Soldiers Gone

Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? is a new non-fiction book (which I have not yet read) by Stanford University history professor James Sheehan. The book jacket says this:

An eminent historian offers a sweeping look at Europe's tumultuous twentieth century, showing how the rejection of violence after World War II transformed a continent. In the last decade we've seen an ever-widening rift between the United States and Europe, most visibly over Iraq. But as James J. Sheehan reminds us in his timely book, it wasn't always thus.

How did America and Europe come to take such different paths? In Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? Stanford historian Sheehan charts what is perhaps the most radical shift in Europes history. For centuries, nations defined themselves by their willingness and ability to wage war. But after World War II, Europe began to redefine statehood, rejecting ballooning defense budgets in favor of material well-being, social stability, and economic growth.

A book review by Adam Kirsch published in the New York Sun reminds us that for the first half of the 20th century, Europe's wars were bloodier and more devastating than ever before. But following the end of World War II, things changed:

For the first time since Napoleon, France and Germany agreed to stop being enemies, choosing instead to work together in building the European Economic Community and the European Union. This resigned neutrality allowed Europe to direct ever more of its wealth away from defense spending and into social welfare: From 1955 to 1979, Mr. Sheehan notes, the military's share of Britain's budget fell from 25 percent to 10 percent.

The rise of what Mr. Sheehan calls "the civilian state" went along with a transformation of public attitudes. Before the Great War, the source of a state's legitimacy lay in its ability to make war: "Without war," as the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke put it, "there would be no state." After World War II, on the other hand, Mr. Sheehan writes, "the legitimacy of every western European government depended on its capacity to sustain growth and prosperity." Europeans stopped caring about the military virtues, and being a soldier became just another job; in the Netherlands, soldiers even have a labor union.

However, as Kirsch notes in his review (and Sheehan in his book), this pleasant outcome likely could not have occurred without the protective support of America's military muscle. Kirsch says:

All this is, of course, cause for great celebration. Hundreds of millions of people in Europe are now safer, healthier, and happier than their ancestors ever were. Billions more in Asia and Africa are free from the yoke of European imperialism (though their new rulers might not be much better). Yet, as Mr. Sheehan points out, this epochal endorsement of peace was sponsored by a different kind of war — the Cold War, which turned America into the guarantor of Western European freedom.

Without NATO and the American nuclear umbrella, Europe's transformation would never have been possible. The continent could afford to discard the military virtues, not because they were no longer necessary, but because they were outsourced to America, which for 50 years managed to combine strength with civility more successfully than Europe itself ever did.

Okay, this is all very interesting and important on its own merits, but now I want to emphasize its significance for the issues that concern CRN...

We believe, for reasons that have been presented here and here, that molecular manufacturing will be such a powerful technology with so much potential to undermine global peace and security, that it should be developed and controlled exclusively by some sort of international body.

If you reason out the logical implications of a technology as transformative as molecular manufacturing, you can conclude that it "has the potential to remove or bypass many of today's limits" on the projection of force, on the scale of surveillance, and on the ability to exert supreme control. As Chris Phoenix has written, "A near-total lack of limits could lead straight to a planet-wide dictatorship, or to any of several forms of irreversible destruction."

So, the only viable option to prevent an inherently unstable nanotech arms race and a probable winner-take-all war might be to establish an overarching structure of global governance that supersedes state sovereignty.

And that's where we get back to Sheehan's book.

The European experience has shown us that it is possible for previously warring partners -- countries that had been enemies literally for centuries -- to come together and unite in a peaceful, prosperous union. Could that success be an analog for a similar worldwide unification? Is it possible for an EU to become, or at least to inspire, a GU (Global Union)?

Or, conversely, does the evident requirement of an external guarantor of safety and security (in the case of Europe, the USA) mean that this success could not be replicated globally?

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog