THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  There was some further maneuvering. Bismarck leaked to The Times a handwritten draft of a treaty by Benedetti that spoke of France acquiring Belgium (without disclosing the date, which was 1866), and this doubtless reinforced the decision of the British not to get involved. But the main brake on intervention by third parties was the general understanding of the situation by the great powers: as in 1866 they completely misread what was actually happening. The leaderships in these states were convinced that this was a war to adjust international tensions, that it involved a local territorial conflict that would be resolved by a limited war. They had lived so long within the rules of the Vienna system that they appear to have thought them self-executing. All states knew it was in the self-interest of the state-nation system to avoid the destruction of any other state; the constitutional form of the state-nation and its precarious relation to the public demanded this restraint, as Castlereagh had taught. They were unprepared for a strategic challenge shaped by a new kind of state, whose constitutional legitimacy required the destruction of the system that had prevented German national unification. If Prussia was to establish itself as the legitimate state of the German nation, the system of collective security that had kept the German people fragmented must be smashed and a new method of validation for the State put in its place.

  The German mobilization order came on the night of July 15, 1870. When complete the Prussian army had over a million men under arms. Against this the French—who fielded a professional, veteran force, experienced in combat, with modern weapons—could at best call on 350,000. In eighteen days, six Prussian rail lines and three additional lines for South Germans transported ten corps, 426,000 troops, to the front. By August 18, one of the two main French armies had fallen back on the fortress of Metz, which capitulated after a long siege. The other French force, attempting to relieve the fortress, was intercepted, driven against the Belgian frontier at Sedan, and surrounded. It surrendered on September 1 with Napoleon III and 104,000 men, who became prisoners of war.

  The Germans invested Paris on September 18 but held only a narrow corridor to the capital. The French still had significant resources. Four new armies were raised in the French provinces. Bismarck, concerned that time was inevitably on the side of the French, who commanded the sea and could thereby bring fresh supplies from abroad, demanded an immediate bombardment of Paris. Moltke demurred, on grounds that he lacked sufficient guns for an effective attack, and argued that an unsuccessful bombardment would merely strengthen resistance. The king, however, sided with Bismarck, and as more heavy artillery arrived, Moltke commenced a furious shelling of the city on January 5, 1871. Armistice negotiations began on January 23 and Paris surrendered on January 28.

  William I was proclaimed emperor of Germany in January at Versailles, the southern states having signed treaties the preceding month creating a united German state. Sovereignty lay in the Bundesrat, but the leading role of Prussia was obvious: of the sixty-one votes in this assembly, Prussia had seventeen, Bavaria six, Saxony and Wurttemberg four each, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt three each, and all the others one apiece. Bismarck became the imperial chancellor, the only responsible federal minister, replicating on the national scale his precarious but decisive role in the Prussian parliament. In September he had electrified Europe by demanding the cession of Alsace-Lorraine. It is still debated whether this was the result of an attempt to capitalize on German nationalist sentiment or was rather the natural aggrandizement of a supremely successful military campaign. In all likelihood it was neither: restoring these ancient lands, which had been taken from Germany by France, was a way of creating a certain kind of state, a state that the nation felt belonged to it.

  This was not lost on all other national leaders. In England, Benjamin Disraeli—who did as much to create the nation-state in Britain as any other nineteenth century leader—remarked with much prescience to Parliament in February 1871:

  This war represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of last century… Not a single principle on the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. You have a new world…91

  Unification was both the outcome of, and in some cases the cure for, nationalism. German nationalism, which sought to embody the political and cultural aspirations of the German people, was employed as a means of stifling Danish and Polish nationalism. Italian nationalism crushed the incipient national revolts in Naples and the national ambitions of Venetia. In both Italy and Germany, it would be as correct to say that a single state-nation conquered the others and transformed itself and them, as to say that a new state arose from the coming together of independent, ethnically connected states.

  After 1871, a new society of nation-states gradually emerged. Its mood was one of easily inflamed nationalism and ethnic truculence. This reflected the public mood, excited by the press on a scale impossible before the spread of free compulsory public education and vastly increased literacy. Three new ideas vied in the public mind for attention and allegiance: Darwinism, which had been easily adulterated into a social credo of competitiveness and national survivalism; Marxism, with its hostility to the capitalist relationships of the industrial age; and bourgeois parliamentarianism, which promoted the rule of law in a national and an international society that was becoming increasing credulous about the role that law

  could play. It was thus an age of faith in law even if the bases for legal consensus were at the time being quickly eroded, an age of anxiety in class relationships, an age of ethnomania within states. The contrast with the world it replaced could not have been greater.* One can scarcely imagine a leader of a state-nation speaking as Bismarck did in explaining the new spirit of the age:

