Although most pre-modern polities generated political power from military might and occasionally from proto-ideological validation, modern social orders are different in the sense that they, unlike their predecessors, are able both to enforce their coercive power on every stretch of their territory and to ideologically mobilise and legitimise this power. Whereas the traditional rulers had no organisational means to control large swathes of territory and had to rely on the support of local notables, modern nation-states are bur-eaucratic machines capable of monopolising all essential means of violence within their borders. Similarly, while pre-modern power-holders ruled over hierarchically segmented and culturally diverse illiterate peasants devoid of any sense of universal equality, modern nation-states derive legitimacy from the popularly shared belief that its inhabitants are all members of the same, principally egalitarian and, in key respects, culturally homogenous, nation.
The historical transformation from the pre-modern to modern forms of rule owes a great deal to the two processes explored in this chapter – the cumu-lative bureaucratisation and centrifugal ideologisation of coercion. As I have tried to show in this and the previous chapters, these two processes were his-torically contingent, gradual and slow to emerge but once the institutional seeds of ideational and organisational power were planted, they grew expo-nentially to create the modern, infrastructurally, ideologically and coercively powerful nation-state. As states developed and were strengthened by intern-ally monopolising violence and increasing ideological accord, they helped foster a sense, shared by most modern individuals, that modernity is much
less violent than its historical predecessors. As the borders of nation-states became the boundaries of distinct, internally pacified, societies, any com-parison with the pre-modern world seemed destined to pinpoint a sharp decline in everyday violence. After all, we do not crucify heretics, bend bodies on the wheel or boil people alive in our town squares. However, it is important to take into account that with domestic pacification violence has not vanished, it has only been transformed – mostly through externalisation into warfare. The birth of the modern age saw the rampant intensification of external collective violence – from the upheavals of the French and American Revolutions, the Napoleonic wars and colonial massacres to the total wars of the twentieth century.
What is distinct in this development is the fact that the enormous scale of human sacrifice in the nineteenth and twentieth century wars has not dented the structures of social cohesion in modern nation-states. On the contrary, the magnitude of the death toll has substantially increased one form of internal collective solidarity which in the process acquired firm ideological under-pinning – nationalism (see Chapter 6). The internally shared perception that
‘our’ nation is morally and ideologically right and that ‘our’ actions are uni-versally justifiable combined with the power of modern social organisation, able to put and hold millions of people in the war machine, has created an environment that fosters the emergence of ontological dissonance.
To reconcile the modern view that all human beings are of equal moral worth, and that human life is precious, with the everyday practice of mass extermination, a person has to deny humanity to his or her enemy. In the pre-modern world there was no structural need to depict your enemy as less than human: not only because this was a profoundly hierarchical world where everybody knew his or her place and where peasants were perceived and saw themselves as an inferior species when compared to nobility or town dwellers, but also because most wars were fought between warrior nobles engaged in ritualistic exercises involving mutual respect. Hence, by declaring universal equality, the modern age also opens the door wide for unimagin-able cruelty, as any slide to protracted warfare creates conditions for the dehumanisation of the enemy. In this way, nominal equality in times of war proves to be a major disadvantage, since in order to delegitimise the actions of the adversary one has to demonstrate his or her illegibility for membership of the human race. In other words, for mass killings to happen, it is necessary to overcome ingrained values, inculcated through the long-term processes of primary and secondary socialisation, which cherish and treasure human life. To do so successfully, the nation-states and individuals themselves have
to portray and understand their enemies as monsters and animals who have no regard for human moral principles and whose actions prove their intrinsic inhumanity. In order to exempt them from universal ethical standards, the Nazi state had, paradoxically, to depict Jews both as subhuman and super-human. To make a small, politically insignificant and largely invisible seg-ment of German society look dangerous, threatening and highly discernible it was essential to conceptualise Jews both as animals (parasites, vermin, etc.) and as exceptionally skilful plotters who were able to mastermind the takeover of the entire world (Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy). The fact that most Jews were so assimilated and integrated in the German society was taken as a further proof of their (superhuman and subhuman) devious, canny and un-human nature. Similarly, one of the first twentieth century genocides, the mass killings of Armenians in 1915, was orchestrated and executed not by an authoritarian, backward and decaying empire but by the modernising, secular and Westernised Young Turks movement, bent on creating a modern culturally homogenous nation-state. To implement this ideological blueprint they had to represent the ordinary Armenian peasantry as a treacherous fifth column endangering the very existence of the modern Turkish state. They too became understood as subhuman and superhuman at the same time.
