Original citation

Learning question
In one or two sentences, do you think that the presence of a hegemonic state makes 
international society more or less prone to war? What examples would you use to 
justify your argument?
How long the nineteenth-century’s Long Peace (or what hegemonic 
stability theorists prefer to call the Pax Britannica) could have lasted 
remains a hyperthetical question, and has led to more than a few books 
and articles being written by international historians and IR scholars alike 
about its collapse with the First World War (often called the Great War) in 
1914. Several different schools of thought exist. One sees the Great War as 
an inevitable consequence of change in the European balance of power 
following the unification of Germany in 1871 and its rapid emergence as 
a serious economic and military challenger to the status quo. It remains 
a commonly held view – especially influential in IR – that the rise of new 
powers will lead to increasing tensions between great powers, which 
over time are more likely lead to war than anything else. Others have 
broadened this thesis by arguing that Germany’s less-than-peaceful rise on 
the back of Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s three wars of German 
unification (in 1864, 1866 and 1870) made armed conflict between 
Europe’s states more likely. 
Others argue that the breakdown of the Long Peace could only occur 
within a larger set of changes that were taking place in the international 
system. According to this thesis, we should focus less on power shifts 

---

11 Introduction to international relations
36
brought about by the rise of a single state, and more on the by-products 
of the global struggle for influence between the various great powers. In 
other words, the key to understanding the collapse of the old order may 
be found in the processes of capitalism and imperialism. This remains the 
view of most Marxists, espoused in a pamphlet – Imperialism (1916) – by 
the great revolutionary V.I. Lenin. In it, he argues that peace had become 
quite impossible by the beginning of the twentieth century because of 
capitalists’ determination to carve up the world in a zero sum game, in 
which one actor’s gain means another actor’s loss. In some ways, this is 
also the view of orthodox Realists, who see politics as an arena in which 
‘winner-takes-all’. Though they reject Lenin’s economic explanation of 
the First World War, they agree that the odds of the Long Peace surviving 
under conditions of increased competition were slim. The end of the Long 
Peace was therefore no accident. Rather, for Marxists and Realists alike, it 
was the tragic result of conflicts inherent in an international system which 
could not be contained by deft diplomacy, carefully worded treaties, or 
states’ adherence to a shared set of practices and norms.
Finally, there are many in IR who insist that the Long Peace was only 
possible so long as weapons technology remained relatively primitive. The 
coming of the industrial revolution, and with it new naval technologies, 
improvement in munitions and a rapid acceleration in the destructive 
capacity of arms, changed the way states fought, making new forms of 
war possible and, by definition, more destructive. This thesis claims that 
technology made war far more likely as one state after another began 
to invest heavily into these new weapons of death. This arms race may 
not, in and of itself, explain what finally happened in 1914. Nevertheless, 
the rapid build-up of modern military technology, in a world where war 
was still regarded as noble and heroic, made armed conflict more likely, 
increasing the insecurity of states great and small.