![]() ![]() And though the nuclear arms race of the Cold War was extraordinary, political power to this day continues to be defined by the facility to use armed force at any time. But these movements also protested against a highly armed world in which the outbreak of violence was possible at any time. Tellingly, many people in the UK, West Germany and the Netherlands joined the movement to express their dissatisfaction with their respective governments. Was this really a good peace? Compared with countries in south-east Asia, Africa and Latin America, the level of violence in Europe was extremely low, prosperity was high and the nuclear threat was – at least according to a widespread interpretation at the time – rather abstract.īut with the advent of mass protests against nuclear warfare in the early 1980s, it became apparent that the nature of the desire for peaceful coexistence within European societies had changed since 1945. Anti-nuclear movements “protested against a highly armed world in which the outbreak of violence was possible at any time”, says Claudia Kemper (Universal History Archive/Getty Images) “Nuclear weapons? No thanks!” Declares a Belgian poster of 1981. Europe was pacified after 1945 because neither side in the Cold War really wanted another military conflict on the continent. The beginning of the Cold War, though, ensured these conflicts were largely put on ice, quashed by the generous Marshall Plan or by rigorous anti-communist policies in the west and anti-fascist policies in the Eastern Bloc. Though Nazi Germany was defeated, many wartime conflicts continued to smoulder in Europe in the postwar period. But there was no such thing as a comprehensive peaceful experience: killings, starvation, revenge and injustice continued in different ways in many regions. When the military violence of the Second World War ended in Europe and Asia in 1945, for many people this meant the beginning of peace. In part, this is because a peaceful state is much more difficult to define than an act of violence, but also because there has always been controversy about what constitutes a good peace. We know much about past wars and violence from historical sources and oral history, but less about past experiences of good peace. “After the Second World War, there was no comprehensive peace: killings, starvation and injustice continued”Ĭlaudia Kemper is a researcher at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research But we might consider that more democracy would have made the peace more stable. It would be an oversimplification to see the disregard for Wilson’s ideas as the sole reason for the failure of the post-Versailles peace and the outbreak of the Second World War. Nor did the new states in the Middle East and north Africa created by the collapse of the Ottoman empire, nor the colonies such as India striving for independence. ![]() The new republics in eastern Europe emerging from the rubble of Austria-Hungary and the Russian tsar’s empire did not play a crucial part. But one of the structural problems of the Treaty of Versailles was that the negotiations, which were intended to create a new world order, were dominated by the interests of the victorious world powers, not by the needs of the young nations seeking freedom. It’s hard to imagine how some of the central questions, such as German reparations, could have been resolved democratically. The other powers considered his concepts too idealistic. But in the negotiations at Versailles beginning on 18 January 1919, Wilson was only partially able to impose his ideas about the link between peace and democracy. ![]()
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