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NOT LONG AFTER HOMO SAPIENS camedownfromthetrees,archeologistsand anthropologists tell us, they organized themselves into political communities and fought one another.1 Since then, the only societies that have not made war upon their neighbors have been those with no neighbors at all; and even in those cases, cleavages within communities usually developed soon enough to provide fault lines for conflict. Indeed, traditionally war has not been considered to be an aberration or a failure of diplomacy, but rather a rational, necessary, and not altogether unwelcome response to a wide variety of national threats and insults. The absence of great power war has such a taken-for-granted quality today that it is easy to forget the utter ubiquity of warfare throughout most of human history. Over 90 percent of pre-industrial societies sampled in one prominent anthropological study fought internal wars at least once per decade, and about half fought almost constantly; 70 percent fought wars against external groups during the same time period.2 War, the authors argued, “is a nearly universal fact of life in the ethnographic (anthropological) record.”3 Fighting accompanied humanity throughout all stages of its development, from ancient times through to the Middle Ages and beyond. Over the course of the previous millennium, according to Charles Tilly, war was “the dominant activity of European states.” It is “hardly worth asking when states warred, since most states were warring most of the time.”4 The evidence is clear from every century. “The sun never set on fighting in the 14th century,” noted Barbara Tuchman.5 There were only seven complete calendar years in the entire seventeenth century in which there was no war between European states (1610, 1669–71, 1680–82).6 This might seem like a small number, but it was actually an improvement over the sixteenth, according to one of its most prominent historians.7 In the eighteenth century, the great powers were never at peace for longer than seven years.8 The stronger the political entity, the more likely it was to wage war in pursuit of its aims. Overall, “the absence of organized violence during long periods of history,” Hans Morgenthau pointed 1 Explaining Behavioral Change: Why Norms Evolve 20 Chapter 1 out, “is the exception rather than the rule.”9 It seems that one might have to be a bit crazy, or at least hopelessly naïve, to consider its obsolescence to be possible. Indeed psychiatrist Franz Alexander wrote in 1941 that, from the view of his profession, “it would seem that the pacifist, who thinks the elimination of war an actual possibility, might be considered a neurotic.”10 Little wonder, then, that those who have argued that major war is a thing of the past have met a great deal of skepticism. Theories proposing that the future is likely to be starkly different from the past necessarily carry the burden of proof. Even if the evidence suggests that the world is more peaceful than ever before, no one should be convinced that these changes will last without a convincing causal mechanism. Why, after ten violent millennia of human existence, should anyone believe that major war has become obsolete? This chapter begins the process of answering that question. It seeks to fill gaps in our understanding of how ideas can sometimes evolve and eventually come to affect state behavior. I discuss how ideas become norms, and I propose a mechanism by which exogenous, material factors influence standing normative debates and provide the engine for their evolution. The chapter ends by demonstrating the plausibility of the mechanism by applying it to two of the most commonly cited examples of behavioral changes brought about by evolving ideas: slavery and dueling. Explaining the Long Peace: From Ideas to Norms In the aftermath of World War II, few people could have been particularly optimistic about the potential for humanity to avoid a third world war. But avoid one it did; indeed the time since has come to be called the “long peace,” or a periodofunprecedentedgreatpowerstability.11 Scholars representing all the major schools of international relations have supplied a variety of explanations for the current period of great power peace, some of which imply a greater degree of permanence than others.12 Rationalists have proposed that nuclear weapons, a variety of domestic and international political institutions, and/or economic interdependencehavealteredthecalculationsthatstatesmakeregardingwarfare. Others, especially U.S. neoconservatives, give primary credit to the stabilizing influence of U.S. hegemony.13 Constructivists do not necessarily deny the importance of any...

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