Ain't gonna make war no more

Seventy years ago today -- June 10, 1940 -- some of my older relatives in Rome recall, they and their fellow schoolchildren were shepherded into the vast Piazza Venezia to fill the crowd cheering Benito Mussolini's hypnotic announcement that Italy was now at war against "the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the west."   The war-intoxicated crowd, shouting "Guerra, guerra!" like the chorus in Bellini's Norma, would all too soon drink the bitter dregs of what they demanded.

Italy's disastrous military performance in the war has made this anniversary an obscure historical footnote, in contrast to those of the attacks by its more potent Axis allies on Poland, the Soviet Union, and Pearl Harbor.  Still, Mussolini's march of folly warrants a moment's reflection on history: What he that day called "the struggle between two centuries and two ideas" would result, after five dolorous years, in the fundamental transformation in international relations and international order that has made such wars of aggression all but inconceivable today.

Seventy years before Fascist Italy joined Hitler's war, a resurgent Germany sealed its unification in a stunningly successful war with France, and seized Alsace-Lorraine as its spoils.  Seventy years since, wars of conquest have virtually disappeared from international relations.  Indeed, any interstate war is today a rarity.

The cult of war animated right-wing nationalism leading up to both world wars, celebrating the purifying and ennobling effect on a nation's character of blood bravely shed and lives heroically lost.  In the decades since, right-wing nationalists often demand toughness, but even they disavow a mystical glory in war.  Yes, there may be jihadist theologians who exalt martyrdom.  But no country's leaders today would disavow the United Nations Charter's condemnation of "the scourge of war."

In fact, the U.N. Charter may fairly be said to epitomize the opposing vision to that of Mussolini and his Axis partners:  "maintenance of international peace" versus the "iron necessity" of war; "principles of justice and international law" versus "a great people [that] does not evade the supreme trials"; "respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples" versus "the struggle of the fertile and young people against the sterile people moving to the sunset."

Perhaps surprisingly, the broad outlines of this opposing vision have set down deep roots in international society and won enduring acceptance.  The attractiveness of these principles made it hard for Western countries that had subjugated distant lands in the decades before Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia to resist the tidal wave of decolonization that swiftly swept away their empires in the decades after.  They have kept alive the bacillus of internationally recognized human rights that has weakened predatory and repressive regimes.

The universal acceptance of these inclusive principles has had at least as much of an impact in preventing interstate wars as have much-vaunted theories of nuclear deterrence -- I'd argue much more impact, in fact.  And the institutions created to maintain security have had reasonable success in containing and shutting down outbreaks of war when they occur, as they periodically have done in the Balkans and Middle East.  Most of the armed conflicts that have raged since 1945--and certainly since Suez a decade later--have begun as struggles for independence or power within countries or territories, in which outsiders have seen reason (often unwisely) to involve themselves. 

For all the hot air vented in the often interminable debates in the United Nations and other international bodies, the fact is that all parties seek to hang their arguments on ratified Charter principles or international treaty obligations.  The countries whose bellicose leaders had plunged the world--and their own populations--into the catastrophes of the 1940s have today internalized the habits of peace perhaps even more profoundly than the eventual winners of that titanic struggle, but even the "sole surviving superpower" now practices restraint.  Saddam Hussein's Iraq (and the world reaction to it) is the exception that proves the rule:  Wars of conquest are a thing of the past.  

Mussolini had it right seventy years ago in seeing his war as one between "two centuries and two ideas."  Fortunately, his throwback century and throwback ideas are the ones that permanently lost out.

Comments

[Ken Tharp]

Thanks for your thoughtful, hopeful analysis and commentary! I'll share it with my family's younger generation.

[Online CPR]

I hope we just get out. Sooner than later.

[Maksim Grakis]

Your remarks would have been complete by mentioning the Mussolini like madness that push the US under G W Bush to carry on the only war of aggression, since the Second World War, against a defenseless nation, causing hundreds of thousands to perish for no reason.
Thank you.
Maksim Grakis

[Jeffrey Laurenti]

I welcome Maksim Grakis's perspective, and I quite share his opposition to the Bush administration's unprovoked invasion of Iraq. I would point out, however, that the 2003 attack was NOT "the only war of aggression since the Second World War." As my piece pointed out, it was Iraq itself that had invaded and announced annexation of a neighboring U.N. member state in 1990: "Saddam Hussein's Iraq (and the world reaction to it) is the exception that proves the rule."