Lobos y perros de la guerra

Posted on Diciembre 8, 2007 porJ


Hablábamos hace tiempo de las bondades de los antiguos ejércitos mercenarios. Escribe Tim Blanning en The Pursuit of Glory:

So war had not lost its teeth. Yet taking a very long view of the period 1648-1815, or at least 1648-1792, it can be seen that it did gradually lose some of its destructive force. It was not that wars became less frequent: on the contrary, there was a major war between the European powers in every decade of the eighteenth century except perhaps the 1720s. Rather it was the case that armies were now better disciplined and better provisioned. For reasons to be discussed later, one state after another moved to establish control over their armed forces. War was still a terrible affliction for anyone infortunate enough to get in its way, but conflicts did become shorter in duration and more limited in geographical scope. It was Frederick the Great’s declared ambition to isolate warfare from civilians to the extent that they would be unaware that it was underway. Of course, he failed, indeed he himself claimed that the Seven Years War had been as catastrophic from a demographic point of view for Prussia as the Thirty Years War. However, there was no return to the anarchy of the first half of the seventeenth century. (…) So there is a great deal to be said for Sir Michael Howard’s canine metaphor to describe eighteenth-century warfare:

It might be suggested that it was not the least achievement of European civilisation to have reduced the wolf packs which had preyed on the defenceless peoples of Europe for so many centuries to the condition of trained and obedient gun dogs -almost, in some cases, performing poodles.

This verdict has been confirmed, albeit more prosaically, by Fritz Redlich, who, in a general account of military depredation between 1500 and 1815, concluded: ‘The eighteenth century experienced a fundamental change in outlook and attitude towards looting and booty’. As we shall see later in a different context, there was a return to the bad old days when the hordes of the French Revolution were unleashed on Europe.

Es decir, que puede apreciarse un proceso general de suavización -pónganse todas las comillas precisas- de la guerra a medida que el Estado moderno va ganando control sobre sus ejércitos. Proceso que, evidentemente, no es lineal ni irreversible; porque fuera de los vademécums y los argumentarios ideológicos, la realidad siempre es más compleja que las consignas. Si nos apartamos de los discursos anti y pro-Estado estándar, puede avanzarse que el grado de control del Estado no constituye -con ser importante- el único factor que tener en cuenta. Es también de la máxima importancia la naturaleza de ese Estado -es una broma de mal gusto proclamar que los Estados han asesinado a doscientos millones de sus propios ciudadanos y no advertir a qué clase de Estados corresponde un porcentaje abrumador de esas muertes. También hay que considerar los factores ideológicos que puedan concurrir -véase la referencia a las “hordas de la Revolución Francesa”, que quizás podríamos comparar en alguna medida con el Ejército Rojo durante la SGM-, así como el origen y la formación de los reclutas. Lo seguro es que el monopolio de la violencia es un asunto lo bastante serio como para evitar los reduccionismos.

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Jacques Callot, Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre

Posted in: Historia, Libros, Militar, Política