The Threat of World Anarchy

Five hundred years ago the centre of world power lay in Asia. Four centuries later Europe had gained dominion over the earth. Inspired by the messianism and dynamism of Christianity, by the rationalism and sense of curiosity and progress which emerged from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, as well as by the new stress placed upon individualism by the Protestant Reformation, the Europeans laid claim not only to the lands but to the seas and oceans. Supporting those claims was their will to power and their sense of racial superiority. It was an era in which the western few dominated the world's many.

By 1914 almost the whole world had become an appendage to the West. Only Japan in Asia, and Liberia and Ethiopia in Africa, had remained free of European control. Western resolution, western confidence, western modes of thought (which envisaged an inherently orderly world), western economics, western values and laws, western systems of transport and communications, western science and technology, western industries and finance, western trade, western diseases and medicines, and especially western armaments had combined to change the world. Under western sway the drama of life had shifted from a tribal to a national, and from a national to a world stage. The planet had shrunk; wealth had grown; famine had been reduced; the scourge of many sicknesses had been lessened. Its superiority matched only by its moral outlook, the West felt that in organizing, governing and developing the world, it was fulfilling its destiny.

But then came the Great War, dwarfing in horror all the wars that had preceded it. The past ages of faith and hope gave way to an age of fear. The Europeans having created wealth on an unprecedented scale proceeded to use it to destroy each other. Because Europe was the fulcrum of world political and economic

Power, the war eventually became world-wide. Never before had so much suffering been inflicted upon Europe. At Verdun and Passchendaele, on the Somme and at Ypres, in a tragedy that might have been avoided, Europe's hopes were buried. The economic stability upon which the Eurocentric world economy had been built was undermined. Out of the ensuing chaos emerged Lenin and communism, Mussolini and Fascism, Hitler and Nazism. As a result of untold slaughter and suffering, Marxism and Leninism first took hold in Russia and then in the world.

In 1939, demonstrating the height of human folly, a second and even greater war broke out. Nothing has had greater influence in shaping the world in which we live than the two world wars. They are landmarks in a peculiarly barbaric and revolutionary century. Faced by the dictators' use of brute force, the western democracies had no choice but to fight. Six years of savagery followed. By 1945 Europe lay in ruins.

Out of the ashes arose two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union. Great powers like Britain and France, which had held the line against the dictators at an earlier stage of the war, were now too weak to lead. With the collapse of German power in central Europe, the two new superpowers, for the first time in their history, found themselves facing each other across the barricades. So powerful were they that they deceived themselves into believing that, although only 12 per cent of the world's population, they could unilaterally impose their will everywhere. Only gradually did they realize that there were parts of the world that were beyond the control of either Washington or Moscow. By the 1950s, the anti-western front in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East had become the third world, with most of the world's population.

Whereas in the eighteenth-century countries like China and India were known for their wealth and their manufactures by 1914 (as a result of the Industrial Revolution in the West) they had become relatively poor. Because of the lopsided concentration of productive power and wealth in the industrial areas of the West, the non-western world had become poor and subordinate to the rich. Western man emerged from these historical changes with the best of the bargain. The white race grew in numbers, dispersed and eventually enriched itself in the world. The non-white races were expected to stay where they were and put up with their lot. When in 1949 Mao said: 'Our nation will never again be an insulted nation, we have stood up', he was expressing the hope of so many of the poorer people of the world that they could break the economic and political ties with the West, which had kept them subservient for so long. In the third world, a new pride was born, a new hope was expressed for material improvement. The dream of economic affluence still lives; the material improvement hoped for remains to be achieved.

Since the late 1940s the disparity of wealth between nations, as well as between people within a nation, which at one time would have been taken for granted, has become a central issue in world politics. The idea of egalitarianism in a democracy which Europe first put abroad, magnified by the twenty-first century information revolution, revealed to the poor of the world the very different levels on which life is lived. There is now an exceedingly rich, sophisticated, visible and vulnerable capitalist global economy, whose glass temples soar like minarets above the cities of the world, and the national economies whose people are beginning to look upon the global dimension as a mixed blessing. And that because the bottom line of the global economy is profit, not the interests of the nation. The global economy not only takes advantage of lower labour costs, and absence of regulation in underdeveloped countries, it also avoids much of the social costs (such as welfare, education, unemployment, environmental protection and defence), which the national economy must bear. Hence the growing resistance to globalization.

