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It was 11 a.m. on a fine summer morning
in Sarajevo, 28 June 1914, when the driver of an automobile
carrying two passengers made a wrong turn. The car was not
supposed to leave the main street, and yet it did, pulling
up into a narrow passageway with no escape. It was an unremarkable
mistake, easy enough to make in the crowded, dusty streets.
But this mistake, made on this day and by this driver, would
disrupt hundreds of millions of lives, and alter the course
of world history.
The automobile stopped in front of a
19-year-old Bosnian Serb student, Gavrilo Princip. As a
member of the Serbian terrorist organisation Black Hand,
Princip couldn’t believe his luck. Striding forward, he
reached the car. He drew a small pistol from his pocket.
Pointed it. Pulled the trigger twice. Within thirty minutes,
the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife,
Sophie, the car’s passengers, were dead. Within hours the
political fabric of Europe had begun to unravel.
In the days following, Austria used the
assassination as an excuse to begin planning an invasion
of Serbia. Russia guaranteed protection to the Serbs, while
Germany, in turn, offered to intercede on Austria’s behalf
should Russia become involved. Within just thirty days,
this chain reaction of international threats and promises
had mobilized vast armies and tied Austria, Russia, Germany,
France, Britain and Turkey into a deadly knot. When the
First World War ended five years later, 10 million lay dead.
Europe fell into an uncomfortable quiet that lasted twenty
years, and then the Second World War claimed another 30
million. In just three decades, the world had suffered two
engulfing cataclysms. Was it all due to a chauffeur’s mistake?
So begins the book Ubiquity, written
by Mark Buchanan and published last year.
Buchanan argues that history is not directed,
predetermined or in any way predictable. Rather, it is capricious,
unpredictable and often cataclysmic. Like earthquakes, avalanches,
forest fires and the extinction of species, the course of
human affairs can take a catastrophic turn without warning.
And the trigger is often an apparently insignificant event.
Earthquakes, avalanches, forest fires and
extinctions all show a similar mathematical pattern – a
power law distribution. When the number of events is plotted
against their size on a logarithmic scale, the result is
a straight line. In a paper published in 1948, entitled
“Variation of the Frequency of Fatal Quarrels with Magnitude,”
English physicist Lewis Fry Richardson analyzed international
conflicts occurring between 1820 and 1945 and showed that
they followed the same pattern. Published posthumously in
1960, his book The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels
examined more comprehensive data and came to the same conclusion.
The complex systems associated with these
phenomena – wars included – exhibit what is called ‘self-organized
criticality.’ They organize themselves into such a state
that, even when disturbed only slightly, they can tip suddenly
from stability to instability creating a major catastrophic
event. The movement of a single grain of sand can set off
an avalanche. A spark can ignite a major forest fire. An
apparently insignificant action can trigger a global conflict.
Such a system is said to exist in a critical state between
order and chaos, poised at the ‘edge of chaos.’
If history works this way, then cataclysmic
events are inherent in the system itself. But the underlying
mechanisms are still unknown. “Neither the ‘web of international
relations’ nor the social fabric of any society is a thing
easily grasped,” Buchanan says. “Even so, it is probably
beyond argument that some form of stress must build up in
both. It seems likely as well that as this stress builds,
it is not always (or even often) immediately released by
‘adjustments.’ It has to build beyond some threshold before
anything changes.”
Lars-Erik Cederman of Harvard University’s
John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies has developed
a computer model of territorial disputes that replicates
Richardson’s results. When a local balance of power is established
in the model, across each of the territorial boundaries
between states, and no country is ready to launch an attack,
the system remains in a state of global equilibrium. This
equilibrium is only temporary, however. Even a small disruption
can cause the system to become unstable, unleashing a chain
of events that resembles the cascading instability of an
earthquake, avalanche or forest fire.
Princeton University professor Robert Gilpin
suggested such a systems model of conflict in his book War
and Change in World Politics, published in 1981. “As
a consequence of the changing interest of individual states,
and especially because of the differential growth in power
among states, the international system moves from a condition
of equilibrium to one of disequilibrium,” he said. And he
believed that war was a means of releasing built-up tension.
“Although resolution of a crisis through peaceful adjustment
of the systemic disequilibrium is possible, the principal
mechanism of change throughout history has been war, or
what we shall call hegemonic war.”
Vanderbilt University professor John Vasquez
explains the size of wars in terms of cascading system instability.
“An ongoing war,” he said in his book The War Puzzle,
published in 1993, “no matter what its initial cause, is
likely to change the existing political world of those contiguous
to the belligerents, creating new opportunities, as well
as threats.”
Cederman believes researchers have largely
ignored Lewis Richardson’s work. Yet, he says, “This remarkable
finding belongs to the most accurate and robust ones that
one is likely to find in world politics.” If the international
political system does obey such a natural law, ignoring
Richardson’s results is unconscionable. We must work much
harder to learn how the system functions and to better understand
the mechanisms by which conflict spreads.
RESOURCES:
Bak, Per. How Nature
Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality.
Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1996.
Buchanan, Mark. Ubiquity:
The Science of History… Or Why the World is
Simpler Than We Think. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2000.
Cederman, Lars-Erik. “From
Billiard Balls to Sandpiles:
Modeling the Self-Organized Criticality in Interstate Warfare.”
Harvard University. March 7, 2001. Adobe Acrobat document.
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/depts/polsci/research/orgs/Cederman_w01.pdf
Gilpin, Robert. War
and Change in World Politics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Matthews, Robert. “The
Mathematics of History.” WorldLink. May 16, 2001.
http://www.worldlink.co.uk/stories/storyReader$647
Miller, Juanita. “Point
of Criticality.” Exploratorium Exhibit. Real Audio file.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/complexity/exhibit/criticality.html
Saperstein, Alvin M. “War
and Chaos.” American Scientist. November-December 1995.
http://americanscientist.org/articles/95articles/Saperstein-full.html
Vasquez, John. The
War Puzzle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Winslow, Nathan. “Introduction
to Self-Organized Criticality & Earthquakes.”
University of Michigan Department of Geological Sciences.
http://www.geo.lsa.umich.edu/~ruff/Geo105.W97/SOC/SOCeq.html
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