WAR AND PEACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Public lecture in series on War

Center for Humanities and the Arts, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Thursday, January 22, 2004, 4:00pm, British Studies Room of Norlin Library 

Francis A. Beer

At the end of the 19th century, Europe had been free from major systemic war for 85 years -- since the Congress of Vienna ended the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Many believed that rationality and science had made war an obsolete relic.Those beliefs, and many of those people and their descendants, came to an end at places with such names Ypres and Verdun, Guadalcanal and Stalingrad, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The 20th century did not bring the expected triumph of sweet reason and peace. Instead, it became, in the words of one observer, the century of total war.

In spite of the lessons of the 20th century, the same fin du siècle optimism as had been present at the end of the 19th

century again prevailed at the end of the 20th. Moreover, not just the 20th century but a whole millennium was ending.The three zeroes of the year 2000 promised the possibility of great new beginnings. Again, there were many who believedthat humanity had finally emerged into the light at the end of the historical tunnel. The end of the Cold War, some thought, was the “end of history.” Miracles of modern technology (the internet, for example) might transform politics to improve the human condition. Many young people had never experienced either war or the draft, and many middle-aged people born after 1945 had no personal knowledgeof war on the soil of their own states. When the Berlin wall came down, it was easy to believe that the end of war

had either already occurred or might finally be within reach. As was also the case for the 20th century, however, the early years of the 21st have not brought encouraging news. The attacks of 9/11, the war on terror, and the secondGulf War suggest that history may not have ended after all, to be replaced by shopping, and that war still remains very much with us.

In this light, we ask three questions: first, what do we know about war and peace, second, what do war and peace mean, and third what can we do about war and peace?

1. What Do We Know about War and Peace?

Let’s focus on the first of these questions: What do weknow about war and peace? Our knowledge about war and peace includes data and theory about trends, causes, and effects.

Trends of War and Peace

There appear to be general long term trends in war and peace. Previous historical compilations of statistics suggest that there have been long term historical tendenciestoward war concentration, peace diffusion, and war aggravation. Over the last several centuries in the Europe-centered international system, there has been war concentration: periods of major international war have been getting shorter. This implies peace diffusion: periods of major peace have been getting longer. In spite of these positive trends, however, there has also been a more negative tendency toward war aggravation. In spite of major wars being shorter, we also know that the destructiveness ofmodern military technology has produced more direct battle deaths and more indirect deaths beyond the immediate battlefield -- “collateral damage,” disease, and malnutrition -- when wars occur. There has been a long term historical increase in war casualties, in terms of both absolute numbers and relative to population.

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Such historical trends may exist as general averages for the international system taken as a whole, but not necessarily for partial, local systems. For example, the pattern of the United States, from its origin through the middle of the 20th century, seems to have been the opposite one of war diffusion and peace fragmentation. Wars became somewhat more, rather than less, frequent over time; peace periods were necessarily broken up more often. War casualties increased absolutely, though not relative to population.

As I noted earlier, many people believe that these historical trends stopped at the threshold of the 21st century. They think that here is now a new historical context for war and peace. The victor in any war, as the French statesman Georges Clemenceau famously said after the First World War, is the last one standing. At the beginning of the 21st century, America appears to be that last fighterin the ring. At this time, the United States is the only superpower and a potential global hegemon. Currently ascendant American political elites seem to have both the capability and the intention to achieve world domination. Inthe terminology of one group, this is the project for the new American century.

The United States has “soft power” resources that dominate the global economy, global science and technology, and global culture. The American version of democracy, free markets, media, and technology--elections, shopping, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—appeal deeply to the young generations of the 21st century. America speaks the language of peace and prosperity.

