FAREWELL TO ARMS
By Jay Winter
The American Prospect
April, 2008
Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University,
is the author of 13 books and served as co-writer and chief historian
for the PBS Series, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century.
CULTURE & BOOKS; Books; Pg. 40 VOLUME 19 NUMBER 4
WHERE HAVE ALL THE SOLDIERS GONE? THE TRANSFORMATION OF MODERN EUROPE
BY JAMES J. SHEEHAN, Houghton Mifflin, 284 pages, $26.00
TRY DRIVING FROM PARIS TO BERlin and you will understand that in Europe
today the only frightening extremes are the speeds at which motorists
drive on the Autobahn. It is a remarkable change for a continent that
not so long ago was consumed by the passions of war and wracked by
cruelty and suffering. In place of that strife are the mundane and
less terrifying tasks of securing the well-being of nations that
are self-conscious of their varying histories and eccentricities,
but whose borders resemble those of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
This transformation is the subject of James J. Sheehan’s Where Have
All the Soldiers Gone?, one of those rare books that rearranges the
terms of discussion of 20th-century European history. A distinguished
historian, recently retired from teaching at Stanford, Sheehan goes
one step beyond Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes–the best and most
stimulating synthesis to date–by showing that 1945, rather than 1968
or 1989, was the real point of no return throughout the continent.
Before 1945, states were sovereign entities that waged war. After
that date and over time, states voluntarily parted with some of
their sovereignty in joining a new Europe whose business was welfare,
not warfare.
Sheehan’s focus is this passage of Europe from "garrison" to "civilian"
states, the achievement that may now allow Europe to put its history
in its past. The change came about through two massive political
transformations after 1945. The first was the peaceful transition from
right-wing dictatorships to democracies first in Germany and Italy,
and then in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, whose political stability is
due in large part to their participation in the European Union. The
second was the relatively peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union and
its empire in Eastern Europe. Sheehan rightly emphasizes contingency in
these two processes. Without farsighted leaders like King Juan-Carlos
in Madrid or Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, these changes might have been
blocked or accompanied by significant bloodshed. But they were not,
probably because men and women all over Europe had had a surfeit of
violence and knew from their own and their families’ experiences what
that violence had meant. "Never again" was a phrase less associated
with the Holocaust after 1945 than with total war against civilians
and soldiers alike.
Here is the source of what Sheehan acknowledges to be a fundamental
divide between European and American visions of the state. Europeans
do not want a superstate that submerges the peculiarities of their
cheese and sausages; even less do they want a Europe that is armed
to the teeth. Americans are more divided on both points–the bland
homogenization of tastes and products, and the need to pay or to
force our grandchildren to pay for today’s perpetual war, the war
on terrorism.
A civilian state, Sheehan shows, is one incapable of fighting a war
without end. Let someone else fight that fight, most Europeans say.
And when isolated European leaders join the fight led by the White
House, the domestic political price they pay is very high. It is
at least arguable that all the domestic achievements of Tony Blair
over 10 years as British prime minister were thrown away when he
stood shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush. Not only did he
undermine the massive majority his Labour Party had forged after the
dark years of Thatcherism, but his willingness to believe the lies
the American regime told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
in 2003 undermined to the vanishing point his credibility with the
electorate. So did the foolish stance taken a year later by Spanish
Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar that the bombing of a commuter train
near Madrid was the work of Basque terrorists (Islamists proved to
be responsible). Aznar made this statement on the eve of elections,
and thereby through his transparent lies, ensured his own defeat. In
rejecting Blair and Aznar, the people of Britain and Spain were making
clear their opposition to an American-style presidential executive,
someone all too ready to send in the marines and to lie about the
reasons.
Leaders of civilian states lie, too. Witness the case of French
Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, the poet of morality who went
to the U.N. Security Council to condemn America. Not long thereafter
he was involved in blackening the name of his chief rival for the
French presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy, by apparently getting one of
his own aides to tap into banking records and to invent and record a
nonexisting account for his rival’s supposed kickbacks from securing
defense contracts. It was de Villepin and not Sarkozy who got caught
and is paying the price. There is no point in claiming any greater
moral vision among Europe’s leaders than among America’s.
Instead, Sheehan points to the role played by millions of ordinary
Europeans who voted with their feet and their pocketbooks against the
garrison state. In 2003, there were massive demonstrations against the
war in Iraq, a moment captured brilliantly by Ian McEwan in his novel
Saturday (2005). Tony Blair ignored the protests, only to be forced
into a somewhat manic retirement, pretending to know how to bring peace
to the Middle East. His failure was inevitable because he tried to use
the resources of a civilian state–and Britain is emphatically such
a state, especially now that the conflict in Northern Ireland appears
to be defused–not for civilian purposes but on behalf of his American
partner in regime change in the Middle East. This decision effectively
destroyed not only his political career and legacy but probably his
party’s chances of remaining in power. Siding with the Americans over
Iraq also had economic consequences. With British state schools still
massively overcrowded and public transport both undercapitalized and
too expensive, should we be surprised that British voters find the
Iraq adventure both irrelevant to their concerns and slightly insane?
