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Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war

economist.com

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Re: Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war

#31

Post by berntb »

Tloewald wrote: post #25
berntb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Bear in mind that the US has been fighting wars against far weaker opponents for over sixty years now That is only natural. The democratic peace theory (see Wikipedia) seems to work, not even USA have wars with democracies but with really unpleasant dictatorships. With the dictators that have nuclear weapons, you had (have) MAD as in "Mutually Assured Destruction". Not even USA starts a war. Which is why every tor…

Only if you define dictatorship as someone the US doesn't like and democracy as someone the US likes. There's no evidence that the government of north vietnam was worse than the organized crime cartel the US backed in the south (that had monks immolating themselves in the streets in protest against them). The US also backed Saddam Hussein against Iran, overthrew a left-wing but democratically elected government in Ch…

Sigh... The subject was war not realpolitik games of common interests, which all countries play (and lie about).

Most of those games also went away with the cold war.

An irrelevant question about your claims:

I don't know about Cuba's number of political prisoners, executions at revolution time, control of information, police state mentality. It might be less bad than the previous junta, but it is worst in the Americas now since the other unpleasant juntas disappeared... Afaik, the south Vietnam regime was horribly corrupt but can it really be worse than a communist place?! (Is that ideology? Do you have references?)

Re: Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war

#32

Post by panabee »

npt4279 wrote: post #9

Thankfully, I don't see WWIII starting anytime soon... But I've always strongly thought the "globalisation will make war unthinkable" argument is naive. We're tribal creatures -Nationalism trumps economic interest at the end of the day. History shows this to be true. As the author hinted at - Russia, Germany, Britain, Belgium, and France were each other's biggest trading partners - by far! Heck, a Belgium company bui…

Interesting perspective. Agree that national interests ultimately trump economic interests. At the same time, what would advance the discussion even more is data on how critical international trade was/is to each country. For instance, what % of GDP for pre-WWI Germany came from beyond its borders vs. present-day China. Globalization may not prevent war, but perhaps it's possible that more intertwined relationships -- whether through deeper financial gain or cultural understanding -- could decrease the likelihood of world war.

Re: Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war

#33

Post by jessriedel »

VLM wrote: post #7

Not a very good analysis of the causes of WWI or application to today: Problems: 1) Cultural attitude of "eh, war is not so bad and higher tech means we'll be home by xmas". See franco-prussian war and the most recent "world war" being Napoleon's activities in the decade after the revolution a century ago. I'm not seeing much warmongering as a cultural phenomena. Of course that can change quickly, 90% of everything A…

Why would you expect there to be such close analogies for so many countries and elements in WWI? Discounting this editorial because there is no one to "play the role of Italy" is weird. The point of the piece is not to say everything is going to be similar, it's (in part) to say that comforting arguments about the war-preventing aspects of economic integration and modernity are insufficient.

Re: Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war

#34

Post by nawitus »

npt4279 wrote: post #9

Thankfully, I don't see WWIII starting anytime soon... But I've always strongly thought the "globalisation will make war unthinkable" argument is naive. We're tribal creatures -Nationalism trumps economic interest at the end of the day. History shows this to be true. As the author hinted at - Russia, Germany, Britain, Belgium, and France were each other's biggest trading partners - by far! Heck, a Belgium company bui…

>Nationalism trumps economic interest at the end of the day. History shows this to be true.

I interpret history as "nationalism used to trump economic interests". A lot of has changed since. Most countries are representative democracies, and it's more difficult for leaders to go into a war.

As for the tribal argument, I think the "nation state" is dying. Tribes are subcultures these days[1]. The internet connects me to my subcultures (like Hacker News), and it matters less every year what country I happen to physically live in. There's also the argument that the world is more united these days (particularly thanks to the European Union and somewhat because of United Nations).

1. http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20So...

Re: Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war

#35

Post by Tloewald »

VLM wrote: post #30
Tloewald wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, Germany had overseas colonies, including one where they committed genocide (foreshadowing later bad acts). And do you think today's globalization isn't colonialism? Explain the real differences, including a discussion of multinationals investing in third world nations and gaining defacto control of their governments and Chinese treaties sewing up the national resources of African countries and acquiring long term…

"Germany had overseas colonies" Yeah like 3 small states in Africa almost by accident. To compare to a "real" colonial empire take a look at the Spanish empire at peak, or the British empire around WWI, or the French colonial empire, or the Russian empire, the Dutch empire... Needs a sense of scale. The Russian Empire around 1900 was the 3rd largest empire in history, something like 1/8th of a billion people. German…

Yes, a point you did not make and which I did not contradict.

Indeed, the same applies to several other European "powers". Also some European nations had quite extensive overseas colonies while not really being military powers (e.g. Belgium and Holland). For that matter. Russia had no colonies that I know of.

Re: Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war

#36

Post by thaumasiotes »

VLM wrote: post #7

Not a very good analysis of the causes of WWI or application to today: Problems: 1) Cultural attitude of "eh, war is not so bad and higher tech means we'll be home by xmas". See franco-prussian war and the most recent "world war" being Napoleon's activities in the decade after the revolution a century ago. I'm not seeing much warmongering as a cultural phenomena. Of course that can change quickly, 90% of everything A…

> Maybe if you put the American Empire in its place and position this in the latter half of the 2000s century and starving people want our rice/corn?

Starving people don't make war; they have more pressing problems.

Re: Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war

#37

Post by Tloewald »

Tloewald wrote: post #25
berntb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Bear in mind that the US has been fighting wars against far weaker opponents for over sixty years now That is only natural. The democratic peace theory (see Wikipedia) seems to work, not even USA have wars with democracies but with really unpleasant dictatorships. With the dictators that have nuclear weapons, you had (have) MAD as in "Mutually Assured Destruction". Not even USA starts a war. Which is why every tor…

Only if you define dictatorship as someone the US doesn't like and democracy as someone the US likes. There's no evidence that the government of north vietnam was worse than the organized crime cartel the US backed in the south (that had monks immolating themselves in the streets in protest against them). The US also backed Saddam Hussein against Iran, overthrew a left-wing but democratically elected government in Ch…

@bertb

Communism isn't worse than anything no matter how bad. It's hard to determine how bad some of the less nasty communist regimes such as Cuba and Vietnam would have been without massive economic sanctions from the US. (Both Cuba and Vietnam wanted to be US allies.)

There are several cases among my examples of the US taking action against real democracies.

Some references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_South...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d'état

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'état

Re: Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war

#39

Post by JumpCrisscross »

“We show that the intuition that trade promotes peace is only partially true even in a model where trade is beneficial to all, war reduces trade and leaders take into account the costs of war. When war can occur because of the presence of asymmetric information, the probability of escalation is indeed lower for countries that trade more bilaterally because of the opportunity cost associated with the loss of trade gains.

However, countries more open to global trade have a higher probability of war because multilateral trade openness decreases bilateral dependence to any given country.

Using a theoretically-based econometric model, we test our predictions on a large dataset of military conflicts in the period 1948-2001. We find strong evidence for the contrasting effects of bilateral and multilateral trade. Our empirical results also confirm our theoretical prediction that multilateral trade openness increases more the probability of war between proximate countries. This may explain why military conflicts have become more localized and less global over time.”

http://econ.sciences-po.fr/sites/default/files/martinp/CEPR-...

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