Does War Pay?

Utterly random research brought me to this quote, condensing the contents of a book that led to the award of a Nobel Peace Prize:

He [Sir Norman Angell of the UK] establishes this apparent paradox, in so far as the economic problem is concerned, by showing that wealth in the economically civilized world is founded upon credit and commercial contract (these being the outgrowth of an economic interdependence due to the increasing division of labour and greatly developed communication). If credit and commercial contract are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self-injurious it must respect the enemy’s property, in which case it becomes economically futile. Thus the wealth of conquered territory remains in the hands of the population of such territory. When Germany annexed Alsace, no individual German secured a single mark’s worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war. Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford. [Sir Norman Angell, The Great Illusion, (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), x-xi.]

The book was originally published in 1909, and the above summary of his synopsis reveals the basic thrust of Sir Angell’s focal argument as an international political advocate: war does not pay. His idea that an interdependent financial network amongst the European powers would discourage war to the point that militarism would become obsolete was proven wrong, in a grisly fashion, only a few years after he published the book (foreshadowing Francis Fukuyama?) but he republished the book after the war and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933 for an only slightly modified version of the thesis. Of course, even in 1933 some people could see that war was coming again and indeed, Sir Angell joined Winston Churchill in urging opposition to the expansionism of the fascist powers of Central Europe.

Whether post-WWII Europe’s even closer economic knitting-together and accompanying long peace is vindication for Sir Angell, or if the general peaceability of Europe’s ongoing financial implosion disproves his idea, is something that I think would bear debate.

From one angle, Sir Angell’s thesis looks hopelessly naïve — just because there are a lot of economic ties between two nations that would be disrupted by war does not mean that they will necessarily stay at peace with one another. But I wonder — since the reversion of Alsace-Lorraine back to France following the Great War, isn’t it really the case that territorial boundaries have not moved all that much in all that many places as a result of war, and where they have, the change in borders have been prohibitively expensive and inconvenient for the nations expanding their territories? The problem may be not that Sir Angell was wrong, just that he has been ignored.

Burt Likko

Pseudonymous Portlander. Homebrewer. Atheist. Recovering litigator. Recovering Republican. Recovering Catholic. Recovering divorcé. Recovering Former Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. House Likko's Words: Scite Verum. Colite Iusticia. Vivere Con Gaudium.

7 Comments

  1. Sounds right to me, Burt. Reunification w/East Germany was a net drain [and the East Germans are still bringing up the rear 20 yrs later, iirc], and Germany’s political-fiscal hegemony over Greece, etc. seems very negative. The problem is, it’s only worth conquering a decent country, and there are so few of them. The US conquering Mexico now would do them a lot of good, us none.

    Natural resources are enticing, but what sane country would want responsibility for the mess that is Congo? And I believe some scholars did a study of the 100s of years of England’s India adventure, and they broke even at best.

    Good one, this. I think of my client law firms: some must grow or die but the Tiffany firms of NY [Wachtell Lipton, Cravath, etc.] don’t increase their profits per partner by growing [even though they have the most resources to do so], so mostly they don’t bother.

    There was a point when the Roman Empire got plenty big enough and gave up the conquering game. Then they had to make everybody under their umbrella citizens to keep things chill, but the provinces turned into a net drain as well. Eventually Diocletian split the Empire in two, grabbed the richer Eastern half for himself, and cut the West loose.

    [I bet the Germans have been thinking along these lines lately. I’m sure reunification and the EU seemed like good ideas at the time, but as it turned out…]

  2. Yawn. Current imperial thought says “install puppet governments”
    And judging by the American Military’s current thought process, we’ve got resource wars coming up.

    • So — not yawn at all! If controlling a particular quantity of fresh water, or oil, or some othe rresource is important enough to justify the tremendous cost and logistical hassle of border expansion, then the economics have shifted, such that war does pay.

      • Smedley Butler:
        “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

      • nobody expands borders. they simply install new Vichys (debatable how you find Iraq’s current gov’t)

  3. I think the real question is “who benefits from war and by how much?”

    The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine maybe had little to no economic benefit to Germany (although I’d imagine that the German government had at least the benefit of additional tax revenue and access to iron (or coal?) without a tariff barrier, but such barriers would have been self-imposed anyway). But if someone in Germany really got a kick out of territorial expansion and German unification–enough of a kick to say that it justified the Franco-Prussian War–then in that sense, the annexation, and the war that preceded it, “paid” well for that someone.

    It seems to me what Angell was doing–and all I know about him is what Mr. Likko wrote and quoted above–was to redefine the terms of what are counted as the costs and benefits of war, and he apparently argued that under his revised calculus, war (usually) wasn’t worth it.

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