The War No One Thinks They Will Lose, By Paul Walker

Civilisations do not imagine their own death. Individuals do, occasionally — usually at three in the morning, or after reading medical test results — but civilisations possess a peculiar psychological immunity. They assume continuity. Tomorrow will resemble today, which resembled yesterday, which resembled the day before that. The streetlights will turn on. The trains will run. The supermarkets will contain oranges in winter.

This assumption is so deeply embedded that it becomes invisible.

Modern Europe lives inside this invisibility.

It has lived there for so long that stability feels like a law of nature rather than an achievement of human restraint. Violence, in the European imagination, belongs safely to the past — archived in museums, contained in documentaries, narrated in black and white. War is something that happened to grandparents, not to neighbours.

But stability is not a law of nature. It is a temporary equilibrium. And equilibrium can fail.

To understand what a true civilisational conflict would mean, one must first discard the cinematic illusion. Civil war is not dramatic in the way films portray it. It is not a sequence of heroic confrontations with swelling orchestral scores. It is administrative collapse. It is ambiguity. It is the slow, grinding realisation that the systems one depended upon are no longer reliable.

The first sign is uncertainty. Not explosions. Uncertainty.

The police respond slower than usual. Or not at all. Courts delay hearings indefinitely. Insurance companies stop answering calls. Public officials issue statements that reassure no one, because reassurance itself has lost credibility.

Trust evaporates before infrastructure does.

The modern state is not held together primarily by force, but by expectation. Millions of strangers cooperate peacefully because they assume others will do the same. This assumption is fragile. Once it begins to fracture, people reorganize their loyalties around smaller, more immediate units — family, tribe, faction. This is not ideological. It is biological.

Human beings evolved to trust the familiar and fear the unknown. Civilization suppresses this instinct. Civil conflict releases it.

The great misconception is that such conflicts produce clear moral landscapes, in which one side embodies justice and the other evil. In reality, civil conflict produces confusion. Each side believes itself defensive. Each side interprets its actions as necessary. Each escalation is justified by the previous escalation.

Violence becomes self-legitimating. History provides examples, though modern Europeans prefer not to look at them too closely.

The collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s did not occur because its citizens suddenly became more evil. It occurred because the structures that mediated conflict lost authority. Once those structures failed, people reverted to older identities that had never fully disappeared. Neighbours did not transform into strangers overnight. They rediscovered that they had always been strangers.

This is the true horror of civilisational conflict. It reveals that the unity one assumed was permanent was, in fact, conditional.

Modern European society rests on an intricate network of abstractions — legal systems, financial arrangements, bureaucratic procedures, and shared norms. These abstractions are enormously powerful, but they are also intangible. They exist only insofar as people believe in them.

The moment belief falters, the system becomes a shell.

A banknote has value because everyone agrees it has value. A court ruling has authority because everyone agrees to obey it. A border exists because everyone agrees to recognise it.

Agreement is the invisible foundation. Without it, the visible structures become meaningless. The tragedy is that no one who participates in civil conflict believes they are destroying civilization. They believe they are saving it.

Each faction sees itself as the last defender of the true order. Each interprets compromise as surrender. Each escalation appears justified by the perceived extremism of the other. Moderation becomes indistinguishable from betrayal.

And so the centre collapses — not because no one values it, but because it cannot defend itself against those who value victory more. The great irony is that everyone loses. Even the victors inherit a damaged world.

Infrastructure can be rebuilt. Buildings can be reconstructed. But trust, once broken, is extraordinarily difficult to restore. It is easier to destroy a functioning society than to create one. Stability requires millions of daily acts of cooperation. Instability requires only enough acts of defection to make cooperation irrational.

Fear is more contagious than trust. This is why civilisational collapse, when it occurs, often surprises those living inside it. It does not announce itself clearly. It emerges gradually, through a series of rational decisions made by individuals responding to perceived threats.

No one intends the final outcome. It emerges from the accumulation of intermediate steps.

The most dangerous moment is when people cease to believe that peaceful coexistence is possible. Once that belief disappears, conflict becomes not merely likely, but inevitable. Violence ceases to be unthinkable and becomes merely undesirable. Then it becomes understandable. Then it becomes necessary. And finally, it becomes normal.

The modern project represented by institutions such as the European Union was, at its core, an attempt to make large-scale conflict structurally impossible — not by eliminating disagreement, but by embedding disagreement within systems that prevented it from becoming existential.

It was an engineering solution to a psychological problem. Its success has been so complete that many no longer remember the problem it was designed to solve. This amnesia is itself a risk. Because stability is not self-sustaining. It requires continuous maintenance — not only of infrastructure, but of restraint. Civilisation depends less on the absence of conflict than on the presence of limits.

The worst-case scenario is not dramatic annihilation. It is gradual normalisation of the abnormal. It is the slow adaptation to conditions that would once have been unthinkable. It is the realization, too late, that the assumptions which made peaceful life possible were more fragile than they appeared.

Civilizations rarely recognize their own fragility. They assume permanence. History suggests otherwise. And the true lesson of history is not that collapse is inevitable. It is that collapse, when it comes, is usually unintended. No one sets out to destroy the world they live in.

They simply make decisions that, step by step, make its continuation impossible.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/02/europe_s_civilizational_war_will_be_bloody.html