Another Century of Conflict?

War and the International

System in the 21st Century
Paul Q. Hirst, Birbeck College, London, UK

Abstract
This article examines the major factors likely to affect sources and methods of armed
conflict in the coming century. First, it considers the role of changing military
technology, concentrating on the Revolution in Military Affairs. Second, it then turns
to the issue of possible balances between economic conflict and cooperation and their
effects on war, including whether the current extreme economic inequality within and
between nations will be reduced by widespread industrialization and the prospects for
China becoming an economic equal of and military rival to the USA. Third, it
considers how climate change may affect the role of states and the sources of conflict
between them. Finally, it raises the question of whether international norms will be
extended and consolidated, leading to greater cosmopolitan governance. It concludes
that this is unlikely in an environment where states are facing confrontational non-state
actors and where the major powers are forced to intervene in collapsing states. The
article envisages a century of conflict, different from the 20th century but in many
ways no less brutal.
Keywords: climate change, international norms, military technology, war

The period since the end of the Cold War in 1989 is in many ways similar to the
situation roughly a century ago, from the 1880s to 1914. Both were and are
periods of large-scale and turbulent change in economics, politics and military
technology. The liberal international economy of the belle poque, created from
the 1850s, was in some ways more open and dynamic than that of today.1 Military
technology changed out of all recognition between 1850 and 1900. The world was
threatened by terrorism and by colonial revolts and areas of instability outside
European rule.2 The Great Powers cooperated in the face of such challenges and
sought to reconcile differences in commercial and colonial questions wherever
possible. The picture of the pre-1914 world as one of intense and inevitable
antagonism between the Great Powers is far from accurate; conflict and
cooperation were more evenly balanced. This rapid change produced a large body
of reflection on the future of war and international politics.3 Some of it was
fatuous and designed to foment conflict between the Powers; such as the English
penchant for invasion scare stories. Some of it was serious and remarkably
prescient; such as Ivan Blochs recognition that the new weapons would lead to
stalemate, to prolonged war and thus to the end of the existing liberal economic
system.4 In the early 20th century a fashionable view among liberal intellectuals
was that war between the Great Powers would be so futile and economically
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(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 16(3): 327342
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destructive that it would become impossible. The political imperative was thus
disarmament and international cooperation. It should be remembered that across
the political spectrum before 1914 it was believed that conflict between the
Powers could be contained and cooperation promoted through international
agreements.5 This was not just the view of intellectuals and pacifists many
mainstream politicians believed this too and participated in the attempts to restrict
and humanize war through new international norms as embodied in the Hague
Conferences of 1899 and 1907.
The situation is somewhat similar today, but with the major difference that
there is now an economic but no longer a military great power system. The G7
dominate the planet economically, but they are all close allies linked in a network
of international agreements, norms and arbitration procedures that the participants
at the Hague could only have dreamed about. In 1900 the current economic
hegemon, the British Empire, faced several powers whose industrial and military
power was growing rapidly relative to its own. The Pax Britannica related to the
world maritime, commercial and financial system. Its functioning depended on
peace, but Britain had no capacity to enforce peace on the major continental
powers. Britain could contain Germany only by sacrificing the sources of its
hegemony and then had no capacity to challenge the USA. In 1922 the UK
conceded naval parity to the USA and thus forfeited hegemony. The British defeat
at Washington was thus more significant in signalling the realities of British
power than the victory over Germany in 1918.
Now the USA is the unrivalled military hegemon. No other power or
combination of powers can rival it either in military spending or in military
technology.6 It dominates the sealanes and airways of the world trading system.
The EU, an economic equal, is a military weakling despite a large defence
expenditure. China and Russia have neither the economic nor the military capacity
to challenge the USA; they can defend their own territory but they cannot project
power significantly beyond their borders. From 1945 to 1989, Americans did not
see things this way, although their military and economic dominance was even
greater in the 1950s than it is today. The USA was convinced that it could be
beaten in technological, economic, and military races with the USSR from the
Sputnik crisis and the Missile Gap into the 1980s.7 Until the early 1990s many
commentators were convinced that the foundations of the US economy were
crumbling and that the USA would be overtaken by Japan as the worlds largest
economy. Even now some commentators are attempting to cast China in this role.
In just over 10 years the USA has moved from Paul Kennedys weary titan,
doomed to decline, to unchallenged superpower.8
In this context many commentators believe that war between the major powers
is obsolete. Economics has displaced war; both leaders and populations are
concerned above all with national prosperity. The dispute resolution procedure of
the WTO will adjudicate on commercial conflicts between nations. Thus the
advanced industrial countries will not use force against one another; but only for
humanitarian protection, peace enforcement and against failed states, the anarchy

