Wars Have Several Causes, and the Betrayal of the People Is Only One

The explanation of war I find most natural is the one I have used most often: rulers go to war because war pays the ruler while the people pay for the war. Those who decide are not those who die, and as long as that is so, there will be more wars than the people would choose. I still think this is true. I have come to think it is also too tidy, and that putting the whole weight on it weakens the case rather than strengthening it.

Here are the other causes, and why they matter for what to do about it.

One Bad Government Is Enough

The betrayal account treats each war as a decision by one government against its own people. But a war needs only one party to want it.

A region can contain a dozen governments that would each prefer peace and still be in a permanent state of war, because a single aggressive regime forces everyone around it to arm, to ally, and eventually to fight. The neighbours are not betraying their peoples when they mobilise; they are responding to a threat that exists whether or not they wish it. A single bad government throws a whole region into chaos, and the chaos then looks like a dozen bad governments when it is really one plus its consequences.

This has a practical implication. Reforming your own system of government makes your own government less likely to start a war. It does not protect you from the neighbour who has not reformed. So the argument for better government cannot be an argument for one country at a time; it has to be about the neighbourhood.

The Mix of Strategies

The second cause is older than governments and would survive their reform.

Put a population of players into an environment and let them try strategies against each other. Some cooperate, some defect, some retaliate. The equilibrium that emerges is a mixture: mostly cooperators, some cheats, and the proportion is set by the payoffs, not by anyone's virtue. I have written about this in the context of individual morality, but it applies to states.

A world of states is such a population. Even if every state were perfectly representative of a peaceful people, the strategy mix would still contain some aggressors, because aggression pays whenever enough of your neighbours are trusting. Their existence forces the others to keep the means of war, and the means of war, once kept, get used. War is partly an emergent property of a population of independent units with no authority above them, and no reform inside the units removes it.

Institutions That Feed on Conflict

The third cause is the one I think is most neglected, and it is the one that direct democracy actually addresses.

Some institutions inside a society are built for conflict and are very hard to control. The military is the obvious one: hierarchical, secretive, with a budget that grows in wartime and a professional culture that measures itself in wars. Religious institutions are the other: also hierarchical, also opaque, and with a doctrine that divides the world into the faithful and the rest. Neither of these is well described as a tool that a government picks up and puts down. They are organisations with their own interests, and one of those interests is the existence of an enemy.

Every society that has had these institutions has struggled to keep them from setting policy. Generals have pressed for wars that the civilian government did not want; clergy have inflamed conflicts that the rulers were trying to calm. When the rulers are themselves few and close to those institutions, the struggle is usually lost. Curbing their influence on internal and external policy is a proper goal of political design, and the historical inability to do so has started wars that nobody at the top formally chose.

Where Direct Democracy Enters

Notice which of the three causes a change in the system of government can reach.

It cannot remove the one bad neighbour, though a region of directly governed states would produce fewer of them. It cannot remove the strategy mix, though it can move the proportions. What it can do is take the institutions that feed on conflict out of the room where policy is made.

A military that has to persuade the whole population to fund a war, rather than a defence minister and a committee, faces a much harder audience, because the population is the part of the society that does the dying. A church that has to win a public vote to shape foreign policy, rather than a few well-placed ministers, has lost its main channel of influence. The people are not pacifists, and I am not claiming they would never vote for war. I am claiming that the institutions whose business is war would no longer have the disproportionate access that their hierarchical structure now buys them.

The Honest Summary

Wars happen because rulers profit where peoples pay; because one aggressor is enough to arm a region; because a population of independent states will always contain some aggressors; and because societies harbour institutions that thrive on enmity and are hard to restrain. The first and the last are matters of political design. The middle two are not, and pretending otherwise would be selling a system of government as a cure for something it cannot cure.

What it can do is enough to be worth doing. Fewer wars started at home, and less room for the institutions that want them, is a real reduction in a real quantity. It is not peace. Nothing on offer is.