At the same time, however, the United States uses the “hard power” resources of military force in “coercive diplomacy,” undertaking short-term wars for the sake of longterm peace. The American trend of war diffusion—more frequent wars-- reflects this propensity to use military force. The United States has achieved “escalation dominance”

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at the higher levels of military force. American formal military capabilities seem at least equal to those of all possible opponents combined. The United States’ technological resources try to make up for the fact that it can not match all opponents in terms of boots or sandals on the ground. American military capabilities extend upward andoutward into the far reaches of space, including the “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile system and the “high frontier” of the moon and the planets beyond. One example is the current mission to Mars, which we are all following and, indeed, on which some of you may actually be working. Because of its ability to achieve vertical envelopment and local concentrations of force, American military capability also extends down into the subterranean recesses of the “spider holes” where individual enemies of the American people like Saddam Hussein may try to hide.

American military dominance has helped produce a changein the texture of war, the way in which war is fought. The first and second Gulf Wars and the American attack on Afghanistan suggest the emerging outlines of “asymmetric warfare” in the 21st century. Faced with American dominationof the virtual battlefield, the huge opposing physical concentrations of land, sea, and air forces of World Wars I and II may become a thing of the past. Enemy political leaders were previously protected horizontally by their fleets or battalions. This is no longer true. They are now vulnerable to vertical pinpoint attacks from the air and space. On the ground, the balance of local forces is still important. Nevertheless, as the second Gulf War showed, the bionic soldier of the 21st century carries an enormous technological advantage in his or her fighting space. This advantage supports an “army hopping” strategy to bypass opposing force concentrations, like General Macarthur’s island hopping strategy in the World War II Pacific. Warfarebecomes narrower, personalized, and focused on individual leaders rather than on armies, navies, and populations. Political decapitation becomes more efficient than massed confrontations to produce regime change.

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In spite of its advantages in military technology, however, American dominance is far from complete. The UnitedStates has huge demographic disadvantages; it includes a relatively small population in a huge global ocean of people, not all of whom support the American project. Technology provides the leverage not only for global domination, but also for global resistance. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction can, astheir name implies, wreak great destruction in small, highlypopulated spaces. Large numbers of people seem willing to give up their lives in the name of liberation to oppose foreign domination. Examples include historical national resistance movements like the Vietnamese or Palestinians, ormore recently self-selected sub-national or transnational groups like Al-Qaeda.

Moreover, the United States is challenged by rising economies in Asia, whose trained, low cost workers produce quality goods and services at much lower prices. American trade deficits, job losses, and rising indebtedness reflect America’s weakened position in the competitive global economic marketplace. Politically, American hegemony faces growing international opposition, even among some major traditional allies in the European Community – France for example. Potential superpowers like China may challenge the United States’ claim to global supremacy. At home, many factors --the incomplete achievement of democracy and socialjustice, erosion of civil liberties and the environment, alienation of young people, opposition to military service—weaken domestic support for the American global hegemonic project.

Given this mixed picture, we may expect that some of the long term historical trends will persist in the 21 st century. American military dominance tends to support continuing the general trend of war concentration and peace diffusion. The possibility of external intervention may dampen war, limiting the outbreak of some future interstate

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wars, and tend to end them when they occur. There should be fewer and shorter formal interstate wars; periods of major interstate peace should be longer. Nevertheless, while such future developments would certainly be welcome, there are also countervailing tendencies. Some of the historical trends that we have considered depend strongly on a particular definition of interstate war, and such interstatewars are only a part of all warlike activity. The United States, since the end of World War II, has undertaken many military interventions without formal declarations of war. Wars that occur beyond interstate boundaries – involving non-state actors that we discussed earlier—do not have clearedges. The clash of civilizations, for example, to the extent that it exists, is much broader than the clash of states and can continue indefinitely in protracted conflicts. Terrorism has emerged from its post-colonial history into a new imperial context. It has become a post-modern form of guerrilla warfare. It is possible to constrain terrorism to some extent, but not to eliminate it completely. In spite of our fervent wishes, terrorism is notgoing away. Terrorism is not part of the statistics of interstate wars, or even of militarized international disputes, but the War on Terrorism promises to be long and difficult.

