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STEN RYNNING

OLIVIER SCHMITT

AMELIE THEUSSEN

Why do Western countries lose wars? Military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, as well as the recent assertive behaviors of countries such as Russia and China, have shattered the image of a dominating West whose superior politics and military forces would almost inevitably overwhelm its opponents. Western military superiority is not a new idea, but it was given particular credence by the Western “victory” in the Cold War, followed by the successfully fought Gulf War of 1991, and then the liturgy of a Revolution in Military Affairs that the West supposedly mastered. Military exhaustion and defeat have since challenged the West, feeding waves of debate, first on whether it was and indeed should be vanishing as a force of international order,¹ then on whether liberal order could survive without it,² and, finally, on whether the West might still prove able to reconfigure its tools of war to a new age of forever wars in zones of contested power and insurgency.³

With this book we wish to take a fresh look at why “the West” is overwhelmingly powerful on the battlefield and yet also strategically fragile. We acknowledge that “the West” is a contentious term, whose definition has been changing over time. For example, Philippe Nemo establishes a morphogenesis of the West based on five foundational stages of equal importance.⁴ The first is the “Greek miracle” at the end of the eighth century B.C., which generated ideas of societies based on law, reason, and education. The second stage is the Roman cosmopolis, which transformed law into an abstract set of rules determining and guaranteeing individuals’ private property, thus establishing the subjects of law as autonomous moral agents. The third stage is the advent of Christianity, which introduced a new relationship with time, substituting an eschatological, linear perception of time (with a beginning and an end) to a cyclical perception for which time is an eternal revolving. The fourth stage is the Gregorian Reform and the “Papal Revolution” of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, during which the Catholic Church replaced the Augustinian theology of the original sin with Anselm’s doctrine of free will (which would influence St. Thomas Aquinas and Jean Calvin). This theological innovation emphasized that individuals’ efforts matter in the process of their salvation. Finally, the fifth stage is the creation and promotion of modern liberalism, beginning with the English revolution in the seventeenth century. Of course, all these stages have been mixed, accepted, and respected to various degrees by specific political communities, but taken together they form the basis of a relatively shared self-perception and worldview among several societies. Building on this description, and for the purpose of this book, we understand “the West” as an institutional practice of military power directed by primarily liberal governments and societies.

We recognize the profound changes in the security environment of the West, from the rise of transnational terrorism to the return of great power conflict, and we contribute to the discussion on the Western way of war by using temporality as an anchoring concept. Temporality is here understood in the broad sense of how the past, the present, and the future relate to one another: it is thus a form of experience and thought among actors. Historians know well that time is not a neutral phenomenon experienced by all individuals equally, but a construct whose shape and texture vary:⁵ already in 1889, philosopher Henri Bergson observed that time was “qualitatively multiple.” In the context of this book, we understand temporality as composed of three interrelated dimensions: trajectories, perceptions, and pace, all of them shaping the actors’ experiences and understanding.

Trajectories relate to the classical metaphysical discussion about the flow of time and its contested linearity and determinism. Actors thus tend to make sense of their experience through narratives implying a specific understanding of the flow of time. Since Edward T. Hall’s classic The Silent Language (published in 1959), it has been well documented that Western actors tend to think of time as linear (or “monochronic”), and thus within the frame of the Aristotelian narrative structure (stories with a beginning, middle, and end);⁶ this in turn shapes how they perceive their own trajectories. This understanding has several consequences when it comes to the study of war. First, there is a relation between trajectories and identities: war narratives always involve the notion of extracting the individual from the present in order to protect the future of the political community. Traditional societies usually focus on a warrior gaining “eternal glory” though courage on the battlefield, but modern discourses of patriotism add a temporal dimension by emphasizing the nation’s survival in the future. More importantly in the context of this book, the linear understanding of time places the trajectory of the West within a framework story of rise enabled by a “military revolution” (beginning), dominance (middle), and eventual fall (end), with numerous attempts by authors to discern whether the inevitable fall has already happened, is underway, or has not yet begun.

The second dimension of temporality explored in this book is the importance of perceptions of time. It is only logical that the multiple ways through which time is perceived across cultures and periods shape socio-political activities, including war and warfare.⁷ Those perceptions shape, for example, the definition of the enemy, who can be presented as belonging to another temporality (“backward” or “barbarian”). It is telling that, when reacting to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014, former US Secretary of State John Kerry declared: “You just don’t, in the twenty-first century, behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped up pretext.”⁸ Political objectives thus define a clash of temporalities. Another example relates to the understanding of war: if war is perceived as cyclical, and thus inevitable, decisionmakers can have a higher tolerance of violence, feeding greater belligerency on the battlefield. Thus perceptions of time constitute a critical dimension in assessing the evolution of Western military power.

The third dimension of temporality is related to how humans experience the pace of life, defined as “the race, speed and relative rapidity or density of experiences, meanings, perceptions and activities.”⁹ Here again, research has shown that different cultures and historical periods experience pace differently. For example, historian Jean-Claude Schmitt has studied in detail how Western medieval societies from the eighth to the fourteenth century were profoundly shaped by specific “rhythms” that regulated the entire pace of life, from walking and praying to all forms of social intercourse.¹⁰ When it comes to studying the pace of contemporary societies, Robert Levine and his colleagues have pioneered a number of comparative studies of indicators such as walking speed in downtown areas, postal clerk efficiency, public clock accuracy, and work speed.¹¹ They find that the pace of life is significantly faster in most Western countries than in other parts of the world. Extrapolating from these findings, it is no stretch to imagine that speed, as the defining feature of how Western societies experience the pace of life, also shapes the way they wage war in fundamental ways.

In this book we dissect this Western condition as a distinctive Western temporality composed of the combination of trajectories, perceptions, and pace, as defined here, shedding a new light on the debate about the past and future of Western military power.

The aim is not to engage the grand and politicized debate on whether the West is doomed or bound to lead. Rather, it is to argue that its historically contingent superiority in war has come with an inbuilt fracture that the West has only begun to understand. For the better part of two centuries this condition was underappreciated because the West generated the industrialized muscle that allowed it not only to win wars but to fight in the overwhelming ways that held its liberal and martial communities—citizens and soldiers—together in the belief that war must be fought only for progressive purposes. The West thus posed as the master of war. Today it is adjusting to the reality that, even when Western network-centric firepower is applied with precision from over the horizon, the inner pace and vagaries of war will dominate. This suggests that for the martial communities within the West, war was all along a recurrent phenomenon that not even liberal society could escape, while for liberal communities control must be regained by new means. As current strategies can no longer reconcile these communities, the West must look anew at its political, normative, and military understandings of war on the basis of a renewed understanding of temporality.

Writing in the shadow of the world wars of the early twentieth century, J. F. C. Fuller argued that “there is no reason why the world of today should be in its present mess.”¹² If only governments and analysts had diagnosed with greater accuracy the forces that recast civilization through the nineteenth century, and their impact on warfare, he wrote, then it would have been within their powers to avert upheaval. Perhaps such diagnostic perception of unfolding tectonic shifts is a tall order, but it remains a key challenge for our era too. With this book we hope to contribute to meeting this challenge.

The following sections develop these three dimensions of trajectories, perceptions, and pace in more detail, before a discussion of the structure of the book explains the ways in which they are interrelated.