Monopoly of Violence: Why Europeans Hate Going to War Paperback – 4 Feb. 2010

Sheehan considers the dramatic shift in public policy within Europe that took us from 1914 (with crowds in favour of war) to the present where it can be hard to get enough troops to patrol Afghanistan. Of course all such trends have individual counter-trends with the Falklands (for example) producing a dramatic but untypical return to the spirit of 1914 in the UK. During this period America went in almost the opposite direction to Europe passing from isolationism to being the world's policeman; but enduring difficult times after Vietnam.There remain within Europe warrior nations and more pacifistic nations. The Danes were neutral in World War One, hardly fought in World War Two, but their troops fight doughtily in Afghanistan when their government permits.I am not sure how much the concept of a pact between citizen and state has actually changed (chiefly because I don't know enough about how the men of 1914 actually felt) but Sheehan points out a trend that shows little evidence of change at present.Perhaps it is the fate of all empires to teach their subjects the true cost of "glory".

There is a large, complicated and (as every small ad flogging a tenure application says) 'important' book to be written on the shift in the relationship between military and civil society in Europe in the last 100 years, both at the policy and the human level; its context, its causes and its consequences.This isn't it. This is the sort of book that someone like Sheehan can knock off in the summer holidays, without breaking a sweat (the bibliography is larger than the endnotes). Sheehan tells us how attitudes changed, but precious little about why, beyond the obvious point that after having tried it a couple of times, it has gradually dawned on the european in the street that continental scale industrial-technological total war is a _bad thing_, and it peters out a bit even from that in the post-second world war period.Maybe having documented the phenomenon, he can now analyse it (or get one of his students to do so). In the meantime, this was a disappointment.

Has the foolish author not heard of the Blair government? Wars against Serbia, Kosovo, Somalia, Iraq, Iraq again? Don't these count as wars? Has he not heard of the French army's post-1945 attacks on Madagascar, Algeria, Tunisia and Vietnam? Has he not heard of the British army's post-1945 attacks on Korea, Malaya, Kenya, Egypt, Indonesia, Oman, northern Ireland, Argentinian forces, Yugoslavia and Iraq? When an author starts from a position of redoubtable ignorance, his conclusions are really not worth the paper they are written on.