Continuation of the trend of war aggravation – higher war casualties—is also unclear. On the one hand, one can imagine very high casualties in regional war scenarios involving weapons of mass destruction around the Korean Peninsula, the Indian subcontinent, and the Taiwan Straits. On the other hand, casualties may be compressed because American intervention with overwhelming force may shorten such wars.

If peace is defined narrowly as the absence of formal interstate war with more than 1000 direct battle deaths, the21st century may thus see war shrink and peace increase in both space and time. This is an important trend. At the sametime, however, states may also become less relevant for

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warfare. The cold war of the late 21st century may be replaced by the hot peace of the early 21st. Collective violence by non-state actors involved in asymmetric warfare may continue and even expand outside state boundaries. War may change its profile, but war and its associated casualties will not disappear. War will go on in different forms and textures to match new contexts.

Causes and Effects of War and Peace

We now turn to the causes of war and peace. We explain causes and effects of war and peace at different levels of analysis – systems, regimes, and individuals.

Systems

At the highest level are systemic explanations of war and peace. Two systemic explanations are those suggested by realist and network theory.

Realism

Contemporary realist political actors include, for example, American neoconservatives who currently dominate United States foreign policy. Realist theory suggests that the basic structure of the international system is one of anarchic power relations, the law of the jungle. The struggle for power is general and permanent. More or less sovereign nation states have been, and will continue to be, the primary actors of international relations. National behavior is and must be guided by national interest defined in terms of power. Military power is particularly importantbecause it allows the direct application of force. War, as the German theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously said, is the continuation of politics by other means. From this perspective, terrorism is simply another form of war, non-state actors another set of players, and the clash of civilizations another form of realism, cultural realism. Forthe United States, defensive realism includes protecting the

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American “homeland;” offensive realism envisions geopolitical control of land and oil resources in the global“heartland” of Central Asia. For realists, the stubborn persistence of war in the 21st century will be no surprise.

Networks

A second form of systemic explanation puts the structure of power in a larger context. It recasts the international system as a network that contains multiple linked institutions and processes that are grouped in three tendencies – polarization, militarization, and aggregation. The relative strength of each of these determines the largernetwork’s dynamics. Different configurations predispose the network towards war, while others predispose it towards peace. As realism suggests, polarizing processes like national differentiation construct an anarchic but hierarchical international power system. Inequality and instability are also part of the mix. Large, rich, cohesive nation states dominate and compete in world politics. This competition often takes the violent form of war. Polarization thus also implies militarization, for example military alliances and continuing arms races, including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. International polarization and militarization thus push the international system toward war. There are, however, countervailing forces. Superordinate aggregative structures and processes of global civil society—international law, organization, trade, and communication, for example-- may pull the actors toward post-realism and peace. The discourse of international morality and ethics, which David Mapel has intensively explored, may also constrain the actors. In thislarger view, countervailing realist and post-realist elements produce different systemic moods or states. In sometimes and places, the international network runs relatively smoothly and peacefully; in other situations it works more roughly; sometimes it simply blows up. These continuing structural dynamics of the international system suggest thatwar and peace will both continue into the 21st century.

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Regimes

At a lower level of political analysis, regime explanations of war and peace concentrate on individual states and distributions of power within them. The “democratic peace” hypothesis, for example, suggests that democratic states do not fight each other. My colleagues Steve Chan and David Leblang have contributed to knowledge in this area. If one wants peace, according to this theory, one should build democracy. The American emphasis on “regimechange” and “liberation” in the second Gulf War is consistent with this body of theory, as are current theorizing and policy in the area of nation-building and peace-building. Presumably, if the United States builds democracy in Iraq and extends it in the Middle East, such democracy will have a pacifying influence. It is not, however, clear how one builds democracy at gunpoint, whetherAmerican enthusiasm for democracy will include directly elected Shiite regimes, or what foreign policy popular democracy in the Middle East will produce.

