee of free initiative,

property rights, and markets regulated by trust rather than trickery or violence. Primitive

hunter-gatherers, in their own way, had such an economic regime, which neolithization

was to disrupt. The creative coalescence of polities, the emergence of specialized political

bodies and the autocratic tendencies of parasitic or kleptocratic elites in effect inhibited the

development throughout the reign of the traditional matrix. Through democratization,

modernity allowed societies to return to a more liberal state of affairs, by gradually

generalizing medieval experiences of economic freedom developed within Italian, Flemish,

Rhenish and Hanseatic oligarchic cities on the fringes of feudalism and then of conquering

kingdoms. This regime of freedom could not have flourished as an engine of development

without science and the innovations it fostered. Where for millennia the traditional matrix

had imposed fixed conditions, positions and aspirations, modernization continuously and

noticeably tended to reshuffle the deck from generation to generation. The link between

political regime and development is clearly visible in the first capitalist take-off at the end

of the 16th

century in the United Provinces, republican and federal as soon as freed from

the Spanish yoke, and then in an England which in the second half of the 17th

century

proved resistant to absolutism. However, it was not until the effects of the Industrial

Revolution, visible in the England of the 1820s and 1830s, that capitalism emancipated

itself and precipitated an economic take-off of unprecedented magnitude. Emulation and

competition between polities did the rest by forcing them to learn from the most

successful. Even in the 19th

century, much more peaceful than others after Waterloo, war

was still on the agenda, because none of the States involved in the European transpolity

could neglect the resources placed at its disposal without unbalancing existing power

relationships. The late emergence of German power, by upsetting the chessboard, then

brought to the fore the close link between industrial development and the instrumental

dimension of war.

The issue of war’s economic benefits is addressed in chapter XVII. The question is

whether it promotes or inhibits the production of economic resources. The answer is clear :

despite the material destruction it causes (or even because of it), war is probably the most

effective springboard for economic expansion. Subjected to the ever-present constraint of

ensuring their survival and security, polities are driven to mobilize all their energies, and to

do so in the most efficient way possible. Allocating resources to the armed forces


undoubtedly carries opportunity costs for the polity (the iron used to make cannons may

hinder the manufacture of ploughs), but such a dilemma is precisely what drives the

maximization of production to satisfy both needs at the same time. Preparation for war thus

favours increased factor productivity in all areas. Failure to improve it in a context of high

military requirements can be ruinous for the economy as a whole, and put the very survival

of the polity at risk. But if this is not the case, as technologies are usually dual, civilian and

military, innovations and investments in the military sector promote overall development.

Even the large-scale material destruction that accompanies war, short of total ruin from

which there is no recovery, does benefit post-war economies through reconstruction

processes that repair damage in a few years or decades, and can revive markets through

strong demand – as witnessed by the post-1945 Keynesian economic expansion in the

West (or even the rearmament of Nazi Germany, which in a few years eliminated the mass

unemployment of the previous period).

Conversely, does the economy call for war ? One case would be scarcity leading to

a war of predation. Another would be the use of force to open up foreign markets, as at the

expense of China and Japan in the mid-19th

century, or as part of the initial (unprofitable)

colonial practice, or again the desire to protect investments abroad. But in all cases, the

economic factor is dependent on the political regime, and its influence is more effectively

filtered by democracy than by autocracy.

The End of the Road : Peace, Imperial, Oligopolar or Confederal ?

“War forms a conceptual pair with peace. The question is whether it is indissoluble

or not” (p.471). If it were to come undone, it could not be for the benefit of war. It is

indeed unthinkable that the kingdom of life could have selected a species biologically

destined to kill each other to the point of collective suicide. The divorce could therefore

only be pronounced in favour of peace. Peace, as the end of the political, could only come

about through the abolition of transpolities, the source of war through the absence of the

same mechanism of pacification by justice that governs polities. Such abolition would be

synonymous with the coalescence of the polities present on the transpolity into a

superpolity. One way of achieving this is unification through war : this is imperial peace,

which we know is an attractor experienced at various times by all the great civilizational

areas except Europe. Should the process be repeated on a planetary transpolitical level, the

final unification would be synonymous with the definitive end of war as polemos.

