Conclusion: The Persistence of Europe’s Small Wars After the Cold War

This study has shown how small wars shaped western European military culture persisted beyond the usual mass and multilateral conflagrations of 1792–1815, 1914–1918 and 1939–1945. The irregular resistance to the Napoleonic Europe before 1815 offers a vector to the explicitly anti-imperialist insurgencies of the twentieth century. Themes have ranged from the impact of metropolitan calculations on colonial counterinsurgency, the impact of colonial veterans on civil wars in the metropole, the motives of insurgents and the extent to which they were ‘logical’ in their use of violence and propaganda, and the extent to which counterinsurgents operated policies of ‘hearts and minds’ or ‘butcher and bolt’. The retreat of European colonial powers, especially of the cash-strapped Portuguese from Africa, bequeathed new states with a kind of ‘privatised’ wars which trapped societies in a cycle of violence. Unlike the state-building small wars of western Europe, post-colonial wars proved only destructive, as economies were burdened by imported weaponry and the demands made on state finances by militia and mercenaries.