War in Europe?

From Impossible War to Improbable Peace

Thibault Muzergues

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000536614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this highly provocative and documented book, Thibault Muzergues describes how war in Europe is now more likely than it has been for at least the past 30 years, how it might come back to Europe and what Europeans can do to avoid getting drawn again in fratricide conflicts.

Many consider Europe a continent of peace, with NATO guaranteeing its security and the EU providing the political glue for a Europe Whole and Free. But what if this was not the case anymore? What if, after a decade of crisis, today's Europe was much more fragile than we thought? The author challenges our assumptions about peace in Europe and forces us to face the realities of a world that has become much more dangerous. Far from being apocalyptic, this book serves as an advance warning to the dangers, both internal and external that are now closing in on Europe – and suggests solutions to avoid them.

This book will be key reading for those interested in European politics and history, the European Union, security, and strategic studies, and more broadly to current affairs and international relations.

PART 1
War and EuropeIt’s a long story

1 RomanceWar and Europe until 1914

DOI: 10.4324/9781003215790-3

When Robert Kagan drew his famous parallel between Europeans hailing from Venus and Americans hailing from Mars in the early twenty-first century, he was of course doing this in the context of the split that was taking place between “old Europe” and the United States over Iraq. But the author himself warned his readers that this state of things was the result of a reversal of roles after 1945 – prior to that, it was the Europeans who were warriors, binging on power while the Americans were the isolationists and pacifists.¹ Indeed, for a very long time, Europe had a passionate relationship with war: not only was it part of Europe’s DNA, but it was also what allowed Europeans to dominate the world in the nineteenth century. The paradox, of course, is that war also ruined the continent in the twentieth century, leading to a breakup between Europe and Mars that, for a long time, was thought to be definitive – leading Robert Kagan to his conclusions about Europeans coming from Venus and Eurocrats in Brussels to proclaim that “Europe is peace” – here again something that might look (partially) true from a perspective of the late-twentieth-century Brussels bubble but completely off the mark in the greater historical perspective.

Europe has a long common history with war, and it is precisely because the relationship is complex that it is necessary to look at it in more detail. Otherwise, we will not be able to understand why Europeans curbed their natural warring instincts in the twentieth century and why the conditions that made the “Long Peace”² possible since 1945 have recently started to fade away. But before talking about the divorce between Europe and Mars, it is worth looking in detail at their long honeymoon.

War and the state of nature

Are human beings naturally inclined toward violence and war, or are they on the contrary peaceful animals that have been corrupted by society and private property? The debate has been raging for centuries between the man-is-a-wolf-to-man discourse of Thomas Hobbes and the descriptions of the peaceful savage dear to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Unfortunately, research in social sciences since then does not seem to have brought us any closer to solving this philosophical mystery. Among the twentieth-century anthropologists who took part in the debate using their own social science tools, two names stand out: Margaret Mead and her study among the peaceful Samoans,³ on the one hand, and Napoleon Chagnon⁴ and his works on the warring Yanomami tribe in the Amazon basin. Each came to almost opposite conclusions about the presence of violence and war in primitive societies – and each was accused of amateurish behavior, falsifying their research, or even in the case of Chagnon conspiring with the Brazilian government to divide and conquer the subject of their studies.⁵

The controversies surrounding both anthropologists may tell us a lot about the endemic sectarian and verbal violence that exists between researchers in the field of social sciences, but it does not help much to resolve the question of humanity’s natural penchant for war or peace. A biological approach can be equally confusing: on the one hand, it is beyond doubt that violence is everywhere in the animal world, with teeth, tusks and horns being developed over time by animals as “weapons” to survive – following Hobbes’ argument, if wolf is a wolf for itself, it seems reasonable to imagine that man in the state of nature should be a wolf to man. But violence is not warfare – war is an organized form of violence involving more or less distinct groups of individuals, and it thus requires social skills to be waged – which means that only certain types of animals, such as ants, apes and humans have acquired the ability organize collectively to attack an enemy, whether for food, territory or reproductive purposes. But not all social animals engage in organized violence: while chimpanzees are naturally inclined toward territorial violence and organize murderous raids into enemy territory,⁶ bonobos, other close cousins of humans, are not at all inclined toward violence. In fact, their propensity to settle their conflicts through love rather than war has led biologists to give them the nickname of “hippie-chimps.”⁷

