ABSTRACT
War, wrote Clausewitz, is the continuation of politics by other means.1 In this famous statement Clausewitz defines war as a political act – the political object being the first and highest consideration in the conduct of war. An alternative iteration of Clausewitz’s famous dictum may be to say that war is the application of regulation through the use of force. By applying a wide definition of regulation as ‘all forms of social control, state and non-state, intended and unintended’,2 we see that war is a logical (final) choice when regulators find themselves in competition with one another. When two competing regulatory authorities, A and B, attempt to impose their regulatory ideologies upon a group of persons (or upon a geographical place) competition for acceptance may occur at several levels. At a socioeconomic level, regulators may compete for recognition by offering economic or social incentives, thereby utilising the market to achieve a settlement. Alternatively, competing regulators may appeal directly to the public at large to safeguard their regulatory role by winning the support of a majority (or a sufficiently large minority) of the populous. This, of course, forms the heart of democratic
regulation by popular government. This technique is also used though by unelected regulators to gain the popular high ground over potential competitors.3 In such situations we may say that they are seeking to obtain a social or community-based settlement. Finally, regulators may seek the protection of a more senior regulatory authority. By appealing to those with power to decide who should regulate and how, junior regulatory authorities seek protection from their senior partner. In effect this happens frequently: regulatory bodies often lobby government to safeguard their regulatory domain, and in many cases to seek to extend it further.4 Such competition for recognition finds its basis in structures of control or hierarchies. Thus we can see that competition for recognition, capacity to regulate, and for finances and resources occurs frequently between regulators. The ultimate expression of competition for resources, recognition, power and finances is when two nations (competing regulators) go to war over an area of land or an issue of political or religious ideology. Thus war is the continuation of regulation by other means. This though is only the beginning of regulatory competition and the regulatory web.
