No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
On the Clausewitz of the Cold War: Reconsidering the Primacy of Policy in On War
Abstract
Throughout the Cold War, scholars gave considerable privilege to Clausewitz's observation that war is the "mere continuation of political activity (Politik) by other means." It is often referred to in intellectual shorthand as the primacy of policy. This article questions the extent to which emphasis on the primacy of policy has been overstressed, influenced perhaps by the strategic context of the Cold War. Clausewitz's trinitarian concept of war-hostility, chance, political purpose-which appears in what scholars generally agree is On War's only finished chapter, does not portray policy as more dominant than the other tendencies; instead, it presents them as equals, stressing only each one's uniqueness in relation to the others. Reinterpreting policy as equal to the other two aspects of the trinity tends to strengthen the relevance of Clausewitz's overall theory to contemporary wars.
... Niklas Luhmann's social theory of self-referential communication systems here seems to offer an amazingly elegant solution to the reconstruction of the Clausewitzian puzzle about the form analysis of war. It is not always necessary to return to Clausewitz' almost 200 years old but indeed classical conception to discover the secrets of war (Aron 1976;Paret 1976;Echevarria 1995;1996;2007a;2007b;Herberg-Rothe 2001). Modern social theory, of course, has arrived to far more sophisticated methodologies of for instance systems analysis than he could develop. ...
... In such a war, everything that seems simple becomes complex (Clausewitz 1832(Clausewitz /1952. Some authors like Keegan (2000) and Owens (2001) doomed Clausewitz out; I do not count van Creveld among them (2000: 119;; others claim for a neo-Clausewitzianism (Herberg-Rothe 2001;Echevarria 2007;Murray 1997;Knox & Murray 2001;Heuser 2002). Certainly, since the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, Clausewitz is reconsidered. ...
This paper is a summary of my 700-page very academic thesis, in Danish, to be published by Aarhus University Press (AUP). A shorter booklet based on it was published by AUP too (November 2014, 250 pages) and so were a number of shorter articles in English, French and German. In Luhmann’s systems theory and in sociology at large there is a missing link consisting in the lack of a sociology of war. A number of German systems theoreticians use Luhmann’s theory to fill that gap. Yet Luhmann (born 1927), who was a soldier and a prisoner of war from age 15-17, would not write a “Der Krieg der Gesellschaft”. The attempt to narrow this lacuna is indeed a heavy burden and a difficult task, in which it is decisive firstly to get the basic distinctions right about a second order observation of war as a conflict system – to be distinct from a military organisational system. This, I do by beginning with a reconceptualization of Carl von Clausewitz’ form analysis and self-description of war from Vom Kriege (1832). The central point is to observe the self-reference of war, or how war became war about war. Conflict is basically a problem of essentially contested communication. Once this historical self-reference established around the 17th century was in place, war became delimited by its structural couplings to religion, mass media (propaganda), finance, welfare for victims and veterans, law, politics and other functional systems. The costs of war increased, reconstituted and transformed modern society in a way that has formed a range of risks and – of course – neglected blind spots.
... This negative connotation of the term "politics" persuaded Michael Howard (2007, v-x) and Peter Paret in their translation of Clausewitz's On War (1976) frequently to use the term "policy" rather than "politics" for Clausewitz's die Politik. This has in turn been criticized by scholars, because "policy" has a narrower meaning, concerned with carefully crafted governmental approaches to and positions on certain issues (Honig 2007;Bassford 2007; see also Echevarria 2007). George Dimitriu (2018) has made a good case for seeing strategy-making as a function, not of rationally derived government policy, but also of politicking, political power games, both in Clausewitz's times and now; this certainly helps us better to understand strategy-making today. ...
