Warfare 205: The Aftermath of War
Greetings and strepsis! Well, I don’t have a spine, so I can spin around all I want! Muahaha! By the request of my dear sister Anne’s student’s request, I will be doing this blogpost on the aftermath of war. War starts, happens, and then ends, but then the difficult part starts.
Armistice vs Peace
In many cases, people may consider these two terms virtually synonymous, but in the political sense, they are not. Who here doesn’t love a good well defined set of words? I will of course give mine as per usual!
Armistice is the temporary cessation of active hostilities by two or more sides within the war without terminating the war itself.
The thing to pay attention to is that an armistice does not end the war. It is often a prelude to peace, but an armistice can last for decades or more. North and South Korea, for example, have never gone to peace and are still in an armistice some 60 years later.
Peace is the termination of the war and includes an agreement between the warring parties on the conditions of the peace.
As you can see–I hope, at least–they are very different. For peace to come about, both sides have to agree to it and sign a treaty that says the war is over. This peace treaty can include giving up land, war reparations, transfer of satellite states, and many other things.
Peace treaty
Leads nicely up to this, doesn’t it? This is important for the aftermath as it dictates everything but the outright destruction that has taken place. What can be included in a peace treaty? Well…
Cession
A lot of wars throughout history have been about the acquisition of land. As I explained in my blogpost on economy, for a large part of history, land, money, and economy were all intertwined and essentially one. So cession was often an important part of any peace treaty; anyone who has played Grand Strategy games knows this! I love me some extra land in peace deals!
War reparations
This one has also been a big one historically. War reparations are when one state is made to pay for damages related to the war. The victor demands the loser pay for the damages they have caused so an exorbitant amount of money has to be paid from one party to another. This can seem fair, but… Well, I’ll get to it later.
War enslavement
This one is simple and more of a thing in the past. Read my post on slavery to know why. But it was a thing, so if you win, you can demand slaves as a form of reparations.
Suzerainty
Fancy word is fancy! This is also commonly called “Puppeting” in modern talk, but it means when a nation is formally sovereign and independent, but they are de facto under the control of someone else. In this case, the loser would become a vassal while the victor would become a suzerain. Some types include but are not limited to:
Puppet state: Autonomous state, but the government is controlled by the suzerain.
Vassal state: Autonomous state that swears allegiance to the suzerain and often pays minor tributes. More common historically.
Suzerainty: Mostly autonomous state, but some internal power has been surrendered to the suzerain.
Satellite state: Formally sovereign and autonomous but de facto under heavy internal influence of the suzerain.
Protectorate: Autonomous state that is under the protection of the suzerain in exchange, often, for land access.
Client state: Autonomous state, but extremely dependent on the suzerain to function economically, militarily, and/or politically.
Mandate territory: Territory or land administered by the suzerain with the authority of an international organisation in order to facilitate and guide the land and people to autonomous independent sovereignty.
There are more than these seven, but I feel these are the big ones that have the biggest effect on the aftermath.
Great Wars and New World Order
Of course, for this to work, I have to define a couple more terms.
A great power is a state capable of exerting its influence on a global, or as global as technology allows, stage either through economic, military, soft, or political power.
A great war is then, in turn, a war between two or more great powers.
A reason why great wars are separated both in discussions and on here is that due to the immense power militarily and economically that they generally possess, a war between great powers is so destructive and devastating that other wars are dwarfed by comparison. World War I and World War II are examples of great power conflicts. There are more before, but before 1600, it is a lot less meaningful to talk about them.
Let’s look at another definition:
World order, or international order, is the pattern and system of relationships and power balances between all states.
World orders are generally stable for a very long time because small powers do not affect it. If they come and go or change and such, the world order does not. It is only if a new great power arises things can go sideways. And this is also why great wars are important to separate from ordinary wars: a great war almost always means a shift in the world order. The victors will create a new one, putting themselves at the centre of the new world order, while at the same time significantly weakening the losers of the great war.
