CIAO DATE: 01/02

When (And How) Regions Become Peaceful: Explaining Transitions From War To Peace

Three important regions have moved from war to peace during the 20th century: South America in the beginning of the century, Western Europe in the middle while the Middle East has begun the move toward the end of the century. Not only did these moves take place in different periods in this century, but they also resulted in completely different types and levels of peace. How can we best explain these transitions and variations?

Western Europe moved from a major war-zone to a zone of peace in the years following World War II. South America started the move to regional peace, even if not perfectly, much earlier in the 20th century. However, since the late 1950s Western Europe has reached a much higher level of peace than South America. A vigorous peace process began in the Middle East, in contrast, only in the early 1990s and the peace there is still much more fragile than in the other regions.

The objective of this study is to address the following two puzzles: what best accounts for the transition from war to peace in different regions in different times? And what is the best explanation of variations in the level of peace which exists in different regions in a certain period of time like the differences which exist today in the level of peace among the Middle East, South America and Western Europe?

With the end of the Cold War, there has been a growing interest in the question of regional war and peace but war, and as a result peace, have always been a neighborhood problem. Thus, regional peace is a prerequisite for global peace. Despite the commonly separate treatment in the literature of causes of war and sources of peace, we can not understand transitions from war to peace without knowing the sources of regional wars and then how different peace strategies address them. My argument is that the underlying cause of regional war-propensity is the state-to-nation balance in a certain region. Accordingly, different peacemaking strategies, derived from different theoretical approaches, produce different levels of peace based on their distinctive treatment of the regional manifestations of the state-to-nation problem, notably, territorial and bound-ary questions.

Yet, the state-to-nation balance in the region conditions the effectiveness of the different peacemaking strategies. When there is a state-to-nation imbalance, strategies which focus on changing the capabilities of the local antagonists can be the most effective. In regional context, it means those strategies related to the type of involvement of the great powers, especially hegemony or cooperation, but not competition or disengagement. However, when there is a relatively high extent of state-to-nation balance, peacemaking strategies, which focus on changing the intentions of the regional parties, can be effective. Most notably, there are two types of such regional strategies: conflict resolution and integration.

I make a distinction between the effects of approaches to peace-making and the conditions for their success. Different peacemaking strategies may bring about the transition from war to peace, but each strategy will be successful only if certain distinctive conditions exist in the region. Moreover, different peacemaking strategies bring about different levels of peace. Thus, even if different strategies may be successful, there will still be dramatic differences in the level of regional peace which they will produce and, thus, in the likelihood of a return to a state of war. The effects of all the strategies are regional, but the conditions for their effectiveness vary considerably and come from three levels of analysis: the global— the presence of a great power hegemon or concert (for the strategy of great power engagement), regional/domestic—the presence of strong and coherent states (for the strategy of conflict resolution), and domestic—the presence of liberal democracies (for the integration option).

The strategies are derived from three major approaches to inter-national relations: one is globalist/systemic and two are regionalists. The two at the regional level are regional society and regional community. The peacemaking strategy derived from the regional society is conflict resolution, while the strategy of integration is derived from the regional community approach (see figure 1). The third strategy is at the global level: great power engagement. The three strategies are derived from the global-regional debate on the sources of regional war and peace. I will propose a solution to this debate by differentiating among two levels of regional peace (cold and warm), and arguing that whereas the global level can bring about only cold peace, the regional strategies may result in warmer peace, more specifically, the conflict resolution in normal peace, while integration in warm peace. The reason that international strategies can bring only cold peace is related to the context in which it is the most effective strategy—a state-to-nation imbalance. Since the international strategy only moderates the manifestations of this imbalance, but it is unable fully to resolve it, the resulting peace is only a cold one. The strategies, which focus on changing the intentions of the actors, can bring about higher levels of warmer peace, although only in a context of a state-to-nation balance. In such a context, they can either directly resolve the outstanding issues in conflict (the conflict resolution strategy) or transcend them (the integration strategy).

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