The story of the human race is war," wrote Winston Churchill. "Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending." When Churchill wrote, this was a realistic perspective and had been for centuries. In the 17th century there were only seven calendar years without a major war between European states. The 18th century began with the wars of Louis XIV and ended with those of Napoleon (with Frederick the Great's in between). In the 19th and the 20th centuries, wars became less frequent but much more intense. Up to the present day the imminence of war has been our usual working assumption. Anthony Eden saw Suez as another episode in the struggle against dictators. Korea, Cuba and Vietnam all seemed to be the opening phase of a wider conflict.
The same belief-that war remains the default option of our civilisation-underlay the policy triumphs of Helmut Kohl in the 1980s and 1990s: the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles and the euro. The peace movement disagreed on everything else, but it shared with Kohl, Reagan and Thatcher the assumption that war was inevitable unless there was positive action to prevent it. These leaders, whose lives were marked by the second world war, have now gone. Kohl was the last German chancellor who will remember the war, Thatcher the last British prime minister and Bush the last US president.
The change of generation means that we can now catch up with reality. War in Europe does not figure among the assumptions of a Blair, a Clinton, a Schr?der or a Jospin-nor among most of the people they govern. Use of force remains a policy option-to rescue citizens, to defend allies abroad, to keep out refugees, to enforce UN security council resolutions, to protect humanitarian operations-but these battles will take place in the middle distance, managed by professional soldiers, with few casualties. The nearest most of us will come to them will be watching them on our television screens.
This is very different from the experience of earlier generations, called up, bombed out, occupied, soldiers in the streets, aircraft overhead, artillery in the distance, killed, wounded or captives in every family. War has not come to an end everywhere. (The Balkans stand ready, and there are several wars going on in Africa.) But there is no longer any reason to expect war in western Europe. Indeed, there is every reason to expect the opposite. Reagan talked of a generation of peace, but in Europe we are already on to the third generation for whom war is an experience of history books, films and television screens.
Almost 100 years ago, Norman Angell and others wrote that war had come to an end in Europe, and then found that the new century brought the most terrible wars in history. Nothing is certain, but the fact that Angell was wrong 100 years ago does not prove that he would be wrong now. The only lesson of history is that history does not repeat itself.
Suppose that the past 50 years are not a historical anomaly but the beginning of a long peace. Suppose that peace is now the natural condition of most of the developed world. If this is true, we are entering a very different world from the one that Churchill described.
When the weeds have grown over the war memorials, historians, looking back, will probably date the beginning of the long peace from 1989 and the end of the cold war. The years before were a kind of phoney peace. We had peace in practice but not in theory. The threat of war remained a determining factor in government policy and a determining influence in society.
The phoney peace provided a preparation, but the psychology of peace has become properly rooted in western Europe only during the past ten years. In some other places-Russia for example, where the memory of war remains vivid and the fear of war remains strong-it may be a long time before the logic of peace begins to work its way through the system. Some universities have departments of peace studies. Strangely, these are preoccupied with war. Perhaps the time has come to start thinking seriously about how the long peace will affect us. Because our societies have been shaped over the centuries by war and the expectation of war, the changes will be far-reaching. It is possible only to guess at some of them.
first, our nations are going to become less military and our military will become less national. This is already happening. One by one, the great national armies of Europe are disappearing. Most European countries have taken the decision to abandon conscription. In the case of France this means abandoning the tradition of the nation in arms. Aux armes, citoyens in the Marseillaise will soon sound as antiquated as most of God Save the Queen.
In 1897 France and Germany both had peace-time armies (including reservists) of 3.5m men. The armies are now about 600,000 strong. In Germany conscription lumbers on, but is sustainable only because a large number of young men prefer working in hospitals or old people's homes to serving in the army. (In some cases modern armies have become vanishingly small; Belgium has an army of fewer than 30,000 and a navy of fewer than 3,000.)
We may be moving back towards the days of the Battle of Hastings, when a decisive battle could take place with only 6,000 men on either side. Small forces need not be ineffective. The lesson of most recent conflicts is that quality beats quantity.
Soldiers today are more professional in the sense that they are more skilled. What about the other sense of the word-that they do it for money (the word soldier comes originally from "solde" meaning salary)? During the Gulf war-a professionals' war if ever there was one-a good deal of the equipment was maintained not by the military but by engineers from the supplying firms. Is it too much to believe that, in the future, armaments firms may supply a package which includes not just maintenance engineers for the equipment but also skilled personnel to operate it? In the future will we see more non-national mercenary forces? The French found that one of the few units they could easily deploy to the Gulf came from the French Foreign Legion. Perhaps, having made the leap from a national army to a professional army, it may prove a small extra step to move from a professional army to a mercenary army.
