Reprinted courtesy of Foreign Affairs.
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The article below is a dialectic response to Francis Fukuyama's piece in the Sept/Oct 1998 Foreign Affairs issue concerning Women and world politics. I consider the Fukuyama article and the response posted below as excellent dialogue between the "nature vs. nurture" camps taken to the ultimate heights in foreign affairs. The exchange between the two is an important piece of history.
Fukuyama's Follies:
So What if Women Ruled the World?
Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollitt, et al.
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1999
Summary: Francis Fukuyama has it all wrong. War comes not from any genetic male
tendency toward violence -- there is none -- but from social and cultural pressures.
It certainly has nothing to do with chimp behavior. Besides, who says women
are not as competitive as men? A world run by women would not be as different
as Fukuyama thinks.
MEN HATE WAR TOO
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Francis Fukuyama marshals the familiar evidence suggesting that males, in our
species and others, are more prone to violence than females ("Women and
the Evolution of World Politics," September/October 1998). Despite the
current academic bias against "essentialist" or genetic explanations
of behavior, this evidence shows that males are indeed more likely to fight,
murder, loot, pillage, and, of course, rape than females. The question remains,
however, whether this apparently innate male predilection has much to do with
the subjects that concern Fukuyama -- war, international relations, and politics.
If Fukuyama had read just a bit further in the anthropology of war, even in
the works of some scholars he cites approvingly, he would have discovered that
there is little basis for locating the wellspring of war in aggressive male
instincts -- or in any instincts, for that matter. Wars are not barroom brawls
writ large, but, as social theorist Robin Fox puts it, "complicated, orchestrated,
highly organized" collective undertakings that cannot be explained by any
individual impulse. No plausible instinct would impel a man to leave his home,
cut his hair short, and drill for hours under the hot sun. As anthropologists
Clifton B. Kroeber and Bernard L. Fontana have pointed out, "It is a large
step from what may be biologically innate leanings toward individual aggression
to ritualized, socially sanctioned, institutionalized group warfare." Or
as a 1989 conference on the anthropology of war concluded, "The hypothesis
of a killer instinct is . . . not so much irrelevant as wrong."
In fact, the male appetite for battle has always been far less voracious than
either biologically inclined theorists of war or army commanders might like.
In traditional societies, warriors often had to be taunted, intoxicated, or
ritually "transformed" into animal form before battle. Throughout
Western history, individual men have gone to near-suicidal lengths to avoid
participating in wars -- cutting off limbs or fingers or risking execution by
deserting. Prior to the advent of the nationalist armies of the nineteenth century,
desertion rates in European armies were so high that, according to historian
Geoffrey Parker, "at certain times, almost an entire army would vanish
into thin air." So unreliable was the rank and file of the famed eighteenth-century
Prussian army that military manuals forbade camping near wooded areas. Even
in the supposedly highly motivated armies of the twentieth-century democracies,
few men can bring themselves to shoot directly at individual enemies -- a fact,
as Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman writes in On Killing: The Psychological
Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, that has posed a persistent challenge
to the Pentagon.
MALE RITES
Fortunately, we need not resort
to instinctual male aggressiveness to explain the male near-monopoly on warfare.
One reason is clearly biological, resting on men's advantage in upper body strength
-- an undeniable plus when the weapons of war are heavy swords, spears, pikes,
maces, or clubs. Another explanation is cultural, or at least as purely cultural
as one can be: In many, if not most, human societies, male initiation rites
feature acts of violence committed by or on the initiates, and one of the most
common of these rites has been participation in battle. Through "blooding
his spear" a boy proved his manhood (or through ordering the bombing of
some smaller nation, in the case of recent American presidents). For an activity
to be a male initiatory rite, it cannot, of course, be open to women and girls.
Hence the widespread taboos on female handling of weapons and, in many cases,
the tools of peaceable male-dominated crafts.
