Publisher's Synopsis
Internal social conditions are often cited as responsible for inter-nation aggression in discussions of war and peace. Indeed, for Marxists the sole cause of war is the existence of class struggles and internal contradictions in precapitalist and capitalist societies.
To test the theory that internal stresses and strains in social systems lead to warlike behavior, five indicators of internal stress and strain-unemployment, industrialization rate (annual per capita kilowatt-hour electricity production increments), suicides, homicides, and deaths due to alcoholism-are correlated with the outbreak of war and with military expenditures, using a BALGOL program for the IBM 7090 (under NSF Grant 6PQ48). Data are collected from a sample of ten countries with reliable statistics-Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, over the time period 1900 to 1960. As expected, the magnitude of the independent variables is positively correlated with frequency of participation in wars and with levels of military expenditures (Spearman correlation). However, all but suicides and industrialization rate are inversely related to fluctuations in warlike behavior (Pearsonian correlation) and only homicides and industrialization rate are higher in bars just before war as compared with other nonwar years (point biserial correlation). A theory of societal mechanisms for coping with stress is presented to account for the findings. Agrarian societies, where homicides are prevalent, lack sophisticated means for handling social problems, and are most likely to go to war shortly after stress is believed intolerable. Nation states in a process of industrialization, where alcoholism is especially common, are most subject of all to discouragement in time of stress because the very aim of attaining a completely industrial society is to make stress conditions reducible short of intolerability thresholds, so they will attempt to militarize in order to ward off possible external dangers with the new technological means at their disposal; but, as with all participants in arms races, they antagonize other states, and war results. Fully Industrialized countries have higher stress tolerance thresholds, less homicides and alcoholism, and they are more likely to postpone international aggression until procedures for settling international disputes peacefully are exhausted.