For the poorer nations the issue is no longer capitalism versus communism, but affluence versus poverty. They are concerned with famine, malnutrition, wide-spread disease, premature death of children under five, early death of adults and desperate public health conditions. Between 1945 and 1965, a period of unparalleled increase of wealth, the gap between the developed and the least developed countries - between the first and the third world - widened until one-sixth of the world's population was obtaining 70 per cent of the world's real income. By the mid-1970s the gap had widened. Globalization had become a system of redistributing wealth to the rich. The trend has continued. In the 1990s the forty-one poorest countries (defined by the World Bank as having a GNP of less than $500 per head), accounting for roughly half the world's population, were becoming poorer. The poorest countries' share of world trade is equally disturbing. Faced by the declining trend in world prices for the primary commodities of the third world, conditions have further deteriorated.1 To cap it all, the third world spends on arms much of what it borrows. Even when some people are helped to their feet, the first thing they do, instead of continuing to improve their material lot, is to go off and make war with their neighbours.

Other than the promise of progress and affluence for everybody, there is nothing essentially new about the disparity in wealth between the rich and the poor. Listen to 'Single Tax' Henry George (1839-97), writing about Progress and Poverty just over one hundred years ago:

This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our time... it is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

Poverty and affluence cannot live in peace together. It matters very greatly to the rich of the world that the widening division between the rich and the poor should be closed. Henry George and Willi Brandt are only two of many voices who have sounded the warnings. The spoils of society cannot be divorced from social responsibility. Property and wealth carry with them an obligation. If history is a guide, to disregard the poor is to ensure social upheaval.

The outcome of the growing disparity of wealth between nations, according to a 1993 UN Report on Population, has been a vast increase in the migration, legal and illegal, of people looking for a better life. Although in the 1990s immigration into the rich world was not a problem of crisis proportions, the total of migrants in the mid-1990s was thought to be double the total in the mid-1980s. UN statistics for 2000 show twenty-one million refugees, asylum seekers and others on the move in the world. One million or more are finishing up in the US every year. In 2000, half-a-million illegals applied for sanctuary in Europe alone. Nothing it seems can stem the flood of people seeking a better and safer existence.2

Economically it might be a good thing for the rich world to receive a flood of cheap labour; politically and socially, however, it is seen by the receiving country as a threat to its own welfare. The harsh fact is that the poor, in their flight to the West, might be chasing a mirage. It is questionable whether the high living standard of the West is ecologically sustainable world-wide.

In the 1990s the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor had helped to create the phenomenal indebtedness of the third world to the West. The relation between the poorer and richer nations has reached a paradox. While the repayment of loans by the poorer nations was impoverishing them still more, the richer parts of the world continued to absorb the capital of both the developed and the underdeveloped world. As much of the money loaned to the third world is subsequently channelled back to the US and Europe as debt service and flight capital, the developing world is receiving little financial assistance. Even where massive transfers of capital have taken place, money alone seems to have done little good in underdeveloped countries.

The poor are poorer than they need be because of the inordinate capacity of the world's defence industries to consume an ever-greater proportion of wealth. Military spending has always followed an upward course, but the upward spiral has never been as steep, or as alarming. Despite the marked fall in outlays since the end of the cold war, too much of the scientific manpower and capital formation of the western world is used by defence industries. In 1995 the US was the largest arms supplier with 43 per cent of the world-wide trade, which amounted to $40-50 billion. In 2001 the US still led. Defence spending, like crime, has become one of the indispensable pillars of the international economy. In many nations military expenditures exceed public outlays for education and health combined. The social cost of increased defence spending in the US during the cold war has been unprecedented indebtedness, widespread profligacy, and in non-military areas, a loss of competitive ability in world mar-kets.3 By 1990 the military-industrial complex against which President Eisenhower had warned in his 1961 Farewell Address4 had become a reality. The extent of defence spending between the late 1940s and the formation of the Russian Commonwealth in 1991 was no better in the Soviet Union. In the 1990s Russia made a dramatic comeback in its world sales of major conventional weapons.