But there is no reason to think that such initiatory activities derive from
instinctual male proclivities. In some cultural settings, the young male's initiation
to the adult world may be entirely bloodless, featuring the receipt of a diploma
or admission into a guild. In others it may be violent in ways not related to
war, involving circumcision, homosexual rape, or nose-bleeding induced with
sharp sticks -- activities few would claim are instinctually driven. In fact,
the very purpose of male initiation rites is to distinguish biological maleness,
which undoubtedly includes a healthy desire for self-preservation, from cultural
manhood, which requires a certain amount of self-discipline and even self-sacrifice
for the group (as does cultural womanhood).
WOMEN WARRIORS
Nor can it be assumed that the
male monopoly on warfare has been as eternal and universal as Fukuyama imagines.
Gravesites recently excavated in Russia contain the remains of women warriors
from the second millennium B.C. -- female skeletons buried with weapons and
bearing wounds inflicted by similar weapons. The victims of the Neolithic massacre
at Jebel Sahaba, mentioned by Fukuyama, included both women and men, and there
is no evidence that the perpetrators were exclusively male. Moving back into
the Paleolithic Age, when hunting was probably the principal form of human violence,
growing archaeological evidence suggests that it was a communal enterprise in
which women and children joined men in driving herds over cliffs or into nets
or culs-de-sac. Thus, Fukuyama overstates the case when he says that "men
[unlike women] have clearly evolved as cooperative hunters and fighters."
The male-centered hunting strategy that figured so prominently in the writings
of sociobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s -- in which a small band of men stalks
an individual animal -- may be a rather recent innovation, necessitated by declining
game populations in the Mesolithic Age.
Myths of ancient civilizations also throw doubt on Fukuyama's assertions. Some
of the earliest deities worshipped by humans were female, but they were hardly
the nurturing earth mothers imagined by many scholars. The archaic goddesses
unearthed from Mediterranean and Mesopotamian ruins or recalled in Mesoamerican
mythology were huntresses and avid consumers of blood sacrifices, often accompanied
or represented by predators such as lions and leopards. Only later were these
terrifying deities "tamed" through marriage to patriarchal male gods
and reassigned to agricultural duties. Although the characteristics of the archaic
goddesses tell us nothing about the roles of actual women, they do suggest a
time when the association of manhood with violence and femininity with gentleness
was not as self-evident as it has seemed in the modern age.
MACHO MAN
Whatever our genetic and prehistoric cultural legacies, women in the past two
centuries have more than adequately demonstrated a capacity for collective violence.
They have played a leading role in nonmilitary violence such as eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century bread riots and revolutionary uprisings, in which they
were often reputed to be "foremost in violence and ferocity." In World
War II, the Soviet military deployed them as fighter pilots and in ground combat.
Since then, women have served as terrorists and guerrilla fighters in wars of
national liberation. More to the point, women have proved themselves no less
susceptible than men to the passions of militaristic nationalism: witness feminist
leader Sylvia Pankhurst, who set aside the struggle for suffrage to mobilize
English support for World War I by, for example, publicly shaming men into enlisting.
Fukuyama concedes that, among heads of government, Margaret Thatcher is an exception
to his gender dichotomy but ignores the many exceptions on the male side of
the ledger -- such as the antimilitaristic, social-democratic Olaf Palme and
Willy Brandt. Nor does he mention the gender of the greatest pacifist leaders
of the twentieth century, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mohandas K. Gandhi.
But perhaps Fukuyama would concede all of the above, for in the end he has little
use for his own dubious claims about the inherent aggressiveness of men and
niceness of women. Up until the last three pages of his essay, one might assume
that he was gearing up to demand solely masculine leadership, if not participation,
in the arenas of politics and war. But no. Women in the military? His only objection
has to do with sex as an activity rather than a category, which leads him to
the mild suggestion that men and women should be segregated into separate combat
units. As for political leadership, he worries a little that the female, and
hence over-kindly, heads of state who arise in the northern democracies will
be a poor match for the macho young males whom he expects to dominate the south.
