Yet now we have 18,500 British soldiers in Northern Ireland and 11,000 in Bosnia - a quarter of Britain's "peacetime" army on active service. There are another 30,000 ready to take over every six months, so in the course of a year, half the army at least is called into action for real We are clearly not at peace, either. As this newspaper suggested last month, we may be seeing the end of "war" and "peace".We are certainly living through the biggest revolution in strategic thought since at least the time of Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831).Most educated people have heard of Clausewitz, but few have read him. They then agreed a principle which lasted almost 350 years - that what happens within a nation state is that state's business and nobody else's Diplomacy, war and peace were conducted on that principle. There were civil wars, but "real' wars took place between nations.No longer.

The latest yearbook from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute confirms that the 30-odd "major armed conflicts" under way last year were all internal, civil wars. Yet the armed forces of Britain and France, to name only two major powers, have never been busier.The implications are profoundly uncomfortable. Back beyond 1648, when the delegates at the Peace of Westphalia ended the terrible international and religious Thirty Years' War, which had raged across the whole of Europe. Even the countries that have the longest traditions of mass conscript armies - France and Russia - have recently returned, or shown signs of returning, to an 18th-century model with small professional armies to fight small, professional wars.The idea that we should intervene in other people's wars - civil wars - to enforce international standards of behaviour takes us back even further. "War was handed back to the [mass of the] people from whom it had been taken away, in part, by the use of select, standing armies."Now it has been taken away again, as we fight highly political wars for precise objectives. However, the growing role of the media in shaping international public opinion and the presence of an international authority to oversee the rule of law between states - the United Nations - has made a difference. The clear distinction between "war" and "peace" - a product of nearly 200 years in which wars got bigger and involved more and more of society - has been blurred again, as we contemplate continuous engagement in other peoples' wars.In the early 19th century, Karl von Clausewitz, the military strategist, wrote that his era was seeing the end of "cabinet wars", 18th-century wars fought by small, professional, mercenary armies for limited objectives. After the Cold War confrontation, with its potential for a war more "absolute" in its destructiveness than any that had preceded it, we have returned to a situation that in some ways resembles the later colonial period, and in others the 18th century.

The spectre of another Rwanda- type disaster in Burundi, and of the international community trying to intervene to stop it. Three apparently unrelated events, yet each forms part of an astonishingly complex revolution. It is the most dramatic revolution in our thinking about war and peace for at least 200 years, and in some ways for 350 years. Sir: With respect to the discussions about the naming of the Nova car (report, 13 July; letters 16 and 20 July), they have the right name but the wrong car. The subject of the Urban Legend in question is the Chevrolet Nova. It was produced in the USA, and the target of the unfortunate Spanish marketing campaign was Mexico SIMON REAP Market Bosworth, Leicestershire.

The breakdown of the ceasefire in Ireland. The slow but, so far, encouraging progress of peace in Bosnia. New Labour has been meticulous and exhaustive in testing its ideas among my colleagues in the artistic world, and has shown a healthy awareness that audiences and communities, supported by a humane and undivisive education system, are the lodestar that should guide any cultural policy This is scarcely surprising. It was the Labour Party that planned the Festival of Britain, founded the Open University, brought the talents of Jennie Lee and Lord Goodman into the leadership of arts provision and, despite the frequent tiffs between Harold Wilson and the media, presided over a golden age of British broadcasting in the Sixties and mid-Seventies. It was a sympathetic Labour administration that allowed the Sadler's Wells Opera to grow into English National Opera and hundreds of thousands of opera-goers each year have reason to be thankful to a party that seems to believe that the greatest artistic creations are for everyone, regardless of their means or origins.DENNIS MARKSGeneral DirectorEnglish National OperaLondon WC2. After 17 years in which the cultural and educational foundations of Britain have been handed over piecemeal to the marketplace, the prospect of a change of government is one of the few aspects of the next 12 months that is not depressing me. I personally am particularly concerned at the neglect of global environmental issues which ought to play a much larger role in international relations.ROBIN COOK MP(Livingston, Lab)House of CommonsLondon SW1The writer is Labour spokesman for foreign affairs.