Who Won the Peace?

Too often we forget that Hitler’s demise did not automatically guarantee peace to a traumatised and broken Europe. Euphoric scenes of Allied soldiers giving out chocolates, cigarettes and kisses to flag-waving crowds quickly gave way to the daunting reality of rebuilding a devastated and divided Europe. It’s one thing to win a war. But how do you win the peace?

Chaos threatened on all sides. Hatred and bitterness towards the enemy and collaborators poisoned grass-roots attitudes among victor and defeated alike. Families had been separated, divided and destroyed. Deep wounds festered physically, psychologically and spiritually. Hunger, poverty and unemployment added to the miseries of injury and upheaval, totally eclipsing anything we are currently experiencing in Europe today. The Cold War was about to begin. Today’s generations have never known the climate of mistrust and suspicion, crisis and conflict that dominated Europe over the five years following the war.

Reconciliation
Today thoughts of such conflict among EU nations are unthinkable, thank God! Thanks in large part to the story of the stunningly rapid yet lasting Franco-German reconciliation after the Second World War. Central to that story is an unassuming, French lawyer-politician, acknowledged as the ‘Father of Europe’, Robert Schuman. Drawing inspiration from his Christian faith and Catholic social teaching, he searched for an alternative to the old order of competing nation states which had repeatedly led to war. Even while imprisoned by the Nazis early in the war and again after escaping in hiding, he wrote that ‘we French will have to learn to forgive and love the Germans to rebuild post-war Europe’. To many that sounded like treason. After the war, when appointed Foreign Minister, Schuman kept looking for a way to prevent the vicious cycle of war.

Exactly seventy years ago on this Saturday, on May 9, 1950, Schuman announced a plan in a speech lasting a mere three minutes. Surely that was the defining moment of post-war Europe! For that speech laid the foundations of the European House in which today half a billion people in twenty-seven nations live together in peace. From that moment on, there was a plan on the table with the goal, in Schuman’s thinking, of forming a ‘community of peoples deeply rooted in basic Christian values’. These values stemmed directly from the teachings of Jesus, Schuman argued. True democracy was ‘evangelical’, he wrote, rooted in the gospel …

Source: Jeff Fountain  -  "Who Won the Peace?", Weekly Word eNewsletter, 4 May 2020
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