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I'm writing this in April 2021, and for no reason whatsoever I have spent the last year thinking about low probability events. All kinds of low probability events. The ones I keep coming back to over and over again, you might say obsessively, are Great Power Conflicts. I should briefly explain what a Great Power is. A Great Power is a Global Power, one that matters outside of its own region. If you can imagine a random crisis breaking out in a random part of the world, Great Powers
are the countries that would be consulted even if they were not directly involved. A Great Power Conflict is quite simply a large scale war between several Great Powers. These wars have become low probability events, but when they do happen, the results are always catastrophic. One of the features of a Great Power Conflict is that the war dominates every aspect of life. The stakes are so high and the requisite resources so great that all other areas of human flourishing are temporarily put on hold.
The war consumes everything. The other thing that tends to happen is that millions die. The wars usually get so deadly that it's easier to count casualties as a percentage of a country's total population. With human suffering on that scale, even the victors lose. It's best to avoid these kinds of conflicts whenever possible. The Thirty Years War was a particularly brutal Great Power Conflict, and became at the time the deadliest war in European history.
Ever since the end of that war in 1648, history has revealed to us a troubling pattern. Since 1648, there has on average been a major Great Power Conflict once every 50 years, like clockwork. This fact is not predictive, it's not a fundamental law of the Universe, it's descriptive, it's simply a pattern that as been observed looking backward through history. The reason we use the Thirty Years War as a benchmark is because before that war, it becomes increasingly difficult to say what is and isn't a Great Power, and if you go back even further, it becomes increasingly difficult to say what is and isn't a country.
Nevertheless, if you squint, you can see this playing out in a similar way all the way back into antiquity. There are only major two exceptions to this pattern. The first is right now. At the time I'm writing this, it has been over 75 years since the last Great Power Conflict. Knock on wood! The second is the 19th century, which went an incredible 99 years without a Great Power Conflict of any significance. 99 years, the longest stretch of sustained European peace since the Roman Empire.
A grand achievement. Something to aspire to. It wasn't that there was literally no war over that period, there's always some war somewhere, but the important thing is that there was virtually no war between Great Powers. Blunders and failures were inevitable, but even these were deliberately contained in both scope and duration so that no one war was permitted to take on the significance of a Great Power Conflict. In fact, that's the entire point. For 99 years, under the highest possible pressure, broad conflicts were successfully avoided. And then it all came crashing down in 1914. That's why I feel myself drawn to the 19th century.
The 99 years of relative peace between Great Powers stands alone as a world historic achievement, but the end of that peace, the Great War of 1914, at the time the worst war in human history, also stands alone as a world historic failure. What's interesting to me is that neither were an accident. The first half of the 19th century was dominated by leaders who had been forged in the fires of war, and understood the price of failure. Of course the wars I'm talking about are the French Revolutionary Wars. And now I've backed myself into a corner, because on the one hand I should assume that there are people out there who don't know what the French Revolution was, but on the
other hand, we can't get into it right now! I'm going to spend the next couple of minutes talking in a general way about what the French Revolution meant to the people who lived through it, but I'm going to skip over every major event in a way that many of you will find extremely frustrating. We cannot start getting into the French Revolution! Once you start you never stop! It's quicksand! The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were a period of history at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century where, for almost 25 years, all of Europe was pretty much constantly at war.
France entered 1789 as one of the most conservative and most religious countries in Europe, ruled by a feudal monarchy, heirs to a system of government that went back 1,000 years. And then within the blink of an eye, they would abolish the monarchy, abolish feudalism, and abolish the Church. They would invent for themselves several new systems of government, a new religion, new ways of doing science, a brand new sense of fashion, and a new calendar, in which they placed their Revolution on par with the birth of Christ by proclaiming it Year One of a New Age.
The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that it felt as if "the past has ceased to throw light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity." After 1789, France fell into a state of perpetual revolution, and over a number of years they basically declared war on anybody who opposed their new systems of government, which is to say.all of Europe. It's difficult today to imagine such a period of political and cultural upheaval. Now try to imagine all of that happening alongside a World War, because that's exactly what it was. To the average person, it would have felt like the end of the world.
Now imagine everybody's shock and dismay when France started winning the war. Before the French Revolution it was fairly common for military campaigns to max out at like 50,000 soldiers. The French Revolution brought modern conscription to Europe, famously passing a law that declared, "every Frenchman is a soldier." Toward the end of this period, each side in the conflict were maintaining armies of about a million men each, fighting in several simultaneous military campaigns across the entire continent.
It took the combined strength of every other major European power, but the French were eventually defeated. They had just lived through almost 25 years of perpetual warfare, everybody was filled with a profound sense of loss and dread. What if something like that happens again? The leaders of Europe's Great Powers came together and collectively decided that going forward, peace would be a priority. The historian Eric Hobsbawm writes of this post-war period, "kings and statesmen were neither wiser nor more pacific than they were before. But they were unquestionably more frightened."
That fear served them well, because Great Power Conflicts on the scale of the French Revolutionary Wars were successfully banished from Europe for the next 99 years. Hobsbawm, born during World War 1 and a participant in World War 2, wrote that "a citizen of the twentieth century ought to appreciate the magnitude of this achievement. It was all the more impressive, because the international scene was far from tranquil, the occasions for conflict abundant."
[.] "Yet in spite of these shoals and whirlpools, the diplomatic vessels navigated a difficult stretch of water without collision." Boats. This chart should give you an idea of the scale of that achievement. It tracks how often Great Powers were at war with each other over a period of 500 years, everything from petty border disputes to World Wars. Look here: in the 16th century, the annual probability of there being a war between Great Powers somewhere on the planet was over 90%.
