THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER

  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.

  While it is commonly assumed that the nuclear great powers would not (because they need not) use nuclear weapons in an era in which they do not threaten each other, in fact the new era that we are entering makes their use by a great power more likely than in the last half century. Deterrence and assured retaliation, as well as overwhelming conventional force, which together laid the basis for the victory of the coalition of parliamentary nation-states in the Cold War era, cannot provide a similar stability in the era of the market-state to come because the source of the threats to a state are now at once too ubiquitous and too easy to disguise. We cannot deter an attacker whose identity is unknown to us, and the very massiveness of our conventional forces makes it unlikely we will be challenged openly. As a consequence, we are just beginning to appreciate the need for a shift from target, threat-based assessments to vulnerability analyses.* What is less appreciated is the consequent loss of intrawar deterrence† and the implications of this loss with respect to the actual use of nuclear weapons. To illustrate this paradox consider this example: Nuclear weapons do not deter biological warfare (because its true perpetrators can be easily disguised), and yet a nuclear strike is probably the only feasible means of destroying a biological stockpile that is easy to hide and fortify in a subterranean vault. As we shall see, the possibilities of nuclear pre-emptive strikes, draconian internal repression, and fitful retaliation all accompany the scenarios of weakened deterrence and disguised attacks, and all can lead to cataclysmic wars between states that would otherwise studiedly avoid such confrontations. Even though the possibility of cataclysmic war threatens the twenty-first century, however, defensive systems can play a far more useful role than they could in the previous period, when they tended to weaken deterrence.

  At the same time that we have experienced these quiet yet disturbing changes in the strategic environment, there have been ongoing low-intensity conflicts of the kind we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Palestine, and elsewhere, which are being transformed by the information revolution. Remote, once local tribal wars have engaged the values and interests of all the great powers because these conflicts have been exported into the domestic populations of those powers through immigration empathy, and terrorism.

  What is rarely noted is the relation between cataclysmic and low-intensity wars and the constitution of the society of market-states that will have to fight them. There can be no peace settlement without war, but there can be peace making. If we can successfully manage the consensus interventions of the great powers in low-intensity conflicts—as we have done, finally, in the former state of Yugoslavia—we will have constructed a new constitution for the society of market-states, thereby avoiding the systemic breakdown that provokes more generally catastrophic war. It may be that the very vulnerability of the critical infrastructures of the developed world, which invites, even necessitates, great-power cooperation, will then provide a basis for strengthening the society of states through information sharing and market cooperation.

  HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE EMERGING

  WORLD ORDER OF MARKET-STATES

  There is a widespread sense that we are at a pivotal point in history—but why is it pivotal? This book offers an answer: that we are at one of a half dozen turning points that have fundamentally changed the way societies are organized for governance. It identifies this change and shows how it is related to five previous such pivotal moments that began with the emergence of the modern state at the time of the Renaissance. It lays bare the neglected relationship between the strategic and the constitutional—the outer and inner faces of the State. Yet, this book is just as concerned with the future as it is with the past, laying out alternative possible worlds of the twenty-first century.

  The modern state came into existence when it proved necessary to organize a constitutional order that could wage war more effectively than the feudal and mercantile orders it replaced. The emergence of a new form of the State and the decay of an old one is part of a process that goes back to the very beginning of the modern state, perhaps to the beginning of civil society itself. That process takes place in the fusing of the inner and outer dominions of authority: law and strategy.

  Whether war or law is the initial object of innovation, constitutional and strategic change inevitably ensue, and new forms of the State are the result of the interaction. Each new form of the State is distinguished by its unique basis for legitimacy—the historical claim it makes that entitles the State to power.

  A great epochal war has just ended. The various competing systems of the contemporary nation-state (fascism, communism, parliamentarianism) that fought that war all took their legitimacy from the promise to better the material welfare of their citizens. The market-state offers a different covenant: it will maximize the opportunity of its people. Not only the world in which we live but also the world that is now emerging is more comprehensible and more insistent once this historical development is appreciated and explored for the implications it holds for the fate of civilization itself.

  The emergence of the market-state will produce conflict in every society as the old ways of the superseded nation-state (its use of law to bring about certain desired moral outcomes, for example) fall away. This emergence will also produce alternative systems that follow different versions of the market-state in London, Singapore, or Paris, and this development could also lead to conflict. Most important, however, the global society of market-states will face lethal security challenges in an era of weakened governments and impotent formal international institutions. And these challenges will pose difficult internal problems as well, as every developed, postindustrial state struggles to maintain democracy and civil liberties in the face of new technological threats to its well-being.

