In his acceptance speech for the prestigious Peace Prize of German book trade, historian Karl Schlögel said that Europeans have been “spoiled by times of relative peace.” With Russia waging war in Ukraine and a president in the White House who does not seem to care about Europe’s security, he said that Europeans must now “think everything through again from the beginning—a kind of stocktaking and examination by a generation that has been enormously lucky and is now finding it incredibly difficult to bid farewell to its preconceptions and to adjust to the war in Europe, with all that it entails.”

Schlögel, one of Germany’s finest historians, is right: What Europeans are grappling with today are not just major security and defense challenges, but also fundamental questions of a more psychological nature. The war in Ukraine and Washington’s open hatred of Europe have turned everything they believed in for decades completely on its head. The way they look at the world needs an overhaul—and the way they look at themselves even more.

In his acceptance speech for the prestigious Peace Prize of German book trade, historian Karl Schlögel said that Europeans have been “spoiled by times of relative peace.” With Russia waging war in Ukraine and a president in the White House who does not seem to care about Europe’s security, he said that Europeans must now “think everything through again from the beginning—a kind of stocktaking and examination by a generation that has been enormously lucky and is now finding it incredibly difficult to bid farewell to its preconceptions and to adjust to the war in Europe, with all that it entails.”

Schlögel, one of Germany’s finest historians, is right: What Europeans are grappling with today are not just major security and defense challenges, but also fundamental questions of a more psychological nature. The war in Ukraine and Washington’s open hatred of Europe have turned everything they believed in for decades completely on its head. The way they look at the world needs an overhaul—and the way they look at themselves even more.

For decades, Europeans believed they had finally managed to make war on the continent impossible. While many thought European integration was imperfect or flawed, few would disagree that its underlying motivation—no more war—was a resounding success. It was so successful, in fact, that most Europeans believed they were beyond war until recently. They could not imagine attacking each other again, let alone outsiders attacking them.

After the Cold War, most European countries steadily reduced their defense spending. Having banned war from their thinking, Europeans became the biggest pacifists in the world. As a result of that and of having taken U.S. protection through NATO for granted, most now have small “bonsai armies,” their public infrastructure is exposed and unprotected, and their social media is wide open for abuse. They do not recognize war, and they do not understand it anymore. They have forgotten what it means to be alert, to make sacrifices for the public good, let alone to live with risk, danger, or evil.

In a small booklet published in January, Notre déni de guerre (“Our Denial of War”), French military historian Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau noted, “Like all pacifists, we believed that if we do not choose an enemy we have no need to fear any threat or attack. We have forgotten, however, that the enemy can also choose us.”

Audoin-Rouzeau studies World War I. To many, that means he does research on past times. But his view is that we have much to learn from the period just before hostilities began in the summer of 1914. The long peace preceding WWI is a parallel with today’s situation in Europe: Then, like now, most people had no war experience, did not know war any longer, and firmly believed that no nation would have anything to win by conquering another. Back then, as novelist Stefan Zweig hauntingly described in his autobiography, Die Welt von Gestern (“The World of Yesterday”), the outbreak of war surprised even those who had followed the news closely and had worried about the buildup of tension.

Zweig spent that fateful summer with Europe’s beau monde at Ostend, a Belgian beach resort. In 1914, war was declared by Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, who just intended to slap Serbia in the face for a few weeks (a Serb had just murdered his successor, Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo) to just teach it a lesson and then quickly sue for peace. He lost the plot within a few days, however, when Europe’s other big powers joined the war— Joseph had not thought of that possibility. It killed the empire in the end. Similarly, in 2022, Europeans watched Russian President Vladimir Putin place 200,000 troops at the border with Ukraine. When Putin assured them that he was not planning an invasion, they believed him because they wanted to believe him.

When Russia did invade, it took Europeans a long time to understand what kind of war it was. To Audoin-Rouzeau, it quickly became clear that it was a war of attrition. Like WWI and the Iran-Iraq War, the front line hardly moves. Such wars do not end with the victory of one of the warring parties, but with the exhaustion of one of the parties. If Europeans had studied war a little more, then they could have understood this earlier and could have worked more systematically from day one to prevent Ukraine’s collapse.

