Page 113 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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aCta
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wars between the secOnd half Of the 20 century and the 21 century
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In the second half of the 20 century and at the dawn of the 21 century, the predominant
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type of war has changed radically. Wars between nations belonging to the Western Civiliza-
tion have disappeared . Albeit in a political-diplomatic context different from that of coloni-
35
alism and decolonization era, the West continues to be engaged in conflicts in the geopolitical
theatres of the Third World, in the new forms of peace-enforcement operations, war on terror-
ism, military interventions aiming at regime change and state building. in the third World,
ethnic, tribal and civil wars, strongly abated by colonialism, have now reappeared on a large
scale . Civil and inter-state conflicts have reappeared within Europe and next to its borders,
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such as ex Yugoslavia and the Caucasus. In other words, wars fought under rules to limit
cruelty have disappeared almost completely, whereas conflicts have proliferated in which
the violation of the rules is a fundamental part of the tactics employed and civil populations
are fully affected by the operations. At the beginning of the 20 century, the ratio of military
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to civilian casualties was eight to one. the ratio became even in the Second World War and
now eight civilians die for each military fallen. Obviously, these data must be compared to
the other, which tells us that in the 20 century, 119 million victims were caused by infra-
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state conflicts and 36 million victims were killed in inter-state conflicts. once the Cold War
ended and the danger of a global nuclear conflict disappeared with it, the inhabitants of the
West, which has abolished both inter-state and civil wars within itself as well as mandatory
draft, could think they were at safe. But the threat of terrorism of Islamic background now
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hangs over their heads and Western Civilians are also threatened by death .

35 From the point of view of resorting to military force, Henry Kissinger notes that the democratic West has
abolished wars within itself. Asia reminds of 19 century Europe: big powers, Russia, India, China and
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Japan perceive each other as strategic rivals. Peace is founded on the balance of power, but war is not ruled
out from the spectrum of possible options. Middle East conflicts remind of the era of religious wars: the
conflicts are not based on economical grounds, such as those within the West, or any strategic grounds, such
as in Asia, but they are ideological and religious, since the parties reject one another’s legitimacy (Does
America Need a Foreign Policy?: toward a Diplomacy for the 21 Century, New York, 2001, pp. 25-26).
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Robert Cooper, who was Blair’s foreign policy advisor, and who is now EU’s foreign affairs general direc-
tor, divides the World into three geo-political areas: the post-modern states, such as those in the EU, which
will never fight among each other; modern, Bismarckian states, which usually own nuclear weapons, such as
China and India, which might resort to force; the «post-imperial chaos» of pre-modern states, which require
the «colonial» presence of nation-builders and peace-makers (The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in
the Twenty-first Century, NewYork,2003, chapters 1-2).
36 «Even with the aid of machine-guns and high explosives, the total of deaths inflicted on Afro-Asia by Europe
must have been trifling compared with the number inflicted on it by its own rulers, in Africa chiefly through
wars, in Asia chiefly in crushing revolts … Against the price of Western conquest has to be set the cessation
it brought of old endemic bloodshed» (V. G. Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse 1815-
1960, Leicester, 1982, p. 227).
37 See J.-J. Roche, Théories des relations internationales, Paris, 2006, p. 104. According to other calculations,
civilian casualties amounted to 10% of the total in the First World War, 52% in the Second World War and
90% in the conflicts after 1945 (R. Toscano, Il volto del nemico. La sfida dell’etica nelle relazioni internazi-
onali, Milan, 2000, p. 150, n. 49)
38 E. Cecchini (Storia della guerriglia. Dall’antichità all’età nucleare, Milan, 1990) writes: «If the history of
guerrilla warfare – although lacking rules, ferocious and indiscriminate – can be considered to be a part of
the big picture of military history under many aspects, the history of terrorism belongs to criminology».