The vacuum of QCD is characterized by the Higgs mechanism. Color is
``spontaneously broken'' by a quark-antiquark condensate in the octet
representation. The massive gluons carry integer electric charges and are
identified with the vector mesons. The fermionic excitations consist of the low
mass baryon octet and a singlet. The interactions between these particles and
the light pseudoscalar octet are largely determined by chiral symmetry and a
nonlinear local symmetry. A consistent phenomenological picture of strong
interactions at long distances arises from a simple effective action.Comment: 67 page
