Thus we won't be able to reassure our peer competitors because we will fail to appreciate the true threats they face. Instead, mesmerized by “rogue states” whose hostility to the United States is essentially a by-product of our global reach that frustrates their regional ambitions, we will find ourselves increasingly at odds with the other great powers. Until we know what will serve the function of maintaining the Alliance that has become a proto-world order, we know not what to assure our allies of (or insure them against). The problem for the United States has become to identify its interests and future threats so that it can use its power to strengthen the world order that it has fought, successfully, to achieve, and that can, if properly structured and maintained, re-enforce American security to a far greater degree than the United States could possibly do alone. This is essentially an intellectual problem, just as the solution devised by the United States and its allies to the universal vulnerability that attended the development of nuclear weapons was an intellectual solution.16 But faced with the immense difficulties of anticipating a new strategic environment—both at the state level, where peer competitors may emerge as threats, and at the technological level, where weapons of mass destruction make nonsense out of our defense preparations—who is eager to take the bureaucratic and political risks inherent in accepting this challenge?17 How much more likely it is that we will extrapolate from the world we know, with incompetent villains and heroic (and recent!) success stories.
Our present world, this “Indian summer”* as one writer puts it, not only presents a beguiling invitation to complacency reinforced by new technological possibilities. It also offers an opportunity to undertake some fundamental reassessments without the terrible pressure of war. Recent American successes in the Gulf War and in Yugoslavia, however, may tend to discourage any too-radical revisions.
Paul Bracken correctly concludes,
The focus on the immediate means that a larger, more important question is not being asked: should planners redesign the U.S. military for an entirely new operational environment, taking account of revolutionary changes in military technology and the possible appearance of entirely new kinds of competitors?18
And Fred Iklé adds that
... military planners, as well as most scholars, would shrug off these cosmic questions and instead nibble at the edges of the problem—worrying, say, about whether a tactical nuclear weapon could be stolen in Russia and sold to Iran, or whether Iraq might still be hiding some Second World War–type biological or chemical agents.19
A failure to take seriously the new strategic environment can have costly consequences in the domestic theatre as well. Should the use of a weapon of mass destruction occur, the state in which this happens will undergo a crisis in its constitutional order. How it prepares for this crisis will determine the fate of its society, not only its sheer survival, but the conditions of that survival. Some societies may become police states in an effort to protect themselves; some may disintegrate because they cannot agree on how to protect themselves.
The constitutional order of a state and its strategic posture toward other states together form the inner and outer membrane of a state. That membrane is secured by violence; without that security, a state ceases to exist. What is distinctive about the State is the requirement that the violence it deploys on its behalf must be legitimate; that is, it must be accepted within as a matter of law, and accepted without as an appropriate act of state sovereignty. Legitimacy must cloak the violence of the State, or the State ceases to be. Legitimacy, however, is a matter of history and thus is subject to change as new events emerge from the future and new understandings reinterpret the past. In the following chapters, we will see how the standards against which state legitimacy is measured have undergone profound change, animated by innovations in the strategic environment and transformations of the constitutional order of states.
It is often said today that the nation-state is defunct.20 Recently, in a single year, two books were published with almost identical titles, The End of the Nation-State21 and The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies.22 To these can now be added Martin van Creveld's distinguished The Rise and Decline of the State.23 There are skeptics, however, who point out that both nationalism and the State are thriving enterprises. Moreover, for all the transfer of functions to the private sector, we don't really want the State to fade away altogether. There are many things we want the State and not the private sector to do because we want our politics rather than the market to resolve certain kinds of difficult choices. And, it must be conceded, the market itself has need of the State to set the legal framework that permits the market to function.
What is wrong in this debate over the demise of the nation-state is the identification of the nation-state with the State itself. We usually date the origin of the nation-state to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years' War and recognized a constitutional system of states. In fact, however, the nation-state is relatively new—being little more than a century old—and has been preceded by other forms of the State, including forms that long antedated the Thirty Years' War. The nation-state is dying, but this only means that, as in the past, a new form is being born. This new form, the market-state, will ultimately be defined by its response to the strategic threats that have made the nation-state no longer viable. Differ-ent models of this form will contend. It is our task to devise means by which this competition can be maintained without its becoming fatal to the competitors.
PART I
THE LONG WAR OF THE NATION-STATE
THESIS: THE WAR THAT BEGAN IN 1914 WILL COME TO BE SEEN AS HAVING LASTED UNTIL 1990.
Epochal wars can embrace several conflicts that were thought to be separate wars by the participants, may comprise periods of apparent peace (even including elaborate peace treaties), and often do not maintain the same lineup of enemies and allies throughout. The Long War—which includes the First and Second World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, and the Cold War—like earlier epochal wars, was fought over a fundamental constitutional question: which sort of nation-state—communist, fascist, or parliamentary—would lay claim to the legitimacy previously enjoyed by the imperial state-nations of the nineteenth century.