  Who rules in France or Sardinia is a matter of indifference to me once the government is recognized and only a question of fact, not of right…. [F]or me France will remain France, whether it is governed by Napoleon or St. Louis…. I know that you will reply that fact and right cannot be separated, that a properly conceived Prussian policy requires chastity in foreign affairs even from the point of view of utility. I am prepared to discuss the point of utility with you; but if you posit antinomies between right and revolution; Christianity and infidelity; God and the devil; I can argue no longer and can merely say, “I am not of your opinion and you judge in me what is not yours to judge.”92

  This is the authentic voice of the nation-state. Regimes may come and go, but the nation endures. International law conformed itself to this new society: how a government came to power was of no relevance so long as the fact of its control over a nation could be established.† Self-determination—the right of nations to have states of their own—became the only principle recognized in international law that detracted from the axiomatic legitimacy of the government that was in control.

  It was obvious at the time that the nation-state bore certain strategic risks that were inherent in the kind of political society on which such a state depends.‡ In his last public statement, in 1890, Moltke issued an ominous and melancholy warning. With such states, the old warrior said, which depended upon and at the same time inflamed popular passions, future wars could last “seven and perhaps thirty years.”93 This Tiresian forecast takes us back to Part I and the Long War.

  There are, of course, other examples of the transition from state-nation to nation-state. Lincoln brought about the first of these constitutional transformations. As James McPherson aptly puts it, “The United States went to war in 1861 to preserve the Union; it emerged from war in 1865 having created a nation.”94 This constitutional transformation, like the others we have studied, was accompanied by a revolution in strategy. Indeed, it may be said that it was Lee's adoption of the state-nation tactics of Napoleon I—tactics at which Lee excelled—that ultimately proved fatal to the Southern cause in the American Civil War. In the Wars of the French Revolution, Napoleon had been able to blast a hole in the enemy's line with canister
fired by massed batteries of artillery, using fire against a line in much the same way a breach in a fortress wall might be opened. But by the time of the Civil War, infantry were armed with the Minié ball rifle, which had a greater effective range than canister. Moreover, with a range four times that of the smooth-bore musket carried by Napoleon's troops, the rifled barrels of the Union soldiers at Gettysburg doomed the frontal assaults that had been favored by the Grande Armée. Neither cannon nor charges could dislodge an entrenched defensive position, 95 and indeed the campaigns of 1864 – 1865 were marked by extensive entrenchments and field fortifications.96 By the end of the Civil War, major battles had more in common with operations on the Western Front in World War I—the initial campaigns of the nation-state's epochal war—than with early Civil War battles like First Manassas or Shiloh. But it was not the constitutional and strategic developments in America that gave Europe its model for the nation-state, in any case.*

  One state more than any other in Europe had used the new developments in warfare to change itself. The Prussian solution to the danger of arming the public and the requirement of vast numbers of soldiers to exploit the opportunities of decisive battle was to militarize the entire society. After the 1873 depression, the German state nationalized the railroads, introduced compulsory social insurance, and increased its intervention in the economy—in order to maximize the welfare of the nation.97 Through-out the nineteenth century Britain refused to adopt a mass conscript army; it was Prussia that militarized as it industrialized. The railways, telegraph, and standardization of machined tools that industrialization made possible allowed for dizzying increases in the speed and mobility of military dispositions. The use of the telegraph, in concert with the railroad, allowed generals to mass widely dispersed forces quickly and to coordinate their operations over a vast theatre. During the Civil War, the Union Army shifted 25,000 troops, with artillery and baggage, over 1,100 miles of rail lines from Virginia to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in less than ten days. An entire society could be mobilized for war, replenishing the front when necessary as the conflict progressed. But this was only possible if that entire society could be made a party to the war. This was the contribution of the nation-state. Far from being the paradoxical fact it is sometimes presented as, Bismarck's championing of the first state welfare systems in modern Europe, including the first social security program, was crucial to the perception of the State as deliverer of the people's welfare.* If the wars of the state-nations were wars of the State that were made into wars of the peoples, then the wars of the nation-states were national wars, championing causes that had deep popular support, and that were fought on behalf of popular ideals. The legitimation of the nation-state thus depends upon its success at maintaining modern life; a severe economic depression will undermine its legitimacy in a way that far more severe financial crises scarcely shook earlier regimes.98

  Bismarck essentially bargained with the peoples of the various states of the North German Confederation to deliver German nationalism by means of Prussian aggression. There was no a priori reason why Prussia, feared and in many German quarters hated, was the natural leader of German nationalism nor any reason why Austria could not have been Germany's champion. The difficulty for Austria lay in the fact that it was necessarily a state-nation: its empire was composed of so many nationalities that it could not, constitutionally, adapt. The difficulty for the liberal states of the Confederation was that they could not marshal the material resources to exploit the military revolution wrought by industrialization. Only Prussia was without both these handicaps. Thus Prussia was the first European state to successfully unite the strategic and constitutional innovations of its time. Koniggratz, Gravelotte, and Sedan redeemed the Prussian pledge, and, in the doing, created a modern nation-state defined by the ethnicity of its people.

