the book

The Beauty Queen's Guide to World Peace, is pitched as a coherent intellectual challenge to the whole Bush/Blair model of the universe, and is strongly pro-democratic.

The book proposes a progressive strategy for international security and political economy that will challenge and may overcome both neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinking.

It can do this by demonstrating to states and communities that radical change managed through popular democracies offers more certainty of safety from random terror and more economic and social justice than current strategies and policies.

The book postulates that strengthening the liberal order requires the consent of the governed at all levels.

Interdependence means that there can be no return to autarchy or competing power blocs such as the postulated development of the EU to counter the US.

In a globalised society, this consent is still best expressed in terms of the original words and intent of the Atlantic Charter of August 1941.

The importance of the charter is that it proposed social security, labour rights and disarmament amongst the allied war aims.

These evolved into the UN. Put in these terms, dismissing the multilateral agenda requires convincing people that terrorists are worse enemies than Hitler and Jacques Chirac a more intractable ally than Joseph Stalin.

In other words, Atlanticism as it was originally meant to be understood, has been perverted by the Cold War.

It is building on these core values not the creation of new ones that will bring security.

From here, the book reveals a number of new and telling points...