When writing history, deciding how things are named is important. People may sometimes overlook this aspect, but the way a period, an ideology or a phenomenon is dubbed can shape our consciousness in complex ways. With rising tensions in global politics, especially in relation to crises occurring or emerging over Ukraine, Taiwan or Greenland, it is now important to seriously discuss the relevance of “The Long Peace” as a concept in modern history.
The Long Peace defines the political nature of our modern era. The name originates from the idea that, after the end of World War II, the great powers of the world have never entered wars against each other, coexisting in peace since then. We live in an age of peace relative to the decades and centuries of the past, purely because there have been no direct declarations of war between major powers in the past 80 years.
As a definition, The Long Peace is naive and optimistic in its approach to history and I argue that it is false. To declare that the modern world is overall less violent than in the past is perhaps conceivable in comparison to the World Wars or colonialism. However, to outright define the last eight decades of modern history as one long, uninterrupted period of peace is at best negligent and at worst malicious, disregarding past and ongoing mass atrocities around the world.
The first issue with this definition is its scope — or lack thereof. The concept celebrates the notion that the world’s great economic powers have not fought each other directly since the end of World War II, but does not consider the damage and devastation caused by conflicts fought in other circumstances. Great powers like the United States and the Soviet Union contributed to proxy wars throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. In cases like Vietnam or the Gulf War, they actively waged war on a mass scale, too.
The notion that we live in an age of worldwide peace only because Western Europe and North America have been quiet and prosperous ignores the rest of the world. It perpetuates the archaic First World, Second World and Third World categories that separate humanity into ideological lines, arguing that so long as the wealthiest Western nations are at peace, what happens in the rest is of no consequence.
The Long Peace may make sense to a person in Switzerland or New Zealand. Indeed, for a wealthy society not burdened by the horrors of war or famine, it is easy to believe that such issues are a thing of the past. You cannot tell the same idea to a person in Iraq, Mali or Gaza and expect them to believe that we live in an age of solidified and perpetual peace.
The second issue is its lack of depth, which is more serious in relation to historiography. Arguing that the world has been in an uninterrupted period of peace avoids, perhaps inadvertently, how close humanity has come to descending into global war. The list of close calls, mishaps, international crises and escalations that almost caused nuclear wars is terribly long, but calling the period in which they all occurred The Long Peace downplays their significance. Consequently, believing in an uninterrupted peace also breeds complacency and even apathy among the public, and taking attention away from global affairs risks allowing mass atrocities and deep political issues to grow unchecked because of the status quo.
The most important issue is the cold truth that this definition, already inapplicable to the past, is also outdated for our present and likely our future. As I said at the beginning of the column, humanity is experiencing tides of aggression and escalation between states over land and resources. To still insist on an ongoing long peace, despite ongoing conflict in Gaza, the rise of expansionist rhetoric in the United States and the immediate potential of wars over key strategic regions like Taiwan or the Persian Gulf, is the essence of harmful naivete. It is the academic equivalent of putting your fingers into your ears and singing loudly while looking at an oncoming storm.
Humanity is still far from sharing its resources among itself fairly and violence among peoples continues. We live not in a long peace but in a long pause, an intermediary stage between the age of old ideologies and systems from the past and new ones that have not yet solidified or replaced them.
My sincere hope is that a world more peaceful than ours today will be realized in the future, but progress is only possible when we acknowledge how violent the world is and how far we are from true and everlasting peace. It is with this understanding, not with a naive belief in peace but a mature acknowledgement of its absence, that we must think about and build upon history.
Deniz Gulay is a junior double-majoring in history and Russian.
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