Jay Winter reviews historian James Sheehan's recounting of how Europe willingly shed its bellicose past:
Sheehan's focus is this passage of Europe from "garrison" to "civilian" states, the achievement that may now allow Europe to put its history in its past. The change came about through two massive political transformations after 1945. The first was the peaceful transition from right-wing dictatorships to democracies first in Germany and Italy, and then in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, whose political stability is due in large part to their participation in the European Union. The second was the relatively peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe. Sheehan rightly emphasizes contingency in these two processes. Without farsighted leaders like King Juan-Carlos in Madrid or Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, these changes might have been blocked or accompanied by significant bloodshed. But they were not, probably because men and women all over Europe had had a surfeit of violence and knew from their own and their families' experiences what that violence had meant. "Never again" was a phrase less associated with the Holocaust after 1945 than with total war against civilians and soldiers alike.
Here is the source of what Sheehan acknowledges to be a fundamental divide between European and American visions of the state. Europeans do not want a superstate that submerges the peculiarities of their cheese and sausages; even less do they want a Europe that is armed to the teeth. Americans are more divided on both points -- the bland homogenization of tastes and products, and the need to pay or to force our grandchildren to pay for today's perpetual war, the war on terrorism.
Can American leaders learn from Europe's example? Read the rest and comment here.
--The Editors
