Understanding global security - Peter Hough

MILITARY THREATS TO SECURITY FROM STATES
in the 1990s can be explained in a number of ways, Clark posits. First, the fact that
this was a cold rather than ‘hot’ war served as a disincentive to the protagonists
to encourage a thaw. ‘Since the Cold War was not a proper war it is fitting that it
should be brought to an end by a peace that is not a proper peace’ (Clark 201: 4). The
originator of the term Cold War, Don Juan Manuel, noted this problematic phenomenon
half a millennium earlier. ‘War that is very strong and very hot ends either with
death or peace, whereas cold war neither brings peace nor gives honour to the one
who makes it’ (Halliday 1986: 2). Second, the Cold War was also an unusual war in
that it was resolved through negotiation and a voluntary, rather than imposed, climb
down by one side. The fact that fruitful negotiations between warring parties preceded
rather than proceeded the conflict served to make them appear superfluous later on.
Third, even ‘normal’ multilateral wars are rarely ended at a stroke. Complete harmony
is unlikely to succeed the hostility and certain unresolved issues are likely to live on.
Prins’ own answer to his question on whether the Cold War could be replayed is
that a sequel is indeed possible, but is ‘unlikely to be cast with the same team of
actors’(Prins 2002: 48). Clark makes a convincing case that there is often a certain
‘time lag’ following major multilateral conflict before real peace is achieved but could
it be that the Cold War will not so much fade away as metamorphose into another
global conflict?
This view was most notably articulated by the US Realist Huntington in his
influential ‘Clash of the Civilizations’ thesis (Huntington 1993). Huntington contends
that transnational cultural conflict is now where the logic of the security dilemma
can best be applied, rather than inter-state rivalry. Major antagonism between democracy
and Communism may be over but there is no ‘end of history’ and the civilization
of Liberal democracy faces other challenges to its hegemony, particularly from the
‘civilization’ of Islam. The notion of a ‘green peril’ replacing the ‘red peril’ attracted
great interest in both the ‘civilizations’ cited as irreconcilable, particularly with the
rise of anti-western Islamic fundamentalism led by al-Qa’ida and ‘Islamaphobia’ in
some western countries.
Democratic war?
While the idea of cultural conflict has risen in prominence, a corollary to this is that
not everyone is convinced that democratization is the route to ‘perpetual peace’.
Although it may be true that democracies do not fight each other, they are equally
prone to be embroiled in war as non-democracies and have a propensity to fight
autocracies. The restraint shown by democracies in resolving disputes with states
with similar political systems is frequently not exhibited in resolving disputes with
non-democracies. Indeed evidence can be found to suggest that some democracies
are predisposed towards violent resolutions of disputes when dealing with dictatorships.
Supportive cases include the 1956 Suez dispute, when France, Israel and the
UK invaded Egypt, Israeli incursions into the Lebanon and the twenty-first century
US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Democratic peace evangelists Russett and Oneal
admit that two autocracies are more likely to have peaceful relations that one
democracy and one autocracy (Oneal and Russett 1997: 283). In addition, democratizing
states have been shown to be more prone to conflict than stable autocracies
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