Chapter I: Democracy in the face of war

Between warmongering and pacifism

Our democracies are uncomfortable with war. Indeed, although professing humanist ideals, most of them were generated by war. For a long time, it appeared to them as a natural and obvious mode of action not only to assert themselves but also to promote their ideas. In the 18th century, Kant may have professed his dream of perpetual peace, but the French Revolution and then the Empire imposed their revolutionary ideals by iron and fire. both through civil war - think of the Wars of the Vendée - and through the conflict between nations. Young America is not to be outdone: it enters the scene with a war of independence and made the Anglo-Saxon model triumph during the Civil War. Then it asserted until today, with ups and downs, its imperial will through a defence budget without equivalent amongst other nations10. repeated military interventions had no other aim than to reshape the world map to its liking and impose its will to power, and its messianic dream: democracy and human rights, i.e., the “new world order” promised by G. W. Bush in 1991. On the other hand, the same cannot be said of the European democracies: sheltered by the American shield since the end of the Second World War, they have been able to let pacifist ideals grow - without any consequences for the time being - and to reduce their defence effort to below a reasonable level.

The influence of pacifism in international relations was most evident in the early 1990s with the deployment of the so-called ‘peacekeepers’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina to provide humanitarian assistance to the Bosnian inhabitants of the besieged city of Sarajevo and to enforce an illusory ceasefire between Serbs and Bosnians.

The term ‘peacekeepers’ is a perfect illustration of the confusion of ideas about war and peace. It implies that there is a noble mission, peace, and a dirty mission, battle. It confuses the end, peace, and war, which is only a means to an end. This expression was born when people naively believed in a new world order based on peace and prosperity.

There is, therefore, the first illusion within Western democracies, which consists in sinning either by excess (United States) or by default (Western Europe) about the defence effort to be made by peoples wishing to guarantee their freedom. To this incapacity to conceive military means to the political situation and resources of their countries, two other illusions about war are added:

- technological superiority conceived as the unsurpassable horizon of war;

- war is confused with battle; in other words, politics is confused with military action, the end confused with the means.

Technological superiority was conceived as the unsurpassable horizon of war

Indeed, technology has a significant role to play, and the superiority of armaments is without question a significant asset for those who have the will to fight. The Polish cavalry in 1939 was certainly no less valiant than the Wehrmacht (Army), but what could cavalrymen do against armour? Nevertheless, if technology or, more simply, material superiority sometimes allows winning battles, it is powerless to win the war because the latter is, first of all, a matter of will. The Russians experienced this in Afghanistan in the 1970s,