THE PEACEMAKERS TO CONQUER THE PAST

Low in the central brain lies the limbic system (hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala), where the aggression seems to start. But there is a higher brain as well. If war originates as an impulse of the lower mind, then peace is an accomplishment of the higher, and the ascent from the brain's basement, where the crocodile lives, to the upper chambers may be the most impressive climb that humans attempt. In 1993 the traffic was heavy in both directions, from the world's lower brain to the upper, and back down again. Gestures of statesmanship, as lately in Northern Ireland, alternated with low-brain savageries: the lashing tribal wars of Bosnia, Somalia, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh . . . The list of conflicts went on and on, like a vicious geography lesson. The euphoria that had attended the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of communism and the end of the cold war had some seers announcing that amid instant global communications, the ''end of history'' had arrived in the triumph of free-market democracy. But the brilliant moment faded, and left a sinister aftermath. The shadow was evident last week in Russia, where the followers of the fascistically minded Vladimir Zhirinovsky unexpectedly won 23% of the popular vote in the recent parliamentary elections and became an ominous new power. Zhirinovsky's ascent looked disturbingly similar in some details (anti-Semitism, fanatical nationalism, anger and economic privation among the people) to Hitler's rise in the 1930s. When incoming CIA Director James Woolsey testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last February, he described the realities of the new world order: ''We have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.'' For years the conflicts in the Middle East and South Africa have amounted to terrible local dragons in their own right, with histories of deep hatred and the potential to erupt into wider violence -- even, in the case of the Middle East, into nuclear war. These struggles were not ideological, like the standoff of the superpowers. South Africa and the Middle East worked at a nastier level, closer to bone and gene and skin. They had, over the years, arrived at stalemate, a no-exit of chronic hatred. The struggles (whether to liberate one's own people, or to suppress the dangerous other tribe, or simply to survive in the moral airlessness) became prisons. The Men of the Year of 1993 -- Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela -- did nothing more and nothing less than find a way to break out. By tradition, TIME's Men and Women of the Year are those who have most influenced history, for good or ill, in the previous 12 months. By that standard, Rabin, Arafat, Mandela and De Klerk might be perceived as odd choices. Neither peacemaking deal is complete. Extremists on all sides threaten to destroy the arrangements, which look at times like fragile shelters being nailed together in a high wind. The regions seem just as violent now as they did before Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, and before Mandela and De Klerk locked into their collaboration toward a new South African constitution. And yet. . . Peacemaking, like warmaking or courtship, depends upon exquisitely balanced, mysterious and usually unpredictable combinations of context, timing, luck, leadership, mood, personal needs, outside help and spending