by

Andrew Bard Schmookler

Even as the essential work of dismantling the cold war world goes forward, it is important that we envision what new world should replace it. Peace needs to be more than just the absence of cold war. The cold war warped the global system for forty years. For two generations, the dominant actors on the planet vied for supremacy. The entire planet became a chessboard; lesser powers became pawns. The way that peace has broken out during the past two years of cold war thaw demonstrates the role of the superpower competition in fomenting conflict around the globe. Even though many of these conflicts remain uncertain of resolution --in Afghanistan, Angola, Central America, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Cambodia, Ethiopia, the Iran-Iraq war-- there have been at least steps toward peace in most of the world's trouble spots. In each case, the cold war thaw helped make the conflict somewhat less stuck-- suggesting how much it had been the global climate of superpower competition that had exacerbated, and sometimes even engendered, these regional struggles. It would be a great mistake, however, to assume that this outbreak of peace is an omen that the end of the cold war assures us an era of world peace. The superpowers did not invent the struggle for power. It has long been recognized that the international system has been plagued by war because there exists no reliable order to restrain actors in that system from using force, or to provide them alternative means of resolving conflicts among them. So long as nations confront each other in that anarchic situation Thomas Hobbes called the "state of nature." the dread Hobbsean "war of all against all" will persist. If all we accomplish now is to remove the superpower conflict from the global arena, without supplanting it with a positive new international order, the end of the cold war will simply create a vacuum that will be filled by the old patterns of intersocietal strife. The gap left by the superpowers will be filled by powers less super, but still capable of filling the world with the smell of hatred and bloodshed. The anxieties surrounding the current discussions about German reunification are a reminder that the good old days before the cold war were not so good. But the world is full of potential and actual conflicts that have nothing to do with the cold war, and which indeed the interests of the superpowers might have conspired to suppress. The present developments are most welcome, of course. We who have lived under the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon can celebrate the emerging pattern of cooperation between the nuclear giants. But history tells us the challenge of the current crisis is not to move backward in time to a world as it was before the hostile confrontation of nuclear superpowers but forward to a new global system. With the dominant powers increasingly able to work together, the United Nations can now be made into a more trustworthy and more effective organization. And there are alternative possibilities for transnational coordination on global problems, such as the formation of a Community of Democratic Nations, which would have the virtue of not reposing power in the hands of the kinds of people who gain power by violence. The time is ripe also for advances in the rule of law in the international system. It has become almost a cliche to note that the Chinese character for "crisis" combines the characters for "danger" and for "opportunity." If we lack the vision to create a new kind of world order out of the present crisis, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the danger that a post-Gorbachev Soviet leader might plunge the world back into the nuclear peril from which we are now emerging. But perhaps the greatest danger is that we will let our present opportunity slip away. It is when the old order crumbles that a new order can be created. Humankind has the opportunity now to make great strides toward creating global institutions that provide more security and justice for the world's peoples. Such a world is not going to come into being overnight. It may take generations. But not since the end of World War II has the chance been so great for making progress toward a new era in human history. The role of the United States in this process is critical. By virtue of its power and its potential for world leadership, the US can promote or block the evolution of the global system. It might be argued that the United States is an unlikely leader for such a process. As the apparent "winner" of the cold war and the main beneficiary of the status quo, according to this view, the US would be the least interested in abandoning the present system. And indeed, compared with our European allies, who are now moving toward a new, larger organization of Europe, American leaders have seemed to regard national sovereignty as an eternal sacred banner. But our power did not always make us cling to the status quo in the international order. Amid the rubble of the Second World War, at the very apex of American preeminence, American vision led the way toward the founding of the United Nations and the strengthening of international law. Can America give the world visionary leadership now, as then? Then, as now, the world was ripe for remolding. Then, unlike now, the Soviet Union was under the control of a paranoid ruler to whom the idea of mutual security made no sense. Now the opportunity is greater. But then, unlike now, Americans were painfully aware that the absence of a world order invited disaster. Have American leaders become too complacent to seize this opportunity? Surely, we cannot afford a World War III to teach us what American leaders knew then. Here is where that "vision thing" really matters. Now, unlike forty-five years ago, it is not only the problem of war and peace that demands the creation of global institutions. In the intervening years, we have learned that even our peacetime practices threaten our survival: the impact of human activity on the biosphere needs regulation. There is serious talk now of a need for a global "carbon budget": to avoid catastrophic changes in earth's climate, over the next few decades the entire planet will evidently have to cut its consumption of fossil fuels to a fraction of present levels. Where are the global institutions capable of overseeing such radical changes where the interests of each actor taken separately vary sharply from the interests of humanity as a whole? National jurisdictions are simply insufficient to deal with problems of pollution, deforestation, etc. where local actions have global impact. Now that humankind wields such enormous powers --both in weapons of mass destruction and in the impact of our economic activities-- the old order of civilization is simply not viable. Now is the time to envision what civilization must become during the third millennium-- if we are to survive.

Andrew Bard Schmookler is the author of Out of Weakness: Healing the Wounds that Drive Us to War. ??