Whatever the situation may be in local cases, there isstill considerable debate on whether and how the democratic peace actually works. No matter what its historical merits, the implications of the democratic peace for the future are unclear. If democratic institutions achieve a global scope, it is not necessarily true that we shall have reached the end of war. Instead, the dividing line between democracies and dictatorships may dissolve into a post-democratic continuum of political forms, different kinds and degrees ofdemocracies—representative or direct, parliamentary or Presidential, for example. The democratic peace hypothesis does not, moreover, imply that democratic states do not go to war. The imperialism of the European democracies, the United States’ Monroe Doctrine and its corollaries, and the continuing American program to make the world safe for democracy through preemptive intervention all suggest that democracies can be belligerent, and that democratic

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aggressions may simply be redirected to less democratic or less friendly and pliant states in the 21st century.

Individuals

Finally, at the micro-level, individual explanations ofwar and peace concentrate on particular human beings, who are often presented in dramatic settings, as agents. Rationalism, the individualist variant of realism, presents decisions as if they are taken purely on the basis of rational comparison of costs and benefits. Individual players in the game of war and peace, from this perspective,advance their own interests and those of the sub-national, national, and transnational groups that they lead.

At the same time, individuals make war and peace not just on the basis of material interests, but also on the basis of ideas and images, as my colleague Colin Dueck emphasizes in his research on the importance of ideas in international relations. The role of religion and ideology in the conflicts of the contemporary Middle East and CentralAsia are further examples of the importance of non-material dimensions of decision.

Finally, recent psychological laboratory experiments, which I have undertaken in collaboration with Professors Alice Healy and Lyle Bourne of the CU Psychology Department,show that public thinking about international attacks is more complex and dynamic than simple rationalism. Such individual reactions to attacks depend on a mixture of emotion and reason, the nature of attackers and targets, personality and gender, and a host of other factors that interact over time. One particularly interesting finding of these psychological experiments is that gender matters. Women respond less conflictually than men to reports of international attacks by actors with whom there exists a previous positive connection. Another democratic state or aninternational ally is a political example of such a prior friendly relationship. On the other hand, if individuals do

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not see a clear prior positive association with an attackingagent, women respond with a higher degree of violence. Nobody likes to be attacked, but men react more strongly to attacks by friends, women to attacks by strangers.

Such findings suggest that political leaders and their followers will continue to calculate and miscalculate through variable combinations of logic and psycho-logic. Though we may learn much more about human nature and cognition, rational or irrational processes, the mixture seem unlikely to change dramatically in the foreseeable future.

Given this general overview of the causes of war and peace, is peace possible? As we suggested earlier, knowledgeof historical trends suggests that islands of peace will continue and may even expand. Certain kinds of war, massed confrontations between state military forces, may diminish. At the same time, our knowledge about the systematic, regime, and individual causes of war provides no reason to believe that war, defined more broadly, will disappear in the 21st century.

2. Meanings of War and Peace?

The second major question concerns the meanings of these facts and events of war and peace? History does not speak for itself. As events present themselves, participantsand observers, journalists and novelists, humanists and social scientists reflect and construct meaning as they describe patterns of war and peace in their talk. Their language frames interpretation of these patterns.

Journalists, novelists, and citizens generally talk about war and peace in a dramatistic way. They care about leading players in the story--who did what to whom, when, why, where, and how. The ultimate question, familiar to all parents telling bedtime stories is “what happened next?” This question leads to a series of outcomes—longer stories,

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more stories, standard stories (the rise and fall of empires), judgments of right and wrong (whose fault was it?), lessons (who was right or wrong?), structured arguments about past and future (should we do x?).

Other actors talk about war and peace in a different way. The language of science, for example, is different fromthe language of drama. This presentation has used the language of a particular kind of science, social science. This discourse shifts the questions and thus the answers. We have talked here about description, explanation, and prediction; trends, causes, and effects; levels of analysis.This language is not value or consequence free; it has effects. For example, how we define wars determines the war and peace patterns that we find and the statistics that we analyze. The inclusion of state or non-state actors, formal declarations of war or peace treaties, direct or indirect casualty levels in our initial theoretical definitions of war, all shape subsequent conclusions about empirical war and peace trends.

