Europe's
culture of war
has changed
By
Jonathan
Power
April 2, 2003
SAN JUAN de la RAMBLA, Spain - U.S. policy "has
weakened a civilisation that is also its own" wrote Juan
Luis Cebrian, the founding editor of Spain's principal
newspaper, El Pais, the other day. Everywhere one goes
here one runs headlong into what the polls say, that over
85% of the population is against the decision by Prime
Minister Jose Maria Aznar to support George Bush in his
war against Iraq. Since the demise of Franco, with the
savage civil war behind it, Spain has been in a mood of
relatively quiet politics, intent on healing division
rather than provoking it. Politics has not been, as in
its Mediterranean Latin sister, Italy, either a subject
for bitter party contest or over heated conversation. No
more perhaps.
I go up to the police station to report the theft of
my car papers and all the policeman wants to talk about
are his strong feelings on the war. I go out swimming on
Sunday far into the Atlantic with the two young sisters
who grew up metres from the sea and know these dangerous,
turbulent, waters inside out, whom I befriended 5 years
ago whilst briefly living and writing a book here, and
find instead of our usual conversation about the state of
the sea and their parents' leather goods shop in which
they work that they are cross examining me about the
war. Even the old lady who runs the haberdashery in
my writer's hideaway - an unspoilt village on the island
of Tenerife - hangs out a notice "No a la Guerra".
In all my life I have never met such a vociferous
anti-war feeling. I grew up in England through the Suez
crisis when tempers ran high and my father thrust the
strong opinions of the Manchester Guardian under my nose,
studied in the U.S. during Vietnam and its protests,
lived at various times all over Europe, most recently in
Sweden, during times of peace and war but never have come
across such a coalescing of opinion, such deeply held
conviction that war is a blunt tool, and for
sophisticated peoples probably an unnecessary one, and
such heartfelt desire to put war behind us for all time.
What is different this time round it is not just the
students and the thinking liberals who are against this
war, it is every man and woman in the street who never
cared tuppence about politics before unless it concerned
the income tax they paid and the state of their health
care.
This mood I suspect is no temporary one, cut to the
cloth of George Bush's Texan swaggering insensitivity
which, as Cebrian says, "has earned the contempt of wide
sectors of western public opinion, losing capacity for
leadership, squandering the fund of support and
solidarity that the world gave it after the September
11th attacks". It is a profound sea change in the culture
of West European society, one that has been bubbling up
almost unnoticed it for decades but which is now
exploding like an unplugged volcano. Knowing about if not
experiencing the terrible world wars, the use of nuclear
weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the humbling of the
superpowers in Vietnam and Afghanistan and even the very
mixed bag of results in Bosnia and Kosovo when war was
waged for purely humanitarian reasons, it appears now
that a large majority has concluded that waging war seems
to make little political sense when compared with the
havoc and mayhem wrecked on both human life and human
artefacts. Also having created the European Union out of
the ashes of the Second World War there is a tangible
sense that if in history's book the most war prone part
of the earth could find a way to live side by side then
other societies can do it too. Not least is the growing
conviction, that once beat slowly but has reached a rude
and striking tempo of confidence, that if democracy can
be spread by non-violent means to the four corners of the
planet- it has already jumped in a relatively small space
of time from 25% of the world to 65% (80% of its peoples
if one excludes China)- then democracies will not go to
war with each other.
I don't know how much my friends, the mermaids,
understood of all this argument as I laid it out between
strokes across the ocean, but I suspect from their
nodding and thoughtful interjections that even the less
educated have somehow got the picture, the work of
thousands, no trillions, of hours of hard work over 50
years by educators of all types, school teachers,
priests, journalists, novelists, filmmakers, and
non-governmental organisations - big ones like Amnesty
International and Oxfam and more specialised ones like
Sweden's Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future
Research, that has at last bitten deep into the soul of
Europe.
After the thousandth book on the holocaust or Vietnam
has been published, millions of kilometres of film
bringing us close up to the ugliness of war have rolled
across the television, after article after article
by journalists who feel a deep compassion for war and
hunger's victims, after educators have set to work
determined that the next generation should be raised with
different attitudes, it struck me most forcefully when
three years' ago my 9 year old daughter brought back from
her village school here her text book for religion that
carefully explained how Christianity meant caring for the
refugees and the dispossessed and abjuring war and
violence - what a far cry from the rigid
Catholicism of the fascist era when the bishops supported
Franco's war. Finally, as if after a hundred
thousand termites have catacombed the interior of a hill,
with one sharp kick the edifice of war has suddenly
crumbled. It is far too early to say that European
societies will never sanction war again, but we should
not underestimate how profound a step has been taken.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
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