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of which threatens international security. Wars will increasingly be within the

borders of poor and failed states. Military intervention will be police action by
major powers without a direct interest in the local conflicts. There are two views
on this development. The first is the optimistic opinion that war will become
increasingly illegitimate: it will be gradually normatized out of existence by
international law. Aggressive war and inhumanity in war will become international criminal acts for which individuals will be accountable before the
standing International Criminal Court (ICC). This view is endorsed by most
human rights lawyers and cosmopolitan political theorists like David Held and
Mary Kaldor.9 The bleaker view is that of the military historian Martin van
Creveld.10 He holds that Clausewitzian war between states is disappearing, but it
is being replaced by non-state conflicts and actors like terrorist groups and
militias. This will be difficult to deal with and will lead to forms of paramilitary
and police action that will be vicious and difficult to regulate with norms. This
view is conditioned by his experience of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and it
gains considerable credence in the aftermath of 11 September. Both outcomes are
possible: the simultaneous existence of norms that apply to some, and extra-legal
police action that applies to others.
If many believe conventional interstate war is obsolete, others believe that the
dominant fact is the changing technology of warfare. The Revolution in Military
Affairs (RMA) will lead to a very different transformation of war, that in which
new high-tech systems remove the old constraints on information and force
projection.11 This will reinforce the dominance of the USA. It will have worldwide real time information on military events, and it will be able to project its
power with new weapons from secure bases and the continental USA. The new
weapons will be truly efficient, far more accurate and destructive than anything
hitherto. They will enable small forces to disorganize and destroy mass armies.
Thus they make possible a post-heroic policy of intervention, in which the USA
need not risk its soldiers lives to achieve policy objectives remote from the
everyday concerns of its citizens. In a way this also takes us back a century, to
colonial victories like Omdurman in 1898 where the Anglo-Egyptian army lost 48
dead, against 11,000 Mahdist dead.
This article is not an exercise in futurology; neither does it attempt specific
prediction. It concentrates on examining some of the major current hypotheses
about war and the international system in the coming century against the available
evidence. The making of predictions about particular future wars is almost always
likely to be wrong. Projecting forward current trends is also likely to be refuted by
events: whether it be generalizing from the recent experience of humanitarian
intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, or extrapolating from Chinas rate of growth
in the mid-1990s to its possible role as a Great Power rival to the USA after 2020.
The only way to look forward is to try to assess the fundamental forces likely to be
acting throughout the century and to see how they might create new sources of
conflict, new ways of fighting, or new environments in which conflict may take
place. There are four basic forces in play and their role needs to be assessed:

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technological change in warfare; changing balances of economic power and

inequality between nations; climate change; and changing cultural standards and
international norms.

Military technology
The hardware on which American military dominance is based is neither that
impressive nor mostly that new. Consider the weapons systems used in
Afghanistan. B52s are nearly 50 years old the plane first flew in 1952. The first
carriers on the scene were the Enterprise, which is 40 years old, and the Carl
Vinson, the design of which is 25 years old. The F14s, 16s and 18s that make up
most of the air power first entered service in the early to mid-1970s. Even cruise
missiles first entered service in the late 1970s. The earlier generation of smart
bombs and precision-guided munitions were designed to fulfil the 1980s AirLand
Battle strategy in Europe and to counter large numbers of Soviet tanks and planes
by achieving a high ratio of hits to weapons launched. Replacement platforms like
the F22 and F35 are not wonder weapons. Combat aircraft, for example, are close
to realistic engineering limits. What has changed US military power is the way
such assets are managed. Until the late 1970s US strategic nuclear and
conventional forces were kept strictly separate. Conventional forces had limited
access to the key national resources of intelligence gathering and communication
through satellites. Such resources were too important to be compromised by use in
marginal conflicts and were reserved for managing the threat of nuclear war. Their
use might reveal how much knowledge the USA had. Since the early 1980s
satellite intelligence and communications has been made increasingly available to
conventional forces. Likewise, the services decided to adopt civilian computers
and benefit from exponential gains in processing power and cost reduction. The
result has been to create a flexible system based around software. All the services
can intercommunicate across the globe in real time, they have close to real time
access to satellite data, and they can use remote sensing to identify targets and
direct weapons to them. When the Global Positioning System (GPS) became
operational in 1990 the USA acquired the means rapidly to reprogram weapons
like Tomahawk cruise missiles against targets and for airplanes to precision-guide
weapons to targets with low risk. This has made US air power truly effective and
made every major ship in the fleet an offensive system rather than just part of a
defensive screen for the big carriers.12
It is important to realize that US military dominance has been assembled out of
bits created at different times for different purposes, and that its gathering together
the elements of an intelligent and controllable system was very recent. The USA
had few of its current capabilities a decade ago. It also shows how much potential
there is further to develop the technologies of the Revolution in Military Affairs.
The essence of the revolution is the further integration of information and
communications technology into military structures and developing new weapons

