The arrest of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in London at the request of a Spanish magistrate was a surprising thing, not least to the general himself, and likely to trouble the minds of the keepers of the international order, the guardians of the immunity of ambassadors and protectors of the sacred sovereignty of states.

As a senator in Chile's congress, Pinochet thought he had diplomatic immunity. Whether he did is unclear, and many an arcane argument over his status will be advanced in days to come.

There he sits, detained against his will, much as he had thousands of others forcibly detained through his long, shameful career. Those who know anything of Pinochet's work must feel a warm glow.

But the story on him is not so pat. Pinochet is more than just another former Latin American despot. He is a salient figure on the periphery of modern history, a factor in the Cold War.

His impact on his country is immense, and not only for the evil it brought. He became both an instrument and a victim of historical forces.

Not many people outside Chile knew of his existence until he overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973.

The socialist president died in the ferocious bombardment of the Moneda Palace in Santiago, and thousands of his followers and sympathizers were rounded up, tortured and murdered in the months and years that followed.

(Among them were a significant number of Spanish nationals, which is what moved the Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzon.)

Pinochet's coup, though sudden, was not unexpected. The world in 1973 had been watching the struggle of an activist, socialist president -- supported by Chile's large, venerable Communist Party -- to remain in power against unrelenting and violent rightist opposition.

There was reason for sustained interest in Allende's fate in Western Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States.

It was a time when communist parties in Europe were advancing electorally and, in Italy in particular, trying to win a role in national governments. Eurocommunism, as it was called, was touted as a gentler version of that creed than Soviet communism.

Washington did what it could to stop it, but its influence was not so commanding in the stronger countries of Europe as it was in weaker states of Latin America.

The question presented was whether a communist party, or a revolutionary socialist one like Allende's, could win power through the electoral process, and then remain in power until its constitutional term ended.

Allende had already taken the first step. Pinochet, with U.S. support, forestalled the second.

Allende's death lent strength to the argument of the revolutionaries of the left -- the political heirs of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and all the others militating in Africa and Asia, that violence was the only path open to them.

It also doused the hopes of the Eurocommunist parties, and eventually the movement, such as it was, languished.

It turned out to be a tremendous victory for capitalism, for when the smoke cleared in Chile, Pinochet -- averse to all the left-wing ideologies of economics that had dwelled for so long in Chile -- contrived to have their direct opposites imposed.

Chile became a laboratory for the ideas of the economist Milton Friedman. For a while pure, unrestrained capitalism reigned there.

The "Chicago Boys," Chilean economists wedded to Friedman's theories, were given a free hand. They utterly annihilated the state-dominated economy. They abolished the tariff: Domestic industries died in their thousands; hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs and sank into poverty.

Chile's communally oriented society was shredded.

But the economy took off like a rocket. Chile became one of the most prosperous countries in the world. In a way, that is Pinochet's legacy, as are the torture, kidnapping and murder.

And there is an irony that reaches all the way from the worst months at the end of 1973, when the streets of Santiago were often filled with smoke and gunfire, to earlier this week when Pinochet, denied diplomatic status, was nabbed by Scotland Yard as he recovered from a back operation in a London clinic.

In the aftermath of the coup, hundreds of people in and around Santiago, pursued by Pinochet's troops, fled into embassies for asylum. The French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Mexican and other delegations took them in.

A lot of people thus escaped an ugly fate, for Pinochet and his counterparts in the military junta then being formed generally respected the conventions on the sanctity of embassies.

Asylum was acknowledged, and eventually nearly all those sheltered in the embassies were given safe passage out of the country.

But the world has changed greatly since then. Had Pinochet been more sensitive to that, he might not have traveled so readily to Europe. (He was denied a visa to France.)

The change that has impaled Pinochet is the emergence of human rights as a major principle in international relations. This has occurred over the past half-century in response to the genocide of World War II, and more recently in Africa and the Balkans.

Reflecting the depth of that body of relatively new law, the Spanish warrant cites nine legal precedents. Two derive from the Nuremberg Tribunals, another from a United Nations genocide convention of 1948, a fourth from a 1984 convention on torture obliging signatory countries to extradite torturers. The overarching one is the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

This principle has grown so strong, in fact, that occasionally it has challenged that other principle upon which the international system has rested for half a millennium: state sovereignty.

Some years back -- as the crisis in Bosnia was developing -- Michael Clark, director of the Center for Defense Studies at London's King's College, spoke in an interview about the frequent collisions of these two principles, and the progress made by the former against the latter.

"If we go to war in Bosnia," he said, "we will be setting human rights above the right of national self-determination."

NATO war planes did strike at Bosnian Serbs, thus entering the Bosnian civil war on the side of the Muslims. Today, NATO prepares to attack an independent state, Serbia, on behalf of citizens of that state, Kosovars, who are being mistreated by its government.

The human rights principle may be about to supersede that of state sovereignty.

Another element that may have exposed Pinochet to the Spanish warrant is the union of Europe. As that process has advanced over the past 40 years, the sense of national identity -- still a force in many countries of the EU -- has nevertheless been slowly extended in the minds of many Europeans from the national home to the continental one.

This sense is strong or weak, depending on the country (weak in Britain, strong in Italy), but it is a force nonetheless, one that would incline a British judge to be more receptive to such a request from a Spanish magistrate today than he would have been in, say, 1973, when Pinochet appeared amid all that fire and smoke.

Pub Date: 10/22/98