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Long Peace

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"Long Peace" is a term for the unprecedented historical period of relative global stability following the end of World War II in 1945 to the present day. [1][2] The period of the Cold War (1947–1991) was marked by the absence of major wars between the superpowers of the period, the United States and the Soviet Union.[1][3][4] John Lewis Gaddis first used the term in 1986,[5][6] stressing that the period of "relative peace" has twice outlasted the interwar period by now. The Cold War, with all its rivalries, anxieties and unquestionable dangers, has produced the longest period of stability in relations among the great powers that the world has known in this century; it now compares favorably as well with some of the longest periods of great-power stability in all of modern history.[5] The Long Peace has been compared to the relatively-long stability of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana,[7] or the Pax Britannica, a century of relative peace that existed between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, during which the British Empire held global hegemony.

Decline of war

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In the 1990’s it was thought that the Long Peace was a unique result of the Cold War.[3][8][9] However, when the Cold War ended the same trends continued and strengthened in what has also been called the "New Peace"[10] and leading to the Decline-of-War thesis.[11] Since 1945, it was claimed, the world pacification becomes exponential.[12] Overall, in the postwar decades, war has diminished dramatically. The number of international wars decreased from a rate of six per year in the 1950s to one per year in the 2000s, and the number of fatalities decreased from 240 reported deaths per million to less than 10.[2][13] In the 1990s, far fewer people died in wars per year than during the Cold War, and in the 2000s their number dropped twice,[14] hitting the lowest recorded number of 56,000 people in 2008.[15] This was the lowest mark of fatalities per population since AD 1400 to the least.[16] The lack of sufficient data before 1400 precludes knowing whether it was the all-time low.

From 2008 to 2021, war fatalities worldwide rose six times, to 348,000 in 2021. However, contrary to another popular belief, the world became more peaceful in three following years. In 2022, despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine, world fatalities dropped by 4%, to 334,000. The drop was due to the end of the Tigray War, which in 2022 was deadlier than the Russo-Ukrainian War.[17] The next two years, with the latter War raging and the Israel-Hamas war began, the world became more peaceful, with 170,000 people killed in wars in 2023,[18] and 233,000 in 2024.[19]

The period also has exhibited more than a quarter of a century of even greater stability and has shown continued improvements in related measurements such as the number of coups, the amount of repression, and the durability of peace settlements.[10] Though civil wars and lesser military conflicts have occurred, there has been a continued absence of direct conflict between any of the largest economies by gross domestic product; instead, wealthier countries have fought limited small-scale regional conflicts with poorer countries. Conflicts involving smaller economies have also gradually tapered off.[13]

Global military spending reached modern-time high in 2024, but per global gross product it remains close to modern-time low. The percentage of the world gross product devoted to military spending has been generally decreasing since World War II. Tallies from the 1960s report military spending rates above 6% of world GDP and in a range from 3.8% to 4.5% in the 1970s and 1980s.[20] It was 4.92% in 1990 (below the Cold War average),[21] reached the lowest recorded in modern history mark[22] of 2.1% in 2014[23] and 2018,[24][25] and fluctuates between 2.1 and 2.4 ever since.[26][27] The 21st-century world has relaxed its military effort and devoted a larger budget for non-military purposes.[28]

In 2012, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for over six decades [having] contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe" by a unanimous decision of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

In the book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker considers that to be part of a trend that has continued since the beginning of recorded history,[2][29] and other experts have made similar arguments.[13][30] Pinker criticized the approach of counting wars or conflicts because this approach gives equal value to World War II and the Falkland War. He called: “Now let's put the numbers back together, and instead of looking at the number of wars, look at number of deaths, again scaled by world population.”[29] This approach revealed drastic world pacification. "In fact the famous dream is coming true: the world is putting an end to war."