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to exploit such integration. This will produce major change over the next 2030
years that dwarfs what has happened since the 1980s. However, some of the
claims made for the RMA are ridiculous. Technology will never eliminate the fog
of war remember what happened when somebody fed an old street map of
Belgrade into a computerized targeting database? Sensors cannot get into bunkers.
War will never become a conflict between remote-controlled machines in which
nobody gets killed.13 A war fought with hypersonic cruise missiles from the USA
would be ludicrously expensive and would render America impotent if enemy
information warriors jammed the GPS signal on which such navigation would
rely. Some infantry will be needed at least to illuminate targets and also to make
sure that allied ground forces are doing what they should and do not defect.
But the RMA is real and it will have two phases.14 The first will reconfigure
the armed forces around the new information systems. Armies have been
cumbersome hierarchical structures with long command chains. The different
services have tended to perform distinct functions in parallel with limited
cooperation. New technologies require institutional and operational change. In the
future, commanders down to squad leaders will be networked; they will access
information horizontally and coordinate through the Internet. Frontline troops will
have local and remote sensor data, enabling them to detect enemies early, and be
able to call down massive firepower based on precision-guided munitions with a
high kill rate. Generals will be able to see the whole combat situation and to
assign resources across the whole theatre to a single squad. Similarly, the different
services will combine assets systematically in one campaign. Undoubtedly
bureaucratic rigidities will limit this, and the major services will not dissolve, but
frontline forces will get used to exploiting the flexibility of the new technology.
The second phase will take place over the next 20 to 30 years. Three
technological breakthroughs may make entirely new weapons possible: the further
miniaturizing of computers, advances in robotics and nanotechnology (molecular
scale machines). Conventional ships, planes and missiles are close to the limits of
useful engineering feasibility. Highly centralized information and battle
management systems like AWACS or Aegis are vulnerable to attack by precisionguided weapons and to swamping by electronic warfare. Imagine then a new
range of small weapons-cum-sensors: micro-aircraft that fly by their own sensors
and mini-computers; intelligent jumping mines, that can communicate with one
another and other systems; networked groups of missiles using different sensors
and each carrying many deadly self-guided sub-munitions. Such weapons will
form a dense and decentralized web. They will share information, building up a
picture of attacks or targets through their separate sensors. They will coordinate
attack or defence locally across the web, independent of central control. Such a
network would be hard to destroy. Its defensive potential should be obvious. It
may be easy to mass-produce some of these weapons from the new generic
technologies of the civilian economy. Such networked weapons sound like an
advert for future American power. But are they? States like China are probably
going to be able to make some of these weapons soon after the USA. They will

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not be expensive like AWACS. They will create defensive webs that will be hard
to penetrate, even for advanced weapons. Unlike centralized and second-rate air
defence systems, like that of Iraq, they will be hard to destroy. Such networked
warfare might keep the USA out of any country able to buy such systems off the
shelf, except at high cost in casualties. US offensive dominance is not therefore
guaranteed by the Revolution in Military Affairs.
How might the USA respond in order to retain its offensive power? First, by
micro- and nano-weapons sown over the battlefield from high altitude. People are
scared of biological and chemical weapons today. Yet their direct military value is
limited. They invite countermeasures and deterrence. They are useful to terrorists,
but otherwise hard to deliver or control to any military purpose. Nanotechnology
may offer an alternative. Molecular machines could act like bacteria. They do not
mutate and they have a finite life. Imagine millions of nanobots sown over the
defensive battlefield. They could smother weapons systems, eating vital parts, and
they could find their way through the air vents of bunkers or amoured vehicles,
eating the occupants alive. Currently such weapons are entirely hypothetical and
they may not happen but, even if they do not, micro-systems will happen and they
will be able to accomplish a great deal of this destruction too. Second, imagine a
true robot weapons system. It would have high local mobility, it would be
toughened, it would have complex sensors, and it would have computerized
decision procedures designed to act on them. It would replace infantry in high-risk
environments like urban areas, jungles, or high-tech defensive networks. It would
not look like the robot from the film The Terminator, but it would do the same job.
It could be a mini-helicopter with micro-weapons or it might look like a metal
insect armed with a laser. Imagine if such weapons had been available to be
dropped into Afghanistan to comb the caves and bunkers for Osama bin Laden,
with his picture in their memory banks. These weapons are conceivable. They
would make warfare more terrible and brutal, not less. Against conventional
armies they would make war a one-sided massacre. Against defence systems they
might be highly effective, but they could be used against US forces too in the long
term and also let loose on Western cities. One must hope that computers cannot
get much smaller and that nanotechnology is just too difficult to mass-produce.
The third element is one that the USA will not just seek to exploit by 2030, but
that it is necessary for it to secure now, and that is space.15 The USA needs to
protect its satellites. Its intelligence, communications and weapons guidance
cannot work without them. It also needs to deny such assets to enemies in a
conventional war. Thus it needs defences against missiles, and anti-satellite
systems to attack others satellites. This is one reason the US military is so keen to
expand the current limited missile defence system into an open-ended research
programme to follow on from Star Wars. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
was a folly, conceived as a shield against mass ICBM attack from the Soviet
Union, but the notion of space weapons systems was far from foolish. If the USA
can protect its satellites, then in the long run it will be able to launch precision
attacks from space with a variety of weapons, including kinetic bombs. Space

