SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE: SUMMARY OF THE BOOK "WAR AND SOCIETY" BY CENTENO., Dispense di Sociologia

Scarica SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE: SUMMARY OF THE BOOK "WAR AND SOCIETY" BY CENTENO. e più Dispense in PDF di Sociologia solo su Docsity! ORAL EXAM SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE: War and Society by A. Centeno + 3 Chapters by "Cultures and Societies in a Changing World" W. Griswold SUMMARY WAR AND SOCIETY BY A. CENTENO INTRODUCTION This book has been written by a teacher of the Princeton University. It analyzes the development of warfare in the Western world, such as Europe, the Americas, and Japan. After a discussion of the nature of war and its origin, we have organized the book around two separate claims. The first is that the history of human warfare is one of increasing size, complexity, and organization over the longue durée. Most certainly the first coordinated efforts at violence were just collections of individuals with men fighting for a common cause that was temporary and circumscribed. As group conflicts developed, it was still the actions of prominent characters which affected the turn of warfare. Warriors were called to fight, and outcomes could depend on the actions of a few. Through a reinforcing relationship of conflict, capital, and politics, war developed into actions between nation states involving armies. The increasing scope and complexity of conflict would continue until history would see veritable wars of societies. Warfare on a scale until that time unknown would follow the turn of the twentieth century and would involve the very real threat of total annihilation. This brings us to our second claim and organizing principle. Parallel to this historical arc of increasing scale and complexity of conflict, the nature of war has proven to be paradoxical. Its essence is brutal, destructive, and chaotic but war also demands the very best of its participants, such as heroism, bravery, and inventiveness. It has often been enacted for the greater good, for the betterment of a society, and to protect and extend life. War would also lead to the development of a number of state institutions and technological innovations: census, taxation, citizenship, and the technologies of destruction and communication. Modern communication systems, including the Internet and global positioning systems, are the direct products of the practice of warfare. And participation in war, ironically, has led many to a better life than they would have otherwise had, socially and economically. World War II is without question the apotheosis of the massification of war that we trace throughout this book. We conclude the book looking to the future of war. We argue that the nature of war has changed, the empires of Europe has come to an end. Guerrilla warfare and insurgency are now the hallmarks of conflict in the world. Furthermore, the development of fantastic technologies of war has led to a dramatic change in military composition, particularly in the West. We argue that these three developments – the end of empire, insurgency, and a dramatic shift in military service – are what characterize this new future of war in the world. CHAPTER 1: THE NATURE OF WAR What is war? It is foremost a social fact. War is a reflection and consequence of social structure, group norms, and relations. It can be studied using the same principles and methods that social science has used to understand other social phenomena: we cannot allow the horror of it to obscure the principles behind it and its very real political and social consequences. War is a critical force in shaping those very structures from which it stems, such as the state, as well as related institutions such as citizenship and class. In the past one hundred years, the toll has been so high and the pain caused by it been so great that distinguished political and philosophical thinkers have made important arguments about its insanity and the need for its prohibition. There is no question that war is chaotic. Anyway, a central theme of this book is that to dismiss war as irrational, stupid, horrific, is to accomplish very little. We write this in full awareness of the costs of war- social, fiscal, and ethical ones. It should come as no surprise then that, beginning with the late nineteenth century, accelerating after the First World War, and culminating with the opposition to nuclear Armageddon after 1945, some of the wisest voices of the planet have called for an end to war. We must appreciate that war is responsible for some of our highest achievements and deepest values as a society. The organization required to conduct war is intimately tied to the organization of statecraft. The technologies of destruction have often come from and been translated into technologies of development and production. The highest awards in the military celebrate honor, courage, and selflessness. It is also important to study war in a contemporary world dominated by market pricing as the basis of social relationships. The relative peace in the developed world of the past few decades has made market dynamics and behavior the central template at individual and group levels. VIOLENCE AND AGGRESSION: War is about violence. This is one reason why the use of the word “war” is inappropriate to describe political campaigns and policy efforts, like efforts to reduce the flow of drugs, to end poverty, or to assure adequate energy supplies. Wars involve physical assaults on human beings. The instruments of war are weapons designed to damage, mutilate, and destroy the bodies of enemies. War is about inflicting as much pain as is necessary to other human beings until the point that they cease to exist or are willing to accept another’s absolute authority over them. While wars are necessarily violent, there are many forms of violent behavior we should distinguish from warfare. To begin, we need to discriminate between what we might call hostile or impulsive and instrumental forms of aggression. Violence is associated with anger and emotion, and it has an end in itself. Thus, impulsive aggression is often associated with either some form of intoxication or some abnormal chemical state or with the immediate sensation of fear or danger. This form of violence is also associated with low levels of socialization: football hooligans, drunken louts, or plain old thugs. We do often see this type of violence in war, and certainly it is difficult to avoid. Thus, war may be partly defined as the social and political space in which this kind of aggression is allowed and encouraged. The very same acts that might condemn a young man to jail when at home, might earn him a medal in battle. But war as a social fact cannot depend on the individual acting out of aggressive impulses. It is a product of coordinated efforts and motivations. War is a function of what has been called “coalitionary aggression”: an aggression not of some completely independent individuals but of groups of people united in some way to act in concert. War involves a very different form of aggression: instrumental or premeditated. This is violence as a tool in the pursuit of some other end. If the first type of violence is associated with the conditioning of innate reflexes, this form is about operant conditioning driven by expectation of a desired re-enforcement. It is associated with those willing to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of their social unit. What makes war sociologically fascinating is that it makes horrible brutality part of a rational course of action for huge numbers of people – people who would otherwise not act out in particularly lethal ways. Understood as a social phenomenon, war is about how human beings are made to do the impossible. The whole point of studying war sociologically is to find out how this happens. WAR AS ORGANIZED VIOLENCE With this distinction in mind, we can come to better comprehend what Clausewitz means when he refers to war as a political instrument. Part of what makes war an excellent candidate for sociological study is the way in which it is an example of micro-level motivations and activity (soldiers, officers), meso-level coordination and strategies (group training, particular engagements and wars), and macro-level political coordination. Similar to the social organization of tribes, wars are a too complex form of behavior and coordination to be spontaneous. The purpose of war is organized coercion and it allows us to uncover the ways that these three levels – the individual, the intermediate, and the large scale –combine to create outcomes that are greater than the simple aggregation of individual efforts. If we are to distinguish between war and simple violence, another key difference is the numbers involved. To merit the name of a war or war-like conflict, the acts of violence must involve a significant number of people. In standard social scientific analysis, the threshold for deaths necessary to call a violent conflict a war is one thousand. Also central to our notion of war is that these individuals are not randomly associated. Somehow, they must belong to whatever organized political groups in an armed struggle. War is a form of aggression between politically distant from the center of social power. In general, the more transgressive the group may be, the higher the likelihood of females fighting for it. Similarly, guerilla armies in the twentieth century have often featured female combatants. Despite these exceptions, in the twenty-first century, female participation remains rare. Why would males want to “own” war? The monopolization of violent labor may have its costs for men, but it also assured or supported their exclusive access to political and economic authority. The link between military service and citizenship or property ownership has been historically rooted. Even today, one path to citizenship with its rights to legitimate political and economic participation is through military participation. Even though war is based on some physiological conditions and predispositions, war is too varied and too complex to be derived from individual cognitive or biological responses. The social cohesion, coordination, and political and economic dimensions of war have nothing to do with individual propensity for aggression or the physical dimensions of a person and they have more to do with the social organization of power and politics. UNIVERSALITY OF WAR: Has war occurred everywhere and in every era? This is a critical question. If, on the other hand, we find significant historical or geographical periods of peace, then we can identify the conditions that seem to produce warfare as well as its absence. The argument for the temporal and geographic universality of war has been best made by Lawrence Keeley and supported by the work of Steven LeBlanc. According to this broad accounting, there does not appear to be a time period or global region, or a level of civilization immune from war. According to Keeley, the minute Homo sapiens appear on the scene and evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common. We may not even make the argument that contemporary war is more violent than its pre-historic antecedents. According to Keeley, the killing ratio of “primitive” war appears to be the same or higher than in “modern” war. However, this position of the historical pervasiveness of war is contested. Scholars including Douglas Fry and Brian Ferguson strongly disagree with Keeley. For them the critical moment is the Neolithic Revolution from10,000 to 8,000 BCE, when sedentary life became possible thanks to agriculture, and when we also see first evidence of permanent settlements. For example, in looking at pre-Neolithic depiction of inter-personal violence, they note that it is restricted to a few individuals and does not indicate the presence of mass groups in conflict. War, they suggest, is a product of the creation and the aggregation of a stored surplus which is only possible with the Neolithic era. This argument is supported by the work of Guilaine and Zammit (2005). The key turning point for them is the Mesolithic (roughly 12,000 to 10,000 BCE). They emphasize two sites from this time period: the first are the famous paintings in Ares del Meastre which depict a number of individuals working in unison and fighting another group doing the same. The second site is the burial site in Djebel Sahaba in Northern Sudan where the remains of at least fifty-nine individuals have been found, most of which exhibit damage from some kind of human weapons. These authors suggest that at least some of these conflicts are linked to increasing competition for control of land and water, as well as the first indications of social inequality and competition for control. The key insight is that warfare as we have defined it seems closely associated with the establishment of more sedentary living arrangements. The evidence in this debate is tricky and may be a perfect example of how hard it is to confirm statements in social science. First, archeological evidence only reveals what is found and we have not found evidence of violence precedent the Mesolithic. What we know is that certainly from that point onward, warfare appeared practically everywhere. The positive correlation between social complexity and war making is quite strong among anthropological studies. If civilization is about the process of aggregation of humans and synchronization of needs, then war may be the ultimate expression of it. Certainly, the apparent coincidence of the appearance of organized violence and the very first permanent settlements suggest that war and civilization are antagonistic. The very victory of agricultural civilization may have been as a result of war. While previously most had considered that the craft and science of agriculture was diffused peacefully from a few centers, increasing evidence points to a process of conquest and colonization by our farming ancestors. The conclusion we can come to from the evidence available is that while inter-personal violence may be a part of our physical and cognitive composition, the more complex process which we call war is not. We have the potential for aggression, but obviously we also have the potential for cooperation and for aggregation into groups. War may actually be a unification of our human nature, of our biologically programmed behavior and of our historical culture. At some point in time, institutions developed and they were able to repress intra-group aggression and direct it toward outside threats. This involved two basic social processes. First it required a political hierarchy of some sort that could impose the control and coercion needed to manage aggression. Second, it also required the creation of a hierarchy of identity in which the obligations to the collective overcome individual preservation and needs. This same process also required the creation of a collective identity to distinguish those in favor whom aggression was prohibited and those against whom it was encouraged. So, war and civilization are actually not opposed, but quite entangled. THE CAUSES OF WAR: If we don’t have to, why do we have wars? If the answer to “why war?” is not a desire of blood, then we have to ask why organized/ instrumental groups persist in engaging in this behavior. Here, we are interested in the general explanatory schemes for war as a social act. We may identify three broad schools of explanations for the social fact of war. The first focuses on material explanations, the second lays responsibility on cultural predispositions, and the third blames psychological phenomena. FIGHTING OVER RESOURCES: It is undeniable that war is often about controlling some form of scarce resource. We can frequently reduce the origin of a war to competition over something producing conflict between two or more groups. The list of resources over which societies may fight is considerable; thus we will concentrate on two that appear to be historically common: genetic diversity and territory. Conflicts and war can be a critical step for the simple demographic re-production of a society. In order to survive, all relatively small groups need to search for genetic resources. Genetic diversity is a necessity for healthy group reproduction. One way of obtaining exogenous genetic resources is to raid and kidnap people from other groups. Disputes about females or raids in order to obtain new sources of female population are very common in the anthropological literature. War may also be used to replenish a population that has been depleted through war or other means. More familiar to contemporary readers, fights over territory are perhaps the most common. The author Robert O’Connell (1995) sees the organized violence of war originating in the competition between populous nomads in the first several millennia of the Neolithic era and well into the Iron Age. From this perspective, the creation of sedentary civilization produced a higher likelihood of conflict than had existed when all were essentially foragers. The presence of permanent settlements required established territories that were the domain of some people and not others. The creation of settled groups also signals the start of the potential for the organized and expensive enterprise that is war. The agricultural revolution produced a key motive for war (territory), but also its means enabled groups to produce enough surpluses to allow significant number of members not to participate in farming but instead to specialize in a variety of non-food production activities such as art, governance, and knowledge creation. This also made possible the specialization in violence – the creation of a class of people dedicated to protection and hostility. Settlements also coincided with the construction of walls and defense ramparts. Thus, such surplus also perhaps permits the elaboration of a sense of identity and supporting ideologies that are so important for war. So, the competition for resources may be at the heart of the origins of war, and it is certainly the basis for economic and political studies of international conflict, but the willingness of millennia of soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the collective good cannot be totally explained by a purely economic or resource-oriented explanation. Wars have been waged for justice, for honor and for common ideologies. We must search for the roots of war in the human soul as well as in the human brain. BLAME IT ON CULTURE: Culturalist explanations have long been used to explain variations across societies. The core idea of this perspective is that some societies are simply more prone to engaging in wars, and that some groups are inevitably going to fight each other. In another variant, some groups are simply thought to think of the world more violently or have political or religious aggression taught to them from a young age; for example, the far too common attribution of violence done by Muslims to a supposedly “jihadist” orientation in Islam. One obvious problem with such accounts is that they are usually used to explain the behavior of societies that the observers have declared as “beyond the pale” of civilized behavior. Anyway, an external observer might well observe that the greatest pouring of blood has often been caused by the hands of the “most civilized.” For example, Western Europe has a much bloodier history than the Great Lakes region of Africa. Similarly, students of comparative religion might highlight the violence encouraged by the Old Testament and question the extent to which Christianity has a weaker commitment to “holy war” than does Islam. Further, culturalist explanations are much more often used to explain violence defined as brutish or bloody like the aggression by a terrorist or by a machete-wielding teenager, but rarely against the bombardier raining death from thousands of feet above ground. Culturalist perspectives assume that violence is a constant in a society and that views do not shift. Yet there is no evidence that either is true. From this perspective, wars happen not because cultures push us toward them, but because cultural prohibitions against violence are lowered and identification of the threat leads to an acceptance of it. US AND THEM: A third explanation for the causes of war comes from social psychology, particularly the writings of Henri Tajfel, a twentieth-century