Abstract
Speculation about the new millennium has tended to stress a positive future, fuelled by economic prosperity and the Internet revolution. If it has expressed a note of concern, it has, above all, been about the inequality that is accompanying globalization and the prospect of this increasing. The perceptive Financial Times correspondent Martin Wolf wrote in one of his final columns of the last century that if there is one thing he would most wish to see in the future it would be the reduction in global inequality.1 There is, however, one wish that is, arguably, even greater than that, and which takes precedence over all others, namely peace. The dangers of war, and the need to think clearly about them, have not disappeared from the world horizon. The world may be living on the edge of a new peaceful, globalized era without, at least, major conflicts between developed states. It may, however, be living in an ‘Interregnum’, a time when the dangers of war have receded, only to return later. The twentieth century has, among other perils, bequeathed to the twenty-first thousands of nuclear warheads, the means to deliver them, and the anxieties to continue deploying them. Outside the developed world, conflict, and preparation for it, continues and this may, in various ways, affect the developed world itself. A generation hence observers may look back contemptuously at the contemporary world as living in a fool’s paradise, neglecting the causes of subsequent conflict and destruction. Carl von Clausewitz talked, rightly, of the ‘fog of war’ but it is also peace, with the complacency it generates and the hidden dangers it incubates, which generates its own fog of illusions, perhaps never more so than today.
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Notes
I have gone into this in greater detail in ‘Europe and the International System: War and Peace’, in Stephen Chan and Jarrod Wiener (eds) Twentieth Century International History (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999).
Dan Smith, The State of War and Peace Atlas, 3rd edn (London: Penguin, 1997);
Dan Smith, Strategic Survey, 1999/2000 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies).
Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in the Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999);
Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998).
For a cogent critique from within the subcontinent, see Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik, New Nukes: India, Pakistan and Global Disarmament (Oxford: Signal Books, 2000).
Achin Vanaik, The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization (London: Verso, 1997).
Lawrence Freedman, The Revolution in Strategic Affairs (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998).
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© 2001 Fred Halliday
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Halliday, F. (2001). The Recurrence of War. In: The World at 2000. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-99427-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-99427-6_4
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