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weapons will be ever more important to the USA as it seeks to maintain its
military dominance. They will not suffer from the weaknesses of aircraft carriers
or the need for fixed bases. They will literally be above the new weapons
networks of phase two of the RMA.
Thus the RMA will reinforce US dominance in the short term, it may challenge
American offensive power in the medium term, and it will force the USA to
exploit space in order to prevail. The militarization of space is probably inevitable
and will take war into a new dimension. On earth, rivals to US power, whether
terrorist groups or states, will be able to exploit new technologies too and to act on
specifically American and Western weaknesses. US military power and Western
society are wholly dependent on information. If flows of information are disrupted
or information systems corrupted, chaos can ensue. Thus information war,
whether by direct action or cyber terrorism, is a rational and asymmetrical strategy
for information-weak societies and political movements. Key military assets will
be hard to penetrate, but, for example, the traffic control computers in Des Moines
or the Belgian social security system may not.16 Like the future terrorist use of
weapons of mass destruction, information war is highly probable. If aggressive
war does become dominated by non-state actors, then one should assume it will be
bloody and difficult to suppress. The sort of futile military actions, like those of
Israel against the West Bank in the spring of 2002, may become commonplace, as
the powerful states lash out. A war on terrorism is ultimately unwinable while
there are causes that create terrorists. It will also erode support for human rights
on the part of populations subject to terrorist outrages and also lead to states
curtailing the freedom of the peoples they seek to defend in the search for
terrorists. American dominance is not guaranteed by technology nor will the forms
of military superiority the USA can maintain and exploit necessarily protect it
from its most likely and pressing enemies. Those who see the RMA as a guarantee
of another American Century ought to think again.

Economic power
Economic power has been seen traditionally to affect international relations in two
direct ways. First, affluent states may fear the loss of relative economic power,
and rising industrial nations can convert their growing economic strength into a
military challenge. Second, states seek to corner markets and sources of raw
materials. How relevant will such factors be in the 21st century? Currently,
economics is not a major source of military friction, certainly not between the
major powers. The WTO system means that nations have access to each others
markets and to raw materials. With the exception of oil, states need not fear for
vital resources if they have the means to trade. The supply of oil is a collective
issue for the developed nations rather than a source of conflict between them.
Control of Middle East reserves is more vital to Japan, and to a lesser extent the
EU, than it is to the USA. The idea that wars are stimulated by economic

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interdependence that economic losers fear political weakness is not really

credible today.17 Nations have economic alternatives to resolving trade issues.
They can petition the WTO in cases where they believe they have been unfairly
treated, they can then use trade sanctions, and they can also invoke economic
necessity to impose crisis measures. They can in addition seek financial help from
the IMF in order to continue to trade. Before 1914, although the world was
divided into competing empires and although many states adopted protective
tariffs, economic and colonial questions were not the primary source of conflict.
Britain and Germany had resolved most such issues before 1914; what remained a
source of tension was the naval armaments race. In the 1930s economics were a
source of conflict, as states sought to compensate for the collapse of world trade
and investment after 1929 by cornering markets and attempting to build autarchic
economic zones. Economic failure certainly played a part in Japans continued
aggression in China and Germanys project to build a Grossraumwirtschaft, but
Hitler did not go to war because of Germanys balance of trade. Certainly
economic interdependence could not prevent war liberals were wrong about that.
But it is clear that economic conflicts did not cause either of the World Wars.
If the classic state-centred view of economic competition is currently largely
irrelevant, an alternative position on the role of economics in relation to the
international system is that the new integrated global economy is hollowing out
the state.18 Globalization is widely held to have reduced the policy autonomy of
most states, and the more extreme globalization theorists believe that global
markets are dissolving national economies and reducing the relevance of politics.
This view of markets as sovereign, of corporations and markets as the primary
means of social coordination on a world scale, took a huge hit on 11 September. It
has been obvious to all but the most dogmatic economic liberals that markets need
regulation in order to function and that can only be provided by a public power
independent of the immediate market participants. It is also obvious that high
levels of international economic interdependence require a core of common rules
relating to trade, property and technical standards. Such rules require not only
supranational institutions to administer them but also the support and compliance
of states. Markets need to be protected by military force against terrorists, pirates
and rogue states. Even if some of this coordination can be achieved by
international trade associations or by common consent between corporations, as
with the re-emerging lex mercatoria, in the end it is underpinned by state power.
That power requires a combination of scope of action and political cohesion, a
large economic area and a core state or group of states. That is a major reason why
the world economy is not an unstructured global market but is organized around
three key trade blocs: NAFTA, the EU and Japan.19 Their mutual agreement
ensures that common rules are universally accepted. Each is either centred on a
nation state, or in the case of the EU a core of powerful nation states.
The issue of scale is central. Too much cosmopolitanism and the rules become
too homogeneous and the public power too weak. The EU already has a problem
with fitting common standards to different national cultures. International agencies