The historical record underlines the weaknesses and costs of this modality of

abolishing war through war itself. Empires, with the sole historical exception of the

Chinese empire, do not last : sooner or later they relapse into war, for reasons already

mentioned – external pressures on the borders and wear and tear of an apparatus of central

power that is bending under the financial burden of imperial overextension. As domination

based on force alone is unsustainable, the political regime quickly evolves into an absolute

hierocracy, based on religion or ideology. The price to be paid by the populations is a tight

top-down control arsenal that for fear of insurrection restricts the freedom of all, and


monopolies which hinder initiative and inventiveness, with economic prosperity as their

first victim.

A planetary polity established at the end of warlike processes obeying the imperial

attractor would have little chance of escaping this fate : it would be affected by the risk or

reality of secessionist tensions, or even of civil war. It would constitute an obstacle to

democracy, a normal aspiration of peoples as the only regime that conforms to the nature

of the human species. The conclusion is clear : “All in all, imperial peace is, if not an

illusion, at least an insufficient and unsatisfactory solution. If peace is to triumph

effectively over war, it must become global without being imperial” (p.484).

Is such a solution likely to succeed ? Two conditions seem necessary. The first is

the existence of a planetary transpolity : this has now been achieved thanks to the

accelerated resumption of globalization after the Cold War, and no region of the world

remains insulated. The second is more problematic : politicization – the substitution of a

single polity for the existing transpolity – must take place without recourse to war. Dante’s

prescription (De monarchia, 1317) was to strengthen the Holy Roman Empire in order to

establish a universal monarchy, which – as subsequent experience was to show – could not

be achieved without war, and ultimately failed. Kant’s plan in this respect (Zum ewigen

Frieden, 1795) was a confederation of republican polities. If democracy is sought, its

application to a global polity certainly requires a federal structure. Yet, not even the most

self-assured federal democracies have been able to consolidate without succumbing to civil

war : Switzerland in 1847, the United States in 1861-1865. The only historical exception is

the contemporary Europe born of the treaty of Rome (1957), which arouses both hope –

peaceful coalescence now seems possible – and scepticism, due to the laborious nature of a

construction that hesitates between federation and confederation, and to recent centrifugal

tendencies. Yet the case is not chemically pure, since this construction was initiated in the

shadow of the two great wars of the 20th

century which left the continent in ruins and two

generations and their descendants traumatized.

However that may be, the rest of the world does not seem on the verge of following

the European example : the global transpolity will remain in place for some time. How will

it be structured ? After the dipolarity of the Cold War, made atypical by the absence of a

rise to extremes due to weapons of mutual deterrence that Rome and Carthage did not

possess, as well as by the self-disqualification of the USSR, it seemed for a while as if a

monopolar phase had been ushered in under the leadership of the United States, the only

actor capable of projecting its forces to every corner of the world. The rapid rise of

Chinese power has since dissipated this illusion, and the world now appears to be heading

towards a new blocked dipolarity. But this does not take into account other major powers,

which will probably not be content to suffer a new East-West confrontation without

playing their own politico-strategic score. In this hypothesis, the configuration would be

oligopolar, i.e. marked by the search for balance. The only possibility that can be excluded

is polypolarity : the great powers would not tolerate the chaos it implies and would soon

put an end to it.


This hypothesis of a likely oligopolar scenario for the global transpolity is tested on

medium-term (1492-1914) and long-term (Holocene) history. The four-plus centuries of

internally competitive domination of the world by an extroverted Europe confirm that

oligopolarity was indeed the dominant transpolitical structure over the period, marked by

two early waves of globalization. By 1914, this overwhelming European ascendancy

already appeared under threat. New great powers appeared (United States, Russia, Japan),

which soon took over. The two world wars, initiated in Europe, hastened the decline of its

world domination. J. Baechler concludes :

The diagnosis of a planetary oligopolarity in the making can be argued and

inspire the conviction that 1991 renewed the thread with 1913 after the 1914-

1991 parenthesis. Even the future of Europe could be seen in outline then.

Germany had become the dominant polity, but in an unaltered European context :

the transition from hegemony to empire was still impossible, because Germany

did not prevail over the coalition of other polities, especially as Great Britain was

unwavering in its commitment to a foreign policy developed after its eviction

from the European continent in the 15th century, and opposed any political

unification of that continent. The question was already being asked : what place

for Europeans in a global concert of polities ? (p.489).

