Opinion

Wars have been a constant of the human race, and they usually end the same way – from exhaustion

Worldview: A discussion hosted by Le Monde brought together thinkers and experts to discuss humanity’s bitter experience of war

Smoke rises from the site of a Russian attack on industrial buildings in Kharkiv, Ukraine last week. Photograph: Finbarr O'Reilly/The New York Times
Smoke rises from the site of a Russian attack on industrial buildings in Kharkiv, Ukraine last week. Photograph: Finbarr O'Reilly/The New York Times
Lara Marlowe's picture
Lara Marlowe
Sat Jun 01 2024 - 06:00

Almost from the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, politicians, historians and commentators have questioned how the war will end. With that in mind, Jérôme Gautheret and Thomas Wieder, journalists at Le Monde newspaper and students of history, wrote a series of articles that they published as a book, Making Peace from Waterloo to Bosnia: Six Ways to End a War.

At a discussion of war and peace with Le Monde readers this week, Gautheret said books more often focus on how wars start than on how they finish. For example, Christopher Clark’s 2012 opus, Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Sylvie Kauffmann, an editorialist at Le Monde, chronicled Europe’s failure to prevent Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine in her 2023 book, Blindsided: How Berlin and Paris Cleared the Way for Russia.

“All wars create a new reality that was previously unimaginable,” Gautheret said. He attended the second centenary re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo on June 18th, 2015, and noted that after centuries of war, England and France have not fought one another since Napoleon. Likewise, the greatest achievement of France and Germany is to have observed nearly 80 years of peace.

Napoleon’s wars claimed the lives of 2.5 million people, including more than one million Frenchmen. The French diplomat Talleyrand exploited divisions among great powers to assert the will of his defeated country at the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna. Charles de Gaulle accomplished a similar feat by obtaining a seat on the UN Security Council for France after the second World War.

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When the Franco-Prussian war started in 1870, “everyone thought Napoleon III’s France would crush Prussia quickly”, Wieder said, comparing that misjudgement to the widespread assumption that Ukraine would collapse within days of the full-scale Russian invasion.

Pierre Buhler, a former French ambassador who served as a diplomat in Moscow, Warsaw and Washington and now teaches at the Institut des Sciences Politiques, was guest speaker at Le Monde’s event. At the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles in 1919, US president Woodrow Wilson naively thought war could be outlawed, Buhler said. “Wilson said the creation of the League of Nations 99 per cent guaranteed that war could not reoccur. The problem was that the 1 per cent chance materialised.”

Churchill and Roosevelt determined during the second World War to enforce peace through international law in a more intelligent fashion, by establishing the United Nations, Buhler said. Article two of the UN Charter states clearly that “All members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means ... All members shall refrain ... from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state ...”

The UN system functioned as it was meant to only once, when the security council voted to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in 1991. Israel systematically violates UNSC resolutions, which carry the force of international law.

One should not presume that a second Trump presidency would automatically spell defeat for Ukraine

Buhler has published on his website his diary of the Dayton peace talks which ended the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. This correspondent was struck by similarities between Bosnia and Ukraine. Slobodan Milosevic and Putin were both irredentist nationalists obsessed with history. Milosevic refused to accept the break-up of Yugoslavia. Putin labelled the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. Putin has manipulated separatists in Crimea and Donbas. Milosevic incited Serbian populations in Bosnia and Croatia.

In the early 1990s, Washington was so focused on post-Soviet Russia and Iraq that it considered Bosnia to be “a little conflict that was the Europeans’ problem”, Buhler said. The late Republican senator Robert Dole made Bosnia a domestic political issue, eventually leading Bill Clinton to impose a fragile solution at Dayton.

The Ukraine war has also become a stake in US politics, except that this time Republicans aided and abetted the aggressor by holding up for six months $60 billion (€55 billion) in military aid for Ukraine. The US enforced a no-fly zone to protect innocent Bosnians but refuses to do so in Ukraine.

Europeans fear the US could exclude them from future negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, then ask them to manage the postwar situation, Buhler said. But one should not presume that a second Trump presidency would automatically spell defeat for Ukraine. “Trump hasn’t been elected yet. There are many possible scenarios. He might be persuaded that it would be a grave error for the US to give such a gift to Russia. Trump thinks like a horse trader ...

[ The Irish Times view on the war in Ukraine: trading threats ]

“Wars usually end from exhaustion,” Buhler went on. “The belligerents sign a ‘perpetual peace’ that lasts for two or three decades ... (The French historian) Fernand Braudel saw that war was a constant of the human race, that peace is not the norm.”

Buhler also cited the US sociologist and political scientist Charles Tilly, who concluded from nine centuries of European history that “wars create states and states create wars in a vicious circle”. Democracy is more likely to foster peace than international law, Buhler concluded. Of the world’s 33 liberal democracies, 26 are located in Europe. Hungary, which this week again blocked EU military aid for Ukraine, can no longer be considered a liberal democracy.