La Grippe and World War I: Conflict participation and pandemic confrontation

Abstract

This paper assesses whether a nation-state's participation in conflict influences its ability to confront global pandemic or disease. Two alternative hypotheses are proposed. First, increased levels of conflict participation lead to increased abilities of states to confront pandemics. A second and alternative hypothesis is that increased conflict participation decreases the ability of states to confront pandemics. The hypotheses are tested through the ultimate case of war and pandemic: the 1918 Influenza pandemic (Spanish Flu or ‘La Grippe’) that killed 20–100 million people worldwide. Using simple correlation and case illustrations, we test these hypotheses with special focus upon the ability of the participant countries to confront the pandemic. The findings suggest, in a limited and varied fashion, that while neutral countries enjoyed the lowest levels of pandemic deaths, of the participant countries greater levels of conflict participation correlate with lower levels of pandemic deaths. The paper concludes with some propositions regarding the relationship between the current ‘war on terror’ and prospective pandemics such as avian flu.

Keywords:

• pandemic
• conflict
• influenza
• World War I

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the 2006 American Political Science Association's annual meeting, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. The authors would like to thank several individuals and organisations whose support made this manuscript possible. We are grateful to Ryan J. Hartman, Michael D. Kraft and Anthony S. Litwiller for productive initial discussions on the topic, and to Michael G. Findley for his helpful remarks at the APSA presentation. We would like to especially thank Timothy Frey for his in-depth comments and support on this manuscript and topic at its various stages. We also thank Jeremy Youde for detailed comments, as well as Phil Schrodt and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on revision. Thanks to Tashia Dare for research assistance on this project and to the General Research Fund grant provided by the University of Kansas which assisted this research. Finally, we wish to thank Professor Richard Parker and the Global Public Health editorial team for their assistance throughout the publication process.

Notes

1. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051004-1.html.

2. Polling data on the recent monitoring of phone records of all Americans, and the American National Security Agency's programme of wiretapping certain Americans without first obtaining a warrant can be accessed at: http://pollingreport.com/terror2.htm While poll results vary, Americans seem to be rather evenly split on the issue (depending upon how the question is worded).

3. Besides Elbe and Youde, see also the burgeoning literature on ‘health security’ and HIV's role in such a concept (National Intelligence Council 2000, Ostergard 2002, Singer 2002, Altman 2003, Bazergan 2003)

4. While Price-Smith (2001b) does not test the same variables in Health of Nations that we do here in our limited study, he does assess the impact of disease upon a country's ‘state capacity’.

5. Although this number is probably still low because of underreporting.

6. As noted by Johnson and Mueller (2002: 107), a disputed fourth wave is suggested that may have persisted throughout 1920, but such a suggestion is ‘debatable’ and instead might ‘be considered … a new epidemic’.

7. Morale concerns seemed to pervade even the beginning of the epidemic, as Barry (2004: 2) reports: ‘The local (Haskell County, Kansas) paper Sante Fe Monitor, apparently worried about hurting morale in wartime’.

8. ‘Unlike the combatant nations of Europe, nonbelligerent Spain had no wartime censorship of the press, no propaganda network to suppress news of epidemic disease among citizenry or soldiers. Soon Spain had joined the venerable ranks of nations whose names were attached to pandemics, a venerable (if often unjust) tradition dating back to 1510’, (Iezzoni 1999: 37).

9. Crosby (1989: 73) observes that during the second flu wave: ‘in the days immediately following the Liberty Loan parade, the pandemic exploded in Philadelphia: 635 new civilian cases of flu were reported for the single day of October 1’.

10. ‘At the memorial service for the pandemic dead at Camp Meade, Maryland, the presiding officer read the names of the dead one by one to a massed battalion, and as each name rang out, the Seargeant of the man's company saluted and responded, ‘Died on the field of honor, Sir’.

11. This would also explain why indigenous populations, like the Maori in New Zealand, would have exponentially higher mortality rates than the national populations (Rice 2003).

12. Johnson and Mueller, ‘Updating the Accounts’ (2002); Patterson and Pyle, ‘The geography and mortality of the 1918 influenza pandemic’ (1991).

13. As mentioned above, the influenza figures were derived from Johnson and Mueller (2002) and Patterson and Pyle (1991). World War I statistics were derived from Ellis and Cox (2001). While the Correlates of War project provides data for both conflict measurements, and several control variables, the number of participant countries is reduced in that dataset.

14. ‘Italy's Food Supply Affected by the Grip,’ New York Times, 29 November 1918, p. 16.

15. A list of Portuguese sources are available in Phillips and Killingray (2003: 340).

16. Mueller (2005) has more recently asserted that in the case of the Iraq War, the American public's support has eroded ‘much more quickly’ than it did in the cases of Korea and even Vietnam, suggesting that ‘the American public places far less value on the stakes in Iraq than it did on those in Korea and Vietnam’ (45). The ‘stakes’ position is supported by previous research which posits that the ‘principle policy objective’ (Jentleson 1992) of the conflict itself is a factor mitigating the casualty effect upon public opinion.

17. This is John Mueller's (1973) term, but the literature on the ‘rally’ effect is vast (see for instance Lee 1977, Brody 1984, Bowen 1989, Brody and Shapiro 1991) and has been extended to publics outside of the USA (see Lai and Reiter 2005).

18. For the literature on epistemic communities, see Ruggie (1975), Haas (1990), Adler and Haas (1992), Drake and Nicolaidis (1992), Haas (1989, 1992) and Breitmeier et al. (2006).

19. See in this context Jeremy Youde's (2005b: 430–431) study on the development of a counter-epistemic community regarding HIV in South Africa. The creation of a new South African identity actually impeded the ability of South Africa to confront HIV/AIDS, with Thado Mbeki ‘employ[ing] narratives of political resistance to white domination and its global order’, thus ‘… The twin forces of history and identity have made the South African government reluctant to embrace public health interventions for AIDS’.

20. Since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, this view was accelerated by the proponents of a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA). One of the leading proponents of RMA, Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, following a January 2002 speech given by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, stated in terms similar to those used by Boot: ‘The most important transformation that we're facing is the transformation from the Industrial to the Information Age.’ Secretary Rumsfeld Speaks on ‘21st Century Transformation’ of US Armed Forces (transcript of remarks and question and answer period), http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=183, accessed April 4, 2007.

21. http://www.cfr.org/publication/12450/

22. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_orbat.htm As a percentage of the American population this equates to roughly 2.15% (1918) and 0.000583% (2007) of the American population, respectively. Population of USA in 1918, 92 000 000 (Ellis and Cox 2001: 244); and in 2007: 301,542,006, from USA ‘Population Clock’ estimate, available at: http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html [accessed 5 April 2007].