The Legalisation of War: How Ordinary People Were Taught to Accept State Violence
This is not just a story about weapons and soldiers. It is a story about ideas — about how certain ideas entered universities, textbooks, laws, and the minds of ordinary people and slowly made the organised killing of other human beings seem like a reasonable and even patriotic act.
Westphalia Changed Everything
In the early 17th century, Europe was tearing itself apart through religious wars. Different Christian groups Catholics & Protestants were fighting each other with enormous cruelty. Whole towns were burned. Millions of people died. The wars seemed endless.
Then, in 1648, a peace agreement was reached. It is known as the Peace of Westphalia. This agreement was more than just a ceasefire. It was a new way of thinking about the world. It said, in simple terms: each ruler has full and total control over their own land and their own people. No outside power — not even the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor — had the right to interfere in another ruler's territory.
This idea is called 'sovereignty'. It sounds like a good idea. And in some ways, it was — it stopped certain kinds of religious interference. But it also had a dark side. When a ruler has total power inside his borders, he can also do terrible things to his own people. And when nations are completely separate and equal in their power, there is no higher authority to stop them from going to war with each other.
The birth of the modern nation-state was also the birth of a world in which war between nations became the final judge of disagreements. There was no world court, no global police, and no higher law that all nations had to obey.
The treaty also made it harder for people to move freely. Borders became real walls — not always physical, but legal and political. Goods, people, and ideas began to face restrictions. The world was being divided into boxes, and each box had an army to protect it.
Science Becomes the Language of War
Two of the most powerful ideas that shaped modern civilisation came from science — but they were soon borrowed by politicians and military thinkers to justify war and conquest.
The first idea came from the English scientist Isaac Newton. In his great work, 'Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy', published in 1687, Newton described the laws of motion. One of his most famous laws says: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In physics, this explains how objects behave when forces act on them. But politicians and war theorists took this idea and applied it to human society. They said: if one nation attacks another, that other nation has a natural right — even a scientific duty — to fight back with equal force. War, in this thinking, was simply nature's law applied to human affairs.
The second idea came from Charles Darwin, the 19th-century British scientist who studied living creatures and evolution. Darwin observed that in nature, animals and plants that are best suited to their environment survive, while weaker ones die out. This is called 'natural selection' or, more popularly, 'survival of the fittest'. Darwin was talking about biology — about animals and plants over thousands of years. But politicians, empire builders, and military theorists grabbed this idea and applied it to nations and races. They argued: if nature itself says that the strong survive and the weak perish, then powerful nations conquering weaker ones is simply following nature's law. War is not a crime — it is nature's way of selecting the best.
When science is used to justify violence, it gives war a kind of respectability. It suggests that killing is not a human choice but an inevitable, natural process — as unstoppable and blameless as an earthquake.
This misuse of scientific ideas was deeply dangerous. It gave powerful nations a comfortable excuse for their violence. It told soldiers they were not committing murder — they were participating in nature. And it told conquered people that their suffering was not injustice — it was simply the result of being 'unfit' to survive.
Education as a Tool of the State
One of the most powerful weapons a government has is not a gun or a bomb. It is a school. Education systems across the world, especially those modelled on certain European traditions that spread during colonial rule, were designed to create obedient citizens — people who would not question the decisions of their government, especially during a crisis like war.
In Prussia — a powerful German state in the 18th and 19th centuries — a highly organised system of public schooling was developed. Every child attended school. Every school followed the same lessons. And those lessons taught children to respect authority, obey rules, and serve the state. This Prussian model of education spread across Europe and later across the entire world through colonialism. It became the template for how most modern schools are built — with fixed subjects, fixed timetables, examinations, and an unspoken lesson running underneath everything: do not rebel, do not question power, do what you are told.
When a government declares war, it invokes what is called a 'national emergency'. Suddenly, ordinary rules change. Free speech may be restricted. Men are drafted into armies. Women are pushed into factory work. And the school curriculum shifts to teach children that loyalty to the nation is the highest virtue. Those who refuse to fight are called cowards or traitors. Those who die in battle are called heroes.
This system works because it starts early. Children who grow up inside these education systems absorb the idea of national loyalty before they are old enough to question it. By the time they are adults, the idea that they should sacrifice their lives for their government feels natural — even honourable.
French Revolution & Democratisation of War
Before the French Revolution of 1789, wars in Europe were mostly fought by professional soldiers — mercenaries and trained armies hired by kings and nobles. Ordinary people watched wars happen but rarely participated directly.
