The Limits of the Western Military Master Narrative

The European narrative has its strengths as well as its limitations, and the strengths deserve consideration. They are well-expressed in the preface and introduction to the Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare, a splendid volume edited by my colleague Geoffrey Parker. The title notwithstanding, it very much emphasizes the western military experience, as the subtitle--The Triumph of the West--makes clear. In the preface, Geoffrey explains his reasons for such a focus:

First, it would be impossible to provide adequate coverage in a single volume of the military history of all major cultures. Second, merely to pay lip-service to the military and naval traditions of other regions would be unpardonable distortion. Finally, for good or ill the past two centuries the western way of war has become dominant all over the world. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remarkably few states and cultures managed to resist western arms for long--and the few that did so usually succeeded by imitation or adaptation. The rise and development of this dominant tradition, together with the secret of its success, therefore seems worthy of examination and analysis.
 

In the introduction, Geoffrey goes on to suggest that the western way of war has five distinctive characteristics. First, western armed forces have always relied heavily upon superior technology, usually to compensate for numerical inferiority. (In the instances where they did not possess superior technology, they were quick to learn from those who did.) Second, "Western military practice has always exalted discipline--rather than kinship, religion or patriotism--as the primary instrument that turns bands of men fighting as individuals into soldiers fighting as organized units." Third, Geoffrey maintains, "the western tradition has shown a remarkable continuity of military theory," from Vegetius to Clausewitz.
 

These first three characteristics--"the triad of technology, discipline, and an aggressive military tradition"--are perhaps shared with other military cultures; e.g., China. But the fourth and fifth characteristics of the western tradition are unique: "the . . . ability to change as well as to conserve military practices as need arose;" and "the power to finance those changes." These Geoffrey collectively terms "the challenge-and-response dynamic."
 

In essence, then, the European metanarrative is the story of a single military culture. That gives it a great deal of coherence, a coherence that may be difficult if not impossible to match in a global metanarrative. But that's only part of the European metanarrative's appeal. The other part--really the more important part--is that by the twentieth century the European metanarrative is also the global metanarrative, because every non-European power that wished to remain a power had to import the western way of war. Moreover, long before that, the western way of war had fundamentally established European military and economic mastery over large swaths of the earth: 35 percent of the world’s surface by 1800, 85 percent by 1914.
All in all, I think Geoffrey supplies a very good overview of the substance of the European metanarrative and makes a very good case for its significance. It's worth noting, however, that this metanarrative is not just Eurocentric; it is teleological. Because we know how the story turns out--or think we do--we emphasize those elements that seem central to the story. If the story is the triumph of the west, the western emphasis is obvious.
 

Supposing, however, that the triumph of the west is a temporary aberration? In ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998), Andre Gunder Frank makes this case explicitly. He sees Asia, especially China, as the hub of the world economy as late as 1800. European states, in effect, used their military prowess to acquire the silver-rich colonies of the Americas, whose precious metals in turn bought entry into an expanding Asian market that already flourished in the global economy. Resorting to import substitution and export promotion in the world market, they became Newly Industrializing Economies and tipped the global economic balance to the West. That, Frank concludes, is exactly what East Asia is doing today. As a result, the "center" of the world economy is once again shifting back to China. If Frank is correct, the European metanarrative has the end of the story all wrong.
 

But one does not have to embrace this thesis to recognize, prosaically, that just as it makes sense to examine the histories of China, Latin America, or sub-Saharan Africa for their own sakes, so too it makes sense to study the military experiences of these regions for their own intrinsic worth--to do "military history as a part of general history," to quote the title of a 1990 conference at Princeton University. And to place these experiences in conversation with one another, it makes sense to create a metanarrative that facilitates comparative work of the sort done by panelist Stephen Morillo in “Guns and Government: A Comparative Study of Europe and Japan.”

Even so, to my mind the principal limitation of the European metanarrative lies elsewhere. For example, what sort of illumination can the European metanarrative give us concerning the current battle in Fallujah?

In one sense, it can give quite a lot. I doubt that anyone questions whether the U.S. forces engaged--superbly-equipped, well-disciplined, officered by the products of command and general staff colleges, flexible and quick to adapt, and backed by all the financial muscle that a deficit-spending superpower can wield--will swiftly recapture the city of Fallujah from the insurgents that have made it their haven since early spring. But plenty of people question whether this inevitable tactical victory will blossom into strategic success. If only the insurgents had read The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare and understood the hopelessness of their plight! And indeed, it may be argued that in fact the insurgents do possess at least an intuitive grasp of the western way of war and have a crafted a method of war designed to avoid or circumvent its strengths.

