European Conflicts

5 Key excerpts on "European Conflicts"

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  Global Insecurity

  • Mary Kaldor(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Pinter

    (Publisher)

  Moreover, ethnic labels can and do change over time. In fact it is not easy to identify ethnicity as a primary source of political conflict. Certainly, conflicts are always between 'us and them'. Because human beings can often be classified according to seemingly deep-rooted differences -language, religion, skin colour -these differences can be exploited to this end by some of the warring parties, regardless of whether the conflict is caused by those differences, which is indeed rarely the case. In general, the causes of ethnic conflicts have to do with other factors -politics or econom-ics. Racists and demagogues will seize the opportunity to render a conflict absolute by narrowing it down to 'natural' differences. Ethnic conflicts cannot be solved in a politically and morally satisfactory way without first eliminating, completely or partly, the ethnic element from the conflict. Political separation on ethnic grounds is never a solution but always a defeat and indeed, in ethical terms, a shame. Unfortunately, ethnic separations occur all too often in the present world. Frozen conflicts This chapter is about frozen conflicts. Since 1945 the freezing of conflict has been one of Europe's most important political innova-tions. The Great Cold War (1945-89) was a frozen conflict in Europe, although the ideological struggle took violent forms else-where. Europe is still confronted with a number of (little) cold wars - in Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Georgia, Cyprus, Azerbaijan, and other places. Can they be solved peacefully, like the Great Cold War? 55 MIENT JAN FABER The Great Cold War was supposed to be a conflict between ideologies. The little cold wars are all (more or less) considered ethnic, but each is subtly different. The Great Cold War ended because the underlying ideological struggle evaporated. But ethnic differences, it is said, will always remain.

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  Conflicts and Wars

  Their Fallout and Prevention

  • Hossein Askari(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 A Glance at Recent Conflicts and Wars A Brief Accounting of Recent Conflicts and Wars The early part of the nineteenth century, from 1815 to 1845, was a peaceful period in Europe with unprecedented industrial expansion. In America, there was political tranquility with rapid economic growth up to the out- break of the American Civil War. 1 World military expenditures were gen- erally low because many imagined that peace would be permanent. By mid-century, however, tensions were increasing and intense rivalry once again developed between England and France. The latter half of the cen- tury was marked by a number of conflicts: the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo- Turkish War, the Boer War, and the Spanish-American War (Zapotoczny). According to the COW (Correlates of War, at the University of Michigan) project, 2 there have been around 490 major conflicts from the beginning of the nineteenth century, with more than 38 million battle-related fatalities; and since 1945 alone, there have been roughly 170 conflicts with nearly 6 million battle-related deaths; while according to SIPRI, since 1988 world- wide military expenditures have accounted for more than $26 trillion (in 2009 constant prices). 3 Heightened global concern about renewed interstate conflicts after World War I brought about the establishment of the League of Nations, which was later (after World War II) replaced by the United Nations Conflicts and Wars 24 because countries were encouraged to use diplomacy to solve emerging conflicts. Many issues such as self-determination, national sovereignty, and the territorial integrity of countries were not addressed after World War II, resulting in conflicts in the ensuing period of decolonization.

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  Conflict Management in Kashmir

  State-People Relations and Peace

  • Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Theorizing Conflicts Conflict broadly implies pursuit of incompatible goals, which can range from competition over resources to contradictory needs and interests. While Coser (1956) defines conflict as struggle over values and claims to scarce resources, Pruitt and Rubin (1986) define it as perceived divergence of interest or a belief that parties’ current aspirations cannot be achieved simultaneously. Four criteria separate a conflict situation from other situations: first, the participants in a conflict must perceive that there is a conflict; second, there is a clear difference of values, interests, aims or relations at the root of the conflict; third, the parties to the conflict are either states or significant elements of the population within the state; and four, the outcomes of the conflict are considered important by the parties (Miall, 1992). Over the years, the patterns of conflicts have changed. The end of the Cold War witnessed decline in interstate warfare and sharp rise in conflicts confined to the borders of states. According to Wallensteen and Axell (1994), 90 armed conflicts took place in 61 locations around the world from 1989 to 1993. Out of these, only four were interstate armed conflicts and the rest were intrastate conflicts, implying that in the post-Cold War period the conflict actors were not only the states. Holsti (1996, 20) refers to internal conflicts, many of which are ethnicity based, as the wars of ‘third kind’. For him, the wars of the third kind have different profiles. In these wars: [n]o single crisis precipitates them, and they typically do not start at a particular date. There are no declarations of war, there are no seasons for campaigning, and few end with peace treaties. Decisive battles are few … wars are fought by loosely knit groups of regulars, irregulars, cells, and not infrequently by locally-based warlords under little or no central authority. The post-Cold War conflicts are complex in multiple ways.

