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- PARIS (AFP) - "The lamps
are going out all over Europe," Britain's foreign secretary Edward
Grey said on the fateful night in August 1914 when, amid popular outpourings
of unbridled patriotism, Britain and Germany lurched into war. "We
shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."
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- He little knew how truly he spoke. It was almost 80 years
before something approaching normal service returned to the continent.
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- War, in its hot and cold varieties, has been the shaping
experience of the century, dissolving empires, engulfing generations, driving
-- and being driven by -- technological change, and forging myths of national
identity.
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- A tidal wave of unprecedented violence swept over the
world in the 20th century, bringing a collapse in values that contrasted
starkly with the slow but steady progress that had preceded it.
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- In 1914 there had been no major war for 100 years, and
only one brief conflict, the Crimean War, in which any more than two of
the major powers had been in battle.
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- The European war of 1914-1945 (broken by a 21-year truce)
was total, drawing in independent states and colonies around the world
and engaging whole populations, civilians as well as soldiers.
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- Where previous conflicts had been comparatively gentlemanly
affairs, involving professional armies fighting for limited goals, the
world wars were desperate, all-or-nothing scrambles for national survival,
as in 1914-18, or titanic struggles between all-encompassing ideologies,
as in the 1939-45 conflagration.
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- The old warrior ethic of duty, heroism and sacrifice
did not long survive the introduction of machine technology into warfare
in 1914.
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- Two huge field armies laid siege to each other, forming
a double line of trenches from the Swiss border to the North Sea that became
a common grave for millions of men mown down, gassed or torn to pieces
by mines or unseen artillery. The manner as much as the quantity of the
killing seared the Great War into the collective memory with an intensity
that later conflicts never effaced.
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- When hostilities resumed two decades later, the war was
no longer one of attrition but one of movement, with tanks and planes playing
the main roles. The instruments of war became ever more impersonal, as
submarines sought to starve entire populations into submission, and bombers
to subdue them through terror from the air.
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- The fighting swept across the face of the globe, sparing
few countries, from the River Plate, off Uruguay, to Iwo Jima, off Japan,
via Stalingrad, the century's key battle.
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- More than 55 million people were killed in World War
II, making it mankind's greatest cataclysm.
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- Wars of annihiliation were launched not just against
armies or nations but against ethnic groups, and a new word was coined
to describe Hitler's campaign against the Jews: genocide. The death camp
at Auschwitz became the symbol of man's fathomless capacity for cruelty.
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- As the war ended another symbol, mushroom-shaped, arose
in the east, and the name Hiroshima became shorthand for the impossibility
of future global conflict as the victors of 1945, the Soviet Union and
the United States, faced off against each other in nuclear stalemate.
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- Weakened by the world wars, the old colonial powers began
to dismantle their empires, first in Asia, then in Africa. Where they clung
on, wars of national liberation succeeded in forcing them out, even --
as in Algeria and Vietnam -- in the face of vastly superior weaponry.
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- Rather than risk the Mutually Assured Destruction that
nuclear weapons promised, the superpowers fought out their rivalry in the
developing world and elsewhere through proxies, with the result that Africa
in particular became the theatre of a series of low-level, long-running
conflicts between (usually) Soviet-backed regimes and US-backed rebels.
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- The ending of the Cold War saw ethnicity replace ideology
as the engine of war, notably in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Militant
Islam, as in Afghanistan and Algeria, was a further source of instability
and, with several regions awash with western or Soviet-made hardware --
in Somalia kalashnikovs were easier to find than school-books -- the world
began to witness the return of warlordism and the spectacle of collapsing
states.
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- Some 60 armed conflicts scarred the decade following
the fall of the Berlin Wall, ranging from Guatemala to Cambodia via Sierra
Leone, Sudan and Sri Lanka. Most of these were fought not by states, which
by century's end had lost their monopoly on organised violence, but by
irregular armies, tribal or ethnic militias or political organisations.
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- The outstanding exception was the Gulf War where, with
much of the world's oil reserves at stake, the United States and its allies
mobilised against Iraq, deploying a vast armada of remote weaponry designed
to ensure minimal western losses.
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- But with chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons
coming within ever closer reach of rogue states, maverick groups and millenarian
sects, it would be an optimist who claimed that war had been forever banished
to the margins.
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