Shattered World 4 : Global War

Historical Context: The Global Effect of World War I

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It is a stalemate which has left thousands of civilians dead. Commentators spoke of a last desperate gamble to bring an end to conflict that has gone on so long that there are western soldiers soon to be deployed to the country who were in nappies when it started in In Syria, where the civil war is now in its seventh year, there is no respite either. Ghouta, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus, is under daily bombardment after years of siege.

Militia manoeuvre for advantage across the country. If anyone thought the fall of Raqqa, the headquarters of Islamic State Isis , would bring an end to hostilities, they were sadly mistaken. There is South Sudan, where a vicious four-year-old civil war is intensifying, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where more protests ended in bloodshed last week. The east of the DRC was the crucible of a huge conflict that killed 5 million people between and and has remained unstable ever since. Thousands have died and millions have been displaced by conflict there in the last 18 months as anarchy overcomes swaths of the vast country.

Since then about 10, people have died, including 3, civilians, and more than 1. Despite a ceasefire deal, a low-intensity conflict has become the grinding everyday backdrop for a region that no longer sees a way out of its misery. To understand the duration of these conflicts we need to understand their nature. Most analysis focuses on states. Our maps show the world divided into nations. These are the building blocks of our political, legal, social and economic systems and, as has become so obvious in recent years, key to our identity.

In Afghanistan , the war is both to establish a state, and about differing visions of what form it should take. In Syria, the war is to maintain, or overthrow, a state. In Yemen, the war is to control one. States have also prolonged these conflicts and, in some cases, caused them.

The involvement of so many regional and international actors in Syria fuelling, whether deliberately or accidentally, violence. Yet, however important, states are far from the only protagonists in these conflicts. In two decades of covering dozens of conflicts around the world, I have reported on just two that involved the troops of two nations in direct confrontation. One was the short war between India and Pakistan in ; the second was the war in Iraq in According to researchers at the University of California, there are none more recent.

The front lines in these new conflicts often follow boundaries that divide clans or castes, not countries. They lie along frontiers between ethnic or sectarian communities, even those dividing, for example, pastoralists from herders or the landed from the landless, from those who speak one dialect or language from neighbours who speak another. These frontlines are not difficult to trace, on the map or on the ground.

In Mexico, Brazil, South Africa or the Philippines, there is huge violence associated with criminality and the efforts by states to stamp it out. There is violence perpetrated against women by those who fear progress in the struggle for a more equitable distribution of power, status and wealth. Our world may not be racked by conventional conflicts between nation states of previous ages, but it is still a very violent place.

The harsh reality may be that we should not be wondering why wars seem so intractable today, but why our time on this planet creates such intractable wars. The conflict in Syria will soon enter its eighth year and, though the fighting that once consumed much of the country has now been restricted to a much smaller area, the chance of real peace still looks very distant. The best that anyone can hope for is a slow evolution towards a precarious pause punctuated by bouts of appalling brutality as the regime of Bashar al-Assad, bolstered by support from Moscow and Tehran, makes efforts to reassert its authority over the shattered country.

What such efforts involve has become clear recently.

In the last few weeks, air strikes by Syrian planes have killed more than civilians in Ghouta , a suburb of Damascus held by the opposition since An estimated , civilians, already starved from years of blockade, are trapped amid relentless air strikes. Humanitarian groups are pleading for an urgent ceasefire to allow them inside. Aid workers say Syrian helicopters have been dropping barrel bombs - metal drums packed with explosives and shrapnel - on marketplaces and medical centres. Although Isis has now been forced from almost all of its territory in Syria , other hardline Islamist groups remain very active, including one powerful organisation linked to al-Qaida.

Armed opposition groups continue to receive logistical support and funding from the United States, Turkey and several Gulf countries. A Kurdish group has seized a swath of territory in the north-east. Successive efforts at peace negotiations have all failed. Why has the war lasted so long? The Syrian war has always been immensely complex, fought out along national, sectarian, ideological and ethnic divides.

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This alone would have guaranteed a lengthy conflict, even without the involvement of regional and international actors. The UN has been marginalised by power politics. The US has stood back. The result has been massive suffering and a broken country which, even if peace can be achieved, will need up to a trillion dollars to reconstruct itself. The toxic effects of the conflict have been felt across the world.

