Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? - James J. Sheehan - Boo... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/books/review/Wheatcroft...

February 10, 2008

POLITICS ISSUE

Europeans Are From Venus

By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

At the time of the World Cup the summer before

WHERE HAVE ALL THE SOLDIERS GONE?
last, there was a nice cartoon in the papers by
Oliphant, with two panels. One showed “Soccer as The Transformation of Modern Europe.
seen by Americans,” a group of dainty chaps
prancing lightly across the grass with purses By James J. Sheehan.
dangling from their limp wrists, and the other, Illustrated. 284 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $26.
“American football as seen by Europeans,” a heap
of brutally moronic humanoids using severed
limbs to batter each others’ brains out.

Yes, that sums up this reciprocal perception rather well — and it might have hinted at a contrast going
beyond sports. The delicate midfield artists of Barcelona and Arsenal are vegetarian Venusians, shall we
say? While the ferocious Giants and Patriots linebackers could be called Martian carnivores. The very games
look like a metaphor for the gulf, growing between the two continents since World War II, that was the
subject of Robert Kagan’s “Of Paradise and Power” in which he denounced sybaritic, pacifistic Europe on
behalf of “Americans from Mars.”

As James J. Sheehan neatly observes in “Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?” Kagan’s philippic was
published on Feb. 5, 2003, just 10 days before Europe saw the largest political demonstration in its history.
More than half a million marched in Berlin to protest the imminent Iraq war, with other huge rallies in
Rome, Barcelona and London (prompting Tony Blair’s bizarre comparison of the number of demonstrators
with the number of Saddam Hussein’s victims). This outpouring of popular feeling against war no doubt
confirmed Kagan in his view that those “Europeans from Venus” are now incapable of the use of military
force that still comes naturally to Americans, and that it was “time to stop pretending that Europeans and
Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world.”

However that may be, it’s a surely astonishing fact that no European war has been fought for more than 60
years, at least outside the ruins of Yugoslavia. Western Europe has become politically and socially
demilitarized to a degree once unimaginable; after so many centuries of bloody conflict, Europeans don’t
want to study war no more. In his scintillating tour d’horizon — and de force — Sheehan suggests that such
obsolescence of war is specifically “the product of Europe’s distinctive history in the 20th century,” and he
argues that it has created a new kind of European state along with “a dramatically new international system
within Europe.”

There had been an earlier age of peace. The half-century following Waterloo was notably pacific after the
violence from which it had emerged, and 1871 to 1914 saw the longest period until now without any war at
all between larger European powers. There was besides a vigorous peace movement. Sheehan describes the
vogue for such books as Bertha von Suttner’s “Lay Down Your Arms,” Ivan Bloch’s “Future of War,” which
inspired the 1899 Hague peace conference, and Norman Angell’s “Great Illusion.” So it was that “at the

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beginning of the 20th century, as at the beginning of the 21st, a relatively peaceful Europe lived in a
dangerously violent world.”

And yet even then there were powerful contrary forces plainly visible. In that age of ever more strident
nationalism, chauvinists saw the army — and war — as the crucible forging national unity. Great powers
displayed their greatness with mass conscript armies, uniforms were seen everywhere, and when a
Bulgarian general said in 1910 that “we have become the most militaristic state in the world” it wasn’t a
lament but a boast (not to say one of the many fascinating quotations with which Sheehan’s book is
studded). An unmistakable mood was bored with the very achievements of consensual government and
material improvement, while “the revolt of the masses” itself had military implications, as some saw: well
before 1914 Churchill said with chilling prescience that democracy was more vindictive than oligarchy, and
“the wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings.”

In the end the Party of Peace did win, but only after the catastrophe between 1914 and 1945, with bloodshed
surpassing anything ever seen and an utterly unparalleled murder of innocents; a regression that remains
an inexplicable moral mystery. In those years one might say that the best lacked all conviction and the worst
were full of passionate intensity: even after the carnage of the trenches, an important minority — Russian
Communists as well as Italian Fascists — still believed in “the regenerating value of violence,” and this was
brilliantly exploited by Hitler. When the next war came it was waged just as he demanded, “with the greatest
brutality and without mercy.”

Although Sheehan’s title alludes to Europe since 1945, almost two-thirds of his narrative deals with the
years up to then — but in a way those earlier years answer the question he poses. By the second half of the
20th century, having given a most vivid demonstration of Walter Benjamin’s saying that civilization and
barbarism are far from incompatible, Europe was exhausted and ashamed. For all the exigencies of the cold
war, there was an overwhelming desire never again to see real war, between France and Germany or among
their neighbors.

The trente glorieuses after VE-Day saw three decades of astonishing economic growth, which coincided with
another most remarkable change: “With or without a fight, Europeans abandoned their empires.” This
proved pure benefit for Europe, if not for the former colonies, and its further significance was that, as
Sheehan says in a typically perceptive phrase, the brute force with which empire had been won and held
now seemed anachronistic, “part of a vanished world in which the ability to wage war had been centrally
important to what it meant to be a state.”

