What Hyman Minsky said about finance, others say about global politics. Stephen M. Walt writes,
prolonged periods of peace may also have a downside: They allow divisions within different societies to grow and deepen. Even worse, they may eventually drive the world back toward war.
A book I recently finished reading, Peter Turchin’s War Peace and War, offers a similar thesis.
It is an idea that puts libertarians in a bind. A progressive can advocate for “the moral equivalent of war” to try to hold together a strong state. Libertarians do not want a strong state to begin with. On the other hand, we do not want to see violence among ethnic groups or populist illiberalism, either.
Note that this runs against the progressive narrative of the ‘cycle of violence’ (peace begets peace, “democracies don’t go to war with each other”, “those to whom evil is done do evil in return”, violence only leads to more violence).
Much of the narrative about ‘peace processes’ relies upon an assumption that long periods of stability and undisturbed calm are essential to the slow, fragile process of building up trust and letting the passage of time diminish group antagonism and the salience and of past incidents.
I think there is some truth in that last part, and that some large share of U.S. domestic discord could not be maintained without relentless agitation and provocation and exaggerated repetition and insistence on the continued relevance of past incidents.
Stability leads to instability, and instability stability. It sounds like Heraclitus https://sweettalkconversation.com/2014/08/06/heraclitus-fears-not-the-reaper/
Perhaps creative destruction mitigates this. So the problem for libertarians is does getting rich the right way cause intractable inequality. Are the muslims resentful of our decadence because of the attendant prosperity? Even so, I’m not sure making a desert is peace because of fear of a future war. I’ll take my chances with peace.
Now that the uppity notion is out of the way, time for the snark. What do our alleged elites want? More home ownership? We sure have some goofy elites.
Turchin expands on this idea even more in his most recent book.
The oversimplified version of the argument is that external competition are necessary to ensure internal cooperation and effective institutions. Absent external competition and the existential threat which competing institutions offer, social cooperation and effectiveness withers. The reason:
Social orgs resist change and thus eventually atrophy.
Rent seeking, inefficiency and privilege self amplify
Free floating rationales justifying the order are constantly created and spread
Concentrated influence groups amplify at expense of general welfare
Variation and experimentation are suppressed
Absent extremely powerful external competition, vooperation and effectiveness wither away into privilege, rent seeking, exploitation and change resistance.
Obviously these ideas resonate closely with Mancur Olson, and the various liberal (classical) writers attempting to explain the Great Enrichment of post Adam Smith Europe.
I will add that there are other types of competition other than war. Firms compete existentially over consumer choice. Scientists and athletes compete for fame, and so on.
Less peace than faltering or unshared prosperity I would say.