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would find it difficult to tax or to find legitimacy for military force, unless they
draw on the resources and willing consent of powerful states. Some enthusiastic
globalizers have believed that the future belonged to region states or to city states,
like Singapore.20 Yet such states exhibit a chronic disjuncture between the scope of
their economic activity, which is worldwide, and their capacity to enforce rules,
which is at best local. City states survive because they are embedded in bigger
entities Hamburg in Germany and the EU or have protection from major states,
as Singapore did against Indonesia. A world of city states and global markets
would degenerate into ongoing conflict in all probability because trade and politics
operated on different levels as with Genoa and Venice in the Mediterranean in the
Early-Modern period. Neither city state controlled its trade routes fully hence the
fusion of trade, war and piracy. This could be sustained because both traded
through armed convoys, hardly a realistic prospect for a city state today.
Undoubtedly small nation states are in a similar position: they either seek bloc
membership or they hope to operate within an international environment secured
by the major states and the supranational institutions that states sustain.
There are two other sources of conflict stemming from economic performance
that are worth considering. The first is China. Some believe that Chinas economic
growth will make it a Great Power before mid-century. It could then have a GDP
surpassing that of the USA. It would still be relatively poor, having over 1.5 billion
people, but it could convert a significant portion of its collective national income
into military power. It would be a more successful successor to the USSR, and a
real rival to the USA. Perhaps, but China has to get there first.21 Currently it has
a GDP slightly larger than the size of Italys but 20 times the population. China
has a triple economy. It has a large peasant sector, still poor and starved of investment. It still has a large state and collective sector, much of which is inefficient and
labour intensive. This is kept going by loans from the big four state banks, and the
inefficiency of this sector threatens the solvency of those banks and also of the state
which absorbs their liabilities. Finally, there is a private export-oriented sector, the
size of which is disputed but which probably represents about 25% of employment
and 30% of output. This is heavily locked into world trade and is mainly concentrated into a series of low-value added export markets. This does not sound like
the recipe for rapid industrial modernization like Japan or South Korea. Only if the
domestic market expands, and genuinely efficient producers oriented towards it
develop, will China fully industrialize. It may happen, but the odds are against it.
China is unlikely to be able to sustain the rates of growth of the mid-1990s. Indeed,
it may be forced to engage in prolonged austerity measures to cope with a triple
crisis of rising unemployment in the state sector, insolvent banks, and an overborrowed state. China may become a more effective military power, it may exploit
asymmetrical high-tech niche weapons, but it is unlikely to be a real rival to the
USA as Russia tried to be into the 1980s. It can defend itself, but who in their right
mind would want to attack and occupy a poor country with 1.3 billion people?
The second issue is global income inequality. In the 1990s it was widely
assumed by international institutions like the World Bank that the recipe for

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economic development was available to all: international openness, sound money

and a liberalized domestic financial market.22 After the Asian Crisis and the crisis
in Argentina it should be clear that this rapid financial liberalization is a recipe for
chaos in all but a few exceptional cases. Japan and South Korea did not
industrialize in this way, but with high levels of domestic savings and behind tariff
walls. The odds are that most developing countries will not achieve the transition
to industrial modernity: they will be locked into the international economy as
primary producers and as providers of labour-intensive export goods. The figures
for international inequality are shocking the richest 20% (about 14% of the
worlds population) produce 86% of world GDP, the middle 60% about 13%, and
the bottom 20% just 1% of world GDP.23 If the figures are shocking, the reality is
worse. Populations across the developed world have fled the countryside for
impoverished mega-cities like Cairo or Lagos. (India and China are unusual in
that they still have large peasant sectors.) Such cities are all but ungovernable;
with large numbers of ill-educated young people and large numbers of
underemployed or unemployed. In the Middle East, Latin America and Africa this
impoverished urbanization threatens political stability. Such cities also offer
breeding grounds and havens for anti-Western activists and terrorists.24
The sources of non-Clausewitzian conflict are thus not diminishing. In the
short term this is the most serious and most intractable threat to Western security,
if not stability. Local political chaos and international terrorism cannot destroy the
international economy or challenge major states. Such forces simply make life
more costly, more risky and less free. The populations of the wealthy world will
have to accept restrictions on their liberty if they wish to combat terrorism. It is
also likely that the developed states will restrict migration and travel from many
poorer countries still further. Such threats to the global economy are not as
dramatic as anti-globalization activists and reborn radicals believe. They are not a
structural threat to the system, like a deadly virus; rather they are like an ongoing
debilitating disease that weakens but does not kill the patient. Western states will
have to accept that the future is that they will have to fight an ongoing war
against terrorism, which at best they can hope not to lose but never to win, and
that they will fight ongoing police actions against protestors, migrants and asylum
seekers. This is a grim prospect, but it is the other side of the refusal to promote
greater development Western aid is derisory, given the scale of the problem and,
despite Monterrey, will remain so and to permit migration.