British social psychologist. His work, developed in response to the Second World War, helps us understand how collectives come to actions and how these then lead to organized violence. His work was specifically motivated by the question of how ordinary people could commit genocide and war on a mass scale. It is important to identify the group psychologies that help shape individual behavior. Intergroup conflict is not produced by some collective aggregation of individual violent tendencies but results from social processes that originate in the act of our coming together to form communities. We appear to find some universal qualities to groups, but particularly the “ingroup bias” through which we perceive those whom we define as belonging to “our group” much more positively than those we define as “outsiders.” This is not only found throughout history and across global geography, but also replicated in laboratory experiments. Groups are competitive because individuals are motivated to achieve or maintain a positive social identity. It seems that hating others might help us love ourselves. Thus, aggression toward others and the creation of “holy” crusades serve to create social cohesion. In this sense, war is not necessarily the opponent of civilization or collective social life, but its co-worker. If we choose to celebrate the creation of an “us”, then we have to accept the creation of a “them.” The reason we have wars is that we lack a single power strong enough to make us behave as one. In the words of Philip Gourevitch, genocide may serve as an exercise in community building. Randall Collins claims that violence is a set of pathways that circumvent the barrier of tension and fear. One of the most interesting observations from Collins’ study is that violence is not contagious: the key step in violence is not necessarily the first punch, but in identifying someone as “different” or as part of a group representing a threat. War has to be understood not as the product of single agent’s desire or strategy, but as the product of the actions and expectations of the groups involved. EXPLAINING WAR: It is a hazard in the academy to search for explanations of a complex behavior, such as war. Nevertheless, we present these different materialist, cultural, and psychological causes of war as important explications of why societies have engaged in large-scale violence. In more general terms, we may link war with social concentration. What we observe over the past 10,000 years is not necessarily the decline of violence, as some have argued, but its aggregation. Violence is not is a limited window during which warriors are useful. While men new to battle need time to learn the informal skills needed for survival, those kept in combat of one form or another for too long quickly lose their effectiveness. Too much awareness of the consequences of failure and too much wearing down of soul and body make for a useless soldier. All soldiers have breaking points and a surprising number of incidents of “cowardice” come from losing contact with a reality too horrible to bear. We can think of the effective life or “productivity” of a warrior as a sort of inverse U-curve. For encounters of short duration between individual warriors, however, short bursts of frenzy may be ideal. In the longer time horizon, soldiers new to the battle need time to be effective, but continued battle exposure for more than sixty to ninety days leads to physical and psychological exhaustion. Much longer-term exposure, such as in modern war, may permanently hamper lives. The multiple deployments of American GIs in the “permanent battle” zones of Iraq and Afghanistan increase in suicides and general decline in mental health among veterans of these wars. While fear, alienation, terror, and panic are subjective, we should understand that these are also social phenomena and that they must be placed in context. For example, how responding to the need for respite has been a problem for all modern armies for whom battle is a perpetual state. These issues serve to highlight the organizational and social challenges facing any armed force. Given the horrors and fears described above, no armed force could ever count on perfect compliance based on individual commitment to “bravery.” Conversely, the collapse of armed units at particular points in time cannot be ascribed to a larger than normal number of cowards within it. What follows examines how it is that soldiers and their collectives come to act out in cruel and horrifying ways. BRUTALITY: War is a particularly brutalizing experience on the individual and collective, and we must acknowledge the brutality that individuals and the collective enacts in its course. There are clear differences across time and space in the kinds and degrees of violence applied. We need to understand the conditions under which particular thresholds of violence, cruelty, and abuse are surpassed. We also need to become much more aware of the context in which these thresholds are defined and applied. On the broadest comparative schema, there are two contradictory trends observable over the past several millennia of war. On the one hand, the use of wanton and explicit viciousness or malice has lost much of the legitimacy it once possessed. In the twentieth century, long accepted practices regarding the treatment of opponents and non- combatants have become more restricted and those who violate particular standards are more quickly and broadly condemned. On the other hand, the degree of violence and destruction applied in war has increased exponentially and the acceptance of what are euphemistically called “collateral damages” has also increased. The levels of physical devastation of urban areas and numbers of civilian and combatant deaths that have become possible through bombing have dramatically transformed the violence of war. We may have created stricter norms, but have also come more readily to accept greater destruction. The difference is that the violence has become more bureaucratized, but it has not diminished. We do find significant differences in war behavior across closer distances of time and space. A prominent case concerns the behavior of the Wehrmacht depending on where, when, and whom it fought. What this case tells us is that we cannot think of violence as a constant of war, but rather a variable that depends very much on the broad historical and social context in which it is fought. Are wars made by madmen, or do wars simply make men mad? The answer seems to be a bit of both. There is no question that even if wars do not drive people to insanity, they certainly provide a context for mad behavior to become normal or accepted. All of us live with constraints on our emotions and actions, but in war many of these are loosened. For some individuals, this process might lead to the release of psychotic tendencies that would have remained hidden or under control in other circumstances. For the vast majority, war also allows for the release of rages and the acceptance of actions far removed from ordinary life. For some behavioral extremes, we need better to understand the process of “running amok.” Most cases of violence seem to arise from the physical and psychological stresses discussed above. That is, aggression seems to generate itself and may even be socially contagious. There also appear to be some forms of what we might call aggressive momentum where, once begun, it is difficult and not impossible to stop or slow the progression of violence. Youth and inexperience may also be factors. The evidence seems to indicate that some kinds of duties tend to produce a more violent response from soldiers. There is also the moral inversion of moral codes that occur in war. The transformation of moral norms and practices can lead to broader ethical crises for individual warriors and perhaps to the very dissolution of any demarcations of appropriate behavior. This confusion can occur not just on an individual level, but also on that of groups, further encouraging forms of behavior. The major problem of understanding atrocities on both analytical and judicial/philosophical is the assignment of responsibility. Can individuals be held responsible for obeying bad orders, for responding to an insane situation with madness, for not resisting social pressures too much for anyone to bear? In this light, we also need to realize that war crimes or atrocities may be part of official policy. For certain armies and in certain theaters, mass killing or other forms of violence may not be an individual exception, but an explicit part of strategy. Often this is a form of “instrumental brutality” meant to cow and sow fear in the enemy. When making judgments regarding military strategies we need to be sensitive to the contexts in which they are devised and the relevant moral codes that they are supposedly breaking. Is it, for example, worse to kill unarmed civilians through random shooting or through random bombing? Arguments about intentionality are often used to justify one kind of violence over another, but to the victims the mindset of perpetrators may not be so relevant. There are clear patterns that we can define in the probability of both individual and collective violence. We are more likely to see excessive violence, atrocities, or brutality when the lines dividing the two sides are: ideological, religious, and racial. That is, the more alien or threatening the enemy, the more likely that whatever bounds of behavior may be normal in war will be crossed. It is critical to note that this distance does not need to be “real” or recognizable to an outsider, but that it is the perceived gulf between the “us” and the “them” that makes all the difference. Collins (2008) notes that cruelty and barbarity can be forms of a kind of boundary management – they both reflect and mark who is inside and who is outside the violent group. Collins notes that in many religions there is simultaneous call of charity, forgiveness, and love and a call for hatred and rejection for those outside of the faith. Similarly in war, we may observe self-sacrifice and love for comrades accompanying forms of inhuman cruelty toward those deigned the enemy. How do we account for the fact that men not only tend to show up and stay in battle, but also engage in tremendous acts of self- sacrifice? Under every imaginable circumstance it would be rational for men either to flee or avoid battle in some way. Anyway, the majority of those in a military encounter will at least remain in their posts. How do societies induce this particular form of collective behavior? One might argue that remaining in battle is an expression of a socio-biological instinct that uses individual sacrifice for the good of a group. Such explanations may make sense for relatively small groups, but not for the units of thousands that are common to war for several millennia. Similarly, warriors might believe that they will not be killed, or that the benefits of participation outweigh the possible costs. The answer lies in the institutions created to foster this kind of thinking. These are the institutions that are responsible for “heroism on command” on which war depends. The following section details the values that are used by society to create soldiers and the institutions which instill them. MAKING WARRIORS: Given that the vast majority of human beings are neither idealized warriors nor blood-lusting madmen, how can we understand the fact that large numbers have engaged in forms of violence that would normally be considered unthinkable? One possible answer is that many appear to enjoy war. What does the joy of battle consist of? There is always the appeal of “the glory that never dies” that Achilles chooses over a long life. Such attractions tend to be significant in warrior societies; for mass armies their appeal may be insignificant. There is also the retrospective relief of survival. Soldiers report that the end of a battle was one of the happiest moments of their lives. The very intensity of combat, requiring extreme concentration and cooperation with a close group, also provides a rare form of joy. Battle and war in general will likely be the most emotionally powerful experience in the lives of warriors. The concept of happiness or contentment being found in “being in the present” may find one of its most extreme versions in battle, where warriors have no choice but to focus on the “here and now” if they are to survive; what Robert Graves called “life’s discovered transitoriness”. Battle and its intensity may also mark an important break from the tedium of daily life. The temporary glory and importance given to actions may represent for many a rare moment of dignity and self-respect. Another answer to our question of how society gets soldiers to fight is that many warriors had no choice but to fight or die. Coercion has a long history in warfare, and some military tactics have been designed to enforce implicitly and explicitly the discipline of fighting and facing danger. From earliest times, we also have accounts of special units, whose only job was to make sure that the front lines stayed there. In contemporary times, the Soviet forces in World War II extensively used “blocking detachments,” who blocked exits from the battle zone; while in the waning days of the war, the German army instituted draconian rules regarding desertion. In the American army, a significant part of MP duties was to ensure that those stationed in the front stayed there. The effectiveness of coercion in part depends on the nature of the battle. Relatively small set-piece combat can easily be mentored. As the size of the battlefield, the length of engagement, and the complexity of battle increase, the possibility of constant and active vigilance is reduced. Combat requiring autonomous action by small units over a large territory will frustrate coercive discipline. Moreover, coerced troops will usually be less reliable than those genuinely committed to battle through some mechanism or other. The quality and depth of motivation of troops may make an invaluable contribution to victory. In general, we may observe another interesting inverse U-shaped historical trend in the effectiveness of coercion. In relatively simple encounters where individual combat is central, motivation is vital and coercion difficult. As we increase levels of aggregation and the complexity of collective action, the possibilities of coercion expand. Despite the critical importance of coercion, at the heart of the social phenomenon of war is an institution that transforms individuals with fears of and ethical objections to killing into elements of a collective whole designed to withstand horrific pain and to inflict it on others. What is the basis of this cohesion? We can divide the answer into two parts. The first consists of a set of values taught and privileged by military forces. The second involves a much more fundamental transformation of individuals through the creation of discipline and obedience. MILITARY VALUES Morale plays an incalculable role in determining the success of any armed force. It has been cited, for example, for the surprising victories of many an armed force, from the Spartan delay of the Persians at Thermopylae to the amazing performance by the Wehrmacht against overwhelming odds in 1944 and 1945. Conversely, poor morale has been blamed for the performance of both US and South Vietnamese forces in the 1960s and 1970s . What are the values that underlie military morale? These are the collective social sentiments that help convince so many to participate in activities so few will find attractive. Among these deserving special attention are camaraderie, leadership, faith, honor, and courage. CAMARADERIE: Throughout history and across geography, descriptions of fighting emphasize the importance of friendship and the bond that unites men in battle. It is important to realize that the significance and appeal of battle camaraderie may be exaggerated through its depictions in myth and fiction, but its very ubiquity in fiction, written and filmed, would indicate that there is some reality to the ideal. Wartime is often remembered as the period of life when men had their most intense friendships, and, for many veterans, their memory of military service is often a collage of remembrances of and affection for those with whom they served. This bonding could take intimate forms, like a non- erotic love. The notion of a special bond linking the men in what has come to be called a squad is universal. Certainly, the most pride and loyalty of individual warriors seems to be toward the small unit with whom he has established personal bonds. A soldier may not necessarily wish to prove his sociology of war is the systemic analysis of how courage arises as a social phenomenon. One clue may be in the notion of duty and discipline. DUTY AND DISCIPLINE Linking all these aspects mentioned before, it is the sense of obligation known as duty. Duty is about submission of one’s own will or preferences to those of another or to a collective. It is a binding force that links warriors to those next to whom they fight and to the collectives that they represent. These values are the antithesis of the classic warrior ethos of an Achilles hungry for glory. They are the much later development of a sense of collective obligation. In order to better understand the role it plays in the military ethos, we have to explore its associated notion of discipline. Discipline is an old word which originates in notions of learning and being a pupil. Let’s consider the modern notion of discipline as defined by Weber: the content of discipline is the methodically trained and exact execution of the received order in which all personal criticism is suspended, and the actor is exclusively set for carrying out the command. This obedience must be uniform and based on habitual routinized drill rather than heroic ecstasy or personal devotion. This notion of discipline is not just inherent to military life but represents the core of what we consider modernity. Modern forms of discipline involves the transition from coercive force to one that we might call “therapeutic.” It involves the replacement of threats of coercion with a form of internalized self-control. This new form of discipline, if originating in some training or surveillance, comes to rely more on self- monitoring than some external watcher. Military collectives have been in the forefront of constructing this kind of discipline. The notion of obedience or discipline as used here helps to further understand the distinction between the specifically instrumental form of aggression that characterizes war, from the more instinctive forms of aggression associated with other forms of violence. The submission to the will of others, the compliance with a larger logic than that of the individual, coheres the collective unit of armed force and is antithetical to the individual warrior hero. Transforming that free individual into a useful and effective member of the collective whole has been a predominant theme throughout history. At the heart of obedience is the submission of the individual to an organizational mindset. How do societies create such obedience? For many years, scholars attempted to associate a propensity for obedience with particular societies or forms of socialization. Over the past few decades, we have come to appreciate that the contexts in which obedience can be instilled can be of much shorter duration. The combination of some legitimacy, absolution of responsibility, and some sense of intimidation can create patterns of obedience instantaneously. Throughout history, armed forces have attempted variations on these patterns of learning and submission involving the inculcation of obedience to a hierarchical command structure. To do so, militaries have often created institutions that “induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power”. Such institutions American sociologist Erving Goffman has called “total institutions” (1961). According to Goffman, total institutions are situations in which people are separated from broader society and work, recreate, and sleep with only other members of the isolated group. Prisons are the most common example used, but Goffman also lists monasteries, psychiatric asylums, and armies as other obvious examples. Indeed, militaries are groups of warriors who temporarily or permanently close