Fluctuations in the Intensity of War

Discussion

Joshua Goldstein:

"Wright (1942:227) studies "fluctuations in the intensity of war" and concludes that "There appears to have been a tendency in the last three centuries for concentrations of warfare to occur in approximately fifty-year oscillations, each alternating period of concentration being more severe" (p. 227). Wright defines these concentrations as follows:

• War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14)
• Concentration of wars around the Seven Years' War (1756–63)
• Napoleonic wars (1795–1815)
• Concentration of wars around 1853–715
• The World War (1914–18, renewed in 1939)

He concludes that "in the modern period of world-civilization fluctuations of war and peace have tended to become stabilized at about fifty years" (p. 378). These fifty-year concentrations of war are synchronous with Kondratieff's long waves.

...

Wright is not explicit about any longer-term cycles and does not elaborate on the alternation of more severe and less severe war recurrences (which, as Toynbee argues, form a one-hundred-year cycle). Wright does, however, delineate four long-term periods (about 150 years) that define the stages of development of military technology in Europe:

• 1450–1648: Experimental adaptation of firearms and religious wars
• 1648–1789: Professional armies and dynastic wars
• 1789–1914: Industrialization and nationalist wars
• 1914–: The airplane and totalitarian war"

(http://www.joshuagoldstein.com/jgcyc05.pdf)