(3 of 4)
thought about democracy: peace is the worst mess, except for the alternative. For all that, these four men reasserted the principle that leaders matter: that an individual's vision, courageously and persuasively and intelligently pursued, can override the rather unimaginative human preference for war. If strong, focused leadership had come from Europe or from Washington, might it have averted the Bosnian bloodbath? If Jean-Bertrand Aristide were a Mandela -- and if he had some equivalent of De Klerk as partner on the other side -- could Haiti have been saved? No one can quantify a negative, but it seems obvious that the absence of leadership -- the opportunities squandered or unenvisioned -- costs the world dearly every day. War is a profound habit -- and sometimes a necessity. When Neville Chamberlain declared ''peace for our time'' after Munich, he gave peacemakers a reputation for fatuous optimism and appeasement from which it took them years to recover. Philosophers of war since Hiroshima have taught, hopefully, that the nuclear threat has made armed conflict ultimately untenable as a Clausewitzian instrument (foreign policy that happens to kill) useful in settling disputes. But not everyone has absorbed the lesson. Among other things, war has an archetypal prestige and bristling drama with which peace has trouble competing: Milton's Lucifer in Paradise Lost is much more interesting than Milton's God. War is rich and vivid, with its traditions, its military academies, its ancient regiments and hero stories, its Iliads, its flash. Peace is not exciting. Its accoutrements are, almost by definition, unremarkable if they work well. It is a rare society that tells exemplary stories of peacemaking -- except, say, for the Gospels of Christ, whose irenic grace may be admired from a distance, without much effect on daily behavior. Kant said that even a race of devils, provided they were intelligent, would be forced to find a solution other than war for their disputes. ''Nature,'' Kant thought, ''guarantees the final establishment of peace through the mechanism of human inclinations.'' The race of devils was busy in 1993, but the mechanism of human inclinations was working as much in the uglier direction, toward war. The global village is really a large, disorderly global city, with many poor neighborhoods, a few that are rich and a number that are terribly dangerous. But as the Balkans reminded everyone, the global city has no police force. Bosnia has been a tragedy of peacemaking turned against itself: the U.N.'s lightly armed blue helmets became virtual hostages to the Serbs and an excuse for Europeans and Americans not to use real force lest the peacekeepers be hurt. The collapse of international law and civil behavior, and the failure of the U.S. or Europe to do anything effective to stop the killing, helped subvert the idea that the world had made much progress toward the higher brain. The feckless sighing and the elaborate international shrugs that masked themselves as realism were somehow worse than plain indifference. It was against all the usual inclinations of the war devils that these four men took what must be the first step in the metaphysics of peace: they recognized the other's existence. They crossed the line from the primitive intransigences of blood/color/tribe to the logic of tolerance and, farther down the road, of civil society. They asserted the power of the future to override the past, a fundamental precondition of
