After seeing off the Soviet Union – our Troy – the free world started to behave oddly. A US Congress that had at least aimed for bipartisanship over the decades polarised under Newt Gingrich, that charmer. No president could attract broad national support any more. (The last time someone won 400 electoral college votes was 1988.) Fox News started broadcasting.
Jörg Haider broke through in Austria, Pauline Hanson in Australia. Jean-Marie Le Pen made the presidential run-off in France. The British right, without Moscow to oppose, came to see Brussels in the same terms. Almost all of this took place amid a Goldilocks economy.
The lesson? A nation benefits from, if not war itself, then being on a war footing. There is nothing like a common external threat to bring citizens together. With ethnic homogeneity a thing of the distant past, this might be even more true now than then. As much as the West rues the “peace dividend” – the post-cold war defence cuts, which paid for consumption and welfare – the true disaster of beating the Red Menace was cultural. People were free to turn on each other. Al-Qaeda rallied them for one autumn but was much too diffuse an enemy to do so for long.
Well, much of Europe is tooling up again. Some governments are contemplating conscription to meet the Russian threat. Even if the US could recuse itself from all this, it has the Chinese end of the Eurasian land mass to fret about. Talk of conflict makes the stomach sink. I notice that even finance audiences, who are paid to price risk, squirm at the subject when I raise it. So let me sweeten things with one thought.
READ MORE
If The Odyssey is useful, it is as a reminder of how our society – perhaps any society – sticks together
We should expect our own societies to become less polarised in the coming years. The external threat, as it registers on people, should have a binding effect on them. Call it the war dividend. It is a civic rather than economic boost, though with good judgment there will be some of both: some incidental re-industrialisation as the defence cash percolates.
“Should”, I keep saying. Of course, the enemy might just become another issue to fall out over. A skilled demagogue can dismiss the idea of war preparedness as an elite-class obsession. But that works only until the threat is unmistakable, until the “grey zone” strikes on infrastructure start to impinge on normal life. There is such a thing as the optimal enemy: threatening enough to unite a society, but not so malign as to frontally attack it. The West had one from 1945 to 1991, and owes some of the social cohesion of that era to it.
The debt to war goes deeper than that. Even the founding stories of the civilisation involve an external menace, whether Trojan or Persian.
[ Spanish PM calls for urgent EU meeting after ‘selfish’ responses to Ceuta crisisOpens in new window ]
Last week, I went to see the latest telling of them. The exposition in the early scenes of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is so inelegant that I still wonder – days later – if it is meant as a dry joke. The King of Sparta looks as though he mans the door at a South Beach nightclub. The moralising at the end, when the film tries to deplore the violence that it has inadvertently glamorised for almost three hours, grates. (François Truffaut was right. “There is no such thing as an anti-war film.”) The scenes are more grandiose than grand. As ever with Nolan, the impression is of someone burning through cash to puff up too small an intellectual concept.
If The Odyssey is useful despite these and other faults, it is as a reminder of how our society – perhaps any society – sticks together. We do so by making extensive use of the Other. Sometimes the opponent is real, sometimes made up. Sometimes it is vilified, sometimes treated with Homeric nuance. Either way, the West went a long time, almost all my life, without one. Compared with the increase in immigration and the financial crash, it is the under-discussed cause of what has happened to our public life. History is in the process of fixing the problem.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