  A society of market-states, however, will be good at setting up markets. This facility could bring about an international system that rewards peaceful states and stimulates opportunity in education, productivity, investment, environmental protection, and public health by sharing the technologies that are crucial to advancement in these areas. And these habits of collaboration can provide precedents for security cooperation; for example, the United States can develop ballistic missile defense technology or fissile material sensors that can be licensed to threatened countries. The technology for safer nuclear energy can be provided as a way, perhaps the only way, of halting global w
arming while assisting Third World economic development. A state's internal difficulties can be dealt with—perhaps can only be dealt with—through international information sharing that the market makes feasible. Markets, on the other hand, are not very good at assuring political representation or giving equal voice to every group. Unaided by the assurance that the political process will not be subordinated to the most powerful market actors, markets can become targets of the alienated and of those who are disenfranchised by any shift away from national or ethnic institutions.

  The decisions that arise from the emergence of the market-state are already, or will soon be, upon us, but they are often disguised if they are not seen in the context of this new form of the State.

  THE FUTURE OF THE STATE

  The pattern of epochal wars and state formation, of peace congresses and international constitutions, has played out for five centuries to the end of the millennium just past. A new constitutional order—the market-state—is about to emerge. But if the pattern of earlier eras is to be repeated, then we await a new, epochal war with state-shattering consequences. Many persons see war as an illness of states, a pathology that no healthy state need suffer. This way of looking at things more or less disables us from shaping future wars, as we search, fruitlessly, for the wonder serum that will banish war once and for all (or as we plan to fight wars we know—or believe—we can win). Yet we can shape future wars, even if we cannot avoid them. We can take decisions that will determine whether the next epochal war risks a general cataclysm.

  Whatever course is decided upon will be both constitutional and strategic in nature because these are the two faces of the modern state—the face the state turns toward its own citizens, and the face it turns toward the outside world of its competitors and collaborators. Each state develops its own constitutional order (its inward-facing profile) as well as its strategic paradigm (its outward-turned silhouette), and these two forms are logically and topologically inseparable. A state that privatizes most of its functions by law will inevitably defend itself by employing its own people as mercenaries—with profound strategic consequences. A state threatened with cyberattacks on its interdependent infrastructures can protect itself by virtually abolishing civil privacy or by increasing official surveillance and intelligence gathering or by expensively decentralizing. Each course has profound constitutional consequences.

  THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

  The Shield of Achilles treats the relationship between strategy and law. I had originally intended to publish this study in two volumes, corresponding to the different focus in each: whereas the first part of this work deals with the State, the second takes up the society of states; whereas the first is largely devoted to war and its interplay with the constitutional order of the State, the second concentrates on peace settlements and their structuring of the international order.

  I have come to see, however, that there is so intimate a connection between the epochal rhythms of state formation and the abrupt shifts in international evolution that a single volume is truer to my subject. Nevertheless, for readers interested in the history and future of war, Book I, “State of War,” can stand alone; for those interested in the history and future of international society, I believe Book II, “States of Peace,” can be read with profit by itself.

  At the beginning of each of the six Parts of this combined work, a general thesis is set forth as a kind of overture to the narrative argument that is then provided. Similarly, the poems that precede and follow each of the Parts reflect some of the motifs of the presentation.

  “State of War,” Book I of this work, focuses on the individual state; it is divided into three parts, which correspond to three general arguments.

  Part I, “The Long War of the Nation-State,” argues that the war that began in 1914 did not end until 1990. By looking at earlier epochal wars beginning with the Peloponnesian Wars, one can see how historians from Thucydides onward have determined whether a particular campaign is a completed war or only a part of a more extended conflict such as the Thirty Years' War. Epochal wars put the constitutional basis of the participants in play and do not truly end until the underlying constitutional questions are resolved. This is how it was with the Long War, which was fought to determine which of three alternatives—communism, fascism, or parliamentarianism—would replace the imperial constitutional orders of the nineteenth century. The Long War embraces conflicts we at present call the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the wars in Korea and Viet Nam, and the Cold War.