The French Revolution changed this completely. When the French people overthrew their king and declared a republic, they also declared a new idea: every citizen has a duty to defend the nation. War was no longer the business of kings and their hired soldiers. It was the business of every man, woman, and child who called themselves French.
This was, in some ways, a democratic development. It brought ordinary people into politics — including the politics of war. For the first time, peasants and workers were told that they mattered, that they were part of something great and important. But there was a catch. If you were now a citizen instead of a subject, you had rights — but you also had duties. And one of those duties was to fight and die for the nation when it asked you to.
The French Revolution exported nationalism — the love and defence of one's country — from the palaces of the elite to the streets of the poor. What had been the concern of kings became the passion of farmers, workers, and labourers.
Napoleon Bonaparte, who came to power after the Revolution, used this nationalist energy brilliantly. His armies were not professional mercenaries fighting for pay. They were citizens fighting for France, for liberty, for glory. They were motivated in ways that old royal armies had never been. And so, paradoxically, democracy — meant to free people — also gave governments a much more powerful army than kings had ever had: an army of true believers.
Free Markets, Capitalism, and the Economics of War
Around the same time that the French Revolution was reshaping politics, another revolution was happening in economics. The Scottish thinker Adam Smith published a book called 'The Wealth of Nations' in 1776. In it, he argued that when individuals are free to pursue their own economic interests — to buy, sell, and trade without excessive government interference — society as a whole benefits. This became the foundation of modern capitalism and what we call the 'free market'.
But Adam Smith's beautiful idea of free trade soon collided with the reality of national sovereignty and imperial power. Nations did not simply trade freely with each other. They competed. They protected their own industries with taxes on foreign goods. They used military power to force weaker nations to open their markets. And they went to war to protect their trade routes, their colonies, and their access to raw materials.
The great colonial empires of Europe — British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese — were not simply about spreading culture or religion. They were primarily economic projects. Colonies provided cheap labour, raw materials like cotton, rubber, coal, and gold, and captive markets for European manufactured goods. And they were maintained through violence — not the occasional battle, but a continuous, grinding system of oppression that lasted for centuries.
War, in this economic framework, was not an accident or a breakdown of order. It was, very often, a business decision. The violence of colonialism was economically rational from the perspective of the colonising nation. It generated enormous wealth — for European factory owners, merchants, and governments. The cost was borne entirely by the people who were colonised.
The White Man's Burden and the Romance of Conquest
To make colonial violence emotionally acceptable to the people back home in Europe, a powerful story was needed. That story was called 'the white man's burden' — a phrase taken from a poem by the British writer Rudyard Kipling, published in 1899. The idea was simple and deeply racist: white Europeans were more advanced, more civilised, and more intelligent than the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Therefore, it was their duty — their burden — to go to these lands, take control of them, and teach their people how to live properly.
This story served several purposes. It made ordinary European citizens feel good about conquest. It made the soldiers and administrators who enforced colonial rule feel noble rather than criminal. It gave governments a moral justification for what was, in reality, theft and slavery on a massive scale. And it created a framework in which the resistance of colonised peoples — their refusal to be ruled by foreigners — could be portrayed as the rebellion of dangerous savages who needed to be violently put down.
When violence is wrapped in the language of civilisation, religion, or scientific progress, it becomes very difficult for ordinary people to see it for what it is: the organised robbery of one group of human beings by another.
The non-Western world was not simply conquered militarily. It was also conquered intellectually. Western education, Western religions, Western languages, and Western legal systems were imposed on colonised peoples, often destroying their own traditions, their own knowledge systems, and their own forms of self-governance. The violence was not only physical — it was cultural and psychological.
The World Wars State Violence at Its Largest
All of these forces — sovereign nation-states, misappropriated science, nationalist education systems, economic competition, and colonial violence — built up over centuries to create the conditions for the most destructive wars in human history.
The First World War, fought between 1914 and 1918, began as a conflict between European empires — the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, British, French, and Russian empires — and ended with approximately seventeen million people dead. It was, by any measure, a catastrophe. And yet it was a completely legal catastrophe. Every country that fought was acting within the rules of international law as they existed at the time. Each government declared war formally. Each government drafted its citizens through legal processes. Each government ran its army under official military law. And each government told its people that they were fighting for justice, freedom, and national honour.