No less a threat to the world community has been the growth in recent decades of religious fundamentalism, particularly in the Middle East. Even though Israel, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and the PLO, all major players in the Middle East drama, are secular-oriented, the militant versions of Judaism and Islam have become increasingly volatile.5 Irrational forces based on faith and passion rather than reason are growing. The Semites (both Arabs and Jews) now influence world affairs, especially since the creation of Israel in 1948 and the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, as they have not done for centuries. Religion, the West is rediscovering, is a factor of great political importance.

If Islam reserves its sharpest criticism for the US, it is because America's influence has grown at a time when the other colonial powers have been in retreat. The US is seen as the last of the western colonial powers, the successor to Britain and France. Iraq feels this deeply. The more the US intrudes in the affairs of the Islamic world, the more it will be resisted with terrorist acts - which is the only way the Islamic fundamentalists can hope to match America's military strength. America's secular, materialistic civilization is considered a threat to Islam's austere faith. Paramount in arousing the hostility of the Muslim world to the US is its unqualified support of Israel. Regardless of America's victory in the Gulf War of 1991, the underlying friction between the Muslim world and the US remains. Every victory of the US in the Middle East has only added to the enmity shown toward the West.

With the resurgence of Judaism and Islam, and the new vigor Pope John Paul II has given to Christianity, especially in Africa and Latin America, theism is on the rise. A sense of the sacred is returning. The world is witnessing a new search for meaning, for consolation, for refuge, for a total perspective, which cannot be found in communism, nationalism or western modernism. There can be no more striking example than the freeing of religious worship in the Soviet Union in 1990 and the state support given to the Russian Orthodox Church. The power of the spiritual word, whether voiced by Jerusalem, Mecca or Rome (and now perhaps Moscow) is once more in the ascendancy. The secular, rationalist humanism that has informed the western world, with its power of reason and its promise of progress, is being overtaken by transcendence (Map XXIV).

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The extraordinary resurgence of theism during the past decade

-  which will affect the geopolitics of the twenty-first century - should make us chary of ascribing the power of nations to any one factor. In the last resort, it is not the power of religion, or the military, or economics that make up the power of a nation; nor is it impersonal 'dynamics', or theories. It is people. On the evidence of the past half-millennium, it is people who are the greatest resource that any nation possesses. The world power struggle must surely take account of productive economic forces

-  the most easily measured attributes - but it must also allow for what people feel, think and do. The limits to the possible have been set in the past more by human imagination, than by material resources. How else can we explain the astonishing recovery of Japan and Germany from their postwar chaos. It is here that the intangible forces, including spiritual, religious, ethnic and cultural, play an important role.

There are few intangible forces at work in the world today that carry with them a greater threat to world peace, or for that matter to the global economy, than revolutionary nationalism. The idea of nationalism which first became powerful in the western world two hundred years ago has now been taken up across the globe. Since the First World War more people have had the opportunity to determine their own destiny. Nationalism has provided an identity and a sense of belonging; it has also demonstrated its worth in government. While it is true that there are more sovereign nation states at the UN than there have ever been - in 2000 there were 189 - it is equally true that there are still other groups seeking nationhood.

National aspirations (as well as religious fanaticism) account for the ongoing war since 1948 between the Palestinians and the Israelis. In Sri Lanka an eighteen-year old civil war drags on with the Tamils no closer to an independent state. In the 1990s Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Qadhafi were appealing to the ideal, and perhaps illusion, of Arab nationalism. The Kurds,6 living in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan, are the largest minority group (63 million in 2000) seeking nationhood. Other minority groups seeking independence are the Maronites of Lebanon (1.3 million), the Alawites of Syria (1.7 million), the Berbers of Morocco and Algeria (15 million), the Copts of Egypt (10 million) and the Christians of the southern Sudan (1.3 million). Of all the minority groups in the Middle East, only the Israelis have achieved sovereignty.