Grand Strategy is a state’s “theory of victory,” explaining how the state will utilize its diverse means to advance and achieve national ends. A clearly articulated, well-defined, and relatively stable grand strategy is supposed to allow the ship of state to steer a steady course through the roiling seas of global politics. However, the obstacles to formulating and implementing grand strategy are, by all accounts, imposing. The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy addresses the conceptual and historical foundations, production, evolution, and future of grand strategy from a wide range of standpoints. It seven constituent sections present and critically examine the history of grand strategy, including beyond the West; six distinct theoretical approaches to the subject; the sources of grand strategy, ranging from geography and technology to domestic politics to individual psychology and culture; the instruments of grand strategy’s implementation, from military to economic to covert action; political actors’, including non-state actors’, grand strategic choices; the debatable merits of grand strategy, relative to alternatives; and the future of grand strategy, in light of challenges ranging from political polarization to technological change to aging populations. The result is a field-defining, interdisciplinary, and comparative text that will be a key resource for years to come.
... Literatürün güvenliğe odaklanan kısmı, değişen savaş kavramı ve yeni teknolojik silahlarla ilgilenmektedir. Bazı yazarlara göre yeni savaşlar savaş kavramını değiştirmemiştir (Echevarria II, 2007;Herberg-Rothe, 2009;Houweling ve Siccama, 1988;Lantis, 2006;Reid, 2003;Schuurman, 2010;Waldman, 2010). Diğer bazı yazarlar ise, yeni savaşları farklı ve yeni terimlerle açıklamayı tercih ederlerken bu savaşların ortaya çıkardığı tehditlerle başa çıkabilmek için yeni araçlar gerektiğini de iddia etmektedirler (Bassiouni, 2008;Daniel III ve Smith, 2015;Rosen, 2007). ...
Full text available at: http://alternatifpolitika.com/site/cilt/12/sayi/1/7-Gokcer%26Gozen-Ercan-Siber-Savas-Jus-Ad-Bellum-Jus-In-Bello.pdf
Savaş kavramı, Soğuk Savaş dönemiyle birlikte dönüşmeye başlamış, yakın dönemde de Amerika Birleşik Devletleri’nin güttüğü “teröre karşı savaş politikası” ile bu durum perçinlenmiştir. Bu kavramsal dönüşüm çerçevesinde savaşların sadece devletler arasında gerçekleştiği artık düşünülmemektedir. Karakter olarak asimetrik ve genellikle sınırlı bir savaş alanından yoksun olan yeni savaşlar geleneksel savaşı tamamen değiştirememiş fakat geleneksel savaşlardaki tanımları ve ayırımları bulanıklaştırmış ve yeni kavramlar eklemiştir. Kavramsal dönüşümler ve yeni özellikler çerçevesinde ortaya çıkan yeni gri alanlar, uluslararası hukukun mevcut kuralları ve uygulanması açısından bazı zorlukları ve/veya sorunları da beraberinde getirmektedir. Ne var ki, uluslararası hukukun normatif gelişimi ve uygulamaları uluslararası politikadan bağımsız bir şekilde gerçekleşmemektedir. Bu çerçevede, bu makalede özellikle Uluslararası İlişkiler literatüründe az çalışılmış bir konu olan yeni savaşlarda jus ad bellum ve jus in bello prensiplerinin uygulanabilirliği siber savaşlar/saldırılar özelinde irdelenmekte ve Estonya, Gürcistan ve Stuxnet vakaları üzerinden literatürdeki örneklerinden farklı olarak “karşı çıkma kuramı” çerçevesinde tartışılmaktadır.
Between the 1940s and the 1960s, strategy was at the heart of security studies and closely intertwined with International Relations (IR). Over the past three decades, however, the study of strategy has been relegated to a secondary position in the international security subfield and marginalized in IR theorizing. One important source of this disconnect is the challenge mounted by critical security advocates, who sought to reorient the study of security away from strategic studies. They reached into the philosophy of science and pulled out three familiar dichotomies, rationalism/constructivism, materialism/idealism, and problem-solving/critical theorizing, that they could utilize within security debates. Specifically, they argue that strategic studies leaves out too much of what is really important for security and world politics because it is rationalist, materialist, and retains an uncritical view of knowledge production. In this article, I turn the critical security conventional wisdom on its head and show that strategic studies, exemplified by the ideas of Carl von Clausewitz and Thomas Schelling, actually transcends these dichotomies and hence offers an indispensable source of insights for both security studies and IR.
