Recent geopolitical crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are highlighting the inability of European leadership to act with clarity and vision in a multipolar world. The European Union has been relegated to the role of a mere spectator, lacking any real political and strategic weight on the international stage. The image of European leaders in the Oval Office, sitting like diligent students taking notes in front of a map of a ravaged Ukraine, is emblematic. Not only does it demonstrate diplomatic subjugation to Washington, but it also reflects a deeper failure to understand the dynamics of international relations and power balances, unless these are experienced in an inescapable way.
Europe’s Lost Identity
There is a lack of genuine reflection on the reasons behind why states act, react, and interact with each other, particularly when it comes to great powers. Europe is lost even in relation to itself: what unites citizens from Lisbon to Warsaw, from Oslo to Athens today? Beyond the bureaucratic apparatus, what is truly left of the European project? Yet, it continues to presuppose to teach the world how to live. The dominant Eurocentric vision is afflicted by dangerous shortsightedness: it tends to analyze “the other” solely through a lens of presumed moral and cultural superiority.
This sterile and self-referential approach has led to a disastrous handling of the Ukraine conflict, as well as a near-total absence in dealing with recent tragedies in Palestine and the so-called “twelve-day war” between Iran and Israel. Rather than attempting to contain and limit the Ukrainian conflict, Europe has wasted three valuable years, caught in a collective hysteria that transformed a geopolitical crisis into a moralist narrative: an absolute struggle between Good and Evil, ignoring the deeper causes of the war, and more importantly, failing to intervene to prevent or defuse it. This is a profound cultural amnesia, spanning all social classes, with political leaders as its most extreme and visible expression.
The Nature of Conflict
Let’s try to clarify things. Human diversity inevitably leads to tensions and crises; discussions and misunderstandings are a natural process. Humans can be spiteful, resentful, they love and hate, make agreements and then betray; they are fragile, full of prejudices, complex, and driven by desires. Consequently, states which are the macro expression of peoples behave the same way. International politics, being a relationship between states, is inherently conflictual, as different political forces, being diverse, do not pursue the same goals. This inevitably leads to clashes, then crises, and eventually a conflict that can culminate in war. Conflicts arise when one of the parties expresses hostility, which begins when one believes it cannot assert its own right, or at least what it considers its right, or when it fails to maintain or regain the resistance of the other.
When these conditions become non-negotiable, force becomes inevitable. War, as a conflict between states, serves the purpose of granting each of them recognition and determination through their will, and this will is expressed on the assumption of recognizing the other as an equal. In Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, war is understood as a conflict between states where each seeks to assert its freedom and gain recognition from others. This conflict, though potentially violent, serves a higher purpose of mutual recognition and the establishment of political order. The purpose of war is not the annihilation or total destruction of the other, but rather the attainment of a decisive advantage, forcing them to acknowledge their inferiority. General von Clausewitz, one of the greatest military theorists in European history, in On War (1832), explains that historically, if the political objective is the end, war is the means, a tool to achieve the goals set by politics. War and peace, therefore, are not independent realities, but tools subordinated to politics.
The Illusion of “Just Peace”
The ideological and practical mistake of many European pacifists today is precisely that of confusing the essence of war itself, without understanding its context, motivations, and nuances, with morality, thereby distorting the meaning of these concepts. Why does von Clausewitz say that “war is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means”? Julien Freund wrote in his Politique et impolitique that politics is both the domain of conflict and the means to resolve it. Its task is to constrain, compress, and tame violence. War is a tool to create the conditions for civil peace, recognizing different human aspirations. It is a mistake to think that peace has nothing to do with force. When we speak of “fighting for peace,” we are talking about a process that involves the use of force. Peace is not a right, nor a value to be defended: it must be conquered. It is fragile. Peace is not the absence of tension, but the harmony between conflicting forces. Peace, like war, depends on a balance of power and is often imposed by external powers. It can only be maintained if the parties respect the new equilibrium. According to Carl Schmitt, the famous German jurist and political philosopher, in The Concept of the Political, war is temporary: the enemy is not the absolute Evil to be destroyed, but simply an adversary whose role begins and ends with the hostilities.
The Criminalization of the Enemy
While criminalizing the enemy does not limit or prevent war which, as we said, is the vocation of politics it, on the contrary, makes it total. Criminalization presupposes the idea of representing humanity and being its safeguard, implicitly excluding those who do not belong to it. Thus, the enemy is no longer just an adversary: he becomes the “absolute evil,” declared outside humanity.
Regarding the so-called “just war” in the name of humanity, Alain de Benoist, in his Rethinking War, defines it as a “international police operation” of the just against the unjust, against which all means, economic, diplomatic, military, can be used to punish its wrongdoings, up to unconditional surrender. Isn’t this the language adopted by European leaders when discussing the war in Ukraine, insisting on fighting for the “final victory”? If we look at history from the end of World War I, for the first time, an international political document made explicit reference to a war crime: the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, in Article 227, states: “The Allied and Associated Powers publicly accuse William II of Hohenzollern, former Emperor of Germany, of the supreme crime against international morality and the sacred authority of treaties.” In other words, for the first time in history, an enemy was criminalized. The conflict thus acquired a discriminatory character, forgetting the historical premise that conditions every war and ultimately distorting it. We then see that, once Germany’s surrender was achieved, the victorious powers demanded a compensation of 20 billion gold marks, causing inflation to explode, leading to one of the most severe economic crises of the century and humiliating the Germans psychologically. Annihilating a people with a profound sense of consciousness and pride what did they think this would cause?
The Consequences of the War
These effects became fertile ground for National Socialism, for Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and for the escalation that would lead to World War II. Even in the second conflict, Germany underwent a summary process: it was deprived of territories inhabited by ethnic Germans, preventing those peoples from reuniting. Subsequently, the justification of the American occupation led to a real “eternal oblivion” for the Germans, a deep sense of collective guilt, a complex that will shape their national consciousness to this day. The enemy is designated as the sole responsible for the outbreak of hostilities. We do not care about the context, the causes of the war, or the legitimacy of the claims: he is the invader, he is wrong, he must be eliminated. But this is a subtle logic. If the condition for not being branded an aggressor is simply not to strike first, even though this gives a huge advantage to one’s enemies, nothing prevents hostile powers from creating the conditions for provoking an attack and then triggering “collective self-defense” that justifies the use of force.
Political pragmatism is expressed in the ability to understand the nature of conflicts, the history of others, their psychology, how they perceive themselves, and how they relate to the world. Pursuing harmony between the parties without moral judgments, even at the cost of great sacrifices, even for material interests, even with traumatic consequences: there is no such thing as just peace, it is a chimera. Our leadership is politically insignificant. Beyond the clash between powers, they have proven incapable of managing conflicts, if not exacerbating them, rather than positioning themselves as mediators. This inability is reflected in the rhetoric of the European army: an impossible project without a shared European consciousness and without strong leadership — which Germany might achieve once it attains the military strength it is silently working toward today. But above all, this rhetoric fails on the issue of European rearmament: arming more does not guarantee security, it is not a deterrent. History teaches that conflicts are not contained by a stronger army or greater military preparedness. In fact, it is often accumulated tensions and diplomatic incapacity that cause wars to erupt. Peace is the result of a conscious and capable political force, not a moralistic illusion. Until Europe learns to understand reality for what it is, it will remain a prisoner of its irrelevance.
Cesare Taddei
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