We are living in a time when material interests dictate that something in "the form of an extremely mature mass movement of the working poor which regard[s] the whigs and the liberals as its probable betrayers and the capitalists as its certain enemies" should theoretically be emerging. So why isn't it?
If I knew, I wouldn't be here, I'd be in the revolution, and so would you. But I think that part of the answer lies in how socio-political collective identities form. I will write a lot on this in the coming weeks, including addressing the present situation. For now, here is a paper that sketches out a basic framework of how I think material interests can be brought back into theories of political collective identity formation that draws on the case of the Soccer War.
There has been just one war in history over a soccer game, known variously as the 100 hours war, the Short War, La Guerra de Futbol, the Football War or (hereafter) the Soccer War. Fought in July of 1969 between the Republics of Honduras and El Salvador after the former lost to the latter in a World Cup qualifying match, neither its brevity, nor its utterly strange timing, to coincide with the indelible July 20th landing of the Apollo 11 lunar module, should by any means obscure its significance to the historical trajectory of Central America. Simply consider the severity of the conflict: in roughly 4 days, 6,000 fatalities, over 12,000 injuries, between 50-100,000 refugees left homeless, landless and jobless, and the paralysis of the Central American Common Market (CACM) that would last for decades (Kapuscinski 182; Durham 1; www.sica.int).
Despite all these idiosyncrasies, however, there are scarcely any serious contemporary efforts to explain the war using the language and tools of either International Relations (IR) theory specifically, or political science generally. There is, however, a great deal of literature on the sociological, human biological, demographic, and ecological sources of the violence (see Durham [1979] chptr. 1 for a good survey). The only mention discovered by this author in the contemporary IR literature is a passing remark that minor partners within an alliance (here the Organization of American States [OAS]) sometimes fight wars against each other (Morrow 1991: p. 929). The obvious subtext in the IR literature is thus that this war was of no consequence to IR generally. This is a point I want to vigorously dispute. Using deductive reasoning based on established IR theory, and inductive reasoning based on the (admittedly spotty) historical record of the war, I will show that the Soccer War was caused by a heterogeneous set of factors deriving from both Neorealism and Constructivism. Perhaps most interesting of all is the resulting finding that each state actor had a unique motivation for war; Honduras may be said to have been pursuing relative gains and greater self-sufficiency in an increasingly constricted material and structural environment, while El Salvador was pursuing a nationalistic “war of rescue” (Van Evera 1994: p. 20) for its persecuted diaspora when it initiated hostilities. The war of rescue explanation (which will draw on social psychological processes based on Social Identity Theory [SIT]) represents the proximate cause, whereas the Waltzian (and, as I will show, also social-identity-theory(SIT)-based-constructivist) factors represent the relevant remote (or, background) causes of the conflict.
In all fairness to contemporary political scientists, from an International Relations (IR) theoretical perspective, the most interesting question may logically appear not to be why the war began, but rather how it was allowed to do so given the two state parties’ allied status (Morrow 1991). It was, after all, the only war in its recent history or since to be fought between two members of a common market system, the Central American Common Market, hereafter CACM (Bachmura 1971: 283). While this systemic question is not entirely irrelevant, it is somewhat tangential to the main one, specifically: why? What chain of inter- and intra-state events actually caused these two states to risk the extremely costly effects of military defeat? Given the fact that a more-attentive/active OAS could have arguably avoided the whole incident entirely, and was indeed able to quash it after just 100 hours of fierce battle with the mere threat of sanctions (Durham 1979), the Soccer War serves as an interesting historical opportunity to test hypotheses about the essential nature of modern state behavior within a relatively unorganized, unconstrained, archetypally Hobbesian state of nature (as opposed to a highly hierarchical system such as most of the bipolar cold war international system at the time), where phenomena such as self-help (Waltz 1977), unitary actors (Wolfers 1962), lowered transaction costs and the shadow of the future (Oye 1985), and in-group and out-group biases (Mercer 1995), to name just a few, are much easier to differentiate, identify/rule out, and observe in motion. The external validity of these findings is likely to be that it may undercut or complicate the states-as-cue balls notion of much of IR scholarship as well as yield potential implications for foreign policy decision makers. This paper will first compare Neo-Realist and Neoliberal explanations for the conflict. My argument here shall be that Neorealism explains the situation in the relatively multipolar system of 1969 Central America better than Neoliberalism, which might have predicted the CACM as a contributor to mutual security and cooperation, but that nationalist and other social psychological factors must also be taken on board in order to explain the proximate cause as well as some of the egoism in each nation-state’s identity which also drove the remote causes of the conflict, which are otherwise well-explained by structural realism. Second, this paper will explore the civic-nationalist dynamics at play in the lead up to the war, and, drawing on Jonathon Mercer’s (1995) pioneering work on identity formation in the international system, argue that while Honduras was pursuing a simple act of defensive balancing by pursuing the policy of expelling its landed illegal immigrants from El Salvador, El Salvador was forced into pursuing a revisionist “war of rescue” as a result of the mal-treatment of its diaspora by Honduran security forces in the pursuit of this policy. Therefore, a negotiated settlement would likely have been quite possible had elites been able to get to the bargaining table in advance of the problem, and a combination of Fearon’s bargaining incentives (1995) and Mercer’s cognitive social identity formation on symbolic grounds offers the best explanation for why such a bargain was never reached despite what would prove to be a very costly war (the 6,000 fatalities experienced between the two countries would be proportional to a 300,000 casualty civil war in the current US, to say nothing of the 15,000 wounded, nor of the economic cost of the collapse of the CACM).
