This war is not a modern war. It is the last episode in Europes twentieth-century War of the Nations. The nationalist fuel burning Kosovo villages in 1999 is chemically identical to the stuff that set the first Belgian and French villages aflame in 1914. What began in the Balkans is ending there. The weaponry has evolved; but the refugees, with their bundles, shawls and carts, look pitifully the same. Nato hasn't noticed this, not really. If it had, the war would be even more controversial, particularly in Washington. For Europe's long war has become, inexorably, a war against the nation-state. The story of our century is in part the story of how nation-tribes failed to live together. Slowly, agonisingly, the old lies about national destiny, race and absolute sovereignty have been tested and exposed. And slowly, fitfully, a new political idea has struggled to replace them. It was present at the short-lived League of Nations. It spoke at the Nuremberg trials and, more confidently, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention of 1948, then at the Geneva Conventions of 1949.The Cold War stuffed its mouth shut, except for Western Europe, which struggled against nationalism through the top-down Community. But the idea is on the march again today; and it directly affects both the Serb conflict and the Pinochet case in London.
And what is this idea? It is world government. That may sound wild. But its starting assumption is that there are universal humanitarian values which matter more than national sovereignty. And in this limited way, at least, it has already been accepted. This, after all, is why we are today attacking a sovereign nation, Yugoslavia, which has a legally elected government and which threatens none of its neighbours. This is why Pinochet, who has broken no law in Britain, is under house arrest in Surrey.
But how does the struggle against nationalism and in favour of supra-national authority, affect this nasty little war? Because this is, in the end, a matter of law. One day, international courts will get at monsters like Milosevic well before we need huge armies to do so. In this, at least, we are not yet civilised.
Stand back and look again at what's happening. To express our anger about a Balkan thug and his policies, we send flying into the air millions of pounds'worth of metal, so that it hurtles down on buildings, people and machines. Like giants with clumpy boots, we stomp on the earth hoping, eventually, to change the mind of a single malevolent politician who doesn't give a damn how many die. This is clumsy.
It's like seeing a bug crawling along the skirting-board and throwing half the kitchen at it, then smashing down the wall for good measure. One day, perhaps, people will look back and find it all unbelievably crude. Why not, they will ask, just reach down and pick out that bug? And indeed, going for Milosevic early and personally would have been far better than what actually happened. It wasn't possible. Why? Because under our current world rules, this bug is a superbug, an elected head of state bug. Like Saddam, Milosevic has absolute authority inside his borders. To get at him we have to go to war against his state - against millions of people we have no quarrel with - and smash buildings, suburbs, factories, aircraft. We have to "degrade his capability' - leaderspeak for splintering the skirting-board - to get near him.
That's been the story of this long European war. But one day, it will be different. Imagine a world in which mass-murderers or torturers, elected or not, were simply treated as criminal suspects from the word go. Imagine if, as soon as there was evidence of villages being ethnically cleansed in Kosovo, world prosecutors at an international criminal court had opened a case against Milosevic personally.
Instead of inclining a condescending head at Richard Holbrook from the gilded pomp of his presidential chair, the booze-drenched Serb gets no diplomatic courtesy at all. He's a fugitive from justice. His own government and army are asked to hand him over. If he tries to leave his country, he's arrested. If he travels anywhere, any time, he faces being Pinochet'd. This is no panacea. It would not change things overnight. Some bandit territories would remain no-go areas. But it is the lack of such a strong, UN-backed court, reaching deep into sovereign states, which has left Nato with the primitive (and I fear, hugely self-destructive) tactic of lobbing missiles into Serbia. In the end, law is the better. In the words of one dreamer, an international criminal court would help tackle "the grotesque parody whereby the killer of one person is more likely to be brought to justice than the killer of thousands". Now consider the reality - which is that, rather amazingly, we are more than half-way there. The dreamer quoted above is Tony Lloyd, a British Foreign Office Minister, celebrating our signing up to the proposed International Criminal Court last year. The court is edging towards reality partly thanks to an extraordinary campaign by non-governmental organisations, including Amnesty International and the World Federalist Movement (president: Sir Peter Ustinov).
Yes, there is a federalist plot, and yes, it is working. On one hot night in Rome last July, this new, sovereignty-sapping court was agreed after an intense negotiation among 160 countries and scores of non-government groups. In the words of William Pace, who has been organising the campaign among the NGOs, "it was a kind of miracle'which produced "the most extraordinary outburst of emotion at a diplomatic conference any of us have ever, or will probably ever again, witness". So far, 78 countries, including three of the permanent members of the UN Security Council (Britain, France and Russia) have signed the proposed new treaty. The Times of India rightly said that "not since the establishment of the UN itself have so many countries voluntarily yielded ground on such a fundamental aspect of state sovereignty." But not every country. And here comes the rub. The American government - fighting today to dismember Serbia - has been very obstructive. The Clinton administration hates the idea of a court that could indict US citizens without prior US approval.
Just before the Rome negotiations, the Pentagon itself began a frantic - and unsuccessful - campaign to stop it. Jesse Helms has described the proposed court as a "monster" and asked: "Imagine what would have happened if this court had been in place during the US invasion of Panama? Or the US invasion of Grenada? Or the US bombing of Tripoli?" Yes indeed, Jesse.
So it is time, I think, for this country to know just what it is fighting in the Balkans for. We are not fighting to prevent the quick slaughter or "cleansing" of Albanian Kosovars. Our bombing is making that worse, not better; you can't police anywhere from three thousand feet up. We are not fighting to protect a sovereign state, as in the Gulf - in fact we are fighting to tear one in two.
We are not fighting, I take it, to calm down Serb nationalism, for that is intensifying. We are not fighting to help the Serbian democratic opposition. (If so, we are having the opposite effect.) We are not fighting because we believe in Albanian nationalism - or at least, we never did before. Ironies abound. But the greatest is this: if we are fighting for a big thing, it is presumably to enforce the subordination of nationalism, after Europe's bloody century, to international law and global humanitarian values. And yet the US, which is leading this war, is fighting in another forum against that very idea. This seems, to put it politely, a tricky position.
On Friday night, Tony Blair asked for our support. In a personal sense, he deserves it, of course. No one here backs Milosevic or wishes harm to Nato troops. Everyone's got their fingers crossed. But we need to know, in the wider sense - support for what? As this goes on, and we get bogged down - which seems likely - the Nato partners are going to face more questions from their own people and from other countries. We have gone to war out of instinct - a good instinct - but without a coherent philosophy or properly thought-out war aims. Going to war is an awesome, unpredictable act. Is it possible that even the US will one day regret this one?