The soldiers who died in the mud of the trenches were not killed by criminals. They were killed by the decisions of legally elected and appointed governments, following the rules of a system that had been built over hundreds of years. The violence was not outside the law. It was the law — the law of nations, pushed to its logical extreme.
The Second World War, fought between 1939 and 1945, was even more catastrophic — approximately seventy to eighty-five million people died, including six million Jewish people killed by the Nazi German state in what is called the Holocaust. The Holocaust is perhaps the most extreme example of what happens when a state is given unlimited sovereignty over its territory and its people, when its ideology is rooted in Social Darwinism (the idea that some races are superior and should dominate or destroy others), and when its population has been educated to obey without question.
The Nazis did not see themselves as criminals. They believed they were following the laws of nature and history. They believed they were defending their nation. They had a legal system that justified everything they did within Germany's borders. And by the logic of sovereignty established in 1648, no outside power had the legal right to interfere — until the violence became so enormous that the entire world was threatened.
Post World War New World with Old Problems
After two world wars, the nations of the world tried to create a new system that would prevent such catastrophes from happening again. In 1945, the United Nations was established. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. A series of international treaties were signed that tried to limit the violence nations could inflict on each other — and on their own citizens.
These were genuine achievements. The world did not experience a third world war between the major powers. International law developed frameworks for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Courts were established to prosecute the worst offenders.
But the old problems did not disappear. They simply changed their forms. The Cold War — the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union from roughly 1947 to 1991 — produced dozens of proxy wars in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, where the two superpowers fought through smaller nations, arming and funding whoever supported their side. Millions died in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and many other places.
Colonial independence movements, while successful in ending formal colonial rule in most places, could not undo the economic structures of exploitation that colonialism had built. The same nations that had colonised Africa and Asia now dominated international trade, financial institutions, and military alliances in ways that kept former colonies in subordinate positions. This system — sometimes called 'neo-colonialism' — maintained many of the economic realities of empire without the formal political control.
The Continuing saga of Violence
Today, in the 21st century, state-sponsored violence continues. Wars are being fought in multiple regions of the world. Some are civil wars — internal conflicts within a single country. Some are between nations. Some involve non-state armed groups. But in almost every case, governments are involved — either directly fighting, or supplying weapons, funding, and political support to one side or another.
The arms industry — the business of making and selling weapons — is one of the most profitable industries on Earth. The nations that sell the most weapons are, ironically, the same nations that sit as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China. These are the same nations that have the most power to prevent or stop wars. The economic interest in selling weapons and the political interest in preventing war are in constant tension — and all too often, the economic interest wins.
Meanwhile, the education systems of the world continue, in many places, to produce citizens who are more loyal to their nation's government than to humanity as a whole. Textbooks in many countries present their nation's wars as just and their nation's enemies as wicked. The enemy's children learn the opposite story in their own textbooks. Both sets of children grow up to be adults who believe that, when it comes to the final test, their side was right — and violence in the name of their nation is not just acceptable but heroic.
Toward a Different Understanding
The purpose of this essay is not to make the reader feel hopeless. Understanding how something was built is the first step toward imagining how it could be built differently.
The system that legalises war violence was constructed piece by piece, over centuries, through decisions that real human beings made — about treaties, about education, about economics, about whose lives matter and whose do not. Those decisions shaped our world. But they were not inevitable. Other decisions could have been made. And other decisions can still be made.
When we understand that war is not a law of nature but a human institution — constructed, maintained, and constantly justified by human beings — we can begin to ask different questions. Not 'which side is right?' but 'why are we fighting at all?' Not 'how do we win?' but 'what do ordinary people on both sides actually need?' Not 'how do we defend national sovereignty?' but 'how do we build a world where sovereignty does not become a licence for violence?'
Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is the presence of justice — economic justice, political justice, and the recognition that every human life, regardless of nationality, race, or religion, carries equal and irreducible value.
The ideas that built the war-making world — sovereignty without accountability, science as a justification for domination, education as a tool of obedience, markets that profit from death — can all be replaced. They have been challenged, in every generation, by thinkers, activists, artists, and ordinary people who refused to accept that this was the only way the world could be organised.
The task of our time is to carry that refusal forward — to insist, in the face of every national emergency, every flag-waving crisis, every 'us versus them' — that the violence of states is not natural, not inevitable, and not acceptable. And to build, patiently and persistently, the institutions, the education, and the economy that make a genuinely peaceful world possible
Before the French Revolution of 1789, wars in Europe were mostly fought by professional soldiers — mercenaries and trained armies hired by kings and nobles. Ordinary people watched wars happen but rarely participated directly.
