Daily Inspiration Quote by E. P. Thompson

A historian’s complaint can land like a siren when it’s this compressed. Thompson’s line is less a lament about etiquette than an indictment of power: in the marquee forums where nuclear policy is supposedly negotiated - Geneva arms talks, the START process - Europe is present as territory, not as an author of events. The repeated “there are no European voices” isn’t redundancy; it’s a drumbeat, a refusal to let the listener slip into the comforting fiction that allies automatically have agency.

The intent is pointedly political. Thompson, writing from the late Cold War world of missile deployments and “dual-track” decisions, is calling out a structural ventriloquism: Europe is spoken for by Washington and, on the other side, Moscow. “At Geneva” evokes the classic theater of superpower diplomacy; “at START” signals the newer, technical-sounding machinery of arms control. Thompson’s subtext: technocratic processes don’t neutralize domination, they can launder it. If the terms are set by two nuclear giants, then “peace” becomes something administered to Europeans rather than chosen by them.

It also functions as a provocation to European publics. Thompson is poking at a postwar habit of deference, the idea that security is outsourced upward to NATO planners and superpower summits. The line’s sting is democratic: if there is no voice, there is no accountability. And if Europe can’t speak where existential risks are bargained over, its vaunted political maturity is revealed as dependence dressed up as partnership.