Seventy Years Ago

Germany invaded Poland, and started the latest, and hopefully last (if you don’t count the Yugoslavia breakup) European war. I don’t know if we’ve properly absorbed all the lessons from it. We seem to have already forgotten the lessons of the Cold War, which ended only two decades ago.

11 thoughts on “Seventy Years Ago”

  1. The last? I’m not so sure — most of the pan-European wars in the past resulted ultimately from alliances and agreements established after the previous one, meant to prevent the next one.

    The Cold War alliances did succeed, but as Russia tries to resume its prior role of proximate threat the rest of Europe acts as though World Peace has broken out forever and ever and…

  2. I don’t know why you wouldn’t count the wars during the Yugoslav break up – they were pretty horrible, complete with fighter jets, napalm, and concentration camps, and it was driven by the same motives that caused WWII (not to mention Yugoslavia’s connection to WWI). Beyond that, the Northern Caucasus are generally considered to be in Europe, which means you have to account for the wars in Chechnya, Ossetia, Georgia, Abkhazia, and Armenia / Azerbaijan/ Nagorno-Karabakh (and I bet I missed some).

  3. There is little will in Europe to antagonize Russia because they are sitting on a pile of gas and oil.

    Russia is already antagonized by the mere existence of a Europe not under its influence. How much influence will its gas and oil reserves buy it?

    And how much influence will be enough?

  4. If Rand wants the focus to be on learning the lessons of WWII, the wars I mentioned are quite relevant. In particular, we can look to the cynical manipulations by the leaders of Croatia and Serbia, but we can also look to how sophisticated educated European Yugoslavs responded to those manipulations.

    If you must focus on pan-European issues: First, remember that local European wars bring in outside involvement (remember that Americans were surprised to find that Russian troops had beat them to the airport in Kosovo hours after the bombing stopped). More to your point, don’t forget that the recognition of Croatia by Germany (and others) spurred the onset of fighting in Croatia, and after fighting started, there was continuous feedback and involvement from the rest of Europe that altered the outcome. Look how ineffective our European NATO allies were at “peacekeeping” under the UN flag, and look how fast the fighting ended once NATO itself (ie Americans) got involved.

    I think there is a lot more to learn, and if you want to learn the lessons of WWII, don’t discount these later wars.

  5. Bob says: More to your point, don’t forget that the recognition of Croatia by Germany (and others) spurred the onset of fighting in Croatia, and after fighting started, there was continuous feedback and involvement from the rest of Europe that altered the outcome.

    As someone who lives in Croatia and who lived through the war, I can assure you Germany had nothing to do with spurring the fighting. Serious conflicts started somewhere around summer ’91, Vukovar (a.k.a. the “Croatian Stalingrad”) fell in November and the first wave of international recognition (started off by Germany) of Croatia happened on January 15th, 1992.

    In ’92 the war in Croatia more or less entered a standoff phase, and about that time things in Bosnia started to get real bad. Culminating probably with the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, described as the worst war atrocity since German concentration camps in WWII. The rest is history, as they say…

  6. Gordan,

    I misremembered the argument. I think the argument against German recognition was that it prompted the Serbs to send troops into Bosnia and/or to prompt the serbs who lived in Bosnia to take up arms. This link discusses the ramifications of the recognition of Croatia:
    http://books.google.com/books?id=SopQbK_nAxgC&pg=PA121&lpg=PA121

    I’m hopelessly on the side of Croatia when discussing this conflict, and I think it was the Serbs, and not Croatia or Germany that was in the wrong, but I still think Tudman was an asshole, and I believe great injustices were done by the Croatians too. Admittedly, all my Croatian friends are/were all weirdos from Rijeka so I have a skewed view!

  7. I still think Tudman was an asshole, and I believe great injustices were done by the Croatians too.

    No argument there about Tudjman! It sickens me he manipulated my people via media and in particular the whole business of the 3 sides splitting Bosnia and redoing borders. In some respects, he was only marginally better than Milosevic, and yet most people here (mostly the voters who keep the same party pretty much on power for the whole 18 years now) still see him as a the great father of Croatia, without whom there’d be no country or freedom today or whatever. I wouldn’t be surprised if the man himself suffered from a messiah complex. He sure had a tendency to act that way.

    When hatred sets in in a war (fueled by media and such, you’d be surprised how easy it is to lead people into this), all sides commit crimes and I will not deny individuals commited war crimes on our part as well. These people need to be prosecuted. However, I strongly resent the recent international attempts to label our homeland war (in particular the military actions carried out in 1995 to liberate Croatian occupied territory) as acts of aggression.

    There is no doubt in my mind about who started the war (be that in Slovenia, Croatia or Bosnia) and who the aggressor was. I hope no amount of historical revisionism ever changes that.

  8. While Russia is certainly an issue, I suspect that they’re unlikely to actively invade Europe-proper any time soon. The U.S. would still intervene.

    I think a more likely threat to European peace is the Islamic population. A European civil war seems not unlikely within the next 50 years. YMMV.

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