But even here he quickly backtracks, admitting, "Masculine policies will
be still be required, though not necessarily masculine leaders."
If, as Fukuyama concludes, either sex can be "masculine" in both admirable
and execrable ways, what is the point of his essay, with its lengthy excursion
into the supposedly murderous habits of cavemen and chimps? Perhaps Fukuyama
is right about one thing: Whatever the innate psychological differences between
the sexes, a certain male propensity for chest-thumping persists, and can be
found among desk-dwelling American scholars as well as alpha apes.
Barbara Ehrenreich is an author and lecturer whose essays have appeared frequently
in Time, The Nation, and The Guardian. Her most recent book is Blood Rites.
FATHER KNOWS BEST
By Katha Pollitt
In his 1989 essay "The End of History?" Fukuyama argued that liberal
capitalist democracy was the final stage of political organization toward which
the whole world was tending. Today, it seems clear that history will continue
to occur, fueled by familiar energies -- nationalism, religious mania, the will
to power of powerful men, drastic inequalities between and within nations, economic
cycles of boom and bust. Undaunted, Fukuyama is back with another idea. He prophesies
that the increasing political power of women in wealthy Western countries will
incline those countries against war because evolution has made violence, aggression,
and status competition hardwired components of male, but not female, nature.
As with chimpanzees, so with humans: From rival male chimps tearing each other
to pieces it is but a step to the famously violent Yanomam of the Amazon, and
before we know it we are on familiar twentieth-century killing grounds -- the
Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia.
But Fukuyama warns that this female peacefulness poses dangers to the West.
Other parts of the world where female infanticide and sex-selective abortion
result in heavily male populations will become more pugnacious. Are Western
women up to the challenge of a testosterone-saturated Asia? And what about women
in the army? If men are genetically destined to bond only with other men and
to compete perpetually for females, will coed army units degenerate into Peyton
Place in camouflage?
In arguing for his story of things to come, Fukuyama strays all over the ideological
map. He draws on "evolutionary psychologists" to portray men as the
main source of human violence, but he ignores those theorists' other claim that
male dominance and female acceptance thereof are permanent features of human
nature. He mocks radical feminists for dreaming that men can be socialized to
be more humane, but he simultaneously imagines that these same unreformable
men will simply let women steer the ship of state into tranquil waters. He projects
into the future current practices that fit his vision, without acknowledging
the possibility that those practices may change. Is it so obvious that Asians
will still be aborting female fetuses in 20 years after a generation of pampered
sons has been unable to find wives? Are we so sure that Europe and Japan, faced
with rapidly aging populations, will just grow gray in a corner? Perhaps these
wrinkled nations will become more immigration-friendly, like the United States.
Indeed, France, Italy, and Spain are already experiencing enormous pressure
as illegal immigration from eastern Europe and Africa increases. The new German
government has just loosened citizenship requirements, suggesting that xenophobia
is not the only response to demographic change.
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY IS BUNK
So what is wrong with Fukuyama's
argument? Just about everything. First, he argues that science has discovered
the genetic roots of human behavior. This is quite untrue; "evolutionary
psychology" is just a theory. It is certainly not the case that "hardly
a week goes by without the discovery of a gene linked to a disease, condition,
or behavior," although it is indeed true that hardly a week goes by without
someone claiming to have discovered such a gene. No one would dispute that diseases
can have genetic components, but behaviors? The much-publicized "alcoholism
gene" turned out not to exist, which should make Fukuyama cautious about
such sweeping statements. In fact, no single gene has ever been discovered that
by itself determines a human social behavior; it is a long way from cystic fibrosis
to marital infidelity. And it has not even begun to be demonstrated that a complex
piece of human behavior like violence or competition could boil down to X or
Y chromosomes.
