Formal declarations of war and choreographed surrender ceremonies have been rarities in humanity’s crimson history, the first an odd legalistic practice spun off from the age-old need to justify making war, and the second high-risk theater prized by modern nation-states.
The declaration of war’s primary target was not and is not the enemy (certainly not in this age of compressed-time, global-strike surprises), but the agent-state’s population, from which sacrifice would be required. The culmination of the artfully conceived and perfectly executed declaration of war in the Western tradition was the post-Pearl Harbor response of the United States government: obviously justified, powerfully unifying, and legally flawless. But the subsequent, brilliantly staged surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay marked the end not only of a globe-spanning war, but of an age of warfare between states that at least feigned compliance with internationally recognized norms and taboos. Thereafter, the world changed, the nature and structure of our enemies changed, and our will to win at any cost collapsed into tortured semantics and self-doubt. The age of extreme violence by non-state actors had begun.
Ferocious bloodletting plagued the post-war, post-colonial, and ideological eras, but virtually all functional states (not least, the USA) avoided the term “war” for their engagements. We saw police actions, interventions, retaliatory strikes, even large-scale conventional campaigns with significant casualties and, not least, “fraternal assistance” from Soviet-bloc forces for unpopular “socialist” governments. Still, we insisted that, somehow, none of these activities quite amounted to war. Politicians fled that evocative label, with its alarmed tone and threat of domestic sacrifice. We could, indeed, have both guns and butter. And we were too nice to declare war on anybody. Weren’t we?
And on what or on whom would we have declared war? It’s hard, if not impossible, to wage war effectively on ideas, which ultimately must fail on their own. Nor have civil wars—so common and cruel in our time—ever involved formal declarations of war. Our lagging conception of war is still of an activity between established governments. If there is no opposing government to which we can deliver our diplomatic notes, we’re on the back foot from the start. In a burst of frustration and ire, we did bluster unofficially about a “War on Terror,” a risible label that merely betrayed our confusion. It was as if, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, we had declared war not on Japan but on surprises.
In a few generations we have transitioned from the historically grounded belief that war is horrible but sometimes necessary, to the conviction that war is “never the answer”—an outright denial of historical fact and a willfully naïve view of human nature. War is not only not to be waged, but not even to be discussed, a bowel disorder at the dinner table. The only carve-outs are applications of the term “war” for domestic campaigns to rid us of social ills. Yet, warfare of the hoary old blood-and-agony sort is one of only two collective endeavors at which humans excel (the other is building and operating cities).
Our determination to behave admirably means we consistently lose to enemies we refuse to understand. We dread casualties in any cause and imagine we somehow can defeat foes who will slaughter their own kin and kind in vast numbers to win.
Surveying history, we might assume that the war-initiating pronouncements of classical-era or medieval despots amounted to declarations of war. But they did not. The point of those ornate, legalistic texts was not to notify, but to justify. Particularly in high-medieval Europe, the obsession with legality, with laws secular and religious, demanded that those who chose war to resolve intractable problems or just because they were in a sour mood justify themselves by enumerating the past wrongs done unto them by the enemy, as well as their own right to rule (Shakespeare nailed it in Henry V and his other history plays). Warning enemies of impending hostilities was rarely, if ever, the intention. The point was to justify one’s actions before emperors, popes, and peers. St. Augustine kept an eye on you, and you had best have done your legal homework. Venetian efforts to absolve La Serenissima of any guilt over the treacherous conquest and literal rape of Constantinople by the armed mob of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 is an excellent example of seized opportunity reframed as a just act (the much-put-upon Byzantine Empire never recovered, but the loot remains in Venice to this day).
The rules-based international order that gave rise to formal declarations of war appeared in the wake of the phenomenally destructive Thirty Years’ War. Those rules were by no means always honored, but they offered a framework better than anarchy. The last century saw those rules wither…until Vladimir Putin swept away the last feeble pretense at conformity.
We are back in the fourteenth century. Without much Latin, but with plenty of nuclear weapons.
As for formal surrenders, the dead don’t initial treaties. Through most of the human pageant, the conquered—at least, their ruling classes—were massacred, either immediately upon defeat or after their misery had been displayed to the victorious population back home. The most fortunate were enslaved, imprisoned, or held for ransom. And surrender ceremonies have never been common in asymmetrical warfare in any epoch. Prior to our self-doubting postmodern era, no rebels, guerillas, or freebooters were accorded any rights at all.
And any formal surrender must be finely judged and managed: If we got it amazingly right in Tokyo Bay in 1945, it was because far-thinking men put transformation above punishment. By contrast (and more representative), the vengeful armistice terms imposed on Germany in that railcar outside of Compiègne in 1918 guaranteed that lasting peace would not have a chance. In the wake of the wisely managed Japanese surrender, the defeated took up baseball. The punitive terms imposed on the Germans (primarily by the French) excited the stab-in-the-back theory and enabled the rise of demagogues.
Nor should we forget that the post-Westphalian order was intended as an insurance policy that focused damage and guaranteed the continued possession of thrones, if not of all territory. It was not the creation of a species that had learned all of its lessons.
Nowadays, no democratic government has the stomach to formally declare war, let alone to win wars. And the only displays of surrender are our inevitable retreats from “non-wars” we have forgotten how to fight.