The only intelligence agencies that interpreted Russia’s troop buildup in 2022 correctly were U.S. agencies. This is not accidental. Historically, as philosopher Thérèse Delpech has argued, war has weighed more heavily on Europeans than on Americans. When Americans think of war, it is usually in some faraway theater, thousands of miles away. When Europeans think of war, they are the theater—their loved ones are killed, their houses are destroyed, their futures go up in smoke. For Americans, war is always one of several tools in the foreign-policy kit since it hardly concerns their own destruction. For Europeans, who have fought each other endlessly throughout history (as novelist Milan Kundera once said, Europe is “a maximum of diversity in a minimum of space”), this is entirely different. They associate war with suffering, loss, and the moral dilemmas that come with life under occupation, including collaboration. War, for them, is so painful to discuss that they threw it out of their toolkit. Now, they are beginning to realize that by doing so, they also lost the ability to understand that others may still be ready to use that option.

Moreover, although hardly any European has lived through war anymore, war is still very much present in Europe. While Americans and British people associate World War II with heroism and a good fight, which they won, Europeans are still traumatized and shaped by it. Austrians are obsessed with neutrality; Germans will always support Israel and are still uncomfortable to lead in Europe; many French and Dutch still like to believe that most of their countrymen were in the resistance during German occupation, refusing to acknowledge painful truths; Slovenian political discourse is still overshadowed by the unspeakable horrors committed by partisans and fascists; and so on. Today’s prosperous and peaceful Europe is underwired by war traumas. European integration, which began in the 1950s, has allowed Europeans to put many of their nightmares to rest and to focus on trade, banking supervision, and student exchanges instead. All of them know, however, that none of the hurt under the surface has really disappeared.

Just because Europeans fought so much in the past, and so horribly, their current denial of war—the deep refusal to have anything to do with it, to understand it, to study it, let alone be good at it—is also particularly strong. The longing for peace goes all the way back to Immanuel Kant’s book Zum ewigen Frieden (“Perpetual Peace”). In the 19th century, Europe had strong peace movements, organizing large conferences with prominent speakers. After WWI, those movements resurfaced, with some people accusing those who advocate for a strong defense of “war mongering”—just like some activists today blame NATO, and not Russia, for starting the war in Ukraine. “Time and again,” Audoin-Rouzeau said in an interview, “war broke out and Europeans discovered that the hope for eternal peace was idle. Which, of course, fueled that hope even more. This lasts until today, for it is in this hope where Europe’s Maastricht treaty in 1992 and Lisbon treaty in 2009 find their fundament.”

Today, bullied and threatened by mercantilist states like Russia, China, and the United States, the main lesson that Europeans are learning is not just that they should not have neglected their own defense for so long, making themselves vulnerable and weak in the face of evil. It is a far deeper message: The past is never dead, no matter how much one tries to bury it. As  satirist Karl Kraus wrote in The Last Days of Mankind: “War is a disgrace, but the greater disgrace is that some refuse to hear about it. They can bear the fact that wars exist but not the facts of war.”

When asked about what he had learned from his travels through a country in war, French President Emmanuel Macron’s special envoy for Ukraine, Pierre Heilbronn, replied that he was deeply touched by the resilience and creativity of all Ukrainians he had met, and perhaps more so by their strong collective drive. They hold up a mirror to Western Europeans, he said, and “in that mirror we see the comfort that has lulled us to sleep, we see endless unproductive meetings and the constant bickering of small interest groups in our own societies. I hope our part of Europe will also rediscover the collective fight for the public good. It formed the basis for European integration at the time. Today, we do need it again to defend and strengthen Europe in a dangerous world.”

Perhaps, he added, “the real question facing Europeans today is if they manage to share not just each other’s dreams but also each other’s nightmares.”

Schlögel ended his acceptance speech on a similar note. Having traveled through both Russia and Ukraine, he also encouraged his audience to learn from Ukrainians. “This would mean learning how to be fearless and brave,” he said. “And perhaps even learning how to triumph.”