The Franco-Roman war, the Brito-San Marinian war…I sure learnt about military history, reading this thread…
Other wars I can think of-though I don’t think they count:
Austro-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
Russo-Turkish War
Russo-Japanese War
Crimean War
As far as I know, none of them involved a democracy.
Turkey/Greece and Pakistan/India were real wars. Don’t write them off because they are territorial, most wars are. Hitler had a whole lot of “territorial disputes”. The German people needed Lebensraum(sp?), space to grow. If only we’d given him a third of the world and kept our mouths shut about his executing the local populations, we might have avoided WWII.
On the other hand, relatively few wars continue to the point of total destruction of one side. More usually there is some kind of negotiated settlement followed by occasional snipings. My point here is, if by “full scale war” you mean a total national commitment and mobilization until victory or death, then I’d say the statment is true.
I recall going through a similar list with Comrade oldscratch a while back with very similar results. It’s interesting to look at the question in historical terms but if we want to use it as a predictor of future possible international confrontations, IMHO, it’s important to factor in two other modern day considerations:
- Freedom of the Press
- Capitalism
FWIW, I imagine the combo of democracy (as discussed), the (relatively) free flow of information (thus largely excluding one-sided propaganda) and international market forces (including the free flow of capital) pretty well exclude the possibility of anything or anybody upsetting the apple cart in the future. One hopes.
kantalooppi, what history book did you get this from? i’ve never heard of any uk troops bombing finland, at any point during either war. sorry, but until you provide a clear cite for this i think most finns will be quite content to disbelieve you.
and besides, renny harlin scrapped the idea of the mansku movie a long time ago after it didn’t get much support from most people. tv-maailma interviewed jude law about the time that the whole movie story came out and he was very surprised about the whole thing, since he’d never even heard of this project…
Well, I was going to point out most of the things mentioned by Cecil in his column, but he got there first. Incidentally, in most of the naval battles during the British-American war of 1812, most of the victories (frigate battles, mainly) were won by the (then) tiny American Navy. So it just goes to show how crappy the French must have been.
Don’t forget about the cooling down of Franco-American relations.