War, Violence and Group Solidarity: From Ibn Khaldun to Ernest Gellner and Beyond

Abstract

The relationship between group solidarity and social change is one of the key topics explored by both Ibn Khaldun and Ernest Gellner. However, these two scholars provide two distinct understandings of group solidarity: while for Ibn Khaldun deep social ties are linked to the frugal lifestyle of desert warriors, for Gellner group cohesion is shaped by the ever-changing economic conditions. Furthermore, unlike Ibn Khaldun who identifies war as the primary generator of social change in all historical contexts, Gellner differentiates the foraging, agrarian and industrial social orders and argues that each of these engenders different types of group solidarity. This chapter critically engages with both theorists and argues that the group solidarity has historically been shaped by the three processes that have developed in parallel—the cumulative bureaucratisation of coercion, ideological penetration and the envelopment of micro-solidarity.

Comment on Siniša Malešević’s ‘War, Violence and Group Solidarity: From Ibn Khaldun to Ernest Gellner and Beyond’

Guido Franzinetti

Department of Humanistic Studies, University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli, Italy

guido.franzinetti@uniupo.it

Siniša Malešević’s chapter addresses a wide range of issues, all of which would require a more extended discussion. This comment focuses exclusively on Gellner and war.

Gellner and politics. Malešević rightly points out that war is a ‘blank spot’ in Gellner’s theoretical models. This leaves open two issues: (i) the reasons why Gellner left open this issue and (ii) to what extent the assumptions he did make on this topic were empirically disproved by subsequent developments.

Gellner usually kept away not only from normative issues, but also from the more strictly political aspects of developments. A former student of his once argued that Gellner was not actually interested in how politics worked out in practice. With reference to a conference on ‘Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention’, Gellner wrote that ‘the context of the discussion at this conference was the study of international relations and their legal aspect, a realm in which norms are social realities and social realities (if they are strong enough) are norms. That is not my habitual milieu’ (Gellner 1994: 29). Whatever one thinks of this approach, the fact of distancing himself from the normative dimension was a key part of Gellner’s intellectual perspective, which ultimately rested on a high level of abstraction. Had he not stuck to this approach, it is unlikely that he would ever have produced Thought and change and Nations and nationalism.

This attitude was reflected in Gellner’s reluctance to directly address contemporary issues of ethnic conflict and war (the Northern Ireland conflict, the wars of dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, let alone the Middle East conflicts). This does not mean that he had no political opinions. In 1993 he made an attempt to encourage talks between Albanian Kosovars and Serbs. He was also quite informed of the efforts which led to the Oslo Accords, via his former student, Marianne Heiberg.

Marxism, violence and war. Already in 1954, Gellner had argued that the role of violence and coercion was a blind spot in Marxist theory (Gellner 1954). This issue remained a constant feature of his discussion of Marxism (Gellner 1984, 1988a, 1988b). This makes the substantial absence of war in Gellner’s model of Industria all the more remarkable.

The absence of violence in Marxist theory (as distinct from neo-Marxism) is relevant in two respects. In the first place, it builds on the absence of a Marxist theory of the state (Bobbio 1975, 1978). Ultimately, it is connected to the theory of the ‘withering away of the state’, which had both theoretical and practical consequences in Marxist debates (Adamiak 1970; Jović 2008).

Furthermore, the absence of violence is also present in the work of the Italian Idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce. He argued that ‘violence is not strength but weakness, nor can it ever create anything; it can only destroy’ (‘La violenza non è forza ma debolezza, né mai può essere creatrice di cosa alcuna, ma soltanto distruggerla’) (Croce 1938). Croce proved highly influential in Italian left-wing culture, not least in the writings of Antonio Gramsci.

None of this meant that Marxism had no connection with violence. But it did mean that it could never succeed in confronting violence and its role in the state.

