One of the developments for which we find it most difficult to account in our analyses of contemporary society, strangely enough, is the revolutionary transition from a state of chronic warring to one of perpetual peace. This ‘peace revolution’ is at least as important as the transformations wrought by the democratic revolution in the political world or by the Industrial Revolution. However, whereas the storming of the Bastille, the invention of the motor car or the spread of the contraceptive pill were spectacular occurrences and/or were immediately apparent to anyone, it has taken a very long time indeed for everyone to realise that, at least in Europe, the historical curse that was as old as humanity itself, namely the recurrent disease of tribal warfare, has been cast out ‘once and for all’. To be more precise, while every one of us has been convinced of this for a long time, we have not understood the dramatic upheavals that have accompanied it, radically changing the whole concept of life in society. Colonial wars, the Cold War and, to a lesser extent, the wars in the Balkans and the terrorist threat have delayed the dawning of this realisation.

Let us examine the full implications of this development. The most apt comparison is that of a contagious disease. This evil that has plagued humanity in epidemic or endemic form has now been eradicated on the European continent, as in North America and in the southern hemisphere, between Australia and New Zealand. This does not mean that the countries in these parts of the world are safe from any kind of domestic organised violence or, of course, that they have nothing to fear from the outside world: nationalist violence still rears its head in Ireland and the Basque Country, extremist groups plant bombs here and there, and Islamic terrorists can strike more or less anywhere, while an increasing number of unstable states are capable of acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Who can claim, moreover, that the disease has been completely eradicated? Be that as it may, this has been a historic transformation. Our societies were forged by the use of force and shaped by the balance of power, both within national borders and in the wider world. Each period of peace was merely an interlude between wars. Large countries prepared for victory in the next confrontation, while small countries tried to ensure that they would not be the next battleground. Every peace treaty led to the emergence or disappearance of governments, states or nations. Under the combined impact of democracy, the rule of law and European integration, of decolonisation and the demise of the Soviet Union, every country in this continent is now a pacified and fundamentally pacific society, living in certain peace with its immediate neighbours and with no enemy nations in other continents.

Our only response so far has been the reduction of our military forces – an operation, incidentally, that has been conducted with undue haste and in a shambolic manner and has ultimately been pretty ridiculous. Fewer than five per cent of young uniformed Europeans are combat-ready, and current efforts are still largely designed to wage past wars rather than face up to the threats of our time. The fact is that our whole understanding of the role of the state and the art of government needs to be adapted to this new situation, for we now live in a different world.

Our religions were revealed two to three thousand years ago to primitive, rural, pastoral and even nomadic societies. Our model of democracy, be it parliamentary or presidential, was conceived two centuries ago. The administrative divisions that provide the organisational framework for the lives of ordinary French people have remained unaltered since 1791. The terms in which we describe economic and social life and with which we still structure the mainstream political debate in France date from the start of the commercial and industrial revolution – Karl Marx versus Adam Smith and Frédéric Bastiat. The social institutions of our welfare state were built in the middle of the last century, and the main reference work of ‘progressive’ political economy, by John Maynard Keynes, whose theories are still invoked to justify our current budget deficits, appeared in the same year as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The venerability of these sources would be reassuring if there had not been so many demographic, scientific, technological, economic and social upheavals in the intervening years. Besides, as theories become increasingly detached from the real world or the lessons it has taught us, public authorities take longer and longer to correct their errors. It took six centuries, for example, for the Church to offer a posthumous apology to Galileo, and, at the rate at which the debate is advancing among the far left in France, they will need a similar length of time to recognise the fundamental error of Communism. The time it takes orphaned ideologists to cope with the loss of their defunct theories is very costly for modern societies.

Theories, concepts, institutions, social structures, symbols and even words devised within and for essentially rural and largely illiterate societies that were rooted in male supremacy, unable to control their fertility, unsure of their ability to feed themselves, dimly enlightened by science – in its infancy and widely contested – and threatened by wars as inevitable as rain on the Atlantic coast can no longer be relevant to post-industrial societies whose members possess university degrees, are peaceful and pacified almost to the point of pacifism, visit Internet chat sites instead of the corner café and seek enlightenment from the 8 o’clock news on television rather than Sunday Mass. Everything around us has changed, except human nature – except our thought processes and the way we govern ourselves. On our futuristic superhighways, we are dawdling along on the back of a mule. What is more, we are even proud to be perched on our grandfather’s trusty old steed!

Alain Lamassoure, 20 January 2004