War : Survivors, Memory, and Moral Responsibility (10)

An elderly Italian man visited his local parish church to go to confession. As the priest slides back the shutter, the old man sighs deeply.

"Father," he says, "while World War II was still raging, a beautiful Jewish woman from our street knocked on my door in a right panic. She begged me to hide her from the Nazis. So, I tucked her away in my attic."

The priest replies, "My son, that was a wonderful, courageous thing to do. You have absolutely nothing to confess there!"

"There’s more to it, Father... You see, she started expressing her gratitude with certain... 'favours,' if you catch my drift. It went on several times a week, and sometimes twice on a Sunday."

The priest sighs. "Well, you were both living under immense pressure and in constant fear. In such circumstances, it’s only natural for human frailty to take over. If you are truly sorry, then you are most certainly forgiven."

"Oh, thank you, Father. That’s a massive weight off my shoulders," the old man says. "But I do have one more little question."

"And what’s that?" asks the priest.

"Do you think... I should probably tell her the war’s over now?"

The joke, for all its ribald charm, contains a kernel of philosophical truth that cuts rather deeper than its punchline might suggest. The elderly Italian gentleman does not visit the confessional out of genuine contrition; he visits it in search of authorisation—a formal, institutionally sanctioned blessing upon conduct he has every intention of continuing. He knows precisely what he has done. He simply requires someone of sufficient moral authority to tell him that it is, on balance, acceptable. The confession, in other words, is not an act of repentance but an act of legitimation.

Much like war, we sometimes seek validation for our sinful deeds. And when one thinks about it, this is perhaps one of the most universal truths about human nature—cutting across eras, cultures, and religions. We come not to repent, but to receive a stamp of approval from whatever authority we happen to trust—be it a priest, a cleric, a judge, or even a close friend. So long as someone is willing to say "you are forgiven" or "the circumstances left you no choice," the conscience may sleep soundly enough.

The parallel with war is, in fact, rather striking: Heads of state do precisely the same thing. War is rarely announced as "we wish to seize their resources"—it is invariably dressed up as "defending freedom," "protecting civilians," "a humanitarian mission," or "the war on terror." They, too, are seated in the confessional, petitioning the world to grant them absolution.

The elderly Italian gentleman is honest in his dishonesty. He knows full well what he has been doing. He simply has no intention whatsoever of stopping. And here, if one pauses to consider it, lies one of the most enduring and uncomfortable truths about human nature: we do not typically seek forgiveness for sins we intend to abandon. We seek it for sins we intend to repeat. The priest's absolution functions less as a cleansing of the conscience than as a kind of moral insurance policy—a retroactive justification for yesterday's transgression and, conveniently, a pre-emptive one for tomorrow's.

War, it must be said, operates by precisely the same logic. No nation in the long and blood-soaked history of armed conflict has ever marched its soldiers into battle beneath a banner reading "We are doing this for oil" or "We find their territory rather convenient." The vocabulary of war is invariably the vocabulary of virtue: liberation, protection, civilisation, self-defence, humanitarian necessity. Leaders do not stride into the confessional of international opinion to confess their ambitions; they stride in to have those ambitions absolved and re-described as obligations. The aggressor becomes the protector. The invasion becomes the intervention. The conquest becomes the mission.

As La Rochefoucauld so aptly put it: "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." So long as we feel compelled to seek validation, we at least demonstrate that we still know the difference between right and wrong—we simply choose the wrong with considerably more elegance. 

This maxim applies with particular force to the waging of war. The very need to justify, to explain, to construct elaborate moral architectures around the decision to unleash organised violence upon other human beings—this need is itself evidence that those who prosecute wars are not entirely without conscience. They know, at some level, the difference between what they are doing and what they claim to be doing. The gap between those two things is where the definition of war becomes genuinely interesting—and genuinely contested.

For if war were simply what its perpetrators claim it to be—a reluctant, defensive, noble, last-resort response to intolerable provocation—then defining it would present no particular difficulty. It is precisely because war is so frequently something rather different from its official description that scholars have found the task of defining it so surprisingly complex, so philosophically rich, and so consequential. Which brings us, by this somewhat circuitous but not entirely unilluminating route, to the question of what a war actually is—and, more particularly, what a world war is—according to those who have devoted their scholarly careers to finding out.

The Definition of “World War”

A General and Specific Examination According to Scholarly Authority

I. The General Definition of War as a Foundational Concept

Before any meaningful discussion of what constitutes a “world war” can be undertaken, it is first necessary to establish what scholars understand by the concept of war itself. The most enduring and influential definition within the Western intellectual tradition derives from the Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz, whose monumental work stands as the unavoidable point of departure for any serious inquiry into the nature of war.

