integrity, in the case of the Soviet Union. The end of the cold war was thought
to offer some hope for a more peaceful future in the region, and some progress
was indeed made, but the region’s internal sources of conflict proved suffi-
ciently enduring for the Middle East to remain the world’s principal source of
insecurity. Indeed, this would be likely to remain so even were there to be
some sort of solution to the endemic Israeli–Arab problems.
Militant
Militant is, of course, a perfectly ordinary English word which means someone
who is very strongly committed to, and very active in support of, some cause or
other. It could be, and sometimes still is, applied to almost any active supporter
of a creed. Perhaps the first common usage like this is, after all, the idea of ‘The
Church Militant’. In British politics during the 1970s the word became almost
exclusively the property of the far left. The ‘Militant Tendency’ was a splinter
group of extreme left-wingMarxistswho penetrated theLabour Party,
especially powerfully in a few economically depressed areas such as Liverpool,
so named after their weekly paperMilitant. This particular group was finally
crushed by the more reformist minded national leadership, under Neil
Kinnock, but only after bruising internal party fights. In more general con-
texts, referring to anyone as politically militant in contemporary Britain would
inevitably imply a political position that was extreme judged by a consensus,
but also, importantly, more prepared to use unorthodox measures to get its
message across.
Militarism
Militarism is a concept that applies to the whole of a society, rather than a
description of a government’s policy, although the two are interwoven. A
militarist society is one in which the values, ideologies and interests of the
military are very widely shared. It is not just a matter of abstract approval of
classic military virtues like heroism, honour and self-sacrifice, nor is it a matter
of approving high defence expenditure to protect national interest. A militarist
society values the military as a way of life, and its activities are not merely for
pragmatic ends. Indeed, to the extent that militarism supports high expendi-
ture on military institutions, a desire for the nation to be militarily mighty is as
likely to be an end in itself as a clear cut consequentialist justification. The
highly militarist German society before the First World War wanted a navy to
rival the British Royal Navy as an end in itself, as a source of national pride,
rather than to facilitate the building of an empire or because of national
insecurity about invasion. The latter fear had much more to do with the
Militarism