THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (3 page)

The settlements reached at Paris in 1990 that concluded both the Second World War and the Cold War that followed it might have been expected, like its predecessors at Vienna, Utrecht, and Westphalia, to introduce another long period of stable peace. Both Germany and Russia were now democratic nation-states and accepted “Western values”; not only the rule of law legitimized by democratic consent, but a further criterion of legitimacy that had developed in the West during the struggle against totalitarianism—the recognition of universal “human rights”: a major derogation from the state sovereignty that had been the basis of international relations since the Peace of Westphalia. But there was another and yet more fundamental difference between this peace settlement and its predecessors. Those had established a stability between nations that rested on a balance between the powers. This recognized not so much the triumph of Western democratic values as the overwhelming and apparently unchallengeable power of the United States: its supremacy in the weapons systems created by nuclear and information technology, its enormous wealth, and the universal attractiveness of its popular culture. America's European allies were at best subordinate and dependent associates. This, so it was hoped, would be a unipolar world of a kind not seen since the fall of the Roman Empire; but like the Roman Empire, it would be based on a rule of law.

What went wrong? It is here that Bobbitt's thesis becomes fascinating and controversial. One obvious feature of the Paris treaties was that, although they may have settled the problems that had tormented Europe for the past hundred years, Europe was now only one region in a global system whose complexities that settlement did not begin to address. Even within Europe, the settlement could not deal with the fallacy that had invalidated the Wilsonian world vision from the very beginning. Nation-states, the building blocks of the international community, are not “given”: they have to be created. Nations—self-conscious ethnic communities—do not create states, though they can certainly destroy them. On the contrary, with few exceptions, states create nations. Even in Europe the problem of “state-building” in the Balkans remained, and remains, unsolved, while elsewhere in the world stable nation-states are the exception rather than the rule. More common are states that have signally failed to create nations, and can barely function as “states” at all.

Further, even the great nation-states that possessed the cohesion and discipline to fight and survive the two World Wars were already becoming obsolete. It did not require a mass effort of national dedication to produce the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor could a similar effort have preserved them. It was largely the realization of their reciprocal vulnerability that prevented the conflict between the West and the Soviet Union from erupting into violence, and made it possible for the Soviet Union to be defeated by American “soft power.” For if weapons of mass destruction could so easily penetrate the conventional defenses of the nation-state—and to nuclear there were to be added chemical and biological threats—so could, in peacetime, economic strength and cultural dominance. Instant communications made possible by information technology were creating a global society that, though far from homogenous, was increasingly interdependent, and within which no nation-state, however powerful, could regard itself as independent and invulnerable: not even the United States, as it discovered on September 11, 2001.

So as the development of guns had destroyed the old feudal order, and the development of railways the old dynastic order, now the development of computers has destroyed the nation-state. Not the State itself, as Bobbitt is at pains to show: the State will always be necessary to provide security, fiscal organization, and law. But in the same way as princely states mutated into dynastic territorial states, and they in their turn into nation-states, now nation-states are mutating into what Bobbitt terms “market-states,” and the second part of his book is devoted to describing the nature of market-states and the possible kinds of world that they may create. The plural is significant: Bobbitt provides no single scenario for the future but multiples, none of them very attractive: we are required to choose among a wide range of equally disagreeable dystopias. We are also required to choose among a wide range of possible wars, because Bobbitt is under no illusion that, any more than their predecessors, market-states will provide perpetual peace. At worst there may be cataclysms, at best a continuation of the low-key global violence to which we have become accustomed over the past ten years and from which not even the wealthiest and most powerful communities will be able to escape. The best they can do is reduce their vulnerability, and the only victory they can look forward to is avoidance of defeat.

This book was virtually complete before the events of September 11 gave a horrible reality to Bobbitt's description of the possibilities that now lie before us. But for that,
The Shield of Achilles
might be ranked with such massive prophecies of doom as Spengler's
Decline of the West
, which scared us witless in the 1930s and is now deservedly forgotten. Such a fate is unlikely to befall this volume. Anyone who believes that the author contemplated with equanimity the future that lies before us should first read the poem from which the book takes its title. Bobbitt believes that mankind could be facing a tragedy without precedent in its history. It is not clear that he is wrong.

