MacMillan noted how today modern US-China strategic and economic competition and the jockeying of each for influence and advantage have the worrying potential from avoidance of armed conflict to preparation in anticipation of it. There were mistakes and dangerous moments when the Cold War came close to being a hot one capable of destroying civilization. The Cold War was driven partly by the clash between communism and democracy. It was in large part due to nationalist rhetoric and an eagerness to organize for war that European powers came into conflict before 1914 in spite of unprecedented economic and political integration. It was nationalism that helped to motivate the grand armies of the Napoleonic Wars, shattered the Concert of Nations prior to WWI, and drew in the combatants in WWII and after. To gloss over or ignore war or politicize it in a blinkered historical narrative is to lose a critical dimension of global history.Īnalyzing war itself, MacMillan reflected how ideology, in the form of nationalism for example, has been a key instigator of war in the 19th and 20th centuries.
While an abhorrent engine of progress or change, just as pandemics or natural catastrophes are, war is a necessary component to understanding the state of the modern world.
Yet the effects of war are not only felt directly in the present day, but extend indirectly from well into the past Wars have brought about social changes such as women's suffrage, political upheavals such as the Bolshevik Revolution, or technological innovations such as the jet engine and modern air travel. Armed conflict, for most of academia and Western societies, is something that happens elsewhere, removed by either space or time. What is war? Why does it keep happening? And how does it affect us? On April 15th, 2021, SAIS professor Mark Gilbert was joined by international historian Margaret MacMillan – whose latest book, War: How Conflict Shaped Us, explores these very questions – for a conversation on the history of modern war, our understanding of its impacts, and the nature of armed conflict in the 21st century.įor many Western universities, which have existed in predominantly peaceful locations since 1945, the study of war often feels remote.
0 kommentar(er)
