PEACE IS AN XCELLENT ADVENTURE

By JOSHUA COOPER RAMO

It's hard to judge a generation by its statistics. Five years ago, my generation was a group of overstuffed slackers; today we're Gordon Gekkos. An unlikely transformation. But there's at least one statistic that resonates: more of us are taking a full five years to get through college. Most of the country's parents look at this as a sort of slacker ritual--the obligatory year of mosh pitting, coffee drinking and Kerouac reading before graduation. But there's another way to regard that extra year: as a peace dividend. A generation ago, in the midst of the Vietnam War, the idea of a year off from college was dangerously ridiculous. Leaving school meant a one-way ticket to Saigon. Two generations ago it was Korea. Three generations ago, war-torn Europe or the inferno of the Pacific. My generation has had the blessing of growing up in peaceful times, and it has made all the difference. That fifth year of college has given us, in the best sense of the cliche, a chance to find ourselves.

It is premature (also probably unlucky) to call Generation X the peace generation, but the evidence is mounting. No generation in American history has had less traffic with war or its brutally congruent demands for sacrifice and faith. And because we haven't had to fight, we've been free from the conformist pressures of a nation at war. We've found our own, unique identity as a generation that thinks and does as it pleases. The peace dividend has allowed us to live abroad more often and for longer than any other generation. Technoliths like Microsoft and Nike are earning their spectacular growth on the backs of twentysomething executives who work overseas and are fighting not only for the cause of their chosen company but also to propagate a belief system that has served us well. It is a pragmatic idealism as intense as the fire that sent Peace Corps workers abroad in the 1960s. The globalized, interconnected economy we are helping create is likely to be our best insurance of a peaceful world for our children.

It is easy, of course, to imagine a wonderful future when all you've known is tranquillity. But this peaceful outlook has brought with it a mouthful of unanswerably hard questions. Is an innocence of war a blessing or curse? Will our naivete make us dangerously curious about the tools of violent power? Or is this the start of a thousand years of peace, secured by a certainty that what we have now is forever worth having?

Even the most cynical historians are beginning to suspect that the peaceful run we've enjoyed may be a persistent blessing, not just a passing respite from carnage. In an essay last year, then Secretary of Defense William Perry argued for "defense in an age of hope"--a military policy based on the idea that peace is sustainable, perhaps less reliable than the sun but more constant than the weather. Around the world the ineluctable algebra of economic and political liberalization (less war = more money) is catching on. At the start of 1997, none of the planet's 179 nations was shooting at another.

To be sure, the globe still rocks with civil warfare. Zaire, Rwanda and the Balkans remind us that politics usually has a blood price. And state-vs.-state threats haven't entirely disappeared: China is increasingly comfortable with saber rattling, and North Korea, though famished, still seems a menace. Across all these conflicts, and others unimagined, the real challenge for my generation will be to finish what economic and political forces have begun: the transformation of discord into self-interested tolerance.

Our army, already spreading around the world (armed with dangerous, crashing laptops), is evangelizing the message of peace with prosperity. Our globalized generation shares values across borders, moving ideas and products with the ethereal freedom of E-mail. It's a two-way street: even as we export Sly Stallone, Air Jordans and Microsoft Word, we've imported a sushi-eating, techno-raving youth culture of our own. As a friend told me over dinner in Kuala Lumpur last month, "Age isn't the issue. Ambition is." And with nearly 50% of the world's population under 30 years of age, with great ambitions for themselves and their countries, prospects for the two essential ingredients of peace--capitalism and democracy--seem better than ever.

Of course, the real world remains a potentially lethal place. Even if Nikes are mighty comfortable shoes and the Smashing Pumpkins are a great band, they're hardly a remedy for Sino-American tensions. The odds of sustainable peace and prosperity--at least in the perspective of history--are squintingly thin. What happens when the balloon goes up? Can a generation reared by Mister Rogers really fight a war? Do we even have a clue what we would be fighting for?

Frankly, we're already battling for it--the chance to choose our own identity, to accept others as they are, to do what interests us and to do it well. This may nauseate our boomer parents, who see this as a recipe for selfishness, a "bonus" year of college spent navel gazing--or worse. But even the historians now seem to agree with us: freedom, tolerance and curiosity are more than slacker slogans. They are also the ingredients of peace.