themselves off from the other parts of society and share many of these institutional qualities. The basic training which contemporary recruits receive in modern armies is the latest expression of these efforts. At the heart of basic training is a psychological manipulation much more important than any set of military skills acquired. These periods of isolation from the rest of the world seek to change the way recruits think, making obedience and discipline no longer simple means but ends in themselves. The stages involved in the process are fairly standard. First, the beliefs and behaviors which the recruits bring to training are destroyed. Then alternative identities, role models, and behaviors are constructed, in which the values described above are extolled above all others. Young warriors or new recruits learn to obey instantly orders from above and to relish the membership in the select group that they represent. In this chapter we asked, how do individuals come to tolerate, even volunteer, for such extraordinary activity? We argue that specific traits, particularly military values of faith, courage, duty, discipline, and obedience, are inculcated in individuals in order to induce them into fighting, and perhaps suffering mutilation or death, on behalf of their country. In the following chapter we analyze the product of these values and virtues, but in an aggregated form. CHAPTER 3: WAR OF ARMIES In this chapter, we will ask a different question: how are the collectives that are involved in war managed? We have seen one answer in the previous chapter though our attention to notions of duty based on obedience and discipline. In this chapter we will make use of these notions, but add to them two important aspects: the development of new forms of social organization and new technologies and how these interacted to produce the twentieth century’s world of wars. Fighting among individuals is fundamentally different from fighting among groups. The former rewards individual virtues that give the warrior a higher probability of winning. The latter must translate the same attributes to the collective level through the elaboration of hierarchical institutional structures and the imposition of discipline. These two forms of fighting also involve different technologies. Most important is the level of social organization required to achieve this translation of coercive skill. Consider the movements an individual might engage in while playing a simple game of basketball or soccer. Now consider the managerial difficulty of achieving this same level of movement, but from a mass of one thousand men, or ten thousand. We may best understand the progress of war over the millennia as characterized by the increasing complexity of these movements, requiring greater organizational sophistication, and the imposition of more elaborate forms of discipline, all leading to increasing lethality. These requirements change everything from the type of warrior formed by society to the form of political organization required to do so. Each shift has been accompanied by revolutionary changes in operations, logistics, technology, and social support. All of these aspects are parts of a central dilemma: how to aggregate humans in such a way as to make the whole encompassed and created by their integration greater than the sum of their parts. The central goal of military organization is the aggregation of instruments of violence and the people who use them and optimizing their use. The sociology of militaries seeks to explain how the amalgamation of hundreds of thousands of individuals can be managed and controlled so as to enable the new collective ensemble to focus on the immediate policy objective: the channeling of violence against an enemy. ORIGINS OF BATTLE: How did social units move from the disorganized and often ritualistic encounters between a few individuals to the deadly encounters of massed infantry? We do not know. We should consider routes that were not chosen on the road to battle. For many societies, war involved the exchange of a ritualistic set of insults that left few physically hurt. More common was the practice, well established in many cultures until quite recently, of conflicts being decided by champions. A third alternative would be a combination of the heroic warfare of champions with aspects of guerilla warfare today: conflict resolved through sporadic fighting between small groups. Instead, war evolved in most societies in a very peculiar way: masses of men would meet and seek to hurt the other side enough so as to either subjugate or even obliterate opposition. Just as there is nothing “natural” about war, there is nothing natural about the manner in which we battle. War as a social phenomenon is the product of historical path dependency and political, economic, and institutional orders. How did the pattern of mass battle come to dominate the globe for centuries? We cannot trace its pre-historic origins with any precision, but we can observe other social developments that appeared to occur in sequence. The development of organized violence is closely linked to greater sedentism and the rise of a notion of territoriality. As the complexity of the violence grew, it seems logical that it was accompanied by the imposition of hierarchical authority and social inequality. Prior to any evidence of war, we do have indications of urban settlements developed enough to merit the label city. They seem to share a privileging of places within them where an elite might live. The rise of this elite to power and its ability to command large numbers of men is at the very heart of the development of the modern state. Armies could only exist linked to elaborate forms of social order. These societies were all characterized by class inequalities, dependency on a mass of agricultural producers, and having political authorities or states that were largely dedicated to war making. It is not clear whether the states were created in order to make war because of the development of competing states, but a relationship between the phenomenon and institution was clearly established. The main use of the military was to counter external threats and to maintain a domestic status quo. These developments appeared to have happened in every major agrarian civilization of the ancient world around 3500 BCE. Within geographical regions, the new forms of war may have developed in one or two centers and then spread. Our earliest detailed depictions of battle and armed groups already contain many of the characteristics that militaries would retain until the present day. In the accounts of the Battle of Kadesh (ca. 1274 BCE) we can already observe groups of up to five thousand men operating as an aggregate fighting under unitary command. The Egyptian divisions could operate both tactically as well as strategically. The Pharaoh Ramses exercised control over these movements and could alter their movement and position depending on the information he received. These already vast armies (20,000 is a consensus estimate) were organized in the standard form familiar to any soldier today: individuals belonged to units consisting of fifty warriors. Along with the centrality of smaller sub-units came the significance of maintaining a core of veterans who would not only command them, but serve as examples and mentors to the recruits. The central role of the so-called non-commissioned officers is ancient and speaks to the central organizing logic of all militaries. The formations already possessed an impressive mixture of arms, including infantry, artillery (archers), and cavalry (chariots and, in India, elephants), each fulfilling specific and sequenced roles. As in every era, specific weapon technologies help define tactics and vice versa. The key resource appears to have been enough material and labor with which to produce the necessary weapon systems (e.g. lumber, metal, and horses for chariots). Geographical context was critical: for the armies of the Mesopotamian plains, cavalry in one form or another was decisive. In more mountainous terrain, or where horses were not available (as in the Americas), infantry became critical. In all cases, armies consisted of a mass of conscripts used during wars, but usually devoted to agricultural work. The consensus is that the importance of the chariot indicates the centrality of some form of aristocracy to war making. It is not surprising then that most of the surviving accounts of battle focus on individuals and their heroic deeds. Yet, militaries could be meritocratic arenas where relatively humble born could climb the social ladder based on martial deeds. Despite the social and material limitations of ancient warfare, the evidence indicates that already by the mid-second millennium BCE, and certainly one thousand years later, armies were capable of considerably complex maneuvers. THE PHALANX, THE FLEET, THE LEGION: Two major shifts occurred over the next few hundred years: the replacement of the chariot by cavalry and the rise to supremacy of the infantry. The first shift had much to do with the expense involved in fabricating the battlewagons, their limited mobility, and their limited use outside of specific physical terrains. As the technology, breeding, and skills of horsemanship improved, cavalry evolved from simply a device to shock infantry and to deliver missiles, to one that expanded the size of the battle and created the need for a much more sophisticated understanding of it. We will focus on the second change, as it had a much more revolutionary impact on wars and the societies that fought them. The Greek phalanx ranks as its most sophisticated elaboration in the Ancient World. The rough terrain of the Greek peninsula and the relative material poverty of ancient Greek poleis made chariots less of a factor. The challenge of discipline and holding a large mass of soldiers together was more of a problem. Without cohesion, massed infantry is useless, as it will be broken by threats or weaknesses. To use infantry properly, a social context had to exist or be created that supported the cohesion of the formation. The phalanx was born out of the particular agricultural structures of ancient Greece. These created the foundation of the “Western way of war.” explosive powders were known in China before 1000 CE, and firearms were already available in most parts of Eurasia by 1300. Most of the earlier innovation in the use of gunpowder in Europe, however, was with artillery, and already by 1500 cannons were an important part of war for several militaries. Variations in the use of such munitions often had dramatic strategic consequences. In Europe, artillery meant the end of localized and autonomous aristocratic powers based in castles. But, the true “gunpowder revolution” required innovations beyond artillery. It was in the organizational more than the technological or purely tactical aspects of battle where we see the broadest impact of gunpowder. The kinds of tactics made necessary by the potential and limitations of gunpowder did bring about dramatic changes in the practice of war. The combination of improvements in the design and manufacture of firearms and new formations led to the creation of the characteristic element of warfare for the next two centuries: the volley or “wall of lead” that replaced the previous obstacle of swords and spears. The success of firearms in the European military tactical market was crucial for later developments. Many in Europe would have envied the successful contemporaneous Japanese efforts to prohibit firearms altogether. For many, gunpowder represented an evil new way of killing. Most importantly, they signaled the end of the privileged position of the aristocratic warrior with his horse, or in the Japanese case, merely armed with his katana. But, in the European cases, the success to be enjoyed by armies with the new weapons and the security they brought to people made opposition futile. From a sociological perspective, the most important aspect of the gunpowder revolution was the creation of a new form of organizational discipline required by the new form of war. The gunpowder revolution produced radical changes in the way men were trained and what was expected of them in battle. This arose from three interrelated changes: tactical, cultural, and demographic. The emphasis increasingly was on the control and manipulation of the collective with declining emphasis on the power of individual initiative and bravery. First, success in battle came down to the ability to coordinate large groups of men so as to assure a continual wall of fire facing any offensive charge. Armies created exercises to train soldiers to fire in organized volleys. The faster delivery of firepower and the larger percentage of men facing fire required the development of the “culture of forbearance”, in which soldiers were expected to accept extreme punishment and death. For roughly two centuries, most battles consisted of formations of men marching toward each other and, as they approached, letting loose and withstanding withering volleys of fire power. The combination of apparent geometric order with the increasing power of firearms brought the need for courage to a new level. What was expected of the soldier was simply the ability to accept his probable death or dismemberment as he calmly marched toward the enemy and loaded and shot his musket in time. This expectation for courage under fire required discipline. In many ways, it required precisely the characteristics that had defined the phalanx two millennia before. Unlike the phalanx, however, these armies were not made up of land-owning neighbors but often of what one observer described as “slime of the nation and of all that is useless to society”, mercenaries. The general assumption was that the common soldier could be trained, but never trusted. Since the officer corps remained aristocratic, the key to running an effective army and navy was to have the men fear and respect their commanders more than the dangers to which they were exposed. A complicating factor was the increasing size of armies. In the war of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, armies of ten thousand had been the norm. Two hundred years later, French king Louis XIV would operate with armies of several hundred thousand. This required ever-greater organizational sophistication as the logistical maintenance of such huge hordes became crucial for success. One of the keys to successful support was standardization of more and more aspects of military life. This included weapons or even dress as uniforms. In an interesting contradiction that would remain constant through the twentieth century, the standardization, bureaucratization, and general imposition of order was accompanied by greater passive destruction. Not only was the killing power of an army increasing, but also as its size grew, the consequences of an army merely passing through any region became ever more terrible. This destructive potential then required ever more discipline to manage it and direct it to the proper object of military policy. These shifts signaled the end of whatever romance of war existed. Changes in war and its practice became part of what Norbert Elias calls the “civilizing process” whereby the chaos and the violence were moved from the public face of conflict. It also created a new form of “military refinement,” which sought to remove itself from emotions and reflect ever more the perfection of manners. THE BIRTH OF TOTAL WAR: NAPOLEON’S REVOLUTION & AMERICAN CIVIL WAR. The next revolution in the manner in which wars were fought had more to do with the social bases of political authority behind them. The political revolutions of the late eighteenth century challenged the domestic political orders of the relevant states, but also the very international system under which they operated. The checkerboard armies of eighteenth-century Europe represented the disciplining of political violence to the will of increasingly centralized states. They accompanied the territorial expansion of a small number of strategic centers and their ability to claim the monopoly over the legitimate application of violence within their territory. They were also the tools of monarchs and were openly used to foster their interests. Armies were meant to protect and expand interests and a lost battle mean a lost province. Much of the strategic emphasis was on the avoidance of battle either through maneuver or through the protection of borders by natural obstacles or fortifications. The apparent order of the battlefield reflected the instrumental rationality of the politics behind it. The American and French Revolutions transformed the relationship between politics and war. The new forms of war were uncertain, and the struggle was increasingly existential. Carl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian general and military strategist, recognized that wars could no longer be limited or choreographed, but required an absolute commitment and with this, new forms and levels of violence. Although still debated, many see the birth of total war in the French Revolution, carried on through the American Civil War, and finding its apotheosis in World War II. Clausewitz would call the kinds of war “absolute” which demanded the utmost not simply from a class of officers, or a group of soldiers, but of the people from which the military was drawn itself. This relationship between war, politics, and the people would develop into total war. The embodiment of this new spirit of war was Napoleon but the changes were also inherent the outcomes of previous developments. The most significant transformation was that armies stopped being seen as the playthings of rulers and became emblems and tools of the nation. The transformation of the French army in part was caused by its internal dissolution as large parts of its officer corps found it impossible to operate in the post-1789 order. More important, was the threat the Revolution represented to the European monarchies and their responses after 1791. Faced with external threats and without an adequate military response, the Paris government created a new form of armed force: its officers would no longer be aristocrats appointed by status, but commoners advanced by their skill. The common soldiers would be the very representatives of the people. In any case, the line between the soldiers in the battlefield and the civilians behind them would be blurred, as each part of the nation would be called upon to do their part so that the Revolution and France could survive. The purpose of battle was also transformed. The struggle had to be carried to the enemy and the threats must permanently be eliminated by the destruction of opposing armies. To this political shift we need add that the French army relied less on the imposition of discipline through drill, but on a new form of morale and fighting spirit. Lacking the organizational capacity to maintain an army through complex logistics, Napoleon used these new circumstances to force decisive battles. The level of violence and the number of dead increased as well. We can appreciate some of these transformations by considering for example Austerlitz campaign. In 1805, it required the redeployment of massive armies over hundreds of miles and in combination with the campaigns between 1805 and 1807 produced hundreds of thousands of casualties. Austerlitz is perhaps most notable for the fact that Napoleon sought a decisive battle even after his defeat of the Austrians in Ulm two months previously. Napoleon sought to decimate the allied Austrian and Russian armies in order to solidify his control over central Europe. More importantly, the French occupation produced a popular and nationalistic revolt which, while eventually defeated, produced a political and military ulcer from which Napoleon never recovered. The brutality of tactics on both sides of this struggle also marked a critical turning point away from the “gentlemen’s wars” of the previous century. Once the power of national military forces and total war (Russia campaign-1812) became clear, it was difficult if not impossible to return to the status quo ante. The next stage in the development of total war occurred in the United States. The American Civil War was a critical moment in the path to total war for six interrelated reasons. First, it involved an existential threat to the protagonists. For