The 17th century was much the same, over 90%, but even more deadly, since it included conflicts like the Thirty Years War. The 18th century was a little better, on average around 70%, but the French Revolutionary Wars at the very end of the century shook the leaders of Europe's Great Powers to their core. They feared the future. The next big war had the potential to be so much worse. Then there's the 19th century. Routinely 0% conflict between Great Powers.
0%. Nothing like this had ever been achieved before. There were some flare ups in the mid-century, but these were minor, regional conflicts, nothing at all like it was before. Plus, each new war was remarkably short. Recall that the 19th century began with almost 25 years of perpetual war. For the rest of the century, the average war involving 1 or more Great Power lasted 3 months. They just didn't have the room to grow into the kinds of conflicts that had dominated the centuries preceding this. Another way of thinking about this is through the lens of military spending.
From the Medieval period until the 17th century, militaries accounted for on average something like 90% of all government spending, with the rest basically serving as a wealth transfer from the poor to the aristocracy. Very little money was actually spent on helping people. That began to change in the 17th century. As states started to invest in their own people, military spending as a proportion to all government spending began a slow and steady decline. And I do mean slow. By the late 18th century, highly militarized states had got that number down to about 75%, while less militarized states were occasionally able to dip as low as 50%. Of course the French Revolution erased all of that progress, and sent military spending
back to where it began. But after the French were defeated, military spending fell off a cliff. Let's use the Great Power of Austria as an example. In 1814, virtually all available funds were going to the military. By 1817, that number was back down to pre-war levels, 50%. By 1830, it was down to 23%, and stayed there for years, bottoming out at 20% in 1848. In a world without Great Power Conflict, entirely new possibilities for government spending open up. Spending that goes beyond just maintaining the status quo and actually helps people. You might be interested to know where we are today. As of 2020, global military spending as a percentage of all government spending was 14.5%. And growing!
I've explained what Great Power Conflict is and why it's important to avoid them, but I haven't explained how. That's a big topic. Where does peace come from? How do you know if you're doing a good job at maintaining the peace? Is the next Great Power Conflict close at hand, or is it far away? How is it even possible to tell the difference? There are three basic schools of thought, and I'll touch on each of them now.
The first group are known as Realists. Realists believe that the world exists in a state of anarchy. However, they also believe that within that anarchy, states are entirely rational, and will respond rationally to incentives as they pursue their own interests. Add that all together, and it means that the behaviour of states should be predictable. This leads very naturally to something called "balance of power" theory, which argues that peace can be created through an international system built with strong incentives against aggression.
In a well balanced international system, aggression from one state should trigger an overwhelming counter-reaction from other states. In a world of rational actors, this threat of violence should theoretically provide the right incentives for peace. To Realists, peace is the goal, and war is failure, even though the anarchic nature of the world makes peace a moving target. Unfortunately, this philosophy can be used to justify all sorts of unspeakable behaviour. A paranoid mind can misinterpret basic political reform as a threat to the balance of power,
and so at times, protecting the peace can easily morph into protecting the powerful. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the world was dominated by Realists. Just for the sake of contrast, let me briefly run down the two rival theories to Realism. On the opposite end of the spectrum sits, unsurprisingly, Idealism, maybe better known as Liberalism. Idealists (or Liberals) believe that peace is possible through political alignment. They believe that when two states agree when it comes to politics, economics, trade, values, whatever, the probability of war decreases.
As a consequence, some Idealists believe that political alignment is a worthy goal unto itself, even if it takes a teeny tiny war to get there. These people are known as Sickos. Unlike the Realists, who believe that we live in an endless a state of anarchy, the Idealists or Liberals believe that if we get the mix just right, we might be able to bring order to the chaos and end war forever. In this context, the French Revolution was an explosion of Liberalism. The Revolutionaries saw the world through the lens of political alignment, and went so far as to say that if you were not in political alignment with their new French Republic,
then you were an enemy. The Marxists came along in the mid-19th century, found this Realism to Liberalism spectrum wholly unsatisfying, and tried to invent a third way. They argue that war is simply a byproduct of economic inequality, and that reducing that inequality produces peace. The Marxists believe that this rule applies both domestically and internationally, which means that the actions of any individual state are not nearly as important as material inequality across the board. It's for this reason that Marxists are sometimes referred to as Economic Determinists, or Materialists.
Marx himself says it quite plainly, "the history of all hithero existing societies is the history of class struggles." Full stop. Realists see trouble when a strong state is next to a weak state, because the world is in a state of anarchy. Liberals see trouble when a state with an open political system is next to a state with a closed political system, because the world is governed by political alignment. Marxists see trouble when a rich state is next to a poor state, because the world is driven by economic inequality.
The thing is that all three of these statements can be true, and they can even be true at the same time. The world is infinitely complex, no one theory is able to fully explain why it is as it is. These are simply 3 analytical tools, and if you find any of them useful, then godspeed. Like I said before, the French Revolution was an explosion of Liberalism, and so it shouldn't come as a surprise that the reaction to the French Revolution was a Realist reaction. In order to prevent another Great Power Conflict, the victors over France thought in terms of constraints.
With these constraints, they sought to create a well-balanced international system, where rational actors would favour peace over war. That international system will be the topic of a future video. In it, we will talk about the generation of leaders that were left to pick up the pieces after the French Revolution, and how they set the stage for a century of peace. Peace!