A bit of historical background is necessary before any further analysis can take shape. The soccer war was virtually ignored by the international press. The US, enmeshed in the cold war, was about to make history by landing a man on the moon, and the Soviet bloc was hardly interested in recruiting allies in America’s backyard at the time, especially after its rather embarrassing performance in the Cuban Missile Crisis 7 years prior. The CACM was part of a growing ideological movement of neofunctionalism (Hass 1970: foreword in Fagan 1970), the idea that integration policies could cause favorable politics based on spillover effects which would lead to better cooperation and economic openness, as was the case in Europe at the time with the Coal and Steel Union. Yet, leaving ideology aside for a moment, there were structural conditions in Central America that did not exist in Europe. Chief among these was a demographic crisis in El Salvador, which was the most densely populated state in Latin America besides Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico (Bachmura 1971: p.283). Both El Salvador and Honduras were considered “food priority” countries by the United Nations, and Honduras, despite its 5-fold size superiority over El Salvador, faced greater economic hurdles such as capital and credit-access deficiencies, and the lack of an industrial service base, all of which contributed to relatively rapid El Salvadorian population growth and comparatively anemic growth in the Honduran population (for e.g., due to El Salvadorian factories performing services for Honduras that would normally be handled domestically, especially transport services) (Bachmura: pp. 283, 289).
These sort of input issues would ideally have been addressed by a common market, which could beneficially alter the terms of trade, and a common lender (in this case the Central American Bank for Economic Integration), by making other structural adjustments to improve the balance of payments between the CACM countries, especially Honduras and El Salvador, with whom about half of Honduran trade was conducted (287). Instead, “the Honduran deficit with other Central American Countries quadrupled within the four years prior to the conflict” (287). Chief among these input issues were the ability of Honduras to develop and tax its own land, and yet, as El Salvador began to run into an acute land shortage, a primary mode of political control became to allow the emigration of its poorest landless peasants into the comparatively unsettled and unutilized valleys of Honduras. This policy was grudgingly tolerated by Honduras for years, and squatters by the time of the conflict had developed into a regional diaspora of some 300,000 (Honduras’ population was 2,413,000 and El Salvador had 3,266,000, so this was not an insignificant number). But the common market’s failure was not merely in attempting to curb the problem; indeed, El Salvador profited from its balance of trade within the common market, while Honduras suffered from the balance within the market and profited from the balance without. The CACM therefore exacerbated the demographic problem in both countries, but at the overwhelming expense of Honduras. Thus “Honduran leaders came to resent the fact that their country was effectively providing a subsidy for the industrial development of other Central American republics, particularly their neighbor to the southwest” (Durham 1979: p.2).
In 1963, Honduras adopted a sweeping land reform law designed to clarify land titles in such a way that would privilege Hondurans over El Salvadoran squatters. But it was actually too poor and un-advanced to carry it out until 1969, and when it did, it led to the mass intimidation and in many cases torture, rape, castration and murder of El Salvadoran migrants, first at the hands of the Honduran military, enforcing the orders given it by the Institute Nacional Agraria (INA) and then by the population at large, which formed civilian population groups and “joined in the fray, with or without government approval” (Bachmura: p. 290). This event is widely seen as the most significant cause of armed conflict. El Salvador withdrew its ambassador and filed a complaint with the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights. Then, the World Cup qualifying matches between the two countries began.
