Europe After the Illusion of Permanent Peace |
For at least seventy years, Europe has lived within a historical exception, mistaking it for normality.
From 1945 onward, the continent experienced an unprecedented phase: prolonged peace, economic growth, political integration, the gradual expulsion of war from everyday language. A span of time long enough to make us believe that history had changed its nature, that violence had become a residue of the past, that conflict belonged to other places and other peoples.
Today we know this was not the case. That phase was not the rule, but a parenthesis. And like all historical parentheses, sooner or later it closes.
War has returned to the European continent, security has fractured, and the categories we thought we had filed away—border, enemy, rearmament, alliance—have re-emerged with a speed that caught many unprepared. Yet what is striking is not only the return of conflict; it is our difficulty in recognizing it. We have continued to read the present with the tools of the recent past, not with........