THE PEACEMAKERS TO CONQUER THE PAST

By LANCE MORROW

Low in the central brain lies the limbic system (hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala), where the aggression seems to start. But there is a higher brain as well. If war originates as an impulse of the lower mind, then peace is an accomplishment of the higher, and the ascent from the brain's basement, where the crocodile lives, to the upper chambers may be the most impressive climb that humans attempt. In 1993 the traffic was heavy in both directions, from the world's lower brain to the upper, and back down again. Gestures of statesmanship, as lately in Northern Ireland, alternated with low-brain savageries: the lashing tribal wars of Bosnia, Somalia, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh . . . The list of conflicts went on and on, like a vicious geography lesson. The euphoria that had attended the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of communism and the end of the cold war had some seers announcing that amid instant global communications, the ''end of history'' had arrived in the triumph of free-market democracy. But the brilliant moment faded, and left a sinister aftermath. The shadow was evident last week in Russia, where the followers of the fascistically minded Vladimir Zhirinovsky unexpectedly won 23% of the popular vote in the recent parliamentary elections and became an ominous new power. Zhirinovsky's ascent looked disturbingly similar in some details (anti-Semitism, fanatical nationalism, anger and economic privation among the people) to Hitler's rise in the 1930s. When incoming CIA Director James Woolsey testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last February, he described the realities of the new world order: ''We have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.'' For years the conflicts in the Middle East and South Africa have amounted to terrible local dragons in their own right, with histories of deep hatred and the potential to erupt into wider violence -- even, in the case of the Middle East, into nuclear war. These struggles were not ideological, like the standoff of the superpowers. South Africa and the Middle East worked at a nastier level, closer to bone and gene and skin. They had, over the years, arrived at stalemate, a no-exit of chronic hatred. The struggles (whether to liberate one's own people, or to suppress the dangerous other tribe, or simply to survive in the moral airlessness) became prisons. The Men of the Year of 1993 -- Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela -- did nothing more and nothing less than find a way to break out. By tradition, TIME's Men and Women of the Year are those who have most influenced history, for good or ill, in the previous 12 months. By that standard, Rabin, Arafat, Mandela and De Klerk might be perceived as odd choices. Neither peacemaking deal is complete. Extremists on all sides threaten to destroy the arrangements, which look at times like fragile shelters being nailed together in a high wind. The regions seem just as violent now as they did before Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, and before Mandela and De Klerk locked into their collaboration toward a new South African constitution. And yet. . . Peacemaking, like warmaking or courtship, depends upon exquisitely balanced, mysterious and usually unpredictable combinations of context, timing, luck, leadership, mood, personal needs, outside help and spending money -- all of these factors swirling around in a kind of Brownian motion. Certainly one of the forces behind peace in both the Middle East and South Africa was what one observer called ''a biological compulsion'' in all four men to reach a settlement. Mandela is 75, De Klerk 57, Rabin 71 and Arafat 64. ''They were aware they did not have much time left,'' says William Quandt, who was at the National Security Council during the 1978 Camp David negotiations. ''And if they waited, history would write about them as people who had missed a chance to end their careers with a capstone achievement.'' Beyond that, they were impelled, or at least strongly encouraged, by new historical realities. The cold war left Arafat without a Soviet patron; backing the wrong side in the Gulf War cost him his wealthy oil-state sponsors. The Israelis were growing weary of the economic and moral costs of the endless occupation. In South Africa the white minority faced a catastrophe: a main achievement of apartheid had been to inflict fatal damage on the country's economy. As for Mandela's African National Congress, it foresaw a descent into chaos and civil war that might destroy any nation worth its inheriting. And so on. Some thought that South Africa and the Middle East proved what might be called the Exhaustion Theory of Peacemaking -- which arises from the cynical, and accurate, observation that peace is the last resort when all else has failed. True: if either side had been able to conquer, it would have let victory dictate the peace. All that said, the settlements-in-the-making in the Middle East and South Africa were hardly involuntary, and they were far from inevitable. Without Rabin and Arafat, the Israelis and Palestinians would have continued down the same bleak, violent road they have followed since 1948. Without Mandela and De Klerk, blacks and whites would have descended into the bloodiest race war in history. In 1993 Rabin and Arafat, Mandela and De Klerk all rose to the occasion before them. Their common genius was that they saw in the convergence of circumstances a ripeness of moment -- and that they acted. They worked in pairs at their two separate projects, even though something inside each man came to the rendezvous reluctantly, uncomfortably -- faute de mieux, as if history had given him no choice. Each needed his other, absolutely, in order to succeed -- and each knew it. Each of the men was putting himself at enormous personal risk in the enterprise -- not now from his long-sworn enemy but from those on his own side who would cry betrayal. But each had the armor of his record in