In this lively and ambitious book, James Sheehan charts what is perhaps the most radical shift in Europe's history: its transformation from war-torn battlefield to peaceful, prosperous society. For centuries, war was Europe's defining narrative, affecting every aspect of political, social, and cultural life. But afterWorldWar II, Europe began to reimagine statehood, rejecting ballooning defense budgets in favor of material well-being, social stability, and economic growth. Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? reveals how and why this happened, and what it means for America and the rest of the world. With remarkable insight and clarity, Sheehan covers the major intellectual and political events in Europe over the past one hundred years, from the pacifist and militarist movements of the early twentieth century and two catastrophic world wars to the fall of the BerlinWall and the heated debate over Iraq.This authoritative history provides much-needed context for understanding the fractured era in which we live.

Prologue War and Peace in the Twentieth Century On Saturday, February 15, 2003, the largest demonstration in European history was held to protest the impending war against Iraq. In London, an estimated million people overflowed Trafalgar Square, filling the city's streets from the Thames embankment to Euston Station; a million marched in Barcelona and in Rome, 600,000 in Madrid. A half million braved the freezing cold in Berlin's Tiergarten, almost as many as usually attended the Love Parade held there in the summertime. Everywhere the crowds were peaceful. There were few arrests, no violence. The demonstrations attracted a rich variety of participants: there were some toughlooking adolescents in leather and young people wearing Palestinian head scarves or anarchist black, but the overwhelming majority were respectable citizens in warm winter coats and sensible shoes - pensioners, middle-aged academics, union members, high school and college students. There were lots of families, parents and grandparents who had not marched since the sixties, children experiencing for the first time a political demonstration's distinctive blend of exhilaration and discomfort. One German newspaper called it "an uprising of ordinary people." Many of the demonstrators carried banners and placards, some prepared by the organizers, others homemade, which proclaimed the various motives that had brought them into the streets: "Freedom for Palestine," "No Blood for Oil," "Stop Mad Cowboy Disease," "America, the Real Rogue State," "Make Tea, Not War," and (my personal favorite) "Down with This Sort of Thing." Unlike the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, no one showed any sympathy for the other side; there were no Iraqi flags or pictures of Saddam Hussein. For most people, the real issue was not who was right or wrong, but whether war was the answer. Seventy-three year-old Thomas Elliot, a retired solicitor from Basildon, Essex, explained why he was attending his first political demonstration: "I remember the war," he told a reporter, "and the effect the bombing had on London. War should only be used when absolutely necessary." In Berlin, Judith Rohde and Ricarda Lindner, fourteen-year-old classmates from a local high school, were surprised that anyone needed to ask why they were marching. "War," they said, "is not a solution." Hilde Witaschek, at seventy-seven a veteran peace marcher, added, "We experienced war when Berlin was liberated - no more war, nie wieder Krieg." In city after city, when one looked out across the ocean of people, the sign that appeared most often contained a single word: "No." Some observers regarded February 15 as a turning point in European history. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former French cabinet minister, declared that a new "European nation" had been born that day. A few months later, in an article originally entitled "February 15: What Unites Europeans," Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, two of Europe's best- known intellectuals, called on Europeans to "counterbalance the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States in the international arena and within the United Nations." Like Strauss-Kahn, Habermas and Derrida argued that Europe's opposition to American militarism could create a new European identity, an identity based, above all else, on a rejection of war as an instrument of national policy. On February 5, just ten days before the great demonstrations, a book by Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, was published. Kagan, who served briefly i