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  Conflict in Africa

  Concepts and Realities

  • Adda Bruemmer Bozeman(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  As the boundaries between personal, national, and international domains have been permitted to become blurred in the West, interstate conflicts have often been con- founded with internal conflicts, and this again has naturally conduced to a disregard of historical perspective and to the disassembling of such comprehensive concepts as the national interest. Indeed, the intensity of personal anxiety in the face of political uncertainty and the insistent as- sumption that all disputes in foreign affairs—including even that con- glomerate of ideological enmities between the Occidental and communist worlds commonly known as "the cold war"—should be capable of reso- lution, just as personal quarrels are put to rest, has come to obsess vast sectors of public opinion to a degree unparalleled in history. For not only do these modern trends diverge dramatically from those observed and sanctioned in the war-torn but culturally unified Grotian system of states; they are contrary also to assumptions prevalent in much earlier epochs. European history begins, after all, with the stamina displayed by classical Greece during continuous military and psycho-diplomatic encroachments by imperial Persia, and in regard to the later medieval epoch it instructs us firmly that Christians and Muslims coexisted for centuries in the Mediterranean region, notably in the Iberian Peninsula, by absorbing the facts of war and sustaining a political climate dense with ideological ten- sions and hostilities that were already then summarily described as "guerra fria." 23 In short, by comparison with other times, present generations in the Occident, especially the United States, may be said to suffer from a 23 A thirteenth-century Spanish writer, Don Juan Manuel, applied the term "guerra fria" to the situation that prevailed in his native land during the coexistence of Islam and Christendom. For this reference see Luis Garcia Arias, El Concepto de guerra y la denominada "Guerra fria," Vol.

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  The Middle East in International Relations

  Power, Politics and Ideology

  • Fred Halliday(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Part III Analytic issues 6 Military conflict: war, revolt, strategic rivalry Wars, old and new, and the formation of the Middle East Armed conflict, social upheaval and the impact of the world economy have constituted the three most important formative influences on the Middle East. In a famous summary of the events of the twentieth century in particular, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt said that it was a time of ‘wars and revolutions’. If this is true of Europe, it equally char-acterises other regions of the world, not least East Asia and the Middle East. Here, as with culture, state and nation, the appearance of ancient patterns of conflict, via wars, reveals the rupture introduced by moder-nity. What distinguishes modern history is the combination of war with socio-economic change and revolution, and the very different character of the first. Prior to the twentieth century, the role of war was evident in the ways in which the ancient pre-Islamic empires, the Persians, the Greeks and Romans and others, were created by war as well as in how the major Islamic empires were formed: the initial Arab conquests forged an Islamic world that was, later, ruled by the Ummayads, the Abbasids, the Safavis and the Ottomans. It was war too which began to reverse this process, to push back the frontiers of the Islamic empires, from the four-teenth century in Spain and the seventeenth on the western (Austrian) and northern (Russian) frontiers of the Ottoman empire. Yet important as these wars were in defining territory and elites, war in these earlier centuries was not, as was to be the case in the twentieth century, linked, as consequence and precursor, to social and political upheaval. In the twentieth century it was, as discussed in chapter 3 , most obviously World War I, itself the product of upheaval in Turkey and the Balkans, which finally brought the end of the Ottoman empire and led to the designation of the modern Middle East state system.

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