The long twentieth century?

Abstract

The paper describes the historical and intellectual foundations on which the European political system was built after the Second World War; this system pursued the goal to prevent any war in Europe, but proved unable to prevent the russian-Ukrainian war. The paper shows that this system was built not only because of the trauma of the First and Second World Wars, but also in accord- ance with the liberal attitude to war, which M. Vatter called «war with “war”»; at the same time, such a clear attitude does not refer to real wars, but to an imaginary «war of all against all». Based on the analysis of the principles and results of the research project “War and Society” under the direction of J. Baechler, the author outlines the principles of liberal Realpolitik as the implementation of the mentioned attitude in the realm of wars: it consists in their rationalization both at the level of goals and at the level of means of warfare; such a rationalization finally makes war irrational and unacceptable. From the point of view of such Realpolitik, war is only an extraordinary means of politics, and the russian-Ukrainian war is only an excess of violence, while in the opinion of the author, it is an inevitable consequence of the irrational and violent russian-Ukrainian extrapolitical conflict, whose stakes is the existence self of Ukraine. The author believes that one of the reasons for the inability of the European political system to prevent the russian-Ukrainian war is the belief that with the end of the Cold War, the “century of total war” in Europe also ended, and that the economic and cultural integration of post-communist countries into the European space makes such conflicts impossible. The author refers to the description of the own logic of wars of the 20th century, proposed in R. Aron’s book «The century of total war», and suggests considering the russian-Ukrainian war as a continuation of these wars. In the perspective pro- posed by R. Aron, the mentioned «century of total war» can be considered as a «long 20th century», which continues to this day.