Human history has seen its fair share of conflict over the last two thousand years. As a species, we have shown that our base territorial instincts, commitment to different clans or ethnicities, our championing of certain religious creeds, or our interpretation of historical events have all been a deep source of contention between societies across both space and time.
So much has been our appetite for violence that history has repeatedly seen efforts by some to brand different societies or social groups as lesser human beings -- legitimizing in their eyes extreme violence or deprivation resulting in genocide or war crimes.
In fact, stalwarts of world history from the 20th century -- from both democratic and dictatorial political fabrics -- have often deeply soaked their hands in blood with absolute impunity -- with almost no remorse for the victims.
Stalin’s cruel policies towards Ukraine and Kazakhstan during his “Forced Collectivization” of agriculture in the then-Soviet Union have often been held responsible for the deaths of nearly three million Ukrainians and nearly 600,000 Kazakhs between 1932-1933, while the Bengal Famine of 1943 that killed nearly three million people resulted from the cruel policy priorities of Churchill, who felt that Britain had no moral obligations to save Indians (then its colonial “subjects”) who “bred like rats.”
So, the bitter truth is that human societies are prone to commit atrocities -- no matter which great moral principle they admire on paper.
Yet, all is not doom and gloom. The two World Wars in the first half of the 20th century resulted in the deaths of millions of people -- with WWII claiming almost 3% of the world’s population in 1940 -- but the advent of nuclear weapons paradoxically means that military conflicts are no longer an ego boosting endeavour for the political elites of the superpowers -- as one wrong move on the international stage carries the potential of ending the world as we know it.
But can we take this peace for granted? Is the relatively low violence which we have experienced during the last seven decades -- compared to what was experienced before -- an aberration of history or a new normal?Modern-day philosopher Yuval Harari eloquently argues that, “real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war.”
Yet, is an outright total war an implausible scenario? Or has global politics just been lucky?
To attain this implausibility of war, our political elites must internalize the cold lessons from history -- and few lessons are extremely vivid: For hundreds of years, human societies found it difficult to live in peace with each other. They found it difficult to respect each other’s territorial integrity. They found plural religious orders to be unacceptable facets of human societies.
This culminated in countless wars over territory and religion. In fact, the urge to establish the “one true religion” across all societies was so strong in the past that millions perished in religious wars and all the associated destruction that they brought. And yet over time, thankfully, we have come to accept that the world will have plural religious orders no matter how intensive the attempts were -- and the urge to establish one true religion has largely subsided over time.
But this source of conflict was replaced by ideological battles over plural political and economic systems. For some, history must end with the acceptance of one single marriage of a specific political and economic system -- democracy and capitalism. For others, the choice is not so simple.
Yet, at some point, we might have to revisit that old lesson from history and start accepting that just like different religious orders, plural political and economic systems, with all their flaws and merits, are likely to endure deep into the 21st century. Thus, any attempt to divide the world over democracies versus autocracies or socialism versus capitalism with the intention to create military hostility is a futile exercise.
Instead, global leaders will serve humanity truly if they learn to work across their ideological differences and create a more inclusive international framework for allowing every political system to cooperate with each other to address common threats, like climate change for example. We must not forget, while military misadventures were painful between 15th and 19th centuries, the cost of a mistake at the international arena is now infinitely higher.
Thus, countries like the US, Russia, and China must embrace this bitter fact. Any attempt to not internalize these fundamental lessons from recorded history is an act of hubris. Plural political and economic systems emerging from uniquely different social, political, and historical conditions are unlikely to filter out in the 21st century, no matter how strongly we feel about them individually.
Thus, true peace will come from that nuanced understanding of that historical fact -- and it should motivate the superpowers to be interested in the stewardship of the global political order -- and not its undisputed master.
Dr Ashikur Rahman is Senior Economist at the Policy Research Institute of Bangladesh (PRI). He can be reached at ashrahman83@gmail.com.