It is Eastertide in the Western Christian (and children's chocolate egg) tradition and so our next posting will be on 26 March as we celebrate at least the potential for peace on earth implicit in the holiday.

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In this season of peace and goodwill, we cannot resist sharing, following the announcement of the British Government's 'new' security policy , the words in the 'evidential' (effectively, explanatory) section of the Draft Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill , buried deep within the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's web site. There are two gems to ponder.

Page 88 - The Government’s assessment of the short and medium term threat of armed invasion of the UK by another country is zero.

Page 90 - ... the only scenario where such compensation would be payable would be where the UK is the occupying power, which we consider unlikely in the current climate.

Consider what is being said here by Her Majesty's Government: "Let us be clear - the UK is under no military threat ['zero'] from another sovereign state power and we are not occupying any territory, certainly not Basra City, Helmand Province or (by proxy) Diego Garcia or any other military base outside our shores."

Whatever it is that we British do overseas, we never occupy anything, any more than the US, our ally. Nor it seems does any major Power, despite significant troop and police presences and effective control over the rule of law, whether of China in Tibet, the EU in Kosovo or Russia in the Chechen lands, where, in all these cases, it is a moot point that the presence is precisely legal or wanted.

The only occupations apparently recognised by HMG are those of Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights by Israel.

Today, vast tracts of the world have soldiers criss-crossing the ground and yet the British Government recognises none of these lands as being 'occupied' by anyone. They are certainly not occupied by the normal residents since these are often forced to become refugees (4.5m internally displaced and overseas in the Iraq case alone) by such non-occupations.

Of course, I am being deliberately naive. Occupation is a technical term in international law and it only requires a puppet government or a sovereign government with no other choice to invite the alleged occupiers to remain for an occupation to cease to be an occupation.

It may cynically be said that the only reason that Gaza and the West Bank are still classed as occupied (the Golan being sui generis) is that there is no sovereign entity to be forced into accepting a 'legitimate' Israeli presence for 'shared' security reasons.

The diplomats will refer to 'international law' but international law can mean a massive concatenation of UN Conventions and 'fixes' in which the judge and jury tend to be the same thing.

There are few international judicial mechanisms independent of some sort of executive control of the agenda, executive authorities are legislators and there is minimal policing of the law except through those authorities.

Even if the judicial system was given more power (as liberals in the West advocate), there is no democratic legitimacy underpinning the system and democratic states can be forced into conduct or policy by international conventions that may operate against their national interests.

If the UK was run like the international system, it would be positively medieval. The Crown (the US in the international system) would be primus inter pares and the major barons could decide to impose the King's Law over the population willy-nilly, with the only constraint being the need not to upset their own households and retainers (that's us) too much.

In our real history, common law operated as a check on executive power - an advantage sorely missed by Europeans with their Roman system. The international system is very, very Roman. There is no international common law as such unless you count the weak bonds of religion.

Such systems soon become debased, like the days of King John or in the peasant myth of the 'good Tsar', into whether the 'King' is a 'good' or a 'bad' King, either absolutely or relative to Baron Hussein or the bandit Bin Laden.

Of course, this goodness or badness is irrelevant except to traditionalist conservatives (like Mr. Blair) because the system is still feudal, still centralising and tends inevitably to 'roman' absolutism. The international system, c'est nous.

And so, major states [barons] do not 'occupy' because they are invited in for 'protection', they weasel a transfer of sovereign rights or they have 'occupied' the land for sufficient time in the hoary old right of conquest much beloved in medieval Europe - much as the Chinese invasion of Tibet demonstrated in the 1950s. Droit de Seigneur has nothing on Droite de Conquete.

We have no moral position on this. We just find it fascinating how po-faced moralising liberal legalism will claim only those universal principles that suit its chief proponents.

Just as in early modern states, there is still only one rule for the rich and one for the poor within international absolutism. The global system's legal framework still remains deeply flawed because of the historic domination of one part of the world over another.

This is one of the paradoxes of American hegemony - that a country built constitutionally on a resistance movement against royalism should reproduce royalism and feudalism in its management of the world outside its own boundaries.

Which brings us to a Great Britain, one of the King's Party, and one that has no (it's official) military enemies.

We think this is over-sanguine but only because in the long run of history, centuries not decades, there will come a time when European and British cultural conflicts may see blue uniforms with small stars tempted to wander through the Channel Tunnel - but, of course, that's just paranoia.

However, we can take it at face value that the Russians never were going to go past the Rhine unless provoked and will not need to go to war with us when they will probably be able to buy us out of petty cash within a few decades. Today, Chelsea Football Club, tomorrow the world. Let's hope we have something to sell by then.

The Europeans currently offer a simulacrum of eternal peace and harmony, the US is an 'ally' and no Arab or Persian state could mount an invasion of our shores even if some potty nouveau Caliph thought it was a good idea.

Nor need we need fear a resurgence of Viking nationalism from Norway, a forgotten claimant to the throne from the line Cnut, a Jacobite rising engineered from the Elysee, an armed and vengeful Ireland - or even a Scots Covenanter attempt to install a Bruce on the throne of England. So, let us take the Government's claim at face value.

Er, so what is the State for? The Crown (taking as read any criminal seizure of resources from weaker parties) was legitimated by one thing above all - the protection of its subjects. If subjects do not need protecting from invasion, it raises a serious question of what Government is for in its Crownly incarnation.

Of course, my question is as naive as my comments on occupation. In addition to its institutional instinct for self-preservation, the British State has moved on.

