The Warrior's Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Consciousness by Michael Ignatieff - Feb 1999

Vintage, Feb 1999. New edition. Paperback. Written for a variety of periodicals during the small wars of the New World Order, these essays on modern warfare discuss the collapse of old ideas of chivalry under the influence of frankly silly nationalist ideas that would be ludicrous if they did not lead to atrocity. The internationalism opposed to this is itself by definition suspect because it is so heavily mediated by television and by the globalisation that implies. Compassion is a complex entity when heavily loaded with voyeurism and with a feeling that knocking heads together is the role of the powerful of the world; Ignatieff points out how compassion gets thoroughly muddled up with what is a bit too much like bullying. Freud's phrase "the narcissism of minor differences" is apposite; small nations define their difference from nations not distinguishable from them by outsiders by exaggerating minor traits. The typical soldiery of the 90s is an irregular without the constraints on their conduct which military training tends to produce. Ignatieff discusses the role of the UN at length and the paradoxes involved in the phrase "peacekeeping forces"; he also discusses the Red Cross and its complex negotiations with the realities of, say, the Taliban in Afghanistan. History has become nightmarish again. --"Roz Kaveney"