the North, defeat would have meant a radical transformation of the Union and for the Confederacy it meant the destruction of a way of life. Non- professional armies largely fought the war. Both sides depended on their civilian populations even for the highest levels of leadership. This was not a war between soldiers, but between peoples. The size and scope of the war also distinguish it from its predecessors. The four years of war included battles in at least three major campaigns separated by hundreds of miles as well as a continual blockade of thousands of miles of coast and included over three million men. It remains the bloodiest war in US history. The level of killing may have been unprecedented, as some units lost over 80 percent of their men in single battles. Civilians were not immune and, particularly in 1864 and 1865, the Confederate population was subjected to the harshest possible punishment and deprivation while the economy of the South was destroyed. Finally, the war was arguably the first in which industrial resources were critical for victory. What was perhaps most remarkable about the American Civil War was that its conclusion did not lead to a major transformation of how military conflicts were viewed and organized. In fact, European militaries ignored the lessons of the war, and even Americans did not reconsider the dimension war in the new industrial age. The next century ( 20th century) would reveal their folly. A CENTURY OF WAR: In many ways, war and the twentieth century defined each other. These one hundred years were marked by a bloodletting unprecedented in its reach and barbarity. While the precise number of victims remains a scholarly debate, the overall picture is indisputable. If we simply count the deaths from inter-state wars, we have a count of roughly eighty million. To this number we may add the estimated 40-50 million victims of colonial, civil, and revolutionary wars. Finally, if we include as wars efforts by states to “reform” their populations along ethnic, religious, or socio-economic criteria, we may add another 80 million dead. The figures are historically unprecedented. This is not to deny previous incidents of mass violence like the European conquest of the Americas, but it is critical to appreciate the manner in which political violence was transformed during the century. These changes are the climax of the processes mentioned before: the aggregation of even greater collectives, the increasing complexity of organization and the centrality of technological development, the resulting level of lethality, and the subsequent transformation of the relevant societies. This was the first time in history when wars occurred across the globe simultaneously. The twentieth century saw a universality of organized violence. Some regions largely avoided inter- state violence but suffered from revolutions and civil wars. In practically every region, each decade of the century witnessed a major war. Some wars occurred across the world. Consider the strategic map of 1942: with the exception of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, the Axis and the Allies confronted each other in every major region from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, from China to Egypt to the skies above London and Berlin. In the case of the Cold War, the entire world was held hostage to the potential outcome of nuclear Armageddon. In part because of this geographical scope, the numbers involved were also unprecedented. During World War I, an estimated 65 million men were mobilized globally. For World War II, the distinction between civilian and military participants became increasingly meaningless, but the total global involvement was at least one hundred million. Single battles could include more men on both sides than had previously fought in entire wars. For example, 2 million soldiers were involved in the battle of Stalingrad and 3 million soldiers were involved in the battle of Berlin. The unprecedented numbers consolidation of Qin China, the Islamic expansion beginning in the seventh century, and the Mongol explosion of the thirteenth century. Closer to our time, the history of Europe over the past two hundred years could be summarized as leading and resulting from attempts at continental conquest. No war or series of wars has had a greater societal impact than the victory of the “West” beginning in the fifteenth century. Consider that after the 1400s, no society has been able to challenge the supremacy of military power based in Northwest Europe and its satellites. The supremacy of the West is based on a five-hundred-year process of military conquest, and the contemporary world cannot be understood without reference to that military prowess. Why did the West win? We can identify four different categories of advantages that have been cited in the relevant. The first advantage is that Europeans enjoyed a significant strength in military technology and used it in extremely effective ways. The second advantage is that Western conquerors brought with them disease to the New World to which local populations had no immunity. Third, the West appears to have enjoyed an organizational and managerial sophistication in bringing a large and effective killing force to bear. Their political organization appeared to have been superior in delivering violence. Finally, we find that the Europeans never defeated their indigenous opponents alone, but they made strategic local alliances. Why did the West have this advantage? There is considerable support for the idea that the competitive market of war in Western Europe produced organizations well-designed and developed for conflict. All these elements played different roles depending on time and place. One general lesson we can observe is that repeatedly the West could win when it was able to establish a strategic and tactical agenda. For example, when antagonists met in open battle, Europeans won, but when indigenous groups used their local knowledge and flexibility in smaller campaigns, they were much more successful. For our purposes, we will focus on three conquests and see how these factors played out in each one: the Americas in the 16th century, Asia from the 15th through the 18th centuries, and Africa in the 19th century. THE AMERICAS: Following the destruction of the indigenous population of the Caribbean, the Spaniards then took only twenty years to conquer a territory vastly larger and more populated than the Iberian Peninsula. How was it done and what does this tell us about war? The indigenous people didn’t passively accept their fate. Neither the Aztecs nor the Incas gave up easily. Their societies, their entire political, social, and economic worlds, were essentially destroyed by a force that was much better able to apply violence to its enemies, and it did so with tremendous effectiveness. The epidemiological luck of the Spaniards should not be underestimated. The elimination of the peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes was almost total. This wave of mass death made the long-term subjugation of these lands and people infinitely easier. Despite the considerable loss of life due to disease, there are arguments against this being the primary factor of success for the Spanish. The Spaniards fought against enemies that might have been doomed by disease, but at that time the native people of what would be called Latin America still had considerable life in them. The main effect of the epidemics was in the political and social disruption they caused. In the case of the Aztecs, the death of Montezuma’s immediate successor made it difficult for the polity to organize itself. The foreign maladies also shattered the legitimacy of the Aztec worldview and disrupted basic social structures. Anyway, the Spaniards still had to enact their military superiority. This was partly based on technology. The most obvious technological advantage was that the Spaniards had the transportation capacity, enabling them to invade the Americas instead of the reverse. While carrying out a long- distance engagement across a vast ocean is a considerable challenge, this enabled the Spaniards to enjoy several benefits, including using the shock of the new, as well as exploiting local allies. It is also indicative of the advanced state of technology that the Spaniards enjoyed over the Aztecs and Incans. We may also count the horses and dogs available to the Spaniards as a military advantage. The efficiency in battle from these animals may not have made a huge tactical difference, but the disorientation they caused was considerable, especially in early encounters. Native Americans had no previous understanding of horses, and dogs in battle were unknown. Spanish armor may not have been much of an advantage, but helmets were critical in protecting them from the barrage of small missiles used by the indigenous armies. There is some debate regarding the effect of gunpowder, as the Spaniards simply did not have that many such weapons, but again the sheer shock value and the advantage this gave in early battles should be accounted. Finally, Spanish steel could best the wood and soft obsidian weapons of the Aztecs and Incans, and in close quarter combat this advantage was considerable. “Soft” technology – organization, discipline, and doctrine – were much more important than any material difference. First, we should not ignore the makeup of the Spanish forces and the social process that had produced them. The legacy of the Reconquista, the prior socialization, and the idiosyncratic leadership qualities of people like Cortes and Pizarro made a critical difference in the success of Spanish conquest of the Americas. These factors did so by producing a collective commitment to a common enterprise. This is not to discount the considerable forces and organization of the Mexica or the Incas. They also fought in formation and had clear battle orders. But all indications are that, they focused more on what we might call “Homeric” styles of warfare – emphasis on symbolic engagements and warriorhood over the collective – and much of their social order was based on individual performance. The Spaniards, on the other hand, were trained much more to fight as units and their incentive system discouraged individual acts of futile bravery. There was also a significant difference in the goals of battle. For the Mexica, for example, the point of battle was capture. For the Spaniards, it was killing. The Incas were also constrained by their culture of war: the capture of the Inca severely disrupted their entire political organization while the Spaniards fought with no constraints. However, it remains impossible for a few hundred Spaniards to have defeated tens of thousands of well-trained, courageous, and increasingly desperate Incan and Mexica warriors. The diseases and the technological differences perhaps would eventually doom the indigenous empires, but the manner in which the role of indigenous allies has been left out of traditional accounts speaks to a political desire to espouse European supremacy rather than acknowledge the important role of local alliances. Neither the Mexica nor the Incas had established absolute rule in their respective region. There seems to have been little inclination on the part of allies or subjugates to treat the Spaniards as any different from their indigenous overlords (and thus requiring unity against a common enemy). The Spaniards enjoyed the logistical and military support of the Tlaxaltecs and others in Mexico, and of various competing factions in Peru. They were able to exploit the local divisions for their benefits. Finally, the considerable political organization which the Mexica and the Inca did possess also ended up benefitting the Spaniards. In both cases, conquering one city or dominating one group was enough to deliver much of the remaining imperial territories. In this way, the Spaniards did not conquer the Americas, but actually succeeded two very well-developed polities that had done much of the work for them. When they met opponents, who were not as centralized and who refused to battle on the Spaniards’ terms, the outcome was quite different. ASIA: The European military advantage becomes clearer when we move halfway around the world to the Portuguese, Dutch, and English dominations in East and South Asia. Here, the epidemiological luck played no role. The Europeans did not decimate the native population through infection, nor did these locations present an ecological barrier to the conquerors. Technology is a different story. It is critical to distinguish here between military technology and science. Speaking about science, various locales outdistanced their Western counterparts, an example is the use of gunpowder, which was developed in China but never converted for use in mass killing. What the Europeans did was to use what science they had for the purposes of mass destruction of others. This is not to valorize one culture over another, but to recognize that the Europeans applied their science in a particular way. The first technological gap had again to do with the monopoly over transport, or violence purveying transport. Obviously, several groups on all three sides of the Indian Ocean had seafaring technology of one sort or another. But the Portuguese innovation was to place early forms of naval cannons on their ships. These effectively gave them control over any disputed passage and allowed them to increasingly monopolize the spice trade, which enabled them to produce more powerful ships than their competitors. The indigenous kingdoms of the Indian Ocean littoral could maintain their independence and they maintained control over land. But the sea had become European territory. Explaining the later expansion of European power into that land then requires we go to our other two mechanisms: organization and local political conditions. For example, the British enjoyed some initial supremacy in technology, and this again played an important role in disrupting the battle order of their opponents. The real key to the success of the armies of the British East India Company was organizational. The indigenous troops were skilled as individuals, but not subject to the discipline and control that is so central for aggregation of military might. This would lead to lines being more easily disrupted, collective charges being undermined, and non-participation or even early retreat by many. Another critical element was that while the British were able to co-opt indigenous groups and cultures to produce the militarily effective sepoys, their Indian counterparts had great difficulty in ensuring the loyalty of their European mercenaries. However, as in the Americas, it was the geopolitics of the subcontinent that made the critical difference. The British (and others) walked into the political vacuum produced by the collapse of the Mughul Empire. While this prevented them from replacing one hegemon with another, it meant that the polities of the sub-continent found it impossible to unite against a common enemy. The subsequent disunion in the Maratha Confederacy further inhibited an Indian response. Worse, the British were able to create temporary alliances against whoever happened to be strongest at any particular time. The British also benefitted from the fact that in many cases the indigenous rulers did not enjoy legitimacy with their troops. This again disadvantaged them in any open battle. Finally, the British alliance and then control over Bengal allowed them access to the wealthiest part of India and these resources were often spent on military investment. AFRICA: We may separate the European campaign in Africa into two very broad periods, each providing its own lessons. The first begins with the sixteenth century and ends halfway through the nineteenth; the second includes the infamous “scramble” that is arguably more familiar. In the first phase, Europeans did not bring disease, but were stymied by it. The geographical and epidemiological challenges of Africa restricted the European incursions to limited sovereignty over some coastal areas anchored on fortifications. Attempts to penetrate deeper were frustrated by high disease mortality, and also by the inability of the Europeans to utilize their technological and organizational strengths. The technology gap was often bridged through trade and the conditions in the region prohibited the kind of massing of medium-size forces effectively. However, the Europeans did not need to “conquer” Africa when in many senses, others would do it for them. Here, what is critical is that warfare and conquest in the sub-Saharan setting was rarely about resources defined by territory, but rather control over human beings. This reflected the relatively low population density of the region. For several centuries, the Europeans expressed no interest in penetrating past their bases as long as the supply of the key resource – human slaves – was assured by other means. It is in terms of this slave trade that this first phase of the European expansion involved a “conquest.” The numbers estimates place the numbers of Africans enslaved at over twelve million, with perhaps an equal number of Africans dead who never made it to the New World. Such figures of enslavement and death created a demographic shock of global historic proportions, affecting the global economic, political, and social context to this day. What weapons were used to inflict servitude on these people? Even European military agency was limited. The Europeans provided an economic and political incentive structure that catalyzed the trade and may have played a role in providing the indigenous slaving militaries with a significant technological advantage. The second phase is much more familiar and begins with the French conquest of Algeria beginning in 1830 and effectively ends with the start of World War I. Once again, disease was not a factor, except those medical advancements made penetration of the African interior progressively more feasible. The colonial double uses as slave labor camps, this was always secondary. People were not killed because they had something someone else wanted – although personal wealth and property were certainly gleaned whenever possible. Nor were they damage. Since great efforts were made to keep it secret, their murders were not functional or instrumental in that they could be used to intimidate or terrorize. The killing was its own objective and the reason was a perceived identity – what has been called “racial warfare”. How could this happen? For the very same reasons as why it happened. The Holocaust was very much directed toward a perceived rational end. The methods used through most of 1941 were not effective enough. Despite the massive killing in places such as Babi Yar, the elimination of so many millions could not be carried out by killing squads. There were also significant human costs to the personnel involved. The difficulty was to remain decent (anständig) in the face of such an obligation. Over and again we find references to the need for hardness and for sacrifice so as to accomplish the great goal. This required a “totally unprecedented invention of synchronized killing”. Each camp had its peculiarities, but all shared the following critical characteristics: First, contact with the victims was minimized to the initial arrival. Very soon afterwards, the victims would be funneled into a path, finishing in their deaths. The removal of bodies was done by Sonderkommando – prisoners forced to work in various parts of the camp. Second, the actual number of non-prisoner personnel involved could be kept to a minimum making the process of recruitment easier. Finally, the process was depersonalized as much as possible while the personnel were encouraged to think of their work as normal, even if unpleasant. To this would be added the “honor” of taking part in a heroic victory. What the Holocaust teaches us is how a tool of violence can be adapted in apparently rational ways. The true horror of the Holocaust was that it did not depend on orders from evil men, but how easily the means of war could be applied to an end that any rational person would reject out of hand. STRATEGIC BOMBING: The twentieth-century Italian general Giulio Douhet is the most symbolically important figure in modern warfare. His book, The Command of the Air serves as the intellectual origin of the concept of strategic bombing. Douhet