Only one major international journalist is believed to have been in Honduras when the conflict began (Kapuscinski 1986). That journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, first writes at some length about the context of the soccer matches, which is not without significant import to any understanding of both the proximate and remote causes of the conflict. The first match, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, saw angry civilians terrorizing the visiting El Salvadorian team the entire night before the match, which Honduras then went on to win 1-0. An 18-year-old girl in El Salvador, watching the striker’s goal, went to her father’s dresser drawer, took out his pistol, and shot herself in the heart. This singular act sparked a nationally televised funeral the next day, in which an army honor guard headed the procession. She “could not bear to see her fatherland brought to its knees,” one major El Salvadorian newspaper headline read (158). The following match took place in El Salvador, where the overnight harassment became even more threatening and dangerous, with scores of rocks and bottles hurled at the windows of the El Salvadorian team’s hotel by throngs of angry fans outside. The game resulted in a 3-0 win for El Salvador, followed by a riot in which the visiting team had to be militarily evacuated by the host country in armored vehicles, and the visiting fans were chased and beaten all the way across the border, with 2 casualties, scores hospitalized, and 150 visitors’ cars burned (159). The next evening, the first bomb dropped on Tegucigalpa from an El Salvadorian warplane (160).
The war lasted only 4 days. During the last day, man set foot on the moon. The Organization of American States that day also threatened stiff sanctions. All countries in the Western sphere, except for Canada due to security concerns for one of its diplomats, joined the OAS and the UN in calling for an immediate halt to hostilities. As many have mentioned (Bachmura 1971; Fagan 1970; Durham 1979), the CACM was already collapsing; the war, on the other hand, at the very least marked the concrete beginning of its decades-long demise (Kapuscinsky 1986). There were no further military conflicts between the two countries besides cross-border skirmishes of a paramilitary variety and an ongoing dispute over the lands around the border.
What might a Neo-Realist argue caused this conflict? As with classical realism (see e.g. Wolfers 1962: chptr. 1), states, especially under the pressures of an anarchic, self-help international system, are unitary actors who must pursue, at a minimum, self-preservation, if not regional or world domination. The chief determinant of survival lies in the relative capabilities of states, and hence, cooperation is anathema to states’ interests because it can lead to interdependence, which by definition constrains the capabilities of the states as autonomous actors, with the obvious exception of a common military threat that would require a weaker state to bandwagon with a stronger one (Waltz 1970: chpt. 6,7, esp. pp. 154-155). One of the key features of this school of thought is that the actors are interchangeable, like pool balls; only their position relative to the other balls on the table can determine their trajectory (i.e. interests and resulting behavior). Thus, states must mind and defend their relative position, leading the system to take on a very structural dynamic.
A noteworthy variant of this theory is Offensive Realism (Mearsheimer 1994), which argues, albeit for more rationally-actor based reasons than the classical realists’ highly cynical view of human nature (Morgenthau 1948), that since relative gains matter, states must assume that other states are revisionist, and pursue their interest of survival through the endeavor of expansion and aggression, which other states are also bound to do for similar reasons.
Let’s start with Offensive Realism: in this view, El Salvador might have intended to conquer Honduras in order to secure its political stability, protect its persecuted diaspora, and gain access to the oceans of both coasts (Kapuscinski: pp. 182-183). In this light, the soccer matches might have simply served as an opportunity for the ruling elite to wage a war with the aid of temporarily flared nationalistic sentiments. And such sentiments could serve as a scapegoat should the war effort fail. There are several problems with this view, however. We might wonder why El Salvador would have ended hostilities and withdrawn its forces so easily when sanctions (not military intervention) were threatened. And it does not seem entirely plausible that such radical military action was ready and waiting at the time of the event that set it off, the suicide of an 18-year-old girl, which seems to have been something of a fluke. Moreover, the hostilities seem to have been triggered largely by the 1963 Honduran land reform act, something which, again, was beyond the control of El Salvador and could thus not be held as causal for their aggression under an Offensive Realist’s model, where the desire for access to water and superior capabilities (in both the size and wealth of population) alone would appear enough cause for military conquest. By taking it to the extreme, the theory does, however, point toward some of the problems of neorealism’s assumption of interchangeable, egoistic, and unitary actors in a self-help world system.
A more serious Neo-Realist effort is provided by Kenneth Waltz’ defensive or structural realism, in Theory of International Politics (1977). According to this model, the two countries were both interested in bandwagoning with one of the two poles (the US and the Soviet Union) in a bipolar world order through the alliance of the OAS. However, given their relatively obscure position in terms of both power and geography in the international system writ large, they also constituted part of a regional system that was in need of its own subaltern balancing; the CACM disrupted that balance by tying the hands of its participants economically (and thus militarily). After a number of attempts at resolving the problem through defensive and diplomatic measures, aggression was the only way to relieve the pressure building up in the regional system.