Age-old national aspirations lie at the heart of the discord between the British and the Catholic Irish in Northern Ireland, between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, between Basque and Catalonian separatists and Spain, and between English - and Frenchspeaking Canadians. Ethnic groups seeking nationhood played a principal role in the outbreak of brutality in Kosovo, East Timor and Rwanda. Although some national conflicts were resolved by the breakup of the Soviet Union on 21 December 1991, when it was replaced by the Russian Federation and the independent states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Baltic States, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Georgia and Turkmenistan, other conflicts remain, such as that between Chechnya and Russia (renewed in September 1999 and still active in 2001). Similar problems face the Balkans in the dispute between Serbs, Croats and Muslims. In 1999 a war was fought between US-led NATO forces and Serbia over Kosovo. Hungary and Romania dispute the territory of Transylvania. Following the Yalta Settlement in 1945, German Pommerania, Silesia and part of East Prussia were transferred to Poland, thereby sowing the seeds of future disputes between Poland and a reunified Germany. Since 1974 an armed truce has existed between Turkey and Greece in Cyprus. In Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Russian Federation, dissenting Kurds, Baluchis and Pathans also seek national independence. India is plagued with the national aspirations of the Sikhs, the Hindu Bengalis, the Kashmiris and the Tamils of Sri Lanka. East Timor having gained its independence, Indonesia is now plagued with demands for independence from the province of Aceh and Irian Jaya (now West Papua). China is faced with the growing demands for autonomy being made by the Tibetans and by its Islamic minority living mostly in the Xingiang Province. The Ibos' failure to form an independent state of Biafra in 1966-70 was perhaps the first of many unsuccessful attempts made since 1945 by groups of Africans to achieve self-determination. Elsewhere the threat to world peace of militant, exaggerated nationalism grows, rather than lessens. In 2001 UN forces were spread across the world trying to maintain peace (Map XXV). New commitments have been made in Sierra Leone, the Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea, East Timor, Croatia and Kosovo.

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Democratic Republic of the Congo 564 (of 5,537 authorized)

' Cyprus 1,440

Note: The figures combine military and civilian personnel

Western Sahi 623

' Ethiopia and Eritrea 3,837 (of 4,200 authorized)

Peacekeepers from the top 25 nations

August 1995

April 2001

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The threat to world peace - whether it springs from an economic, a spiritual or a political source - is no less strong today than it was in 1500. The world is still dangerously divided. While there is no world war, there are more wars being waged within states. The Balkans, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan are examples. In 2000 there were thirty-five armed conflicts. Crude power, strategy and interest remain the language of international relations. It was not moral criteria, or love, or voluntary co-operation, or international law that determined the outcome of world affairs these past five hundred years; nor was it the supposed death throes of capitalism or communism. Regrettably, it was conflicting interests and ever-changing levels of force.

The destructive power of mankind now dwarfs anything known before. With missiles, national frontiers no longer count. Conventional warfare has become obsolete. The world has been at bay since 1945 not because (as in 1939) a group of evil men sought world domination, but because of the almost incomprehensible damage that man can now inflict upon the world. If there is any correlation between the number of existing nuclear weapons (equivalent to several tons of TNT for every human being on the planet) and the security of the human race, one must reluctantly conclude that the world is still a very dangerous place. President Bush's announcement of plans for an anti-missile system - banned by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 - might promote a new arms race. Somewhere down the road, perhaps because of the on-going proliferation of weapons, perhaps out of desperation, impulse, or weariness, or madness, or terrorism, some individual or group will use nuclear, or biological or chemical weapons (as the Iraqis did against the Kurds). As long as people strive for power and influence, as long as we nurse historical grievances, as long as we have incompatible cultures, religions and political and territorial ambitions, there will be conflict. But we can and should make a beginning by trying to abolish or limit weapons of mass destruction. Dilatory attempts to establish international control of chemical and biological weapons have been made since 1969. A Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention took place in 1972. The most recent meeting in November 2001 revealed the ongoing differences of different countries toward biological and toxin weapons control. One cannot harbour illusions about the difficulties of this task. But then one cannot harbour illusions about the possibility of a world conflagration either. On the evidence of the past, if it is war we prepare for, it is war we will get.

