Excerpts

This is the first of a series of excerpts from the book War and Anti-War by Alvin & Heidi Toffler. Published in 1993, the book provides thought-provoking insights into the nature of warfare and the forms it is likely to take in the future as well as strategies for dealing with warfare. According to them, as new forms of warfare emerge, the peace-form must evolve as well. Some of the issues which are discussed in the book seem chillingly familiar now.

The old tools of diplomacy will prove obsolete - along with the UN and many other international institutions.

Much foolishness has been written about a new, stronger United Nations. Unless it is dramatically restructured in ways not yet even under discussion, the UN may well play a less effective and smaller, not larger, role in world affairs in the decades to come.

This is because the UN remains what it originally was, a club of nation-states. Yet the flow of world events in the years ahead will be influenced by non-national players like global business, cross-border political movements like Greenpeace, religious movements like Islam, and burgeoning pan-ethnic groups who wish to reorganize the world along ethnic lines - the Pan-Slavs, for example or certain Turks who dream of a new Ottoman Empire that unites Turks and Turkic speakers from Cyprus in the Mediterranean to Kyrgyzstan on the Chinese border.

International Organizations unable to incorporate, co-opt, enfeeble, or destroy the new nonnational sources of power will crumble into irrelevance.