Evolutionary psychologists' theories are popular with the media, which love
stories that suggest feminists are barking up the wrong tree and that gender
equality is a doomed project. But Fukuyama is wrong to suggest that evolutionary
psychology has won the day in science. Fukuyama tends to name the people he
agrees with while referring only vaguely and condescendingly to opponents ("radical
feminists," "many feminists," "postmodernists"). But
Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and many other scientists
make formidable arguments, grounded not in ideology but in biology, against
genetic determinism. It is not encouraging that Fukuyama seems unfamiliar with
their work.
He argues that men are more violent than women. Someday he may provide actual
evidence that this is a biological rather than social tendency. But even if
women are innately less violent, they are plenty violent enough to call into
question Fukuyama's claim that more female political power would mean more peace.
Women commit infanticide, abuse and kill children, mutilate the genitals of
little girls, and cruelly tyrannize daughters, daughters-in-law, servants, and
slaves. They have also been known to encourage and defend male violence -- egging
on personal, family, or gang vendettas, blaming the victims of rape and wife-beating,
and so on. Historically, cultures organized around war and displays of cruelty
have had women's full cooperation: Spartan and Roman women were famed for their
"manly" valor. Did Viking women stand on Scandinavian beaches begging
their husbands not to pillage France? Did premodern European women shun public
executions and witch burnings? As these examples suggest, even defining violence
raises questions: The same act can be regarded as wrong, psychopathic, glorious,
or routine, depending on its social context.
When it comes to organized state violence -- war, executions, slavery, concentration
camps, and so on -- women's pacifism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. So how
can it be genetic? You might as well say that today's women explorers, world
travelers, athletes, and foreign correspondents prove that women have belatedly
acquired that supposedly male gene for "adventurousness." (Fukuyama
has clearly never tried to get a middle-class American man to see a foreign
movie or try a new cuisine.) As for his claim that group-status competition
is a male characteristic -- didn't Fukuyama go to high school? Girls and women
do not beat each other up as much, but they certainly do compete for status
-- through clothes, money, boyfriends, popularity, sexuality, cliques, and sororities.
"Keeping up with the Joneses" is a form of female competition; so
is getting your child into a fancy private school; so is being a groupie or
marrying a famous man. Fukuyama concedes that for his supposedly sex-linked
traits, each gender falls along a bell curve and that these curves mostly overlap.
This contradicts his argument that men are violent and competitive and women
are not. If most men and most women fall in the middle range, it is hard to
see how gender difference can carry the burden Fukuyama assigns it.
WHY THE DRAFT?
Fukuyama's essay's second flaw is arguing that individual
qualities determine state behavior. For him, war is personal violence multiplied
by the number of participants. But this is the wrong model. World War II was
not fought because a lot of hotheaded young men got together and decided to
invade Poland. Nor did the Holocaust take place because groups of young men
were competing for status over who could murder the most Jews. War and its atrocities
are organized politically, from the top, by leaders who are -- yes -- usually
men. But they are generally old men who are not necessarily personally violent.
In modern times they rarely fight -- Lyndon B. Johnson never personally threw
prisoners of war out of helicopters. It is young men who fight, but how willingly?
If war is so appealing to male genes, why has every major modern war required
a draft? Why does today's army recruit by touting its vocational fringe benefits?
VOTERS DON'T MAKE FOREIGN POLICY
Fukuyama argues that war and
foreign policy are determined by voters, who will be disproportionately female
and therefore antiwar. True, women are more likely than men to oppose war --
though the difference is hardly as large as a genetic explanation suggests it
should be -- but wars are not decided at the ballot box. If they were, the United
States would not have entered World War I. After all, the mostly male electorate
chose Woodrow Wilson, whose slogan was "He kept us out of war." In
1964, voters picked Johnson ("I seek no wider war") over the saber-rattling
Barry Goldwater. Nor have subsequent military actions in Panama, Somalia, the
Persian Gulf, and Sudan or secret adventures such as supporting the Contras
been the subjects of popular votes.