Recent research tends to suggest that humans tend more toward the killing chimp than the hippie chimp, though. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson argue in their book on the origins of human violence among the great apes⁸ that for geographical, genetical (but also gender) reasons, it is the violent, territorial and possessive nature of apes that is most commonly found in the behavior of gangs of hunter-gatherers – they may prefer intimidation (to minimize the risk) when they are unsure of the balance of power, but they are also capable of staggering violence when it is clearly in their favor. This leads Francis Fukuyama to conclude that there is a natural propensity for man to use violence to settle conflicts:⁹ humans are tribal animals by nature, which means that they will want to protect members of their group (seen in a very strict and narrow sense) and attack those who are not part of the group. This does not, however, exclude another penchant for peace: depending on the balance of power, and often after a fierce fight that will decimate a group, it is not uncommon for survivors to become part of the winning group. Even if humans are not totally violent by nature, organized violence is clearly part of their daily life.

Archeology seems to confirm this thesis, with hard evidence of armed conflict actually going back a long way in time – 14,000 years ago, about 9,000 years before the appearance of the first states.¹⁰ Illinois University professor Lawrence H. Keeley has also shown that the state of peace is by no means what defines the history (and prehistory) of humanity, quite the contrary. According to his research, between 90% and 95% of all known societies practice or have practiced war.¹¹ This does not mean, of course, that war is necessarily a natural state for mankind, since peace is sought when groups have an interest in it. No society has been able to survive in a permanent state of war, and evidence shows that humanity evolves in a spacetime where periods of peace alternate with periods of war. Moreover, war is not the only instrument of conflict resolution for mankind: when the balance of power is obvious before the fight, flight, cooperation or submission are equally instinctive choices for a group.

To the extent that humanity alternates between war and peace, can we isolate certain conditions that would make war more likely in one environment than in another? This is where geography kicks in.

Prisoner of Mars?

Although Greek mythology portrayed the young maid Europe as a captive of Zeus, a more modern perspective of the tale would more actually depict here as a prisoner of Mars, if not symbolically then at least physically – or to be more precise, geographically. As American author Robert Kaplan explains in his 2012 book, geography has done much to constrain human decision and attitudes, and strategists and politicians alike have begun to recover a certain awareness of its importance over the past two decades: if “The 1990s saw the map reduced to two dimensions because of air power […] soon after the three-dimensional map would be restored in the mountains of Afghanistan and the treacherous alleyways of Iraq.”¹²

This is not to say that we should rely on geography only: as Kaplan himself concedes, it “informs, rather than determines. Geography […] is not synonymous with fatalism. But it is, like the distribution of economic and military power themselves, a major constraint – and an instigator of – the actions of states.”¹³ Technological advances may well transform our environment and free us from some of these physical constraints, but freedom will always be partial or at least fragile: while the Internet allows for instant communication between individuals, it does not replace a physical encounter between them. And while a bridge can allow us to cross rivers, lakes and straits, as soon as it is swept or blown away, the obstacle it was supposed to eliminate reappears instantaneously. Whether we like it or not, we can only escape the constraints of geography at our own risk, as the American military (re-) discovered in Vietnam and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this sense, the geography of Europe tells us a lot about its nature. And when it comes to war, even a superficial look at the physical map of the continent leads to the conclusion that Europe is probably the most perfect place in the world to prepare, create and sustain warfare. From a geopolitical point of view, Europe differs from other continents by three major characteristics: first, its particularly rugged terrain with many mountain ranges clearly cuts it into many small pieces; the Alps are a good example as they mark (some would say create) a border between Latin Europe to the South and Germanic Europe to the North. Second, and this is partially a result of the first point, Europe also stands out with its rugged coasts, which are themselves home to thousands of coves, bays and, importantly, islands and peninsulas – which themselves are very indented and encircled by numerous seas (the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea in the West, the Baltic Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the North, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea in the South). Third, Europe opens up to its East to the vast Eurasian plain, and this unclear eastern border makes it difficult to define where Europe ends or where it begins: nineteenth-century geographers arbitrarily opted for the Ural Mountains, but this “natural” border between Europe and Asia is neither intangible (the ancient Greeks made their world end at the Don, not in the Urals) nor apolitical – including the South Caucasus as a European Mountain chains and Mount Ararat (5,137 meters) as its summit carries consequences as to where Georgia and Armenia, for example, can legitimately claim European aspirations.

