A new book on the Spring and Autumn period and its experiments in conflict and diplomacy helps explain today’s global order
The historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote one of the most powerful openings of any book. “In the state of nature which Hobbes imagined, violence was the only law, and life was ‘nasty brutish and short’,” he wrote in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918.
“Though individuals never lived in this state of nature, the Great Powers of Europe have always done so. Sovereign states have distinguished European civilisation, at any rate since the end of the fifteenth century. Each individual state in Europe acknowledged no superior and recognised no moral code other than that voluntarily accepted by its own conscience …”
If Hobbes saw true, he wrote, “the history of Europe should be one of uninterrupted war. In fact, Europe has known almost as much peace as war; and it has owed these periods of peace to the Balance of Power”.
But statesmen, he observed, are often tired out by the balance of power, as the situation resembles anarchy among states; and wars periodically break out.
“Men have not always acquiesced in the perpetual quadrille of the Balance of Power,” he continued. “They have often wished that the music would stop and that they could sit out a dance without maintaining the ceaseless watch on each other.”
So what is to be done? “The simplest ‘solution’ for anarchy, as Hobbes held, is that one Power should subdue all the rest.”
Taylor was describing the struggle of great powers in Europe throughout the modern period, but more specifically during the second half of the 19th century. The choice is clear: either balance of power in a multipolar system, or hegemony secured by a single state. Sound familiar?
Taylor could just as well be describing the relations among states during the two major periods between the decline and fall of the Zhou dynasty (1046-256BC) and China’s unification (221BC): the Spring and Autumn period (770-481BC) and the Warring States period (481-221BC).
During the Spring and Autumn period, China experimented with the balance of power, resulting in periodic but often limited wars not unlike what has been called cabinet warfare in early modern Europe.
In the Warring States period, when states became essentially war machines, total wars became the norm as each sought the destruction of rivals. Qin Shi Huang, of course, became the last man standing in 221BC.
“After three centuries of the Spring and Autumn [period], China became immunised against polycentric rule,” wrote sinologist Yuri Pines, in his new book, China’s Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs and Autumns Period. “This may be the most surprising contribution of the aristocratic age to China’s eventual endorsement of the unified empire as the normative civilisational orientation.”
With key ancient Chinese passages quoted in the original with translations, this book has pretty much everything you would need to know about the power struggles of this pivotal period, when all were in a state of flux before the norms and practices associated with China’s millennial dynastic cycles were solidified and established.
But balance of power and hegemony are abstract ideas. Life in wartime could just be brutal and short in one or the other system, whether in modern Europe or ancient China.
“By 1900, the roughly 500 European polities that existed around 1500 had been winnowed to about 20,” wrote US political scientist Michael Beckley in a recent article in Foreign Affairs.
According to political scientist Victoria Hui in War and State Formation in Ancient China and Modern Europe, Western Zhou had about 170 political units. The dynasty weakened and became Eastern Zhou. Coinciding roughly with the Spring and Autumn period, Eastern Zhou had 23 polities. These, of course, were further cut down to the seven Warring States.
Hui counted 89 wars among the major European powers between 1495 and 1815, and 256 wars among the major ancient Chinese powers between 656 and 221BC.
“[W]ith the transition from elite-based chariot warfare in the Spring and Autumn period to peasant-based infantry warfare in the Warring States period, the scale of war surged and battle deaths climbed to the tens of thousands,” she wrote. “In the third century BC, the system further witnessed a ‘shift from wars seeking advantage in a balance of power to the campaigns of all-out conquest launched by Qin’.”
Total wars came to be marked by “unlimited carnage and brutality”.
Ancient history? Today, wars of unlimited carnage and brutality are back in the news. We are, again, confronted by the awful choice between hegemony and power balance.
