Violence can only be the greatest evil if primary good secured by politics is the preservation of life as such rather than continuing to live in a certain way that defines one’s community-and opposing threats to that way of life posed by one’s enemies. Every time democracies were confronted to authoritarian regimes, they always thought that the men in charge were sufficiently reasonable to prefer a good compromise to a bad war.”ĭemocracies push the spirit of compromise too far because they tend to consider violence to be the greatest evil. That is, to believe that everything can be solved by a compromise. “The greatest weakness of democracies is to push the spirit of compromise too far. In a 1952 lecture given to future high civil servants, Aron identified excessive aversion to conflict as a pathological product of modern democratic politics: Such principles can be the object of discussion, but the prospect of war inevitably compels communities to give them substance and meaning-to decide on the boundaries of a singular common good rather than seeking to reconcile disparate values among members of society.Ĭonditions of peace and stability will always encourage compromise. Among those moral qualities is a common understanding of the principles-the sense of common good-for which a community is ready to make sacrifices. In other words, superiority in terms of metrics means close to nothing politically without the moral qualities that make political communities ready to mobilize them through concrete action. It is grotesque to believe that cannons can be resisted with butter, or effort with rest.” It is ridiculous to set regimes founded on work against regimes founded on leisure. “When one is speaking to people who profess to despise peace, one must say that, if one loves peace, it is not out of cowardice. In a 1939 lecture at the dawn of World War II, Raymond Aron, the French political philosopher and sociologist, observed that democracies, despite their wealth and power, only encouraged aggression when they decoupled these dividends of peace from the military virtues totalitarian regimes claimed to have a monopoly on: The weapons that Europe has at its disposal cannot become a threat to anyone so long as the continent’s democratic societies won’t demonstrate a capacity and determination to make use of them. Putin knew that, despite its material strength, Europe was incapable of embracing the possibility of an open conflict. That was because he understood the moral and political realities behind the veil of material imbalance. But that did not stop Russian President Vladimir Putin from carrying out his aggressive plan against Ukraine, which Europe has clearly declared an important interest in. NATO already has at its disposal military means that are vastly superior to Russia. But they have made the mistake of believing that a material response to those threats will suffice.Īrmaments are only one aspect of Europe’s problem. It would be unfair to say European leaders are unrealistic about the threats they face. Europe’s gradual rearmament, accelerated by the war in Ukraine, bears witness to that. Europe’s military leaders have been aware for some time that high-intensity military conflicts and even major wars are a real possibility for the continent.
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