I've been throwing around the term metanarrative for several paragraphs now. Before continuing, it may perhaps be worthwhile to remind the reader that a metanarrative is essentially "a narrative about narratives." It's a big story that determines which smaller stories are of central and which are of peripheral importance.

A key limitation of the European metanarrative is not merely that it privileges one military culture above all others, but that it comprehends the world largely in terms of state societies, especially nation-states, and emphasizes the conflicts between state societies and the armed forces they employ. Stories involving state socities and regular armed forces are the core; other stories are ignored, relegated to the margins, or even defined as something other than war stories, no matter how blood-soaked their pages may be. This metanarrative notably slights non-state actors. The very terminology I just used--"insurgents"--derives from this metanarrative. An insurgent, we are told, is "a person who takes part in an armed rebellion against the constituted authority." Yet who gets to say what is the constitituted authority? Usually it's the very authority under attack--the authority whom the insurgent refuses to recognize.

We probably need a vocabulary that can describe this type of combatant in less politicized terms. But at a more basic level, we need to create a metanarrative capable of giving this type of combatant as central a place as the soldier who serves a nation-state; or to put it differently, a metanarrative that manifests as much curiosity about this type of combatant. We also need a metanarrative able to examine this type of combatant on his (or her) own terms, rather than through the lens of "counterinsurgency."

Similarly, we do not have a metanarrative that knows what to do with what political scientist John Mueller has termed "criminal war." Most current warfare, he argues, is opportunistic predation waged by packs—often remarkably small ones—of criminals and bullies. The ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia fit this description, as does the on-going civil war in the Sudan. This "criminal warfare" also has a history, as does what Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm calls "social banditry." Why does this matter? It matters because if you think about how people have experienced collective violence down the centuries, a large percentage of that experience--and therefore the history of that experience--has been made up of insurgencies, criminal wars, and social banditry.

Moreover, it's important to note that the European metanarrative focuses our attention on elites--if not the statesmen, generals, and admirals that directed the western military juggernaut then the common soldiers who nevertheless belonged to the dominant states. It is not really much of a stretch to think of the European metanarrative as the history of white people at war. Very often, military historians look over the shoulders of the dominators, not the dominated. Yet if the history of the oppressor and the oppressed, the colonizer and the colonized, is a history of violence—and it invariably is—I can think of no intellectual reason for the historians of that violence to adopt the perspective of one side and not the other. By this, I'm suggesting the possibility of what I have elsewhere described, tentatively and no doubt clumsily, as "postcolonial military history." Gautam Bhadra's "Four Rebels of Eighteen Fifty-Seven", an essay suggested for the conference by panelist Pradeep Barua, is a good example of what postcolonial military history might look like.

Finally, I’d like to suggest that a new military metanarrative find a place to include a phenomenon that at first glance may look out of place: nonviolent resistance; e.g., the tactics and campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi and his best-known disciple, Martin Luther King, Jr. Why nonviolent resistance? Because unlike outright pacifists, proponents of nonviolent resistance are determined to confront those with power—they are, in short, as intent on achieving political change as any conventional revolutionary. They simply refuse to use violence as a means to accomplish their objective. You have to have thought very deeply about the nature of war, and even more about strategy, to simultaneously reject violence and yet be willing to take on adversaries willing to use violence against you. It seems to me that such a perspective belongs as much in a history of war as the views of Thucydides, Clausewitz, or Sunzi (Sun Tzu). Indeed, while the first two might not have been able to understand that the Salt Satyagraha or the Selma March were acts of war, I suspect Sunzi would not only have grasped the point, he would have been mightily intrigued.

The other thing I like about the inclusion of nonviolent resistance is the chance it affords, without being moralizing, to offer a powerful challenge to the metanarrative of military history, with its implicit, deeply-held assumption that the use of violence is not only legitimate and normal but also the only realistic way to respond to intractable threats. Indeed, by sticking a chapter or lecture on nonviolent resistance into the military history master narrative—by which I mean a basic survey textbook or course intended to introduce students to the subject—you can pretty much have your master narrative and undercut it too.