WAR AS A PHENOMENON OF WORLD HISTORY: А PHILOSOPHICAL AND POLITICAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

The authors seek to uncover the root causes of the terrible Russian-Ukrainian war, raising the question of whether it is possible to establish a lasting peace without wars, the "Eternal Peace" that Kant wrote about. The authors consider one of the fundamental problems of political philosophy – "war and world history". A review of the statements of a number of political philosophers and politicians about war allows the authors to suggest that wars (including revolutions), for all their terrible impact on the lives of peoples, are essentially intertwined in the historical process. The authors place world wars in a special category. The article develops a system of criteria that allows distinguishing world wars from small wars and local military conflicts. The authors point out that all world wars occurred within a relatively short period of historical time (from the Thirty Years' War of 1618–1648 to the Cold War of 1946–1991). The article raises the question of why so many world wars "gathered" in this period of time (sixteenth and twentieth centuries) (the hypothesis is that there were five). To answer this question, the authors turn to the methodology of world-system analysis and I. Wallerstein's version of world (conventionally, "thirty-year") wars as a "phase of structural transition" of the world-system, whose life span (500 years) ends (according to Wallerstein) in the twenty-first century. A deeper analysis of this problem will be developed in the next issue of the journal "International and Political Studies". The general conclusion of the scientific reflection is that out of all the many wars, a cluster of world wars stands out, which occupies a very limited period of history (from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century). Establishing a lasting peace remains a complex global problem, the solution of which is impossible without a deep and fundamental reorganization of the existing world system.