Alas, the threat of world war is only one of the threats that face mankind. In economics, health care, politics, widespread drought, the wasting of the world's non-renewable resources and especially in the growth of world population,7 we are also at risk. Because the Malthusian theory that people will outstrip food supply has been disproved in the past, is no guarantee that it will be disproved in the future. Ecology and the pollution of the biosphere present us with particular problems. The real loser of the next millennium might be the planet itself. The need is for a greater symbiotic relation between nature and humanity.

But perhaps all this is too gloomy a view. An optimist might argue that in terms of war and peace the world is more stable (and some would say much richer) than it has been since the beginning of the twentieth century. World war has passed from being unthinkable to being unacceptable. The retreat of communism in eastern Europe, coupled with the efforts made by Russian and American leaders to improve their relations, has helped to strengthen the belief that the threat of world war has been banished. The threat of nuclear conflict between the two superpowers has certainly receded. The spectre of a Russian invasion, which has haunted Europe since the 1940s, has vanished. On 19 November 1990, in Paris, the twenty-two nations making up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact signed an arms control treaty that provided for a massive reduction of conventional weapons. Since then world military spending has shrunk drastically. The total for 1996 ($811 billion) was the lowest in thirty years. At the peak in 1987 armaments industries employed about seventeen million. By 1995 the figure had fallen to eleven million. In 1996 the US spent on arms half of what it had spent ten years before (but its defence budget had risen). Also in November 1990, in the Charter of Paris, thirty-four European and North American states proclaimed the end of the 'era of confrontation and division'. An unusual emphasis was being placed by both the Russians and the Americans on the need for international law and international government. In January 1995 the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was formed to further East-West relations through a commitment to non-aggression and human rights, as well as co-operation in other fields. A more coherent world order was taking shape.

The optimist might also point out that since 1945, among the leading powers, problems have never been allowed to get completely out of hand. Regional wars have never been allowed to become world-wide. In Berlin, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Angola (where fighting between government and rebel forces was still going on in 2002), in Israel, in Syria and in Egypt, the great powers have had a dozen excuses for going to war, but have always drawn back. The Gulf War was confined to the Gulf. Except for skirmishes along the border between China and the USSR, and China and India, words were always substituted for blows. Time and again, the balance of terror has saved the world from utter destruction or total anarchy. Even allowing for the diffusion of power that has taken place since the 1950s - allowing, that is, for the resurgence of Beijing, Tokyo and Berlin, and the rise of Riyadh and Rio - it is evident that the US and Russia are still major actors in the world power struggle, and neither country seeks war.

On the evidence of the past fifty years, there are further grounds for hope for an alternative to warfare in the growing voluntary economic and political co-operation between nations. With the receding of bipolarism, future emphasis would seem to lie not in world-wide military alliances but in coalitions of nations based upon regional, religious, cultural, economic and political ties and interests. The EEC, founded in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, has brought more peace to Europe than crude force ever did. Likewise the OECD8 established in 1961. Other examples are the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Group (APEC),9 the Arab League,10 the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Commonwealth (formerly the British Commonwealth),11 the European Free Trade Association (EFTA),12 the Group of Eight (G-8),13 the Islamic Common Market (ICM),14 the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The multinational European Union, founded with the object of gradually integrating the European economies and eventually obtaining political union, has become one of the world's leading trading communities. Encouragement for internationalism might also come from the ever-growing number of international corporations, as well as from internationally recognized financial organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF, which operate freely across national borders. In the World Trade Organization the nationstate has to keep a set of global rules.

Fierce opposition to globalization was manifest at the World

Trade Organization's meetings at Seattle in December 1999 at Okinawa in the summer of 2000, and at Milan in summer 2001. It is coming to be realized that globalization enriches the rich, but does little to alter the prospects for the majority of people in the world who scrape along in a subsistence economy untouched by globalization. There was a dramatic period of globalization in the late nineteenth century, which was undone because countries were eventually forced to safeguard their own interests.15 Consumerism is an inadequate basis for any civilization.

