245 Alberto Bueno The Culture of Security and Defence: A Proposal for... in this manner, was “a conflict between states with a politically definable objective”50 and, exactly for this reason, an instrument of a political nature. This premise inspired the view that, in order to achieve military objectives, war effort would include a coun-try’s full capacity, which would involve society as a whole: defence thus concerns the community of citizens that comprises a nation state51. These ideas reveal the importance attached to’the people’when it comes to the suc-cess of a war venture, one of the vertices of the’trinity of war’presented by Clausewitz: the armed forces, as the volitional part; the government, as the rational part, and the people, as the passionate part52. Although these ideas may today lead to certain con-troversial aspects and must be qualified, it is vital to point out that we are not dealing with an original idea, since we appreciate how the population of a country has always been a major factor in the mainstay of national defence. War, far from being an exclu-sively military phenomenon, has been and continues to also be a political and social phenomenon53. Nonetheless, it is precisely this idea of all-out war that took hold towards the end of the 19th Century -with a clearly offensive tone- and which was to culminate in the two world wars, that was abandoned and instead we saw the criminalisation of this type of warfare and greater efforts made to avoid it. This idea of warfare is gradually yielding in the face of political thinking and attitudes that are more inclined to reflect the current concept of defence, an evolution which has involved a significant “shift in values”54 within European societies. The belligerent predisposition of states is losing ground to a restrictive defence-based concept of war, whereby it is understood only to be an action whose purpose is to protect the state and its citizens from attacks, threats, danger or harm, and which entails the use of force against the will of the state which has fallen victim to this attack in order to deal with an attack inflicted upon it55. 50 KALDOR, Mary, Las nuevas guerras. La violencia organizada en la era global, Barcelona, Tusquets, 2001, p. 31. 51 ALONSO, op. cit. 52 AZNAR, Federico, “Conflicto y opinión pública”, Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies, 2013, available online (consulted 23 February 2015): http://www.ieee.es/Galerias/fichero/docs_analisis/2013/DIEEEA35-2013_Conflicto_OpinionPubli-ca_ http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee FAFM.pdf. 53 José Luis Calvo asks the very pertinent question regarding where the fourth power, that is, mass media, would currently fit into the Clausewitzian trinity of war. CALVO, José Luis, «Tres ideas de Clausewitz que invi-tan actualmente a la reflexión», Grupo de Estudios en Seguridad Internacional, 2014, available online (consulted 1 June 2015): http://www.seguridadinternacional.es/blog.mosaico/?q=es/content/tres-ideas-de-clausewitz-que-invitan-actual-mente- la-reflexi%C3%B3n. 54 PALACIOS, op. cit., p. 15. 55 CALDUCH, op. cit., pp. 16-17; PALACIOS, op. cit., pp. 80-81.
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