Ukraine won’t trigger World War III: Accept the new global disorder

[bemildred]

Wars start in the most unexpected of places. World War I was triggered not in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, London, Paris, or Istanbul, but on the streets of Sarajevo by several shots fired by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. A few years earlier, on Oct. 26, 1909, the Japanese statesman Itô Hirobumi was assassinated by Korean nationalist Ahn Jung-Geun on the platform of the railway station in the remote Manchurian town of Harbin. This proved a landmark incident ultimately enveloping all of East Asia. And the irredentist instinct of Adolf Hitler to absorb ethnic German populations (the Sudetendeutsche) from Silesia, Moravia, and Bohemia was a cause of World War II. The temporary truce negotiated in Munich in September 1938 has remained in history as a synonym of appeasement.

So what are we to make now of Simferopol? Hardly a household name, the capital of Crimea, along with highly unfamiliar Ukrainian place names such Donetsk and Luhansk, may well resonate as epicenters of tension for some time. Crimea has certainly been off the global beaten track for a long time. Nor since the “Orange Revolution” that occurred 10 years ago has Ukraine featured prominently on anyone’s radar screen. In the more than 50 pages of the World Economic Forum Global Risks 2014 Report, the words Crimea and Ukraine do not appear once. So does the Ukrainian crisis signal the return of revengeful European ghosts from the past?

The answer is almost certainly “no.” The Ukrainian situation may turn nastier, but it will not propel Europe into war. Europe, including Russia, no longer has the demographic, economic, military, political and geopolitical dynamics it possessed in the past. In that sense, we have witnessed the “end of European history”–that Europe has reached a post-modern stage which has displaced the earlier eras of empires, armies and ideologues. A reenactment of the enthusiasm with which Europeans went gaily off to war in the summer of 1914 is impossible to imagine in 2014. We were young then, we are old now.

Ukraine is a detour on the ineluctable march of history beyond European frontiers and toward the East. The narratives of the 19th and 20th centuries were written in Europe, but the narrative of the 21st century will be written in Asia, extending from the Persian Gulf to the East and South China seas.

http://qz.com/205132/ukraine-wont-trigger-world-war-iii-accept-the-new-global-disorder/

[The Magistrate]

1. Right Enough, Sir, So Far As It Goes

The attempts to whip up hysteria on this subject, the 'it's a new Cold War!' and 'what if it goes nuclear!' lines you will hear, most often from people taking up the Russian side in this, are nonesense. I am not so sure war has been banished from Europe; I remember a lot of talk on the same lines as the late Balkan War was developing a quarter-century ago. War would have a very different character today than it had in the early and mid twentieth century, certainly, but that is not quite the same thing. The real key to Europe's stability, to its modern ( and historically anomalous ) absence of war is a social consensus that the status quo, the boundaries of the nations and their populations, is to be treated as fixed and unalterable. This is risked by Russia's present activities.