War...a Change

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Author Philippe Delmas

Publisher The Free Press

Year 1997

Pages 256 pp.

Price $23.00

Philippe Delmas seeks to persuade us that there will be no New World Order, if that means a world without war. He believes that the future will bring wars in profusion, largely because the world places false hopes in the concept of legal order, which he holds to be no substitute for the strength of traditional states. Currently a counselor at the French finance ministry and formerly an analyst at the Quai d'Orsay, France's foreign ministry, Delmas is equally pessimistic about the prospects for peace through economic integration, which he sees as a source of, rather than a cure for, material rivalries.

What follows is a brisk Anglo-Saxon summary of an extremely French book. To say that Monsieur Delmas has a capacity to infuriate a pragmatic Englishman is to put the case mildly. For page after page, his prose recalls to me those unbearable afternoons of philo in the lycee where I had been sent to learn French in 1951 -- to an English mind, a farrago of wordplay, hollow conceptualization, and false antitheses. For instance, "The political map of the world was frozen so that the entire planet would not freeze in a nuclear winter." It may sound better in French -- reading along, I kept on catching myself guessing at the original -- but "la carte politique du monde se congelait à fin que la planète entière ne soit pas gelée par un hiver nucléaire" is not a particularly arresting thought even in retranslation. If he means that the Cold War kept the lid on regional conflicts between the superpowers' client states, why doesn't he say so?

There is much more, and much worse. The book reads in part like Giscard d'Estaing in a post-presidential mood -- lofty, know-it-all, and world-weary -- and in part like long extracts from an Economist regional survey, full of declining GNPs, rising birthrates, unauthorized technology transfers, and multinational corporate dealings with weak governments. The author is particularly keen on multinationals, as keen as Frederick Forsyth or Jeffrey Archer, and as impressed as their readers are supposed to be by the number of multinationals that have budgets larger than those of most sovereign states. Multinationals bulk large in his cosmology as underminers of elected governments, alternative sources of power, and enemies of international economic arrangements. But international organizations also cause him gloom with their false promise of harmony through harmonization, if I can invent a phrase that Delmas himself does not actually inflict on us.

ACTION, NOT WORDS

Buried somewhere in his opening chapters, the author does have the beginnings of a case to make. He identifies the end of the Cold War, and the nuclear disarmament by the superpowers that preceded and followed it, as an important change in the international security system. Nuclear deterrence made states behave whether they possessed nuclear weapons or merely sheltered in a possessor's shadow. In the retreat from deterrence, states have sought new guarantees of good behavior in the creation of systems based on law. Those systems constitute what he calls "order," as distinct from "power" exercised by dominant politics. In a lengthy reworking of the Hobbesian idea that "covenants without swords are but words," he argues that international law has no force of itself, that its imposition requires actions, that action must take a military form, and that, in consequence, "war has a rosy future."

In support of this prognosis, we have the long Economist-style passages on economic disparities between and within regions, exacerbated by the activities of multinational corporations. Common markets, tariff agreements, single currencies, and the like, Delmas writes, can only palliate and must in the long run erode the "order" that systems of law -- the United Nations and its subsidiary and local imitations -- seek to sustain.

Delmas is not the first to offer such a vision of the future. In his book The Transformation of War, Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli scholar, proposed something similar, though much more directly. (It is an interesting thought that Israelis, having adopted English as their international medium of communication, and in a distinctively British form, have liberated them selves from the obscurities of Continental idealism and now talk straight.) Van Creveld also believes that the state is withering away, that multinationals, including criminal conspiracies, are the potencies of the future, and that the world is fated to decline into a condition of chronic insecurity in which the rich will barricade themselves into enclaves and the rest will make do the best they can. Even if one does not agree with Van Creveld, one can at least understand him.

Should one agree? I think not. Both Van Creveld and Delmas really do no more than bring us back to Hobbes' starting point, the war of all against all. Van Creveld gets there empirically, through his observations of the failure of states to deal with terrorism, organized crime, ethnic and religious dissidence, and the lawlessness of rogue regimes, which foster lawbreaking and harbor lawbreakers. He is not impressed by the success of the coalition forces in the Persian Gulf War, believing the survival of Saddam, Qaddafi's Libya, Hamas, and Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front to be more significant indicators of the future. Delmas proceeds a priori. Choosing "order" and "integration" as the concepts by which to define the organizing principles of the post-Cold War world, he has no difficulty demonstrating the contradictions inherent in either, and therefore roams free in pessimism. The more states there are -- he points out that the world now has 200 -- the weaker they will be and the readier to pursue empowering legitimacy by violent emphasis of their ethnic, religious, or ideological differences from their neighbors.

MOUNTAINS OF MOLEHILLS