competent to adjudicate all conflicts between states, as our national courts adjudicate conflicts between individuals. A world police must be ready to enforce the world law.
In the European Union, the national states were not dismantled; each kept its flag, language, and traditions. The same will be true in the coming world order. But the national states will be subject to a compulsory world order, much as citizens are subject to the laws of their state.
An unrealistic vision? Not at all. I am quite certain that this will be reality by the year 2100. What a pity that I shall not be around to see it.
September 24, 2005
In "The Second Coming," the Irish poet W. B. Yeats described chaos thus:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The defining phrase, as I read it, is "the centre cannot hold." It is a military metaphor: on the classical battlefield, the main force was located in the middle, with the flanks secured by lighter forces. The enemy's aim was to break the center, often by turning the flanks. But even if the flanks collapsed, as long as the center held, the battle was not lost.
That also holds for a political struggle. Everything hinges on the public in the center. If one wants to make a revolution, the stability of the center must be undermined.
That was the aim of the settlers, when they started their nationwide campaign against the Gaza withdrawal. It ended in utter collapse, a defeat of historic proportions. In spite of the dramatic spectacle of the uprooting of the settlements, where everything was planned down to the minutest detail by the rabbis and the army, there was no real public crisis, no national trauma. In Yeats' language: "The centre held."
To understand Israel, one has to comprehend the nature of this center. What convictions hold it together?
A national consensus is not immutable. It changes all the time, but