predicted that the wars of the future would be decided by air-power alone. Massive fleets of bombers would destroy an enemy’s cities before the more traditional forces of army and navy could even be mobilized. The destruction would be total: he advocated the targeting of both the productive capacity of the enemy and the terrorizing of the population. The futility of defense was central to Douhet’s thesis. While many of the particulars of Douhet’s thesis were wrong, the central premise of unimaginable destruction defined warfare in the twentieth century. With the advent of strategic bombing – meaning mass civilian bombing – the means of war have become cause for their own use. We have seen the mass killing of conquest as a byproduct of the process of appropriation, and the killings of genocide being their own purpose. The killings that are a result of bombing are because military logic declares it the only possible strategy. The early use of strategic bombing carried many of the characteristics that would dominate its use for a century. First, it was most often used against those whose essential human kinship was in doubt. Italians, French, Spanish, and British used terror bombing against colonial subjects, as did the Japanese in China. Second, the motivation was not purely to destroy infrastructure or even armed forces, but to destroy the will of a society to wage war. Third, the development of the strategy was closely tied to the organizational ambitions of the new military arm: the air force. Finally, it was conceived as an improvement on the efficiency of killing: it spared one’s own armies and delivered a great deal of destruction for a relatively small amount of money. Of all the paradoxes presented by war, that of strategic bombing may be the greatest: an impeccably rational and instrumental logic produced incredible devastation on the world. The apocalyptic fears of the interwar years were realized in the 1940s. While the London Blitz may be the most memorialized and best-known example of civilian bombing in World War II. Initially used to target industry and transport, bombing campaigns were frustrated by inaccuracy and danger. The logic of bombing evolved to include not only military and industrial targets but later the very societies in which these resources existed. In Europe, the purpose of “promiscuous bombing” was simply the destruction of Germany’s cities. The British Royal Air Force (RAF) and US Air Force (USAF) dropped nearly three million tons of bombs in Europe, resulting in an estimated half a million deaths and the destruction of most of urban Germany. The most infamous raids occurred in Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945 when more than half of each city was destroyed and roughly 100,000 civilians were killed. The campaign against Japan was arguably worse. First, the damage was concentrated in the last year, and particularly the last six months of the war. The targeting of civilians in a campaign of terror was even more explicit than in Germany, and the technological advances made the firebombing ever more efficient and destructive. The campaign culminated with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. By that date, little was left in Japan. Was it worth it? Was strategic bombing an effective means of achieving the political ends? Fighting the war meant killing as many enemies as quickly as possible and not waiting for them to come up with better ideas for killing first. From this perspective, extermination of civilians not only made strategic sense but in a bizarre calculus saved lives by shortening the war. The consensus has been quite clear: strategic bombing of Japan and Germany was not critical in winning the war. It had significant effects on war-time production and required that rare resources be used in defense, but airpower was not enough for victory, nor the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians resulted in destroying their will. NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON: It seems that the first nuclear bomb was largely seen as simply an extension of the scale of strategic bombing. We have references to those who, on August 10, 1945, thought that the world would never be the same, but also considerable evidence that it took some time for the difference of nuclear power to be widely understood. It is now widely accepted that in terms of human suffering the two atomic bombs were on a par with some of the worst incidents of strategic bombing in the 1943–5 period. What was different was the transformation of the logistical support needed to annihilate a city. Producing an atomic bomb required considerable economic, scientific, and industrial infrastructure. But to deliver the deathblow merely required one bomber. The ratio of resources per casualty had been transformed even more dramatically than during the gunpowder revolution. The question would then become how to use this new weapon. Certainly at first the mystery and novelty of the weapon sufficiently served to give the United States an inestimable advantage. While few knew how many bombs there actually were, the promise of even more destruction may have played a role in the timing of the Japanese surrender. It certainly served an important deterrent role for any Soviet consideration of utilizing their massive advantage in armor and manpower in the European theater. The existence of and monopoly over the bomb provided the US with a strategic safety switch, allowing the rapid disarmament critical for the post- war economy. After 1949 and the Soviet success in producing their own bomb, this strategic advantage was somewhat altered. Even with limited numbers of weapons, each side could threaten the destruction of whole armies and significant parts of Europe. Certainly in the mind of some, the bomb could be analytically treated as an immensely powerful battlefield weapon.Two developments transformed nuclear weapons into a very different sort of war instrument. The first was the exponential increase in destructive power brought about by the mutual and simultaneous development of the hydrogen bomb by both the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1950s. To give a sense of the scale involved, the bomb used in Hiroshima, had roughly four times the destructive power of the 48-hour bombing of Dresden. By the mid-1950s, the US was testing devices with 1,000 times the yield of the first atom bombs. Moreover, the physical size of these weapons was reduced, vastly increasing the yield/weight ratio. This made it possible to deliver enough bombs via bomber as to threaten the viability of an opponent’s society. The second, and most important, development was the evolution of missile delivery systems, beginning in 1957. The scale and speed of these meant that the warning time of an attack would be reduced to hours if not minutes, and the possibility of preventing enormous damage rendered null. By the 1960s, the US and the USSR could hold each other hostage. Winning a nuclear war meant and assured destruction (MAD) at the first use of a bomb. The response to this quandary had several stages, at least in the US. The key distinction between strategies has to do with tactical vs. strategic use. The first involves using nuclear weapons in a battle setting as a form of ultra-artillery. Contemplation of such use fluctuated during the Cold War between periods of relatively causal consideration to absolute rejection of any first use at all. The use more associated with nuclear weapons is strategic: to defeat an enemy one must defeat, and if necessary, annihilate the enemy’s society. With the development of two great powers capable of such destruction, the dilemma of how to handle nuclear warfare and mutual destruction arose. Great efforts were made to escape this dilemma. Improvements in civil defense measures and anti-missile defense also promised that some sort of protection could be impermeable enough to make post-nuclear war survival possible. Unfortunately, for each advancement in protection, technology and strategy soon made it superfluous. One might imagine that such a situation would produce an uneasy equilibrium at a relatively low level of mutually assured destruction, and this was the case until the early 1960s. But the pursuit of strategic dominance required that each side produce enough weapons, first to assure that enemy targets would be destroyed no matter what, and second, that one’s own side always had enough left over to produce total destruction of the other. Fueled by intra-service competition, institutional inertia, domestic political coalitions, and an ever-increasing desperation to resolve the dilemma by sheer numbers, the number of bombs and the complexity of delivery grew for decades. By the mid 1980s an equilibrium had been reached, but only after the construction of a system with the capacity to produce 60,000 Hiroshimas leading not only to the destruction of the opponents, but the obliteration of the human race. How does sociology explain the development of such a massive scale of weaponry intended for social destruction? We can focus on four key processes: the “other-ization” of each side, the apparent surgical precision of the strategies, the sheer industrial capability and wealth of the two societies, and, strangest of all, the mutual agreement and understanding required to maintain the system. On the first, the United States witnessed several waves of “Red scares” throughout the twentieth century that produced images of “communists” often not dissimilar to more racialized constructions against the Japanese in World War II. Experiments have proven that the more immediate and messy the violence, the more human beings are reluctant to use it. Nuclear strategy was the ultimate expression of this logic. A pair of air force officers in a silo somewhere in world would be unlikely physically and psychologically to withstand the stress of killing millions of individuals. Yet, by a press of a button they would accomplish in a few minutes what they could not do over hours or days. Nuclear weapons were also a product of their relative cost. This was certainly a major factor for the United States. Nuclear strategy was a product of the technological advantage enjoyed by the two superpowers. While in some ways crude atomic weapons would be an ideal weapon for poorer nations, maintaining an arsenal, and more importantly, a delivery system, required sophisticated organizations and a considerable amount of money. Joining the nuclear club became something of a rite of passage as it indicated – sometimes falsely – a high level of institutional and socio-economic development. In that, atomic bombs were an easy expression of the American standard of living. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of nuclear strategy was that it was premeditated on mutual agreements about the appropriate use of such weapons. Nuclear arms required that the adversaries be in constant communication, mutually assuring each other of intentions and safeguards. By early in the 1950s, the tactical use of nuclear weapons outside of accidental or catastrophic circumstances was inherently prohibited. Exceptions to this rule include the stationing of tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba prior to the Missile crisis of 1962 and the arming of the Israeli arsenal in the darkest moments of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But despite the limited number of scares, all of the nuclear powers agreed that lines would not be crossed. We have claimed that the arc of the development of war in human history has been one of an ever-increasing scale and complexity. We have also argued that the technological developments that have accompanied this massification of war have also been the engines that have pushed further expansion. With the before. Similarly, the recovery of the US from the Great Depression may owe more to World War II than to the New Deal: the productive capacity of the US economy was unleashed by the war effort. The war also produced an international system centered on the US and the dollar. For the losers, the very destruction of war may be beneficial as it eliminates outdated technologies, reallocates state spending on non-military investments, and allows the creation of new industries. Wars can also develop group cohesion within the state. Wars create nationalism, a sort of civil religion that celebrates the nation and its people. The idea is that through the organization of the military, the shared experience of battle, and the antagonism of a common enemy, wars create cohesion within a state. Others, however, argue that nationalism actually precedes and causes wars, through its emphasis on difference and competition. There are also claims that war has a completely different relationship with nationalism. Wars can actually lead to anti-nationalist or certainly anti-bellicist movements.Yet, there is fairly clear evidence for war making a strong contribution to not a state centered nationalism, but a less institutionally coherent united community. This is the sense of unity was an essential part of the foundation for democratic rule and may be an essential product of war. It is a unity born out shared sacrifice, a sense of danger, and the euphoric celebration of community. This sense of oneness can then translate into a recognition of the less fortunate in the society as worthy of assistance, it can serve to expand suffrage, and it may also provide the basis for the recognition of minimal civil rights that all in the community can share. This sense of inclusiveness, however, is defined by exclusion. We are the same because they are different from us. It is this sense of exclusive community which might make notions of transnational citizenship so difficult to achieve. War is an important part of the construction of this community, but in the absence of collective enemies, how to create a democratic unity on a non- national basis? The best example of welcoming its citizens are the Athenians in Thucydides. Nationalism is an ideology based on the premise that the individual’s loyalty and devotion to the nation-state surpasses other individual or group interests. Obligations to the state and to the community outweigh more individual or personal allegiances. To go into battle is to risk emotional and material crises for all of one’s kin. It implies the identification of the state or nation with the people. Nationalism is sociologically paradoxical in that it stresses the particular and parochial, the differences, and the national individualities spearing one group from another, but simultaneously emphasizes how the commonalities within the group outweigh any differences. Obviously the creation of this sense of community is not new. But nationalism is a new phenomenon to the extent that political allegiance was not previously so exclusively defined by the combination of ethnic identity and geographical proximity. The rise of national feeling to major political importance was encouraged by a number of complex developments: the creation of large, centralized states ruled by absolute monarchs who destroyed the old feudal allegiances; the secularization of life and of education, which weakened the ties of church and sect; and the growth of commerce, which demanded larger territorial units to allow scope for the dynamic spirit of the rising middle classes and their capitalistic enterprise. This large, unified territorial state, with its political and economic centralization, became imbued in the eighteenth century with a new spirit – an emotional fervor similar to that of religious movements in earlier periods. War was central to all these developments. Military references are a popular part of nationalist rhetoric. War served to construct icons with which to teach nationalism. For some periods in some states, such references are central to the task of identity formation. To choose one example, consider any random assortment of flags and national symbols. Perhaps the best example of the centrality of war to the iconography of national identity is the reference to and from war in the public landscape of most major cities. Monuments objectify the ideals for which the nation is supposed to stand. Memorials make the past not only bearable, but also usable; they re-write history as a glorious beginning. They indicate the hierarchy of official memory. Monuments and the like also help create an illusion of unity. SERVICE, CITIZENSHIP, AND DEMOCRACY Since the mid-nineteenth century and through the immediate post-World War II period, the European and North American armed forces served as social institutions whose tasks included national defense, but also the forging of young men into productive and responsible members of the community. Through mobilization, exposure to nationalist doctrine, and the cohesion encouraged by shared danger, armies made citizens and nations. For individuals, the transformation can be both dramatic and positive. The initiation into and training by the armed forces may improve the physical health of the recruit and teach him basic skills as well as discipline and self-respect. For the society as a whole, the collective experience could introduce previously isolated individuals to the variety of ethnic groups with whom they share a territory and build camaraderie among all while exposing them to nationalist themes and a sense of patriotic duty. The changes in these policies may imply a significant social transformation. Conscription, understood as forced participation in a military, is by no means new or unique to modern Western Europe. In UE we can find an universal conscription including all social sectors, legitimated by a common membership in a nation- state. This universal conscription of national members, it has been argued, is the foundation of the citizen-soldier paradigm, and it has played an important role in the self-definition of Western civilization. Yet this tradition was breached more often than honored for much of the past two thousand years. Since the end of the Roman Republic, fighting in the army was seen as the job for professionals, and not a very well respected job at that. During the Middle Ages, the gulf grew between those who fought for honor and the large mass who was in no way enhanced by military activity. In fact, much of so-called universal service has not been universal in history. Beginning in the sixteenth century, armies began to require a greater imposition of the state on their societies. After the late seventeenth century, European states came to expect that their subjects had an obligation to serve in some vague form. The Prussian state climbed from insignificance to minor power status in the eighteenth century because of a modified version of compulsory service. But resistance to conscription was practically uniform. To be in the army still meant that one was part of the rural poor, without money or corporate sponsors able to remove the yoke of conscription. It was widely perceived that “the army must inevitably consist of the scum of the people. The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars provided a strong enough threat to require the radical rebalancing of military forces. The French General Assembly, when debating the policies through which it would reform the army of the ancien regime, was quite aware of the costs and benefits associated with universal con-scription; with giving the army to the people and vice versa. The notions of soldier and citizen were seen as diametrically opposed. The Revolution and its radicalization after 1791 bridged these two identities. The levée en masse of 1793 was inspired by external threat, but also by the need to mobilize the population for the Revolution. It represented a radical rupture with the past in that it called the “people” to defend their newly acquired status of citizen. The important break had more to do with the relationship between state and society. The state stopped legitimately being the possession of the few and came to represent the aspirations of the many. As such, it had the right and obligation to call on them to defend their property. But an important change did take place. War stopped being a game of kings and became the business of the people. The various stages of conscription in Napoleonic France raised an army of one million men. France’s enemies had to respond in kind.The fear of a French invasion transformed the