Telegraph Editorial: We still need peace, but the world has changed
This is a season of anniversaries. This week we commemorated the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. This autumn, we are marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of Communism, symbolised above all by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Both historic moments have much to teach us about the political landscape of the 21st century: about why the developed world is peaceful, about how we go about keeping it peaceful – but, also, about the frightening instability of a world vulnerable to the terrorism and religious fanaticism that have replaced conventional war between nation states.
When war broke out on September 3, 1939, people had visions of a replay of the Great War, in which a fresh generation of young men would be wiped out by poison gas. In the event, civilian casualties outstripped military ones; they included the most cruelly systematic slaughter of human beings in history, the Holocaust.
After the war, the United Nations, the Common Market and other institutions were set up: talking shops, certainly, and often corrupt ones, but they prevented war from breaking out among the great powers. There have been grisly Balkan conflicts close to home, badly handled, but they have not exploded into global conflicts.
The Allies did not, however, create a free world after 1945. Half of Europe was enslaved, at first with the complicity of the West. The Cold War achieved little. It took the unblinking courage of a few statesmen – foremost among them Ronald Reagan, but also Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher – to bring it to an end. But they were able to do so only because the free-market prosperity of the West had destroyed Communist morale and the vestiges of popular support for Eastern bloc socialism...
... China, the most important emerging economy, stuck to its recipe for combining the ruthless maximisation of profits and the equally ruthless suppression of political, ethnic and religious dissent. Disfranchised minorities in Muslim countries, tantalised and disgusted by Western lifestyles they perceived as decadent, took refuge in Islamism, with its glamorous warrior ethic. The terrorist techniques of Leftist radicals were refined by jihadist fanatics, meeting less than total condemnation in Arab countries that were supposedly Western allies. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, slid further into tyranny and tribal carnage, their despots protected by international institutions terrified of provoking accusations of colonialism. And then along came climate change. Global warming is more than a threat to the environment; it has profound political implications. We cannot ignore the possibility that the advance of deserts and shortage of water may create new violent struggles, or exacerbate existing conflicts...
Read entire article at telegraph.co.uk
When war broke out on September 3, 1939, people had visions of a replay of the Great War, in which a fresh generation of young men would be wiped out by poison gas. In the event, civilian casualties outstripped military ones; they included the most cruelly systematic slaughter of human beings in history, the Holocaust.
After the war, the United Nations, the Common Market and other institutions were set up: talking shops, certainly, and often corrupt ones, but they prevented war from breaking out among the great powers. There have been grisly Balkan conflicts close to home, badly handled, but they have not exploded into global conflicts.
The Allies did not, however, create a free world after 1945. Half of Europe was enslaved, at first with the complicity of the West. The Cold War achieved little. It took the unblinking courage of a few statesmen – foremost among them Ronald Reagan, but also Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher – to bring it to an end. But they were able to do so only because the free-market prosperity of the West had destroyed Communist morale and the vestiges of popular support for Eastern bloc socialism...
... China, the most important emerging economy, stuck to its recipe for combining the ruthless maximisation of profits and the equally ruthless suppression of political, ethnic and religious dissent. Disfranchised minorities in Muslim countries, tantalised and disgusted by Western lifestyles they perceived as decadent, took refuge in Islamism, with its glamorous warrior ethic. The terrorist techniques of Leftist radicals were refined by jihadist fanatics, meeting less than total condemnation in Arab countries that were supposedly Western allies. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, slid further into tyranny and tribal carnage, their despots protected by international institutions terrified of provoking accusations of colonialism. And then along came climate change. Global warming is more than a threat to the environment; it has profound political implications. We cannot ignore the possibility that the advance of deserts and shortage of water may create new violent struggles, or exacerbate existing conflicts...