—Michael Howard

This book is about the modern state—how it came into being, how it has developed, and in what directions we can expect it to change. Epochal wars, those great coalitional conflicts that often extend over decades, have been critical to the birth and development of the State, and therefore much of this book is concerned with the history of warfare. Equally determinative of the State has been its legal order, and so this is a book about law, especially constitutional and international law as these subjects relate to statecraft. This book, however, is neither a history of war nor a work of jurisprudence. Rather it is principally concerned with the
relationship
between strategy and the legal order as this relationship has shaped and transformed the modern state and the society composed of these states. A new form of the State—the market-state—is emerging from this relationship in much the same way that earlier forms since the fifteenth century have emerged, as a consequence of war. This war, the fifth great epochal war in modern history, began in 1914 and only ended in 1990. The Long War, like previous epochal wars, brought into being a new form of the State—the market-state. The previous form—the constitutional order of the nation-state—is now everywhere under siege.

As a result of the Long War, the State is being transformed, and this transformation is constitutional in nature, by which I mean we will change our views as to the basic
raison d'être
of the State, the legitimating purpose that animates the State and sets the terms of the State's strategic endeavors.

The nation-state's model of statecraft links the sovereignty of a state to its territorial borders. Within these borders a state is supreme with respect to its law, and beyond its borders a state earns the right of recognition and intercourse to the extent that it can defend its borders. Today this model confronts several deep challenges. Because the international order of nation-states is constructed on the foundation of this model of state sovereignty, developments that cast doubt on that sovereignty call the entire system into question.

Five such developments do so: (i) the recognition of human rights as norms that require adherence within all states, regardless of their internal laws; (2) the widespread deployment of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction that render the defense of state borders ineffectual for the protection of the society within; (3) the proliferation of global and transnational threats that transcend state borders, such as those that damage the environment, or threaten states through migration, population expansion, disease, or famine; (4) the growth of a world economic regime that ignores borders in the movement of capital investment to a degree that effectively curtails states in the management of their economic affairs; and (5) the creation of a global communications network that penetrates borders electronically and threatens national languages, customs, and cultures. As a consequence, a constitutional order will arise that reflects these five developments and indeed exalts them as requirements that only this new order can meet. The emergence of a new basis for the State will also change the constitutional assumptions of the international society of states, for that framework too derives from the domestic consti-tutional rationale of its constituent members.

Ever since Max Weber,
¹
scholars have argued that a revolution in military affairs brought forth the modern state by requiring an organized system of finance and administration in order for societies to defend themselves. Accepting this premise, however, it is unclear precisely which revolution in military affairs actually brought the modern state into being. Was it the use of mobile artillery in the sixteenth century that abruptly rendered the castles and moats of the Middle Ages useless? Or was it the Gunpowder Revolution of the seventeenth century that replaced the shock tactics of pikemen with musket fire? Or the rise in professionalism within the military in the eighteenth century and the cabinet wars this made possible (or was it the change in tactics that accompanied mass conscription in the nineteenth century) ? One important consequence of asking this question in this way is that it assumes that there has been only one form of the modern state: the nation-state. If, as many believe, the nation-state is dying owing to the five developments mentioned above, then this scholarly debate about the birth of the state has consequences for its death.

But if we see, on the contrary, that
each
of the important revolutions in military affairs enabled a political revolution in the fundamental constitutional order of the State, then we will be able not only to better frame the scholarly debate but also to appreciate that the death of the nation-state by no means presages the end of the State. Moreover, we will then be able to see aright the many current political conflicts that arise from the friction between the decaying nation-state and the emerging market-state, conflicts that have parallels in the past when one constitutional order was replaced by another and led to civil strife within the State and spurred novel and deadly conflict abroad. Finally, we will be better prepared to craft new strategies for the use of force that are appropriate to this new constitutional order—and vice versa.

Every society has a constitution. Of course not all of these are written constitutions—the British constitution, for example, is unwritten. Nor does every society happen to require a state. But every society—the Vineyard Haven Yacht Club no less than the Group of Eight—has a constitution because to be a society is to be constituted in some particular way. If a revolution in military affairs enables the triumph of certain constitutional order in war, then the peace conferences that ratify such triumphs set the terms for admission to the society of legitimate states, a society that is reconstituted after each great epochal war on the basis of a consensus among states. Each great peace conference that ended an epochal war wrote a constitution for the society of states.

Yet all constitutions also carry within themselves the seeds of future conflict. The 1789 U.S. constitution was pregnant with the 1861 civil war because it contained, in addition to a bill of rights, provisions for slavery and provincial autonomy. Similarly the international constitution created at Westphalia in 1648, no less than those created at Vienna in 1815 or Utrecht in 1713, set the terms for the conflict to come even while it settled the conflict just ended. The importance of this idea in our present period of transition is that we can shape the next epochal war if we appreciate its inevitability and also the different forms it may take. I believe that we face the task of developing cooperative practices that will enable us to undertake a series of low-intensity conflicts. Failing this, we will face an international environment of increasingly violent anarchy and, possibly, a cataclysmic war in the early decades of the twenty-first century.