While there is general agreement among experts that we are in a Long Peace and that wars have declined since 1945,[2][13] Pinker's broader thesis has been contested.[13] Critics have also said that a longer period of relative peace is needed to be certain,[31] or they have emphasized minor reversals in specific trends, such as the increase in battle deaths between 2011 and 2014 due to the Syrian Civil War.[10] The prevailing popular view, however, remains that the post-Cold War world is deadlier, less orderly and more dangerous. For proponents of the decline-of-war thesis, the only puzzle is why this view prevailes disregarding the statistics: "If, explains Joshua Goldberg, we turn off the screech of 'alarmist' news and overblown political rhetoric for a moment and look at hard evidence objectively, we find that … in fact the world is becoming more peaceful. For this shocking idea to sink in requires either a paradigm shift or at least a broken TV set." His best explanation for the Doomsday Clock of the traditionally panic-stricken Bulletin "would seem to be that the Bulletin needs alarmism to attract interest and donors."[32] Pinker's work has received wide publicity and the Decline-of-War thesis reached a worldwide audience, which mostly found it compelling. According to Robert Jervis, the trends involve an order of magnitude or more.[33] The extent of the decline of war and other forms of violence, which is still viewed with surprise and sometimes skepticism by non-specialists, is relatively uncontroversial within the research community,[13] and the main disagreements are over the causes of the decline.[10]

Causes

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Major factors cited as reasons for the Long Peace have included the deterrence effect of nuclear weapons, the economic incentives towards cooperation caused by globalization and international trade, the worldwide increase in the number of democracies, the World Bank's efforts in reduction of poverty, and the effects of the empowerment of women and peacekeeping by the United Nations.[10] However, no factor is a sufficient explanation on its own and so additional or combined factors are likely. Other proposed explanations have included the proliferation of the recognition of human rights, increasing education and quality of life, changes in the way that people view conflicts (such as the presumption that wars of aggression are unjustified), the success of non-violent action, and demographic factors such as the reduction in birthrates.[7][10][13]

