War is man's natural state and peace decadent. Conflict is dynamising and harmony will-sapping. Such were the beliefs that undergirded the conduct of human affairs until relatively recently. How these ideas have come to be considered barbaric is the central theme of this extended essay by one of Britain's foremost historians. As he approaches his 80th year, Michael Howard sums up a lifetime's thinking in a valedictory volume as thought-provoking as it is slim. In wide-angle, and with a lightness of touch rarely found in historiography, he charts the path to peace in Europe over a millennium and more.
Sir Michael's starting point is the establishment of feudal order after the collapse of imperial Rome. This order, dominated by Christendom's fiercely independent warrior caste, endured well into the middle ages. But its feuding aristocrats were weakened by constant fighting - against infidel and each other - and eventually brought to heel by centralising monarchs, whose writ widened with the use of fortress-destroying firearms.
In turn, monarchs gradually ceded power to the middle classes, whose ascent was largely attributable to wealth-creating commercial endeavours. The result was a swelling of the ranks of the educated, non-aristocratic and increasingly secular minority "aware of the imperfections of their societies as measured by standards of divine or natural justice". From these minds came a torrent of new thinking about man, God and government. And from the finest of these minds came the invention of peace. Immanuel Kant, a colossus of his enlightening times, believed perpetual peace to be the inevitable end-point of international society.
Kant maintained that this would happen in three steps. First, democracies would become the preferred system of governance throughout the world. This would give those who fight and risk their lives in wars a say in their declaration, thus curbing the belligerent impulses of often remote leaders. Second, as states developed their technologies and economies, the destructiveness of war, and hence its cost, would increase. Man, imperfect but rational, would fight fewer wars as a result. Finally, in order to solidify peace, states would accept the authority of an international body which would adjudicate in disputes, thereby circumventing the need for war. Most of Howard's historical evidence would seem to support this happy Kantian outcome. But in his concluding chapter, when the author turns his attention to the future, he seems to see an internal contradiction in Kant's theory. He suggests that peace contains the seed of its own destruction, because once it is well established (as it is now in western Europe) the fellow-feeling and common purpose, born of collectively facing an enemy, is lost.
For Howard, it is the shared sacrifice of wartime, more than anything else, that creates the glue that binds societies. Without war, societies, and states along with them, may unravel, leading to what that doom-monger of the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes, considered to be man's ineluctable fate; the anarchy of "war of all against all".
Kant may indeed be proved wrong about the inevitability of peace, but it will not be for lack of the camaraderie created by war as Howard suggests. While the shared experience of life-threatening conflict may be a factor in forging and maintaining national identity, it is hardly more important than all other institutions and values, unrelated to fighting, that cement and give legitimacy to states.
Take Sweden. It has remained uninvolved in conflagrations of any sort since 1814, but is among the most cohesive societies in the world, with its national self-image built on civilian achievement and pacific internationalism. Moreover, no country in which individual freedom has been meaningfully realised has ever disintegrated into chaos. Some questionable conclusions aside, there are insights in spades on matters historical. His conventional account of the emergence of the international state system after the destruction of the Thirty Years' War is deliciously clear and concise. On colonialism, he deftly rubbishes in a single paragraph the reductionist view that mammon alone was the motive for the subjugation of non-Europeans.
The brushstrokes of a master are also evident in observations on, among others, secularisation, Napoleonic expansion, the rise of nationalism and the factors that led to the "second Thirty Years' War" of 19141945. But these are a mere taste of the subjects covered in a book so rich in ideas that it will delight anyone with the slightest interest in how the world has reached its current juncture.
Dan O'Brien is Europe editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit in London