And as we have seen today, the loss of a great power status can be very significant on the mentality of the leadership and people of a country. 🇷🇺🤛🇺🇦
Initial recovery
Whether loser or winner, after a war is concluded with peace (hopefully), recovery is a must because let’s be honest, who wants to live in the hell hole everyone just created? No one!
Infrastructure
This is, in most wars, the most important thing before, during, and after a war. Without infrastructure, you are royally forked. Infrastructure is everything, and when disasters and wars happen, one of the major reasons why people die is not because of shells or weapons but because the infrastructure got destroyed.
Infrastructure allows help to come in, food to be delivered, water to be transported, economies to function. It allows everything in modern and old societies to work. Without good infrastructure, most people are as good as dead. This is why during war efforts, rudimentary infrastructure is made by soldiers to assist transportation of, well, everything.
So after a war, infrastructures have to be fixed as fast as possible to a bare minimum to where it is sufficiently functional. Every day you don’t have it well enough to transport all that is needed means people are dying.
Economy
Depending on the destruction from the war, this can go either way. At the best of times, where most of your industry is intact, the big issue is to go from a war economy, where resources and labour are prioritised toward anything relevant for the war effort, to a civilian economy, where the focus is on what civilians want. While not destructive in and of itself, this can be a major hurdle for a society to deal with. That is because a lot of labour may no longer be needed and even outright bad because the companies do not have huge contracts with the state that has endless pockets to pay for things. So they can face mass layoffs and/or very sudden shortages as no one is capable of producing in accordance to the new market demands. Inflation can skyrocket now that the government's money is being allowed to behave in accordance with the market forces.
If you are on the other side, the receiver of bombardments that trash your industrial capacity, well, you might be alive, but you have no work! That place went up in smoke along with all the machines! Of course, having your industrial capacity destroyed is going to be atrocious for your economy. This will mean that, as a nation, you are incapable of producing a lot of what is needed, and a lot of people won’t have any jobs. This, of course, will cause massive issues with food distribution. The ordinary market forces that used to keep it all working nicely and smoothly are now gone. This is why often governments have to step in and provide food and more.
Governments often have to use locals to help with the work of rebuilding with the pay being the necessities to survive and little above that just so that the nation can, in some way, recover as fast as possible. This, of course, can lead to mass migration as people are trying to survive. One benefit at the end of the tunnel is that often when the new industries are up and running, they are more efficient than what they were before. This is generally because in normal times, companies and people in general do not replace entire things all at once. That costs a lot and takes time, which produces no value. But now when it is all trashed and useless, you might as well use the best stuff possible!
Though all of this recovery, of course, can be significantly slowed down for the loser by war reparations draining resources away from the country.
Politics
This one can be extremely difficult or extremely easy. It all depends on the peace treaty and what happens afterward. If the treaty leaves most of the political side alone, there is little to no recovery to be had as the institutions still exist. There might be some pains because buildings were lost and people died in the war who were in politics.
If, however, suzerainty takes place, this can be much more difficult. A new political system and order within the country has to be established. The entire system that people once relied so heavily on can disappear almost immediately as the new government is put in place and starts tearing out the old system. This happened in eastern Europe when the Soviets replaced governments with communist ones. When the political structure of the land changes, revolts can happen as people do not want things to change, which of course means the new government is likely going to have to use force, which generally means that the suzerain has to come in.
This is one reason why when suzerainty takes place, the suzerain often has a military presence in the country despite it being nominally independent. But eventually, things will settle here with the new politics in place, even if most may not be happy.
Society
War is hell, war leaves scars in the flesh, on the ground, in the mind, and society’s psyche. Studies have shown that after war, for over 2 generations, usually 3, the damage remains in the mentality of the society. The people who experienced the war are all scarred by it and traumatised. But then that generation traumatises the next one in a different way, and that shows as well. It is only in the third generation at best that the distance to the war and the calm experienced from peace makes the new generation able to see it not through the lens of trauma and horror, but as history that they were not part of.
