With the sociologist Jean Viard, director of research at the CNRS, we are looking at this great ordeal which has affected all European countries since this week: the outbreak of war in Ukraine. These images of Ukraine and these testimonies mark the French. They want to know what’s going on. We see this with the audiences of the news channels. The presidential campaign also seems more than secondary at the moment.
franceinfo: Wars, there have been many, but this one affects us much more than the others ?
John Viard: She touches us much more than the others. Honestly, I had tears in my eyes when I got the information. I thought of my grandfathers who told me what happened in 1939 and of my father who joined up as a volunteer. I had trouble understanding and suddenly you understand what these generations have been through and what Ukrainians are going through right now.
I am from a generation where we were against the war, the Germans were still much more so than us, basically this period is over. We live in a world of violence. Violence is spreading, asserting itself, including in political movements, at home. We are in a period of staged violence. Putin is absolutely not shy about showing what he does.
And then, Europe is not ready. Germany at the time of reunification had 5,000 tanks, they have 300 left, of which 40% are broken down. We completely disarmed ourselves, especially Germany, including on gas, etc., in a culture basically where we thought there were no more wars, just as we thought there were more pandemics. It felt like the world was soft and open. And there, in two years, we have a pandemic that shows us that everything can be broken. And then, we have the beginning of a war in Europe which we don’t know where it will end. The goal will be to find a solution, and that will be extremely difficult.
Do you think that we no longer really knew what war really was, and that those who did were beginning to forget it?
Yes, we forgot it and we thought it was behind us or that it was wars between Third World countries, in quotation marks. And then there was terrorism which came to shake it all up, in our countries in particular. France was heavily attacked. Let’s not forget the 100,000 dead from the Yugoslav wars, though. And we have had for 75 years a feeling that peace is final. This feeling was wrong. We will have to re-muscle, rearm, including mentally.
And the nuclear threat in the background, is it a fantasy of the 21st century or on the contrary, and this situation perhaps reminds us, it remains an essential fact?
But it is essential data. I am from a generation where we lived through the Bay of Pigs affair, with the nuclear rockets arriving in Cuba, against the United States, and so on. We’ve all lived there, but we always said to ourselves: they’re never going to use it, it’s too dangerous. Today, it’s a bit the same thing. That is to say that effectively, what will probably limit the stages, is that effectively, the Russians will not attack NATO because of this nuclear power which pacifies.
Afterwards with nuclear power, the risk is madness. And indeed, there can always be a leader who, aging, traumatized by the pandemic, completely in despair at the loss of power by the Russian Empire, does indeed act irrationally. But otherwise, I think it continues to limit war, and fortunately we have nuclear power, it’s terrible to say things like that, but it somewhat limits wars which are absolutely horrible.
The weapons of deterrence, the force, the brutality of Vladimir Putin, you would say that they put the European Union to the test, because we are not used to using this tool?
No, but we are witnessing a rise of empires, look at what is happening with Turkey, it is not very different. We are no longer in major ideological struggles, we are in a return to para-religious confrontations and a return to the rise of empires. And it’s a question that comes after, you might say, the Cold War. This period will be a period of violence and we will have to prepare.