Peace: Jonathan Schell scared us before. Twenty years ago, his bestselling The Fate of the Earth shocked the world into recognition of the abyss to which nuclear weapons had brought us. Now terrorism and the Western response to terrorism have renewed the shock.
With the peaceful end of the Cold War, it seemed that humanity had made it to a new plateau of civilisation. Schell makes a good case for moral progress in his new book. He describes the collapse of communism and the transformation of South Africa from the despotism of its white settlers into a working democracy as the miraculous products of such progress. Without bloodshed, the Soviets gave up their empire, the Afrikaners their dominion.
Schell sees these events and the leaders who made them possible as the modern revolution against violence, an idea whose time has come. Hitherto nations have organised around the principle of maximum force as the safest instrument of security. Si vis pacem para bellum, the Latins tagged it, and it has never since been a good career move for an army general to wonder if there might be another way. There was no alternative, Margaret Thatcher loved to tell us, even as political and economic alternatives were being forged in the revolutionary movements described by Schell. You can't buck the market, she insisted, while bucking like a bronco herself whenever national or party interests were at stake.
The idea that we can choose our economic and political destiny, that human choice is not restricted to the daily rituals and trivial options offered to us as consumers and citizens, but can extend to the most profound level of domestic and international politics, is the key message which Schell tries to draw from his survey of the history of non-violence. The starting point of his book is the idea that states and communities have always had to organise their relations according to a world-view based on the principle of violent opposition or peaceful cooperation. It has always been a choice between Pericles and Jesus, Clausewitz and Kant - Churchill and Gandhi, one might add, Thatcher and Mandela.
While most eras have biased the choice in favour of military force, Schell's reading of history leads him to believe that the balance has swung in favour of greater freedom to choose non-violence and cooperation. He first addresses what he calls "the war system", the mentality that views international relations as a jungle and all the players in it as puppets of anarchy. But in the example of peace activists, in the history of revolutionary movements - even bloody ones such as the French Revolution, no less than velvet ones such as the European Union and Northern Ireland - Schell finds testimony to another way of seeing the world and of organising the power of non-violence to redeem it.
He is in no doubt that the militaristic mindset has been reinforced dramatically in the neo-conservative policies of his native US. The American response to the attack on the Twin Towers threatens to elevate the war principle again as the sole option and to delegitimise alternatives as naive and utopian.
The problem with Schell's analysis is not just that it will be dismissed as wishful thinking by the usual suspects in the hard-nosed realist circles of academia and policy-making. But even the fair and open-minded will be hard pressed to extract a practical course of politics which will deliver us again from Pericles to Jesus, or from Bush to Gandhi. The merit of the book is that it presses home the truth we must all cling to in relation to international affairs. If we want peace we must prepare for peace long before its breakdown makes violence inevitable and elevates militarism as the natural means of survival. If we live in a jungle it is because we have chosen to see the world in that light, not because nature ordained it.
"The days when humanity can hope to save itself from force with force are over," Schell writes in conclusion. "None of the structures of violence - not the balance of power, not the balance of terror, not empire - can any longer rescue the world from the use of violence, now grown apocalyptic. Force can only lead to more force, not peace."