His masterwork On War (Vom Kriege), published posthumously in 1832 by Ferdinand Dümmler Verlag, Berlin, remains to this day the foundational text of strategic theory. Clausewitz defined war as an act of violence intended to compel an opponent to fulfil one’s will, and characterised it as the continuation of politics by other means. This formulation is explicitly political in character: for Clausewitz, war is never an autonomous act of destruction but is always subordinate to a rational political objective. His “remarkable trinity”—comprising passion, reason, and chance—identifies war as a compound phenomenon that cannot be reduced to any single dimension of human experience.

The American political scientist Quincy Wright offered one of the most rigorous and systematic scholarly treatments of the subject in his encyclopaedic work, A Study of War, first published in 1942 by the University of Chicago Press, Chicago, and subsequently revised in a second edition in 1965. Wright approached the definition of war from multiple disciplinary perspectives—legal, sociological, military, and psychological—and arrived at a comprehensive synthesis. In its broadest sense, he defined war as a violent contact between distinct but similar entities. However, recognising that such a definition would encompass everything from stellar collisions to animal combat, he offered a narrower formulation: war is the legal condition which equally permits two or more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed force. The resulting synthesis holds that war is simultaneously a state of law and a form of conflict involving a high degree of legal equality, hostility, and violence in the relations of organised human groups. Wright’s work is significant precisely because it refuses to confine war within a single disciplinary lens, seeking instead to capture its full complexity as a social, legal, and military phenomenon at one and the same time.

A more operational and empirically measurable definition was advanced by J. David Singer and Melvin Small in their landmark quantitative study, The Wages of War, 1816–1965, published in 1972 by John Wiley & Sons, New York. Singer and Small defined war as a series of events resulting in at least 1,000 battle deaths—a threshold that subsequently became the standard benchmark of the Correlates of War (CoW) Project and has been widely adopted across the field of conflict studies. This quantitative criterion, whilst inevitably somewhat arbitrary, possesses the considerable practical advantage of providing a clear and replicable standard by which to distinguish war from lesser forms of political violence.

II. Specific Scholarly Definitions of “World War”

The concept of a “world war” is considerably more contested than the concept of war in general, and the scholarly literature reveals a range of criteria by which a conflict might qualify for that designation.

The most widely cited general definition holds that a world war is an international conflict that involves most or all of the world’s major powers. Conventionally, the term is reserved for the two major international conflicts that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century: World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945). The first known usage of the term “world war” in the English language has been traced by the Oxford English Dictionary to a Scottish newspaper, The People’s Journal, in 1848, in the formulation: “A war among the great powers is now necessarily a world-war.” This early usage is revealing, for it encodes within the very genesis of the term an assumption that the involvement of the great powers constitutes a definitionally necessary and constitutive condition of the concept.

The most rigorous and analytically demanding scholarly treatment of what distinguishes a world war from other large-scale conflicts is to be found in the work of Jack S. Levy, Board of Governors Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. In his seminal study, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975, published in 1983 by the University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Levy carefully defines the concept of the Great Power and identifies the Great Powers along with their international wars across a span of five centuries, producing a unique compilation of war data centred upon a well-defined set of leading actors in the international system. Within this framework, Levy distinguishes what he terms “general war”—the closest scholarly equivalent to what the popular imagination understands as a world war—as a conflict that simultaneously involves a substantial majority of the great powers then active in the international system. He finds that eight of the ten general wars in his dataset involve more than 80 per cent of the great powers active at the time, and that any conflict which brings the major powers into direct confrontation with one another across multiple fronts constitutes a conflict of systemic, rather than merely regional, significance.

Levy developed this framework further in collaboration with William R. Thompson in Causes of War, published in 2010 by Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. That work analyses both interstate and civil wars whilst attending to the changing nature of armed conflict over time. The framework advanced by Levy and Thompson implies that the distinguishing feature of a world war is not merely the geographic extent of the conflict but its systemic character—that is, its capacity to threaten the fundamental organising principles of the international system itself.

A parallel and complementary conception is offered by Kalevi J. Holsti in The State, War, and the State of War, published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press, New York. Holsti’s work, whilst not exclusively concerned with world wars as such, provides an important corrective to purely quantitative approaches by emphasising the qualitative transformation that occurs when conflicts escape regional containment and begin to restructure the norms and institutions of international society as a whole. For Holsti, wars become “world wars” not simply because of the number of belligerents involved, but because of the degree to which they remake the international order in their wake—a criterion that both World War I and World War II plainly satisfy.

George Modelski, in his concept of “global war” developed in Long Cycles in World Politics, published in 1987 by Macmillan, London, offered a systemic-historical framework in which truly global wars are those that arise at the turning points of the long cycles of world leadership—periods of roughly one hundred years—during which hegemonic powers are challenged and the structure of the international system is fundamentally contested. On Modelski’s account, a world war is specifically a hegemonic war: a conflict in which the dominant power of a given era is challenged by a rising power or coalition of rising powers, with the consequence that the entire ordering of the international system is placed at stake.