The Holocene – the ten to twelve thousand years since the last ice age – also

confirms the hypothesis ; it again verifies that “the political is at the centre of the historical

condition of humans and that war is at the heart of the political throughout the period”

(p.490). All civilizational areas (China, India, Near Asia, Aztec and Inca Amerindia)

experienced the process of imperial unification, with the exception of Europe – but also of

Africa, which remained anchored in the segmentarity of tribes and chiefdoms.7 For a very

long time, they remained out of contact with each other : change only came with the first

wave of globalization in the 16th

century at the initiative of Europeans. But a thought

experiment suggests that if a transpolity had existed between them much earlier, the

difficulty of conquering or subjugating very large areas would have led to an oligopolar

type of equilibrium.

The global oligopoly hypothesis is not a prediction : the future is unknowable. Its

value is heuristic. It serves to detect trends in the present that are already observable, in

particular with regard to the ability of players to play the oligopolar game, that of non-

oligopolists to exploit the flaws of the oligopolar transpolity, and the type of wars that may

result.

Today’s leading powers seem a priori little inclined to a rational oligopolar game,

i.e. one that conforms to its logic of seeking balance. Experience and tradition (condensed

into strategic cultures), but also ideology and passions have something to do with it :

7 The explanation, or so it seems, has to do with geography : the barriers constituted by the Sahara and the

equatorial forest may have delayed neolithization by several millennia and inhibited the emergence of a

maximum North African cultural area. With the plausible exceptions of the kingdoms of Buganda, Dahomey

and, in statu nascendi, Natal, political coalescence did not take place. The author further mentions in passing

that geography, because of the scattering of islands over a very large area, also explains why Polynesia did

not experience the imperial attractor phenomenon.


India and Brazil have never had a foreign policy worthy of the name in past

centuries. China has maintained a monopolar imperial vision for millennia,

recently hardened by a powerful resentment of the humiliations suffered

between 1840 and 1949. The United States has always been engaged in dipolar

all-or-nothing games and adheres to the ideology of a mission to lead in the

world. Only Russia has the historical experience of the European concert of

nations, which has endowed it with smart diplomatic traditions. But it is a long-

established empire, which has never managed to get rid of the imperial principle

that any transpolitical game is zero-sum. The risks are therefore very high that

the game will be played badly and that catastrophic irrational developments

may result.

However, it may well be that the risks of major war between oligopolists today are

so extreme that these powers would be brought to their senses, and that the process of

learning the unwritten rules of oligopolarity would take less time than it took Europe

before the treaties of Westphalia.

This overall game can be disrupted by partial dipolar logics, between China or

Russia and the United States, or between China and India. Bad calculations are to be

feared, especially if ethnocentric passions get involved : the European oligopolar system

sank, for these two reasons, into war madness between 1914 and 1945.

Another weakness in the system lies in three major lacunae. The first is that there is

no such thing as a political, and therefore military, Europe. It is a zone of low geostrategic

pressure that can distort calculations and spoil the prudence required by a collective quest

for balance.8 The second is the lack of a unified polity in Near Asia, the locus of a several

thousand year-old civilization currently divided into three subsets, Arab, Iranian and

Turkish, without any prospect of coming together. It is an inflammable area of even greater

weakness, open to outside manipulation whose success is not guaranteed, but which the

world cannot ignore because of the still needed fossil resources it contains. The last

concerns sub-Saharan Africa, which European colonization enabled to leapfrog several

millennia in barely a century by bequeathing political coalescence without the long warlike

processes of polity creation that other continents had experienced. The result is “fragile

polities on uncertain transpolities” (p.495), and a third zone of weakness conducive to

violent conflict. The oligopolists cannot afford to ignore it as globalization has turned the

planet into a system that local disturbances can easily destabilize.

A final flaw is the asymmetry between oligopolists and non-oligopolists. The very

wide power gap between the two groups can incite a strong polity to attack a much weaker

one : the outcome is not predetermined, because provided that it does not expose its forces

to a head-on clash, the weak can win by not losing, and the strong lose by not winning. The

opposite situation is irrational, since the weak lose by not winning and the strong win by

not losing, which seems assured (but terrorism is then the strategy adopted which, if

sustainable over the longer term, is apt to reverse the perspective).

