National University of Singapore

Is the use of force obsolete in the post-Cold War era?

by

 Jochen Gottwald

Content:

1. Clinching with a new disorder

2. Cold War, its place in history and the emergence of non-traditional security issues

3. Realism, its false impact on the concept of sovereignty and the problem of pre-emptive force

4. Global Players and the use of force

5. The use of force as a paradigm and its concept of sovereignty

6. Conclusion

"War, in our scientific age, means, sooner or later, universal death " Bertrand Russel¹

"Peace can only be seen as the absence of war" von Clausewitz²

1. Clinching with a new disorder

Contemporary theories of International Relations regard the use of force as an outcome of the security dilemma that exists between sovereign nation states due to the reciprocal lack of knowledge about their actors′ intentions and goals. As the above quotations show, different theoretical approaches lead to different concepts of peace. While for the scholars of Realism, who see war as a necessary evil, the question if the use of force is obsolete really is obsolete, the followers of more normative orientated theories like Liberalism, Structuralism or Functionalism aim to reduce the use of force by the creation of political, economical and social interdependencies, which should lead to spill-over-effects and finally to unintentional, hohum cooperation. This essay will ask about the future role of force in international politics by challenging the widely acknowledged perception that the end of Cold War gave impact to an essential paradigm shift of International Relations. It aims to explain why the scholars of International Relations, as well as the actors of global politics, face a widening gap between an accelerated implementation of international institutions and an increasingly troubled world, hit by the violent outbreak of ethnic and national conflicts, the rise of global terrorism and a new cultural and religious conservatism. Today we are in the really paradox situation that the bipolarity of the Cold War - long perceived as the most frightening constellation of the international system - can be seen as its stabilizing factor. To find the origins of the resulting disillusion it is necessary to ask for the reasons that made the western actors in the 1990′s believe that they succeeded. What made them believe that the end of Cold War meant the extermination of the use of force? Did the end of the Cold War really impose a paradigm shift! Did it really change the nature of International Relations?

The thesis provided in this essay will be: no! It didn′t! It has to be shown that Cold War only represented a common constellation of the international system, which can be often found throughout history; that the contemporary confusion exists because the paradigms of International Relations are based on a misinterpretation of Hobbes′ state of nature³; and that the use of force is the only continuous variable and therefore can be seen as a paradigm of international relations. This approach aims to lead the debate back to an actorcentered model of international relations, which tends to reduce force by a more flexible, constructivist interpretation of political leadership in the background of the actor′s contemporary political and economic environment.

2. Cold War, its place in history and the emergence of non-traditional security issues

Even if the presence of weapons of mass-destruction during the Cold War marked a never experienced degree of reciprocal vulnerability, also the conflicts between Greek and Sparta, Rome and Carthago or Christianity and Islam in the medieval were perceived as their times′ worldwide controversies. And although they sometimes culminated in open clashes, these conflicts went through long periods of cold phases. In the case of Christianity and Islam these phases endured several hundreds of years. While the solutions of these conflicts were accompanied by several changes in the reciprocal perceptions of their people, they didn′t change the underlying principles which drove the actors′ motivations of going to war or not. If changes were made, they were handled domestically. The struggle for democracy e.g. only affected the Roman and the Greek society, not their relations to foreign countries.

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1 Bertrand Russel, Unpopular Essays (London: George Alien & Unwin 1950) -

2 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard (Penguin Classics Paperback, 1982)

3 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Penguin Classic Paperback)