“War has had a profound impact on the development of Europe’s states and relations among them over time.”
By William Nester
WAR IN EUROPE began with the first human migrants. For tens of thousands of years, bands that encountered each other braced themselves to fight, flee, talk, or trade. Before the nuclear age, warfare was never more existential. A war party could ambush a band, slaughter its men, and seize its women, children, and goods. With time, bands allied with each other to form tribes that traded freely among their members and either warred or traded with rival tribes.
European ‘military history’ however began when the ancient Greeks and Romans began writing about it. Since then, Europe’s center of political, military, and cultural gravity has shifted several times over the millennia. Arguably, Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem dominated during the ancient period; Rome and Constantinople during the Middle Ages; Florence, Venice, and Milan during the Renaissance; London, Paris and Berlin during the late 18th through early 20th centuries. This would continue in the decades after 1918, with Washington and Moscow holding sway.
War has had a profound impact on the development of Europe’s states and relations among them over time. No one put it more succinctly than historian Charles Tilley: “War made the state and the state made war.” One might add that “war made the nation and the nation made war.”
Of course, both aphorisms are simplistic. War is as old as humanity while modern states and nations began developing just a few centuries ago. Just when did nations make war and war made nations? The Dutch revolt against the Hapsburg empire might be a good start, followed by the American rebellion against the British empire, and then the French revolutionary struggle against the counter-revolutionary states.
“We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.” That famed insight was the title of Prime Minister Massimo d’Azeglio’s memoir. Azeglio was among those who fought to unify Italy. When he died in 1866, Italy was unified as a state but not as a nation. Nation-building is much more difficult than state-building because human identities are far deeper rooted than administrative units.
Although Europe’s system was never closed, European states dominated it before the 20th century. The Persian Empire tried and failed to conquer the Greek city-states during the fifth century BCE. The Europeans faced a Muslim threat spearheaded by Arabs from the seventh to the 12th century, and by Turks from the 12th to the 18th century. The fighting was chronic in the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim invasion in 710 to the surrender of Grenada, the last Muslim fortress, in 1492. The Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople’s capture in 1453, then overran much of southeastern Europe and even besieged Vienna in 1529 and 1683. But no non-European power ever dominated let alone conquered Europe.
Indeed, from the 15th century, European states began conquering and colonizing peoples beyond the continent to the ends of the earth. Among many forces, an edge in “guns, germs, and steel” decisively empowered them to do that. By 1914, Europeans had colonized all of South and North America, Australia, and Oceanica, and nearly all of Africa and Asia, although the American colonies had won their independence. As European states competed and at times fought to extend or retain their overseas empires, they at once became more nationalistic and European. Confronting, conquering, and colonizing alien cultures and races reinforced European identity. They saw their religion, humanism, art, literature, and entire way of life as superior to those of “barbarian” peoples. They justified their imperialism as bringing Christianity and Enlightenment to their subjects.
George Canning famously boasted in 1823 that “I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the old.” He was referring to Britain’s policy of encouraging the Latin American states to win independence from the Spanish empire. Actually, Britain’s role in that was at best peripheral. French King Louis XVI did not but could have uttered that same boast in 1783, with ample cause to do so. The United States won independence when and how it did because France provided crucial amounts of treasure, arms, troops and warships.
Eventually, the United States repaid that debt. Thrice in the 20th century, Americans saved Europeans from themselves. First through the follies that led to World War I, then the fascism that led to World War II, and finally the communism that led to the Cold War. Most Europeans regarded America’s intervention and leadership with mingled relief, gratitude and resentment.
If warfare in Europe is as old as the first prehistoric humans, the idea of Europe is much more recent. Historically, Europe has been a core value and an ill-defined shifting territory with increasingly diverse peoples who traded and fought each other over thousands of years.