  Part II provides “A Brief History of the Modern State and the Constitutional Order”* beginning with the origin of the State in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century and ending with the events that began the Long War. These chapters assert the thesis that epochal wars have brought about profound changes in the constitutional order of states through a process of innovation and mimicry as some states are compelled to innovate, strategically and constitutionally, in order to survive, and as other states copy these innovations when they prove decisive in resolving the epochal conflict of an era. Sometimes the impetus comes from the constitutional side, as when the political changes wrought by the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century demanded tactical and strategic change to cope with the loss of a highly trained officer corps; sometimes the impetus was the reverse, as when the use of mobile artillery against the rich walled city-states of Italy in the early sixteenth century required the creation of bureaucracies and efficient systems of taxation. Most often the causality was mutual: strategic innovations (like the use of mass conscription) brought about changes in the constitutional order of the State—such as a broadened franchise and mass public education—and these constitutional changes in turn brought forth new tactical and strategic approaches that sought to exploit the possibilities created by the new domestic political environment, opportunities for innovations as different as terror bombing and the Officer Candidate School.

  Part III of Book I, “The Historic Consequences of the Long War,” argues that the Long War of the twentieth century was another such epochal war, and that it has brought about the emergence of a new form of the State, the market-state. These chapters address the situation of the United States, one of the first market-states, and suggest how this state will change both constitutionally and strategically as this new constitutional order comes to maturity.

  Related theses can be found elsewhere. The notion that state formation in Europe occurred as a result of a revolution in military tactics (a claim made by Michael Roberts and others), the “short century” thesis (the notion that the century began in 1914 and ended with the end of the Cold War) associated with Eric Hobsbawm, and even the notion that a new form of society is coming into being (proposed by Peter Drucker, among others) are well-known. My thesis, however, implies, but also depends upon, the constitutional/strategic dynamic of five centuries, and it is this dynamic that shapes the expectations I put forward about the future structure and purpose of the market-state.

  While Book I treats the individual state, Book II, “States of Peace,” deals with the subject of the society of states. The society of states, as described notably by the late Hedley Bull, is to be distinguished from the state system. The state system is a formal entity that is composed of states alone and defined by their formal treaties and agreements. The society of states, on the other hand, is composed of the formal and informal customs, rules, practices, and habits of states and encompasses many entities—like the Red Cross and CNN—that are not states at all. International law is usually defined in terms of the state system. There are, of course, exceptions to this way of looking at international law, particularly in the work of Myres McDougal and his followers. In Book II, I treat international law as the practices of the society of states rather than as an artifact of the state system. I argue that international law is a symptom of the triumph of a particular constitutional order within the individual states of which that society co
nsists (and is not therefore a consequence solely of the international acts of states). International law arises from constitutional law, not the other way around.

  Part I of Book II, “The Society of Nation-States,” deals with the society of states in which we currently live. It traces the origins of this society to the abortive peace that followed World War I and the American program that attempted to superimpose the U.S. constitutional model on the society of states. Part I then brings this plan forward to its collapse in Bosnia in the 1990s, and concludes with the claim that the society of nation-states is rapidly decaying. Although it is not novel to encounter a claim that the nation-state is dying, my thesis is markedly different from others because it derives from my general conclusion that the dying and regeneration of its constitutional orders are a periodic part of the history of the modern state. Those who write that the nation-state is finished are usually also of the view that the nation-state is synonymous with the modern state itself. Thus they are committed to maintaining that the State is withering away, a highly implausible view in my judgment. Once one sees, however, that there have been many forms of the modern state, one can appreciate that though the nation-state is in fact dying, the modern state is only undergoing one of its periodic transformations.

  Part II of Book II, “A Brief History of the Society of States and the International Order,” revisits the historic conflicts that have given the modern state its shape and which were the subject of Part II of Book I. In Book II, however, the perspective has changed. Here I am less concerned with epochal wars than I am with the peace agreements that ended those wars. Part II makes the claim that the society of modern states has had a series of constitutions, and that these constitutions were the outcome of the great peace congresses that ended epochal wars. The state conflicts discussed in Book I are taken up in Book II in terms of their peace conferences, culminating in the twentieth century with the Peace of Paris that ended the Long War in 1990. In these chapters, the emphasis is on international law rather than strategic conflict, though of course, consistent with my general thesis, the two subjects are treated as inextricably intertwined.