  This new form of the state undertook to guide and manage the entire society, because without the total effort of all sectors of society, modern warfare could not be successfully waged. Not only the power of the State but its responsibility as well were extended into virtually all areas of civil life. All aspects of life were accordingly promised to improve. We hear its voice in Wilhelm II's famous assertion, “Herrlichen Zeiten führe ich euch noch entgegen” (“they are marvelous times towards which I will yet lead you”), 99 a public relations remark one can scarcely imagine in the mouth of his dignified and reticent grandfather.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Study of the Modern State

  All wars are so many attempts to bring about new relations among the states and to form new bodies by the break-up of the old states to the point where they cannot again maintain themselves alongside each other and must therefore suffer revolutions until finally, partly through the best possible arrangement of the civic constitution internally, and partly through the common agreement and legislation externally, there is created a state that, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.

  —Kant, Idea for a Universal History

  with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784)

  OPEN ANY TEXTBOOK on constitutional law and you will find discussions of the regulation of commerce and the power of taxation, religious and racial accommodation, class and wealth conflicts, labor turmoil and free speech, but little or nothing on war.* The same is true of treatises on jurisprudence and legal theory. Yet who would deny the constitution-shaping experiences of war on the modern state? Think of the constitution of Japan, which was imposed by war; or that of Napoleonic France, which was extinguished by war; or that of the United States, which was established as a reaction to a revolutionary war and then transformed by a civil war. Even the discussion of the American Civil War is traced by such treatises mainly for its doctrinal effect, though in fact a civil war is the most revealing of the constitutional structure of the State because it lays open the anatomy of the body politic.

  Open any textbook on war and you will find chapters on strategy, the causes of wars, limited war, nuclear weapons, even the ethics of war, but nothing on the constitutions of societies that make war—nothing, that is, on what people are fighting to protect, to assert, to aggrandize. A constitution is not merely the document that manifests the ways in which a society recognizes the rights of family, of property, of land and personal security, of commerce, of ethnicity and religious commitment, and of government itself: rather a constitution is these ways. Societies, all societies, are constituted in a certain way, and this way is their constitution. States, which direct the political affairs of most national societies, are also constituted in a particular way, and this is not merely reflected in their law, it is their law. But even the more sophisticated contemporary books on geopolitics do not deign to mention law, unless it is to denigrate lawyers and “legalistic” thinking. And so it is that the fundamental force fields of the State—the relation between law and war, and between legitimacy and violence: relations that yield the State's most basic expression of its identity, indeed that gave birth to the modern state—are rarely even mentioned, much less addressed. These relations, these force fields, are simultaneous: it is only when the State is authorized by the society to defend that society with violence that the State is also accorded the monopoly on violence domestically, and is accorded the right by the society of states to resist external coercion. History discloses no examples of states that have given up the constitutional authority to deploy domestic or international violence without ceasing to be states.

  The State has two primary functions: to distribute questions appropriately among the various allocation methods internal to the society, determining what sorts of problems will be decided in what sorts of ways; 1 and to defend that unique pattern of allocation by asserting its territorial and temporal jurisdiction vis-à-vis other states. These two tasks are, respectively, the work of constitutional law and strategy. History—the self-understanding of the society—is what enables the legitimation of constitutional law and strategy because history provides the means of giving an account of the Stat
e's stewardship—whether the State has fulfilled the requirement of its particular constitutional order.

  In the preceding chapters it has been argued that there is a mutually affecting relationship between strategy and constitutional law such that some strategic challenges are of so great a magnitude that, rather than merely requiring more taxes, or more bureaucrats, or longer periods of war service, they encourage and even demand constitutional adaptations; and that some constitutional changes are of such magnitude that they enable and sometimes require strategic innovation. One cannot say whether, because of the development of light infantry and novel artillery tactics, the eighteenth century state was superseded by a state that could exploit the human material of the masses, as for example occurred with the Prussian constitutional reforms of 1806, or whether, owing to the revolutionary constitutional changes of 1789 in France that destroyed the army of the ancien régime and brought forth a surge of popular enthusiasm for the new state, new military policies, like the levée en masse and Napoleon's tactics, came into being. Both are persuasive accounts of the birth of the state-nation and the death of the territorial state. Both of these narratives culminate in the copying of the new constitutional order of the State and of its strategic inventions by other states that cast off the old forms.2 Strategy and the constitutional order are mutually entailed. The common element to these two subjects lies in the state's quest for legitimacy.*