Sheehan rightly emphasizes the transformation of living standards
in Western Europe since 1945 in the process of Europeanization and
"civilianization." Europeans can afford the social state. There are
still gross inequalities in all the countries of the European Union,
but there is also a safety net for everyone who at one time or another
falls off the tightrope of the labor market or gets sick.
Garrison states are costly because they never stop devising new weapons
for their defense. And these weapons systems are now astronomically
expensive.
While Sheehan’s story is persuasive, he misses one aspect of the
transition from the garrison state to the civilian state: the creation
of a European human-rights regime. Nearly ten years before the Treaty
of Rome got the European Economic Union under way, the Council of
Europe, a body of independent states, ceded some of its sovereignty
by framing a European Convention on Human Rights. To enforce that
convention, a European Court of Human Rights opened its doors in 1950;
its decisions must now be written into the laws of member states.
This commitment matters. The obstacle to Turkey’s admission to Europe
is not just its military. Two other hurdles are its dreadful human
rights record and its refusal even to countenance the word "genocide"
to describe the extermination of approximately 1 million Armenians.
In a way, the Turks are still fighting World War I and trying to
defend the honor of the Kemalist revolution that gave birth to modern
Turkey by denying a crime that everybody with eyes to see accepts as
historical truth.
It is a pity that Sheehan left the rise of human-rights commitments
out of his story, because if he had included them, he would have seen
that the post-1945 human-rights movement was a product of many people
who learned to hate the garrison state by fighting in its defense.
Ex-soldiers were responsible for the transition at the heart of
Sheehan’s book. The man who presented the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights to the United Nations in Paris 60 years ago, Rene Cassin,
was a severely wounded veteran of World War I and un grand Resistant
of World War II. In his last years, he asked that the text of a BBC
address he delivered in September 1940 be placed in his coffin in
remembrance of the men with whom he had fought and suffered during
the Battle of the Marne in 1914. Soldiers of peace, he called them,
and he was right. The veterans’ movement he helped create was one of
the strongest voices for pacifism between the two world wars, and he
took that position directly into the planning of the postwar world
in 1941-1945. For Cassin and millions of others, states that violate
human rights are a threat to peace. The European human-rights movement
was pre-1945 pacifism projected onto the stage of European law after
1945. This was one of the sources of the judicial reconstruction
of Europe.
The role of human-rights law in the making of the new Europe is
significant in another way. At the heart of the Helsinki accords
of 1975 was the Soviet Union’s acceptance of human-rights monitors
in exchange for recognition of its western borders. Dissident groups
such as Charter 77 and Solidarity drew strength from that human-rights
commitment. The fall of the Soviet Union was overdetermined, but surely
one element in the story was the growing belief that states cannot
deny their citizens human rights in the way the Soviet leadership
regularly did. After the disastrous nuclear accident at Chernobyl in
1986, hundreds of apparatchiks got their families out and then calmed
down the populations in Ukraine by saying that nothing dangerous had
occurred. Garrison states do that; civilian states cannot.
Recently Walloons and Flamands in Belgium concluded a standoff that
left Belgium without a government for months. And yet the absence of a
ruling party, indeed the absence of a functioning state or executive
power, seemed to make no difference at all to the Belgian people or
to anyone. Those who control garrison states matter to the population;
those who control civilian states are less important because they can
do less damage. Millions of people in Europe today would be happiest
if (as in Italy, for instance) they had nothing to do with the state
and the state had nothing to do with them.
No, the state is not withering away. It is still robust, but older
ideas of sovereignty have gone. The state is no longer "a master in
his own castle," as Goebbels liked to say. What is different today,
and what is clarified by Sheehan’s lucid analysis, is the sense that
Europeans no longer have to fear their own states. Their states may be
massively incompetent and occasionally corrupt, but they don’t murder
their own citizens, they don’t exterminate, they don’t recognize the
power to go to war as the bottom line of any definition of what a
state is.
We are in James Sheehan’s debt for telling us in a powerful narrative
how this extraordinary change in the nature of the European state
came about. His book is one of those rare publications that makes its
readers feel not only better informed but also a bit more intelligent,
a bit more humane. The term "humane scholarship" can be a cliche;
here it is a description of the best that a historian can offer.