A thought on the cause of war

I watched a panel discussion titled "Dividing a Nation: The Origins of the Secession Crisis and the Civil War" from the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. To oversimplify, one speaker focused on the underlying economic causes of the war, one on the political processes that led to the war, and the third on the rhetoric used in the run up to the war. All three properly emphasized that the three approaches are complementary and interrelated. Speaking from the politics of the pocketbook, people come to believe what they say.

It occurred to me that a fundamental cause of the war was the inability of the political leaders of the deep South to accurately predict what they were about to experience due to their actions. Had they understood that secession and firing on Fort Sumter would lead to years of war in which so many of their citizens would be killed, to the destruction of their land by Sherman's march, to the rapid emancipation of their slaves and the consequent loss of capital, and to the permanent loss of the market for their cotton exports, and then to the reconstruction and decades of economic and political problems then I suppose they would not have acted as they did.

One of the panelists spoke to the effect that disunion had been for many decades after the revolutionary war perceived as almost surely leading to a desperate civil war as well as to dire threats from the European powers. Apparently the rhetorical leaders in South Carolina and other states of the deep South in the decade immediately before secession constructed a theory which carried the day that the Confederacy would have the military strength to stand off the North long enough that the Union would accept the secession. They were wrong!

I suppose that the leaders of the North also misperceived the horrors that the Civil War unleashed, but the cost of war is always greater for the losers.

Did Hitler perceive that he would end up a suicide in a bunker in the ruins of Berlin or Mussolini perceive he would be executed by a firing squad and his body desecrated? I don't think so. So how do we get people who might start losing wars to recognize what they are letting themselves and their countries in for?

Indeed, one wonders whether those on the "winning" sides of war would not have worked harder to find a negotiated compromise had they fully understood the consequences of war.

Knowledge of the likely and possible consequences of war may be the best defense of peace. How can we better promote the dissemination of such knowledge.

I suspect that the social construction of a theory is a better model for what happened in the lead up to the Civil War and to other wars, combined with the recognition that the war decision is always political involving the interplay between different power groups with their own socially constructed intellectual positions, rather than a model of a single decision maker doing rational decision making. Again, the question is how the appropriate knowledge can be spread to the appropriate people and how the mechanisms of social construction and political negotiation can be modified to promote peace.