The chaos, and resulting war, in Yemen is now in its seventh year. Yemen, once a British colony, has never been stable, and was only united after brutal conflicts in the s. For more than a decade before the crisis of , corruption, unemployment, food shortages, a powerful tribal system, entrenched separatism in the south, and the involvement of regional powers had combined to maintain high levels of instability.

He was the only candidate. Hadi flees to Aden. It was late in entering the war, only in , but emerged far stronger than most other nations as it had not suffered either the bloodletting or the wasted industrial effort of the major European nations. Their experience and loss of life helped push demands for independence. India alone sent some , troops to fight for Britain. More than 10, never returned home. The First World War also heralded the birth of the League of Nations, a body of nation states to promote international peace and security. In the US would adopt a different approach.

The financial crash of brought misery across Europe. Few in Western Europe believed that Hitler was deadly serious about creating a Greater Reich across the European continent. There were also concerns that the reparations that had been demanded by France at Versailles had been too harsh, a view expressed eloquently in The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes. When London and Paris finally awoke to the threat it was too late.

By Hitler controlled half of Europe after a stunning series of Blitzkrieg victories. In , just thirteen years after the proclamation of the one thousand year Reich it was all over.

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Germany was divided and lay in ruins. It was the greatest and deadliest war in human history, with over 57 million lives lost. In combat, approximately eight million Russians, four million Germans, two million Chinese and one million Japanese soldiers lost their lives.

Britain and France each lost hundreds of thousands. The civilian toll was probably higher — an estimated 22 million Soviet citizens were killed, and six million Jews in the Holocaust. It would take a coalition of the UK, the US and the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler after six years of bloody warfare that again brought widespread death and destruction to Europe — and to many other parts of the world.

The war was not confined to Europe. It affected the Middle East, Africa and Asia causing untold suffering, not least when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in The war also increased demands for independence throughout much of the colonial empires still in European possession — the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in South East Asia, the Belgians in Central Africa, the British in India, etc.

This was a particularly traumatic and drawn out process for the French, in Algeria and in Vietnam where they fought prolonged and bitter wars in an attempt to maintain their colonial control. The defining paradigm for the next half century would be the Cold War. The Russian people had suffered immeasurably during the war, and western Russia was devastated by the land warfare which was primarily on Russian territory. But, in the process of defeating the Germans, the Russians had built a large and powerful army, which occupied most of Eastern Europe at the end of the war.

Spared the physical destruction of war, the US economy dominated the world economy by Vaccinations helped lower mortality rates and boosted population growth. Pro-gress in electronics and computers fundamentally transformed the post-war world. The de-velopment of the atomic bomb by European and American scientists during the war, not only changed the nature of potential future wars, but also marked the beginning of the nuclear power industry.

World War II also gave the impetus for the establishment of the United Na-tions in , with the full backing of the US and other major powers. There was a determination to avoid the mistakes of the interwar years which had exacerbated the Great Depression. One of the main results of the Second World War was the division of Europe.

Huge armies stared at each other through an Iron Curtain that ran through the heart of Europe. The US marshalled Western Europe into a system of containment aimed at limiting and ultimately diminishing Soviet power. The division of Europe froze political change for several decades.

Attempts by some Soviet satellite states to break free East Germany in , Hungary in , Czechoslovakia in were brutally suppressed by the Red Army. There was no possibility for the nations that had been bolted together in the state of Yugoslavia to establish their own identities. The pent up demand for independence would later tear the Balkans apart in the s after the death of President Tito. By the s it became clear that Soviet communism was failing to deliver the standard of living that most people enjoyed in the West.

The appointment of a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in , opened the path for a fundamental realignment of the European political landscape. His policies of glasnost and perestroika offered hope to the peoples of Eastern Europe and in he declined to send in the Red Army to suppress demonstrations for greater freedom in East Germany. The prescient founding fathers took the highly symbolic coal and steel industries as the starting point for a new community method of government. If France and Germany shared responsibility for the industries that were at the heart of the armaments industry then there really could be no further war between these two rivals.

This logic continued with the birth of the European Community in The desire to develop a new system of governance and avoid war as an instrument of policy was at the very heart of the discussions leading up to the Treaty of Rome. The EU was viewed then and continues to be viewed as a peace project.

Why is the world at war?

