Nowhere are the tensions, mentioned above, more visible than in children’s rooms and digital spaces. Online games featuring realistic weapons, drones, and high‑tech battlefields have long been popular. What changes in a pre‑war mindset is the interpretive frame: virtual combat is no longer just an escapist fantasy but can easily be reimagined as informal training, as a way of getting used to the imagery and logic of modern warfare.
This does not mean that societies are consciously turning children into soldiers. It does mean, however, that the symbolic world in which young people grow up is saturated with martial metaphors and competitive hierarchies. Empathy and compromise risk being coded as naïveté, while dominance and “winning” are celebrated as mature virtues. When this value shift syncs with official messaging about existential threats, it becomes harder to maintain spaces – in schools, media, and families – that treat peace not as an absence of fighting but as a positive political and moral horizon.
The new geopolitics of anxiety
Behind the cultural transformation lies a strategic one. Europe finds itself squeezed between a still‑assertive Russia, a globally ambitious China, and an increasingly inward‑focused United States wrestling with its own political polarization. Washington’s commitment to European security remains formally strong, but is now filtered through debates about prioritizing resources for the Indo‑Pacific theater and about the costs of long‑term support to Ukraine. This uncertainty fuels anxiety in European capitals and strengthens the argument for rapid rearmament and strategic autonomy.
At the same time, nationalist and far‑right forces across Europe exploit the security debate for their own agendas. Some call for tougher military postures while questioning the cohesion of alliances or the value of supporting Ukraine; others flirt with Moscow or Beijing, framing them as partners against “liberal globalism.” The result is a fragmented strategic conversation in which the language of hard power spreads, but agreement on long‑term goals remains elusive. Security, in this context, becomes a contested identity marker rather than a shared project. Who defines the threats – and who profits from the chosen responses – becomes as important as the threats themselves.
Can there be a new peace realism?
The uncomfortable truth is that Europe is likely to live for years, perhaps decades, in a high‑risk environment shaped by unresolved wars, arms races, and hybrid attacks. Denying this would be irresponsible. But accepting it does not require surrendering to the idea that war is destiny. Between naive pacifism and aggressive militarism lies a still underdeveloped alternative: a peace‑oriented realism.
Such an approach would start from a sober recognition of power politics, but insist that every military measure be balanced by diplomatic, institutional, and social initiatives aimed at lowering the long‑term temperature. It would treat arms control and crisis‑communication channels as strategic necessities, not sentimental relics. It would invest not only in hardware but in the political imagination needed to design security architectures that reduce incentives for preemptive strikes and accidental escalation.
At the societal level, a peace realism would fight the quiet colonization of everyday life by war thinking. It would defend educational programs that train children in empathy and conflict resolution alongside civil‑defense drills. It would promote media narratives where security is linked to social justice, ecological stability, and democratic resilience – not only to the number of fighter jets on standby.
The stakes of imagination
Ultimately, the return of the unthinkable is not just a story about geopolitics; it is a story about imagination. European societies are being asked to picture themselves in an indefinite “before” of catastrophe, to habitually anticipate blackout, bombardment, and nuclear blackmail. That imaginative shift has consequences: it shapes how people vote, where they invest, whether they trust their neighbors, and what they tell their children about the future.
A continent that accepts permanent pre‑war anxiety as the new normal may well become better armed and more technically prepared. But there is a risk that, in the process, it forgets how to articulate a credible politics of peace – not the utopian peace of the early 1990s, but a hard‑earned, institutionally anchored, and constantly defended peace. Recovering that ambition, without closing its eyes to real dangers, might be Europe’s most difficult and most important task in the years ahead
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