the struggle. Just as only a longtime anticommunist like Richard Nixon could convincingly make the opening to China, so only men with the longevity in their conflicts of Rabin, Arafat, De Klerk and Mandela had the credibility to make peace. None of the men much liked his partner. They were bound together, two by two, as if in an impossible combination: they became each other's steptwins. Their negotiations at times resembled nothing so much as the conflict they were trying to resolve. Mandela and De Klerk were at each other's throats even as they accepted the Nobel Peace Prize together. Rabin could barely stand to shake Arafat's hand on the White House lawn. Each of the settlements-in- progress shows that peacemaking is often as difficult and dirty, in its own way, as warmaking. The Men of the Year sometimes seemed to be elaborating a variation on Churchill's thought about democracy: peace is the worst mess, except for the alternative. For all that, these four men reasserted the principle that leaders matter: that an individual's vision, courageously and persuasively and intelligently pursued, can override the rather unimaginative human preference for war. If strong, focused leadership had come from Europe or from Washington, might it have averted the Bosnian bloodbath? If Jean-Bertrand Aristide were a Mandela -- and if he had some equivalent of De Klerk as partner on the other side -- could Haiti have been saved? No one can quantify a negative, but it seems obvious that the absence of leadership -- the opportunities squandered or unenvisioned -- costs the world dearly every day. War is a profound habit -- and sometimes a necessity. When Neville Chamberlain declared ''peace for our time'' after Munich, he gave peacemakers a reputation for fatuous optimism and appeasement from which it took them years to recover. Philosophers of war since Hiroshima have taught, hopefully, that the nuclear threat has made armed conflict ultimately untenable as a Clausewitzian instrument (foreign policy that happens to kill) useful in settling disputes. But not everyone has absorbed the lesson. Among other things, war has an archetypal prestige and bristling drama with which peace has trouble competing: Milton's Lucifer in Paradise Lost is much more interesting than Milton's God. War is rich and vivid, with its traditions, its military academies, its ancient regiments and hero stories, its Iliads, its flash. Peace is not exciting. Its accoutrements are, almost by definition, unremarkable if they work well. It is a rare society that tells exemplary stories of peacemaking -- except, say, for the Gospels of Christ, whose irenic grace may be admired from a distance, without much effect on daily behavior. Kant said that even a race of devils, provided they were intelligent, would be forced to find a solution other than war for their disputes. ''Nature,'' Kant thought, ''guarantees the final establishment of peace through the mechanism of human inclinations.'' The race of devils was busy in 1993, but the mechanism of human inclinations was working as much in the uglier direction, toward war. The global village is really a large, disorderly global city, with many poor neighborhoods, a few that are rich and a number that are terribly dangerous. But as the Balkans reminded everyone, the global city has no police force. Bosnia has been a tragedy of peacemaking turned against itself: the U.N.'s lightly armed blue helmets became virtual hostages to the Serbs and an excuse for Europeans and Americans not to use real force lest the peacekeepers be hurt. The collapse of international law and civil behavior, and the failure of the U.S. or Europe to do anything effective to stop the killing, helped subvert the idea that the world had made much progress toward the higher brain. The feckless sighing and the elaborate international shrugs that masked themselves as realism were somehow worse than plain indifference. It was against all the usual inclinations of the war devils that these four men took what must be the first step in the metaphysics of peace: they recognized the other's existence. They crossed the line from the primitive intransigences of blood/color/tribe to the logic of tolerance and, farther down the road, of civil society. They asserted the power of the future to override the past, a fundamental precondition of change. Few forces are more intense than tribal memory and grievance, the blood's need for vindication. $ The past wants revenge, like Hamlet's father's ghost. Peace settlements in South Africa and the Middle East will bury the bloody shirt, shut down the past as an imperative. The projects of Mandela-De Klerk and Arafat-Rabin are not yet realized, of course. Leaders must bring followers along. Leaders must exercise the visionary's gift. They must tell their people a new story about themselves (in these cases, the story of themselves at peace, to replace their older myth of struggle) and make it plausible. Peace is a way of reimagining the world. Often the peace must actually be made before people will embrace the idea. We do not know -- and may not know for months or years -- how good these four will be as storytellers. Of course, it is possible that the year's peacemaking has merely lit a couple of candles on an altar that has been dedicated for centuries -- and is still dedicated -- to human sacrifice on an Aztec scale. Blessed are the peacemakers, and few in number. Still, in the words of Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations: ''The fact that Muslim and Jew, black and white, accept each other proves that war between civilizations is not inevitable. This sends out a global message of hope.'' Jean Cocteau remarked in his memoirs that stupidity is always amazing to behold, no matter how often one has encountered it. If war represents at bottom a kind of moral stupidity, the Men of the Year were making their way out of that violent region and toward a better part of the mind. That too was amazing to behold.

With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister/Washington, with other bureaus