Until unification in Germany was content to take a back seat to the US on security matters and to France on EU matters. Germany was a Musterknabe of the EU and one of the strongest supporters of a federal Europe. This ap-proach began to change under the chancellorship of Gerhard Schroeder and accelerated under Angela Merkel. Germany began to play a more assertive role in defending its national interests. It swiftly became apparent that only Germany had the financial and economic muscle to rescue the debt-laden members of the eurozone.

But Germany received little thanks for its bail-out assistance. Anti-German sentiment was also to be found in many other countries, from Spain to Hungary. Even though Germany has become the undoubted leader of the EU it is still reluctant to play a dominant role in military matters. It contributes less to European security than Britain or France: This reflects a continuing horror of war in general and a determination that German troops should never again be used for the purposes of aggrandizement.

This had led to Berlin being at odds with its EU partners, especially France and the UK, over issues such as the intervention in Libya and the proposed intervention in Syria. The burden of the two world wars is much more obvious in Berlin than Paris or London. But the reluctance to use force to achieve political aims is widespread in the EU. The US continually presses the Europeans to spend more on defence, a plea that usually falls on deaf ears. The bloody conflict in the Balkans in the s, however, showed that war as a means to achieve political goals has not disappeared from the European continent.

The Russian military intervention in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in and its annexation of Crimea in showed that the Russian bear was also ready to use force to achieve its aims. The EU response as a conflict prevention manager and peacemaker has been patchy. Tony Blair hoped that the Balkans tragedy would push the Europeans to do more. Together with Jacques Chirac he promoted a plan for the EU to have its own defence forces. The ambitious aims outlined in , however, have never been realised. True, the EU has engaged in some useful peacekeeping operations in the Western Balkans and in parts of Africa.

But overall the EU is not perceived as a hard security actor. This again reflects the deeply ingrained memories of the horrors of war on the European continent, especially in Germany. The Russian de-stabilisation of Ukraine in the first half of has also brought challenges to Germany. Traditionally Germany has enjoyed a close and privileged relationship with Russia, partly due to historical ties including war guilt and partly due to economic and trade interests.

These economic ties led Germany to be very cautious about agreeing to pursue a sanctions policy against Russia. The group of Russlandversteher crossed party lines epitomised by former Chancellor Schroeder greeting Putin with a bear hug in St Petersburg at his 70th birthday party. Germany has also been to the fore in seeking a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis although it remains to be seen whether this will produce acceptable results.

The shadow of and is thus still present in Europe today. Perhaps the biggest change is that military power is far less significant in European politics than it was a century ago. There is little or no appetite for using force to achieve political goals. Defence spending remains low. The rise of television and social media has brought the horrors of land wars and casualties instantly to a broad public.

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One has only to compare the public and media reactions to one soldier killed in Afghanistan to the huge numbers killed at the Somme. But as the world moves from a hegemonic system based on the US hyper-power to a more multi-polar world this will have serious consequences for Germany and Europe. For Europe, will it redouble efforts to deepen the European integration project, trying to ensure a closer connection between the EU institutions and European citizens?

Or will it drift back into a system of nation states adopting beggar thy neighbour policies? As leader of Europe Germany again has a key role to play. It has also profited hugely from the EU and thus has a moral duty to ensure the continued success of the European project. These gains should not be under-estimated.

The Impact of the First World War and Its Implications for Europe Today

The anniversary of the First World War should give us the occasion to reflect on what kind of Europe we want. A Europe dominated by populists and nationalists has never brought a more peaceful or prosperous Europe. It has only led to conflict. But as the results of the European Parliament elections in May demonstrated we cannot take the progress in European integration since for granted.

We owe it to the fallen in both world wars to fight for a closer and more integrated Europe. For above all, it is about the people of Europe. The people of Europe are those who we are commemorating in this project. Portugal, a country full of hopes for the future in A country with very poor macroeconomic and social-development indicators, where most of the population had limited contact with the rest of the world, except those spread in the African colonies and in some European countries.

Greek democracy faced at least two major challenges over the past forty years, but has overcome both of them and despite the effects of the economic crisis which it currently faces, it can reform itself and develop further. This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.

This image is licensed under Creative Commons License. Who caused the war? Foreign policy implications The conflict had a global impact. Implications for Europe today Even though Germany has become the undoubted leader of the EU it is still reluctant to play a dominant role in military matters. Conclusion The shadow of and is thus still present in Europe today.

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