8 L’auteur relève à ce sujet : “La stratégie russe actuelle sur sa périphérie occidentale n’acquiert un semblant

de rationalité transpolitique que par l’assurance qu’en aucun cas il n’y aura de réaction militaire du côté

européen” (p.494).


The types of war to be expected, if the hypothesis of a five- or six-major-power

transpolity proves correct, are between two oligopolists, two non-oligopolists, or one or

more oligopolists and one or more non-oligopolists. (Civil war is a possibility dismissed as

irrelevant here). The first case is unlikely because the available armaments would make it

suicidal for both sides : the dominant strategy must be deterrence, a prediction borne out by

the facts so far. The third case is hardly more likely, for a different reason : the weaker side

can always seek support from another oligopolist, which even if such support is not

entirely certain is likely to dissuade the aggressor (as in the cases of Russia against

Ukraine, of China against Taiwan, for example), whose only rational option is to refrain

from any frontal assault (though aggressive or intimidating manoeuvres underhand and/or

by proxy, in the Russian “hybrid” manner, are possible).

The second case, on the other hand, that of wars between medium or small powers

over regional transpolities, offers a greater probability, which has been abundantly attested

to in recent decades. It entails the risk of destabilizing the global balance, which could

push oligopolists to intervene in order to encourage compromise or impose a settlement –

that is if they accept the oligopolar logic of strategic equilibrium and convince themselves

that it is a positive-sum game. They can of course seek to score points against each other

by supporting one of the belligerents. But they are then exposed to the risk of sufficiently

alarming miscalculations and loss of control to bring them to their senses and incite them

to support a collective settlement. Another possibility is that, as a result of a local civil war

gone wild, humanitarian compassion generates growing awareness of humanity as

interdependent and the subject of its own history ; or that local civil wars disseminate

terrorist metastases whose threat is so serious and widespread that they cannot be ignored

and call for collective action to put an end to them. In all these configurations, the

imposition of the oligopolar order gives the phrase “international community” more

substance than it had previously possessed, and collective action the character of police

operations rather than wars. J. Baechler draws the conclusion in the following terms :

The hypothesis does not predict the disappearance of war, but its rarefaction

through decreasing probability, and its replacement by increasing police

operations (...) over the planetary transpolity. The facts confirm the prediction

and allow for a more optimistic diagnosis of the world’s polemological state

than is usually the case. It will behove historians of the present time to confirm

this judgement with the appropriate abundance of detail (p.499).

Oligopolarity and Confederation

Polity and transpolity form the basis of the concept of war and distinguish it from

other violent conflicts. The transition from one to the other is either cause or effect. War

can indeed unify a transpolity through conquest ; the disintegration of a polity often leads

to it as well, as in Biafra in 1968-1970 or in former Yugoslavia in 1990-1995.

The best chances of peace today would be ensured by the as yet unlikely transition

from an oligopolar transpolity to a world federation without recourse to the imperial

attractor, the latter undoubtedly doomed to failure in present and future circumstances. The

existing confrontations between oligopolists, based on interests, ideologies, passions or


identities, are too strong in the short term to envisage an accelerated march towards a

world polity ensuring peace through justice – a prospect nonetheless included in the idea of

peace as the end of the political, itself a pre-eminent order among the orders of human

activity. Between world federation and the maintenance of oligopolar equilibrium,

however, an intermediate term – confederation – exists.

The confederal model is “a close alliance between several polities which agree to

settle their conflicts peacefully, bringing them before a common arbitration body, and to

stand together (...) when dealing with the outside” (p.499). It is different from the federal

model, which is a real polity. The reason for this is that a confederation is based on

“renewed delegations to a body which draws its substance from these delegations. (...) The

system imposes the rule of unanimity, thus giving each constituent polity a right of veto”,

from which “must result an alignment on the lowest common denominator” (...), “limited

efficiency, and a risk of impotence” in external relations (p.500). Each confederate polity

can defect at any time, which the confederation cannot prevent, except by starting a war

that would be contrary to its first principles. On a continuum leading from a maintained

oligopolar transpolity to the quasi-polity of a world confederation, multiple intermediate

positions can be imagined.

That being the case, the issue is to identify present signs pleading in favour of a

progression of humanity, in the age of globalization, beyond pure oligopolarity

in the direction of a confederal quasi-polity, capable of defining rules of the

game and law in search for the common good of humankind, while awaiting a

possible mutation towards a planetary federal polity (ibid.).

