Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union

LITTLE REVIEWSConquering Peace is a truly significant reenvisioning of the last three centuries of Europe's history. It is an imaginative and beautifully written longue durée narrative that presents familiar names, dates, and events in a new way, forcing readers to rethink their understanding of the subject. The book traces the emergence, periodic revivals, and revisions of the idea that Europe can be defined as one cultural community whose people could live in peace by eliminating ethno-cultural violence and tensions between competing empires. Ghervas follows the continuing thread of this intellectual history as she recasts five “experiments [in] engineering peace,” all of them major events in European history: the Treaties of Utrecht that settled the Wars of Spanish Succession, the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars, the Versailles Conference of 1919–20, the post-1945 settlements that produced the Cold War division of Europe, and finally the enlargement of Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War. Most historians have presented these attempts to create enduring peace as a series of failures that make it easy to assume the current war in Ukraine proves their “realist” convictions that peace equals security and that only deterrence and the organization of military alliances can achieve it. What this dominant approach fails to appreciate, and Ghervas highlights, is the persistence of a very different definition of peace first formulated in the early eighteenth century by Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant. In the view of these Enlightenment thinkers and of the generations of peace seekers who sustained and revised their ideas, enduring peace would result when Europe's nations voluntarily gave up some sovereignty to achieve closer political, economic, and social integration.Ghervas explains clearly and in great detail when, how, and why the first four of the peacemaking experiments that ended Continental wars failed to prevent another major war, highlighting especially the long-term fragility of international peace that is dependent on a balance of power. Diplomats working in various postwar situations designed peacekeeping mechanisms (such as the Congress of Europe in the early nineteenth century and the League of Nations in the early twentieth) that failed when new political and economic developments undercut their legitimacy. What has changed this pattern during my lifetime is the rise of peace seekers who decided their goal of pacifying Europe could be achieved only by setting in motion what Ghervas calls “organic” processes capable of gradually integrating European nation-states. “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan,” as French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman declared in May 1950 when announcing what would become the European Coal and Iron Community. Now, nearly seventy-five years later, the European Economic Community, the European Union, the Eurozone, European Parliament, European Courts of Justice and Human Rights, and other Euro-institutions prove the wisdom of Schuman's prophecy.As Ghervas brings her narrative to a close, she insists that Mikhail Gorbachev, not Ronald Reagan, was the statesman who did the most to end the Cold War. In the spirit of European peace, Gorbachev pushed for reforms that ended Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, opening the way in the 1990s for Russia to become part of the newly integrated Europe. But the expansion of NATO closed the door to enduring peace that Gorbachev had opened. Conquering Peace provides potential Realist critics no opportunity to deploy their favorite word weapons—naive, idealistic, utopian. This peace history should be mandatory reading for everyone concerned about how the long war in Ukraine will end and about the prospects for ensuring enduring peace in Europe during its aftermath.