In 2008, James Sheehan, an eminent American professor of history known for his work on Germany, wrote a book entitled, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? It explains how America and Europe began to follow separate paths, based on divergent foreign and domestic policies in the late 20th century. The
New York Times reviewed the book, noting that the two World Wars convinced Europeans once and for all of the perils of militarism:
as the cold war ran down the clock, it became gradually clearer that liberal democracy and a market economy mitigated by welfare had won a complete political victory over “actually existing socialism.” At the same time Europe was fully “civilianized”: conscription was abandoned, armies themselves assimilated the values of civilian society and, as the great English military historian Michael Howard has put it, “death was no longer seen as being part of the social contract.”
Continental Cold War European politics and problems in the Balkans were in fact highly militarized. But since 1989-1991, hazy politicized stereotypes have obscured that history to produce a post-WWII story about peaceable Europe and warlike America.
In fact, one main after effect of the World Wars was the splitting of military and civilian realities, between and within countries. This was an enormous historical shift. In Old Europe, the military class was fully integrated into the middling and highest social classes and recognized as such. Europe's earliest dramas revolved around war. They culminated in 19th century European society, with young ladies fainting after military cadets in the background of masterworks such as
War and Peace or
Eugene Onegin. There were plenty of contemporary novels describing the malaise that afflicted soldiers as they drank, philandered and gambled away the century in their barracks or in unsettled imperial border regions, for example,
A Hero of Our Time, or
The Radetzky March.
But for all the hell they raised, there was no hint here that soldiers were not a fully integrated part of society. The rift with civilian life came only in the period after the Second World War, which saw the entire European military tradition marginalized.
And while America has been painted by her uneasy allies as a warlike nation marching out of step to the drums of European social welfare, internally in the United States, there is a rift between civilian and military worlds too. The 1960s' and early 1970s'
Flower Power summed up how things had changed: society's eager young woman and the soldier were now on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide, especially after 1970's
Kent State shootings.
Again, that split between things military and things civilian has been politicized. My point here is not to get into the politics, nor to debate terrorism and counter-aggressions of the past 20 years, nor to discuss the wrongness and - as the Old Prince in
War and Peace would say - the inevitability of war.
Rather, I want to recognize that political arguments about war, war-making and militarism cloak complex attitudes about many things that are no longer accepted in globalized society. There is a strange unwillingness in global culture - driven by mass media and worldwide marketing - to face grim aspects of reality. Popular culture is filled with violence. But it is a plastic violence where no one ever really gets hurt. As the
NYT reviewer rightly cited,
death is no longer seen as being part of the social contract. For that matter, neither is ugliness, nor ageing, nor unhappiness. Also, it seems nuclear war is not really someone talks about in polite company anymore. Anyone who deals seriously with any of these things isn't part of polite company. That's the tone. That's the consensus.