This is all part of an established European tradition. Wellington's and Marlborough's forces were an amalgam of troops from all over Europe. A little further back we find Scottish, Irish, German and Swiss mercenaries making up the core of many European armies. And 85 per cent of the English fleet that defeated the Armada was privately owned. For the moment only the Vatican and the French Foreign Legion (and the Gurkhas?) keep the mercenary tradition alive: but it may yet return.
And a less military nation? For the most part, states were created by conquest. Even when looting and extortion ceased to be its core business, the state has grown strong through war. Taxation was invented to pay for wars (many other things were invented also: beet as a source for sugar during the Napoleonic wars; standard sizes for clothes during the American civil war; and countless technologies during the first and second world wars). War justified increases in state power which otherwise would not have been tolerated. The state often retained at least some of these powers after the war had ended. Licensing hours were originally imposed in Britain during the first world war; economic planning began in the second. A chart of state power would show a big upsurge during wars, followed by a slow decline as wartime controls were dismantled (this often happened more quickly in the case of a defeated power). The state made war, but war also made the state. If this is true, then what will peace do?
Military influences on our state go further than the question of parti-cular powers or taxes. The original purpose of the state was military and states are (still) organised along military lines. Victories in war are won through unity of command, concentration of strength and surprise. It is therefore no accident that most states are characterised by hierarchy, centralisation and secrecy. As war becomes less central to the life of our states, some of these qualities will also fade.
The trend is towards less secrecy and less centralisation. Freedom of Information Acts have not yet become the norm, but it will be a surprise if they do not do so in the next few years. Decentralisation is under way not only through political devolution, but also through privatisation and the hiving-off of regulatory functions to autonomous bodies. Who knows how far the devolution trend will run? Because military strength was one of the justifications for the creation of larger states, a less militarised Europe might eventually see the re-emergence of a medieval patchwork of small states. Perhaps for the first time we are seeing a state-sponsored growth in civil society: a demilitarisation, that is to say, of our state and society.
Perhaps the absence of war is also one of the things behind the falling prestige of government and politics. Now that we no longer need the state to defend us, we do not conceal our dislike of it taking our money and ordering us around. We impeach presidents and hound cabinet ministers. War needs leaders. Out of war come kings and dictators. Peace is republican. The era of great men is behind us.
As the state weakens, so does the nation. Many nations were forged in war: France, as it drove the English out of Gascony; the Netherlands, as it liberated itself from Spain and fought off France; Britain, as it built an overseas empire. These conquests-and even, in the cases of Serbia or the Boers, defeats-created the sense of a nation as a "community of fate." As Ernest Renan said, the nation is bound together by the memory of sacrifices made in the past and the readiness to renew those sacrifices in the future. But in a long period of peace the idea of a common begins to seem implausible; and a common sacrifice irrelevant. The nation will not disappear altogether-geography and a shared language will still give national identities some point; but it will be a much weaker point.
The weakness of national identity may bring more divided societies. National feeling was one of the things which brought rich and poor together. Today the rich have no country; instead they have an apartment in Manhattan, a villa on the Mediterranean and an e-mail address. What about the poor? Most likely they will be left with a set of values which the dynamic parts of society have long since discarded.
The urge for community will not fade with the nation. We can expect to see smaller communities formed around ideas, ideologies or religions. Because these are chosen communities they will be tighter, more single-minded and in some cases more dangerous than the nations. Just as single-issue groups seem to be taking over from parties as the main form of political mobilisation, so single-issue (but multinational) organisations may take on part of the role of nations. They will not have the power of the state behind them, but they will still have a capacity for violence through terrorism or mass demonstrations. With the privatisation of the nation goes the privatisation of violence.
For all these changes, the era of peace will be one of relative stability. There is nothing like a defeat in war for provoking a revolution. States may become less important, and they may be more likely to split up, but they will at least be stable.
if politics changes in the long peace, so will economics. War has been the great destroyer of value; it is only natural to couple peace with prosperity. More wealth has been produced in the past 50 years of relative peace than in the whole history of the world. As the idea sinks in that peace is now the natural condition of the developed world, we should find ourselves in one of the great bull markets of history. Perhaps it has already begun.
The Duchess of Richmond's ball before Waterloo is an image of the wish to eat, drink and be merry in case we are killed tomorrow. Now that the risk of a nuclear holocaust or a major war in western Europe seems to have been postponed indefinitely, we ought to feel more sure of the future, be more ready to save and invest. If interest rates are the price of future uncertainty, this should be an era of low interest rates. Of low inflation, too. The great inflations of this century (in Europe at least) are associated primarily with wars. We must only hope that consumerism for its own sake will be enough to keep us consuming, otherwise we could find ourselves in a deflationary world. Is Japan the forerunner of a peaceful society?
