Paris - What has happened in recent day in Gorazde in Bosnia was not simply a failure of the international community. It was a demonstration that the international community is a phantom.

As a coherent political force, there is no international community. There is little point in talking about what the international community will do in Yugoslavia, or elsewhere, the next time - after the U.N. is strenghtened, or when its military committee is reformed, or a UN army recruited, or when the Maastricht agreement on a common european foreign policy is applied. The international community will do no better in the future because, politically speaking, it does not exist.

Even today, were Boutros Boutros Ghali, Bill Clinton, Francois Mitterand, John Major and Boris Yeltsin to come to an agreement on defending the remaining U.N. »safe heaven in Bosnia, they would inevitably fall into disagreement about how to do it, or, if not that, what to do afterward.

We must stop pretending that there is some prospect of an internationally supervised »new world order . This notion was promoted by the Bush administration and is implicit in the Clinton administration's commitment to multilateralism in foreign policy.

In the Bush administration's case it was a promotional justification, or after-action rationale, for essentially unilateral american policies with respect to Kuwait and Iraq. In the Clinton case it substitutes hypothetical and unrealizable international cooperation for practical and achievable national actions. The general thrust of liberal opinion and liberal international reform since early in the 19th century (using »liberal in its historical sense, not the partisan one) has been to substitute collective international action for national initiative in the relations of nations.

This has provided an inportant body of international law and inspired international agreement in a great many technical and regulatory areas of common international interest. It was responsible for the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations. The fondamental assumption of liberal internationalism has been that enlightened people agree on the values that should govern international society. They see these values as intrinsically right or just, part of an ascertainable common truth. Those who resist this universal values are ignorant or backward, or criminal - international »outlaws . Thus the liberal internationalist not only sees the methods of the Bosnian Serbs and the Serbian government as criminal as they carve out a Greater Serbia at other's expense, but condemns the Serbs' nationalism as itself criminal. However, Radovan Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs' General Ratko Mladic think that they are making a better world. A better one for Serbs, and for the West as well, which the Serbs claim

to be rescuing from fascism and islamic fanaticism. Hitler believed that he was making a better world. The inherently superior people would rule the inferior (those who were allowed to go on living) and breed an improved mankind. There is the problem. What makes a better world a matter of moral conviction and philosophy of history, on which agreement is limited even among the democracies. The liberal expectation that generally recognized principles of international conduct and cooperation exist and can be made to prevail runs into the reality of incompatible national perception of what is good and desirable.

The Western liberal democracies do have a general agreement among themselves on how international society should function, but they disagree on what specifically to do about it. And even if they agreed on that, they would need the political will to do it.

The UN Security Council has placed Gorazde and other Bosnian cities under UN protection, but the United States won't send troops, the British are fed up and never believed in intervention in the first place, the Russian already are disillusioned with the Serbs and see little to gain for further dealings with them, and the French, who have the largest number of UN troops in Bosnia, fear that they are about to be abandoned by the others and left to pick up the pieces for the United Nations.

The fiasco is apparent to all, and nothing is likely to be done about it. The Security Council will meet again, the European foreign ministers will consult, but this are sterile exercises.

No common agreement is available, and the search for a common agreement restrains action by individual governments. The new world order thus reveals itself to be the old one in which individual nations purse their national well-being, cooperating in areas of clear mutual advantage but governed on all matters involving in risk and sacrifice by national or domestic political interest alone. The rhetoric of liberal internationalism has been permitted to obscure this for too long. This is an unpleasant reality to face, but such is life.