The French Revolution changed this completely. When the French people overthrew their king and declared a republic, they also declared a new idea: every citizen has a duty to defend the nation. War was no longer the business of kings and their hired soldiers. It was the business of every man, woman, and child who called themselves French.
This was, in some ways, a democratic development. It brought ordinary people into politics — including the politics of war. For the first time, peasants and workers were told that they mattered, that they were part of something great and important. But there was a catch. If you were now a citizen instead of a subject, you had rights — but you also had duties. And one of those duties was to fight and die for the nation when it asked you to.
The French Revolution exported nationalism — the love and defence of one's country — from the palaces of the elite to the streets of the poor. What had been the concern of kings became the passion of farmers, workers, and labourers.
Napoleon Bonaparte, who came to power after the Revolution, used this nationalist energy brilliantly. His armies were not professional mercenaries fighting for pay. They were citizens fighting for France, for liberty, for glory. They were motivated in ways that old royal armies had never been. And so, paradoxically, democracy — meant to free people — also gave governments a much more powerful army than kings had ever had: an army of true believers.
Free Markets, Capitalism, and the Economics of War
Around the same time that the French Revolution was reshaping politics, another revolution was happening in economics. The Scottish thinker Adam Smith published a book called 'The Wealth of Nations' in 1776. In it, he argued that when individuals are free to pursue their own economic interests — to buy, sell, and trade without excessive government interference — society as a whole benefits. This became the foundation of modern capitalism and what we call the 'free market'.
But Adam Smith's beautiful idea of free trade soon collided with the reality of national sovereignty and imperial power. Nations did not simply trade freely with each other. They competed. They protected their own industries with taxes on foreign goods. They used military power to force weaker nations to open their markets. And they went to war to protect their trade routes, their colonies, and their access to raw materials.
The great colonial empires of Europe — British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese — were not simply about spreading culture or religion. They were primarily economic projects. Colonies provided cheap labour, raw materials like cotton, rubber, coal, and gold, and captive markets for European manufactured goods. And they were maintained through violence — not the occasional battle, but a continuous, grinding system of oppression that lasted for centuries.
War, in this economic framework, was not an accident or a breakdown of order. It was, very often, a business decision. The violence of colonialism was economically rational from the perspective of the colonising nation. It generated enormous wealth — for European factory owners, merchants, and governments. The cost was borne entirely by the people who were colonised.
The White Man's Burden and the Romance of Conquest
To make colonial violence emotionally acceptable to the people back home in Europe, a powerful story was needed. That story was called 'the white man's burden' — a phrase taken from a poem by the British writer Rudyard Kipling, published in 1899. The idea was simple and deeply racist: white Europeans were more advanced, more civilised, and more intelligent than the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Therefore, it was their duty — their burden — to go to these lands, take control of them, and teach their people how to live properly.
This story served several purposes. It made ordinary European citizens feel good about conquest. It made the soldiers and administrators who enforced colonial rule feel noble rather than criminal. It gave governments a moral justification for what was, in reality, theft and slavery on a massive scale. And it created a framework in which the resistance of colonised peoples — their refusal to be ruled by foreigners — could be portrayed as the rebellion of dangerous savages who needed to be violently put down.
When violence is wrapped in the language of civilisation, religion, or scientific progress, it becomes very difficult for ordinary people to see it for what it is: the organised robbery of one group of human beings by another.
The non-Western world was not simply conquered militarily. It was also conquered intellectually. Western education, Western religions, Western languages, and Western legal systems were imposed on colonised peoples, often destroying their own traditions, their own knowledge systems, and their own forms of self-governance. The violence was not only physical — it was cultural and psychological.
The World Wars State Violence at Its Largest
All of these forces — sovereign nation-states, misappropriated science, nationalist education systems, economic competition, and colonial violence — built up over centuries to create the conditions for the most destructive wars in human history.
The First World War, fought between 1914 and 1918, began as a conflict between European empires — the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, British, French, and Russian empires — and ended with approximately seventeen million people dead. It was, by any measure, a catastrophe. And yet it was a completely legal catastrophe. Every country that fought was acting within the rules of international law as they existed at the time. Each government declared war formally. Each government drafted its citizens through legal processes. Each government ran its army under official military law. And each government told its people that they were fighting for justice, freedom, and national honour.
