Vol. XVIII No. 2, Fall 1998
Suganami, Hidemi, On the Causes of War.
Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996.
In On the Causes of War, Hidemi Suganami reflects on one of the perennial questions that challenge students of international politics - that of the causes of war. Suganami, already well-known in the field of international relations theory for his earlier work, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), once more seeks to apply the philosophy of social science to the analysis of approaches put forward in the attempt to understand and explain international politics.
In this case, he examines such efforts as Kenneth Waltz's Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) and Keith L. Nelson and Spencer C. Olin's Why War? Ideology, Theory and History (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1980), and seeks to clarify the questions at issue. He does not dismiss such works but does suggest that some clarification can be achieved by distinguishing among three questions: "What conditions are required for wars to take place? What circumstances make war more or less likely? and How did a specific war come to take place?" Waltz considers three approaches to the explanation of the causes of war; they focus on human nature, the state and the absence of an overall authority in the international system. While he identifies some substance in each approach, Waltz sees the anarchic character of the international system as ultimately the fundamental precondition for the outbreak of war. Suganami asserts that the anarchic character of international politics emphasized by Waltz is either trivial or tautological as an answer if one is asking what preconditions are necessary if war is to take place, and entirely inadequate if we are interested in determining either what factors make the outbreak of war more or less likely, or what brought about any particular war. Nelson and Olin's emphasis on domestic politics, assuming that domestic discord and instability breeds aggressiveness toward other states, fails, according to Suganami, to account for the variety of factors that lead in particular instances to the outbreak of war.
While Suganami finds the discussions of R.J. Rummel, Victor Wallace and Doyle in regards to the apparent correlation of certain phenomena, such as domestic instability, arms races or dyadic liberalism respectively to be suggestive, he cautions that such hypotheses require further study and, while typically presented as simply correlations, do entail implicit assumptions about causation that, in each case, fail to capture the range of factors that influence the actual outbreak of war in specific cases.
Suganami's own view is that:
. . . war origins are quite diverse especially with respect to their backgrounds, the operation of war-conducive mechanisms, and the influence of chance coincidences; and that the first two of these three items are often considered as the underlying causes of war; that there are, however, some family resemblances amongst war origins; and that these are due chiefly to the limited number of ways in which relevant governments can be said to have acted in making their key moves in the partially overlapping processes resulting in the outbreaks of war. (p. 206)
Much of the book consists of critiques of previous work on the causes of war. Suganami adopts a somewhat skeptical approach, not necessarily dismissing the findings of such work but stressing the limitations and tentativeness of such findings. He is consistent when he presents his own hypotheses, emphasizing the range of factors and the inescapable elements of chance and coincidence. Such a scrupulous approach is appropriate so long as students of international conflict are not intimidated from raising hypotheses and exploring potentially fruitful avenues of enquiry. One of the merits of Suganami's own approach is his assertion of the salience of political leadership. Without dismissing the influence of the structure of the international system, he insists on the urgency of examining how decisions made by political actors impact on the incidence of war. By making the point that states do, albeit within certain constraints, make choices, selecting one course of action in preference to alternatives, Suganami asserts an important role for examination of the ethical issues entailed in such decision-making.
On the Causes of War should be considered required reading for serious students of international conflict. It will make challenging but fascinating reading.
James G. Mellon
Halifax, NS