In a similar way, political leaders also articulate meaning and describe patterns of events, as they use language to spin war and peace. In democratic societies, thelanguage of war and peace is not just part of the symphony of vernacular voices that Jerry Hauser has described so well. It also becomes part of permanent electoral campaign competition. It is commonly believed that actions speak louder than words, that talk is cheap, and that leaders’ speeches are “just” rhetoric. Nevertheless, speech acts and verbal behavior are important, observable dimensions of war and peace. Language mediates between the external objective world and the internal subjective one; it provides importanttools to interpret thoughts and shape events. Leaders may not always say what they think or think what they say, but they probably say what they think that their followers think-- or want to hear, or need to hear in order to follow -- and what they want other political leaders to believe. Theirrhetoric is an important means to mobilize political support

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and neutralize or destroy political opposition. This rhetoric reflects to some extent the objective fact patternsof international relations. However, the connection between fact and talk is not always either clear or true. In spite of American political rhetoric, where were the Iraqi weaponsof mass destruction; what were the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda; where were the Iraqis among the bombers of 9/11. Nevertheless political rhetoric, true or not, guides societies as they react to international events. For example, the attacks of 9/11 could have been characterized, as was the earlier Oklahoma City bombing, as individual criminal acts instead of international acts of war. Palestinians could be depicted as nationalist freedom fighters or insurgents under Israeli occupation rather than inhuman terrorists. Eastern Europe can be conceived as a recent addition to the existing European Community or as an independent actor in the form of New Europe. Potatoes can beFrench fries or freedom fries. Political rhetoric helps givesuch phenomena meaning.

The rhetoric of war and peace relies heavily on metaphor and narrative; it develops in phases consistent with those of war and peace; and it is directed through multiple media networks to parallel audiences. Each nation has its own cluster of metaphors, many of which are associated with past wars. Not only military generals, but also political leaders, seem to fight previous wars. American Presidents have used metaphors from prior wars extensively in justifying war policies. Franklin Roosevelt’s“holy war” and Dwight Eisenhower’s “crusade in Europe” drew on the religious wars of the Middle Ages. Such analogies merge well with religious themes in such phrases as “In God We Trust” or “God bless America.” The Munich metaphor was important as Harry Truman went into Korea. As the United States fought in Vietnam Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson invoked prior American experiences in World War II and Korea. Although France had preceded the United States inIndochina, and there were substantial parallels between French and American experience, American leaders were,

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ironically, reluctant to use metaphors from these earlier events. Metaphors from prior American military engagements were employed to mobilize support and opposition during the political debates about contemporary United States wars in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, and Central Asia. In the “metaphor wars” surrounding the physical wars, the World WarI Balkan powder keg or tinderbox; World War II appeasement at Munich and the Holocaust; and the Vietnam quagmire were all metaphorical clusters from past wars whose applicabilityand implications were advanced and contested by partisans ondifferent sides of the political debate. 9/11 was cast as Pearl Harbor.

The primary metaphor for war and peace, beyond previousperiods of war and peace, is the metaphor of the body, resting on the common human physical condition of embodiment. Louis XIV’s famous statement that he was the state recalls the important connection between the person ofthe sovereign and the sovereign personality of the state. Itis, therefore, not surprising that the sovereign “state-as-person,” particularly as a warrior-person, has been important in justifying and motivating war. The “body politic” is a collective simulacrum. The nation-state is a virtual body in which all citizens sacramentally participate. The penetration of that body, as in the sackingof the White House in 1812, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, or the plane crashes of 9/11, are perceived as acts of profane violation. The part stands for the whole; the Presidential residence in 1812, the naval base in 1941, the twin towers in 2001 represent America. The attacks are not just physical, but deeply symbolic. They are humiliating andmust be avenged, whether or not vengeance is taken on the actual perpetrators, less related, or unrelated unpopular surrogate scapegoats. The British were beaten back, the Japanese forced into unconditional surrender. After 9/11, ifOsama bin Laden was unreachable and the Saudi regime untouchable, pain and rage could be displaced onto Afghanistan, Iraq, and Saddam Hussein.

