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Nation-States, Empires, Wars, Hostilities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2021

Cheyney Ryan
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Abstract

A starting point for thinking about war and preparations for war is that today the average citizen in Western countries has absolutely no interest in fighting in a war him or herself. The best study of this phenomenon rightly notes that what might be called the “great refusal” of ordinary people to involve themselves in actual war making reflects what might be called the “great disillusionment” with war itself. However, this has not meant the end of war, or of preparations for war, but rather war's transformation from a “nationalized” to a “postnationalized” arrangement. For the United States, this has meant expansion into a new type of empire. As part of the symposium on Ned Dobos's Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, this essay explores these developments and the challenges they pose.

Keywords

warwar buildingnationstatehostilitiesVietnam Warrepublican
Type
Book Symposium: Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , Fall 2021 , pp. 367 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Ned Dobos for writing the book that prompted this essay and Peter Balint for organizing the symposium of which an earlier version of this essay was a part.

References

NOTES

1 Sheehan, James J., Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008)Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. xx.

3 Economist (June 5, 2004), quoted in ibid., p. xvi.

4 Chris Bockman, “Why the French State Has a Team of UFO Hunters,” BBC News, November 4, 2014.

5 Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review, June 1, 2002.

6 Michael Ignatieff, “Nation-Building Lite,” New York Times Magazine, July 28, 2002, sec. 6, p. 26; and Michael Ignatieff, “The American Empire; the Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, sec. 6, p. 22.

7 Ferguson, Niall, The Cash Nexus: Economics and Politics from the Age of Warfare through the Age of Welfare, 1700–2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 418Google Scholar.

8 Robert Burns, “Blacks, Women Retreat from Army,” Associated Press, March 9, 2005. See also David Walsh, “Opposition to Iraq War Hitting US Military Recruitment,” World Socialist Web Site, March 12, 2005, www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/03/mili-m12.html.

9 GFK Custom Research, quoted in Walsh, “Opposition to Iraq War Hitting US Military Recruitment.”

10 Cheyney Ryan, The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

11 See Lolita C. Baldor, “Military May Ease Standards for Recruits,” USA Today, November 6, 2007; and William Matthews, “Lawmaker: Recruiting Criminals Unwise,” Army Times, November 9, 2007.

12 Max Boot, “U.S. should look beyond borders for more troops,” TribLive, February 27, 2005, archive.triblive.com/news/u-s-should-look-beyond-borders-for-more-troops/.

13 Hendrickson, David C., Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 1–2Google Scholar.

14 Ryan, Cheyney, “Pacifism,” in Lazar, Seth and Frowe, Helen, eds., The Oxford Handbook on the Ethics of War (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 277–293Google Scholar.

15 Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?, p. xx.

16 Ibid., p. 179.

17 Howard, Michael, “War and the Nation-State,” in “The State,” Dædalus 108, no. 4 (Fall 1979), pp. 101–10Google Scholar.

18 Appy, Christian G., American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York: Penguin, 2016), p. 126Google Scholar. Soldiers’ second favorite song was “Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin.

19 Cheyney Ryan, “War, Hostilities, Terrorism: A Pacifist Perspective,” in Jorg Kustermans, Tom Sauer, Dominiek Lootens, and Barbara Segaert, eds., Pacifism's Appeal: Ethos, History, Politics (Cham, Denmark: Springer International Publishing, 2018).

20 Andreas Wimmer, Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 4.

21 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. chs. 20 and 21.

22 John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 10.

23 The best overview of this is given by Jürgen Osterhammel in The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 392–468.

24 I draw this characterization from Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 3, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890–1945 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. ch. 14, “The Last Inter-imperial War and the Fall of the Fascist Alternative, 1939–1945.”

25 See Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 2000).

26 See Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (New York: Harper, 2018).

27 Accounts of this era are in David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today (New York: Doubleday, 1975) and Richard Boyle, GI Revolts: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam (San Francisco: United Front Press, 1972).

28 Robert D. Heinl Jr., “The Collapse of the Armed Forces” (Armed Forces Journal, June 7, 1971), in Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn B. Young, H. Bruce Franklin, eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History (New York: Grove Press, 1995), p. 327.

29 H. R. Haldeman, quoted in Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), p. 475.

30 Howard, “War and the Nation-State,” pp. 106–110.

31 Ibid., p. 106.

32 See the interview with Ferguson in Niall Ferguson, “Our Imperial Imperative: Niall Ferguson, the Author of Colossus, Laments the Emasculation of American Imperialism,” interview by Frank Bures, Atlantic (May 2004); and Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Penguin, 2005).

33 See Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York: Viking, 2005) for the argument that the Civil War was a direct result of an imperialist venture, the Mexican-American War (p. xiii).

34 For further development of these points, see A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019); Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (London: Penguin Books, 2017); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America's Long War (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); and Anthony J. Hall, The American Empire and the Fourth World, vol. 1, The Bowl with One Spoon (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 2005).

35 See Alan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (Oxford: Free Press, 1984) on how Indian fighting was the primary function of the U.S. military since its formation.

36 Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Picador, 2020), p. 216. See also David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015).

37 Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli, Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-First Century (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2019), p. 12. See also Eli Berman and David A. Lake, eds., Proxy Wars: Suppressing Violence through Local Agents (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2019); and Tyrone L. Groh, Proxy War: The Least Bad Option (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2019).

38 Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

39 Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, 1st ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), p. 6.

40 Donald Stoker, Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Harlan Ullman, Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2017); and Dominic Tierney, The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts (New York: Little, Brown, 2015). See also Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

41 Stoker, Why America Loses Wars, p. 5.

42 Douglas Lute, quoted in Samuel Moony and Stephen Wertheim, “The Infinity War: We Say We're a Peaceful Nation. Why Do Our Leaders Always Keep Us at War?,” Washington Post, December 13, 2019.