War: The Monopoly of Violence: Why Europeans Hate Going to War By James Sheehan Houghton Mifflin, 284pp. £25 After two devastating world wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation in the first half of the 20th century, European leaders found a more interesting and profitable way of life than armed conflict.
Five years ago, a New York Times journalist addressed the same question as that posed by his fellow American in this book: Why are Europeans different? Why do they always want to talk more, discuss endlessly, negotiate when they can, appease when they can't . . . instead of just fixing the problem? Why can't Europeans be more like us?
The answer from Robert Kagan was simplicity itself. They live on a different planet. He was reflecting on the widening gap between the European and the American pillars of the transatlantic alliance after the events of 9/11. The partnership that was founded, it was believed, on common interests, values and culture, was now in free fall. It had survived half a century of the Cold War, laid claim to victory over the common enemy of socialism, and was now tearing itself apart under the strain of finding a common response to the terrorist attacks, even a common language to define them.
SHEEHAN'S AIM IN this book is similar to that of Kagan: to show that war is obsolete in Europe, if not in America, and that this obsolescence is a consequence of Europe's experience of modern warfare in the first half of the 20th century. His conclusions are similar; his argument is more persuasive.
Sheehan borrows the words of Kagan's best-seller Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order to outline his own thesis. "It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world."
Far from advancing common values and interests arising from shared experiences, the two partners of the transatlantic alliance today confront one another with that uncomprehending bemusement that John Gray famously attributed to men in their relations with women. For Kagan (and, it seems, for Sheehan who quotes him approvingly) "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus".
For centuries, Sheehan writes, European states and statesmen lived in the reality or in the shadow of war. When that shadow grew long and the memory grew faint - as in the peace that followed the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 - the one certainty for states and their populations was that violence would reassert its legitimacy throughout the continent. States make war and war makes states, he writes. "War was deeply inscribed on the genetic code of the European state".
If competence in war-making was still the major source of legitimacy for the state and its leaders at the beginning of the 20th century, it was not so by the end. In Europe at least, the age-old intimacy between violence and statecraft had by then withered and the legitimacy of the state rested more on the production of economic goods and welfare and the maintenance of a stable peace than on the display of aggression.
HOW DID THIS happen? How did Europeans move from being hard-wired to fight at the beginning of the century to being exemplars of the more feminine virtues in international relations at the end of it?
Sheehan divides his book into three sections, the third of which addresses the central question highlighted in the sub-title: Why Europeans Hate Going to War. Part of the reason for their antipathy to war, if the author's argument holds, is that they have been scarred by a century's experience of state violence and transformed - as if by natural selection - from warriors into pacifists. This transforming experience is the subject of the second section which focuses on the shock to the system of the brutality of industrialised violence.
The book opens with an account of a continent which was "Living in Peace, Preparing for War", as the chapter title has it. The author examines the 14-year period before the outbreak of the first World War in order to highlight the contrast between the two ideals which would struggle for supremacy for the next century - the ideal of peace in Kantian philosophy and the nobility of militarism more easily accessible in popular myth and culture. In 1898 Czar Nicholas II issued an invitation to the heads of all European states to attend an extraordinary conference in The Hague, designed, he said, "to liberate the state's resources for peaceful purposes by halting the production of weapons and working to create lasting harmony among nations".
The conference ended with predictably anodyne resolutions about the need to limit weapons of mass destruction, the desirability of the pacific resolution of disputes, and the need for another conference.
Within three months, Britain went to war against the Boers, and by 1914 Russia, Japan, Italy and the Balkans were at it again like fighting cocks. The Darwinian metaphor seemed spot on.
For the next 30 years, until the end of the second World War, the pacific impulse which had briefly coexisted with European militarism and challenged its assumptions at the beginning of the century, was stilled. (Sheehan strains the coexistence somewhat by giving more weight to the pacifist campaign at the time than his own evidence justifies. Militarism and pacifism were unevenly matched in popular or high culture. At the first whiff of cordite after the peace conference, the leaders of state and military could scarcely contain their delight that the talk of living in peace would give way to the normality of military combat.)
The shattering experience of two wars which far exceeded the capacity of state leaders to control them or even to imagine their consequences was not enough to trigger the transformation of European states which is the central question of Sheehan's book. The main reason, he says, was the discipline imposed by two non-European states engaged in nuclear confrontation across the European theatre, who effectively threatened annihilation for all if war should break out among some.
THUS WAS WAR made obsolete - for 50 years until the end of the century, Europeans got out of their old habits and found that a more interesting and profitable way of life was possible within the framework of shared sovereignty in a community of states. Perhaps the Darwinian metaphor in both Kagan and Sheehan is stretching the transformation a bit. Old habits could return. But Sheehan makes the better case and paints the more optimistic picture of a transformation which will survive.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the school of ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin