The delusion of a peaceful modern europe

The received wisdom—trotted out at Davos panels, EU Commission summits, and in the more sentimental columns of the Financial Times—is that Europe, having learned its lessons from two world wars, has spent the past eight decades basking in a glow of enlightened tranquillity. No more trenches, no more blitzes. Just a polite consensus of democratic cooperation, cross-border trade, and the occasional fracas over mackerel quotas.

How charming. And how utterly wrong.

War in Europe didn’t end; it simply changed dress code. The continent exchanged the muddy boots of trench warfare for the polished shoes of technocracy. The cavalry gave way to credit ratings, and the siege engine was replaced by the Excel spreadsheet. In this brave new Europe, invasions are launched via procurement deals, and national humiliation comes neatly packaged in a Memorandum of Understanding.

The myth of the post-war peace

Cold war: the most polite world war never fought

The so-called “Long Peace” kicked off with a forty-year standoff during which Europe was not so much spared conflict as conscripted into a geopolitical tug-of-war. The United States and the Soviet Union, too civilised to shoot at each other directly, instead turned the continent into a strategic chessboard.

Washington’s contribution to peace came via embargoes and covert coups. The Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom), for instance, ensured that anything remotely useful—like microchips, lathes, or even ball bearings—was kept out of Soviet hands. The Eastern Bloc responded in kind by weaponising energy, turning gas pipelines into pressure valves and holding half of Europe hostage every winter.

Meanwhile, the neoliberal zeal of the Reagan-Thatcher axis spread across Europe like a low-interest-rate plague. While sold as domestic reform, the dismantling of organised labour, privatisation of public assets, and deregulation of markets served another purpose: to hollow out any remaining ideological support for socialism, lest the Soviets appear to offer a viable alternative. It was a war of attrition with sharper suits.

The 1990s: genocide on live television

Just as the ink dried on Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis, the Balkans collapsed into a fury of ethnic violence. The breakup of Yugoslavia came with the full wartime ensemble: mass graves, snipers, sieges, and genocide—all conveniently broadcast on CNN, lest anyone cling too tightly to illusions of peace.

But the real novelty was in the economics. International sanctions on Serbia induced hyperinflation so obscene that prices doubled every thirty-four hours, rendering banknotes useful only for papier-mâché or novelty wallpaper. NATO’s humanitarian bombing of Serbia came with some oddly strategic side-effects, like knocking out power stations and TV transmitters—targets not known for committing war crimes, but very effective at breaking civilian morale.

Europe’s response was a masterclass in performative ethics: waver, condemn, hesitate, bomb, and then slap together a reconstruction plan riddled with IMF reforms and privatisation schemes. From mass graves to free markets in a single decade—surely a record.

21st century warfare: less bang, more bank

The eurozone crisis (2010–2015): austerity as economic trench warfare

Greece didn’t suffer an invasion—it suffered a troika (EU, ECB, IMF) demanding pensions be slashed, hospitals shuttered, and assets sold to German vulture funds. The country’s GDP contracted by 25%, worse than the Great Depression, while youth unemployment hit 50%, creating a lost generation.

The irony was delicious: Germany, having had its own debts forgiven after World War II, now lectured Athens on fiscal responsibility. This wasn’t economics. It was debt colonialism, enforced with the cold precision of a bailout agreement.

Brexit: a slow-motion economic suicide

A masterclass in how to turn a trade dispute into a national identity crisis. The Treasury’s warnings of immediate recession were dismissed as “Project Fear”—until the pound crashed overnight.

The Irish border, dismissed as a technicality, became a geopolitical crisis when it emerged that no one in Westminster had actually read the Good Friday Agreement. And the “oven-ready deal”? More like a half-baked disaster, leaving British exporters drowning in customs forms while the EU, ever the gracious victor, made sure the UK’s departure was as painful as possible.

Russia’s hybrid war (2014–present)

Putin didn’t need tanks to destabilise Europe—just gas pipelines, Facebook ads, and a few well-placed bribes. Nord Stream 2 became a geopolitical grenade, alienating Ukraine, Poland, and the US simultaneously.

The Salisbury poisoning, with its nerve agents on a park bench, was a reminder that modern warfare could still be lethally old-fashioned when required. And when Europe finally imposed sanctions in 2022, it promptly realised it had forgotten to wean itself off Russian gas—leading to a self-inflicted energy crisis that left households freezing while China happily bought Russian oil at a discount.

Why ‘peace’ is a misnomer

War has gone corporate

Today’s battlefield is the market. Conflict plays out in competition lawsuits, subsidy spats, and tax evasion crackdowns. Apple’s slap-fight with Brussels over €13 billion in unpaid taxes had more at stake than many historical sieges. Uber’s campaign against European taxi unions caused more social unrest than some regional insurgencies.

Gazprom’s standoffs with EU regulators weren’t war, just market disputes. Apple’s tax avoidance battles with Brussels weren’t war, just state aid investigations. And Uber’s guerrilla campaign against London cabbies wasn’t war, just disruptive innovation—though the occasional Molotov cocktail did add a certain je ne sais quoi.

When multinationals wield more power than nation states, war becomes a quarterly report.

The human cost is still human

Greek pensioners digging through bins, British families choosing between heating and food, and German factories shutting down due to gas shortages—these aren’t accidents. They are casualties of a new kind of conflict, where the weapons are clauses in trade agreements and the battlefield is the welfare state.

We may not count body bags in the streets, but the toll is still real, still measurable, and just as deliberate.

Conclusion: the new european way of war

Europe hasn’t abolished conflict—it’s just outsourced it to technocrats, bankers, and lobbyists. The weapons are subtler, the casualties less visible, and the deniability absolute.

So the next time someone claims Europe is at peace, ask them:

Is it peace when pensions are gutted to pay foreign creditors?

Is it peace when entire industries are held hostage over gas supplies?

Is it peace when a country votes for self-harm because it’s been fed lies for a decade?

No. It’s just war with better PR.

Resources

• Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine https://naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/ – For how crises are turned into cash
• Adam Tooze, Crashed https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/296442/crashed-by-adam-tooze/9780141987648 – A forensic dissection of modern financial warfare
• Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571338641-this-is-not-propaganda/ – On how truth itself is the first casualty in information war