Solving the Peace and War Puzzles?

Abstract

States, Nations, and the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace. By Benjamin Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 500 pp., $42.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-69161-1). The field of International Relations was born out of the moral concern with the problem of war and the conditions that would be necessary and sufficient to bring something akin to universal peace. The political theories underlying international organizations share this perspective. The United Nations, for example, has as its main purpose the maintenance of “international peace and security.” Numerous books, following diagnostic exercises on the causes of war, advocate hegemony, balances of power, world government, or collective security as paths to peace. All have an implicit or explicit universal bias. Waltz (1959) provided a significant fillip to these disparate studies by systematizing causal relationships in the famous three levels of analysis: war as the result of human nature, the domestic makeup of states, and the international system. However useful as organizing devices, these explanations failed because they could not account for critical variations in the incidence of war. If war is rooted in a Hobbesian psychology, why has Sweden not been involved in a war since 1721? If war is the outcome of particular socioeconomic characteristics, as Marxist theorists proposed, why did many socialist states use military force with a higher frequency than most capitalist states? And if anarchy (the main …