Political power is not merely or even primarily a matter of ballots or public
opinion. Most Americans favor handgun control, but the National Rifle Association
spends millions to make sure it never happens. In the case of war, what matters
is not what the voters want but campaign contributions from defense manufacturers
and others, the short-term public relations needs of presidents, or the nation's
geopolitical interests as interpreted by a Henry Kissinger or a McGeorge Bundy
(or a Jeane Kirkpatrick or a Madeleine Albright). Once the powers that be have
decided, public opinion can always be manipulated to fall into line. Before
the Gulf War, Americans were split over whether to send troops. Antiwar voices
were prominently featured in the news. Once the troops were dispatched, however,
the media cut off debate and soon it was yellow ribbons all around.
American women have had the vote for nearly 80 years. So far, they have not
even won paid maternity leave or affordable daycare, things taken for granted
in other industrialized countries. In light of these failures, the assertion
that women will be transforming American foreign policy anytime soon, against
the will of those now in control, strikes me as a fantasy second only to the
notion that genetics will bring it about. It is more likely that as women become
more enmeshed in politics and business, with all their compromises and rewards,
whatever modest inclination they may now possess toward nonviolent conflict
resolution will be swamped by other factors: vanity, greed, fear, perceptions
of national interest, lust for cheap oil.
Fukuyama's article is so confused and contradictory, so lacking in real evidence
and logic, that one wonders what it is really all about. Despite his professed
sympathy for women's claims to fuller citizenship, he suggests no means by which
to move them along. He does not, for example, urge political parties to put
forward gender-balanced lists of candidates, as happens in some European countries.
Indeed, the only concrete proposal Fukuyama makes is to restrict women's citizenship
by limiting their military role. Women make up only 12 percent of Congress and
hold only three governorships, the first two female Supreme Court justices are
still on the bench, but Fukuyama is worried that the girls are about to seize
power and turn the United States into an international wimp.
Forget feminism, genetics, or evolution. What we have here is basically a convoluted
variation on two old conservative themes: When it comes to the military, too
much is not enough, and when it comes to foreign policy, father -- not mother
-- knows best.
Katha Pollitt is Associate Editor of The Nation. Her essays have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New York Times. She is the author
of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism.
PERILOUS POSITIONS
By R. Brian Ferguson
In his desire to prove that
world conflicts have a basis in biology, Fukuyama makes a number of outright
errors.
First, chimpanzees do not "routinely" murder their peers. The famous
incident at Gombe that Fukuyama refers to occurred only after major human-induced
changes, most important of which was the researchers' artificial provisioning
of bananas. Other reported instances of "chimp wars" also took place
in stressful situations. Primatologist Margaret Power offers a contrasting view:
"Virtually everywhere that they were studied by naturalistic methods, undisturbed
wild chimpanzees live peacefully in nonaggressive, nonhierarchical groups."
Fukuyama fails to note that the lesser-known bonobos are as closely related
to humans as chimpanzees and display no tendencies to collective violence.
A debate rages within the anthropology of war about the relationship between
the high rates of violence observed in tribal societies and the behavior of
our distant ancestors. Fukuyama takes one side. On the other, copious evidence
documents dramatically increasing violence after Western contact. Disruptive
factors -- new weapons, trade rivalries, demand for slaves, and forced migrations
-- transformed and intensified indigenous warfare. This higher-level carnage
has been incorporated into our theories and images of "primitive war."
War leaves many recoverable archaeological signs, and global findings are straightforward
and consistent: Evidence of war is rare until long after a shift to agriculture
and the development of hierarchical social systems. War emerges late in human
history because it is difficult to organize without authority. Fukuyama's conclusion
that "the line [of collective violence] from chimp to modern man is continuous"
is a breathtaking leap over a mountain of contrary evidence.
