Читать книгу The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith - Страница 12
Оглавлениеhalting and uncertain, Europe has faced a serial crisis and renewed recessions.
The contrast with China has only served to emphasize its rise. The European
Union’s combined economic scale remains huge; it is the largest single market
in the world. But the combined political weight of its member states, which
has always seemed less than the sum of its parts, has diminished because of
the political leaders’ seeming inability to find a solution to Europe’s problems
that retains credibility for more than a few months.
WAR & PEACE
This is not a peaceful world, and yet it is more peaceful today than at
any time since before the First World War and, some argue, ever. Military
spending remains high, and armed conflict remains a major cause of death,
yet by comparison with earlier times, there are markedly fewer wars and they
are less lethal. There has been an avalanche of peace agreements in the two
decades since the end of the Cold War, and a major, sustained if quiet effort
not only to make peace, but then to lay the foundations for long-term peace
in conflict-affected countries.
It would be wrong to look at the issues of war and peace and declare job
done. In many countries, it is not so much a case of having achieved peace
as, rather, of bottling up conflict. Indeed, declaring job done prematurely is
a repeated failing of the Western governments who often offer themselves
as custodians of peace processes in war-torn countries. In many countries,
there are patterns of violent conflict that are from a different mould than
civil wars. They are generated by, and reinforce, a dangerous intersection
between crime and politics, and in several cases they revolve around the
trade in illegal narcotics or other illegal and massively profitable enterprises.
The main international institutions on which we rely for responding to armed
conflicts are strikingly ill-prepared for this kind of violent conflict. A high
United Nations representative can be sent to negotiate with even the most
despicable of dictators, but the same space and the same role does not exist
between a government and a drug lord.
There is, further, a risk that the number of civil wars could increase. The
environmental, demographic, and economic pressures are there. The United
Nations has become quite adept at generating norms that manage violent
conflict, but a new round of conflict pressures might encounter a deficient
response because the governments that have tended to fund peace efforts
include several that have been hard hit by economic crisis. With repetitive
demands for bailing out countries and banks, these governments may simply
conclude they have too many competing calls on economic resources for it to
be politically feasible to support long-term peacebuilding. If no new actors
appear to take their place, the peacebuilding enterprise could collapse.
Two decades of
growing peace
Number of wars
1990
2000
2010
50
37
30
11