David Coulby - Education and Warfare in Europe

Sarajevo is in many aspects, a typical southern European city. In the evenings, its famous walking street is full of young people and families strolling along, greeting friends, enjoying the feeling of being with other people. Celebrating the very act of being free to walk their streets in safety, an aspect of life most of us in Europe take for granted. Sarajevo is also, in a sense, at the core of this book. Events in the city helped frame the century that has just finished, events that had a decisive impact on European history. In 1914, the spark that ignited the First World War, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, took place in an unremarkable Sarajevo street. No plaque marks the spot. The revenge that the Austro-Hungarian empire took on Serbia at that time was horrendous, 15% of its population dying in the subsequent war, a fact often forgotten amid the more general carnage. The inadequate peace led to the Second World War, which further devastated Europe. And in the 1990s, Sarajevo was back, this time the victim of an horrendous siege by Serbian forces, from which the city is only now, in the next century, recovering.

All over former Yugoslavia, schools were destroyed, teachers and pupils killed, while the rest of Europe looked on, trying to reason away irrationality. The fighting has been stopped, international aid has rebuilt many of the schools and new teachers are being trained. The international community is endeavouring to support new countries like Bosnia-Herzegovina to build up an education system that is both efficient and modern but one that also will play a leading role in the attempt to curb old enmities and build a new generation that will not so readily be the victims and agents of war.

In that ending of violence, as so often in the past, searching questions have been asked of education. What contribution did it make to both starting and stopping the violence? And as so often after wars, the education system is reformed, to rebuild not just the economy but also to try and build the state (nation) anew.

If major education changes and reforms occur after wars, partly to avoid their re-occurrence, it is important to examine why, in Europe as elsewhere, there has been only partial success in that aim. This is the primary purpose of this book. The book does not assert that education causes wars. Teachers across Europe would, in the main, assert that they endeavour to teach tolerance and respect to their children in their care. It is probable, but improvable, that they have been successful more often than not. Europe has been relatively at peace for the last fifty or so years compared with much of the rest of the world and education has likely played a part in that. However, events in the 1990s have punctured some of that optimism. Can those working in European education systems do more, perhaps by re-examining their policy and practices, to re-build that confidence? This book attempts that process. It tries to tease out why and in what ways, European schools and universities maintain and sustain antipathies, nationalisms and xenophobic attitudes which in turn, have the potential for the initiation of violence and ultimately, war.

The ending of the Cold War was said at the time to be both the end of history (Fukuyama, 1992) and the beginning of the peace dividend as the run down of armed forces around the world meant increased revenues being spent on more socially useful activities like poverty amelioration. The widespread perception that warfare was at an end was based on a view of war as the clash between the armed forces of states along the lines of the First and Second World Wars. Yet warfare has continued after 1991, in Europe as elsewhere. Much of it is classified as either civil wars, low intensity warfare or sub-conventional warfare, where state armed forces fight guerrilla or other non-state armed forces. In Europe, such sub-conventional wars are being fought or have been recently fought in, amongst other places, Albania, France, Georgia, Russia (Chechnya), former Yugoslavia and the United Kingdom. Some have been relatively minor for the states involved, Northern Ireland and Corsica for example, although clearly not for the people caught up in the violence. Others, like the conflicts in Georgia and former Yugoslavia, have devastated whole populations.

Europe has been formed by war, as indeed, has much of the world. As Freedman notes:

Wars have taken place from the beginning of recorded time in all parts of the world. They are prominent, and sometimes dominant, both in history books and todays headlines. They have shaped the international system and prompted social change. They have inspired literature, art and music (Freedman, 1994, p. 3).

Nowhere is this more true than in Europe. The break up of the Roman and Byzantine empires and the slow division of Europe into competing nation states is a process not yet at its end. Meanwhile new supranational organisations like the European Union and, to a lesser extent, the United Nations and the Council of Europe are emerging. Even NATO is falteringly attempting to find itself a more peaceful and less partisan role in maintaining European stability.