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CIAO DATE: 05/06
Promoting Sustainable Security
ed. Jean Dufourcq and Laure Borgomano-Loup
February 2006
Introduction
War has vanished; it seems to have disappeared from the mental landscape of the Western world. War, that is, as it was understood in the 19th and 20th centuries, as conflict between nation-states and organized societies for the defence or conquest of territory and wealth, the establishment of empires or the imposition of ideologies by force. When the Second World War ended, the Western victors attempted to outlaw war by means of collective regulators and the restrictive provisions of the San Francisco Charter concerning individual and collective legitimate defence. And then these very peoples, armed to the teeth for the cold war, developed the art of strategy and sophisticated weapons of destruction to such a point that, unwittingly, it seems, they domesticated war. The hugescale disasters that the destructive power of the atom was now able to inflict made war unthinkable. Thus the cold war ended in a strategic stalemate, without a shot being fired. War quietly fell into discredit, as Western states, conditioned by centuries of national wars, border fighting and national defensive postures against neighbouring countries, slowly began to shift the focus to collective security to protect common interests, and policies on disarmament and prevention of proliferation in whatever form it took. In doing so, they exposed themselves to a potential new hazard: the danger that war might return, via other routes, to the heart of the Western world.
And so war in the classic sense of the term, as sophisticated, orchestrated action, now only exists elsewhere, outside the Western world. As a rule it still takes the debased form of local or regional crises, internal warfare, internecine strife or, more commonly, civil war, mainly in areas with failed, oppressed or criminalized states. Yet the disappearance of the more sophisticated version of war did not usher in an era of universal peace, nor did it eradicate the causes of conflict in the modern world. Far from it. These tensions found ways other than war to generate hostility between unstable peoples and tear apart weak regions. As a result, the number of crises multiplied after the end of the cold war, bringing in their wake unrest, destruction, and a long list of victims, more often than not civilian. Under the banners of the UN (UNPROFOR, etc.), NATO (IFOR/SFOR etc.) and the EU (Concordia, Artemis etc.), the Western nations that had finally rid themselves of war on European soil took on the task of reducing these crises and using their military expertise to deal with the civil wars raging on the rim of Europe, in the Balkans and in Africa. From national wars in Europe to civil wars on Europe's periphery, the transformation of warfare profoundly affected the last decade, necessitating radical reappraisal of military structures, tactics, equipment and capabilities. Warfare and defence were gradually abandoned in order to address security issues and control of violence in all its forms.
