What threatens the magnificent unity of Europeans on the war in Ukraine? Probably not Russian propaganda and disinformation, not the widespread pacifism in European society, not even the economic consequences. Any new evidence of Russian barbarism on the ground is enough to stoke the indignation. There could instead be a danger of psychological resistance. Allow me a quote, by definition politically incorrect, from Joseph De Maistre: “wars are not won or lost above all with weapons, but with the head”.
The psychological effect of wars
Our governments are required to send two not necessarily reconcilable messages into people’s heads. “We are not at war“, but also “this war affects us closely and therefore we must support Ukraine“. The problem is that the Europeans’ relationship with war after two world conflicts that represented a near-successful attempt at collective suicide is unprecedented in history. The result was theEuropean integration based on a Kantian model and a strong pacifist sentiment spread throughout the population. Pacifism facilitated by having largely delegated our defense to the USA. Sure, there was the Cold War; but indeed it was cold, in the sense that we were afraid of what might have happened, not of what was happening.
The US, on the other hand, had the Coreail Vietnamthen theIraq and theAfghanistan; always with numerous American dead. These were conflicts that also involved Europe, but in a marginal way and in any case with a limited emotional content. The same can be said of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, with the exception of a few episodes: the massacre of Sebrenicacertain moments of the siege of Sarajevo. The exception were theIndochina and theAlgeria, but only for France. But even for those conflicts, 60 years have now passed; the wounds that remain are not related to the fighting, but are ethnic, political and social.
Europe and the “CIS Syndrome”
In Ukraine, on the other hand, we are grappling with a conflict that has exceptional characteristics: it does not involve us materially apart from the impact on the economy, but it has a very strong emotional impact. The question we must ask ourselves is therefore: how does our emotionality behave in the face of a conflict of this type? Taking into account, among other things, the fact that Europe has not only been spared wars but also the endemic violence that characterizes the United States. It is also interesting to note that even the periodic waves of internal and external terrorism tend to disappear from the top of the list of citizens’ main concerns shortly after the end of the acute phase.
To try to better understand how the minds of our fellow citizens work, we can perhaps find help in a phenomenon that has strongly influenced the place that conflicts and violence occupy in our imagination and in our emotions as peaceful Europeans: film fiction and recently especially television. The reference is to what scholars of the phenomenon call “the CSI syndrome“, from the popular American detective series. Our collective imagination has in fact been accustomed by fiction and films of which we are big consumers to expect that every violent phenomenon, even the most intricate and dramatic, must be resolved without doubt and ambiguity within an hour, or rather 50 minutes counting advertising; at most a few hours, or a few episodes.
The psychological impact is so deep-rooted that it forces the real managers of the forensic police unjustly accused of inefficiency to explain that reality is very different from fiction, that serious investigations can last for months and that they do not necessarily lead to certain conclusions. Real wars are treated the same way. The decisive battles of the last two world wars (Verdun, la Marna, el-Alamein, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad) which in reality lasted for months, in our cinematographic-television imagination are completed within two hours or so. Forgetting however that after these decisive turning points the real war lasted for years.
Even in a series as broad as “Game of Thrones”, the decisive battles last less than an episode. Whatever the power of the images, this way of narrating war erases the two most tragic but most important aspects: duration and unpredictability. For the generations, almost all of them by now, who have never known real war, what is proposed to us is therefore the only one we can imagine; except (but who does it anymore?) immerse ourselves in the great frescoes that go to the rhythm of reality such as War and Peace.
War, information and the collective imagination
What can we expect from a public opinion whose imagination has been educated in this way, in the face of a war in which it is involved emotionally but not materially? The media help to complicate things. Anxiety about real war and anxiety about fake wars are served almost simultaneously on the same screen. Of course, the war correspondents in Ukraine almost all do their job well and report the events in their contradictory and slow uncertainty. However the frenetic pace of informationthe novelty bulimia and explanations that confirm what we think, insert in what then arrives on our screens a need for acceleration that does not correspond to the facts on the ground.
Every day, the story of events must be accompanied by a definitive prediction. Yesterday a disputed location was lost, but today it is safe. The success of yesterday’s Russian missiles indicates that Putin has the upper hand; the effectiveness of today’s Ukrainian anti-aircraft is instead proof that Zelensky is on his way to liberate the Crimea. The result is that every change of scenery increases its anxiety-provoking impact. Not to mention that this swing has been going on for a year. Some news channels make an effort to question serious experts; who, however, have to perform verbal stunts to remain anchored to facts and common sense and to resist the pressing question: who will win and, once this is established, when? The next step is to be tempted to want the ending at all costs; maybe even if the price to pay is that the bad guys won’t receive the right punishment.
The real time of war
This is by no means a likely scenario, but Putin can consider it plausible and deduce that time works for him. Not the long time. That cannot be a friend of a country like Russia which has only an immense territory and many raw materials on its side, but which is crippled by sanctionsdal population declineby a for now acquiescent but restless public opinion, by the drain of the best brains and by the growing addiction to the Chinese ‘big brother’.
Instead, Putin can legitimately think that time is playing its game in the near future and that there will be a psychological breakdown of the West and especially of Europe before its internal difficulties prove unsustainable. It is one of the reasons why the best Western strategists insist on speeding up and increasing military aid to Ukraine in order to create the conditions on the ground for acceptable negotiations as quickly as possible.
Strategy that now, more than political obstacles, collides against supply problems ed out of stock. In other words, a mobilization of the war industry which was in any case already underway. It is the right strategy, which however also requires one communication effort to prevent our public opinion from falling into the “CIS syndrome” before the situation on the ground changes. Winston Churchill he wrote that the British won because they were stupid. When all the smart people thought that Germany had already won, they didn’t understand it and kept fighting. It would therefore be good to make people rediscover that all wars are won not only in the head, but also in the duration.
Cover photo EPA/MARIA SENOVILLA