Did Europe Learn to Live in Peace?

There is something extraordinary about Europe that we hardly notice anymore. For more than eighty years, France and Germany have not fought each other. Neither have Germany and Poland, France and Britain, or any of Western Europe’s major powers.

That does not mean Europe has enjoyed eighty years of peace. It hasn’t. We had the wars in Yugoslavia and Kosovo, and today there is a brutal war in Ukraine. What is extraordinary is something else: for centuries, Europe’s great powers regularly settled their differences through war, and after 1945 they stopped doing so.

We Europeans have a rather comforting explanation for this. We learned. After two world wars, we finally understood where nationalism could lead us. France and Germany reconciled, economies became intertwined, common institutions were built and eventually we created the European Union.

All of that is true. But something else happened after 1945 that tends to receive less attention: the Americans stayed.

This is where an uncomfortable historical comparison becomes interesting. Not because the United States is Rome or because postwar Europe became an American province. That would be absurd. But there is something about the function of the Pax Romana that deserves a second look.

Rome did not magically transform Gauls, Iberians, Greeks or Germans into beings of light. Their identities, interests and rivalries did not disappear. What Rome created was a larger order capable of keeping many of those rivalries within limits.

So perhaps, separated by two thousand years of history, we should ask a similar question about Europe after 1945. Did Europeans stop fighting because we finally changed, or did we also change because a new political and military architecture made fighting each other much more difficult?

It is not just a provocative historical analogy. NATO itself, when describing the reasons for its creation, lists three original purposes: deterring Soviet expansionism, encouraging European political integration and preventing the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence.

That last point is easily forgotten. The people who designed the postwar system did not behave as if European nationalism had suddenly disappeared. They had seen too much to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)