Zusammenfassung
Carl von Clausewitz’ Denken über den Krieg steht paradigmatisch für ein instrumentelles Verständnis von Gewalt in der Politik. Gewalt ist für Clausewitz ein Mittel, das im Krieg verwendet wird, um politische Zwecke zu erreichen. Seit dem Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts ist jedoch die Ansicht weit verbreitet, dass Clausewitz’ Überlegungen keine Gültigkeit mehr besitzen. Gegenwärtige Formen des Krieges seien zwar gewaltsam, aber nicht mehr politisch, weil sie nicht allein von Staaten oder aus einer eng verstandenen Staatsräson heraus geführt werden. Der Einwand missversteht jedoch Clausewitz’ Begriff der Politik. Dieser soll im vorliegenden Aufsatz systematisch rekonstruiert werden. Dem zu entwickelnden Interpretationsvorschlag zufolge bezeichnet „Politik“ in Clausewitz’ theoretischem System zunächst einmal nur ganz allgemein eine Interaktion von zwei oder mehr Akteuren, die jeweils ihren Willen realisieren wollen, deren Willen sich jedoch nicht vollständig vereinen lassen. Krieg ist für Clausewitz dann solche Politik, die mit gewaltsamen Mitteln betrieben wird. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird argumentiert, dass Clausewitz’ Theorie des Krieges einen fruchtbaren Analyserahmen bietet, mit dem sich die Transformationen der politischen Gewalt von den Kabinettskriegen des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zu den „neuen Kriegen“ unserer Zeit nachvollziehen lassen.
The world of the future will not be one without wars. The many hopes we have about a future peace governed by a more or less confederal state will not make wars obsolete. Regular wars and irregular wars will continue and probably on different subjects than we are used to. The article proposes that the form of war will be more about temporalities, i.e. fast interchanges or, rather, more risky protracted wars of attrition and exhaustion and less on tactical well defined territories. The West can neither dominate such wars nor establish one world that is ruled or even governed. The risk is that we have the systems we have. They have their own path dependencies, their temporal bindings and their own stories to tell. In the worst case, the West sticks to an imaginary of almighty power – and then it will lose. We tend to forget that our present past will be experienced and told differently in the future. The “extreme 20th century” will have another history and another impact. Its extremes will be narrated as more extreme, and its temporal bindings become easier to observe. The much celebrated “revolutions in military affairs” will not dominate future war systems. Unipolarity is fading away. Kantian convergences may appear.
Does Australia have a ‘strategic policy’? Australia’s debate has seen an inflation of the use of the term ‘strategic policy’, often used synonymously with ‘defence policy’ and ‘strategic guidance’ to indicate a major policy or to simply describe Australia’s strategic environment. However, far from pure semantics, the term ‘strategic policy’ has become dissociated from the specific understanding of the policy objectives attached to the use and the threat of the use of military force. Instead, contemporary usage of ‘strategic policy’ has come to reflect what Everett Carl Dolman called a ‘favourable continuation of events’, reducing strategy to a mere functional adjective. Moreover, a focus on ‘policy’ as meeting the objectives of a state, as opposed to ‘politik’, which encompasses policy, politics and the polity, has led to the restriction on choices and objectives for Canberra. In an increasingly contested Asia, the Australian debate should avoid the obfuscation that comes with a term such as ‘strategic policy’ as this can have negative implications for Australian force structure and planning. More broadly, the application of the term ‘strategic policy’ reflects the challenge of Australia as a medium-sized power developing an independent strategy in the context of its history, geography, politics and society.
