Quintus: People should know when they’re conquered.
Maximus: Would you Quintus? Would I?
Most Americans are familiar with this picture. It is a powerful commentary of how modern nation-states understand the natures of "war" and "peace." I mean, other than that being a huge-ass book.
Herfried Munkler pointed out in his book that the creation of nation-states with defined and recognized borders has helped in the formulation of ideas regarding the duration of wars. When states have borders, we can more easily define a beginning and ending to wars: wars truly start when a political border is breached and they tend to end when hostile forces leave the borders.
More generally, war is understood to end when the physical fighting is over. It may not end permanently, but there is a finiteness to our understanding of war.
This is true as far as it stands, but one of the new thrusts of the “New Military History” is to look beyond combat. This might seem counter-intuitive, since isn’t war all about fighting? As a point of methodology and conceptualization, well, no. War is broader phenomenon and is not strictly about fighting, but about conflict, which can encompass everything from combat to diplomatic negotiation to more subtle forms of contention. So while it is perfectly viable to simply examine a war by looking no further than the operations, a better understanding can be made if we study the events that happen before and (especially) after, the war.
I mention this because of something little-appreciated: wars and great conquests are achieved as much in the ensuing “peace” as during the combat. And this “peace” can be every bit as violent as the “war.”
Agents of empire. Sounds all Maddow-watching, leftist, tofu-eating, change-hoping American academic of me, ain't it? These are Spanish friars in the Philippines, incidentally.
As I said earlier, a better conceptual model for war is to regard it as a form of conflict, and that conflict encompasses more than just fighting. Another to remember is that the goals or objectives in conflict are not always simple or easily resolved– and that they can change over time. What this means is that a combatant’s objectives can either still be met somehow after a defeat in battle, or can be changed to accommodate this defeat.
An excellent example here is the case (again) of the Philippines after the Spanish “conquest.” The Spanish managed to insert themselves into the shifting political struggles in the Philippine archipelago in the 16th century. The circumstances of this conquest are far more complex than just a military takeover and annexation. Unfortunately for the Spanish of the Legazpi Expedition– and as I explained earlier– Filipino military culture had a tactic of simply avoiding contact with the Spanish if they thought they were too strong. The Spanish were able to capture some settlements, which convinced the Filipinos to just run away and leave them. The result was that the Legazpi Expedition was left, like the Villalobos Expedition, in dire straits due to supply problems and it was only when Miguel Lopez de Legazpi managed to convince a local chieftain to ally with him that things slowly began to turn around (I shall perhaps discuss the Philippine conquest more extensively some other time).
Fast forward to the end of the conquest and these kinds of issues of local evasion and recalcitrance persisted. The Spanish could defeat the Filipinos in stand up fights, but could rarely get them to cooperate. Quite often they simply never saw the Filipinos and there were too few Spaniards to both chase after the Filipinos and garrison their two outposts in Cebu and Manila. The difficult, rough and jungle terrain also worked in their disfavor.
So how did the Spanish actually hold the Philippines and eventually turn it into a colony? By using those agents of empire above. They sent missionaries (usually monks or friars from one of the religious orders) out into the Philippine wild to convert the locals. The missionaries were sent pretty much alone and were often in great danger– and many paid with their lives. The fighting continued, even it often just involved small-scale skirmishing. But the missionaries slowly drew many of the Filipinos to them, finding ways to convert the Filipinos to Spanish Christianity and essentially getting them to accept Spanish culture, which included Spanish hegemony. Their efforts at conversion were sometimes backed up force, but was mainly accomplished because they got to know the local culture, and therefore knew which people to talk to, who to manipulate and how to manipulate them, and learned the local ways of power.
Despite this, many Filipinos continued to resist, if only by staying away from the Spanish settlements– they became what is known by the Spaniards as remontados “those who returned to the mountains.” Mindanao, now the southern Philippines, was never truly subjugated due to local recalcitrance until the 1800s. This was often actual combat, as the two sides would periodically raid, fight, and harass each other.
Many local elites chose to join with the Europeans for various reasons.
Because conflict persists after active violence, it often turns out that accommodations can be made to ensure “victory.” This is part of what I meant when I defined war as essentially a negotiation over power. The various combatants in a conflict often continue the negotiations after the worst of the violence has been concluded. In this case, local collaboration and cooperation is once again crucial to “victory.”
For instance, many of the “conquests” made by Europe relied very heavily on coming to an accommodation with some sectors of the societies they “conquered.” Very often those who negotiated and collaborated with the Europeans were people we could call elites: people of political power and economic substance who traditionally hold sway in society. It makes sense to collaborate with local power holders, since it goes straight for the people who can most powerfully affect society without having to make accommodations with too many people. The Europeans did not need to make accommodations with all elites, they just needed enough cooperation to achieve their goals.
And many elites saw it was in their best interests to collaborate with the Europeans. In the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia, the Europeans could be used to defeat other local elites. The Philippine elites also realized that the Spaniards had stable and hereditary notions of authority– far more stable than the quickly shifting patterns of authority that had existed before– and in many cases, Europeans were just as much used by local elites to prop up their authority and ensure continuity of rule. The Europeans didn’t always understand the local cultures they interacted with, despite long exposure, to understand the nuances of power. Ross Hassig has argued quite cogently that the Tlaxcalans used the Spanish to destroy the Aztecs without the Spanish ever quite realizing this was happening.
It is very often the case that “victory” is a two-way street. Those who collaborated with the conquerors can benefit as much (or even more) than the conqueror from a situation.
Local cooperation and elite consent is often the main reasons for a colonial project’s viability. It is often the only means of keeping a subject people under rule in a cost-effective manner– a colony that requires constant policing and a large military presence is a failed colony since it becomes uneconomical. Note that these same local elites often turn against the colonial powers, and this usually leads to the expulsion of the colonial power. This can be seen as a proof of their pivotal role in securing a conquest.
Antonio Luna, an example of the Philippine colonial elite who were instrumental to Spanish rule-- and then rebelled against the Spaniards. I've also been told that I look like him. Such a handsome devil.
Because negotiations over conflict can continue on after the “big” fighting, many wars– perhaps even most– don’t really end in any kind of defined, decisive manner. Rather, they continue on, the violence coming and going, notions or terms of victory changing with the circumstances. Many wars tend to peter out, or perhaps the violence just abates, before flaring up again. After America’s Civil War, the violence hardly stopped– the Reconstruction involved nasty, vicious guerrilla fighting from Southern groups trying to overturn the terms at Appomattox by destroying the political structures the Federal government tried to plant. There are good reasons to claim these resistance groups achieved many of their goals– e.g. Jim Crow laws that persisted for almost a century after.
Obviously, I am not saying that the combat phase of a war or conflict is unimportant. What happens during this phase can or always dictates what happens after, for instance. But what I am pointing out is that since war is a component of conflict, there is more to it than just military operations. Moreover, understanding the underlying cultures involved in the fighting will provide a clearer picture of what the terms of this conflict are.
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