The 1914 in the wars of 2014
Timothy Garton Ash
100 years on, the jigsaw pieces of old empires are being reassembled in new puzzles.
Ukrainian government artillery guns in a field near the village of Debaltseve, Donetsk region, on July 31 (Beta/AP)
There is war in Europe. No, I'm not using the historic present
tense to evoke August 1914. I'm talking about August 2014. What is
happening in eastern
Ukraine
is war – 'ambiguous war' as a British parliamentary committee calls it,
rather than outright, declared war between two sovereign states, but
still war. And war rages around the edges of Europe, in Syria, Iraq and
Gaza.
I do not say 'Europe is at war'. I leave the hyperbole to
Bernard Henri-Levy. Most European countries are not directly engaged in
armed conflict. Still, we should be under no illusions. For decades, we
have lived with the comforting notion that 'Europe has been at peace
since 1945'. This was always an overstatement. In parts of eastern
Europe, low-level armed conflict continued into the early 1950s,
followed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia
in 1968. In the 1990s, former Yugoslavia was torn apart in a series of
wars - as a recent report by the EU's Special Investigative Task Force,
credibly charging Kosovo Liberation Army leaders with 'war crimes', has
just reminded us.
Kosovo was where I first saw the corpses
sticking out of makeshift body bags and the blood in the snow. While
that blood was still fresh, I talked to one KLA commander, Ramush
Haradinaj, who memorably observed: 'me, I couldn't be no Mother Teresa'.
(He subsequently became prime minister of Kosovo, resigned when
indicted for war crimes in The Hague, but was twice acquitted.) Then I
would fly back to Western Europe, to
find people
arguing over which acronym had 'kept the peace' in Europe. Was it the
EU, NATO, or perhaps the OECD (i.e. economic interdependence), the OSCE
(i.e. pan-European security structures), or even the UN? The premiss was
false then, and is even
more so now. There is war in Europe, and around its ragged edge.
For all the differences, the dirty little wars of 2014 have an
important connection to the horrendous 'great' one that began in 1914.
Many of them involve struggles of definition and control over patchwork
territories left behind by the multi-ethnic empires that clashed 100
years ago, and their successor states. Thus, for example, the battle for
eastern Ukraine is about the boundaries of the
Russian
empire. Some of the Russians, from Russia itself, who are now leading
the armed pro-Russian movement in eastern Ukraine, have characterised
themselves as 'imperial nationalists'. (From their point of view, they
are not 'separatists' but unionists.) In a fine piece of satire in the
New York Review of Books, Vladimir Sorokin describes Putin's Russia as
being pregnant with Ukraine. 'The infant's name,' he writes, 'will be
beautiful: Farewell to Empire'.
During the Balkan wars of the
1990s, jigsaw pieces from the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were
fought over, and then reassembled into new, smaller puzzles, such as
Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia. Many of the frontiers on today's map of
the Middle East
go back
to the post-First World War settlement, when Western colonial powers
spliced together disparate parts of the former Ottoman Empire into new
protectorates – Iraq, Syria, Palestine. The big exception is of course
the state of Israel; but that, too, can trace a lineage back to the
deadly after-life of European empires. For Nazi Germany, which attempted
to exterminate the Jews, was the last hideous
fling of German racial and territorial imperialism.
So what is Europe going to do now about its own long-term consequences?
The first thing we must do is simply to wake up to the fact that we
live in a dangerous neighbourhood. Being Greater Switzerland is neither a
moral nor a practical option: not moral, because Europeans, of all
people, should never be silent while war crimes are being committed; not
practical, because we cannot insulate ourselves from the effects.
Today's fighters in Syria will be tomorrow's terrorists in Europe.
Today's dispossessed are tomorrow's illegal immigrants. Let these little
wars burn, and you will be shot down out of the sky on your way from
the Netherlands to Malaysia on
flight MH 17. No one is safe.
Whereas in the past the irresistible wake-up call was the annexation of a territory, most West Europeans slept through
Putin's
Anschluss of Crimea. As Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev point out in
Foreign Affairs, the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner on July 17
was a turning point, not least because commercial air corridors are the
place where businesspeople live. Without that transformative event, it
is unlikely that chancellor Angela Merkel could have persuaded German
public opinion, and German business, of the need for tougher sanctions
on Putin's Russia.
But what use is the EU's slow, soft economic power against the Kremlin's rapid, hard power? Or,
indeed,
against all the rapid hard powers of the Middle East? What use is
butter against guns? The answer is: more than you might think. Europe
alone cannot
stop
war in the Middle East. Only working with the United States, and with
some more cooperation from – of all places – Russia, can it bring peace
to Syria or Gaza. It does, however, have the power to punish Russia for
having its artillery shell the regular Ukrainian army, from Russian
soil, while that army tries to reconquer its own territory - and to
persuade and enable the legitimate Ukrainian authorities to make the
most generous internal settlement possible, as soon as control over its
sovereign territory has been restored.
Even the minor sanctions
that Europe has thus far implemented have been gnawing away at the
edges of the Putin regime. The larger sanctions Europe agreed this week
will, with time, have a larger impact. Liberal democracies are usually
more slow to act than dictatorships, and a voluntary community of 28
such democracies is bound to be slower still. Economic measures take
more time to bite than military ones, but they can be more effective in
the end.
100 years ago we had 'the guns of August', in Barbara
Tuchman's resonant phrase. Now we have the butter of August. Note the
different role played by Germany, then and now. Slowly, step-by-step,
the Berlin government is doing the right thing. Germany is bringing the
unique weight of its economic relationship with Russia to bear, while
quite reasonably insisting that the pain is shared with France, Britain
and Italy. Some things do change. Some even get better.
Timothy
Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, where
he currently leads the freespeechdebate.com project, and a Senior
Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book
is Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name.
