Readers must choose for themselves whether to regard the two centuries of strategic
history analysed here as a journey towards a less war-prone world. Or have those 200
years simply registered enormous changes in many of the contexts for statecraft but no
changes of significant note in the fundamentals of strategic history? Change is not
synonymous with progress, understood to mean ethical and political advance. Is history
more cyclical than arrow-like, or vice versa? It is tempting to try to impose scholarly
discipline upon the two centuries by means of working backwards from today. One might
seek to demonstrate how, faltering step by faltering step, with many painful falls along
the way, humankind has struggled to improve its conduct of international relations.
Conflictual domestic relations are another class of challenge. As Chapters 17 and 18
explained, the prospects for peace, order, justice and general good governance are none
too bright in many parts of the world, especially in Africa, the Middle East and South and
Central Asia.
This book has adopted only one concept to serve as a working approximation to that
highly suspect, though convenient, scholarly weapon, the master narrative. That concept
is strategic history. This text rests upon the proposition that force and the threat of force
have had a greater impact upon the many contexts for human behaviour than has any
other source of influence. This view is undoubtedly pessimistic-realistic, although it is
open minded about the future. Above all else, this venture in strategic history does not
postulate a predetermined destination for human endeavours. It is hostile to historical
narratives that fail to allow contingency a major role.
This chapter reviews the whole of the historical domain that has been discussed.
The focus is upon the relationship between peace and war, and, no less important, war
and peace. A condition of peace with security generally is held to be the product of an
international order characterized by justice, or tolerable injustice; by widely shared
norms for acceptable international conduct; by processes and possibly institutions for the
resolution or amelioration of disputes; and, last but not least, by a policing mechanism
and a policeman or two, or three, or more. What does the strategic history of the past two
centuries reveal? How well did statesmen and soldiers cope with the challenges they had
to face? The period covered here saw four great, or general, wars (three actual and one
mercifully only potential, though potentially that was the most awesome and awful of
all). These were the conflicts (or, in the final case, non-conflict) of 1792–1815, 1914–18,
1939–45 and 1947–89. A subject of prime interest to the strategic historian is how well
international order was organized and maintained in the interwar periods, though that
phrasing exaggerates the role of purposeful design and behaviour geared to system
stability.
The core concern here is to review how great wars emerged, or erupted, from the
preceding period of peace, and also how particular conditions of peace succeeded wars.
(The latter is a topic much neglected by scholars.) The chapter concludes with an
examination of the deceptively simple concept of peace.
New world orders
Strategic history is not only about the consequences of the use and threat of organized
force for political reasons. It is also deeply interested in the slippery, and much contested,
concept of order, both international and domestic. The wars discussed in this book all
War, peace and international order 265