Climate change
Currently corporations and markets are the primary means of the production and
distribution of resources, goods and services; states regulate markets and derive
tax revenue from them. States, therefore, have an interest in maintaining economic
activity, both domestic and international. This could change. Certain key resources
energy, water, farmland could become scarce and states may intervene to

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secure them in order to protect their populations and to ration resource

distribution. States could thus become more salient and markets less so. This
resource crisis would inevitably lead to more conflictual relations between states,
given imperatives to corner resources like those of the mercantilist era or the
1930s. The reason would be climate change. Global warming is a well-established
tendency for which there is now ample evidence.25 It could lead to a variety of
phenomena: rising sea levels and a consequent loss of habitable land in highly
populated areas like Bangladesh or the southern coast of China; desertification
and water shortages, for example in the Middle East and Southern Europe; and
even cooling, with harsher winters, in Western Europe should the Gulf Stream be
degraded by cold water from melting Arctic ice. We have no clear idea of how or
when such change could occur; it may be catastrophic and rapid. If so, states
would have no chance to adapt policies gradually but would be forced into crisis
measures. One should assume serious effects by 2030 and possible catastrophic
effects (like massive melting of the poles) by 2080. There is no point accepting
conservative estimates in the belief that this is the sensible middle course: we
just dont know. The result could well be huge numbers of environmental refugees
and a struggle between states to corner scarce resources. Assume also in this
context that energy sources will have become scarcer and more costly as a result
of the depletion of oil reserves.
The results of such evironmental changes in a world as unequal as now, and
with the same selfish attitudes prevailing in the developed world, are unlikely to
be pleasant. In this context, states may well fight over resources, and displaced
peoples struggle for the right to settle. In a context of scarcity and conflict one
should not assume that the present open trading economy will function smoothly.
It could well go backwards in the wake of financial and economic crisis
consequent upon climate change. In such a situation the present primacy of
cooperation over conflict between the three major trading blocs might shift in the
other direction, although it would be rash to predict war between the major
developed nations. Indeed, both the EU and NAFTA can shift towards a more
autarchic posture without difficulty both still have relatively low trade-to-GDP
ratios. The principal conflicts would most likely be between less developed states
and also between forces in the impoverished world and the wealthy states of the
OECD. The EU and the USA currently have no inherently divergent interests that
would lead to armed conflict, and both are likely to have common enemies.
Climate change is seen by those who view globalization as a potentially
positive process as one of the key forces moving us towards extended international governance.26 Nation states acting alone cannot prevent or cope with
climate change. Actually, neither can international agencies. It is probably too late
entirely to reverse global warming; at best, drastic action to cut energy
consumption and emissions could retard it and prevent an acceleration into
catastrophic collapse. The problem is that such action would require drastic and
coordinated action by the major powers that are the chief sources of the process.
This is not remotely likely. The measures adopted at Kyoto will not prevent global

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climate change, but even they are too much for the principal source of energy
consumption, the USA. No international agency could compel compliance with
really effective measures in the absence of an interstate agreement that included
the major powers and that made provision to aid the developing world to obtain
less damaging energy sources. Such an agency would then rest on the power of the
chief states; it would be in no sense truly supranational. The advocates of
cosmopolitan governance today are rather like those who, in the 1920s,
enthusiastically believed in world government through the League of Nations.

Cultural standards and international norms

Cosmopolitans believe that international integration is pushing us towards
extended governance by international law and towards the common acceptance of
international human rights standards. International law currently relies on a
population of states that abide by the rule of law domestically and thus are willing
to accept judgements against them in international forums just as they are to
accept rulings against the government in national courts. It thus remains statecentred, even if its effect is to limit absolute state sovereignty. How likely is the
continued growth of such a truly global and supranational culture of law? If it
continues to develop, it will be a powerful check upon war not sanctioned by
international law or brutality against ones own citizens. All public officials guilty
of such acts would be subject to the International Criminal Court, in the absence
of effective domestic action against them.
The odds are that we are close to the end of a period of growth of international
norms, rather than at the beginning. The analogy may be made with the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. Then there was widespread hope that interstate
cooperation and arbitration would mean that the need for war could be all but
eliminated and that weapons of war and the conduct of war rendered more humane
by international agreements. However, during the First World War central parts of
the Hague Conventions were violated first by Germany and then by other
combatants. One should separate those norms essential to the current international
system from the normative aspirations of the cosmopolitans. The international
system has always imposed conditions of membership on states. Sovereignty has
been conceded only to those entities whose structure and behaviour conform to the
prevailing interstate norms.27 The question is whether supranational norms on
state behaviour will prevail over those standards that are convenient to states and
whether they will actually apply to all states. Here there will be a real difference
between economics and politics. The international regulation of business activity
and the proliferation of common standards are essential to the world economy.
Economic norms will continue to proliferate and to be enforced by international
agencies.28 However, some of the core principles of the old international law are
wearing thin, as are those of the new international order of human rights that take
precedence over national sovereignty. The doctrine of national sovereignty when