Not only is the form of international organization changing, the theory behind economics is also changing. We are beginning to realize how inadequate some of our earlier economic assump-tions16 really were. The universal theories put forward by the West to stimulate the economic growth of the developing world have had little relevance to the actual situation. The wealth being calculated today on a world scale ignores the degradation of the environment and the exploitation of non-renewable resources. The older concepts of a faceless, self-regulating market are being disputed. A new global economic order far from Adam Smith's stress on the nation is also emerging, in which emphasis is placed on the weal (well-being) as well as the wealth of nations. Smith placed his theories in a firm moral framework.17 A blind trust in the self-regulation of the market we are discovering is unjustified; covetousness without integrity and responsibility is disastrous for all.

A study of the world during the past half millennium suggests that an optimistic view of world security needs to be guarded. Not least because a blind trust in reason as a sovereign standard of truth, applicable at every level of human activity, is very recent and very fragile. In human affairs there is always the element of the incalculable. The West is not only the heir of ancient Greece, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but also of Paleolithic man. Passion and emotion rather than reason have always had a fatal attraction for the human race. The leaders of the French Revolution of 1789 took pure reason as the basis of their formidable work of destruction. The Russian communist revolution of 1917, in its search for social justice and reason, created one of the greatest tragedies in history. 'Corruptio optimi pessima', (The greatest evil is the good corrupted). The West errs in assuming that its exceptional 'Age of Reason' is normal and universal - especially at a time when there is a flight from reason going on in the West itself. 'If everything on earth were rational, nothing would happen', said Dostoyevsky. To this day, countries like China, or those of the Middle East, are incapable of basing a world outlook on rationality alone. Reason, we are discovering, is not a universal attribute. On the contrary, it is a tiny island threatened by a sea of primeval emotions, passions, prejudices and vitality. In this unreasonable world, talk of 'spaceship earth' and 'global village' is premature.

One also questions whether western forms of democracy should be thought of as universal. Great as the contribution of western thought has been, it is wrong to think of it as exceeding that of all others. Some western ideas will be accepted, others will be rejected. There is simply no one pattern of government entirely suitable for every situation. In 2001 there were remarkably few examples of a working democracy either in Africa or in the Middle East. In the Islamic world, God not man is the final arbiter. The new democratic states that have appeared recently in eastern Europe and Latin America should not lead us to believe that a new age of reason and democracy has arrived.

Far from another general conflagration being unlikely, some problems seem to invite war. The Arab-Jewish conflict could spread throughout the Middle East. In spite of the ceasefire announced in October 1995 in the Bosnian civil war, war also threatens. In the summer of 1995 an agreement between Russia and the secessionist republic of Chechnya was reached, only to be broken. (The Russians may still be forced to leave Chechnya as ignominiously as they left Afghanistan.) A wrong move by North Korea or Taiwan could have frightening consequences. Twenty-five years after Turkey invaded Cyprus, a settlement of conflicting claims is as illusive as ever.

No less a threat to world peace are the tensions that exist (despite Gorbachev's visit to Beijing in September 1989, the first of its kind in thirty years) between Russia and China.18 In the 1850s Russia took about half-a-million square miles of Chinese territory. The Chinese intend to take it back. Indeed, the most fortified and perhaps the most dangerous frontier is that separating Russia from China. In 1945 Moscow was in a position to dictate to Beijing, today Russians look to eastern Asia with growing fear. India also has frontier problems with China, which still occupies the territory it seized from India in 1962. If Asia carries with it a greater threat of war than any other continent, it is because of the great changes taking place there. Rapid change and war often go together. The most we can hope for at this point is not to banish war, but to limit it.19

In the search for a more civilized, peaceful, rational, human way of life we cannot be satisfied with the moral poverty of present-day Machiavellism, which postulates that the world of international relations is regulated ultimately by the exercise of political and economic power. Indeed, what must strike anyone who studies world history since 1500 is the relativism in morals. There has been a moral dissolution in the West that would have been thought impossible only a couple of generations ago. To protect the state or business interests, it seems that anything is permissible.20 Sometimes the difference between one country's outlook and that of another strikes one as hypocritical. The very countries pointing the finger at Iraq are those with the greatest stocks of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. A score of countries are making such weapons. It seems possible for the greatest powers (democratic or totalitarian) to uphold the sanctity of law and moral obligation on the one hand, while espousing lawlessness on the other. Violation of human rights in one country is deplored; equal or worse violations elsewhere, despite the Helsinki Accords of 1975, are ignored.21 There can be no true justice in world affairs as long as double standards prevail.

