The myth of World War III: Europe’s civil wars and the end of colonial mobilisation

Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, Ciano 

just before signing the 

Munich Agreement, Sept 1938

Since the guns roared in Ukraine and the fires spread across the Middle East, the world’s commentators have been murmuring a familiar prophecy: World War III is upon us. 

Yet the phrase itself is a ghost — an echo of the 20th century that refuses to die. The truth is simpler and more sobering: a “world war” in the classical sense is no longer possible. What we mistake for a global conflagration is often a regional contest amplified by the memories of Europe’s own cataclysms.

A true world war presupposes that a significant number of great powers are locked in combat — not in proxy or policy, but in arms. History, however, offers no such precedent. Even the so-called World Wars were not global wars in the literal sense; they were European civil wars with imperial appendages.

The First and Second World Wars were Europe’s internal convulsions — tragic quarrels among its own dynasties, ideologies, and ambitions. Their scale became “worldwide” not because the world chose to fight, but because Europe commanded it to fight. The empires of the day possessed colonies, and through the machinery of imperial authority, they dragged Asia, Africa, and Latin America into their continental vendettas.

Millions of young men from lands that had no quarrel with Germany or France or Britain were compelled to die for them. Indian soldiers perished in Flanders, African battalions marched through deserts not their own, and Caribbean sailors sank in cold Atlantic waters — all in wars that had nothing to do with their destiny. 

The term “world war” thus concealed an ethical scandal: it was not the world that went to war, but the world that was made to fight for Europe.

Today, such coercion is impossible. Colonialism — the great European engine of conscription — has been dismantled. No European power, nor any other, can now summon men and resources from unwilling nations to die in its stead. Every state, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, now answers to its own conscience, not to a colonial office in London, Paris, or Berlin.

Therefore, if Europe, or any power bloc, chooses to engage in conflict, it must bear the full moral and material cost of its own belligerence. The rest of the world will no longer offer its youth as collateral for European anxieties.

The world has grown both more connected and more sovereign. It is bound by trade, data, and dialogue — not by imperial chains. In this new reality, the very notion of a “world war” belongs to a bygone order of domination. Wars may still erupt, but they will be regional storms, not planetary infernos.

The 21st century’s greatest challenge is not the prevention of another “world war,” but the prevention of a world order that still imagines itself through Europe’s old wars. The age of imperial mobilization is over; the age of moral independence has begun.

The world need not march again to Europe’s drums.