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Another important book for liberal internationalists is Paul Berman's highly readable new look at the evolution of key parts of the European left since 1968. Berman draws a trajectory not unlike the ones he has traced in other books about the gradual sobering up of major parts of the 1960s radical movements in the United States and elsewhere.

The central narrative shows, among other examples, the transformation of European leaders like Joschka Fischer and Bernard Kouchner from radical anti-authoritarians in the 1960s and 1970s into confirmed anti-totalitarians and humanitarian interventionists in the 1990s and 2000s. The journey is twisted, complex, and long -- but of critical significance for international affairs, because it destroys so many leftist myths along the way.

As is typical of Berman, he begins with what for most Americans was the fairly obscure 2001 scandal surrounding Fischer -- then the German foreign minister -- when photographs were published of him in a black motorcycle helmet attacking a policeman during his radical student days. The incident gives Berman a vehicle for introducing us to modern European radicalism at its murderous worst in the form of the Red Army Fraction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. Linked by both methods and ideology to other terror groups -- from the Italian Red Brigades to the Palestinian Black September -- this tiny group came to embody both the nihilist and the suicidal strains (three of its members killed themselves in prison) of European extremism that, according to Berman, reappear in today's totalitarian movements like al Qaeda and the Baath parties of Iraq and Syria.

In his landmark Terror and Liberalism (2003), Berman convincingly established 20th century European fascism -- with its roots in 19th century German romanticism -- as the linear ancestor of bin Ladenism and other radical movements in the Middle East, like the Muslim Brotherhood. To these he now adds -- mainly through an analysis of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Teheran -- the theocratic extremism of Iran.

All of these movements, in Berman's view, are the living embodiments of the Nazism we thought we had exterminated in 1945. All are based on a fantastical view -- a "grand mythology" -- of Arab and Persian glory. But, in fact, they have mainly succeeded in killing people. Berman: "The Islamists in Iran generated a pious cult of suicide; the Baathists in Iraq, a nationalist cult of cruelty. Either way, the end point turned out to be the cemetery."

This reality has become ever clearer to leading lights of the left in Europe, says Berman. The great turning point was the wars in the Balkans, especially in Kosovo. It was the sight of Albanian Kosovars being herded into trains for ethnic cleansing -- a scene chillingly evocative of the Nazi deportation of Jews to Poland -- that triggered Fischer's historic conversion to supporting armed German intervention outside NATO. He uttered the resonant phrase, "Never again Auschwitz," trumping the left's traditional cry of "Never again war" -- and took an entire anti-war movement with him.

Berman introduces a large cast of players of the last halfcentury in Europe -- from existentialist philosopher Jean- Paul Sartre and 1968 student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit to Che Guevara and his chronicler, Regis Debray. But, besides Fischer, it is two Frenchmen who are most impor- tant to Berman's narrative. They are André Glucksmann, the original New Philosopher who overthrew the knee-jerk anti-anti-communism of Sartre, and Bernard Kouchner, the French physician who created Doctors Without Borders and became France's minister of humanitarian action.

Although close to such leftist icons as Cohn-Bendit, Kouchner goes further, faster, in adopting Glucksmann's trinity of principles for managing relations in Europe and the world: anti-totalitarianism, humanitarianism, and military intervention. All these are intellectual light-years from the anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, and anti-capitalism that guided the European left when these men first joined it. Kouchner is not restrained by any binding party affiliations like Fischer's leadership of the German Greens party, which for years advocated abolishing NATO, not using it.

What led to such fundamental dogmatic revisions, in Berman's telling, is the history of resistance and collaboration. Berman maintains that the whole left-wing project of the 20th century is, in one way or another, a struggle against fascism and the legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust. Life on the left was all about not being what the preceding generation had been, collaborators in the most destructive political undertaking in history.

The polar opposite of capitalist exploitation and political corruption, for the left, seemed for years to be the communist ideal -- Stalin's excesses notwithstanding. Even in the United States, resistance to authority was the normative self-definition, automatically excluding overseas interventions. That changed with Rwanda, Saddam Hussein's brutal suppression of the Kurds, and the Balkan wars. Kouchner, in particular, developed a philosophy of humanitarian intervention that countered the leftist reaction against the use of force by big powers. Intervention, he wrote, is not "rape" but rather "consensual, so long as intervention always responds to a cry for help." Indeed, hiding behind the fig leaf of national sovereignty and ignoring the victims' cries is a form of collaboration with fascism.

Berman's book is, indirectly, the story of his own intellectual journey from left-wing activist to liberal interventionist: political history as picaresque tale. He sees the bookends of this story as 1968, when the world was in uproar, and 2003, with the war in Iraq. "The story of the generation of 1968 ended there, surely," writes Berman, invoking the deadly bombing of the United Nations' office in Baghdad as the final loss of innocence. Yet he might have extended that to 2005, when Fischer, after a lost election, took himself out of Germany's political leadership, bringing an era to an end.

Fischer had heaped no glory on himself by acquiescing, in 2002, to German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's demagogic anti-American campaign tactics. But even so, he had already fundamentally altered a leftist view of the world so much that he could say in a speech in 2004, echoing George W. Bush, that the status quo in the Middle East had become intolerable and that a "positive globalization" of values such as human rights and democracy was the real strategic response to what he now calls a "new totalitarianism."

For the man who once attacked policemen and other symbols of authority for the general hell of it, that represents a long journey.

Peter Ross Range is editor of BLUEPRINT.