Pop Stops War

As I type this the Eurovision Song Contest is playing in the background. It was easy to stop watching - Norway is so far ahead in the voting its hard to imagine anything will change.

A lot of Europeans cringe at the mention of the contest. The music is often so bad, the lyrics so unoriginal, the emotion so fake that's all pretty understandable. But in Australia its treated as high camp - hugely popular in the Gay and Lesbian community and ironic inner city inhabitants who wouldn't be seen dead at this sort of music the rest of the year. If I'd slept more last night I might be at a fundraiser where you could watch it on the big screen.

But whether you love or hate the clothes, music and presenters, its worth spending just a minute to consider the real benefit of the event. It was created in the 1950s, when Europe was desperately searching for a way to prevent another war. The European Union was the most important product of this search, along with the court of human rights and other bodies that managed to pull in even more of the continent's nations. Besides these Eurovision might seem pretty trivial. But it is all a part of the process of building a common European identity. The hope was that the more one saw of another nation's culture, the less likely you were to invade.

Modern technology and the fall of the Wall has given the whole project a renewed lease of life. Western Europe doesn't need it any more, and aside from the Scandinavians they don't much care either. But for Eastern Europe, so recently at war and with unresolved conflicts still to be address, anything that instills fondness for the neighbours has value. The fact that everyone gets to vote these days is important too - when you've just voted for Bosnia to win the contest you probably don't feel so much like bombing them back to the Stone Age. It's even better if they've just given you 12 points - but even 5 or 6 will do.

It's hard to prove that Eurovision works. It's a pretty flimsy basis for continental peace after all. But these things build up. Once Europe was in a continuous state of war. Peace for any nation was a temporary aberration, and for the whole place to be free of war at once was almost unimaginable. Last year, when Russia and Georgia went to war, the first conflict anywhere west of the Urals for 9 years, it was like an event from another era. Which in fact it was.

You may, like me, think that the Norwegian entry was so boring it ranks as three minutes of your life you'll never get back. But spend some time in the cemeteries of Flanders if you need to be reminded there are worse things than boredom.

How Moving Are These?

Of all the areas on which one might hope the US President would work for change, the Middle East was perhaps the one that inspired least optimism, at least in me. I figured that Obama would be too scared to take on the more hardline Israeli partisans, given the "broken alliance" between American Jews and blacks, and the pressure of the republican rumours on his religion. It certainly seemed that way during the campaign and the period between election and inauguration.

But his words since then inspire hope even here. I've been a strong supporter of Israel since I was a child, but the behaviour of its governments in recent years make clear that for its own good, as well as that of the Palestinians, it needs a president who can pull it into line. If Obama can do that, what can't he do?

The Year To End All Wars

Mark 2068 in your diaries. It’s the year humanity will achieve its crowning glory – an end to war.

OK, I’m not actually serious with that. The date is based on a calculation so rough it barely deserves the name, but I’m trying to make a serious point. Unlikely as it may seem, we are on target to end perhaps the greatest blight on human happiness in history, and in the life time of some people alive today.

I suspect that most people, off the cuff, would say that war is getting more common in the world today, and scoff at the idea we are on a trajectory towards ending it. But this perception is false, based on three factors:

• We have a general tendency to think bad news is increasing, even when it is not
• Wars are now more reported than ever before, so we hear about atrocities in far off lands of which we know little.
• The wars that are occurring may well be becoming more bloody – at least in absolute terms – which creates a perception there are more of them.

There is no doubt new technology is allowing killing on a greater scale than ever before, and as the world’s population grows it is to be expected that death tolls will rise.

But the happier side of the coin is that the number of wars in the world is on the decline, and has been for quite a while. My very rough estimate is that every three years two wars are ended and one new one starts. A slightly less rough assessment is that there are 20 wars in the world today. On this basis it will take 60 years to end war entirely, thus the date above.

Now there are many, many things one can quibble over in these figures. The definition of war is not that easy, as is defining when many conflicts start and finish.. I’m sure I’ve also left out a few wars from the table below, and would be grateful for corrections (although of course I’d prefer that there are no more horrors to confront) I’ve put my definitions at the bottom. Feel freed to disagree with them, but I’m fairly confident that on almost any consistent definition you can use my broad conclusion is robust – the number of wars in the world is in long term decline.

The obvious fly in this ointment is that environmental degradation increases conflict and will lead to more wars. Already the Dafur conflict may well have been caused, at least in part, by desertification of the Sahel.

