A page of history is turning. After some 20 years in transition, the new international chessboard is finally taking shape. As in 1991, when the first Gulf War was the curtain-raiser for a new world, freed from Soviet communism and dominated now by just one superpower, the brief Russian/Georgian conflict has shed a raw light on a new landscape hitherto not fully apprehended.

The multipolar world is a reality. Historians will use pictures from the Olympic Games in Beijing to illustrate the extraordinary rise of the ‘Middle Kingdom’, but India and Brazil too are shaping up as global players, in the World Trade Organization and beyond it. Russia, meanwhile, is reasserting itself by resorting to methods of international politics which we thought had gone out with the Soviet Union. In a painful sort of symmetry, and despite its hugely increased budget, the USA is demonstrating the limitations of military might as it pays the price of its bizarre illogic in turning an effort to combat crazed Islamic fundamentalists into a ‘clash of civilisations’.

War – real, bloody war – has made a comeback. Admittedly the world has not actually been at peace since the end of the Cold War: apart from the whole succession of conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East, there have been less televised, though much more murderous, struggles, including the civil war in the Congo, where the flames of hatred were fanned by neighbouring countries and more than five million people were killed at the beginning of the new millennium. Yet still we continued to drift along in a bubble of high-minded pacifism, firmly convinced that by stamping out the virus of aggression in the nations that had spawned two world wars we had done enough to ensure perpetual peace. War was an outdated, unfashionable activity, a relic of the past – now to be found only among the unfortunates of the developing world. And we were gradually getting over it there too, with the help of humanitarian aid and UN peacekeeping missions, whose casualty rates were roughly similar to that of a busy fire brigade. Seven years after the destruction of the Twin Towers, however, the threat of Al Qaeda still hangs over our capital cities. Dozens of British, Canadian and now French soldiers have fallen in Afghanistan, without preventing the Taliban from regaining substantial tracts of lost ground. The President of Iran is no longer content to threaten Israel with nuclear attack: he is developing missiles capable of targeting European town and cities, and using our airspace for strikes on the United States, thus placing Europe in the front line of America’s anti-nuclear defences. The Russian response has been to put European disarmament deals on ice. And now, in a shocking and grimly symbolic development, the Russians and Georgians have used their respective ‘peacekeeping’ contingents to wage open warfare!

From our obsessive preoccupation with the only ‘politically correct’ form of warfare – the war against climate change – and our readiness to follow Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez in declaring ‘peace with nature’, having already declared it with all mankind, we have been brought down to earth with a bump. Literally to earth, to the reality of life on this planet where military expenditure everywhere outside Europe is burgeoning – its growth rates often in double figures. To earth, where everywhere outside Europe (and a very few other places such as Japan), war is still seen as a form of ‘politics by other means’: disagreeable, certainly, but also inevitable. Suddenly the job of soldiering no longer seems old-fashioned; its old grim grandeur has been restored. It is even possible that military spending will soon cease to be regarded as an unacceptable waste.

There is also another telling change that has its source in Europe.

The EU has now managed to ‘digest’ its most recent enlargement. It has designed the new institutions that it needs and it aims to introduce them next year. Its currency has become the strongest in the world. It has demonstrated its vision and its capacity for leadership in launching the fight against global warming. It has finally learned the lessons of its fratricidal divisions over Iraq. Even its most naïve members have had their eyes opened by the cynicism of Russia in manipulating its gas reserves and resorting to arms from a position of strength. And – in a benign twist of fate – a leader of the calibre of Nicolas Sarkozy has taken the helm in Europe at a critical juncture of international crises, just as Washington, labouring through a presidential twilight zone, finds itself sidelined. Suddenly, there really is a European Union!

Russia – accustomed to playing off divergent interests and selfish rivalries among the European countries – has, for the first time, encountered a united front. The EU was united in supporting the six-point peace plan for Georgia; united on suspending negotiations with Moscow until the plan was fully implemented; united on consolidating Georgia’s independence politically and economically; and united in extending its protective arm to Ukraine, the declared next target of Russian resentment. It has been united too in espousing a policy of energy-source and supply diversification, whereas only days previously and despite its stated ambitions it was stuck in ‘every man for himself’ mode. Moscow thought it had embarked on a bought of diplomatic arm-wrestling with Washington and NATO, but its real opponent has proved to be the European Union.

Of course this solitary, unexpected swallow does not make a European summer. There will be plenty of opportunities for the united front to crack: the position of the Council presidency will remain vulnerable until it achieves the permanence that the Lisbon Treaty would give it; and so long as Europe’s diplomatic ambitions are not matched by an appropriate military resource, it cannot be a front-ranking political player. Nonetheless – for the first time – the Union has acquired real substance. It has dared to oppose its most powerful neighbour. In a few months time, the European elections will confer full democratic legitimacy on its existence and its new policy. What we have seen so far is only a rough outline on a blank page, but a new chapter is nonetheless beginning.

Alain Lamassoure, 4th September 2008