In the post-Cold War era the changing international system, primordial hate and violence motivated by ethnic and religious conflicts, transnationally operating non-state actors, relativization of the state, and rising democratic and liberal values have prompted an ongoing debate on the nature of war. Those commentators who argue that the "new" wars have fundamentally changed the nature of war are of the opinion that the theory of war by Carl von Clausewitz has lost its analytical relevance as a conceptual framework for understanding and explaining war in the twenty-first century. The major contention of this article is the following: In some respects, "new" wars are different from the "old" (conventional) ones. The depth of this difference, however, falls short in changing the nature of war. The conceptual framework of Clausewitz, therefore, remains relevant to a great extent. Clausewitzian interpretation of contemporary wars would be useful to reevaluate political and strategic alternatives that are developed to control and terminate them.
The end of the Cold War era coincided with the beginning of a shift Iran's foreign policy from the ideological to the pragmatic. The collapse of the Soviet Union created an important geopolitical region in the north of Iran. The dialogue doors were opened by Khatami's "dialogue among civilizations" in contrast to the "clash of civilizations". With the election of Bush and especially after the September 11 th attacks, the US code was changed from globalist to regionalist. In this period Iran, was named as one of three countries in the "Axis of Evil". After 2005, the Iranian policy towards the US changed fundamentally so that Israel and the US were seen as the main enemies of Iran. Also, Iran's nuclear issue aggravated the hostility and it was used by the US to maximize its hegemony. In this context, the US efforts to impose its geopolitical codes on other countries to be involved in conducting its policies against Iran could be justified. It was also regarded as a geopolitical imperative, Today, the US has to curb Iran's ideological-political activities and if both Iran and the United States do not scale down their demands, military confrontation could be predictable.
This review article is meant to unlock the traditional foundation of civil-military relations, i.e. political supremacy, expressed in Huntington’s work. This would mainly be done by reviewing the thinking of Clausewitz on political supremacy, whom Huntington drew his philosophical foundation from. This article argues that first, Clausewitz’s Trinitarian concept of war– hostility, chance, political purpose – does not portray policy as more dominant than the other tendencies; instead, it presents them as equals, stressing only each one’s uniqueness in relation to the others. Second, Huntington’s misinterpretation of On War might have resulted from his use of a 1943 faulty translation of the book, coupled with his political ideology and inclinations to solve the problems facing the US at that time.
Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía Esta es una obra ya clásica, donde el autor cuestiona muchos de los viejos supuestos sobre el papel de los militares en la sociedad, y desarrolla una teoría general de las relaciones entre la sociedad civil y la milicia.
The Post-War Strategy of Limited War: Before, During, and After Vietnam
- Robert E Osgood
Die politischen Ansichten von Clausewitz
- Peter Paret
A similar teleology with regard to the role of war is evident in Kant's works; see Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History
- G W F Hegel
- . J Philosophy Of History
- Sibree
notes that Clausewitz used the same objective-subjective construct in an earlier essay entitled “Strategie und Taktik
- Clausewitz Paret
A similar teleology with regard to the role of war is evident in Kant's works
- G W F Hegel
The Powell doctrine appeared in 1991-92, as a modification of the doctrine that Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger developed in 1984. The Weinberger doctrine consisted of six conditions for the commitment of U.S. forces to combat: (1) it should only be done to protect vital interests
- Clausewitz In Bassford
- English
Book 8 was thus intended to serve as a sounding board of sorts for the revision of the rest of On War. Indeed, compared to the tightly argued first chapter of book 1, many of the chapters in book 8 appear rather raw, marked by tendentious or even circular logic and vague or contradictory ideas
- Vom Kriege
- Nachtricht
The last three books (Defense, Attack, and The Plan of War) reflect this perspective
- Vom Kriege
Objective principles are equally valid for all; subjective principles are valid only for those who adopt them
- Vom Kriege