Humankind as Subject of its Own History ?

There are indeed converging signs of this trend. One is the rise of the reference to

human rights, a set of freedoms, entitlements, and prohibitions of inhuman individual or

collective acts (torture, rape, genocide, ethnic cleansing), which “affirm that democracy is

the natural political regime of the species as such and that a human being can only become

fully human under such a regime” (p.501). These rights are to be promoted by everyone,

and enforced by education, public or private interference from outside where they are

violated, but also by courts endowed with universal jurisdiction. “This co-responsibility is

very similar to a planetary citizenship” (p.502). Moving modal sentiment from humanity in

itself to humanity for itself, it contributes to the idea that it must become the subject of its

own history.

One ideological perversion of human rights consists in considering that humans are

entirely defined by their belonging to humanity. This is to forget that human nature is pure

potentiality and is only embodied through particular socialisations ; it also amounts to

denying the historicity of humanity, a consequence of its freedom. The diversity of

possible acculturations and particular histories “is not the outdated heritage of a

surmounted stage of dispersion of the species into artificial varieties, but an essential

character of the species as species” (p.503). Another ideological perversion consists, on

the contrary, in rejecting human rights as a mere expression of Western culture and in


making exhortations to respect them, outside interference and universal jurisdiction the

signs of its arrogance and instruments of its domination over other cultures. Yet,

the particular conditions of an emergence does not exclude the universality of

what has emerged, any more than the European circumstances of the birth of

science in the 17th century compromise its universal validity (p.507).

A second indication is the universalization of capitalism as the economic regime

best able to ensure prosperity, even in nominally communist regimes after the collapse of

the USSR illustrated and sanctioned the failure of economies administered from above,

with little concern for preserving private and intimate spaces. Nor is this development free

from false ideological interpretations, such as that which consists in seeing economic

prosperity as the final end of humanity, whereas it is merely about increasing resources to

meet needs that only politics and ethics are capable of evaluating and orienting.

The Globalizing of Major Issues

Humanity’s new awareness of its common destiny is the result of globalization and

the increased interdependence of polities and societies it has brought about. Environmental

problems common to all have attracted attention since it has become clear that humankind,

free but fallible, is disrupting the balance and self-regulations of the physical and living

kingdoms. Gigantic “butterfly effects”, already effected or only feared for the future,

reinforce the perception of multiple interdependencies. The same applies to demographic

issues – the upheavals caused by differential fertility rates, questions about the capacity to

feed a growing world population before demographic transition processes affect it in its

entirety, and even more so to the political problems associated with large migration flows.

But one could multiply the areas that reinforce these perceptions of the unity of the planet

and the human species, starting with the current pandemic (not mentioned because it was

still to come at the time of the book’s publication).

A Cultural Laboratory

Cultural realignments are implied by the hypothesis of modernity as matrix change.

As earlier, the issue is to imagine hypothetical models of evolution, and identify current

signs of such inflections.

The first concerns morphologies, the cement that holds together individuals, groups

and networks by means of a principle of solidarity. Societies have so far been based either

on groups organized into polities (cities, chiefdoms, nations, empires), or on integrated sets

of nested groups (bands, tribes, castes, feudalities). The hypothesis here is that they could

be recomposed on the basis of specialised networks formed around orders of activity,

juxtaposed but likely to coagulate into fluid groups according to common objectives. The

author notes that the United States is more amenable to such developments than Europe

because its definition of nationhood emphasizes compliance with the rules of the game

rather than collective historical substance. Europe, the birthplace of the nation, is not a

nation and will not be one. Political union and the demands of adapting to realigned global

transpolities highlight the growing disjunction between polity and nation. Its

maladjustment calls for a new morphology, which could take the form outlined above. The


perceptible return of the medieval acceptation of the word ‘nation’, more cultural and

affective than political and ideological, seems to go in this direction.

The demographic assumption is that the world is safe from the collapses or

explosions of the pre-modern era, that the gene pool, divided into isolates for millennia, is

unifying on a global scale, and that family patterns are diversifying, without it being

possible to predict whether the world population will increase, stagnate or decrease as a

result.

