What causes contemporary conflict?

It seems that much of the disagreement concerning our current conflict is predicated upon differing understandings of the causes of the dispute.

I thought it might be interesting to isolate the factor that each of you considers "most" important. I realize that most people probably believe in multiple sources of causality, as do I.

I vote for "economics" personally. Wealthy people see no reason to alter the status quo, except for possibly greater political empowerment, which can be accomplished peacefully through it's own self-created medium. While political systems are important, I believe that economic prosperity provides the base for the political superstructure.

I think the Marshall plan helped prove the foremost significance of this. By rebuilding the economic infrastructure of Europe, the US curtailed radical movements from the outset. This also took place in Japan, South Korea, and most recently, Taiwan. As economic prosperity is realized, the citizens of said countries increasingly seek democracy, as they desire political power commensurate with their economic status (which explains the American Revolution as well, of course). From there, the Democratic peace takes care of the rest (which I won't get into here, since that would take another loooong post).

Culture, imo, is less important, as states generally seem to act similarly in their international relations regardless of cultural identity. If culture mattered more, we'd expect to see differences in state behavior, a la Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations." I don't think this is grounded in empirical observation. The behavior of states during the Cold War is the most recent, and well-studied, example of the irrelevance of culture. China, the US, and the Soviet Union all acted in accordance with Realist theory.

Personality can be important, but I believe that other people would take the place of famous dictators, etc, in a hypothetical world where they didn't exist. Stalin was awfully bad, and probably excacerbated Cold War tensions, but it seems strange that Great Powers have a history of opposing each other in search of hegemony. When a leader is dissynchronous with the population, he loses power, as happened in the case of the Shah of Iran, or Ulbricht in East Germany.

Religion seems to be a red herring. I think that religion is often used as a scape goat, but lacks real teeth of its own. In the Balkans for instance, religious turmoil was blamed for the conflict. However, during Tito's rule, intermarriage rates among Muslims and Christians were higher than intermarriage rates for blacks and whites in the US. In free, objective surveys, Yugoslavians came more and more to identify themselves as "Yugoslavs" as opposed to Bosnians or Serbians or Croats. There was little overt ethnocentrism in the mass culture.

Then Yugoslavia collapsed, hard times hit, and leaders resurrected ethnic tensions to perpetuate their own power. Milosevic had no mandate or justification to stay in power. He was losing popularity, and was about to be voted out. Then he starting blaming Muslims, and fabricated instances of Muslim violence. You know the rest.

Enough of my rambling. What do you think?

 

Mango:

I considered that as well, but believe it's too often separate to actually combine them. For example, how important is Buddhism truly, in post-Maoist China? It's technically still the most prominent religion, but it's influence on culture is minimal, imo.

I also came close to adding "Realism" as an option to the poll, but that's too much of a lightning rod.