On the connection between violence, gender, and age, Fukuyama's position is
again perilous. A 1993 review of aggression literature concludes, "In laboratory
studies of human aggression, where the use of physical aggression is controlled
and the possibility of escalation of violence is eliminated, there is little
difference in the frequency of aggression in males and females." The evolutionary
psychology Fukuyama follows claims that most violence is done by young men.
The study cited to support this human universal is based on contemporary homicide
statistics, primarily from Detroit. Crime patterns in modern industrial cities
tell us no more about our distant past than do statistics on automobile fatalities.
Ethnographic data on war in tribal societies provides an entirely different
picture. War leadership and killing are usually tasks of middle-aged (by local
standards) family men, while young men go along as apprentices.
Men make war. There are important exceptions, but they are rare. Yet women are
often among the most vocal advocates of war, making a gendered disposition to
peace hard to support empirically. Why not more women warriors? Because war
is work, and all tribal societies have pronounced, gender-specific divisions
of labor. Women get tasks compatible with pregnancy and child-rearing; men get
those that put a premium on strength and endurance. Tribal men also get the
job of long-distance trade, but no one claims men have a gene for shopping.
Fukuyama asserts that having viewed "international relations through the
lens of sex and biology . . . it is very difficult to watch Muslims and Serbs
in Bosnia, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, or militias from Liberia and Sierra Leone
to Georgia and Afghanistan . . . and not think of the chimps at Gombe."
This is ridiculous and misleading. Recent world conflicts have occurred in an
intricate political field complicated by the intersection of local structures
and global forces. Fukuyama replaces this understanding with a crude discussion
of chimp behavior, aggressive young men, and biological tendencies.
R. Brian Ferguson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University.
PREHISTORY RETURNS
By Lionel Tiger
A remarkably valuable feature of Fukuyama's essay is that he admits he was wrong
-- not by acknowledging that the earlier approaches to macropolitics with which
he made his reputation were incorrect but by emphasizing the bizarre distinction
made between natural and social sciences. This has let social scientists believe
they can conduct research quarantined from neurophysiology, paleoanthropology,
genetics, endocrinology, and the comparative study of animal behavior. It is
now overwhelmingly clear that, however complex, humans are subject to the same
rules as other species and thus that human studies should not work in isolation.
It was recently revealed that only 50 genes distinguish us from chimpanzees
-- with whom we otherwise share some 100,000.
Fukuyama has moved from the "end of history" to the beginning of prehistory,
a study that will soon be required for contemporary political history. He understands
that much of feminist theory entails profound disruptions in how human beings
have always balanced production, reproduction, and civil society. Fukuyama's
appropriation of prehistory lets him recognize that the overwhelming mass of
traditional political analysis -- even when described as "human behavior"
-- has been about the behavior of males.
Feminism has produced two contradictory assertions: first, that men and women
are the same and that any important behavioral differences result from discrimination,
sexism, and patriarchy; second, that women are different and morally better
than men. The first assertion is employed most often by lawyers, who conclude
that there should be as many women in any job, sport, club, party, or cabinet
as there are in the relevant population. The second assertion is made by Carol
Gilligan, whose In a Different Voice proposes that girls pursue moral behavior
and social harmony better than boys because, well, because they are girls. The
fact that sexual differentiation in negotiating strategies also emerges in other
primates does not affect the feminine sentimentality that propelled Gilligan's
work to prominence. Other writers, including feminists such as Katha Pollitt
and Christina Hoff Sommers, criticized the Gilligan approach. Nevertheless,
it stimulated efforts to restrict male behavior, stigmatize males as generally
brash and insensitive, and claim that girls suffer from low self-esteem because
they conform to male wishes. That women generally do better than men in the
educational system and now compose 55 percent of the college population does
nothing to discourage such zealous misinterpretation.
Fukuyama acknowledges the genetic male propensity to competition and violence.