Gellner and war. Malešević explains how in Gellner’s model the changing role of war was an essential part of Agraria, but not of Industria. The recourse to violence was superseded by consumerism. He points out that ‘the staunchly materialist understanding of social change leaves no room for understanding the role of organised violence outside of their economic contexts’. Regardless of the merits of Gellner’s view, it is consistent with his use of abstraction. It is not a casual distraction.

Malešević disputes this vision from an empirical point of view: ‘This line of reasoning cannot explain the historical reality of organised violence. Rather than gradually disappearing from the historical scene, warfare has intensified over the last three centuries, with the twentieth century being often characterised as “Earth’s darkest period yet”, with a total tally of human fatalities ranging between 187 and 203 million’.

Can we really use statistical estimates (over three centuries) for assessing the human costs of wars? Three hundred years ago the world population was much smaller. Population records and assessment were infinitely less precise. In the case of the victims of the Bosnian War, we are still going through a meticulous tally of all the people killed (paid for by the Norwegian government). But in 1721? As Michael Howard pointed out, ‘Before 1870 deaths from sickness in armies normally surpassed death from enemy action by a factor of about five to one’ (Howard 1976: 116). But deaths from sickness are not war deaths.

Malešević is more convincing—from a theoretical and even empirical point of view—when he points out, ‘while Gellner recognises that the multipolarity of states that have emerged in early modern Europe has contributed to the transition from Agraria to Industria, this geopolitical argument suddenly disappears in his account of the modern world. The key issue here is that political power, just as economic power, is an autonomous force with its own logic, and as such, the economic cannot replace politics in modernity’. This is indeed crucial. While usually sticking to his preferred level of abstraction, he does occasionally slip from one level to another (e.g. in discussing the origins of Islam).

But it is quite another matter to argue that ‘Gellner’s theory of history cannot explain genocides of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’. Issues of this kind were repeatedly excluded from Gellner’s explanatory model. This was actually one of its strengths. The fact that genocide has now become a growing field of research does not prove that it was a topic which Gellner needed to address. It proves that scholars who had previously neglected the topic belatedly discovered it (Mann 1973, 1999, 2005; Franzinetti 2011–2012). There was no shortage of research on the topic when Gellner published Thought and change (1964), let alone Nations and nationalism (1983). As Lewis Namier once pointed out, ‘it is easier for the sick and the wronged to attain sainthood than to preserve a sense of proportion’ (Namier 1947: 72).

Malešević points out that ‘Gellner was also a man of his own time, and that is reflected in his overemphasis on the nuclear power as the key deterrent of war in Industria. The possession of a nuclear arsenal was certainly important as a geo-political curb on nuclear wars, but this did not prevent the proliferation of conventional wars, from Korea and Vietnam to Angola and Afghanistan, and hundreds of small-scale proxy wars and military interventions which resulted in over twenty million casualties’. But this is a very blinkered view of the role of nuclear power. The fact of the matter is that the much-deprecated MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) actually did work for the entire duration of the Cold War, even when it seemed to be on the verge of not working (Cockburn 2021). In Korea the nuclear threat was necessary to achieve an armistice; had it not been for Lyndon B. Johnson, the US military might have gone for a nuclear option in Vietnam. This is the whole point of nuclear deterrence: for it to work, you must never test it.

As Malešević acknowledges, Gellner had pointed out that this might not be immutable: ‘Gellner (1992: 69–72) acknowledges that this situation can change either through the greater technological asymmetry between the states, through the possible widespread access to nuclear weapons by the non-state organisations, or through the neutralisation of wealth (i.e. the environmental situation or the rise of post-materialist values). If this were to happen, Gellner (1992: 72) argues, Industria would revert to some form of Agraria: “If it does, systematic coercion, and hence its occasional overt manifestation (‘war’) may once again recover its pride of place as the key institution of human society”’. This was no small concession on Gellner’s part.