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War/peace discourse also uses metaphors from other dimensions of life. Family metaphors are important, as in talk about sending our sons and daughters into harm’s way, whether or not those who go are really our sons and daughters. There are, interestingly, again important genderdifferences in the use of such metaphors. An analysis of theCongressional debate before the Gulf War revealed that womenused family metaphors significantly more often than men. Thelist of words in the family metaphor cluster include the words brother, children, daughter, family, father, growth, husband, kid, life, love, mother, parents, preserve, protect, sister, son, and wife. Women members of Congress used these words more often in the debate than men--about twice as often. This tendency was uniform across each and every one of the family words. The result was the strongest gender difference across four thematic scales -- realism, idealism, body, and family – that occurred during the Congressional Gulf War Debates.

Game and sports metaphors are also prevalent in talk about war and peace. Scholars of international relations arefond of mathematical game theory as an analytical tool. In amore popular context, General Schwarzkopf mixed football andreligion when he characterized a military flanking maneuver as a “Hail Mary” play. Disease metaphors are important. For example pictures of delousing Saddam Hussein after his capture carry powerful metaphorical meaning. Macho phrases, taken from other contexts, like “read my lips,” “make my day,” “let’s roll,” or “bring ‘em ‘on”; images of Presidentschopping brush or landing on aircraft carriers in flight gear, also send powerful metaphorical messages.

Metaphors of war and peace are included in larger, widely promulgated, narratives of good and evil, what the eminent historian William McNeill called “mythistories,” through which nations shape their collective memories and find their identities. My colleague Ira Chernus has done extensive research in this area. These larger hi-“stories” form the context and sub-text of daily news “stories.” From this perspective, the 20 th century was a struggle between

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evil, in the form of totalitarian dictatorships, and the forces of good, in the form of allied democracies. The plot outline ran roughly as follows:

1. The Cold War was a struggle between ultimate evil, represented by the Soviet Union, and the forces of good, represented by the United States and its allies.2. Under American leadership, the Atlantic Alliance provided a wider umbrella of association and security.3. The Alliance had a center, defined geographically byNorth America and Northwestern Europe and functionally by free market economies.

This narrative, reinforced by events, was the hegemonic discourse, the dominant interpretation, the mythical superframe of world politics for the last half century.

We may look upon the war on terrorism as the 21 st century installment in this long-running serial. The war is defined as a “just war” advancing the twin causes of globalization and democratization. It is waged against an “axis of evil,” which recalls the enemy Axis powers of WorldWar II. There is a “clash of civilizations,” which echoes General Eisenhower’s “crusade in Europe,” as well as a millennial historical struggle between the forces of Christianity and Islam. “Wanted dead or alive” – Osama or Saddam – is the American western version of evil and retribution in the service of historical “Manifest Destiny or in western cowboy movie posters.

This repetitive script for world politics can be easilyunderstood by “ism-analysis.” Anti-fascism gives way to anti-communism, which is, in turn replaced by anti-terrorism. The underlying ism-plot structure remains the same. Only the anterior modifier, the name of the enemy, changes. The plot line of the sequel is as follows.

1. The War on Terrorism is a struggle between ultimate evil, represented by terrorist actors, and the forces of good, represented by the United States and its allies.

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2. Under American leadership, a loose alliance of anti-terrorist states provides a wide umbrella of association and security.3. This anti-terrorist alliance has a center, defined geographically by the states in the Northern hemisphereand functionally by market economies.

