ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: War is war no matter who calls it and what they call it

With China and the US circling each other and the Russian war on the Ukrainian people approaching its first anniversary, a single concept glows in the dark literature on these subjects, as illustrated in an open letter to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz published recently by feminist magazine Emma, which urged him not to supply Ukraine with weapons because doing so risks a “third world war”.

Many questions abound in this era of a multidimensional global crisis, but the one that stood out in recent days has been who, exactly, has the power to name wars, or any international state of affairs for that matter. The statement “a multidimensional global crisis” is more layered and complex than the term “polycrisis” coined by historian Adam Tooze to describe what happens when “disparate shocks interact so that the whole is worse than the sum of the parts”.

These shocks may not be all that “disparate”. It may sound pedantic, but the idea of a multidimensional global crisis, akin to a mirror ball with lights reflecting in varying directions, is probably more useful as it encompasses the idea that we live in a totality, a single world in which it is difficult to separate issues into discrete and nonoverlapping jurisdictions.

Tooze does nonetheless cite former US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, who more appropriately described the early 21st century multidimensional crisis as “the most complex, disparate and cross-cutting set of challenges” of the past four decades. I shan’t go down this road, at least not now, but return to the question who gets to name a crisis, a state of affairs and a war, for that matter.

Stopping just before wilful revisionism it is not unfair to ask who named the European wars that occurred between 1914 and 1945 “world” wars. One way of looking at it is that the Europeans dominated and controlled vast areas of the world directly and indirectly in various permutations of colonial ownership. This suggests that when a European colonial power went to war their colonies were automatically part of the conflict. But how does one explain a “third world war” conceptually?

With almost every country functionally integrated into a globalised whole, a disturbance in one area of the globe quite readily affects a distant region. For example, the Russia-Ukraine war has caused shortages of noodles and cooking oil in villages on remote islands in the Indonesian archipelago. There is a lot of evidence in the databases of regional banks and international institutions to support the idea that war among major producers of commodities carries a threat to communities around the world. In both of the instances above it becomes easy to speak of a “world war”.

Naming something has an effect on how people think about it. Consider the US declaration of independence. As a settler colony at the time there is an argument to be made that it was an early example of the type of unilateral declaration of independence made by Rhodesian settlers in 1965.

A somewhat similar argument can be made of homologies between the “American revolutionary war” (1775-1783) to get out of the yoke of British control, and the declaration of the Republic of SA — to break away from the British crown. “Independence” cannot be a bad thing now, can it? Yet to new émigrés and settlers Israeli independence was cause for celebration, whereas for Palestinians it was a tragedy.

It’s not unusual for combatants to justify their own actions while vilifying those of their opponents. The 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne observed, most pithily, that “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice”. It’s in the name where symbolic ideas are conveyed well beyond their meaning. The names we give things carry meaning. Associating Germany with a “third world war” carries meaning that words fail to capture. 

Almost exactly a year ago, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock repeated her country’s reluctance to get sucked into the war in Ukraine. “Our responsibility after the second world war was that never again from Germany there will be war, and never again there will be genocide.” Since then Germany has announced a €100bn boost to its own military, and has sent significant aid and weaponry to Ukraine.

Katja Hoyer, author of Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire explained last week (with respect to the European wars of the early 20th century) that while Britain, the US, France and Russia tend to speak of “duty, heroism and sacrifice, Germany’s history has made such positive commemoration of war difficult … Germany is intensely conscious of the suffering the two world wars caused millions of people in Europe and beyond. Where the victorious powers see purpose in suffering, most Germans see only senseless slaughter and guilt.” 

Right now, after more than 70 years of pacifism, Germans may be forgiven for thinking that Thucydides may have been right, in that it is hard to shake the belief that war is what makes them “definitively human” — much as pacifists might wish to ignore that.

• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.