A bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in
attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace. Political peace in Europe has
historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century
European thinkers and leaders in pursuit of lasting peace fostered the idea of European
unification. Bridging intellectual and political history Ghervas draws on the work of
philosophers from Abbe de Saint-Pierre who wrote an early eighteenth-century plan for
perpetual peace to Rousseau and Kant as well as statesmen such as Tsar Alexander I Woodrow
Wilson Winston Churchill Robert Schuman and Mikhail Gorbachev. She locates five major
conflicts since 1700 that spurred such visionaries to promote systems of peace in Europe: the
War of the Spanish Succession the Napoleonic Wars World War I World War II and the Cold
War. Each moment generated a spirit of peace among monarchs diplomats democratic leaders and
ordinary citizens. The engineers of peace progressively constructed mechanisms and institutions
designed to prevent future wars. Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment
through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations to the institutions of the European Union
and beyond Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified
Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to
sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history
of peacemaking however this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a
step in the quest for a less violent world.
