Stories of war origins: a narrativist theory of the causes of war

Abstract

All history is tendentious, and if it were not tendentious nobody would write it.R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. edn, ed. Jan Van Der Dussen (Oxford, 1994), p. 398.

History is therefore never history, but history-for.C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage) (London, 1972), p. 257. This is reminiscent of Robert Cox's much-quoted statement that '[t]heory is always for someone and for some purpose'. See his 'Social Forces, States and World Order: Beyond International Relations Theory', Millennium, 10 (1981), pp. 126-55, at p. 128.

Introduction

War is a multi-causal phenomenon, not only in the oft-noted sense that a variety of factors contribute to the making of a war, but also in the perhaps less obvious sense that there are multifarious casual paths to war. Some of the more idiographically minded are adamant, therefore, that 'the only investigation of the causes of war that is intellectually respectable is that of the unique origins ... of the particular past wars'.A. Seabury and A. Codevilla, War: Ends and Means (New York, 1989), p. 50; emphasis in original. And even one of the more nomothetically minded has conceded, some dissentign voices notwithstanding, that 'the hope that there are a few necessary conditions that must always be present in order for war to occur is probably not going to be fulfilled'.J. A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle (Cambridge, 1993), p. 48. For a dissenting voice, see B. Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven, CT, 1981). Vasquez, however, goes on to suggest three necessary conditions of 'world wars'. For a brief, critical discussion of Bueno de Mesquita and Vasquez, see my On the Causes of War, pp. 74-9.