Will War in Europe Ever Happen Again

Laust Schouenborg, PhD Candidate, London School of Economic science and Visiting Fellow, Forum on Contemporary Europe
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Information technology is quite remarkable that a continent, which for much of its modernistic history was embroiled in internecine warfare, now seems to be i of the most stable regions of the world. Since the finish of Globe War Two, no wars have been fought in Europe. That is if 1 excludes the Balkan wars of the 1990s, something I will render to below. It is not surprising, therefore, that scholars working within the subject area of International Relations have been eager to explain this apparent puzzle in an try to meet this state of diplomacy maintained and/or to transfer any "lessons learned" to other regions of the world. In this essay I volition set out three sets of explanations which are debated in the literature 1) Cold War overlay arguments; two) democracy and economic interdependence arguments; and 3) security community arguments. These should not necessarily be seen as competing explanations - although they are sometimes presented in this style - but rather as different "lenses" through which to focus on a particular aspect of the puzzle.

Common cold War Overlay

The starting point for the first set of explanations or arguments is the item state of affairs Europe found itself in at the end of World War II. Germany had been defeated and divided into two occupation zones: a Western 1, governed by Britain, France and the United states of america, and an Eastern ane, administered by the Soviet Union. In the years that followed, this partition between E and W was extended to comprehend the whole of Europe as the former allies who had fought confronting Nazi Germany embarked on a new conflict which was soon known as the Cold War. Winston Churchill, the wartime prime minister of Great britain, in 1946 spoke of an "iron curtain" having descended upon Europe, dividing the continent from Stettin in the Baltic Sea to Trieste in the Adriatic Ocean. The Western nations, under the leadership of the United States, banded together in the NATO alliance, and the Eastern nations, led by the Soviet Union, in the Warsaw Pact.

The core arguments which follow from this are that the overarching disharmonize betwixt the 2 so-called super-powers, the United States and the Soviet Matrimony, armed with nuclear weapons, worked to suppress whatever open hostilities within Europe. This was why it was termed a Cold War. Moreover, it also helped to suppress traditional rivalries within each opposing 'camp': for example, (West) Germany and French republic, and (Due east) Germany and Poland.  To put it bluntly, information technology was no longer feasible to have isolated wars between individual European states, everything was subsumed within the larger Eastward-West confrontation, which due to the presence of nuclear weapons, had to remain cold. A hot state of war, information technology was believed, would inevitably pb to mutual annihilation.

Democracy and Economic Interdependence

The first thing that should be noted is that commonwealth and economic interdependence can be considered 2 different sets of arguments. Even so, most of the time they are presented as interconnected and hence this will also be the way they are dealt with here. The basic premise of these types of arguments is that in the aftermath of World War 2 all the nations of Western Europe became democracies, and democracies do non seem to wage wars against each other. Scholars accept come up with a number of supporting arguments for why this is the case, ranging from democratic norms working against the use of force in international relations to various checks and balances in democratic systems that make it hard for hawkish conclusion-makers to cull such policies without the consent of the people. The latter argument is frequently likewise based on the assumption that a given people will be rationally opposed to war, since information technology is likely to carry almost of the costs. This fits nicely with the economical interdependence argument, which holds that democratic nations seem to trade more with each other and thus have stiff economical incentives not to jeopardise this with state of war.

During the Common cold War, these kinds of arguments obviously only practical to the democracies of Western Europe, merely since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the enlargement of the EU and NATO, they have been marshalled in support of a pan-European peace.

Security Community

The indicate of divergence for the third ready of arguments is that two or more peoples, regardless of their grade of government, may as a thing of fact develop a very hostile relationship or a very friendly one. They are thus about commonage feelings of enmity and amity. The concept of a "security community" refers to the latter state of affairs, where state of war has become unthinkable as a means of settling political differences amongst a given set of states. Hither there are too various supporting arguments, some focusing on amity as a role of interdependence (both economic and societal), and some focusing on the incremental process of alter in collective identities. In the European context, these types of arguments are used to explain why France and Federal republic of germany, which could very well exist seen as the primary protagonists in both world wars, reconciled and are now key partners in the EU. An important aspect of this way of thinking about the problem of war is also that politicians, and states more generally, can consciously work to change a hostile relationship. Staying with the Franco-German case, the 2 states decided to establish the Coal and Steal Community in the 1950s (the forerunner of the EU) for the explicit purpose of controlling the 2 main resource needed for war, and also enacted diverse programs of reconciliation. The achievement of a security community was thus not an accident, but a consciously pursued policy.

Will State of war Stay Obsolete?

This is obviously the natural question which follows from the discussion above. Currently Europe is still at peace, just in that location are sure political developments that can potentially challenge this state of affairs. For one there were the Balkan wars of the 1990s mentioned in the introduction. Some would attribute these to the disappearance of the Common cold State of war overlay with the break-up of the Soviet Wedlock and the "window of opportunity" this provided for onetime conflicts between indigenous groups to reassert themselves. Regardless of whether this estimation is right or wrong, the Balkan tragedy demonstrated that fifty-fifty during our modernistic era, war could notwithstanding threaten to engulf the continent. More recently, the relationship between Russian federation and the West has become quite strained, specially post-obit the Russian-Georgian war in 2008. This has led some politicians and commentators to speak of a new cold war in the making. Dire predictions are something international relations scholars are experts in. However, information technology is perhaps wise never to cease pondering the question of whether and under what conditions Europe volition stay at peace. After all, several tens of millions of people had their lives cut short here during the first half of the 20th century.

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Source: https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/why_war_has_become_obsolete_in_europe