It is no historical accident that genocide is a phenomenon of modern times, as any attempt to systematically annihilate entire groups of people on the basis of their cultural difference requires the existence of both modern social organisation and modern ideology. Although contemporary humans are prone to think of their lives as being less constrained by external controls and substantially freer than those of their historical predecessors, the general increase in the organisational and ideological powers of the modern states indicates otherwise.
The key principle of any social organisation is hierarchy. Bureaucracy would not be able to function if it was not clear who gives orders to whom and if incompliance was not punished. A bureaucratic hierarchy is premised upon the relationship of the dominating and the submissive; hence follow-ing orders automatically implies the presence of external constraints and a willing obedience. In other words, the hierarchical relationships of the pre-modern world, whereby one is submissive to king or a despot, are replaced with another and much more efficient form of submission – institutional obedience channelled through organisational supremacy. As hierarchy is now seen as justified (a further sign of increasing ideological power in mod-ernity) since the compliance is derived from institutional rules and regula-tions, rather than from the vacillating human will, it acquires much more
structural potency. However, the fact that bureaucratic hierarchy is more legitimate and more efficient than patrimonial systems of rule, neither makes it more pleasant nor its outcomes less violent. On the contrary, precisely because the modern bureaucratic machine has nearly universal validation, organisational strength and efficiency, it is more likely to generate large-scale systematic murder. Modern bureaucracy is not only better at achieving the submission of huge groups of people but it is also better at breaking the bonds of micro-level intra-group solidarity, as the institutional compartmentalisa-tion of responsibility dissolves the common moral universe and makes social agency invisible. It is in this sense that the ‘Eichmann syndrome’ in which the individual’s sense of ethical responsibility is eliminated through bureau-cratic diligence and the strict following of orders is truly possible only in the modern age of advanced social organisation. The instrumental rational-ity of administrative apparatus thus transforms moralrational-ity into institutional efficiency.
Similarly, the military bureaucratic machine applies the same principles of efficiency and productivity as a modern factory and is valued accord-ingly. Caputo (1977: 160) illustrates this well in the context of the Vietnam War: ‘the measures of a unit’s performance in Vietnam were not the dis-tances it had advanced or the number of victories it had won, but the num-ber of enemy soldiers it had killed (the body count) and the proportion between that number and the number of its own dead (the kill ratio)’. Hence if the number of killed Vietcong significantly surpassed the number of dead American soldiers, the organisational rationality would imply an absolute military success. In times of war this instrumental rationality is wedded with value rationality, that is, ideology, as a society that finds itself in the condition of total war has an overarching goal and values associated with this goal – a commonly shared telos of wining the war. While in peacetime there is no common ultimate purpose, as social and individual agents pur-sue their own aims, in wartime values and interests bring organisational and ideological power to the forefront: the actions of an entire society are to be governed by a single purpose. The enormous killing fields of modern battlefields, the efficiency of mass extermination through genocidal policies and the unparalleled kill ratios of twentieth century warfare all demonstrate that when it comes to successful mass murder the contemporary nation-state has no historical equivalent. No other political entity has had such potent organisational means at its disposal to coerce individuals to pursue a single military purpose, and has been able to rely on the most sophisticated mechanisms to ideologically justify such a goal.
Conclusion
There is something profoundly disturbing in modernity’s relationship with war and violence. Although our age, like none before, nominally despises any use of violence, it has also generated more bloodshed and destruction than all previous historical periods combined. This is not to say that mod-ern individuals are more violent than their pre-modmod-ern predecessors per se;
on the contrary, it is precisely because contemporary humans do not toler-ate individual acts of violence that they invoke the authority of an external, coercive, arbiter – the nation-state. However, the very fact that we surrender our individual or group right to violence to the monopolistic social organ-isation in exchange for long-term security creates a situation where such organisations gradually accumulate more coercive power which ultimately can be, and is used, against us and other human beings. In other words, the large-scale social organisations, such as the nation-states, become simultan-eously realms of individual liberty and of collective imprisonment: to free ourselves from domestic robbers and individual murderers we either become state-sponsored killers ourselves (through military conscription in war) or we directly or indirectly justify such killings (through ideological legitimisa-tion). Hence, by attempting to circumvent perpetual ontological dissonance, modern humans find themselves in a paradoxical situation in which they reinforce the very sources of this dissonance: ideologies and social organisa-tions. To delegitimise killing and destruction caused by social organisations coated in ideological discourses, modern humans invoke further ideologies and demand action on behalf of other organisations. Even though they are both products of human action and can be transformed, or possibly even eradicated, by human action, social organisations and ideologies remain overpowering precisely because, once set in motion, there is little possibility of breaking this vicious circle.