Although Europe is called a continent that is misleading. Eurasia is the continental landmass that stretches nearly a third of the way round the world between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Contemporary Europe is clearly bound by the Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean, and Arctic Sea but its eastern border will always remain amorphous with culture and politics more important than geography. Regardless, with seawater crashing ashore on three sides Europe is perhaps the world’s largest peninsula.
Europe is much better understood as an idea than a place. Humanism, enlightened individualism, is Europe’s core value. The assumption is that everyone is born a unique bundle of potentialities, most good, some bad. Our moral duty is to nurture the best in ourselves and others and sublimate the worst into something better. And that is not just a social effort but ultimately cultural and political. Before the modern era, humanism was confined to rare clusters of individuals with enough wealth, power, and desire to realize and perpetuate its ideals.
Humanism was born in the eastern Mediterranean basin as a dynamic matrix among Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian values. Mythologically, Odysseus and Eve were the first humanist man and woman; for knowledge and freedom Eve dared to defy God while Odysseus defied the Gods. But in the ancient world, no realm realized humanism more than republican Athens.
When Rome devoured Greece in the second century before Christ, humanism was the most nutritious spoil. Humanism spread with the Roman Empire although few exemplified its ideals, most notably Cicero, Caesar, and Aurelius. Over time, Judeo-Christian humanist values mingled with Greco-Roman ones, especially after Constantine legalized that faith and Theodosius made it the empire’s faith. Humanism mostly gestated during the Medieval millennium from the last Roman emperor to Gutenberg’s Bible, kept alive in a few brilliant courts like those of Charlemagne and Frederick II, and by anonymous monks reveling in the wisdom and beauty of the manuscripts they copied.
Although Christianity was split between Catholicism and Latin westward and Orthodoxy and Greek eastward, their estrangement rarely turned violent as each warred against neighboring Muslim states. During the Renaissance, worldly Europeans understood themselves as sharing humanism, history, territory, Christianity and enemies. Then the Reformation divided Europe between Catholic and Protestant states that fought a series of wars against each other for more than a century through 1648.
A series of peace conferences illuminated the notion of Europe with a common culture, law, and interests including Westphalia from 1643 to 1648, Utrecht from 1713 to 1715, and Vienna from 1814 to 1815. No one contributed more to a European legal system than Hugo Grotius with his On the Law of War and Peace published in 1625. However, those legal concepts and the subsequent international treaties and laws that they inspired did nothing to prevent wars or mitigate their death and destruction. Indeed, war’s scale and carnage rose steadily through the modern era.
The horrors of the First and Second World Wars made unity an imperative rather than a sentiment for ever more prominent people on either side of the Atlantic. The answer was an increasingly integrated European economic and political system starting with the Organization of European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) from 1948, European Coal and Steel Community (OCSC) from 1951, European Economic Community (EEC) from 1957, and European Union (EU) from 1993. Those international organizations that promoted European interdependence along with others like the United Nations (UN) from 1945 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NAT0) from 1949 have made war among European state members unthinkable. Thus did European identity and institutions develop in opposition to the wars that had plagued Europeans throughout their history and prehistory.
Those extraordinary achievements liberated Europeans from wars among themselves but not from others. Jihadist groups will keep committing terrorist attacks across Europe. Millions of desperate refugees from wars and failed states in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere will keep trying to migrate to Europe. Through cyberwarfare and other means, Russian President Vladimir Putin will keep trying to breakup Europe and transform its liberal democracies into illiberal democracies beholden to Moscow rather than Brussels and Washington. Those and other threats will worsen in the coming decades as global warming devastates ever more regions already locked in vicious cycles of political, economic, social, and ecological deterioration and will eventually engulf Europe itself. Will Europe’s institutions continue to uphold peace, prosperity, law, and unity or will they collapse to loosen war again among Europeans?
William Nester is the author of Land of War: A History of European Warfare from Achilles to Putin. A professor at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, he has written more than two dozen books on global politics/power and the history of warfare, including books about Europe’s colonial wars in North America, Napoleon, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles De Gaulle, and Winston Churchill.
