Allen Lane £20 pp448

Jonathan Schell’s book will probably appear in the international relations section of bookstores. Strictly speaking, it belongs with More, Campanella and Fourier in a section on utopias, for it bears little relationship to our world of child soldiers, suicide bombers, and the potential slippage of WMD into the hands of religious maniacs. Both his enthusiasm for small-scale communities and his belief that he could bring about peace on earth remind one of Fourier, although he does not pursue Fourier’s idea of transforming oceans into lemonade. His book would have been less blandly earnest had he done so.

Contrary to the evidence of the world as it is today, Schell claims that war has become obsolescent, as a result of two tendencies that nullify it as the “final arbiter” between nations: “While the self-determination movement was encasing the giant’s feet in cement, nuclear weapons were immobilising his head and limbs.” This curious figure may require further explanation.

Asymmetric “people’s” warfare, beginning with the Spanish guerrilla campaigns against Napoleon, has cancelled out the advantages of larger conventional forces. Smart statesmen, such as General de Gaulle, recognised that the time to quit Algeria was when the French were ahead; successive American presidents slogged on in Vietnam, failing to see that the enemy had already won hearts and minds. Parallel to this upward trend is one that comes from the top down. Schell argues that the threat of total annihilation prevented war between the cold-war superpowers, leaving them to conduct shadow wars through clients and surrogates. These two trends have created the opportunity to transcend war altogether.

History is ransacked to prove an ideological agenda, a “tradition” of non-violent resolution of conflicts. While the Glorious Revolution was undoubtedly a potential civil war where the dogs were called off almost as it began, discerning readers may balk at Schell’s sanitised accounts of the French and Russian revolutions as examples of the peaceful transfer of power.

Schell elides these genocidal events with genuine non-violent protest movements. These include Gandhi’s attempts to invest politics with spiritual love and the “soft” revolutions that contributed to the downfall of communism. Schell writes rather well about Václav Havel, Adam Michnik and Gyorgy Konrád, although he overlooks both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who, after all, tipped the USSR into unsustainable military expenditure. This is a sin of commission. For when his tract reaches our own time, Schell abandons his measured tones to unleash a typical American liberal critique of the current Bush administration. The sheer magnitude of 9/11 eludes his imagination.

“Historically,” Schell opines, “nations have responded to terrorist threats and attacks with a combination of police action and political negotiation, while military action has played only a minor role.” Has he been to Algeria or Israel lately? Perhaps Bush should have sent a deputation of sheriffs and federal marshals, armed with the appropriate warrants, to the caves of Afghanistan. Instead, he opted for a global war on what is, after all, global terrorism, together with a doctrine of pre-emptive intervention, which, according to Schell, have dragged the Republic into an “imperial” role, notwithstanding all the evidence that America would like to disengage from Iraq as soon as possible.

Everything gets chucked into Schell’s utopian mix of a future based on non-violent cooperation: “disarmament, conventional as well as nuclear; democratisation and human rights; advancement of international law; reform of the United Nations; local and regional peacekeeping; and social and ecological programs that form the indispensable content of a program of non-violent change”. The future, apparently, lies with more NGOs and more international lawyers. What, though, does Al-Qaeda care about ecology, human rights, international law, and all the other elements of Schell’s fatuous left-liberal blather? How will a “democratic league”, modelled on the EU, prevent a terrorist dirty bomb in Oxford Street? Schell’s book will doubtless find an audience, but one suspects that those with the unenviable task of dealing with what Blair recently called “real and existential” dangers will find more useful reading. The generation of Vietnam and CND really has little to teach us.

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