Although the historical origins of this structural trap go all the way back to the states of Mesopotamia and Egypt, it is on the European continent that the cumulative bureaucratisation of coercion and centrifugal ideologisation have developed as fully fledged and highly discernible processes. To under-stand why this is so, it is paramount to explore the role war and violence have played in the social development of other continents.
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Introduction
The dramatic economic rise of the European states in the last few centuries and their nearly absolute global political dominance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been referred to as ‘the European mir-acle’ (Jones 1987). Although historical sociologists generally agree that after lagging behind for a long period of time Europe suddenly surged ahead of Asia and other continents, there is no agreement as to when, how and why this happened. There are basically two contrasting views of this development which, for the sake of simplicity, can be termed ‘Europeanist’ and ‘non-Eu-ropeanist’. Europeanists (Hall 1985; Mann 1986; Jones 1987; Gellner 1988a) argue that the fundamental breakthrough to modernity emerged only in pre-industrial Western Europe and was deeply rooted in the continent’s unique geographical, demographic, ecological and geopolitical position. In contrast, non-Europeanists (Pomeranz 2000; Goldstone 2002; Hobson 2004; Darwin 2008) see this rise as occurring much later (nineteenth century) and link it primarily to the birth of the industrial revolution, the incidental availability of cheap and abundant coal reserves in Britain and the acquisition of essen-tial resources from the New World colonies. Europeanists stress the internal sources of this transformation, such as the relatively unique multipolar sys-tem of competitive states that encouraged the growth of civil society and hence limited rulers’ despotic powers. In contrast non-Europeanists attrib-ute more importance to external causes such as the exploitative character of European imperialism and colonialism.
What is of particular interest in this debate is the contrasting interpret-ations of the role warfare and military power played in the rise of European dominance. While most non-Europeanists understand warfare through the prism of its economic irrationality and destructiveness while deducing mili-tary might from economic supremacy, some Europeanists (Hall 1985; 1987;
Mann 1986; 1988; 2007) emphasise the autonomy of geopolitics and focus on
military competition as a driving force of European modernisation. In other words, for the non-Europeanists warfare is nothing more than a mechan-ism of territorial conquest whereby European empires waged wars to acquire resources for expanding capitalist and industrialist economies, while for Europeanists warfare can have both destructive and constructive outcomes.
They argue that whereas in Imperial China, India and the Islamic world, warfare was parasitic and highly damaging, pre-industrial European wars played essentially a productive role in the birth of modernity. The conten-tion is that, unlike other early civilisaconten-tions, European military competiconten-tion, under the common normative roof of Christianity, prevented mutual exter-mination while simultaneously allowing for the expansion of autonomous economic and political institutions.
The general argument of this chapter, which also follows the thread of the last two chapters (3 and 4), is closer to the original Europeanist proposition that modernity owes a great deal to the pre-industrial dynamics of warfare in Europe. However, it differs from the Europeanists account in three ways.
Firstly, it emphasises that warfare was the catalyst of modernisation out-side of Western Europe too. This is most clearly evident from the cases of the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia and Japan and the rise of the USA.
Secondly, it aims to bring together some claims of the Europeanists and non-Europeanists in attempting to show under which structural conditions the outcome of warfare is likely to be socially destructive or productive. Finally, it attempts to go beyond the instances of ‘continental determinism’ and ‘cul-tural essentialism’ that hard notions of ‘West’ and ‘East’ regularly imply.
Following the discussion from the previous two chapters that focused pre-dominantly on the Western European experience, the idea here is to compare and contrast developments in Western Europe with the rest of the ‘old’ and
‘new’ world.