Another aspect of recovery occurs in the direct aftermath of the war. It is, to be honest, exceedingly horrific, but it has been documented time and time again in occupied regions: the purge of collaborators from society. This is sometimes outright killing them in the rage that is released upon being freed from occupation or later. This is rarely done with government sanctions but in spite of them. Of course, there are also non-lethal manners, but they are still horrific and gruesome. After World War II, it was documented, for example, that women who were suspected of having slept with Nazis were pulled out of their homes, stripped, heads shaved, and put on display for all to see the collaborators who betrayed France.
As horrific as this is, studies have shown that this kind of social purging and degradation seems to have a net positive for the group. By ejecting these from the social group, it strengthens cohesion and unity after the traumatising events of the war, making the people more able to work together and trust each other, thus speeding up the recovery, at the price of the collaborators having it much worse or being outright dead.
Another form of ejection can happen in cessed lands where the former natives of the losing ethnicity, culture, or any other imaginable subject, are ejected out of the land and forced to move where the rest of their culture and people are. Though some conquerors, especially historically, have been of the mindset of “don’t care, pay taxes and shut up and you can do whatever.” Which has at least short term created more stability.
Post Recovery
The war is over, things are finally starting to settle down. You have your job back, or at least A job. You might be traumatised by the war and your children more so. What is there left after this? Well, if we assume war reparations and such are all paid off, your people come back from the cessed land where they were ejected from, then life moves on.
Unfortunately, the journey might seem over, but we are still at the very beginning. If you were like Nazi Deutschland–Germany–that was the instigator of the war and actively tried to do horrendous things, you have a long road ahead of you. People and great powers will not tolerate your shenanigans anymore and will put their boot on your neck to make certain you never rise again. It takes decades and generations to regain the trust you lost with this war, and it will take even longer to become a great power again.
Speaking of losing great power status, a great war where a nation loses this will often host resentment toward the victors for taking away their great status in the world. Germany used to be highly looked up to, and German was one of the best languages to learn, and even one of the languages of science! But they were stripped of this in World War I, and they resented it, along with the war reparations. This kind of sentiment easily gives maniacs the platform required to gain power and… Well, we know what the sequel was like. But after World War II, they have behaved and are on the rise again and have a fundamentally different national attitude to what they once had and have taken accountability for all that they did..
Another alternative is like Japan. They never quite got great power status before the war but were going for it. Well, we know they were beaten into the ground 💣 They have since behaved and been mostly a model member of the international order. I say mostly because unlike Germany, they have never once come to terms with their past, and their culture is such that it is extremely hard for them to do so. This creates enormous strains in certain relationships because they refuse to acknowledge what horrors they did. And let me tell you, they put the Nazis to shame in some instances. By not doing the job, they have made the present much harder.
These examples are about international standing and relationships in the world order that came after the second World War. Eastern Europe had to do as big daddy Soviet Moscow said, so it is not like they could do much there post recovery beyond obeying or being invaded according to the Warsaw Pact. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, a great power disappeared, and a super power as well. What we see today when it comes to Russia, for example, is the sentiment I discussed earlier where they want to feel big and mighty again but cannot for many reasons. But in this case, at least it wasn’t imposed on them by someone else.
In my post about civil wars, I discuss that they arise from a fundamental disagreement about the country and how it is run. In my post about revolutions, I speak about elite infighting and civil wars as the culmination of this disagreement, but instead of a revolution breaking out, the elites go against each other in a war for the soul of the nation. Eventually it too dies down, and you either end up with two nations or one whole again. But if the difference in opinion on how it shall be run is never resolved, and you cannot resolve these clashes with guns and swords, it will still be there simmering. Remember how I said peace and armistice are different? This is no longer a peace; this is an armistice now. The prime example in history? The United States of America.
Summa Summarum
So what have we learned?
The aftermath is a long process, and it is not easy for the victor or the loser. They both face difficulties and hardships, and if the victors do not take things into proper account, another war is only brewing again, and you are in for what really amounts to an extended armistice.
At the same time, it is important for losers, if they can, to work on themselves and acknowledge what they have done in order to become a proper part of the world order again. Same goes for the victors who must also acknowledge what they have done over time.
The road to recovery for all is long. The scars will heal, but only if given time.
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