For a brief historical moment, many Europeans believed that large interstate wars on their continent belonged definitively to the past. The post-Cold War decades were framed as a transition from power politics to legal norms, from nuclear brinkmanship to economic interdependence. Today that confidence has evaporated. Governments quietly refurbish bunkers, defense budgets balloon, and public debates revolve around “readiness” and “deterrence” rather than reconciliation. What was once unthinkable – preparing for a major war in Europe, even for nuclear scenarios – is being normalized across politics, education, and culture.
This shift is not simply about tanks, missiles, or troop numbers. It reflects a deeper transformation of how European societies imagine their future, their neighbors, and their own children’s lives. The language of peace has not disappeared, but it has been subordinated to a new grammar of permanent emergency.
From peace movements to pre‑war rhetoric
In the 1970s and 1980s, West European societies built powerful peace movements aimed at preventing precisely the kind of militarized mindset that is now returning. Mass protests, supported by churches and trade unions, cast suspicion on any attempt to legitimize nuclear deterrence. The idea that “if you want peace, prepare for war” was widely criticized as a dangerous doctrine that disguised offensive ambitions as defensive prudence. Preparing for war was seen as a moral failure, even as a contribution to the very danger it claimed to prevent.
The contrast with the present is stark. Since the full‑scale war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, political elites and many commentators explicitly speak of a “pre‑war” period. The message is not that war must be rendered impossible, but that it must be expected, budgeted for, and psychologically rehearsed. The focus has quietly moved from disarmament to resilience, from preventing catastrophe to surviving it.
The broken promise of the “global village”
The end of the Cold War generated a seductive narrative: economic globalization, democratic expansion, and liberal norms would gradually tame geopolitical rivalry. Europe, especially, seemed destined to become a post‑historical space where borders were softened by trade and supranational institutions. Peace was supposed to be a by‑product of integration, not the fragile outcome of constant political work.
What actually happened was more ambivalent. Integration deepened, but so did strategic competition. A rising China, initially embraced as a workshop of the world, emerged as a long‑term systemic rival. Russia, losing its superpower status, turned toward regional revisionism and hybrid coercion. Western governments, meanwhile, treated the post‑Cold War moment as an opportunity to expand their own influence under the banner of liberal values. The result was a layered conflict: ideals of democracy and human rights became entangled with classic great‑power maneuvering. When the war burst out in 2022, this entire narrative of the “global village” collapsed. Markets and interdependence had not neutralized imperial instincts. Legal norms had not prevented the forcible redrawing of borders. The world revealed itself less as a cooperative neighborhood and more as a landscape of overlapping, sometimes clashing, strategic projects.
Normalizing the extraordinary
Faced with this reality, European governments are reshaping their security posture at high speed. Defense spending is rising across the continent; NATO has expanded its rapid‑reaction forces dramatically and intensified exercises along its eastern flank. Civil defense, long neglected, is being rediscovered: from national stockpiles of medical supplies to renewed attention to critical infrastructure and continuity‑of‑government plans. Yet the most consequential changes are taking place in the realm of the ordinary. Exercises simulate not only military scenarios but also blackouts, cyberattacks, and prolonged disruption of basic services. Children are introduced to emergency procedures, sometimes through games and storytelling designed to “take the fear out” of crisis situations. Educational materials that once centered on dialogue, fairness, and shared responsibility increasingly coexist with messages about personal toughness, competition, and the need to stand firm in the face of external threats.
What would, in another era, have been denounced as psychological preparation for war is now presented as mental health care and responsible risk management. The border between vigilance and fatalism becomes dangerously thin: if war is framed as structurally inevitable, then every act of preparation can be justified as common sense, even when it raises the temperature of confrontation.
to be continued
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