80 Years of Peace in Europe?
On 15 May 2025, a roundtable '80 Years of Peace in Europe?' was convened with students and staff at Leiden University to reflect on the anniversary of the end of World War II.
Five speakers from different (sub-)disciplinary backgrounds, including International Relations, Political Science, European Studies, History and Economics were invited. The roundtable was the pre-cursor to a one-day workshop for researchers, on the same theme.
The organisers were most grateful to Professor Roberta Guerrina of Bristol University, UK who is an expert on gender in the EU. Professor Guerrina stepped in as a last minute replacement for Dr Laurien Crump of Radboud University, Nijmegen. She spoke alongside Dr Jue Wang from the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, who is a Global Political Economist, with a particular focus on China. The remaining speakers and the moderator are all lecturers at the Institute for History, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University but largely coming from differing disciplinary and theoretical positions: Dr Vineet Thakur bridges the History and IR disciplines; Dr Daniel Schade focuses on the EU and its external relations; Dr Maxine David is a foreign policy analyst, specialising in EU-Russia relations. The speakers were ably guided by Dr Matthew Broad, an historian of contemporary Europe. The event began with the panellists setting out their initial ideas about where they saw the EU and Europe, both from the vantage point of their expertise and from 2025, in the context of a month where many western Europeans at least were celebrating 80 years of peace in Europe. Whose peace, what kind of peace, even the reality of peace became very much the focus of the evening’s discussions.
Professor Guerrina began the roundtable by talking about minoritised groups, asking the question Cynthia Enloe asked back in 1987 but which is, unfortunately, still very much relevant today: where are the women? Article 119 of the Treaties of Rome established equality as a founding principle of European integration, but it has largely been ignored in mainstream accounts of European integration. Moreover, the principle of equality embedded within the process of European integration with its focus on access and opportunities is vulnerable to co-optation. This co-optation, alongside other developments, mean it is no wonder that for the last 10 years at least, we have witnessed the erasure of gender as a structure of power. This is all very relevant to questions about peace. As Professor Guerrina argued, gender has been weaponised, such that it is no exaggeration to say it is part of the hybrid war effort and so casts doubt on any notion that Europe is at peace.
Dr David agreed with Dr Guerrina on this last point, emphasising the vulnerability of democratic European societies to those undermining democracy from within, especially in relation to information. While Russia is the obvious threat to many other European states, we ignore at our peril the responsibility of democratic states for undermining European integration and with it the peace so many have tried to build and sustain since 1945. The EU, NATO and other organisations created after WWII, constitute significant objects of analysis, of course, but Dr David insisted on the need to pay more attention to the domestic policies of states in regional and international relations. Drawing on the work of those critical feminists who had fought for women’s rights on the basis that the 'personal is political', she argued that if more thought had been given to the Russian state’s treatment of its own citizens, especially of responses to domestic violence, no-one would have been surprised about the way that Russia went on to conduct its war on Ukraine, including the massacres at Bucha and Irpin.
Dr Thakur took the audience back to 8 May 1945, delivering an important reminder that the end of WWII most decidedly did not bring an end to violence for everyone. On the very day that many western Europeans celebrated their liberation, Algerians were subjected to a series of massacres by the French colonial powers. In the years that followed, people were 'wrested from Europe and often violently'. Algerians were not the only people to have to wage long and bloody wars for independence. Vietnam, for example, would have to wait until 1954 before they defeated the French. In a devastating criticism of the idea of 80 years of peace in Europe, Dr Thakur spoke of how colonial wars continue today, witness the struggles of the people of Palestine and Ukraine. Dr Thakur also drew attention to how nomenclature matters. He asked what might have been different if we had spoken of the period between 1945 and 1991, not as the Cold War period, but the decolonial one.
Dr Schade built further on the fact of very different experiences in 1945 and afterwards, depending on where we look. Russia celebrates the end of WWII and the liberation of Europe on 9 May but for those 'liberated' by the Red Army, what followed was actually (re)occupation. What 'Europe' do we speak of, therefore, when we speak of 80 years of peace? Fastforwarding to the present day, Dr Schade spoke of the EU’s tendency to celebrate two narratives around 1945: 'Europe of peace'; 'Europe of prosperity', each reliant on sustained commitment to established rules and norms. The narratives remain, despite the clear irony of the European Peace Facility being used to arm Ukraine. The EU risks sending the message that it is hard power, not commitment to rules and norms, that matters. What this will mean for the identity of the EU and/or for these starting narratives is a matter of critical speculation.
Dr Wang offered the wider view, commenting on China’s challenge to the Liberal World Order established after WWII and upon which Europe has been so reliant and to which it has contributed so much. With the enormous regional and global economic governance structures that came from 1945 onwards, China faced both opportunity and threat. It was only over time that the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the Bretton-Woods system were added to. The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) (later the African Union) were of particular significance in addressing western dominance. 1978 marked the moment that China moved towards the West’s system, 2001 the moment it began to move in another direction. From 2001-2015, China became the 'world’s factory'. Unaffected by the 2008 financial crisis which devastated so many western economies, the Beijing Consensus, in contrast to the Washington Consensus, became a signifier of China’s difference from the West. Since then, the creation of alternative structures, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, have caused China to be seen as the competitor and challenge to the West and its ordering principles.
Moving then to the Q and A, questions from the audience were wide-ranging, echoing and adding to criticisms of narratives of peace, amid what was expressed by one student as an increasing fetishisation of war. Questions were asked about whether peace is possible within an environment of securitisation. Meanwhile, an Irish student, channelling what is a matter of great dispute in Ireland today, asked whether neutrality was possible anymore. Others spoke of rising nationalism and questioned the extent to which we should be concerned about it. Equally, the complacency of Europeans, for too long, was remarked upon, epitomised by feelings expressed after February 2022 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, that the 'unthinkable' had happened. 2022, it was said, had brought an end to a sense of the inevitability of peace, along with never-ending growth. Another key theme in the audience’s interventions was the hypocrisy of much policy in Europe, especially in relation to migrants, asylum seekers and the climate crisis. Belatedly, questions came too about solutions, what can we do when it is hate and sexism that sell and sell well. Can we build more empathy? How? How can we help people who seek hope?
Coming a week or so after celebrations and remembrance ceremonies in so many European capitals and towns, the event was sobering. It was clear that for many of the young people we teach, the idea of peace in Europe was at best idealistic, at worst, a manipulative lie. It was clear, too, that the problems facing us in Europe today are understood by the younger members of the university, and what they want more than anything are realistic solutions – or at least the hope that they can be found.