MCMXIV
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist; and the pubs
Wide open all day—
And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer;
Never such innocence again.
—Philip Larkin
CHAPTER ONE
Thucydides and the Epochal War
THUCYDIDES WROTE the classical masterpiece The Peloponnesian War during his exile from Athens. That exile began in 424 B.C. as a consequence of the loss of Amphipolis where he had been commander of the Athenian forces, ending the period in which
he had served as an Athenian general in Thrace. He is believed to have begun his history of the war between Athens and Sparta in the years after 421 B.C., that is, after the signing of the Peace of Nicias that ended the Ten Years' War, as it was known to him and to his contemporaries. Yet he is not generally known to us as the author of a “History of the Ten Years' War.”1
It is clear from the way in which he concludes his account of this war in the perfect tense before beginning his famous “second preface” that he regarded this war, and its history, as complete. It was only after 413 B.C. that Thucydides conceived the idea of the series of conflicts between Athens and Sparta as a single continuing war. At this point he decided to incorporate this first book—the history of the Ten Years' War—into the larger work.
Why was this? Thucydides did not make this decision after the final defeat of Athens; the main body of Books VI and VII was written when he was still in exile, well before the end of the war. Rather it seems to have been an Athenian raid in 414 B.C. that made clear that the issues of the Ten Years' War had not been fully resolved. So it is with all epochal wars—the Hundred Years' War,2 the Thirty Years' War,3 the Punic Wars4—and so it will be seen of the war of the twentieth century. Historians classify such epochal wars as constituting a single historical event because, despite often lengthy periods in which there is no armed conflict, the various engagements of the war never decisively settle the issues that manage to reassert themselves through conflict. Whereas we commonly think that the aspirations at the outset of war will determine its closure, it is in fact the dynamic interplay between strategy and the legitimating goals of the state that must be satisfied before we can say that a particular war is really over. The goals of the warring states must be compromised or otherwise the means of pursuing those goals by violence will be taken up again. When constitutional issues come into play there is little room for compromise; the loss of the issue can mean the loss of the state itself.
It may take some time, and some disagreement, before a consensus among historians is reached on the war of the twentieth century. The term “Thirty Years' War” appeared in 1649 in the English weekly newspaper The Moderate Intelligencer, shortly after the end of that war in 1648.5 A journalist from that paper linked the various religious wars fought in Europe after the rebellion in 1618 of Protestant Bohemia against its Catholic ruler, Ferdinand of Habsburg, later the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. Other historians since have also tied these various wars together, though some begin somewhat earlier (1566) with the Dutch/ Calvinist revolt against the Spanish,6 which undoubtedly had a religious dimension. For these historians, the epochal war is the Ninety Years' War. Still others break up the struggle into two epochal wars: one beginning with the 1618 Bohemian revolt, and another commencing with the Swedish invasion of Bavaria in 1630, which was a more typical war among great powers. For historians of this perspective, such as Bishop Gepeckh of Freising, there were two separate wars: a Twelve Years' War and an Eighteen Years' War.7 All of these wars have in common that they end with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Yet other historians, who emphasize the political and secular dimensions of the conflict, see it as continuing until the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 or the Peace of Copenhagen in 1660.8 And one is not necessarily more correct than another: if the historian views the war as having arisen from sectarian differences, it is nevertheless true that by the end of the war Europe had been politicized, secularized, and rationalized to a degree inconceivable at the beginning of the struggle, when theological convictions so preoccupied Europeans that national, social, and patriotic considerations were subordinated.9
Similarly, although the actual phrase “Hundred Years' War” apparently was not used until the nineteenth century, historians two centuries earlier saw the conflict as a single epochal war, even if they disagreed as to its precise dates. As with the Thirty Years' War, the disagreement turns on what the ultimate issues are taken to be. Francois de Mezeray in his Histoire de France in 1643 considered the Anglo-French struggles to constitute a single war beginning in 1337 and lasting one hundred sixty years.10 Most historians today start the war in 1328 (the date that Philip VI of France confiscated the French property of the English king Edward III and the year that Edward obtained a claim to the French throne) or 1340 (the year that Edward declared himself to be king of France), but some see the war between England and France as an Anglo-French civil war—because the kings of England were feudal lords of France—lasting from 1294 until 1558 (the date England lost her last holding in France and ninety-five years after the usual date for the end of the war when the English were removed from all of France except Calais).11 The reasons given by the contending scholarly parties to this historical controversy assume the same fundamental premise: a single epochal war encompasses shorter wars, interposed with periods of little or no fighting, when a central issue links the constituent conflicts and remains unresolved until the ultimate settlement. Therefore, whether an epochal war can be said to encompass other particular wars depends on what issue the historian believes was central to all the linked conflicts, even if this issue only becomes clear in the course of the conflict itself. This is the lesson of Thucydides.12
Thucydides did not live to see his epochal war carried to its conclusion, when Macedon put an end to the constitutional order of Greek city-states and proved that only a larger empire could maintain itself and defend Greece. This event, like the war that preceded it, provides an overture to the narrative that follows.