From the 1970s the economy stalled while Europe faced numerous social problems. And yet as the cold war
ran down the clock, it became gradually clearer that liberal democracy and a market economy mitigated by
welfare had won a complete political victory over “actually existing socialism.” At the same time Europe was
fully “civilianized”: conscription was abandoned, armies themselves assimilated the values of civilian society
and, as the great English military historian Michael Howard has put it, “death was no longer seen as being
part of the social contract.”

But life is full of surprises. Sheehan’s book is sprinkled with confident but foolish predictions, like H. N.
Brailsford averring in the early summer of 1914 that “there will be no more wars among the six great
powers,” or The Economist in September of that year dilating on “the economic and financial impossibility
of carrying out hostilities many more months on the present scale.”Just over 70 years later, as cocksure as
ever and as wrong, that magazine asserted in 1985 “that nothing much will have changed by the year 2025.”
Shortly after those words were published, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet empire imploded and savage
violence consumed the Balkans, whence so many of Europe’s woes had long stemmed.

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Here Sheehan is most sagacious. He sees that the game was up for the Soviet regime the moment Gorbachev
disavowed “force and the threat of force,” and he gets the break-up of Yugoslavia right. In late 1991, at the
insistence of the German government (itself egged on, one might add, by Serb-bashing right-wing
columnists in papers like The Frankfurter Allgemeine), the European Union recognized the sovereignty of
Slovenia and Croatia, and then Bosnia, crucially and disastrously before the nationality questions in those
territories had been resolved. This encouraged a competitive round of territorial acquisition and ethnic
expulsion and “intensified the predatory war being fought by Serbs and Croatians against Bosnia.”

It was of course ludicrous as well as hubristic for Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg, to say at
this juncture that “the hour of Europe has dawned,” but trans-Atlantic denunciations of European weakness
were also misplaced. When the tub-thumpers of Capitol Hill and the op-ed pages were asked 15 years ago
what kind of military intervention in the Balkans they had in mind, it turned out to mean American air
cover while the Western Europeans provided the P.B.I., as the British Army used to say, the poor bloody
infantry, a division of labor that had little appeal in Europe.

What sense does “Mars and Venus” have in the light of the past century, and the price paid by different
countries? In 1914-18, 1.3 million Frenchmen (those cheese-eating surrender monkeys) were killed
defending their country, which is to say more than twice as many as all the Americans who have died in
every foreign war from 1776 until today. There has been much anguish about American casualties in Iraq,
where last year was the worst since 2003, with all of 901 deaths. Reading that, the European may reflect
silently on the dates Aug. 22, 1914, when 27,000 French soldiers were killed in a day, or July 1, 1916, when
20,000 British troops died.

It isn’t necessary to agree with Evelyn Waugh writing to his friend Graham Greene — “Of course the
Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate
monarchs for fear of military service” — to see clearly that the United States isn’t a warlike country at all. In
many ways it has always been more deeply peaceable in its instincts than ever Europe was.

And is the civilianization of Europe such a bad thing? Although there has been much grumbling about the
Bundeswehr’s inadequate contribution in Afghanistan, some of us cannot see it as an occasion for pure
regret if the Germans have changed character so drastically. In World War II, the Wehrmacht was
unquestionably the best army, man for man and unit for unit, not least against the less ferocious “citizens in
uniform” of the British and American Armies. Is that really a cause for British or American shame? When
German rearmament began in the 1950s, at American urging, Gustav Heinemann resigned as Adenauer’s
interior minister, with the words, “God took arms out of our hands twice; we must not take hold of them a
third time.” Was he so wrong?

In a bravura final chapter Sheehan explains “Why Europe Will Not Become a Superpower.” As he
recognizes, the European Union is already a superstate economically, but its failure to develop a common
foreign and defense policy will continue to disappoint some enthusiasts. Disingenuous and ignorant at once,
Blair once said that no one had ever envisaged a United States of Europe. In fact that very phrase has been
current since the mid-19th century. But it was always a false analogy, illustrating Johnson’s saying that life’s
follies stem from the attempt to emulate that which we do not resemble: the European Union no more
resembles the American Union than the Soviet Union, and why should it?

It is not complacent to say that “the European idea” has in many ways been a heartening success, even if it
never achieved all that its early proponents hoped. Europeans may have chosen butter instead of guns, and
Europe as a whole may even be what Churchill said he hoped to see Germany become after 1945 — fat but
impotent. And yet, while the continents are certainly drifting apart in some ways (secular Europe looks on

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with bewilderment at the contest between preacher-men in this presidential campaign), Europeans aren’t
quite the decadent lotus-eaters that some Americans claim.

One can talk about European soft power against American hard power, but the point is made better by
Sheehan in the peroration to this excellent book. The birth of the Bolshevik regime — and then of Fascist
and National Socialist regimes — was a direct consequence of the “intense violence” then poisoning Europe.
The astonishingly peaceful collapse of Communism rather more than 70 years later reflected in turn “the
decline of violence that, by the 1980s, had transformed international and domestic politics throughout
Europe”: a change for the better if ever there was one. To put it another way, soccer is not only England’s
and Europe’s gift to all mankind. It really is a better game.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include “The Controversy of Zion,” “The Strange Death of Tory England” and
“Yo, Blair!” He is writing a book on Churchill’s reputation before and since his death.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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