The soldiers who died in the mud of the trenches were not killed by criminals. They were killed by the decisions of legally elected and appointed governments, following the rules of a system that had been built over hundreds of years. The violence was not outside the law. It was the law — the law of nations, pushed to its logical extreme.
The Second World War, fought between 1939 and 1945, was even more catastrophic — approximately seventy to eighty-five million people died, including six million Jewish people killed by the Nazi German state in what is called the Holocaust. The Holocaust is perhaps the most extreme example of what happens when a state is given unlimited sovereignty over its territory and its people, when its ideology is rooted in Social Darwinism (the idea that some races are superior and should dominate or destroy others), and when its population has been educated to obey without question.
The Nazis did not see themselves as criminals. They believed they were following the laws of nature and history. They believed they were defending their nation. They had a legal system that justified everything they did within Germany's borders. And by the logic of sovereignty established in 1648, no outside power had the legal right to interfere — until the violence became so enormous that the entire world was threatened.
Post World War New World with Old Problems
After two world wars, the nations of the world tried to create a new system that would prevent such catastrophes from happening again. In 1945, the United Nations was established. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. A series of international treaties were signed that tried to limit the violence nations could inflict on each other — and on their own citizens.
These were genuine achievements. The world did not experience a third world war between the major powers. International law developed frameworks for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Courts were established to prosecute the worst offenders.
But the old problems did not disappear. They simply changed their forms. The Cold War — the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union from roughly 1947 to 1991 — produced dozens of proxy wars in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, where the two superpowers fought through smaller nations, arming and funding whoever supported their side. Millions died in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and many other places.
Colonial independence movements, while successful in ending formal colonial rule in most places, could not undo the economic structures of exploitation that colonialism had built. The same nations that had colonised Africa and Asia now dominated international trade, financial institutions, and military alliances in ways that kept former colonies in subordinate positions. This system — sometimes called 'neo-colonialism' — maintained many of the economic realities of empire without the formal political control.
The Continuing saga of Violence
Today, in the 21st century, state-sponsored violence continues. Wars are being fought in multiple regions of the world. Some are civil wars — internal conflicts within a single country. Some are between nations. Some involve non-state armed groups. But in almost every case, governments are involved — either directly fighting, or supplying weapons, funding, and political support to one side or another.
The arms industry — the business of making and selling weapons — is one of the most profitable industries on Earth. The nations that sell the most weapons are, ironically, the same nations that sit as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China. These are the same nations that have the most power to prevent or stop wars. The economic interest in selling weapons and the political interest in preventing war are in constant tension — and all too often, the economic interest wins.
Meanwhile, the education systems of the world continue, in many places, to produce citizens who are more loyal to their nation's government than to humanity as a whole. Textbooks in many countries present their nation's wars as just and their nation's enemies as wicked. The enemy's children learn the opposite story in their own textbooks. Both sets of children grow up to be adults who believe that, when it comes to the final test, their side was right — and violence in the name of their nation is not just acceptable but heroic.
Toward a Different Understanding
The purpose of this essay is not to make the reader feel hopeless. Understanding how something was built is the first step toward imagining how it could be built differently.
The system that legalises war violence was constructed piece by piece, over centuries, through decisions that real human beings made — about treaties, about education, about economics, about whose lives matter and whose do not. Those decisions shaped our world. But they were not inevitable. Other decisions could have been made. And other decisions can still be made.
When we understand that war is not a law of nature but a human institution — constructed, maintained, and constantly justified by human beings — we can begin to ask different questions. Not 'which side is right?' but 'why are we fighting at all?' Not 'how do we win?' but 'what do ordinary people on both sides actually need?' Not 'how do we defend national sovereignty?' but 'how do we build a world where sovereignty does not become a licence for violence?'
Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is the presence of justice — economic justice, political justice, and the recognition that every human life, regardless of nationality, race, or religion, carries equal and irreducible value.
The ideas that built the war-making world — sovereignty without accountability, science as a justification for domination, education as a tool of obedience, markets that profit from death — can all be replaced. They have been challenged, in every generation, by thinkers, activists, artists, and ordinary people who refused to accept that this was the only way the world could be organised.
The task of our time is to carry that refusal forward — to insist, in the face of every national emergency, every flag-waving crisis, every 'us versus them' — that the violence of states is not natural, not inevitable, and not acceptable. And to build, patiently and persistently, the institutions, the education, and the economy that make a genuinely peaceful world possible
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