I'd suggest that a key factor here is the enduring strength of **nationalism** - identifying with a larger national entity is a kind of psychological defense against awareness of one's individual vulnerability and mortality, especially in times of rapid social change. The benefits of economic integration have a hard time competing with nationalism, as demonstrated by Brexit, or the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty (>49% Yes), or Angell's failed prediction.
Of course the problem is that nations often seek to increase their power, or to regain the power that they had in the past. Chinese nationalists remember when China was a center of civilization, and the humiliation of falling behind not just the West, but Japan. Russian nationalists remember when the Soviet Union was a superpower.
E. H. Carr (another realist) suggests in "The 20 Years' Conflict 1919-1939" that the key divide in international politics isn't based on ideology or political system, but between those countries which support the status quo and those which seek to overturn it. When the countries which oppose the status quo are stronger than those which support it, we can expect trouble. That is, if we want to avoid violent conflict, we need to pay close attention to the balance of power.
By the way, Carr criticized the assumptions exhibited in Adam Tooze's comments about war having a poor track record.
"Politically, the [incorrect] doctrine of the identity of interests has commonly taken the form of an assumption that every nation has an identical interest in peace, and that any nation which desires to disturb the peace is therefore both irrational and immoral. This view bears clear marks of its Anglo-Saxon origin. It was easy after 1918 to convince that part of mankind which lives in English-speaking countries that war profits nobody. The argument did not seem particularly convincing to Germans, who had profited largely from the wars of 1866 and 1870, and attributed their more recent sufferings, not to the war of 1914, but to the fact that they had lost it; or to Italians, who blamed not the war, but the treachery of allies who defrauded them in the peace settlement; or to Poles or Czecho-Slovaks who, far from deploring the war, owed their national existence to it; or to Frenchmen, who could not unreservedly regret a war which had restored Alsace-Lorraine to France; or to people of other nationalities who remembered profitable wars waged by Great Britain and the United States in the past. But these people had little influence over the formation of current theories of international relations, which emanated almost exclusively from the English-speaking countries. British and American writers continued to assume that the uselessness of war had been irrefutably demonstrated by the experience of 1914-18, and that an intellectual grasp of this fact was all that was necessary to induce the nations to keep the peace in the future; and they were sincerely puzzled as well as disappointed at the failure of other countries to share this view."
Hmm.
I'd suggest that a key factor here is the enduring strength of **nationalism** - identifying with a larger national entity is a kind of psychological defense against awareness of one's individual vulnerability and mortality, especially in times of rapid social change. The benefits of economic integration have a hard time competing with nationalism, as demonstrated by Brexit, or the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty (>49% Yes), or Angell's failed prediction.
Of course the problem is that nations often seek to increase their power, or to regain the power that they had in the past. Chinese nationalists remember when China was a center of civilization, and the humiliation of falling behind not just the West, but Japan. Russian nationalists remember when the Soviet Union was a superpower.
E. H. Carr (another realist) suggests in "The 20 Years' Conflict 1919-1939" that the key divide in international politics isn't based on ideology or political system, but between those countries which support the status quo and those which seek to overturn it. When the countries which oppose the status quo are stronger than those which support it, we can expect trouble. That is, if we want to avoid violent conflict, we need to pay close attention to the balance of power.
By the way, Carr criticized the assumptions exhibited in Adam Tooze's comments about war having a poor track record.
"Politically, the [incorrect] doctrine of the identity of interests has commonly taken the form of an assumption that every nation has an identical interest in peace, and that any nation which desires to disturb the peace is therefore both irrational and immoral. This view bears clear marks of its Anglo-Saxon origin. It was easy after 1918 to convince that part of mankind which lives in English-speaking countries that war profits nobody. The argument did not seem particularly convincing to Germans, who had profited largely from the wars of 1866 and 1870, and attributed their more recent sufferings, not to the war of 1914, but to the fact that they had lost it; or to Italians, who blamed not the war, but the treachery of allies who defrauded them in the peace settlement; or to Poles or Czecho-Slovaks who, far from deploring the war, owed their national existence to it; or to Frenchmen, who could not unreservedly regret a war which had restored Alsace-Lorraine to France; or to people of other nationalities who remembered profitable wars waged by Great Britain and the United States in the past. But these people had little influence over the formation of current theories of international relations, which emanated almost exclusively from the English-speaking countries. British and American writers continued to assume that the uselessness of war had been irrefutably demonstrated by the experience of 1914-18, and that an intellectual grasp of this fact was all that was necessary to induce the nations to keep the peace in the future; and they were sincerely puzzled as well as disappointed at the failure of other countries to share this view."