To what extent have ‘civil wars expanded in modernity and now become the preeminent form of warfare in the contemporary world’? One man’s ‘civil war’ is another man’s ‘civil disturbance’. Was the repression of Southern Italian banditry by the troops of the new Italian state after 1861 a ‘civil war’? It was no less bloody. A scholar who works in Dublin does not need to be reminded of the ambiguities of the terms ‘War of Independence’ and ‘Civil War’. Undoubtedly, Gellner did not devote much time to these issues, although he was well aware of them. Yesterday’s ‘guerrilla resistance led by the famous Ruritanian social bandit K.’, after Ruritania attained independence, could turn out to be an embarrassment for the new Ministry of the Interior (Gellner 1983: 58–59).

Ultimately, Malešević argues, ‘economic prosperity, the development of science and technology, and continuous economic growth are only possible in the relatively stable environments where nation-states have established a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence over their territory. In this context, coercive power does not decrease in modernity; it only becomes successfully monopolised by states, which can unleash it in times of war and other crises’. Gellner might well have agreed with this last point. He could have argued that it did not contradict the basic structure of his argument. After all, people tend to migrate towards states which have successfully monopolised violence.

On the other hand, Malešević could argue that Gellner was in fact following Marxists in neglecting the role of violence. Furthermore, ‘Gellner rarely made direct links between nationalism and war … he was also adamant that, in the developed industrial societies, nationalism is bound to become pacified and mostly symbolic. Nevertheless, as many scholars of nationalism and war show, it is only in modernity that the rulers are able to mobilise millions of individuals to fight or support the (national) war cause’. Indeed, Gellner actually argued that the intensity of nationalist feeling would progressively decrease.

This may have sounded bewildering in 1995, in the aftermath of the first phase of the Yugoslav Wars of dissolution. But it so happens that the end of the Cold War has been followed by one of the biggest changes in the life of young males: the phasing out of compulsory military service in Europe. It now survives in small countries which preserve it for decorative purposes. Even in Israel some military officials have begun to contemplate the possibility of eliminating military service. Military action is now an extremely professionalised and expensive activity, not least in terms of training. More than ever, it is a matter of logistics, of military support personnel; it is a job for contractors. Conscripts are simply a burden.

Has nationalism actually increased? Malešević argues that ‘nationalism feeds on shared collective memories, and the experiences of previous wars play a pivotal role in the reproduction of nationalist discourses in modernity…. That is one of the reasons why nationalism has not decreased in the late modern era, but has proliferated and has become fully embedded in the discourses and practices of state institutions, civil society and everyday life’.

This remark raises two distinct issues. The first is that it would appear that the past (‘previous wars’) explains the present (nationalism, nationalist discourses). To this Gellner could have answered with his version of Malinowski’s thought: ‘We do not perform the acts we perform because we believe that certain things had happened: we believe that certain crucial events had happened because we do what we do’ (Gellner 1987: 63).

The second issue is: Has nationalism really ‘increased’? During our conference Daniele Conversi asked: How do you measure nationalism? One may add that data gathered in the style of Cambridge Analytica is somewhat questionable. In any case, there is at least room for argument over the presumed increase of nationalism (Bieber 2018). Ultimately, the debate revolves around the question: ‘What is nationalism?’ It is a debate which can easily drift into circular definitions.

Conclusions: Theory and Practice. These comments may seem to amount to an uncompromising restatement of Gellner’s views on nationalism, violence and war. This is not the case. The intent is, rather, to separate a series of empirical issues (on which a more extensive discussion would be required) from the key theoretical and conceptual issues which lie at the root of any theory of violence and war. There is always a risk of drifting into a circular definition of these terms, similar to Orwell’s definition in 1984: ‘The object of power is power’.

Gellner provided a cogent critique of the Soviet Marxist theory of violence, at least as far as Agraria is concerned. But in his conceptualisation of Industria, his model actually seems to come close to Marxist theory. At Gellner’s level of abstraction, this did not actually matter. But at lower levels of abstraction—in confronting and explaining the problems of the post-Cold War world—Gellner’s approach might seem inadequate. Politics, violence and war would have all required a more fine-grained approach.

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