A century on, the first world war is still being played out | Timothy Garton Ash

From Ukraine to Syria these wars are a legacy of the 1914 clash of empires and the patchwork territories left behind

There is war in Europe. No, Im not using the historic present tense to evoke August 1914 (and rile John Humphrys). Im talking about August 2014. What is happening in eastern Ukraine is war ambiguous war, as a British parliamentary committee calls it, rather than outright, declared war between two sovereign states, but still war. And war rages around the edges of Europe, in Syria, Iraq and Gaza.

I do not say Europe is at war. I leave the hyperbole to Bernard Henri-Lévy. Most European countries are not directly engaged in armed conflict. Still, we should be under no illusions. For decades we have lived with the comforting notion that Europe has been at peace since 1945. This was always an overstatement. In parts of eastern Europe, low-level armed conflict continued into the early 1950s, followed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the 1990s, former Yugoslavia was torn apart in a series of wars as a recent report by the EUs special investigative task force, credibly charging Kosovo Liberation Army leaders with war crimes, has just reminded us.

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