In a world increasingly divided between rich and poor, peace even with prosperity all too often degenerates into chaos. Yet war, even if always marked by violence, unleashes great energy and a sense of purpose among peoples. Four centuries ago, Japan succeeded in harnessing that energy and purpose to end four centuries of civil war. The strategy of new Clinton doctrine calls for ending regional conflicts through American power and disarmament. So far it seems similar to that Japanese model. PNS editor Franz Schurmann writes a weekly column on the ideas behind world events.

Ever since the 60s bumper stickers have been urging "PEACE, NOT WAR!" Peace means living under conditions of tranquillity and security. War implies violence and danger. But are peace and war necessarily moral opposites?

A century ago the American psychologist/philosopher William James, a fervent pacifist, wrote an influential article entitled "The Moral Equivalent of War." Despite its horrors, he argued, war gives people moral direction and energizes them to act.

World War II bore out James' argument. It claimed 55 million lives but imbued the three great nations involved -- the U.S., Japan and Germany -- with a tremendous sense of purpose. Though the U.S. won and the others lost, all three in the end emerged as supremely powerful, rich -- and peaceful -- countries.

For Japan and Germany, the driving force was the will to survive. During World War II, as punishment for their savagery, the Americans laid waste their cities in ferocious air raids. Yet that aroused their people's determination to work hard for survival and some kind of future for their children.

The war also unleashed a moral energy in Americans through which they accomplished unprecedented feats on both battlefields and assembly lines. Most wars show only two sides: generals plotting battles and soldiers killing or dying. But in World War II Americans exhibited a third side -- righteousness.

Neither Nazi Germany nor Imperial Japan fought for justice in World War II, but Americans did, envisioning justice as a world where all would have a respected place and be treated fairly. Because America's post-war occupation policies grew out of these sentiments, they made converts out of both erstwhile enemies.

Since World War II many Western strategists have argued that democracies don't go to war with each other so that if all the world goes democratic, we will have global peace.

But current trends indicate that in an all-democratic world, there will be little justice. Instead, societies will be marked by an ever widening gap in income and quality of life between a shrinking and still largely white mainstream middle class and a huge class of the poor and dark-skinned. Even if there is rising prosperity, that in itself will arouse competition and erode whatever equality and fraternity those at the bottom enjoy. Liberty by itself will prove trivial. And democracy will only ensure the status quo for the benefit of the free and prosperous elites whose numbers will hover at around 30 percent of the overall population in the West.

The lesson of the French Revolution is that when liberty, equality and fraternity vanish, revolution and chaos follow. On the other hand, many historians believe collective human life goes through cycles -- war followed by peace followed by war, not unlike boom followed by bust followed again by boom. In either case we would seem to be fated for new wars to break out at some point, probably in Eastern Europe or the Middle East, and maybe later in booming East Asia.

If this is the inevitable legacy of peace, is there a third way upheaval and war can be avoided? Four centuries ago, Japan's shoguns (the word means generals) found a solution that involved combining the moral force of war with the order and prosperity of peace.

From the 12th to the 17th century Japan suffered incessant domestic warfare which gave rise to a powerful warrior class. From the early 1600s on, however, Japan has enjoyed virtually unbroken domestic peace. The shoguns laid down -- and enforced -- three policies which remain valid in modern Japan.

* They decreed total disarmament within Japan and a ban on foreign wars.

* They transformed the warrior class into the people's teachers and moral exemplars.

* They set up an order in which everyone had an individual and collective role with rights, obligations and a sense of belonging.

With today's politicians fanning conflicts and "defense" corporations smothering the world in arms, we are in need of the same kind of moral direction the shoguns and their warrior class offered. Could it come from the military?

Already American, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and West European militaries are working together much more closely than publics realize. Why in the great powers can't soldiers serve as teachers and soldiers in the poorest neighborhoods and the remotest regions?

If militaries can learn to teach as well as kill, then political leaders can learn the art of justice. They can make contracts with all people to ensure them a legitimate place in a just new order, starting at home and ranging out over the world. After World War II American soldiers assumed this historical role. Now the U.S. may have a unique opportunity to resume this process. In Bosnia, disarmament and economic reconstruction are necessary first steps and can, as earlier in Japan and Germany, release great energy and drive among the peoples concerned. But to make it work it must also, as the Japanese shoguns discovered, give all people a legitimate place in a just order.