Our deeply troubled world is getting involved in more and more dangerous situations. While one world threatening war situation has not been resolved yet, another one erupts. Many smaller wars causing extreme distress in their own regions are also continuing, while several potential ones lurk in the shadows. The World Peace Index noted in its latest report for 2025 that as many 78 countries are engaged in a conflict beyond their borders.
In such a situation it is important for more and more peace opportunities to be created, and while everyone should contribute to this, someone has to play a more leading role to take things forward, and Europe appears to have a significant potential to be in the position of becoming a leader for world peace.
Among its many assets, the European Union and some of the leading European countries occupy a position of prestige for a large number of people in the world and this can be helpful for Europe to be in a leading role for peace. Most countries of Europe are already united in the European Union and this makes it possible to take forward several peace issues more quickly. In addition Europe, at the level of relations involving people, scholars, statesman, activists, experts etc. can more easily create a wider consensus on important issues on peace involving several other countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and to a certain extent USA.
Europe has very high levels of education and hence it should be easier to have more public consciousness regarding the dangers of war and the more destructive weapons, and based on this understanding to have a wider and stronger peace movement for avoiding wars and for disarmament. Europe has both the reations
As a region with high levels of education, scientific and technological development Europe stands to benefit greatly in a world centered on peace, stability and development. On the other hand its dense population makes its people more vulnerable to wars and heavy bombing.
Unfortunately despite such obvious strengths, advantages and reasons for emerging as a leader of world peace efforts, Europe has not been able to live up to this potential at all. Instead Europe has served for the greater part as the junior ally, some have even used words like vassal, of the USA seeking to extend and maintain its hegemony and dominance over the world, leading in turn to the involvement of several European countries in several unjust wars, hence becoming a force for war rather than peace. In the context of the Ukraine war, Europe including UK of course has played the role of aggravating and prolonging the conflict, obstructing peace opportunities such as the Istanbul peace negotiations that had emerged at a very early stage of the war. In fact Europe’s biggest damage to world peace has been in the form of constant hostility towards Russia, ignoring the economic and peace benefits that would undoubtedly come with friendly relations which were much cherished by Russia for several years earlier but for the greater part ignored by Europe.
More recently with increasing emphasis on militarization by several European countries particularly Germany, demonization of Russia and Putin was stepped up under the reasoning that the more this threat is made to appear, the stronger the support that can be drummed up for increasing military budgets. This provided an incentive to leaders pursuing a highly distorted logic to increase military and intelligence help to Ukraine to hit more targets in mainland Russia.
Before this happened, the possibilities of Russia attacking one or more European countries were remote. However following increased military help to Ukraine, such possibilities have actually increased, raising the chances of direct confrontation between Europe and Russia, something which under worst case scenarios can prove destructive in unprecedented ways. Europe’s policy in this context has been of falsely crying wolf for so long and to such an extent that a wolf that did not exist earlier may have actually appeared now.
Why did Europe reject the path of being a leader of world peace, choosing instead a very different path which has significantly increased the risks of a very destructive war for Europe?
Europe spent a long time and a lot of efforts to create the democracy and democratic institutions to enable it to make the best and most well-informed choices. Then it somehow went ahead to ignore the best options and chose the worst ones and the most high risk ones.
Europe must seriously introspect and find out what went wrong. Can it belatedly still take corrective actions? The possibilities of this can increase if a sincere and unbiased peace movement in Europe can become stronger and can have a more visible and effective presence with continuity.
Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071 and Man over Machine. His website is bharatdogra.in and his YouTube channel is Bharat Dogra| Save Earth Campaign.