This explanation is satisfactory to an extent. Where it fails is in defining the diverse interests of the actors, as if each was interested in precisely the same thing (relative gains) and not in their own heterogeneous, identity-based interests. In this sense, it is still largely a puzzle why a soccer match was the proximate cause of the conflict, as opposed to something much more security-salient like, say, a movement of troops. The only satisfactory explanation within Waltz’ framework would seem to be that of a huge coincidence. Otherwise, we might be forced to pay heed to Kapuscinsky’s prophetic claim that “In Latin America, the border between soccer and politics is vague,” that, in some strange way, the culture of the two countries played as much of a role in triggering the hostilities as their relative position in their regional system. Though it may not make for a parsimonious explanation, it is highly implausible that Kapuscinski was completely wrong in this regard, and not just because he spent most of his professional life as a beat journalist in the global south, living in and covering the very region to which his aphorism refers, but also because of a common sense reading of the case itself. Moreover, a Defensive Realist explanation can not well explain how the common market came into being in the first place; spreading ideas and ideologies such as neo-functionalism can not be both the sources of conflict and imbalance in a system and at the same time simply the “efficient” causes of these conflicts that are auxiliary to the regulating force of the international balance of capabilities, threats, or any other realist notion of power.
There is only need to touch briefly on the chief competing theory to Neo-Realism. Neoliberalism (Axelrod 1985; Keohane and Martin 1995; Oye 1985) argues that relative gains matter only in cases when the “shadow of the future” is sufficiently small, and that through repeated interactions the same actors are likely to understand as a matter of common knowledge the decomposition of the payoff from defecting on an agreement, the fear of which being the chief source of security dilemmas and other barriers to international cooperation. Hence, cooperation becomes “profitable” despite the fact that states are still unitary, interchangeable, and egoistic actors. There is much more one could say about this theory; however, it is already in breach of the facts of our case. The common market was unable to create any of the aforementioned benevolent effects for either poor country. Though it did result in a great deal of cooperation, such as common prices on 98% of its target exports and the establishment of common tariffs (Fagan 1970), it was not successful in balancing its own internal competing interests, regardless of the extra face-time and iterations of cooperative endeavors, regardless also of the significant information-sharing that must have occurred as a result. This war would also seem to run afoul of mainstream IR constructivism, which sees such socialization processes as opportunities for states to actually alter their identities and beliefs about other states and thus the culture of anarchy as a whole, in this case towards more of a “Kantian culture of anarchy” (Wendt 1999; pp.297-307).
The ecosystem of Constructivist thought in IR, however, is incredibly biodiverse. One theory is especially useful here in improving Waltzian explanations of the Soccer War. Jonathan Mercer (1995) accepts the constructivist notion that “identities are made, not given” (230). Yet he agrees with Waltz’ assessment that since all states want to maintain their position in the system, they must “at a minimum become defensive positionalists,” as any less would be to invite increased insecurity and decreased autonomy (231). How does Mercer arrive at these two seemingly contradictory conclusions? Using SIT in the minimal-group paradigm, he argues that group-level analyses are the only “systems-level” psychological analyses that can explain behavior without either individualizing (“reducing” in Waltz’ parlance (1979: chptr. 2) or awkwardly totalising the unit of analysis (Mercer 238). According to 20 years of minimal-group experiments in SIT, individuals adopt the identity of a group according to nothing more than a top-down symbolic indicator of “groupness.” Rather than groups forming based on common material needs or goals, SIT has shown that individuals form groups first based on whatever common symbol is out there, only after which the adoption of a common fate or other source of material pursuit can possibly follow. One of the most obvious things that preexist in an individual’s symbolic environment is ethnicity, nationality, and race. Sometimes ethnicity is genetically inherited, while at others, it is socially engineered, as in the case of the Dutch exacerbation of Tutsi and Hutu ingroups which still persist in Post-Colonial Rwanda, even despite the massive genocide that these identities caused (Mamdani 2001). So why do these social processes support Waltz’ theory of relative gains? “SIT can explain our pronounced tendency for relative gains in the minimal group experiments. Once subjects are put into a category, no matter how arbitrary or minimal, their desire for a positive identity leads them to maximize the differences between their group and the other group” (242). The desire to differentiate between self and other is the source of relative-gains-regarding behavior. It follows from this that our “need for a positive social identity [is an] autonomous factor that may push relationships in the direction of conflict depending upon political, economic, or historical factors… Categorization requires comparison, which in turn leads to competition” (243).
