Page 107 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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Political regimes, international systems and types of
wars: total wars, limited wars and asymmetric wars

MASSIMO DE LEONARDIS *

stasis and polemos-tyPe wars

The percentage of deaths among soldiers and the number of civilian casualties do not
depend exclusively on the power of armies and tactics employed . Whether a war is limited
1
or total depends also on the type of political regimes and international systems.
From this point of view, two words used by ancient Greeks, especially Plato, can help us
describe conflicts : όόόόόό, war among adversaries separated by matters of interest, though
2
within an institutional framework and having common values, and πόόόμόό, war between
enemies, divided by opposite conceptions of the World and political systems . As Raymond
3
Aron points out, international systems concerning ideologies can be homogeneous or het-
erogeneous depending on whether the main actors share a common worldview or not: the
4
former lead to όόόόόό wars, such as the one between the Westphalia peace of 1648 and the
French Revolution and from 1815 to 1914, and the latter lead to πόόόμόό wars, such as reli-
gious wars, the French revolutionary wars, Napoleon’s wars and the Second World War. Von
Clausewitz brings to the attention that it was the coming into sight of an actor, the Revolu-
tionary France, which rejected the existing system, that lead to an absolute war and not the
other way around. .
5
Naturally, the many-sided truth of history forces us to admit exceptions to such rigid
classifications . In various times, different types of wars may have existed alongside the
6
* Professor of History of International Relations and Institutions, Director of the Department of Political
Science, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. Professor of Contemporary History at the European
University of Rome. Secretary General of the Italian Commission of Military History.
1 Even rudimental weapons are sufficient to kill many people. For instance, Aztec priests could take shifts
at four tables and stab more than 80,000 war prisoners with a dagger in four days as a sacrifice and for in-
timidation (see V. D. Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, New
York, 2001) and in the ‘90s of the 20 century «more than five times as many people got hacked to death by
th
machetes in Rwanda and Burundi than killed by the atom bomb in Hiroshima» (C. Jean, L’uso della forza.
Se vuoi la pace comprendi la guerra, Rome-Bari, 1996, pp. 16-17.)
2 «Enmity among relatives is called disagreement, enmity with strangers is war», Plato, Dialoghi politici e
lettere, ed. by F. Adorno, Vol. 1, Turin, 1970, Repubblica, book V, chapter. XVI, p. 426.
3 On this matter, see G. Miglio, Guerra, pace, diritto. Una ipotesi generale sulle regolarità del ciclo politico,
now in id., Le regolarità della politica, Milan, 1988, Vol. II, pp. 773-774 in particular.
4 See. R. Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations, Paris, 1962, pp. 108-113 and Id., La politica, la guerra, la
storia, Bologna, 1992, p. 74 [Introduction by A. Panebianco].
5 K. von Clausewitz, Della guerra, Milan, 1970, libro VIII, pp. 774-777.
6 In M. Kaldor, New and old wars: organized violence in a global era, Stanford, 1999, Table I provides
an overview on the evolution of wars from the 17 century to date, which links political systems, goals of
th
war, types of armies, military techniques and war economy and Table IV correlates models of international