The difficult pursuit of peace.

• Author: Hammond, Grant T.

THE COLD WAR is over. The Gulf War ended more than five years ago, though Iraq's Saddam Hussein is stirring again. Even the conflict in the former Yugoslavia is on hold. Yet, peace and the ability to preserve it are more fragile than ever. Why should this be so?

First, as the number of states has increased, so has the chance of war. When the United Nations was created in 1945, there were 51 members. There was no India, no Israel, no Vietnam, and Japan and Germany were occupied after World War II. Today, the UN is approaching 200 members. Colonies have become independent, and disputes that were internal have become international.

Second, though the pace of change has quickened with many areas of the world going from a near Stone Age past to the 20th century in a generation, political maps evolve more slowly. In a century-long effort to promote international law and peaceful change, we are loathe to recognize change by force of arms. As a result, the world continues to recognize "states" that are largely fictions and "governments" that have no sovereignty and which don't even control their own capital, let alone a country.

In some cases, there are long-running civil wars; in others, anarchy with no pretense of law or order. In many others, there are regimes that are puppets of other states or kept in power only by using massive amounts of international aid as graft and corruption. Liberia, the Sudan, Lebanon, Cambodia, Haiti, Zaire, Somalia, and Bosnia are "pretend states," not real ones.

The problem, as historian Charles Tilly has noted, is that "States make wars and wars make states." Trying to shape the international system without resort to the force of arms is a noble aim, but a very difficult process. Most states owe their existence to the force of arms and have suffered one or more secessionist threats. There are more long-running civil wars--Chad, Sri Lanka, and even Northern Ireland, and more recent examples in the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union--than there are examples of peaceful secession such as Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Third, because there is no universal international law, no global sovereign, or an effective enforcement mechanism accepted by all, change in the international system is condoned or rejected by individual states. Globe-spanning empires such as the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese in the 17th and 18th centuries and the "concert of Europe"--the great powers of the 19th century--did the...