Overlooked in the scholarly research but prominent among the US policy circles, the Neoconservatives and some other Anglo - American scholars is Unipolarity and the application of the Hegemonic stability theory to the US Hegemony or Pax Americana.[10][34] Donald Trump calls it "peace through strength."[35] Robert Kagan noted that Pinker traces the beginning of Long Peace to 1945, "which just happens to be the birthdate of the American world order. The coincidence eludes him but it need not elude us."[10][36]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Gaddis, John Lewis (1989). The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504335-9.
  2. ^ a b c d Freedman, Lawrence (2014). "Stephen Pinker and the long peace: alliance, deterrence and decline". Cold War History. 14 (4): 657–672. doi:10.1080/14682745.2014.950243. ISSN 1468-2745. S2CID 154846757.
  3. ^ a b Saperstein, Alvin M. (March 1991). "The "Long Peace"— Result of a Bipolar Competitive World?". The Journal of Conflict Resolution. 35 (1): 68–79. doi:10.1177/0022002791035001004. S2CID 153738298.
  4. ^ Lebow, Richard Ned (Spring 1994). "The Long Peace, the End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Realism". International Organization. 48 (2): 249–277. doi:10.1017/s0020818300028186. JSTOR 2706932. S2CID 155032446.
  5. ^ a b Gaddis, John Lewis (1986). "The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System". International Security. 10 (4): 99–100. doi:10.2307/2538951. ISSN 0162-2889. JSTOR 2538951. S2CID 59686350.
  6. ^ Vasquez, John A; Kang, Choong-Nam (2012). "How and why the Cold War became a long peace: Some statistical insights". Cooperation and Conflict. 48 (1): 28–50. doi:10.1177/0010836712461625. ISSN 0010-8367. S2CID 154868730.
  7. ^ a b Inglehart, Ronald F; Puranen, Bi; Welzel, Christian (2015). "Declining willingness to fight for one's country". Journal of Peace Research. 52 (4): 418–434. doi:10.1177/0022343314565756. ISSN 0022-3433. S2CID 113340539.
  8. ^ Gaddis, John Lewis (1992). "The Cold War, the Long Peace, and the Future". Diplomatic History. 16 (2): 234–246. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.1992.tb00499.x. ISSN 0145-2096.
  9. ^ Duffield, John S. (2009). "Explaining the Long Peace in Europe: the contributions of regional security regimes". Review of International Studies. 20 (4): 369–388. doi:10.1017/S0260210500118170. ISSN 0260-2105. S2CID 145698353.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h Fettweis, Christopher J. (2017). "Unipolarity, Hegemony, and the New Peace". Security Studies. 26 (3): 423–451. doi:10.1080/09636412.2017.1306394. ISSN 0963-6412. S2CID 148993870.
  11. ^ Bear F. Braumoeller (2019). Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age, (New York: Oxford University Press), p XVI-XVII.
  12. ^ Tupy, Marian L. & Bailey, Ronald (March 1, 2023). "Battle death rate is declining." Human Progress, https://humanprogress.org/trends/battle-death-rate-is-declining/
  13. ^ a b c d e f g Human Security Research Group, Simon Fraser University (2013). "Human Security Report 2013: The Decline in Global Violence" (PDF). Retrieved 11 November 2018.
  14. ^ Goldstein, Joshua (2011). Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide, (New York: Penguin), p 4.
  15. ^ Norton-Taylor, Richard (May 20, 2015) "Global armed conflicts becoming more deadly, major study finds," The Guardian.
  16. ^ Roser, Max (2019). "War and peace data introduction," Our World in Data, chart 2, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-4-regional/40-collapse-and-restructuring/a/read-data-exploration-war-and-peace
  17. ^ "Year in review: global disorder in 2022," ACLED, January 31, 2023, p 11-13, https://acleddata.com/2023/01/31/global-disorder-2022-the-year-in-review/
  18. ^ 153,000 excluding Brazil lethal police operations and Mexico cartels. Haines, Julia (January 18, 2024). "The deadliest conflicts across the globe in 2023," USNews, https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/countries-with-the-deadliest-conflicts-of-2023#:~:text=With%20the%20continuation%20of%20Russia's,Event%20Data%20Project%2C%20a%20crisis
  19. ^ "Global conflicts double over the past five years: How much conflict is occurring in the world? ," ACLED, https://acleddata.com/conflict-index/index-december-2024/
  20. ^ Ed Gresser (November 8, 2023). "PPI’s Trade Fact of the Week: Military spending was 2.3% of world GDP last year," PPI, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/blogs/ppis-trade-fact-of-the-week-military-spending-was-2-3-of-world-gdp-last-year/
  21. ^ SIPRI, (2018). “Military expenditure by region in constant US dollars, 1988-2017,” https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/4_Data%20for%20world%20regions%20from%201988%E2%80%932017.pdf
  22. ^ Ed Gresser (November 8, 2023). "PPI’s Trade Fact of the Week: Military spending was 2.3% of world GDP last year," PPI, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/blogs/ppis-trade-fact-of-the-week-military-spending-was-2-3-of-world-gdp-last-year/
  23. ^ Tian, Nan (2018). "Trends in world military expenditure, 2017," SIPRI Fact Sheet, https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep24451
  24. ^ Mehta, Aaron (April 29, 2019). "Here’s how much global military spending rose in 2018," Defense News, https://www.defensenews.com/global/2019/04/28/heres-how-much-global-military-spending-rose-in-2018/
  25. ^ "World Military Spending/Defense Budget 1977-2025," Macrotrends, https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/world/military-spending-defense-budget
  26. ^ For 1960-2022, World Bank Group, (2024) "Military expenditure (% of GDP)," World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?end=2022&start=1960&view=chart
  27. ^ For 2023, Tian, Nan et al (April 2024). "Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2023," SIPRI, https://www.sipri.org/publications/2024/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2023
  28. ^ Ed Gresser (November 8, 2023). "PPI’s Trade Fact of the Week: Military spending was 2.3% of world GDP last year," PPI, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/blogs/ppis-trade-fact-of-the-week-military-spending-was-2-3-of-world-gdp-last-year/
  29. ^ a b Pinker, Steven (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking. ISBN 9780670022953.
  30. ^ Joshua S. Goldstein (2012). Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Plume. ISBN 978-0-452-29859-0.
  31. ^ Clauset, Aaron (2018). "Trends and fluctuations in the severity of interstate wars". Science Advances. 4 (2): aao3580. Bibcode:2018SciA....4.3580C. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aao3580. PMC 5834001. PMID 29507877.
  32. ^ Goldstein, Joshua (2011). Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide, (New York: Penguin), p IX, 19.
  33. ^ Bear F. Braumoeller (2019). Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age, (New York: Oxford University Press), p XVI-XVII.
  34. ^ John Mueller (2020). "Pax Americana is a myth: Aversion to war drives peace and order," Wasington Quarterly, vol 43 (3), p 116-117.
  35. ^ Kim Hjelmgaard ey al (28 November 2024). "After talk of ending Russia's war in Ukraine 'in a day,' Trump names peace envoy," USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/27/trump-ukraine-peace-envoy/76258885007/
  36. ^ Bradley A. Thayer (2013). “Humans, not angels: Reasons to doubt the decline of war thesis”, International Studies Review, vol 15 (3): p 406–411.
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