III. The Criteria Scholars Identify as Constitutive of a “World War”

Drawing together the various scholarly traditions surveyed above, it is possible to identify a set of criteria that recur across the literature as necessary—if not always individually sufficient—conditions for a conflict to be classified as a world war.

The first criterion, and the one most universally agreed upon, is the involvement of the great powers. As many scholars in the field affirm, the elevation of a conflict to the level of a “world war” requires that the belligerent parties include the dominant actors in the international system—those whose combined capabilities, alliances, and interests shape the structure of world politics. A war fought exclusively between minor or middle powers, however destructive in its immediate effects, does not qualify on these terms.

The second criterion is geographic scope spanning multiple continents. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), for instance, was fought across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, and has consequently been identified by some historians as the first genuinely global war, precisely because its theatres of operation were not confined to a single region but were distributed across the entire surface of the globe. This criterion of multi-continental scope is closely related to the great-power criterion, since it is the overseas empires and global reach of the great powers that have historically transformed European conflicts into world wars.

The third criterion is systemic impact—that is, the capacity of the conflict to alter the rules, norms, and structure of the international order. Both World War I and World War II had profound effects upon the course of world history: the old European empires collapsed or were dismantled as a direct result of the crushing costs of the wars, and the modern international security, economic, and diplomatic system was established in their aftermath, with institutions such as the United Nations founded with the explicit purpose of preventing another outbreak of general war. By this criterion, a true world war is not merely a very large war; it is a war that brings one era of international politics to a close and inaugurates another.

The fourth criterion, implicit in the Clausewitzian tradition and made explicit by Levy’s concept of general war, is the totality of mobilisation—the degree to which the conflict draws upon the full economic, social, industrial, and human resources of the belligerent states. World War I is characterised in this respect as a total war: entire societies were mobilised in support of the war effort, blurring the distinction between combatants and non-combatants and demanding a degree of total national commitment that had no precedent in the history of industrial warfare.

IV. The Contested Boundaries of the Concept

It is worth noting that the scholarly consensus on what constitutes a world war is far from absolute. Some theorists, particularly those working within the tradition of the Copenhagen School of International Relations, argue that the distinction between a world war and a very large regional war is ultimately a matter of political recognition rather than objective criteria. Others, following the quantitative tradition of Singer and Small, insist that any definition must be operationalisable and measurable if it is to be of scientific utility.

Richardson, in his attempt to arrange all deadly quarrels upon a continuum of violent conflict — ranging from a single murder at one extreme to the approximately ten million killed in the Second World War at the other—represents the most ambitious effort to fix the threshold of war quantitatively, yet he does not resolve the specific question of what threshold separates a world war from a large-scale interstate war. This difficulty is compounded by the emergence of hybrid and proxy wars in the contemporary era, in which great powers pursue their objectives through non-state actors and technological means rather than through direct military confrontation. As many scholars of New Wars theory have argued, wars of today differ from those of the past in scope, tempo, methods, and strategies, and can no longer be explained entirely by Clausewitz’s classical formulation of war as the continuation of policy by other means. If this is correct, then the traditional criteria for a world war—direct great-power engagement, multi-continental geographic scope, systemic structural impact—may need to be supplemented or revised to account for forms of conflict that achieve equivalent systemic effects through different means.

V. Conclusions

In sum, whilst there is no single universally accepted scholarly definition of a “world war”, the weight of the academic literature—from Clausewitz’s On War (1832) and Wright’s A Study of War (1942, 1965), through Singer and Small’s The Wages of War (1972), Levy’s War in the Modern Great Power System (1983), Holsti’s The State, War, and the State of War (1996), and Levy and Thompson’s Causes of War (2010)—converges upon four essential criteria: the direct involvement of the great powers; geographic scope extending across multiple continents; the capacity to restructure the international order; and the total mobilisation of the societies engaged in the conflict. It is against these four criteria that any claim that a given contemporary conflict constitutes a Third World War must ultimately be assessed.

Bibliography

Clausewitz, C. von. (1832). Vom Kriege [On War]. Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler Verlag. (English translation by M. Howard & P. Paret, 1976. Princeton: Princeton University Press.)

Holsti, K. J. (1996). The State, War, and the State of War. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Levy, J. S. (1983). War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Levy, J. S., & Thompson, W. R. (2010). Causes of War. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Modelski, G. (1987). Long Cycles in World Politics. London: Macmillan.

Singer, J. D., & Small, M. (1972). The Wages of War, 1816–1965: A Statistical Handbook. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Wright, Q. (1942; 2nd ed. 1965). A Study of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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