World Peace Proves the Most Elusive of Global Goals

Ten years ago, the world seemed radiant with optimism and confidence. The Cold War was over. The Gulf War had ended in what looked like a stunning triumph of American military might. Peace was breaking out across the globe. Humanity finally seemed to be turning its back on war and conflict.

The future offered a gleaming vista of peace and prosperity, of a global village united by trade, modern technology and peaceful resolution of disputes. War was out of date. E-mails would replace bullets.

A decade later, much of the hope and optimism is shattered. Wars and rebellions that have lasted for decades, even centuries, show no sign of ending despite the efforts of armies of diplomats and peacekeepers. The Middle East, Kashmir, Northern Ireland, the Balkans--the bloody, baffling list seems unending.

The United States, which would seem far too powerful for any rational nation to attack, faces a bewildering global fight against terrorists motivated by historic grudges. President Bush, whose father saw out the Cold War, now sees the West arrayed against a new “axis of evil” consisting of Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

To many people, especially in the West, the state of the world makes no sense. The past keeps tripping up the future. Old wars and old hatreds seem insoluble and unending even though many of the fighters can’t explain very clearly what they are fighting for. As the power of religion and ideology has declined in the West, it has become harder for many Westerners to grasp how seriously it is taken by societies elsewhere.

Henry Ford, founder of the automobile company, spoke for many, then and now, when he said in 1916: “History is more or less bunk.”

Europe was being ripped apart by World War I and millions had been killed. America was determined not to be dragged into the Old World’s madness, but within months it was fighting in a war that began in the Balkans in 1914. By century’s end, the Balkans would be burning again, and American forces would be bombing Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia.

To Ford, the past was dark and dismal. All that counted was building a better future, and it seemed to be emerging as effortlessly as the Model T cars that flowed off the conveyor belts of his factories.

James Joyce saw it very differently. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake,” the great author wrote.

Then, as now, his native Ireland was being torn by a conflict stretching back to the Middle Ages.

Time and again, humanity has believed it stood on the brink of a great new future, an era of peace, prosperity and progress. Time and again, the past seems to have reached out to wreck that hope.

There was nothing new about the optimism 10 years ago at the end of the Cold War. In 1900, the Western world thought it was entering a new era of science, peace and progress. Instead, the 20th century was the bloodiest epoch in Western history.

Optimism tinged the dawn of the 1800s, when visionaries believed science and the spirit of the American and French revolutions would transform life. But that century, too, was torn by war and suffering.

History is often positive, with people taking pride in their ancestors and drawing on it to unite a country, shaping national character and identity.

Most Americans celebrate the American Revolution and the end of the Civil War, just as the French remember their revolution of 1789 with an annual parade.

But why do so many people focus on the negative, fighting old battles and old wars? Why not forget the past and build something better?

Because, historians say, the present is only the product of the past and no one can cut themselves off from history.

Or, as Abraham Lincoln said in the depths of the Civil War: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.”

Conflict can last for centuries because some ancient battle has become a vital part of a nation’s identity--especially when the losing side is still living in poverty while the victors prosper.

Modern Serbs are haunted by defeat at the Battle of Kosovo Field in 1389, believing it deprived their nation of its destiny. Lines drawn on the map of Africa by European colonialists dividing up the continent in the 19th century cause conflict in the 21st century because those pencil strokes forced together rival ethnic and sectarian groups. Some Afghans refer to Westerners as “Franks,” a reference to the European Crusaders of the Middle Ages, even though the Crusades never came within 1,000 miles of Afghanistan.

History is divided into periods to make it easier to study. But the division of time into segments like the Middle Ages or the 19th century misleadingly suggests history has neat beginnings and ends. It doesn’t.

Osama bin Laden, a product of modern tensions in the Middle East, can also be seen as part of a historic clash between Western and Eastern civilization dating to the ancient Greeks in the 6th century B.C. Bin Laden brands the West as Crusaders to try to invoke historic resentment by evoking wars that ended more than 700 years ago.

The end of the Cold War, instead of ushering in peace, saw the reemergence of much older conflicts that had been put on hold or covered up by the global struggle between East and West.

In the former Soviet Union, centuries-old struggles between rival ethnic and sectarian groups flared; Yugoslavia became a killing field of ancient national and sectarian conflicts; Afghanistan, already shattered by a Cold War proxy battle between the Soviets and the West, sank back into the historic struggle among ethnic groups and meddling neighbors.

The modern struggle between India and Pakistan is shaped by the lines drawn on the map by Britain when it divided its Indian empire into Hindu and Muslim states in 1947. The two nations have clashed ever since, trying to change those lines. But the conflict can be taken further back, to the Muslim invasions of India and the clash of long-forgotten kingdoms.

When 19th-century novelist George Eliot wrote, “The happiest nations have no history,” she knew there was no such thing.

Western civilization has been profoundly influenced by a belief in progress. “It was scarcely possible . . . to conceive of historical change except as change for the better,” wrote the English historian E.H. Carr.

But the idea of history as progress often creates a blinkered view and makes it hard to understand the importance of the past.

The Middle East seems to Westerners a helpless quagmire of war and instability. A thousand years ago, it was very different. Europe was a welter of petty, military dictatorships, while the Middle East was exporting scientific and philosophical thought.

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Barry Renfrew is the AP’s London bureau chief and has also been stationed in Australia, Pakistan, South Korea, South Africa and Russia.