Within this larger narrative are embedded smaller ones like “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Such narratives intersect with collective identities. The French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur (1988: 247) states that"individual and community are constituted in their identity by taking up narratives that become for them their actual history." Self is thus embedded in narrative; narrative is the matrix that identifies, locates, indexes, specifies, andrecognizes the emergent pattern of the self.” In plainer language, this means that national histories reflect and form national identities. To be American for some is to believe in the story of good and evil that pits the democracies against the –isms, us against them. Good and evil are indivisible. As former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles put it, there are no neutrals; in the words ofGeorge W. Bush, “you’re either with us or against us.” Todisbelieve this story is, in the chilling title of a recent best-selling book, treason.

Metaphors and narratives form the texture of the rhetoric of war and peace, which changes with the phases of war and peace. At the onset of war, the hot rhetoric of mobilization dominates. There is graphic talk about evil people responsible for atrocities: Osama bin Laden and the victims of 9/11, Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds. As war progresses, a cooler rhetoric of disengagement eventually appears. Such distancing talk is more removed from everyday physical experience; it frames events more abstractly in terms of self-congratulation for the benefits of intervention, critical reflection about the costs, and lessons for future policy-making. This cooler, more abstract

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rhetoric will be increasingly evident as the United States withdraws from Iraq.

The rhetoric of war and peace provides meaning to multiple, diverse, parallel audiences, within and beyond theboundaries of particular nation states. At home, its purposeis to promote unity and patriotism; abroad, it binds allies and deters enemies. It provides cues to domestic and foreignaudiences about leaders’ future plans. Modern media networksdistribute the words and images connecting leaders and followers, friends and foes. Different media, in different national contexts – CNN, BBC, Agence France Presse, or Al Jazeera – interpret conflicts in different directions with different images and commentary. Histories of democracy and imperialism, Iraqi freedom and American invasion, the war game and dead children, are opposite sides of similar coins.

During the 21st century, multiple rhetorics will continue to reflect and shape meanings of war and peace. Humanistic, scientific, and political language will interpret events andprovide hints about what the actors think. Our progress toward peace will depend on our ability to hear these rhetorics with a critical ear and on how well we can decipher their clues to understand alternate worlds of meaning in cultures other than our own. Our ability to see war/peace events from other perspectives is directly relatedto our ability to elaborate less warlike scripts that respond to them. Solutions that focus on hard choices between mutually exclusive alternatives (either/or) may be less helpful than those that create combinations (both/and).

3. What Can We Do?

After considering knowledge and meanings of war and peace, we are left with the third and final important question, “what can we do about war and peace?” I would suggest that we need to be conscious, constructive, and prudent. As scholars and students, we should be conscious ofthe lessons of past experience and self-conscious about our

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own reactions. Following the half century of what the historian John Lewis Gaddis called “the long peace,” many ofus have been surprised and traumatized by the pain and suffering of 9/11. As a first step, it is essential that we absorb these emotions and use them as energy to drive the development of knowledge and action. We must come to terms with our historical knowledge about war and peace. We must recognize the historical evidence of continuing tendencies toward war. Does war have to go on forever? Perhaps not. Certain forms of warfare may diminish. But current events suggest that, defined more broadly, war will continue in the21st century just as it has in the centuries that preceded it. We might have hoped otherwise, but the beginning of the century reconfirms the continuation of humanity’s violent heritage. Terrorism and the war on terrorism are open promises for continuing violence. Those who have already died in the 21st century’s first few years are a down payment on what is yet to come. Just as we must accept war in the 21st century, we must also come to terms with the historically based insights of international realism. As therise of American hegemony clearly shows, power politics is not going away. Symmetrically, we can expect continuing resistance in different forms from other power centers like Europe, Russia, China, and the Arab-Islamic world. These countervailing international actors will try to balance American power along the various dimensions of internationalrelations – political, military, economic, social, and cultural. The world will continue to be a dangerous place, where some actors and neighborhoods are worse than others. Total security and total peace will not be attainable.