British military and the state. If the army was to grow enough to counter the threat, administrative systems had to be established to count, select, coerce, arm, and transport men. Perhaps more importantly, the Napoleonic scare transformed the English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots men who served by giving them a new sense of common identity with their fellow (British) soldiers. War and the response to it made them into Britons in ways that had been unimaginable before the 1790s. Conscription encouraged a different attitude toward the state – one based on collective identity and shared citizenship. War and military experience also helped break down provincial allegiances and networks and replace these with ones more centered on a national community. After 1870, military powers or those who aspired to that role could no longer ignore the new means of doing war. This was not just the case in Europe (Ralston 1996). Despite the harshness of the army, conscription did help create a greater sense of national identity among the Egyptian fellahin. Mass conscription resulted in a series of parallel and complementing processes that would arguably define the relationship between people and their state. Conscription and citizenship were two sides of the same coin. Along with compulsory education and the right to vote, conscription was seen as one of the pillars of the democratic state. On the one hand, the state came to demand more from the population than passive obedience. On the other, the population came to see themselves in the state and to demand more from it in part as recompense for their ultimate sacrifice. In exchange for the obligation to participate in war, citizens were rewarded with greater rights and more welfare services. The vote and national military service were corollaries. WAR AND RIGHTS The foundational right in a democracy is that which recognizes the basic autonomy and inviolability of the individual. Civil rights are those that protect that status by assuring constraints on the actions any state can take regarding the life or property of a citizen. Further, as citizenship develops, people begin to demand more from their state, including social and economic guarantees. How does war affect this? The foundation of civil rights through military service rests on citizenship and the exchange of rights for service between the state and soldiers. This can be played out in many ways, but essentially involves citizens demanding some rights in exchange for their participation in war. Similar exchanges have been a mainstay of the history of the rise of the constitutional state in Britain and the institution of a militia in various parts of the world. Perhaps the best contemporary argument for the link between war and the welfare state is by political scientist Theda Skocpol (1992). Such contracts between states and populace are not solely historical artifacts. Today in the United States, for example, there exist programs offering “expedited citizenship” through military service. Sometimes, the relationship between citizenship and military service is less of a bargain between soldier and state and more the product of the need of the state to defend its reputation. War can have very different effects on the concentration of power inside a regime and the manner in which that power is exercised. On the one hand, wars provide “emergencies” during which legal rights are perceived as possibly unnecessary and even dangerous luxuries. The suppression of basic civil rights has often accompanied wars: freedom of speech is limited, the obligations of government are lessened, and individuals are required to give up some of their “negative freedom” to the collective needs of the endangered whole. In the wake of 9/11 and considerably after, it was a brave and often rare American public figure that warned about the dangers of giving federal and executive authorities too much power. The notion that torture might save lives had many adherents. Obviously, the effect of this sometimes dissipates in the post-war period. Nevertheless, a variety of regimes justify the limitation on individual freedoms by either claiming that the enemy remains undefeated, or by pulling ever-new terrors from the global political environment. There is also a relationship between voting and war. The key historical step here, as Avant (2010) notes, is the creation of mass armies. In this process, each individual willing to risk his life is paid off by the state with a promise of suffrage. Conversely, wars can elicit states of emergency where elections need to be postponed, as New York Mayor Giuliani sought to propose in the aftermath of 9/11. Wars also potentially limit suffrage by forcing the creation of grand coalitions that not only obscure political difference, but also retain power through an agreed deferment of elections. The relationship between electoral democracy and the military has been the subject of the most study. When we include the entire globe of democracies there appears to be a weak relationship between suffrage and conflict, or between war and democracy. The relationship between war and the political import of election results is therefore harder to unwind than one might suppose. First, there is the tricky historical question of causal order. Which really comes first, the soldier or the citizen? Do mass armies produce mass citizenship, or polities of existing citizens produce mass armies? We do not have enough historical detail on these questions. The second difficulty is that suffrage does not mean democracy. Even if war plays a significant role in expanding voting rights, there is no reason to believe that these votes will have any meaning. The Spanish expression “elecciónbúlgara” women who do not. This has been a robust finding across service members from all wars. Recent studies have shown that both deployed men and deployed women report greater adverse mental health than their civilian counterparts, while non-deployed women also reported greater adverse mental health than their civilian counterparts. While mental health access is increasing greatly among active service members and veterans, comprehensive mental health care is still unattained and remains a goal. EDUCATION Historically, the educational benefits that came with military service were unmatched by those that could be obtained in the civil sector. Prior to the Vietnam era, military service was not an alternative but a pathway to education. Over a century and a half ago in the United States, military service was tied to nationalized education. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 was developed specifically with citizen-soldiers in mind. It granted US states donated federal land and money upon which to found universities. Military tactic is specifically listed as a subject. Sixtynine colleges were funded through this program, including major state flagship universities such as the University of Wisconsin as well as private universities like Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This act was passed as a means to ensure a broad base of technically and militarily educated citizens upon which to draw during war-time. World War II veterans were the recipients of the GI Bill, passed in 1948, which gave generous financial assistance to veterans who chose to attend college. Studies show that US World War II veterans had more education than comparable nonveterans. This finding was even more robust for black veterans of World War II, who had even greater educational advantages over their black civilian counterparts. That military service could be a path to greater education was actively promoted by the army. For the average citizen, military service up until Vietnam provided greater education and opportunity than otherwise was available to most young men.The educational advantages of service declined during the Vietnam era. When comparing those who served in Vietnam to those who did not, there are statistically significant differences in educational attainment. In fact, according to Teachman, Vietnam veterans showed up to a two-year deficit in education at discharge compared to their non-servicing compatriots. Race was not a statistically significant factor when accounting for the deficit, however, indicating that minority groups still have better educational outcomes if they enter into military service. Today, enlistees do have better education than their civilian counterparts, but this is in part a function of the high-school diploma requirement for enlistment. This is to say, 100 percent of enlistees are required to have a high-school diploma. Officers are actually less educated than their civilian employed equivalents according to the same report. This is because those who are better educated have more to gain financially and socially by entering the civilian workforce than the military. This finding is echoed internationally as well. In Germany and Holland military service is associated with less educational attainment. This is all to say that for some groups, particularly minorities and lower-income groups, military service remains a pathway to greater education. In an exciting development, schools on military bases are testing across the board better than their civilian counterparts. They are also dramatically reducing the Black–White education gap that has proved so enduring in US society outside of the military. This begs the question as to what the military is doing right, and how it can be replicated in civilian society. INCOME The difficulties in studying the effect of military service on economic and class outcomes prior to World War II are difficult to overstate. There is simply very little systematic record-keeping or data with which to draw conclusions. It is difficult to measure any sustained effects of service on income. Nevertheless, a few studies point to an improvement on both as result of participation in the armed forces. Research has shown that immediately following the World War II era, military service was associated with increased income after discharge. This is in large part due numerous government programs designed to reintegrate servicemen into the economy, such as the GI Bill and house and car buying programs, and due to the robust post-war economy. Unfortunately, these gains in income and socio-economic status were lost after the Vietnam era. Studies show that veterans make less than their non-serving age mates over their lifetime. We also know that the effects of military service on income are different among whites and non-whites. Teachman (2005) demonstrated that white Vietnam era veterans experienced lower incomes than non-veterans of the era, while black veterans experienced no income changes relative to other black non-veterans. In fact, active duty black serviceman saw increases in their incomes. For the most part, men and women who are actively serving in the military make more than their comparable age mate counterparts. This is in large part because most people entering military service are 18 to 24 years old. The standard income for an 18-year-old military enlistee with a high-school diploma is considerably more than his or her counterpart is making in the unskilled labor market. However data also show that incomes decline dramatically compared to their age mates once people leave the military. Attending school, the college graduate will command more in pay upon graduating after four years than his or her age mate after four years of military service. Thus the economic gains of military service for the most mobile people in the labor market in the modern era are temporary. This is a finding that is also found in other countries, including Germany and Holland. Another factor in household economy is the income of the spouse. Since the vast majority of people serving in the military are male, the spouse is typically a woman. Research shows that spousal income suffers a twopercent drop every time the household moves, which is not an uncommon event in the life course of a service man. Further, there is a 20 to 29 percent wage gap between spousal income and their civilian counterparts; significant enough to affect dramatically overall household income. It is believed that such a large penalty is due to the frequent location changes and the attendant inability to build a long-term career with a particular company or industry. Finally, undesired unemployment is higher among military spouses than in the general population. There has been concern that an all-volunteer military draws too heavily on the lowest economic classes, or that the upper classes do not serve. Research indicates that in fact the lowest classes are not disproportionately represented in the military, but that the top is vastly under-represented. At least in the contemporary US, the military has become the province of the middle-third of the income distribution. There has also been concern that of those who do serve, minority groups disproportionately face fatal combat service. This was the case during the early Vietnam years, but specific policies have reduced Black combat fatalities to representative levels. Less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military at any given time. We do well to keep this in mind when considering any effects of service on individual outcomes. Service can have a very positive effect on health, education, and income for particular groups in the modern era but military service as a social mobility policy, will never reach significant portions of the populace. What we see is that wars and the military are not only great machineries of destruction, chaos, and suffering. In fact, there is great evidence that the long- term outcomes of war include centralized political authority and institutions of state-building that promote economic and social development. But in addition to these big outcomes, individuals, too, can benefit from war making. While the ultimate price may be paid in loss of life, far more often the outcome for soldiers is better health, education, and income. This chapter has shown how nation states, nationalism, citizenship, and rights have all developed specifically from the practice of war. Further, military service has had a clear positive effect on the lives of many young men, and now women, in the world. We now turn to what may be the future of war in the world. The next chapter outlines a few of the changes, looking particularly at the decline of Western powers, the rise of insurgencies, and the changing face of military service. CHAPTER 6: WAR AND SOCIETY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY The number of parings with the word “war” grows ever longer: water, civilizational, ecological, ethnic,ecc. Anyway, we will focus on changes that dramatically affect the relationship between war and society. We believe that the state of war in the twenty-first century presents another paradox in our study of the link between social structures and organized violence. On the one hand, we are living through something that could be called a “world war” in that practically every region is affected by at least violent threats. On the other, the majority of humanity does not live in a state of war. We can use this paradox as a way of illustrating the changes in the relationships between war and society in the near future. AN UNSEEN GLOBAL WAR? We may begin mentioning examples of organized violence around the world. In North America, we note a continued state of alert in the United States and a continued commitment to defend itself from terrorism. In Mexico, the number of dead associated with its “war on drugs” over the past decade is in the multiple tens of thousands. In Central America, the level of bellic ferocity is so high. In the Southern continent, the casualties of the Colombian civil war have declined, but there remain threats to state control over its territory. In the rest of the region, such threats tend to be concentrated in parts of major urban centers. Africa is awash on conflict. From the Atlantic shores of the Sahara through Suez, claims of territorial monopoly over the means of violence are contested daily. The situation in Northern Nigeria remains volatile with a variety of threats to the state. In all of these countries, some form of political violence is endemic, but as with the case of Central America, the degree of organization is problematic. Finally, we come to the region most associated with military conflict in the twenty-first century: the Middle East. The complexity of conflicts here is clear, but we can highlight at least 4 types of conflicts: inter-national ones (Saudi Arabia vs. Iran, Israel vs. all neighbors), religious or ideological ones (Salafi vs. Shia vs Sunni; secular vs. religious; democratic vs. authoritarian), conflicts over resources (oil and gas, water), as well as the cultural bellicosity and group dynamics. The level of violence ranges from the possibility of a nuclear exchange to fights between isolated partisans armed with AK-47s. Also, the level of organization of the violence ranges from global alliances, to national, to sub-national entities. Obviously, each of these conflicts is producing massive numbers of casualties. For those killed, wounded, raped, or exiled by war, it appears as traumatizing as ever. The global statistics show that the percentage of humanity killed by war is certainly lower than any point since the 1940s, and they highlight a “decline of war”. However, there are several problems with such statistics. First, the twenty-first-century wars and their fatalities tend to occur far from media centers and the killed-in-action census is not precise. Today much of the destruction is taking place away from major urban centers and is particularly concentrated on some of the poorer parts of each region and of the world in general. For example, the millions of victims in the African Great Lakes region are dying anonymously and largely unnoticed. To put it most crudely, unlike the first half of the twentieth century, in the first decade of the twenty-first century few of the victims are of European heritage. Moreover, the technological advantage of the US and allied countries, combined with the professionalization of the military, means that civilians in large parts of the rich world can live in a world where war is nothing but an element of a video game, or perhaps a news item. After the first Gulf War and the development of new precision weapons, for us, the line between war and an action movie seems increasingly blurred. Certainly, the US has experienced its longest period of continuous warfare in the twenty-first century while leaving a bare ripple in the civilian cultural consciousness. Second, because of the nature of the weapons used and the quality of medical care, survival with lasting mental and physical scars is much more likely now. The value of measuring war by deaths may be declining at a time when the consequences are not necessarily fatalities, but life-changing events such as rapes, decapitating wounds, or exile. Wars do not just kill but can destroy societies without a significant number of bodies. Certainly, in the case of Iraq and Syria the destructive tsunami of war is much greater than that measured by the already considerable number of dead. The share of civilian deaths in these conflicts has increased even in the absence of the kind of strategic bombing used in World War II. In Iraq after the 2003 invasion, over 70 percent of those who died of direct war violence were civilians. These “collateral” casualties are hard to count. This has largely to do with the fact that the wars of the twenty-first century are not between countries but largely within them. We are faced with interesting dilemma: on the one hand, war remains very hurried, but dignified exit. A similar dilemma faced the British in Palestine during the civil war of 1947–8. A similar process occurred in 1956 when the British and French attempted to retain control over the Suez Canal. Despite the overwhelming military victory of the Europeans and their Israeli allies, no war could continue without US support, and this was expressly denied. Combined with significant domestic opposition in the UK, this made the politics of military victory impossible. Egypt retained control over the canal. A very different situation occurred in parallel in Hungary. The Soviet Union and her “allies” had invaded Hungary in order to assure continued control over the territory. As in the case of Suez, there was no question of realistic military resistance. