On February 15, 2003, an estimated million people demonstrated in London against the impending Iraq war – the biggest rally in London ever. Similar demonstrations took place across Europe. The demonstrators were not taking sides; they were just anti-war.

In a poll at the time, 55% of Americans supported war “to achieve justice”, while no European country registered more than 20%, and most barely 10%. Europeans considered a recourse to state violence for whatever reason as past history, a barbarian relic of the terrible 20th century.

So is Europe the first pacifist continent? Are its people really from Venus and the rest of the world, particularly Americans, from Mars?

When I began James Sheehan’s essay on Why Europeans Hate Going to War, I thought his case overstated. European states, he said, “have retained the capacity to make war but lost all interest in doing so”, thus creating “a revolution as dramatic as any other in [their] history”. Over the past century they had tested war to literal destruction, and reached the exhausted and bloody conclusion that it did not work.

Indeed, says Sheehan, whenever Europe does go to war as part of some coalition of the willing – in Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq – it does so half-heartedly and inefficiently. Peoples and their governments have no stomach for such fights. They have tiptoed away from history. Tired of killing, they have invented “the civilian state”, the economic state.

I confess myself persuaded. Sheehan points out that, despite the wars of the 20th century, statesmen were increasingly obsessed with rendering them obsolete. The first world war was the last in which fighting was regarded as glorious, when Rupert Brooke could write that God had “matched us with His hour / And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping”.

Sheehan traces the struggle for permanent peace from the Hague convention of 1899 through to the 1918 Treaty of Versailles. He examines the Kellogg-Briand peace pact of 1929 and the foundation of the League of Nations, the United Nations and the new alliances that ended the cold war in 1990.

In many cases, noble hopes were dashed on the rock of reactive chauvinism and the juggernaut of military establishments. Fools often held sway, claiming that bombers would end war, or that war would be too horrific for democracies to tolerate. By the end of the century, central Europe had enough firepower on its soil to destroy the planet many times over.

Yet Kant’s thesis that “war was a pathology to be overcome rather than a scourge to be endured” took hold. John Bright claimed that “nothing could be so foolish, nothing so mad as a policy of war for a trading nation”. Economists saw in the barters of trade not just a route to prosperity but a new way of resolving conflicts — not least the great 20th-century conflict between capitalism and collectivism.

By the 1950s it was unthinkable to do battle with the Soviet Union, even to save freedom in Czechoslovakia or Hungary. The cost was simply too high. Communism was defeated not by force of arms but by their cost and by “soft power”, the evidence of its failure to give people the wealth delivered by capitalism. Sanctions and boycotts were the nearest that European states came to aggression. They even hijacked the word war to use as a metaphor for civil action against poverty, drugs or crime.

Sheehan watches the emotional baggage of state violence go into abeyance. Young men no longer accept that they owe the state “the duty to die”. As the historian Michael Howard put it, by the end of the 20th century “death was no longer seen as part of the social contract”. Except to some extent in Britain, militarism vanished. Army parades and uniforms disappeared from the streets. Flags were for football. By the 1980s, the scenarios of nuclear war had taken on a surreal improbability, reflecting John F Kennedy’s complaint at being asked to choose “between holocaust and humiliation”.

Europe rolled all this up into the creation of a European Union, formed to make another continental war unimaginable and requiring “not citizens who are prepared to kill and die . . . only consumers and producers”. In this respect, the EU has been supremely successful. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Russia’s western satellites moved from totalitarianism to democracy not by bloody revolution but by peaceful change. In cities such as Madrid, Lisbon, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw and even Moscow — whose streets had run with the blood of centuries — soldiers simply refused to turn their guns on the people. Nowhere was Gandhi more honoured than in Europe in the past half century. Small wonder Europeans “hate going to war”.

So how do we answer the obvious rejoinder: if Europe abandons the military functions of statehood, who is to resist evil and police the world? Europe’s effort at collective defence has been farcical, delegating it first to warlike America and, since the end of the cold war, not bothering with it at all. The much-vaunted European army is a joke.

Americans have taken up the white-man’s burden, first against Soviet communism and, now that danger has passed, against rogue states in general. It seems an incompetent warrior, with a naive belief in technological warfare as an alternative to battlefield bloodshed. Its late-20th-century wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have been messy failures, parroting the mistakes made by Europeans in their retreat from empire.

But it is one thing to criticise America’s manner of carrying the burden, quite another to wish it to cease. Would Europe really feel safer if America opted for Venus? Suppose its people cried out for global action, whether against some spreading aggression or some ecological catastrophe? Sheehan does not stray into that future. It is refreshing to find an American noting Europe’s innovation of regional concord over the past half-century. But Europe is only one continent among many. I sense it is too early to stow away that gun.

THE MONOPOLY OF VIOLENCE: Why Europeans Hate Going to War by James J Sheehan
Faber £25 pp400

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