Peace is one condition (not the most important, by any means) for globalisation-after all, no one wants to invest abroad when war is likely. Competition between states to attract capital, and to attract the talented rich and creative people who bring wealth and jobs with them, will be one replacement for military competition. In the past, companies competed for the favours of the state. Now it is the other way round.
The impact of the long peace on the social order is more difficult to predict. There have been extended periods of peace before, for example in Ming China; but these took place in traditional societies untouched by the liberating cancer of modernism, where values and structures were accepted. A peace policy was adopted by the Ming emperors and the Tokugawa shoguns precisely to reduce the risks of change. It will be different for us. We live in a society without the fixed values of religion; one in which change is seen as a given and an opportunity.
Without war, what shall we do with our aggression? Sport is one obvious substitute for battle. The time, money and the attention it attracts seem to grow all the time. The rise of the sports superstar has perhaps only just begun. The time is not yet ripe for Michael Jordan to run for office, but it is a fair bet that one of his successor superstars will be president of the US in the first half of the next century.
Business is another possible outlet for male aggression. Newspaper layouts which put the sport and business sections together recognise the similarity. Perhaps in Europe we shall begin to see the entrepreneur as social hero, as people already do in the US. Where business can package identity and aggression, as sport does, it should do well. Computer games are good on aggression but are only just beginning to work on identity. Fashion is strong on identity but needs (at least for the male audience) to add a little violence. Rock music manages the combination rather well. Properly packaged party politics could make a comeback if only it could focus more on winning and less on governing; more aggression, more identity, less policy-some might say these signs are already visible.
At the same time the long peace may give opportunities for those who are less aggressive. The dominant position of men has rested on their superior capacity for violence. In a society of networks and relationships, rather than of hierarchy and orders, women may come to play a bigger role. Sweden, which has been at peace since 1809, provides some pointers. Another model might be Hong Kong. There we find an increasing number of women in politics, administration, law and medicine but, as is also the case in Sweden, business remains a predominantly male domain.
War can destroy states. It may be that peace will destroy society. Nothing gives people a stronger sense of belonging than a collective life-or-death struggle against a common enemy. It is this sense of purpose and community which drives down suicide rates in wartime. Consumerism (which will be the opiate of the masses during the long peace) is by contrast an individual ailment. The symptoms are eating disorders, loneliness, drug taking, gambling and other forms of self-destruction. As collective self-destruction is now off the agenda, we shall find ways of doing it one by one.
The values which have sustained us over the centuries-faith, loyalty and courage-will fade. Honour already seems old-fashioned. Burke's pronouncement, 200 years ago, that the age of chivalry was gone and that it has been succeeded by that of sophisters, economists and calculators, was right but premature. Michael Milken's dictum, that greed is good, points the way to the future.
International affairs will be dull: endless meetings about legal and technical issues negotiated among lawyers and technocrats. Germany provides an interesting example of how the decline of international relations can impact on domestic politics. Until the 1990s the main parties-CDU and SPD-divided primarily on foreign policy issues: Atlantic versus Ostpolitik. The FDP was placed neatly in the middle: more Nato than the left, more Ostpolitik than the right. With the end of the cold war and Germany off the front line, the main parties now divide on domestic issues. So instead of two large parties with a small one in between, we now have two large parties with a small one (Greens and FDP) on each flank.
International institutions will continue to expand, to proliferate, to overlap and to confuse the public. Without a general war there will be no opportunity to scrap them all and start again as we did after the second world war. Many institutions will be born but none will ever die.
Occasionally we will be disturbed by something happening outside our zone of peace and we will decide that "something must be done." With our own security not at risk we can afford the luxury of a foreign policy which takes more heed of moral values-indeed, this is what the television viewers will demand of all governments. But we will not want to use force; so most often this demand will translate into economic sanctions (the US currently has sanctions against several dozen countries). In extreme cases we will turn to force (preferably air force). As time goes by, even these sort of actions may become rare. A less hierarchical, less centralised government may also be a more parochial one.
How does the long peace end? In war-how else? Perhaps in civil war. It may come with the return of the irrational from within. National communities will be weakened but rational materialism will not be enough. It is the irrational which brings us together. And it is beliefs, usually irrational beliefs, that people die for, not rationality or consumerism. We cannot yet imagine what beliefs or values may divide and destroy our societies, or reduce them to chaos, but they will seem as compelling and right, as God and Nation appeared to our great-grandfathers.
Alternatively, war may come from outside as a rationally calculated act of aggression. When the Manchus swept away the Ming dynasty, some 25m Chinese died, one sixth of the population. If it is war from outside which ends the long European peace, the results may be similar. We or our children, grown soft in peace, grown complacent in enlightenment, will have forgotten how or why to defend ourselves.
