Today’s Europe is a far cry from its medieval counterpart.

James Sheehan, a Dickason Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University presented a lecture Thursday in the Sun Room at the Memorial Union, in which he focused on his theory behind the development of modern Europe.

Sheehan’s new book, slated for release in January 2008, is titled, “Where have all the Soldiers gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe.” The book will focus on the divide between the United States and Europe. The lecture focused on Europe’s transition from a continent defined by war to a continent defined by the solidarity of the European Union.

Europe has gone through three major transformations. The third and most recent change happened in the 1990s, when most European countries abolished their standing conscript armies.

“These revolutionary changes are fundamentally important in understanding what Europe is about,” Sheehan said.

In the beginning of the 1900s, most of Europe was still focused on militarization. Sheehan said this was because a standing army was what made a sovereign state.

“Even in Britain, where the conscript idea was very thin, there was a conscript army until the 1960s,” Sheehan said.

The main purpose of these armies, Sheehan said, was to train large groups of men willing to fight and die for their country.

“The bipolar division of Europe had become stabilized,” Sheehan said.

He maintained that this stability created a situation where security concerns where no longer paramount to Europeans and began to slowly fade from the public consciousness. As the economy grew, less money was allocated to the military as people simply weren’t as worried about the possibility of invasion.

Peter Orazem, professor of economics, had a large number of students attend the lecture.

“We divided our class into teams and so we needed to have some things that the teams could compete on, and one of the things was to attend some of the evening lectures by famous people who are coming onto campus this year,” Orazem said.

The lecture, Orazem said, was relevant because it showed how Europe went from centuries of being highly militarized to a basically passive coexistence in just 50 years. He said the topic was particularly important to Americans – especially young men who are eligible to be drafted – because we, as a country, are unmistakably focused on shifting our military presence.

“It seems to me like that’s pretty fundamentally important for a country like the U.S., which is supposed to be the one-world military power,” Orazem said.