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, could resist international pressure and whatever domestic protest might have existed was obviously moot. If not clear before, looking at the two revolts taking place in 1956, in dealing with empires, military might had long given way to political expediency. France suffered the most significant colonialist defeats in the decades following the end of World War II. It lost the Vietnam, French Indochina and Algeria. Perhaps the extreme example of how insurgencies do not need to win wars may be found in the case of the fall of the Portuguese empire. Portugal represented the greatest distance between the size and scope of its imperial pretentions and the ability of the domestic society to support and maintain it. It lost the Portuguese Africa, more specifically Angola and Mozambique. While this process has been seen as one of decline of the West, it may be better to understand it as the decline of the power of accretion. The outcome of global wars of the twentieth century and the development of the nuclear power seemed to indicate that a new imperial age had arrived. Yet underneath that apparent power laid an important political fragility: the costs of using it were geopolitically profound and the legitimacy of its use was weakly founded in the home countries. The process of aggregation required that a military enjoy enough social support to maintain itself. That made any agreement between what was militarily feasible and politically acceptable impossible. The two great post-war powers had the capacity to destroy any civilization, but in the absence of public approval to do so their military prowess had limited political application. Perhaps the contemporary example which best illustrates the divorce of statehood or social resources from military capacity is post 2011 Syria. Over and above the devastation in that country what may be most significant from a scholarly point of view is the increasing fragmentation of power and the ability of relatively small and under-resourced actors to reinforce the decline into chaos. Moreover, Syria seems a perfect example of proxy wars where major protagonists are not present, but merely provide enough resources to allow even the almost defeated to survive. In the case of Syria, for example, most ISIS fighters are foreigners with no link to the society. THE LIMITS OF FIREPOWER: VIETNAM, AFGHANISTAN, AND IRAQ For insurgents to defeat declining empires may not seem surprising. The last forty years have shown that even the most destructive firepower ever assembled may be humbled. A standard story about Vietnam is that the United States did not try to win the war. The US did not use nuclear weapons or invade the North, to call Vietnam a “limited” war or one fought with hands tied behind the back is simply incorrect. Consider that roughly 3.5 million men and women served in Southeast Asia, with 2.5 million in Vietnam. Of these more than a million fought in combat or provided close support. At the peak of the war, the US had more than half a million troops in the country, consuming nearly half of Army and marine personnel. The US built dozens of airports and deep-water ports and millions of square footage of storage, hundreds of miles of roads bridges and pipelines, and spent more than $750 billion, or 2.3 percent of GDP at the peak of the war. Over 59,000 Americans lost their lives, as did perhaps two million Vietnamese and Cambodians. An often-alternative story is that Vietnam was an anomaly, not representative of the military might used by the US. This is also incorrect, as the war was an exemplary model of how the US military was taught and sought to fight. American policy in Vietnam was a natural extension of the experience in World War II: given that the US was bigger and much more technologically capable and that the other side was a peasantry and industrially weak, winning was assumed. And yet, the US lost precisely because the military attempted to make war into a managerial game and a production function. The logic used was a war of attrition, reflecting the experience of the two world wars, in which the Vietnamese would be overwhelmed into defeat. What such a perspective forgot was that defeat is a strategic goal, but a political one as well. A classic example of such a strategy was the so-called “search and destroy” missions where the US would use the well announced arrival of troops so as to attract and then destroy the enemy. Unfortunately, what made a helicopter one thousand feet above the battlefield made little on the ground. The enemy quickly learned not to walk into obvious traps. Another example was the institution of “body counts” by which progress was measured statistically depending on reported numbers of those killed in action, supplies destroyed, and even battalion fitness reports. The US military succeeded in everything it sought to do in Vietnam and displayed awesome power. It just didn’t win the war. Practically the same story could be told of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. Seeking to support a weak ally and to institutionalize formal authority, the Soviets spent more than $50 billion and fifteen thousand lives in a war in which they suffered “a thousand cuts” from a motivated insurgency. The American experience in Afghanistan after 2001 was depressingly similar. Almost four decades later, the US made a similar error in Iraq in the early 2000s. If the mission had simply been to defeat and depose Saddam Hussein, 2003 would have been seen through a similar light to that of the 1991 Gulf War. Unfortunately, what the US hoped to do in Iraq was much more complicated and involved actually controlling Iraq and recreating its society. Note the critical difference: the military centric logic is to simply destroy the enemy, but the underlying political logic is to assure some form of stability. Even after it became clear that the US was facing an insurgency in Iraq, the US military adopted the same decade-old logic: if you killed enough insurgents, the remaining would give up. As was the case in Vietnam, allied forces won every major set battle. Only later in the war the policy of “clear, hold, and build” began to establish a true legitimate monopoly over the means of violence. A problem still remained, similar to that faced in Vietnam – the war mission was defined in such a way that it would take years, perhaps decades, to accomplish. Similar to Vietnam, the public support for such a campaign rarely lasts so long. The last fifty years have seen something of a “democratization” of massive violence. There no longer needs to be advanced industrialization and a Weberian bureaucracy to inflict significant damage. This is potentially a major revolution in the link between war and society as it separates societal development from capacity for significant violence. Technology allows for a small group of individuals to gather the killing power previously limited to a regiment of soldiers. The interconnectedness of modernity also provides many more targets which before were available on the simple battlefields. This makes the central characteristic of states, the monopoly of violence over a given territory, much more problematic. The decline in numbers of dead in war might actually be a result not of the pacifying of the globe, but of the lower aggregation of deaths associated with individual acts of violence. Military violence is now occurring more in the hinterlands. While terrorism makes every civilian in the wealthiest parts of the world a potential victim, the other result is to divorce much of the world’s population from the consequences of military violence. This trend is made more significant due to the “professionalization” of the military in the wealthiest countries, accompanied by the “militarization” of civilians in war zones. WHO WILL SERVE? THE CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS OF THE MILITARY Since the 1970s in most countries, armed forces have moved away from a conscription model and more toward one based on volunteer service. In the rest of this chapter, we focus on the case of the US as this is a country very much associated with the notion of military service being critical to political development, and its military is the most significant in the world. The argument is a shift in military composition – a shift that may have important consequences for citizenship and social and economic mobility. The changing demographics of the military are the result of a number of forces. First, there is the historical background of the US case, one that is not unique. The military was filled with male white citizens exclusively. This meant that women, men of color, and non-citizens historically have not been immediate participants in and benefits of war. In practice, the wealthy often were able to buy their way out of combat participation. Political currents and social developments have led to the inclusion of non-traditional groups in the military, including African Americans and non-citizens, women, and now openly homosexual soldiers. Such social shifts have had an enormous effect on the demographic make-up of the military. The increasing innovation in military technology also has significantly altered the nature of participation. It has allowed armed forces to develop practices never before imagined, particularly with the advent of elements such as body armor, night vision wear, and drone technology. While women are still officially not allowed to serve in combat positions, they are increasingly closer to full combat participation in part because of these technological developments. HISTORICAL MILITARY SERVICE Since the beginning of the United States, there has been a history of a limited standing army with rapid expansion during war and immediate contraction once the war concluded. The typical standing army from 1800 through 1940 was less than one-half of a percent of the total population. The Civil War saw a mobilization of 3 percent of the population, with nearly the same amount active during World War I. World War II saw the involvement of an incredible 12 percent of the country, and then saw a gradual decline in the following fifty years to today’s level of approximately 0.5 percent of the US population serving. Counter to popular belief, the United States was historically an all-volunteer service. A tiny portion of the population was a part of a standing militia, and volunteers supplemented the low number of standing militias as wars developed. It was not until the Civil War, which made incredible demands on the population, that conscription came into effect. The percent of the total serving military that has been drafted has been in decline since World War I. Contrary to popular belief, the draftee population in Vietnam was a significant minority of military servicemen, only 16 percent compared with the 72 percent of drafted servicemen in World War I. 88 percent of the infantry serving in Vietnam was conscripted. Amid the increasing professionalization of the armed forces following the Korean War and the growing domestic political resistance to military engagement, especially after more than ten years of involvement in Vietnam, Nixon declared the end of the draft in 1973. This created what is known today as the all-volunteer force (AVF). The military as we know it today exists in the contexts of two particular trends: expansion and consolidation. The US military expanded its eligible enlistees to include African Americans and then other minorities, first in segregated units. While women have historically served in combat support units, particularly as medics, they were excluded from combat roles by law in 1948. This law was lifted in 1994 for aviation roles, and completely in 2013, such that women can serve in nearly all positions in the US military. Finally, homosexuals have been recognized as service members since the Clinton era through a policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and then officially after the Obama administration’s repeal of that law. What should be noted is that the expansion of armed forces to include these groups has not occurred evenly. Across the service branches there is wide variation in the numbers of minorities and women serving. Currently Blacks are overrepresented across the military, but particularly in the Army, while Latinos are underrepresented across the board. Women are increasingly serving in the military, with just over 15 percent of the current force comprising women. Of those women, 34 percent are Black, almost three times their civilian percentage. There is no official census of homosexuals serving in the military at this time but estimates run at 2.5 percent. The consolidation of the military is seen in four different areas: family history, geographic representation, political orientation, and socioeconomic status. Following the advent of the AVF, the greatest predictor in serving in the military is having a family member who has also served. Relatedly, the greatest predictor of not serving is having a college- educated parent. The American South and rural households contribute the largest share of men and women to the military. The southern contribution can be explained through the fact that the region has a greater share of eligible recruits, young males from military families. The next largest share of enlistments is from the North Central region, with the remaining military population drawn from the West and Northeast regions. There is some evidence that current service men and women are more affirms French cultural values of dignity and equality). Richard Peterson observed that by culture sociologists usually mean one of four things: 1) norms= the way people behave in a given society; 2) values= what people hold dear; 3) beliefs= how people think the universe operates; 4) expressive symbols= representations, often of social norms, values and beliefs themselves. In the last decades of the XX century, sociologists added a fifth item: 5) practices= people’s behavior patterns, not necessarily connected to any particular values or beliefs. The academic perspective on culture can be divided into two schools of thought: humanities and social sciences. We can say that both approaches are based on two fundamental assumptions: 1) Culture and society are abstractions - what exists in the real world are people who work, joke, raise children, love, think, worship, fight and behave in a wide variety of ways. 2) There is a distinction between culture and society: culture designates the expressive aspect of human experience, whilst society designates the relational aspect of human experience - the same object or behavior may be analyzed as a social (a business card communicates information necessary for economic transactions) or cultural (a business card has a different meaning to a Japanese than to an American). THE TRADITIONAL HUMANITIES VIEWPOINT This viewpoint is based on 5 assumptions. It assumes an opposition between culture and the prevailing norms of the social order, or “civilization”. In the XIX century, civilization referred to the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent social upheavals: contrasting culture with civilization was a protest against the belief in progress as an invariable benefit, against the ugly aspects of industrialization and against what Marx called the “cash nexus” of capitalism whereby everyone and everything was evaluated on an economic basis. It believes culture was “a study of perfection”. Deriving from the Latin root meaning “cultivation”, culture entails the cultivation of the human mind and sensibility. Culture could make civilization more human by restoring “sweetness and light”, beauty and wisdom respectively, which come from an awareness of and sensitivity to “the best that has been thought and known” in art, literature, history and philosophy, and a “right reason”. The British educator, Matthew Arnold, saw culture in terms of its educational potential: culture is not an end in itself but a means to an end: it can cure the social ills of civilization by teaching people how to live and conveying moral ideas. It is the humanizing agent that moderates the more destructive impacts of modernization. This conception of culture holds that it addresses a different set of issues from those addressed by logic or science. Max Weber, already, in his essay “Science as a Vocation” laid out the limits of what science can and cannot do: to find a meaning for their lives human beings must turn to culture. It evaluates some cultures and cultural works as better than others. The belief in culture’s extraordinary eventually turns into ethnocentrism, a hymn of praise to Western European culture as the summit of human achievement. It fears that culture is fragile, that it can be lost or debilitated or estranged from socioeconomic life. Consequently, culture must be carefully preserved through educational institutions and in cultural archives, such as libraries and museums. It invests culture with the aura of the sacred and untouchable, thus removing it from everyday existence. This separation is often represented symbolically: Bronze lions, for example, guard the entrance to many libraries and museums. THE SOCIAL SCIENCE STANDPOINT In opposition to humanities viewpoint, we can present social science standpoint and its beliefs. It avoids evaluation in favor of relativism. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder argued that we must speak of cultures, not simply culture, since nations and communities within or across nations have their own, equally meritorious cultures. It assumes a close linkage between culture and society. This “close-fit” assumption is shared by both functionalism and Marxism. Functionalism identifies culture with the values that direct the social, political and economic levels of a social system. In this perspective, a fit exists between culture and society because the goals given by the culture and the social means for attaining these goals work in harmony. Marxists reverse the direction of influence, from social structure to culture: in their view, cultural products rest on an economic foundation. An example of this assumption is provided by Peter Berger’s analysis of culture as formed through externalization, objectification and internalization: human beings project their own experience onto the outside world, then regard these projections as independent, and finally incorporate these projections into their psychological consciousness. For instance, many religious belief systems externalize the dualism of biological reproduction into dual powers, such as the Christian duality between good and evil, and the Chinese duality of yin and yang within human body. Such dualities become objectified and exist in the culture independent of any thinker; in turn, they become internalized, influencing human thought and practice. It emphasizes the persistence and durability of culture, rather than its fragility. Culture is “that complex whole” which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. Viewing culture as a people’s entire way of life avoids ethnocentrism, but this definition lacks the precision desired in the social sciences. A recent trend leads toward cutting the culture concept down to size and characterizing the object of analysis: like the distinction between implicit and explicit culture. It assumes that culture can be studied empirically like anything else. Social scientists do not regard the culture as sacred or fundamentally different from human products and activities. