The War-Weariness Hypothesis: An Empirical Test

Abstract

The hypothesis and other hypotheses of negative addictive contagion assert that war induces in its participants an inhibition against subsequent war for several years. These national-level hypotheses are tested empirically by examining the addictive effects of wars between the great powers over the period 1 500-1975. The findings are consistent over a variety of indicators of contagion: there is no empirical support for negative addiction hypotheses. great power war does not reduce the likelihood of a subsequent war involvement by one of its participating powers, and the distribution of elapsed time between wars is consistent with an exponential distribution derived from the null hypothesis of no contagion. The likelihood of a second war is unaffected by the seriousness ofthe first war, and general wars have no distinctive contagion effects. Nor does the frequency of great power wars in one period affect the frequency of wars in the following period. Finally, there is no evidence that these patterns of contagion change over the five-century span of the modern system. It is now commonplace to argue that the United States' proclivity toward military intervention in the Third World in the period immediately following the Vietnam War was lessened by a war-weariness induced by its Vietnam experience (Holsti and Rosenau, 1984). Britain and France also appear to have been affected by immediately after World War I, and undoubtedly other examples could be cited in support of the argument that a state's tendency toward war or perhaps even the use of force short of war may be tempered by a recent war experience. In addition, there are good theoretical reasons for expecting that a nation's war involvement might, for a time at least, inhibit its subsequent war behavior. This is expressed by Richardson (1960a) in his version of the well-known warweariness hypothesis: A long and severe bout of fighting confers immunity on most of those who have experienced it (p. 232). But in spite of the Vietnam syndrome and other comparable examples for other states, and in spite of the inherent plausibility of the hypothesis, numerous empirical studies have concluded that there exist no regularized patterns of in the international system (Singer and Small, 1972, 1974; Levy, 1982b; Garnham, 1983). This tension between the apparently obvious implications of particular cases and the conclusions of systematic empirical