Nor is there a solution to be found as yet in international law. International courts and tribunals might decide what is legally and morally right or wrong, but they have always had difficulty enforcing their decisions. Until now only a nation-state could do that.22 Against the backcloth of the past half-millennium, it too often did so, not because of legal or moral principle, but because of national interest and expediency. Political expediency of nations these past five hundred years, rather than law and morals, carried the day.23

Unless we can effectively ensure international law and order - and that means meeting acts of aggression with superior force - we run the risk of world anarchy. While a body of international law exists and is generally accepted, its details are still very much disputed.24 Law by itself, national or international, without moral foundation and the will to enforce it, is not going to take us very far. 'Quid leges sine moribus?' asked the ancient Romans (What is the use of laws without morals?). To ensure international law and order we must first formulate an international moral imperative.25 China's world view, for instance, is not that of the US. Sometimes it is not new laws that are needed, but the resolve to apply the laws we already have. Future law and order entails the formulation of new moral criteria.26 The Hague Court27 is a beginning, but it cannot possibly deal with the number of people who need to be tried. Nor is it easy to exclude revenge and political expediency in war crimes trials. This is evident at the UN's tribunal established at Arusha in Tanzania to try those responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda in 1994.

In 1945 the world looked towards the United Nations to maintain world peace. The UN was charged with authorizing the use of force under international law. Half-a-century later, its role has become ambiguous. Although the world has changed, the UN still reflects the power structure that existed after the Second World War. India, with a population of one billion, still does not have a permanent seat on the Security Council. Every important power has its own agenda. In 1999 a group of states, led by the US, intervened in the crisis in Kosovo without seeking authority from the UN Security Council. The security system set up at the end of the Second World War was undermined. The concept of national sovereignty under international law, these past sixty years, has become blurred and needs to be redefined. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, international conduct forbad interference in the internal affairs of nation states. Frontiers are no longer an absolute defence of sovereignty.

Politically the UN has scored successes in peacekeeping in Palestine (1947), Kashmir (1948), Indonesia (1962), Cyprus (1964), the Middle East (1956, 1967 and 1973), the Congo (1960-64), and more recently in central Africa and the Balkans. The Korean War (1950-53) and the Gulf War (1991) were fought in its name. It played a role in ending the war between Iran and Iraq in 1988, and Ethiopia and Eritrea in 2000. It was less successful in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Rhodesia (1965-80) and South Africa. It failed to prevent the Falklands War (1982) and its intervention in Somalia in 1992 was calamitous. Its policy in the more recent outbreaks of violence in Rwanda, Congo, Sierra Leone and Timor has been too little, too late. That situation will continue as long as the UN is denied the means to do what the Security Council asks of it.

Whatever the basis of future rivalry or accord between human beings, ultimately in the building of a better, safer world we shall have to live and let live. Peace means the successful adjustment to the endless conflicts and differences inherent in human kind. There will be no peace among us as long as we refuse to accept the fact that truth is shared; that no nation, no continent, no race has a monopoly of truth; that all societies, all human institutions have relative strengths and weaknesses that cannot be judged universally. It is wrong of the West to claim to know what everybody in all parts of the world ought to do. It is to assume that life on this planet is simple and predictable, whereas it could hardly be more complex and uncertain. There are no universal, final solutions. Democracy and the market system are not the end of the road. The world is going to have to tolerate different concepts of God, nature, morality, economics, government and society. It is going to have to reconcile individual interests with those of the community. Our need is not to control life, which will always elude us, but to come to terms with the unpredictable, the perpetual and the incalculable elements in life. Unless our efforts are directed to enhancing the value and significance of human life, life itself will have been in vain. The choice is ours to make. For myself, I turn from this study of the past five hundred years strengthened in the belief that the human spirit will prevail.