In our 1971 The Imperial Animal, Robin Fox and I proposed that the central question
of any social system is "What do we do with the young males?" The
question remains central today, especially in economies unable to generate jobs
for them. Fukuyama suggests that the introduction of more women into the controlling
systems of society, especially in politics, will give a pacific tone to national
and international action. For this view, he cites some opinion-poll data about
the support for military adventure, examines the behavior of the few female
leaders involved in military decision-making, and could have noted the preference
of many females in contemporary militaries for "operations other than warfare."
But though Fukuyama's forecast that political change will accompany changes
in the sexual composition of leadership is plausible, the picture remains conjectural.
There is no empirical evidence of large-scale, long-term social structures that
have been created and maintained exclusively or even largely by females. The
overworked myth of matriarchy notwithstanding, we do not have good examples
of groups of women engaged over generations in creating and sustaining public
organizations such as armies, religions, police forces, or even international
businesses. It remains an open question if there is a female equivalent to the
omnipresent male bonding that encourages the alloy of assertion and self-sacrifice
at the heart of a community's central power structure. The political gender
gaps emerging in liberal democracies certainly suggest the beginnings of such
edifices.
It is possible, even if unlikely, that one response to greater female influence
will be greater male belligerence and even violence against them. At the same
time that the Taliban restricts women from kindergarten, radical activists restrict
women from abortion in the United States. In the contemporary world, there is
nowhere for women and children to go. We receive daily bulletins about the bewilderingly
lethal intransigence of male leaders committed to some program of desperate
importance to them. The struggle for social control may be one that women choose
not to take up.
Lionel Tiger is Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. His
next book is The Decline of Males.
STATES MAKE WAR
By Jane S. Jaquette
Fukuyama gives insufficient weight to the dynamics of the nation-state system
in explaining both war and peace. Wars start not in biology -- instinctual male
aggression -- but in realpolitik -- a state's need to defend itself from outside
threats. War does not come naturally to humans. Men must be trained to fight
and kill others, and all people must be taught patriotism. States go to great
lengths to demonize their enemies.
State power explains the brutality of internal ethnic conflicts such as those
in Bosnia and Rwanda. Fukuyama mistakenly cites these examples to hammer home
his equation of humans with murderous chimps. But control of the state involves
high stakes, with winners deciding how laws are made, taxes applied, and access
provided to economic and educational opportunities. Unsurprisingly, competition
is fierce when the incentives are so large.
Fukuyama suggests that women are more pacifistic than men. Several decades of
research shows that women do differ from men regarding war. Women are markedly
less interested in and knowledgeable about it. Women prefer lower military expenditures
in times of peace and negotiations instead of force. But this does not mean
that women are unaggressive; they can sometimes be more aggressive than men.
When women are allowed to carry arms, they are often fierce fighters, as was
true of many Central and South American guerrillas. Once war commences, there
is little evidence that women withhold support from the male-dominated state.
Today many women receive military training and press to go into combat -- not
to satisfy their hardwired desire to kill but to succeed in military careers
that require proving oneself on the battlefield.
If women are more inclined to negotiation, what difference does it make? The
cliche Fukuyama cites is that more women leaders would mean more peace. But
female leaders face the same pressures as men. For every Mary Robinson or Gro
Harlem Brundtland who has made peacemaking a focus of her leadership (and who
probably represents a small European state that can afford to promote peace
because it relies on the protection of larger powers), there is an Indira Gandhi
or Margaret Thatcher leading a major power that uses force to achieve its foreign
policy and domestic goals.
But these women may have been forced into male posturing because there are so
few female leaders. If there were a critical mass of women leaders or if nation-state
sovereignty gave way to international law, the argument goes, international
relations would include less interstate competition and more global cooperation.
This would spotlight social issues and organizations in which women already
play important roles. As women's traditional concerns become top priority issues,
women's say in foreign policy debates will rise.
Jane S. Jaquette is Professor of Politics and Chair of Diplomatic and World
Affairs at Occidental College.