These three physical characteristics have led historically to very a high degree of political fragmentation in Europe, making its pacification very difficult, if not impossible. First, mountain ranges are obstacles to communication between peoples; they, therefore, favor the constitution of distinct communities and institutions: just as the Alps crystallized a North–South divide between Latin and Germanic Europeans so the mountains surrounding the Pannonian Plain (the Alps in the West, the Carpathians in the North and East and the Balkans in the South) literally enclosed the Magyar conquerors of the ninth century in what became greater Hungary until 1919. These “natural borders” are, of course, at the origin of the extraordinary diversity that is constitutive of Europe, but this diversity is also a source of conflicts and, therefore, of potential wars. Diversity is also encouraged by the presence, on Europe’s maritime peripheries, of many islands, difficult to subjugate – Britain, although close to the mainland, has not been conquered since 1066. The same could be said of Europe’s numerous peninsulas: the three great southern land protrusions are also civilizational worlds in themselves, and the rugged terrain helps to further fragment them linguistically, culturally and sometimes politically. The Iberian Peninsula is a prime example of this: apart from Spain and Portugal, the Catalans, Basques and Galicians all claim a heritage and a language of their own. Diversity is also present on the Italian Peninsula, which was only re-unified in the middle of the nineteenth century, after 1,400 years of divisions; finally, the name “Balkans” itself suggests in our vocabulary extreme fragmentation.

The combination of rugged terrain and jagged coastlines also favors a remarkable diversity in the flow of rivers, which are particularly effective vehicles for forming homogenous cultures: it is difficult to imagine the development of modern America without considering the importance of the Mississippi River and its waterways for the dissemination of goods, passengers and also newspapers, music and language in the nineteenth century – especially before the railway revolution.¹⁴ Similarly, Chinese civilization could only develop around two river basins, the Yellow River and the Yangtze, which flowed in the same direction and were quickly connected by a canal – allowing those who controlled these two rivers, from the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty to Mao, to dominate the Middle Kingdom. But Europe’s great rivers do not follow any of these logics: the Rhine flows from South to North into the North Sea, the Danube flows into the Black Sea following a West-East course and most of the other rivers (Seine, Po, Elba, Vistula, etc.) remain small in size compared to the Mekong, Nile or Ganges, which are all civilization-markers. Here again, geography favors fragmentation: where control of the Mississippi guarantees that of a vast plain stretching from the Appalachians to the Rockies, where the submission of the Yellow and Blue Rivers in the East allows almost uncontested domination of the vast expanses that make the “Chinese world”, control over one or even two rivers does not guarantee domination over Europe – or even of one of its main peninsulas: if control of the Po or the Tiber guaranteed control of Italy, it would not have waited 1,500 years to be reunited.

If geographical fragmentation favors political fragmentation, the latter in turns favors conflict, which can easily turn into war: in a single, geographically framed ensemble like China, there is no other way out of dissent than victory, submission or death: if a group fell out of favor, flight through the Himalayan mountains, the Gobi desert or the vast Siberian forests remained an option, but the high risk of the enterprise made it extremely difficult for large numbers of people to flee, while distance made it impossible for the groups to then organize into rival principalities that could fight back into enemy territory. Europe’s geography, on the other hand, is full of options for would-be renegades: even if hunted down by an organized state on a given territory, rebels could always flee into the nearby mountains and settle there to regain strength, organize guerillas and counterattack (a recurring feature of Balkan and medieval Italian history); they could also leave to a nearby island and either take over its administration to organize it as a rival separate entity or serve for a sovereign with no interest in seeing the mainland unified – an enterprise made easier by the physical protection of the seas (any allusion to the history of the United Kingdom’s history of relations in Europe would, of course, be fortuitous).

Finally, the lack of clear natural borders is an aggravating factor for Europe’s securit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the author
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 War and Europe: It’s a long story
• PART 2 Perilous present
• PART 3 The future
• Index