CHAPTER TWO
The Struggle Begun: Fascism, Communism, Parliamentarianism,
1914 – 1919
WE SHOULD REGARD the conflicts now commonly called the First World War, the Second World War, and the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, as well as the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the Cold War as a single war because all were fought over a single set of constitutional issues that were strategically unresolved until the end of the Cold War and the Peace of Paris in 1990.
The Long War (as I shall call it) was fought to determine what kind of state would supersede the imperial states of Europe that emerged in the nineteenth century after the end of the wars of the French Revolution (a war that also appeared as a series of engagements and discrete wars until the Congress of Vienna resolved the fundamental questions at issue). These states dominated Europe and eventually the world until the collapse of the European system in 1914. The Long War was fought to determine which of three new constitutional forms would replace that system: parliamentary democracy, communism, or fascism.
What propelled this cataclysm? What put these three particular alternatives in play? It was the instability of two states, Germany and Russia, within whose domestic societies these three options furiously contended. Once Germany and Russia were taken over by one of the radical alternatives to the parliamentary systems outside these states, Germany and the Soviet Union attempted to legitimate their regimes by making their systems the dominant arrangement in world affairs. As we shall see in Part I, the legitimacy of the constitutional order we call the nation-state depended upon its claim to better the well-being of the nation. Each of these three constitutional alternatives promised to do so best. Within every state, these alternatives contended, but it was the triumph of the radical alternatives in two Great Powers that led to the Long War. To understand this it is necessary to begin with the German struggle to create a nation-state.
FASCISM
After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 full recognition was given to the sovereignty of both Catholic and Protestant German princes of the Holy Roman Empire—that, indeed, was the key solution to the conflict. Thus, despite paper provisions to the contrary, the Empire ceased to exist in practical terms. It had no common treasury, no authoritative common tribunals, and no means of coercing dissenting member states. In place of the Empire, there was only a collection of weak and disorganized states divided by religious affiliation.1 This collection of states faced the great continental powers of France, Russia, and Austria, and the g
reat maritime powers of Holland and England, all of whom had consolidated themselves constitutionally in the seventeenth century. These Great Powers were thus not joined by a great German state.
Not until the middle of the nineteenth century did one German state, Prussia, impose its rule on the others and create the first European nation-state.* From its beginning the German state was hostile to the prevailing international system and its creators, which had hitherto provided models for a German state. We owe to Bismarck the decisive strategy of separating German national aspirations from the liberal background that had formerly nurtured them. He accomplished this through the adroit use of war, defeating in turn both Austria-Hungary and France, the two states that had dominated German politics since Westphalia. This allowed him to place at the apex of the German state a radically conservative, militarist class whose only claim to pan-German legitimacy was that it alone was able to realize the ambitions of national unity. German nationalism†—a program that held that a state was legitimated by its service to a pre-eminent ethnic nation—was the prototype for fascism, as its expression in the Constitution of 1871 confirms.2
Bismarck did not so much unify as conquer the other German states and then proceed to transform their politics by delivering German unity under a popular doctrine of militarism and ethnic nationalism. This put fascism on the table as a competitor to the parliamentary systems. But that would not necessarily have led to war had the question of constitutional legitimacy not arisen within the new German state. It is useful to remember that Bismarck's goal had been “to achieve German unity without revolution so as to fend off the social consequences of successful revolution,” as Geoffrey Barraclough has put it.3 When Bismark's successors were threatened by a Social Democratic electoral victory in 1912, they found the moment to attempt an ambitious strategic program of European conquest. Germany sought through an attack on the pre-existing empires of Europe a means of vindicating its claim to destiny that would, perforce, also vindicate its autocratic regime's claim to legitimacy. Indeed, we might think of the situation in Germany in 1914 as replicating that of Europe as a whole: within, as without, Berlin sought to defeat the movement for parliamentary self-government and the threat of revolution, the two other options contending for the future of Europe. This point is powerfully supported by the path-breaking work of the historian Fritz Fischer.4 Whatever may have been the case when Barbara Tuchman wrote her popular and influential Guns of August, or A.J.P. Taylor his War by Timetable: How the First World War Began, it is impossible to maintain today,* in light of German archival research, that World War I was all a ghastly mistake, unintended by any of the parties, the result of complicated alliances and railroad timetables.5
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