And it kinda makes sense. I mean, it essentially raises the opportunity cost of starting a war and can encourage more frequent communicaiton between members of a country. But does any of that actually LEAD to peace?
We can readily think of glaring counter examples where this wasnt the case. For example, the late 19th century was an age of expanding trade across Europe. Yet that didn’t prevent the First World War.
By contrast, the reverse was true for the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They had very little economic contact with each other (esp. during the 50s and 60s), yet were able to successfully prevent tensions escilating to all out war. How this was achieved is the subject of a very interesting (and kinda old) article by John Gaddis:
So I figure the impact trade has on the probability of war must be TINY at best. In fact, as far as I can tell, trade is neither a necc or a sufficient condition for peace between two countries. But, after a 30 second google search, I couldn’t find any empirical evidence on this point. So I thought I would get this forums opinion (next best thing, right). What do you think?
I think that the opportunity costs associated with going to war are only relevant for the extremely small number of ruling elites who have control over whether or not a state goes to war. They know that nuclear weapons will kill them too, hence peace between nuclear powers in the Cold War. Most international relations theorists like to imagine that there is such a thing as a rational national self-interest. There is no such thing.
Free trade between nations will benefit people in those nations who benefit from free trade. People who benefit from such voluntary economic interactions are not the same people who decide whether or not a country goes to war. They will send a country to war, and pretty much everyone in the country who benefits from voluntary transactions will suffer as a result, but the people who made this decision will benefit greatly.
Look at the 19th Century between the Napoleonic Wars and the Great War. An era of unprecedented free trade and wealth generation. In a sick way, it was this very generation of wealth which allowed for the construction of the massive war machines that conducted the World Wars. A little bit of freedom now seems to result in a horrific relapse into tyranny down the road. Maybe one needs to remove the tumor entirely in order for treatment to be effective.
There’s a difference between the concepts of free trade leading (or tending towards) peace and free trade creating peace. The latter is absolute, while the former is not. Even if we take the argument to the extreme: will anarchy eliminate conflict? No, because the elimination of something is absolute, and you simply can’t make complex theoretical arguments on human behavior absolute.
^ i take this to mean that a handful of counter examples like those i offered are not enough to defeat the claim that trade leads to peace since no one ever said it would eliminate all conflict. i think that is a fair point and one i agree with 100%. that’s why i was looking for more rigorous empirical analysis to see whether we have historically observed freer trade leading to less conflict. but i had no luck (granted i didn’t try long ) .
that being said, even though recent historical examples don’t make a slam dunk case, they leave me pretty skeptical. much more skeptical than the commentators I linked to.
Trade is also, de facto, a replacement for war and conquering for resources…So, while it would obviously not do away with ALL conflict, it does serve to take up priority for wars.
Non-coerced trade amongst participating parties who benefit from the transactions is essentially peaceful. If I think of trade in such a manner then trade is a peaceful movement of people and goods.
Peace is the result of war being too costly. War can be made costly in two ways: 1) if we already get in peace many (all?) of the perks we’d get from annexation and 2) the cost of carrying out a successful annexation would be prohibitive.
Free trade and free movement of people and capital go a long way toward giving countries the perk of conquest in peace, meaning that only a small country which is easy to take will be worth attacking. Still the years prior to WW1 where not years of free trade. There was no free trade even within the British Empire, let alone throughout ! If there had been 100% free trade and would have been delighted with the other Europeans powers bearing the costs of colonization while those countries got only the perks. Indeed colonization would have been a global case of free riders, not the scramble that it was. But that was not the case.
As for the missed war between the sovs and the yanks, its clearly due to the second path: nukes made that war so costly, that it just wasn’t worth it. History shows that the first path is ephemeral, because formerly free traders can change their mind, and the second is 100% foolproof.
I don’t think there’s any argument that can be made against the idea that free trade at least adds a little bit of incentive not to go to war. With this being said the old proponents of free trade vastly overestimated the effect it would have on peace. I think that it’s a large case of peace causes free trade, not free trade causes peace, although it solidifies it. Trading makes countries “allies” more so than they would be, but I don’t think that this in and of itself makes them allies. It helps, but because people aren’t so economically focused, and can be manipulated through other things free trade is not a total safeguard by itself. However, traders and important lobby groups often have interests in peace, however, some do in war as well.
So it helps, and it can assist in solidifying peace, and the prerequisite for trade in the first place is peace, and today is the best example of this. The world today is mostly fixed on trade, not conquest and ultra-nationalism.
Also, wars cost A LOT of money. That money is almost always obtained through non-free-trade practices, such as taxing/inflation. With this source of income gone, there is much less of an incentive to fight wars.
Well the people profiting from trade and the people making the decisions on war and peace are rarely one and the same, so the effect does not have to be great. (We know that if merchants profit eventually everyone does, but few people really get that, especially the politicians.)
What would be perhaps more interesting would be to examine cases where the link between the merchant class and government was the strongest. How often and for what reasons did merchant-dominated states of old like Venice, Ragusa, Novgorod, Genova, Hanseatic League cities go to war with their trading partners and for what reason?
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