Moreover, modernity makes ideological, political or social uses of religions less

relevant, unless new revelations emerge. Religions do not undergo doctrinal upheavals, and

become more individual and private because they are based on free adherence, even if their

followers create networks, or even occasionally organize into pressure groups. Schisms

and periodic crises occur due to the constraints of collective decision-making. However,

these purified and à la carte religions are more in evidence in the Western world than in

other regions, where religious modernity has hardly taken hold yet. Islam, which inherited

from earlier Near Asian traditions a quasi-confusion between community and society, is at

odds with modern secularization.

Finally, the perfectly delimited polities inherited from the European conception are

becoming more fluid. Their definition as a framework within which all conflicts are

pacified by justice gives way to another in which there are as many polities as there are

types of conflict to be resolved. Such a configuration is in harmony with the differentiation

of orders and the morphology of networks. However, it faces the difficulty that other

polities maintain the old configuration and will not go along. But it can be facilitated by

the transformation of the oligopolar transpolity into a quasi-polity. An ultimate step would

be taken (it is impossible to say whether it will, or when) if the oligopolists’ polities (not

necessarily their cultural identities) were to break down and if the quasi-polity were to

mutate into a planetary polity based on variable definitions depending on the problems to

be solved.

The construction of Europe provides a reduced scale model of such a world polity,

since the deconstruction at work of rigid nation-polities is breeding a variable-geometry

polity, if only the constraints of the global game allow it to do so. On a planetary scale,

international institutions of all kinds (associative, jurisdictional, economic, cultural, political)

pointing in the same direction are in place – with the reservation that their substance is still

only that which polities are willing to concede. “But human history is not over. In a certain

sense, that of the unified histories of humanity as one, it has only just begun, after tens of

millennia of natural history and millennia of traditional histories of dispersed humanity"

(p.516).

The book ends with a masterly summary that brings out in a nutshell the author’s

original, powerful thought, one that makes polemology, the science of the nature,

dimensions, role and impacts of war, a department of politology, itself a central part of

anthropology in the broad sense of a science of the human kingdom. J. Baechler had made


clear from the outset the aim and scope of his project : not reiterate, through exegesis and

commentary, what Clausewitz and Raymond Aron (to whom the volume is dedicated) had

perfectly expressed before him in the only two works he considers definitive – On War,

and Peace and War among Nations –, but plough the same field while following a distinct

thread : that of historical sociology and sociological history, embracing all ages and

civilizational areas as far as documentation will allow. The challenge has been met, and

how !

Upon closing the book after a second attentive reading, this writer was at great

pains to find fault with it. True, its neologisms and the multiplication of fine conceptual

distinctions are apt to baffle the reader to begin with ; yet, as he or she eventually gets

accustomed to them, they turn out to be not only useful but particularly enlightening. One

has no trouble coming to terms with “polity” and “transpolity” : “State” and “international

relations” would be anachronistic or inappropriate in many of the periods and contexts

discussed. A little more difficult initially (especially for those whose school fare did not

include ancient Greek) are the nuances introduced by, for example, “sodality”, “sociality”

and “sociability”, but one ends up realizing, a few pages or chapters later, how these

distinctions effectively serve the demonstration. Even the numerous reiterations of the

overall sequence of reasoning that dot the text prove precious. They would undoubtedly be

reproved in an exam paper, but in a 538-page work where a very complex argument

unfolds (and which, as one might have guessed, does not read like a novel), they happen to

be quite welcome, as they make it possible to read it chapter by chapter at different times,

without on each occasion having to locate previous passages expounding the line of

argument that will help grasp the new points made. In fact, the only serious criticism that

can be levelled at this thick volume is its lack of an index : it would greatly facilitate the

reader’s task, and one cannot too strongly advise the publisher to add one in a future

edition.

Guerre, Histoire et Société is clearly a rare and important book, probably as

valuable as its two avowed models. It is a must read for serious social scientists, not least

those specializing in war studies, who will find reading it an exceptionally enlightening

and rewarding experience. But one might also wish that it be meditated upon by advisers to

those who may one day be faced with the tragic choice of war or peace. May this

inordinately long review encourage them to do so !

Bernard Boëne

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Jean Baechler Guerre, Histoire et Société Éléments de ...resmilitaris.net/ressources/10325/50/res_militaris...Guerre,Histoire et Société is one of those books that arouse admiration