In its current quasi-democratic form, it maintains (or tries to maintain) its own stability, law and order, economic stability at worst and growth at best. In its more socialist iterations, not excluding the Tory Leader's discovery of 'social capital theory', the welfare of individuals and even the protection and enhancement of life opportunities for the relatively disadvantaged are on the agenda. Not even Americans have yet got that 'civilised'.

Bit by bit, the function of the State moves from protecting subjects as its economic assets from other predators ('better the predator you know') to being (in theory) the agent of the citizens themselves. So, again, if there is no threat of predation from outside by another sovereign state, why do we need our expensive military capability?

Why precisely a standing army, a navy and an air force - or even the scale of great power foreign policy apparatus that we maintain. This is the background to Gordon Brown's catch-all security statement.

Part an assessment of genuine threats, it is also a desperate attempt to sell to the British People (the more so as we head for serious economic turbulence) the belief that we actually need all this expensive paraphrenalia of statehood - like African states used to 'need' a loss-making state airline or a cement factory.

The threats are not all manufactured by any means but some of the hysteria about them is - and there is a determined attempt to talk up some scary issues and diminish others because a proper debate would be embarrassing.

An entire infrastructure of institutional power has been built up on assumptions that may not hold water. A lot of people have built budgets and careers from a world in which massed tank battles across the North German European Plain may not have been very likely but were credibly possible and reasonable to plan for on the precautionary principle.

A debate on fundamentals is not 'politically', given the closed nature of the British political class, 'wise'. It is like the Rev. Wright saying 9/11 attacks were like "chickens coming home to roost". It happens to be true but no politician would dare agree in public with such an 'inconvenient truth' and still expect to be accepted as 'one of us'.

The panic in the House Of Commons Defence Select Committee this week that a failure by Europeans to invest in NATO would result in the Americans losing interest in Europe is as much about this political elite losing its justification for its institutional presence as the nation's rulers by divine right (the Crown displaced by Parliament) as it is about any real strategic threat.

We now have conservative institutions like NATO resisting serious debate about their use-value in a modern liberal state and we have progressive politicians desperately running around seeking new things for these institutions to do, uncovering new and old threats to justify continued engagement. This is combustible material in terms of peace on earth.

The circle is squared, of course, with the British liberal-progressive love affair with three multilateral institutions - the United Nations (because it creates a framework of a largely Western-inspired rule of law), the European Union (because it means that regional defence can deter some threats before they become threats to the Atlantic Islands) and NATO (which really has no purpose at all other than to keep the Americans in Europe).

There is a rational (if weaker than we like to think) national interest in British engagement with the UN and the EU, even if both seem to give cover for British participation in unnecessary foreign adventures that increase rather than diminish threats to British subjects on British soil.

But there needs to be more of a debate about NATO. The 'fix' to hold it together as a Cold War relic will take place in Bucharest next month, but it is a broken tool because it is riddled with contradictory purposes, meeting different needs for very different participants.

For some it is a ticket to joining the Western Club, to others it keeps the Americans from going isolationist, to others still it is a way station towards a European Defence Force.

Is it still, covertly, a deterrent to the Russian Empire? Is it (as some Americans want) a forward agent for the containment of Russia? Is it an instrument for dealing with insurgency? or for dealing with global (aka Western) energy security? Is its purpose to spread Western liberal ideas into a benighted emerging world and to police failed states?

Which of these are really required by the British national (that is, the British people's) interest and at what cost? And why are Atlanticists so nervous of an independent European military capability? And who do the Americans really protect by being based in Europe?

These are serious questions for the general public to consider, because the fearful result may be a realisation that the American and British national interest lies in returning Europe to the Europeans and letting the US get on with its global mission with new partners.

From a national interest perspective, this comes down to something far more basic than the Atlantic connection per se. Is NATO a collaborative instrument for meeting the primary duty of the Crown which is the Defence of the Realm?

Or is it an instrument for defence for expansion with British participation in an attempt to extend Western values to the limits of their potential?

Is it really in the national interest to encourage a process that risks clashes in the European and Western borderlands, clashes that may lead, like Sarajevo in 1914 or Danzig in 1939, to a serious inter-state clash over resources or culture within the coming century?

If it is an issue of simple Defence of the Realm, then perhaps it is time for the British to bite the bullet and accept that the two most obvious and nearest threats to its existence and stability are an over-ambitious Europe and an over-ambitious West.

And if it is to claim a stake in a European capability then the national (aka the people's) interest is in one under popular democratic control and constitutionally limited to the defence of clear and defined borders.

The corollary of this is that the effective defence of Europe does not require an obsession with sea routes (though these are important) so much as an accommodation with the Arab community and with Russia. What the national interest certainly does not require is Cold War style confrontation with anyone.

Perhaps we also need a rethinking of international law in relation to both energy security and counter-insurgency (including organised crime), one that is centred on avoiding provocations in a complex world. In this respect, as we look to peace on earth and goodwill to all men this season, we have to be pessimistic.

There are too many institutional interests in the United Kingdom concerned with what our French friends call 'gloire', with the survival of systems beyond their sell-by date, with the jobs and flows of cash associated with particular historic models of national defence and with the emotional belief that guns are useful tools in settling the mess created by the West in its imperial phase.

In some cases, the old guard are just that - old, sclerotic, incapable of envisioning another world in which you may invest in big sticks but you ensure that you never have to provoke someone and use it.

This other world is one where you guard your own house well and pay taxes for policemen, but do not go lumbering around to neighbours and bursting into their houses to check that they are conducting themselves properly. The world has probably had enough of busy-body amateur social workers with theories out of a book ...

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