Our identities as political citizens pull us toward action. We have strongly held beliefs; we wish to influence events, to make a difference. “Don’t just sit there, we tellourselves, do something.” At the same time, we must remain true to ourselves and our long-term vision for our society. Action needs to be joined with knowledge and thought, so that that it will be constructive and make things better rather than worse. In considering action, we must ask a

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larger strategic question: Will the likely effects of our actions in a complex world reduce the incidence and casualties of war and move us closer to peace?

Power balancing, and its associated diplomacy, are traditional realist ways that the international system has limited war and constructed islands of peace. At the same time, our accumulated knowledge also suggests that we may beable to work toward a post-realist peace by acting simultaneously at systemic, regime, and individual levels.

At the systemic level, this implies strengthening the superordinate forces of international aggregation that help to regulate the system. The institutional dimension of international law and organization is important in providingrules and restraint for global interaction. It is not helpful to declare the United Nations irrelevant, dysfunctional, or broken. Globalization will inevitably proceed, but it must be shaped in a balanced way. Sub-globaltendencies toward polarization, for example, growing regional and national socio-economic inequalities, need to be limited. The system needs to be rebalanced: Some degree of social consciousness and redistribution of gains is necessary to build global civil society. Finally, our knowledge suggests that serious attention to global militarization -- weapons of mass destruction in the hands of all parties -- needs to continue.

At the regime level, it also makes sense to promote theconstruction of open, democratic societies that are responsive to the needs of their citizens and respectful of human rights. Such regimes are typically supported by a strong middle class. They also tend to be led by persuasive rather than coercive elites, politicians rather than soldiers. This is an area where the carrot may be more appropriate than the stick. It may not be useful to impose democracy by violence, to force people to be free. The higher the level of associated violence, the more likely that liberation will be perceived as imperialist occupation.

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Moreover, such democratic societies, guided by the will of their own people, may follow policies that we do not approveand which may threaten our own interests. If we truly believe in democracy either for itself or as a long-term strategy for peace, we must be willing to accept the fact that there are democratic Others who may not always agree with us. The current situation in Iraq, with its Shiite majority, as I have already suggested, is an obvious case inpoint.

At the individual level, as we support persuasive over coercive elites, we must also be aware of our own psychological susceptibility to the instruments of mass persuasion -- to the cognitive and particularly the emotional effects of the images and sounds of popular films,music, and especially the “reality TV” of the news -- which inevitably embraces the dramatic value of contrast and conflict. We need to be attentive to the inevitable bias of any source. We must try to maintain our critical distance bycultivating multiple sources, multiple interpretations, and multiple meanings for individual cases of war and peace.

Finally, we need to be prudent. While we build and use our knowledge, a part of wisdom and practical judgment is torecognize our limits. Humanistic, scientific, and political rhetorics powerfully influence the politics of reality and shape the meaning of war and peace. We live within truth regimes of our own making. The ultimate truth is beyond our grasp. Given what we know about final solutions, that probably is a good thing. Our understanding, and that of ourleaders, about the external world and our own reactions to it, is partial and imperfect. This may seem a superficial disclaimer; actually it is a call to modesty, a warning against arrogance. The tragic courses of classical and modern European empires, from Athens and Rome through Britain and the Soviet Union, show clearly the path down which the concentration of power inevitably pulls us. American feelings of optimism and exceptionalism, our emphasis on youth and technology, make us particularly

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susceptible to such temptations. As a current modification of Lord Acton’s famous dictum has it, “power tends to corrupt, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.” Our work to achieve the great human values of freedom, justice, and peace, needs to respect the countervailing weight of the world’s other great cultures and to respect the dignity of their members.

As we act in the world, as we try to struggle against the force of war during the remainder of this new century, we need to aim for the high ground and keep a final questionbefore us:

Given our uncertain knowledge, how do we work to create a more democratic, just, and peaceful futurefor ourselves and for all the other people on thisplanet?

Our answers to this question will guide us as we accumulate knowledge, as we interpret the meanings of events, and as wetry, with greater or lesser success, to create peace in the 21st century.

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