Eighty years ago this month, World War II in Europe ended. With the unconditional surrender of the Axis forces, the war was over, Hitler was dead, and the guns had fallen silent.
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Forces Europe, cabled a simple message to the Allied governments: “[T]he mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 3 am, local time, May 7, 1945”. With this terse statement, combat operations in the European theater came to an end.
The next day at Karlshorst, Berlin Generalfeldmarshall Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Staff, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, signed an amended instrument of surrender. Nearly 80 million human beings had perished during a war that had cost in excess of $4 trillion, the most devastating conflict in human history.
This was indeed a monumental event in human history. However difficult waging this enormous effort had been, it paled in comparison to making a lasting and effective peace between the belligerents and later amongst the former allies.
But make it we did: “A hard and bitter peace,” J.F. Kennedy called it. From the ashes of this most destructive conflict in human history, we fashioned a new world order, invoking notions of collective defense, energizing and creating international courts to provide juridical responses to transnational disputes and dispense justice to war criminals.
We created international economic forums to deal with currency, trade and post-colonial change. Perhaps most importantly we established the United Nations as a permanent forum to address cooperation, develop consensus, facilitate planning and foster understanding amongst the world community. Although our post-1945 interactions gave rise to the Cold War, l would offer that at the very least a great power conflict was averted, or at least devolved into something less than a thermonuclear exchange, initiating an unimaginable conflagration. Although our differences simmered just beneath the surface in a fierce 50 year standoff, nuclear war was successfully avoided.
Western nations had twice tried to establish a long-term (and lasting) international order after earlier, large-scale conflicts.
The agreements at Vienna (1814-15) and Versailles (1919) were credible if flawed efforts. Both were weakened and thwarted by the developing forces of absolutism, mercantilism and nationalism. While the pervasive, though not universal, rise of liberal democracy focused modern political energy, it should be recognized that our new world order, from which the rule of law is a logical outgrowth, saw our co-democrats in Europe developing into a new super-confederation with parliament, common legal statements, and human rights courts that might perhaps serve other geographic regions as a model.
While no act of political legerdemain can make longstanding differences disappear, a model for dispute resolution based upon shared interest, peaceful resolution and equitable resource distribution is an initial step to addressing our myriad of conflicts in a true rules-based order. While I do not necessarily suggest a replication of Common Market evolution into European Union as a singular model, I would say it is an immediate example of our human civilization advancing in the modern era.
Since the Seven Years War, Europe has been center stage of world conflict. The competition of colonial empires, modern leadership in technology, and rapid industrialization placed Europe in an unenviable position of initiating global conflict.
From 1756 to 1990, large, all-consuming global conflict has been the exclusive purview of European capitals; hence, the effective solutions to persistent and pernicious problems of modern political competition could well be examined from a pan-European perspective.
Future historians may take a long view and identify the thread connecting a Vienna–Versailles–Brussels regime of transnational political order evolving over three centuries as developmental stages towards the post-modern era of political development.
Yes, Europe might be condemned as the region “responsible” for problematic elements of the modern political order, but perhaps within it, there is also the kernel of solutions and future hope. A retinue of smaller states have coalesced with larger, traditional great powers in a confederated body, underpinned by law without the former aggrandizement of earlier times or the hegemony of more modern eras.
The light at the end of the darkness may be a sunrise.
Professor James Armstead, US Naval War College (Ret.)
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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