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it crystallized in the 19th century clearly only applied to European states, to the
neo-Europes and subsequently to a few analogues in the non-European world like
Japan. Native rulers were fair game for colonial conquest. Now once again it is
patent that states are not equal, that the sovereignty of some is a fiction, like
Somalia, or seen by the West as a threat, like Iraq. Certainly, the USA is willing to
make up its own international law and to intervene where it perceives it has vital
interests. The West promotes human rights obligations on rulers, but will not in
practice be bound by them. This is true not only of the USA but of the EU too: its
role in intervening in Kosovo and bombing Serbia was dubious at best by current
international standards.
Central to cosmopolitanism is the belief that representative governments tend
to keep the peace internationally and do not attack one another. The growth of
democracy is thus central to international peace and human rights. Cosmopolitans
argue that national democracy needs to be strengthened by greater international
democracy, by a global civil society and by the general acceptance of international human rights law.29 Central is the belief that democracies do not fight one
another, and liberal states keep the peace, only fighting when attacked. In the past
century liberal and democratic states have been the exception among states, and
they have had powerful undemocratic states as common enemies, like Nazi
Germany or the USSR. Hence it was in their interest to band together, and also the
democracies were the haves of the international system challenged by
expansionist and revanchist powers. The point is that when democracy becomes
commonplace its value as a predictor of state behaviour declines. Democracies
may fight if their vital interests clash; the recent past is too exceptional both in the
number and the international situation of the democratic states to form a
judgement on this matter. States can be subject to demagogic pressures towards
bellicosity because they are democracies. Imagine in the recent tension between
India and Pakistan that some major military incident had occurred by accident in
the context of the upcoming Indian elections. A populist governing party like the
BJP would find it hard to back down.
In the USA powerful voices are emerging to claim that the USA needs a new
definition of its role, coincident with its military dominance and global
responsibilities. They argue that the USA as global hegemon is in fact the centre
of a new empire. US leaders should accept imperial obligations and the need for
ruthless but responsible action that goes with it. If the USA is in fact an empire, it
cannot be bound by the norms of those who are subject to its power. The USA
bears the costs and the obligations of world security; it cannot, therefore, be
subject to institutions like the ICC. Influential American writers like Robert
Kaplan advocate an imperial stance and the need to learn from ancient Rome.30 In
the UK the diplomat Robert Cooper argues that the West needs to recognize that it
is running a de facto empire and to be more open about it and more willing to
include those subject to it.31 The sovereignty of lesser states would be an
irrelevance if an explicitly imperial ethos came to dominate among US policymakers.

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The USA in this vision can choose the terms on which it deals with the
international system. It will be multilateral when the policy dimensions are in its
interest and the international institutions involved are substantially under its
control. Thus it will persist with the major institutions of international economic
governance the IMF, World Bank and WTO, but otherwise it will choose why,
how, and when it intervenes. One should not see this as a peculiarity of the Bush
administration; almost any electable US government will follow a variant of this
strategy and, when it does not, it will be constrained by Congress. Thus it is
unlikely that Kyoto or the ICC could have been driven through the Congress, even
had Al Gore, a Democrat committed to the environment and international law,
found himself in the White House. The current US government has refused to
ratify the Kyoto agreements. It has refused to put the ICC convention to Congress
and will not accept the jurisdiction of the Court for its own personnel. It has also
refused to submit to international pressure in its treatment of prisoners from the
Afghan conflict. It is likely for strictly military reasons to abandon at some time in
the future the international conventions preventing the militarization of space, as
we have seen. Moreover, the USA will repudiate the international convention on
landmines. This is because some of the high-tech weapons-sensors it wishes to
deploy in the future are likely to be covered by the very exhaustive definition of
the convention, even though they are not old-fashioned mines. The effect of the
USAs refusal to be bound by these various conventions will undermine the ethos
of the new international law, as it will not apply to the most powerful. All
international norms involve a degree of hypocrisy: they are applied when it is
possible, prudent and convenient to do so. No laws are applied consistently, but
laws that apply to all but are enforced only on some have little legitimacy.
International tribunals have hitherto tried the defeated and the weak. The ICC
raises the stakes; it claims a scope and consistency of application that is new.
Failure to accept its jurisdiction or for major states to cooperate when they have
failed to act domestically will expose its optional nature for the powerful. The
USA is not alone in not signing up to the ICC. China, India and Russia are among
the major states that have not ratified the convention. Moreover, some of the states
that have are hardly advertisements for good governance.
The truth is that politics cannot be completely bound by law, whether national
or international. In a state of exception, leaders are expected to do what is
necessary, and populations will support them.32 The notion that there can be no
politics outside of law, ignores the fact that law is founded on state power even if
it is much more than just an extension of power. Slobodan Milosevics defence
before the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague will be
central in this regard and is ultimately founded on the claim that all leaders of
sovereign states have the right to practise reason of state, not just the USA or the
EU. If the West has the right to realpolitik, then the same right will be claimed by
every leader of a lesser state, whether dictator or not, and every revolutionary
leader. The West may be unable by necessity to be bound by its own rules, but
then it will find they do not bind. The notion of a liberal cosmopolitan order in

