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By Emmanuelle Giuliani | France
"The images of bombings, tanks, lines of people fleeing on the roads and refugees at the borders of Poland or Romania… all reinforce this distressing impression of déjà vu," says Professor Isabelle Davion, when asked about the worrying situation in Ukraine.
A lecturer of diplomatic and strategic history at the Sorbonne University in Paris, she says many will find it tempting to compare the situation in Ukraine with the beginnings of World War II.
But Davion said it's a bit more complicated than that in this exclusive interview with La Croix's Emmanuelle Giuliani.
La Croix: What should we understand by the expression "this is the return of war to Europe"?
Isabelle Davion: What stands out to us so intensely today is the invasion of a territory by another state. Immediately, memories of World War II arise with an army entering into a neighboring country.
I was struck by a question from my students who were surprised that there was no declaration of war, as they often learn in textbooks. Yet most wars happen without a declaration. It is more a question of "entering" into war, of establishing a "state" of war.
Moreover, whether we know it well or not, the memory of World War II remains hanging over our societies. The rhetoric of Vladimir Putin - when he speaks of "denazification"! - as well as that of the Ukrainians, for that matter, shows it well.
The images of bombings, tanks, lines of people fleeing on the roads, refugees at the borders of Poland or Romania, etc., all reinforce this distressing impression of déjà vu...
What are the feelings that the state of war provokes on the two sides?
On both sides, there is first of all a sense of bewilderment. For the Ukrainians, obviously, but also for Russian public opinion when people discovered in the morning that their country had gone to war against their neighbor.
Then comes the desire to defend oneself and the resignation about the necessity to fight.
The latter is not immediate because, although war is the most widespread social phenomenon in the world, no people wants to be at war.
In this type of invasion, we observers reason in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys". Can it be that simple?
Undeniably you have a country that's the aggressor and a country that's been attacked.
But you always have to deal with complexity, especially when it's also a propaganda war, as it is here.
How can one succeed in dismantling Vladimir Putin's simplistic arguments if one does not analyze their workings?
For example, his accusation of a "Nazi Ukraine" abusively feeds on the real complacency that some Ukrainian nationalists had towards Hitler - as did many others in Europe.
This must be explained, just as it must be explained that in 2022 Vladimir Putin is behaving like leaders of the USSR.
Have we thus returned to a "time of war"?
I don't think that this aggression - at least I fervently hope not - inaugurates a new cycle of conflicts in Europe.
On the other hand, we thought that after the two world conflicts peace had become the natural state of Europe and war an exception. This is opposite to the idea of previous centuries, which saw peace as a temporary state between two conflicts.
But this natural state is perhaps not so natural, just as democracy is not a given or is secured once and for all. Both need to be defended.
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