Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I War as law enforcement (to 1600)
- PART II New forces stirring (1600–1815)
- PART III War as state policy (1815–1919)
- 5 Collisions of naked interest
- 6 Tame and half-hearted war: intervention, reprisal and necessity
- 7 Civil strife
- PART IV Just wars reborn (1919–)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Table of cases
- Table of treaties
- Index
6 - Tame and half-hearted war: intervention, reprisal and necessity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I War as law enforcement (to 1600)
- PART II New forces stirring (1600–1815)
- PART III War as state policy (1815–1919)
- 5 Collisions of naked interest
- 6 Tame and half-hearted war: intervention, reprisal and necessity
- 7 Civil strife
- PART IV Just wars reborn (1919–)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Table of cases
- Table of treaties
- Index
Summary
[I]n cases where a strong state or group of states finds itself obliged to undertake what are practically measures of police against weak and recalcitrant powers, [reprisals] may be a useful alternative to war. They are less destructive and more limited in their operation. It is true that they may be used to inflict injury on small states, and extort from them a compliance with unreasonable demands. But war can be equally unjust, and would certainly cause more suffering.
T. J. LawrenceThe distinction between perfect and imperfect wars, inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, continued to exist in the nineteenth, although under different labels. Perfect wars were the ones that fitted the positivist analysis: conflicts in which one state attempted to force its will upon another, or in which two states reciprocally attempted to impose their respective wills onto one another. As observed above, wars in this proper legal sense were seen as clashes of policy or interest rather than of law. But these fully fledged perfect wars of the positivists constituted, so to speak, only the showy surface of interstate violence. Beneath that surface was another type of armed action by states to which the label ‘measures short of war’ was commonly given. Clausewitz had recognised this distinction in holding that conflicts between states occupied an entire spectrum of degrees of violence. At the one extreme, he placed the ‘pure’ type of war, ‘a death struggle for total existence’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- War and the Law of NationsA General History, pp. 215 - 249Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005