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341

which all politicians are subject to common international legal standards and none
are above them is likely to founder on that fact.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is not to predict wars; rather it is to outline the
technological, economic, climatic and normative forces that are likely to shape the
context of conflict in the coming century. Those forces are inclining us towards
more conflict rather than less. Moreover, such conflicts will be multiple: between
states, within states, and between states and non-state military actors. Technology
is likely to make war no less brutal than it is now; giving the advanced countries
vast killing power, but also shifting the balance towards the defence and away
from the current offensive dominance of the USA. Technology is also likely to
place deadly weapons in the hands of terrorists. Major states will remain the
salient actors in international politics, and climate change is likely to enhance their
economic role. That states may grow in power is not an unqualified gain for good
governance; they will do so in a turbulent economic and climatic environment in
which they struggle to secure resources for their populations. Democracy and
liberalism, both domestic and international, will be threatened by the need to
combat terror within and impose Western power without. States are likely to
become more authoritarian and act in violation of human rights more frequently.
International political norms will decline as powerful states flout them and antiWestern forces exploit such hypocrisy for their own ends. This is not a pleasant
prospect. It may be that the forces outlined here will be less powerful, that
climatic change will not be so dramatic, that the RMA will prove more limited in
scope, that the developed countries will shift resources dramatically to tackle
poverty on a world scale, and that international norms will gain in strength and
contain realpolitik. For that to happen, the attitudes of ordinary citizens in the
developed countries would have to change radically: accepting the reduction of
emissions to check climate change, paying for more for aid, welcoming migrants,
and seeking to eliminate the sources of conflict rather than repress those who take
up arms. It would be a remarkable reversal and it will have to happen soon.
Notes
1
2

3
4

See K.H. ORourke and J.G. Williamson (2000) Globalization and History: The Evolution of a
Nineteenth Century Atlantic Economy. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
One forgets the magnitude of the terrorist threat from anarchists and irredentists: between 1881
and 1914 they killed the Russian Emperor (1881), the Presidents of France and the United States
(1894 and 1901), the Empress of Austria (1898), the Kings of Italy (1900), Portugal (1908) and
Serbia (1903) and the heir to the Austrian throne (1914) imagine the hysteria if anything on this
scale were to happen today.
See I.F. Clarke (1970) Voices Prophesying War 17631984. London: Panther.
For Bloch, see J.F.C. Fuller (1932) War and Western Civilization 18321932. London:
Duckworth.

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6
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8
9
10
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18

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G. Best (1980) Humanity in Warfare. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
See P. Kennedy The Eagle has Landed, Financial Times, 2 February 2002.
A good treatment of this issue is L. Freedman (1977) US Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic
Threat. London: Macmillan.
See P. Kennedy (1989) The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. London: Fontana.
D. Held (1995) Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan
Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press. M. Kaldor (1999) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence
in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press.
M. van Creveld (1991) On Future War. London: Brasseys.
A good short exposition of the implications of the RMA is Eliot A. Cohen (1996) A Revolution
in Warfare, Foreign Affairs 75:2 pp3754.
This growth of US conventional capacity based on space assets is clearly explained in Norman
Friedman (2000) Seapower and Space. London: Chatham Publishing.
For an intelligent criticism of the wilder claims for the RMA, see M. OHanlon (2000)
Technological Change and the Future of War. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.
A useful attempt to periodize the evolution of the RMA is M. Libicki (1997) The Small and the
Many in J. Arquilla and J. Ronfeld (eds) In Athenas Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the
Information Age. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.
See G. Friedman and M. Friedman (1996) The Future of War. New York: St. Martins Press.
See Arquilla and Ronfeld (eds) op.cit.
This view of conflict through economic interdependence is advanced by the Friedmans op. cit. in
an otherwise sensible argument that the world economy is not globalized.
For the positive version of this argument about the collapse of politics before markets see, for
example, T.L. Friedman (1999) The Lexus and the Olive Tree. London: Harper Collins. For the
negative see, for example, HP. Martin and H. Schumann (1997) The Global Trap: Globalization
and the Assault on Democracy and Prosperity. London: Zed Books.
For an account of the regionalization of the world economy, see chapters two and three in P. Hirst
and G. Thompson (1999) Globalization in Question, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity Press.
See K. Ohmae (1996) The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies. London:
Harper Collins.
For sceptical views on Chinas economic prospects see G.C. Chang (2001) The Coming Collapse
of China. London: Century. J. Studwell (2002) The China Dream: The Elusive Quest for the
Greatest Untapped Market on Earth. London: Profile.
The classic statement is the World Banks 1993 report The East Asian Miracle: Economic
Growth and Public Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Figures from UNDP (1999) Human Development Report 1999. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
See R.D. Kaplan (2001) The Coming Anarchy. New York: Vintage.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes 2000 report is chilling in its implications; this
is perhaps why the USA chose to shoot the messenger and campaigned to sack the Chairman. See
P. Hirst (2001) War and Power in the 21st Century, chapter three. Cambridge: Polity Press.
See D. Held (1999) Global Transformations. Cambridge: Polity Press.
See P. Hirst (2001) Between the Local and the Global: Democracy in the Twenty First Century
in R. Axtmann (ed) Balancing Democracy. London: Continuum.
See J. Weiner (1999) Globalization and the Harmonization of Law. London: Pinter.
See for a representative example D. Held (2002) Globalization, Corporate Practice and
Cosmopolitan Social Standards, Contemporary Political Theory 1:1 pp5978.
R.D. Kaplan (2002) Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. New York:
Random House.
Robert Cooper (2001) The Next Empire, Prospect October 2001.
The classic statement of this argument is Carl Schmitt (1976) The Concept of the Political. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.