At this point the argument hits a fork in the road: there is great debate within SIT over the role that norms (of fairness, for example) play in the minimal-group, and the corollary is the role that national cultures (such as that of soccer) versus cognitive processes played in the conflict. Because these two factors probably have a high degree of interaction, I suggest holding one static for our purposes and asking how events would have had an effect on the other. Given that cognition is more adaptive to events than culture, I suggest that holding culture constant, we can get a sense of whether strong in-group national identities led to the conflict by looking at events that might have effected cognition by either reinforcing or challenging existing categorization. I argue that both of these types of events occurred.
First, the CACM was a challenge to existing national identities, because it was a super-ordinate goal, the outcome of which can often, according to Realistic Conflict Theory, result in new superordinate in-group identities emerging (Sherif 1966). The natural response of states or other weak social identity groups might be to eschew such goals, which according to the laws of functionalism would likely lead to conflict (Brewer 1999). Second, the move by Honduras to evict the El Salvadorian squatters, many of whom had been integrated into Honduran village society, renewed and reinforced the social identity distinction between Honduran and El Salvadorian societal groups in a very salient, noticeable way. Finally, the soccer matches are a natural (even if perennial) reminder of national identities that, combined with these other two social identity-driving processes, might have served to strengthen in-group favoritism and out-group bias between El Salvador and Honduras. This, I believe, can explain the puzzle left by a Waltzian explanation of the Soccer War. It has the added benefit of not lapsing into a banal “cultural” explanation of the conflict as soccer crazed Latin Americans taking sports too seriously. And it manages to keep some of the positionality of Waltz’ theory intact; though the actors in question become social groups, not states per se, the social groups here remain largely products of the external environment, albeit a less materialistic, security environment and hence a more social than structural environment.
I’ll conclude with a puzzle. There is still left unresolved the dilemma of differing interests; Hondurans didn’t seem to want a war; El Salvadorians arguably did, as they were involved in violence at the popular level before the conflict, and were also the initial military aggressors. These differing immediate interests indicate a much deeper heterogeneity that can not be entirely explained by identity; Honduras began aggressive policies to gain autonomy over its own land; El Salvador launched a war in response, and in order to rescue its diaspora from such policies, but El Salvador was not pursuing its emigration policy in order to provoke a military conflict. Both sides at heart wanted different—and hence perhaps negotiable– goals. Human ecological scholars often stress the scarcity of resources in the conflict, forgetting that the conflict itself resolved none of these scarcities and yet led to no future major military conflicts. Neorealists may stress the end of the CACM as the source of relative future peace, but it would be easy to overemphasize this aspect at the expense of the obvious. Clearly, this war was not in either side’s interest, and thus the longer, more painful work of bargaining and negotiation was the real solution to these diverse competing needs and interests. The Common Market eventually resumed and is in operation today. The institutional design must have been improved, if it was ever a source of conflict in the first place (as I believe it to have been). James Fearon identifies three causes for why seemingly irrational war can be rational in the minds of decision makers: incentives to bluff, inabilities to credibly commit, and issue indivisibility (1995). It would take further research into the mindset of leaders, the content of negotiations, etc., but what can be said from this research is that both commitment problems resulting from a shifting balance of power, and issue indivisibility rooted in cognitive processes and demographic pressures, are equally good candidates to explain the conflict. Which it is depends on the direction of the causal arrows between the two, a problem that is all-but-impossible to resolve with the limited amount of information available at the time of writing. But the implications are important; this case was a primary example of modern states acting in a relatively unconstrained way that more-closely resembles the minimal-group paradigm than perhaps any other war in modern history. As such, the behavior of its actors has the possibility to shed light on such major IR scholarly debates as the levels of analysis argument and the pre-assumption of egoism. The egoistic assumption here seems to hold, and there is evidence that it is rooted at least on some level in cognitive social identity forming processes and partially in other factors, especially the balance of power in the international system, which seems to have been restored in part simply by the experience of the costs of war. Was the war itself a weakening force on the positive social identity-seeking cognitive psychological processes of El Salvador and Honduras? Or did it perhaps simply restore the Neo-Realist balance by each side sharing massive amounts of information about its capabilities, as Fearon might argue? This is a question that warrants further IR research in regard to this important and under-studied chapter of modern military history.
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