But against this there is the fact that wars tend to breed more wars, and peace breeds more peace. Conflicts on a nation’s borders lead to destabilisation, most clearly seen in the way civil war in Liberia engulfed surrounding nations. On the other hand, the more countries there are that are free of wars the more support there is for the humanitarian and peace-keeping missions, as well as the trade sanctions and moral pressure which collectively have contributed to ending quite a few of the world’s conflicts.

I think we’re in a race, to get the number of wars in the world down to the point where virtuous circles take over and war is put behind us like smallpox before global warming fans the embers of an unstoppable number of blazes.

I’m far from certain we’ll win this race, but there is a much better chance than most people realise that we might.


Nation’s experiencing wars[1] begun since 1993 (5)
DRC
Dafur
South Ossetia/Abkhazia[2]
Iraq
Ivory Coast

Nations whose experience of war stopped since 1993 (12)
Aceh
Algeria
Angola
Bosnia
Bougainville
Djibouti
East Timor
Guatemala
Liberia
Northern Ireland
Peru
Sierra Leone

Nations experiencing continuing wars (15)
Afghanistan
Burma
Casmance
Chad
Columbia
Eritrea
Israel/Palestine
Kurdish Turkey
Lebanon
Mindanao
Niger Delta
Somalia
Sri Lanka
Uganda
West Papua

Wars that started and ended between 1993 and 2008 (7)
Burundi
Chechnya
Guinea-Bissau
Kosovo/Servbia
Nagorno-Karabakh
Nepal
Rwanda


I’ve chosen 1993 as the starting point because it gives us as long a timeline as possible while still avoiding the events surrounding the ending of the Cold War, which stopped quite a few conflicts, while starting several others. If you take the starting period back to 1983 you’ll find the ratio of wars ended to wars begun is even more promising.

There are also a couple of wars I’ve found difficult to classify. Officially the war in South Sudan is over, but I’m not confident enough to put it in the second column. I’m also not sure whether Pakistan belongs in the first or the third column or should not be listed at all since it is more a powderkeg than an active war. The South Thailand insurgency is another puzzle – it started well before the era, but has spiked since 2004.

On these numbers we’re actually doing slightly better than my estimate, but several of the wars that have been brought to a close were quite small, so I’ll round down.

If I’m right, by 2023 we should have ended around ten of the current wars, although five new ones will have started. This doesn’t strike me as incredible at all. Certainly some of the wars listed in columns 1 and 3 look intractable (it’d be a braver blogger than I who predicted the end to the Israel/Palestine conflict, or peace in Somalia). However, many of these look like they could come to an end a good deal earlier. The peace treaty for Mindanao was defeated on an 8-7 vote. The Columbian FARQ and the LRA in Uganda look close to collapse and I’m pretty confident South Ossetia and Abkhazia will end up as peaceful independent states. It’s quite likely historians will judge that war already over.

It’s true three of the new wars are a whole lot bloodier than the ones that have come to an end, but if we can get the number of active conflicts in the world into single figures I think we’ll see fresh enthusiasm for positive global intervention.

And just think – if we could cut the number of wars in the world by a fifth in a period where George W Bush was president, imagine what’s possible when we actually have a president desirous of peace.


[1]I use the term “Nation’s experiencing war” to refer to situations where a political conflict is killing more than 1 person per hundred thousand per year. I think its important to look at the actual costs, rather than whether war has been officially declared. Of course the cost of war is measured in injuries and economic damage as well, but deaths per head of population are easier to measure and seem a pretty good starting point. The rate of 1/100,000 is completely arbitrary. However, as I have said I think the general conclusion stands up whether you use a higher or lower rate as long as one is consistent.

I have excluded from this definition cases such as Zimbabwe where a government is killing large numbers of its people, but the killing pretty much all goes one way. Whatever this should be called, I don’t think it is war. It’s pretty easy to demonstrate however, that atrocities of this form are also in long term decline – another reason for optimism.

A more difficult exclusion is conflicts that are not based on national or religious feeling, or political ideology, cf the Mexican battles over control of the drug trade. I’ve left these out because they’re harder to track, but also because, horrific as they may be, the death rate is usually lower than “proper” wars.

[2]The conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia are so linked in cause and likely outcome I am counting them as one. Even combined, the death toll is still one of the lowest on the list.