Жолбов. Английский билеты. 4-5 курс / The relationship between war and politics

28. The relationship between war and politics.

Throughout human history people of different nations from different countries communicated with each other, concluded some treaties, tried to find some new ways of resolving problems, preventing armed conflicts and, at the same time, they sought to achieve their aims by all peaceful means, not resorting to violence. In this case politics was formed as a process of making collective decisions.

But still people wanted to protect their interests and in order to get immediate result they launched wars against each other. And as we know, there are a lot of

so - called reasons for waging a war. Some of the experts argue that they are connected with the innate human instinct of destruction and others support the idea of human material needs. In other words, they believe that previous wars were waged not because of the human desire to kill each other but due to some economic reasons, the desire to have better living conditions, new territories, natural resources. But in reality the phenomenon of war is used by the people whose aim is to benefit from some terrible situation, to reach some political goals.

Undoubtedly, these two subjects are interconnected. There is no politics without influential instruments of achieving any aim, and there is no war without politics. Talking about war, it goes without saying that this action always has political basis and pursues some specific interests. In my opinion, it’s possible to use political methods, excepting wars, but, it is impossible to imagine a war without any political aim as it is the very act of international policy. In other words, the existence of politics doesn’t depend on the existence of war and war, on the contrary, is a consequence of politics and, as to say, political method.

To conclude, I’d like to agree with the statement of Mao Zedong who says that politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed. I think, this thesis explains the essence of the interconnected relationship between war and politics.