ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: We may be in a delicate calm before a stormy new year of European wars

We’ve just passed mid-December, and Europe is slinking towards Christmas — as are many of the rest of us. There is talk swirling about an imminent third world war. The first and second — those three decades of violence — were, essentially, a conflict among European countries. Japan and the US arrived late, leaving Europe as the main theatre of that era of death and destruction.

It was, at the time, the latest in Europe’s wars of the previous four or five centuries. In 1976, British historian Michael Howard reminded us that “the origins of Europe were hammered out on the anvil of war”. That reminder came before Europeans destroyed Yugoslavia and before the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

There will be a lot more written about Europe and its war futures in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, there is much belligerence under way this December: wars in Sudan and in the Levant, the return to militarism in Germany and Japan, those powers that conspired to bring the world to catastrophe early in the 20th century…

Pick any place in the world, and we see tension, social breakdown and political, economic and geostrategic fear and trembling — essentially more death and destruction. There is limited space here, but we can, and will, certainly, return to all this in the near future.

Here we are, then, on the eve of Christmas, possibly feeling we are in that time of peace and confidence — but also of caution — that shaped the months before the resumption of European wars in 1914.

However, there are a few things that stand out today. One is the tired belief that the world is too economically interdependent and the financial stakes too high for a return to a world war. Another is the (related) way in which we are simply going about our days: a little confident and a lot oblivious, assured that this time will be different. A third is just how impossible it is to paint a clear picture of the past and how it informs the present.

We may examine December of 1913, the year that art historian Florian Illies described as, and titled his book, [1913:] The Year Before the Storm, for consideration of interchanges between normalcy and foreboding of life in Europe and wonder to ourselves about peace in these lazy days of summer in the southern hemisphere.

Things were fairly normal in 1913. It has been speculated that, early in that year, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler ran into each other in Vienna; by December, Stalin was freezing in Siberian exile. In Paris, Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote down his desires for the next several years; more than anything, he wanted peace.

That same year, German philosopher Oswald Spengler started work on The Decline of the West and wrote pithily about the bleakness of life in Europe. On the last day of 1913, Spengler wrote: “Life in this century oppresses me. Everything redolent of comfort, of beauty, of colour, is being plundered.”

What happened next threw all sensibilities about “economic interdependence” and the impossibility of war onto burning battlements across Europe. What stands out now, at least to me, is just how difficult it is, though not impossible, to point to a single villain in the way that the Germans were singled out as the start of a chain reaction that drew Europeans back into war. The evidence does not support contentions of a “global” military threat coming from China, or Russia, or Iran.

If we follow one money train, we may see a pattern in Western Europe’s military and financial support for conflicts from Venezuela, across the Levant to Ukraine and the East. We seem to be ignoring the fact that in mid-December the US announced an $11.1bn weapons package for Taiwan (ostensibly to fight China), as reported by Reuters.

Early in December, Politico confirmed that European countries and Australia and New Zealand, which the late British economist Angus Maddison described as Europe’s outgrowths (along with the US), had contributed a $2.5bn “package” for Ukraine (ostensibly to fight Russia), with a further $5bn to come before the end of the year.

And so, as we walk on from 2025, it’s worth remembering, not without discomfort, what French essayist Paul Valéry said (in the context of the inter-war period): “We do not know what will [come to be], and we fear the future, not without reason.”

This December may be a month of relative calm before a storm of yet more European wars.

• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.