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined culture as an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, by which men communicate and develop their knowledge. THE CULTURAL OBJECT In an attempt to understand the connections between a society and its culture, it is necessary to start the analysis with a close examination of the smaller parts of the interrelated, larger system, that is, the cultural objects. A cultural object may be defined as: a socially meaningful expression that is audible, visible, tangible or that can be articulated. It tells a story, and that story may be sung, told, set in stone, enacted or painted. The status of the cultural object is not into the object itself; rather, it results from an analytical decision that we make as observers. Bread is an example of a cultural object: it is basic yet fundamental. It is expressive: the post-World War II white bread expressed a child’s view of the good life, whereas in the 1960s and 1970s whole-grain bread turned into a political statement that expressed a repudiation of American capitalism, technology and homogeneity. It is steeped in tradition: the Bible abounds in references to bread; in the Christian communion, it embodies the Divine; during the first centuries of Islam, white bread symbolized a lack of discipline to the Arabs; in the European ethnic heritage bread connotes security, love and family; in some countries, such as Nigeria, eating bread signifies being Westernized or modern. It is by no means universal: human beings eat different grains in different places. All cultural objects have creators - they may have a single creator or multiple creators. However, only when such objects become public and enter the circuit of human discourse, they enter the culture and become cultural objects. Therefore, all cultural objects must have receivers, people who hear, read, understand, think about, enact, participate in and remember them - the so-called object’s “audience”. Both cultural objects and the people who create and receive them are not floating freely but are anchored in a particular context, that is, the social world. The social world is the economic, political, social and cultural patterns that occur at any particular point in time. Thus, we have identified four elements: creators, cultural objects, receivers and the social world. If we draw a line connecting each element to every other one, we create a cultural diamond. It is not a theory of culture because it says nothing about how the points relate; nor is it a model of culture because it does not indicate cause and effect. Instead, the cultural diamond is an accounting device intended to encourage a comprehensive understanding of any cultural object’s relationship to the social world. The connection between Cultural object and the Social world answers to the question “What are the characteristics of the object and how is it like some other objects in the culture and unlike others?”. While the connection between creator and receiver answers to the question “Who created it and who received it?”. Social world/Creator: How in this society do some types of people get to create this type of cultural object and others do not? Cultural object/Receiver: How do some cultural objects reach an audience and others do not? DEFINITION OF CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY Cultural sociology is characterized by attention to both the cultural and the social - i.e. the relationship between cultural objects and the social world - thus distinguishing itself from cultural studies, which focus more on the cultural side. A second difference is methodological: cultural sociology, as a social science, depends more heavily on empirical methods and the analysis of evidence, whereas cultural studies is more purely interpretative. CHAPTER 2: CULTURAL MEANING By definition, a cultural object has shared significance - i.e. it has been given a meaning shared by members of the culture. Meaning or significance refers to the object’s capacity to suggest or point to something else. A Japanese businessman attaches personal honor to his business card, whereas the same card means nothing to the American beyond its practical function. A woman’s veil means modesty to local Muslims, but it means a religious intrusion into the secular state’s domain to non- Muslim French. We can identify two types of meaning: 1) Simple meaning denotes one-to-one correspondence; 2) Complex meaning can be found in symbols: rather than standing for a single referent, symbols evoke a variety of meanings; symbols do not denote, they suggest, connote or imply. They evoke powerful emotions and can often both unite and disrupt social groups. Because of its complexity, cultures comprises complex rather than simple meanings. Thus, to understand culture, we must be able to analyze the relationship between a symbol on the one hand, and “things exactly as they are” on the other. Although this relationship can prove highly personal and individual, the sociology of culture looks for social meanings, which in the cultural diamond link cultural objects with the social world. Why do we need meaning? Most of what animals do is genetically given by their instinct yet human beings are different, since their genetic aspects do not provide sufficient information for survival: humans must learn to live; and learning in humans is a social process of interaction and socialization. Anthropologists, such as Clifford Geertz, stress that the total of such human interactions transmits patterns of meanings and behaviour, called culture. Along similar lines, Peter Berger suggested that the ultimate human terror is not evil but chaos: human beings create culture to provide order; in turn, culture provides order and meaning through the use of symbols, whereby certain things designated as cultural objects are endowed with significance over and above their material utility. The question that arises is, what types of relationships exist between the social world and the cultural objects? CULTURE AND MEANING IN REFLECTION THEORY The reflection theory holds that culture is a faithful reflection of social life: culture mirrors social reality. Therefore, the meaning of a particular cultural object lies in the social structures and social patterns it reflects, admitting the vice versa, that is, how society reflects culture, only as a secondary consideration.We can analyze the connection between television and violence: putting the reflection model on the cultural diamond, we would expect that television violence, allowing for a certain time lag, would rise and fall along with the rates of real-life violence. This does not mean that social violence causes television violence, only that the two correlate. Reflection theories of culture also have a long history, going back to Plato. According to Plato’s theory of forms, behind all appearances lies an idea; physical things reflect the ideas of those things, although imperfectly. Human beings, however, confuse appearance for reality, just as when people in a cave take as reality the shadows thrown on the wall. Plato envisioned three types of creators: 1) God, the creative being, who makes ideal forms → form. 2) The carpenter who makes physical things → appearance. 3) The painter, who makes a picture of the physical thing → art. Thus, art is contemporary sociological research: Jack Goldstone sought to explain why structural factors triggered a wave of revolutions in the West but not in the East. He took up Weber’s metaphor of the role of culture as a railroad switchman: the Western religious tradition was linear and eschatological, when a change occurred it was once and for all; while Eastern religions view history as cyclical and, as such, it did not turn political and economic triggers toward revolutionary action but encouraged a return to previous forms of authority. Lisa Keister shows how the “switchman” operates also at the individual level. Her research focuses on the Weberian link between religion and economic behaviour. Protestants tend to accumulate less wealth because their ethos (money is not your own, but the Lord’s) demands that they give away money away freely; Roman Catholics accumulate more wealth because their family strong orientations demand they save and make only low-risk investments. Two general critiques have been advanced to the Weberian position: 1) it is too subjective. Robert Wuthnow maintains that culture is an observable behavior rather than a subjective system of meaning; as such, sociologists should not be psychoanalysts, trying to get inside people’s minds, as Weber’s approach suggested. 2) It is too formal and rigid, whereas people behave in contradictory ways. Sewell talks in terms of cultural schemas and informal presuppositions that lie behind formal rules. Ann Swidler holds that cultures are more like tool kits, since they contain rationales which are not internally coherent, but underlie various lines of actions in different contexts. She demonstrates her thesis by showing how Americans have two distinct ideologies of love: 1) the romantic “till death do us part” ideal of mutual love and 2) “so long as my partner meets my needs” ideology. Moreover, Huntington underlines a binary image (Islamism VS West) of cultural wars in his “clash of civilizations” thesis, according to which different civilizations interpret the world differently, producing fundamental conflicts over meanings. However, such assumptions are mistaken, since Palestinian liberationists have only weak links to Islam, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was militantly secular and most Muslims abhor terrorism. The founding fathers of sociology, Marx, Durkheim and Weber, supposed that the bases for cultural clashes - religion, ethnicity and different worldviews - were disappearing, but XXI-century assertions of religious and ethnic particularism proved them wrong, further revealing the failure of modernity to realize its goal of an enlightened humanism. Consequently, modernity prompted strong cultural reactions in two directions: 1) Postmodernism, a term applied to the culture of contemporary society. Many people believed that society has entered a new stage beyond modernity, a postindustrial stage of social development dominate by media images, in which people connect with other places and times. Whereas earlier eras had always defining stories that produced meaning and constituted the lens through which people interpreted their experience, in postmodernity, there exists a growing sense that life is meaningless and culture is only a play of images - such developments have produced a countermovement, that is, religious fundamentalism. 2) Fundamentalism appears in many forms, all of whom share the rejection of modernity, in an attempt to re-shape the world according to their own values. Fundamentalists assert the older claims of religion and traditional social patterns, which they regard as justified by religion. Their commitment attracts many to the cause, since they offer a culture with clear meanings that provides stability in a chaotic world. CHAPTER 3: CULTURE AS A SOCIAL CREATION It has been established that cultural objects are meaningful to human beings living in a social world; conversely, the social world, otherwise chaotic, is meaningful because of culture. Yet a main problem remains: Who are the creators of specific cultural objects? Two answers, although unsatisfying, have been provided: it has always been that way and it is because of an individual genius. Sociology suggests an alternative by positing culture and cultural works as collective, not individual, creations. Such a view of culture as a social product originates in the work of Émile Durkheim on religion.Durkheim observed that pre-modern societies were characterized by the mechanical solidarity, where people did the same type of work, followed the same religion and had similar lives. The shared beliefs and understanding of a people constituted their collective consciousness which governed their thoughts, attitudes and practices. Change came when people began to specialize: by contrast, in modern life people have different occupations, different fields of knowledge, different beliefs and different life experiences. Institutional specialization occurred as well (schools, mosques and hospitals). Under such conditions of specialization and differentiation, how can societies hold together? The first answer Durkheim provided is the so-called organic solidarity, which made people interdependent on each other. At other times, he proposed professional associations as a future source of cohesion. More generally, Durkheim believed that every society must have some kind of collective representation, demonstrating to the society’s members their undoubted connection to one another. The French sociologist viewed religion as the most fundamental bond among people of earlier times: thus, in “The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life” he analyzed the most primitive forms of religion - the totemism of Australian Aborigines - to see the “constituent elements” fundamental to all religions. His analysis centers on four key ideas: 1) collective representation. Durkheim regarded all categories of thought as social - for instance, the seven-day week is a social convention of Western societies, one we recognize as artificial yet necessary. Thus, human beings possess an individual biological component and a shared social component, that is, our participation in a collective consciousness. Religion and culture are collective representations. 2) the distinction between sacred and profane. All religious beliefs divide the world into sacred and profane. Nothing special determines the nature of the sacred, only its absolute separation from the profane. Durkheim traced our sense of the sacred by looking at its elementary form: the totem. Aborigines societies are organized around clans, each of whom is represented by a totem - these tribal peoples base their entire cosmologies, their classifications of human beings and nature on the totem, thus imposing a sacred/profane structure on the entire universe. 3) the origins of the sacred. The question that arises is, where do such people get the idea that the totemic emblem is sacred? Clearly, it does not originate from the object itself, since the totem personifies a rather lowly animal. Durkheim suggests that the totem symbolizes both the totemic principle - or God - and the clan: consequently, the god of the clan is the clan itself. Indeed, he elaborates that society arises a sensation of divinity in human beings through its power or control over us and its positive force of strengthening and vivifying action. 4) the social consequences of religion. Two realities seem to emerge, that associated with the religious force and that of everyday life. Using the example of Australian clans, the Aborigines experienced two phases in their lives: the everyday routine and the corroboree. During the corroboree, people come together to sing, dance, and enjoy sexual freedom in a state of “collective effervescence”. Because of its visibility during these times, the totem comes to represent both the scene and the strong emotions felt: thus, the religious force comes not from a totem or a god but from the experience of the social; and because religion provides the source of the classifications through which we apprehend the world, all of human culture becomes a representation of the social. There is an underlying functionalism: groups and societies need collective representations of themselves to inspire sentiments of unity and mutual support, and culture fulfills this need. Culture is a collective representation in two senses: the cultural objects are not simply created by an individual inspired by his genius or by God:, instead, people bound to each other create cultural objects. In their cultural products people represent their experiences of work, pain and love. The main implication for sociological research is that to understand a certain group of people, one would look for the expressive forms through which they represent themselves to themselves - that is, the collective production approach to cultural meanings. This approach aims at revealing the many social activities, such as interaction, cooperation, organization and contestation, involved in the formation of cultural objects. The first version of collective production theory involves the interactions among people and how they generate culture: it stems from symbolic interactionism, concerned with how people actively construct and learn their norms and roles. The basic insight of interactionists is that the human self is not a preexisting form but is shaped through social interaction. Charles Horton Cooley elaborated the theory of the “looking-glass self”, according to which an interaction comprises three phases: 1) The self imagines another’s response to his or her behaviour; 2) The self imagines the other person’s judgement; 3) The self has an emotional reaction, such as pride or shame, to that judgment. Such interaction eventually establishes norms to restore social harmony. As George Herbert Mead pointed out, all social learning takes place through more than two-person interactions. First, the developing child learns to take the role of another person - it is the “play” stage, where the child plays at being a teacher or with an imaginary friend. Later comes the more complicated “game” stage, wherein the child takes into account a variety of roles. Ultimately, the child learns to take into account the response of the generalized others, a term with which Mead describes society - it is the source of morality. Mead used the metaphor of a baseball game: the runner must know what the other players are likely to do. Where does culture come in? Symbolic interactionism suggests that human interactions create culture: once created, cultural objects are perpetuated and transmitted through their repeated expression and the socialization of new group members. Howard Becker, in his paper on how people learn to smoke marijuana, underlines that it is not simply a biological response, but a complex process of social learning takes place. First, the novice smoker interacts with more experienced users; from these experienced smokers, novices learn how to smoke and what to feel. Becker underlines that, if the interaction process breaks down - for example, if a new user tried to smoke a joint alone - he would unlikely develop the habit. Identity is a key concept for the symbolic interactionist approach: the self projects a certain set of meanings onto those with whom it interacts and in return tries to interpret the meanings constructed by partners in the interaction. Erving Goffman analyzed this process as a theatrical performance: when it interacts, the self is an actor performing a role before an audience; if the performance succeeds, the self confirms a certain identity both to partners in interaction and to itself. Most interactions that transmit culture and form identity call on a known and shared history of the community. Thus, the cultural position is distinct from the biological one. In their study of homeless people, David Snow and Leon Anderson cite a biological argument suggesting that human beings have a hierarchy of needs, such as food, clothing, shelter; only once these needs have been met do people have the luxury of worrying about meanings and identities. On the contrary, the homeless, who may not know where their next meal is coming from or where they will sleep that night, nevertheless still manage to interact and foster a specific set of impressions. SUBCULTURES People, however, belong not only to a single group or community but to a variety of them. Mead identified two types of groups: 1) abstract social groups, that function as social groups only indirectly; 2) concrete social groups, such as political parties, whose individual members are directly related to one another. If these relations prove strong enough to counteract some of the influences of the societal generalized other, the group becomes a subculture. A subculture exists within a larger cultural system and has contact with the external culture. Within the subculture’s domain operates a powerful set of symbols, meanings, and behavioural norms - often the opposite of those in the larger culture - that bind the subculture’s members. Moreover, a subculture does not just refer to consumption tastes, but to a way of life. Sociological interest in subcultures began in the early XX century: research focused on unassimilated subcultures (immigrant groups and criminal gangs) and the questions posed involved when and how such subcultures would assimilate into mainstream American life. Subcultures, with their elaborate symbols and meanings, develop by people interacting with one another - therefore, they have been of great interest to sociologists oriented toward symbolic interactionism. Gary Alan Fine studied members of Little League baseball teams: he concluded that they develop an elaborate linguistic and symbolic code known only to the team members. What are the roots of this idioculture? The interacting preadolescent group responds