Читать книгу The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith - Страница 12

halting 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

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