War Cycles
History
Joshua Goldstein:
"In describing the war cycles, I find it helpful to look at the war pattern as evolving and passing through successive stages of development, which I call "eras." In each successive era, the recurring pattern of war severity resembles the previous era in some ways but differs in others:
1. From 1495 until about 1618/1648
.. great power wars fluctuate up and down around a level of about ten thousand fatalities per year (from 1511 to 1606 there are only three "peace" years out of ninety-four).
Three war peaks, albeit weak ones, can be picked out on the basis of sustained, high-fatality wars: 1521-29, 1552-56, and 1593-1604.15
2. From about 1618/1648 to 1793/1815
.. there is a repeating pattern, or "signature," of great power war, in which a series of wars of escalating severity culminates in a high-fatality war and a relatively peaceful period follows. This pattern repeats four times, the war peaks ending respectively in 1648, 1713, 1763, and 1815. The fatality levels of these war peaks are an order of magnitude higher than in the previous era about one hundred thousand annually and rise steadily during the two centuries. In these centuries a trend toward more peace years breaking up the years of great power war is observable.
3.From about 1793/1815 to 1914/1945
.. the peace years become predominant and the pattern of escalating wars within a long wave is replaced by one or more peaks of short duration. In this era the wars are shorter and, in the case of World Wars I and II, more severe by an order of magnitude (about two million battle fatalities per year). I hypothesize that a fourth era may have begun around 1945 in which even fewer great power wars will occur, but any that do will be of even greater severity and shorter duration.
Note that Wallerstein's (1983) three "world war" periods , each followed by the start of a new hegemony (see chapter 6), seem to correlate with the eras just described."
(http://www.joshuagoldstein.com/jgcyc11.pdf)
More information
Research into War Cycles
Goldstein discusses, in this chapter of his book on Long Cycles, the historical research of:
- Ludwig Dehio (see: Ludwig Dehio's Theory of War Cycles)
- L. L. Farrar, Jr.
Joshua Goldstein:
"The third strand of research coming out of Quincy Wright's work leads into the current debate on cycles of war and hegemony. The influences of Ludwig Dehio, Arnold Toynbee, and A. F. K. Organski come to bear, as shown on the right-hand side of figure 5.1. This strand focuses not on fifty-year cycles (long waves) but on longer cycles defined by the very biggest wars, which I will call "hegemonic wars. "34This conception of war cycles flows out of Wright's observation that every other fifty-year war concentration was "more severe." Toynbee formulated this into a one-hundred year war cycle scheme, and his contemporary Dehio formulated a similar scheme based on the recurrent efforts of Continental powers to gain hegemony in Europe.
This concept of a cycle of hegemonic challenges eventually drew Organski's "power transition" theory into the debate, since that theory deals with the outbreak of war when a rising challenger surpasses the dominant power in capabilities. Different conceptions of what constitutes hegemony, hegemonic war, or a hegemonic challenge lead to different interpretations and datings of these phenomena. By hegemony I mean the position of the leading country in the world, which is able, by virtue of superior economic and military capabilities, to largely shape the rules by which international relations (both economic and security relations) are conducted."