THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  Civil wars and revolutions are characteristic of transitional periods between constitutional forms as the old constitutional archetypes struggle against the birth of the new, 6 whereas epochal wars are transformative. The Dutch Revolt of 1567, the English Civil War, the Fronde, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War all began periods that encompassed epochal conflicts and a shift in the constitutional order. Epochal wars often include, and indeed are often begun by, revolutions and civil wars. These revolutions determine the possibilities; epochal wars make the choices; history provides the rationale.

  The link between the strategic and the constitutional is seldom drawn in contemporary affairs. There are notable exceptions to this: Michael Howard, 7 Geoffrey Parker, 8 Aaron Friedberg, 9 and Jeremy Black come to mind as military historians and analysts who have written with great sensitivity about the relationship between history and force; Anthony Giddens, 10 Peter Mancias, 11 and David Beetham12 are political sociologists who are keenly interested in the relationship between legitimacy and violence, about which each has written with real insight. The problem seems to be that the two groups so seldom talk to each other. The contemporary debate over a future national security paradigm for the United States provides a good example of such missed opportunities. Although this debate is at the very center of current policy planning, and is being carried on by persons of great ability, it has as yet yielded little practical benefit to decision makers.

  Why is it so difficult to decide when to use force today? Is it the nature of modern conflict with its nonstate actors, terrorism, transnational threats, and so on?13Or a more complex geopolitics perhaps, now that the Soviet Union has collapsed?* Or poor leadership? I think the difficulty is that before September 11, 2001, we didn't know what it was we were fighting for, and thus could not judge the appropriate costs. And that was because the market-state has not fully emerged or been fully realized and accepted by any society. So we did not yet agree on the fundamental constitutional order that we must secure. It was rather the attacks on this emerging order that gave it definition.

  Without an understanding of the Long War as such, the current search for a new security paradigm is apt to confuse this endeavor with the search for policies; unless we understand the paradigm from which we have emerged, we will not be able to free ourselves from the habit of thinking in its terms. And without an understanding of the constitutional source of war and the strategic basis for law, and, most important, the link between the two that has provided the choices that account for the transformations of the State over five centuries, we will be unprepared to understand the next transformation of the State and its strategic and constitutional consequences.

  The history of warfare is often at the center of the study of the creation, character, and development of the modern state, but this centrality is frequently defined away as war is analyzed as a mere epiphenomenon of economics, ideology, or sociology. Strategic matters should have the same level of significance in such studies as that currently enjoyed by economic and social issues.14 I hope the present work will help to revise the widespread assumption that economics and sociological conflict are the basis for all historical phenomena. A defining feature of any state is its ability to make war and keep peace. No state has ever made an economy or a class system.

  The State is born in violence: only when it has achieved a legitimate monopoly on violence can it promulgate law; only when it is free of the coercive violence of other states can it pursue strategy. This history provides the reason why warfare—like law—is a key to understanding the development of the State for it connects the ever-present intrusion of international pressures (the outer) to the political anatomy of the State (the inner).

  In the preceding chapters I have argued that the constitutional order of the State is undergoing a dramatic change. This, I believe, is not the first time such a profound shift has occurred either in our state or in other states, and therefore I disagree with the usual notion that the Westphalian consensus of 1648 produced the constitutional order of the nation-state within which we currently live. Instead, I have described a series of such orders, both before and after Westphalia. One such order, that of the market-state, is already superseding that of the nation-state, which can be seen to be only about a century old.

  This change is taking place all across the society of states. The market-state manifests itself in three forms vis-á-vis the larger society of states:* the mercantile, managerial, and the entrepreneurial state. Mercantile market-states closely ally the state with national enterprises; they protect these industries with trade barriers, sometimes even using the national security apparatus on their behalf, and compete globally as if there were no distinction between the State and its corporations. Managerial market-states attempt to act as flywheels, using regional blocs as counterweights to national competition. Entrepreneurial states blur the distinctions between the welfare of the single state and that of the society of states, and seek the widest sharing of collective goods within that society.

  In my view the United States ought to encourage the development of entrepreneurial states rather than other forms in order to avoid international conflict, including sabotage, industrial espionage, and even armed warfare. I speculate that leadership for this move is likelier to come from the leaders of multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) than from leaders of the national security apparatus and the political establishment, but I concede that business leaders are generally not prepared for such a role today.

  A market-state is not a market. There is an irreduceability of governing that cannot be assimilated into market operations. But governments must have a basis in legitimacy for them to exercise the powers of coercion that they alone possess. Business corporations cannot try people and jail them, or levy fines, and therefore they need not have any basis for legitimacy other than the voluntary consent of consumers. The State needs to produce public goods—which engender the qualities of reciprocity, justice, solidarity, empathy, and civility—because such goods are, by definition, what the market does not produce on its own. The mass protests that took place during the meetings of the G-7, the IMF, and the WTO remind us that unless there is a legitimate process by which public opinion, in all its shades, can be registered there is little reason not to take to the streets. The market (and new market-state institutions) do not provide these processes unaided by the State and its laws.

  The State is not withering away, nor is it going to be replaced, but its form—its constitutional order—will undergo an historic change. In Book II we will study the impact of this new constitutional order on the society of states. There I will argue that the study of law must be at the center of the history of the society of states (as I have argued in Book I that the study of war is central to the history of the State) and that, contrary to our usual assumptions, international law is derived from the constitutional order.

  At the end of the twentieth century, it is interesting to recall what persons at the end of the nineteenth century expected of the hundred years to come. In some influential quarters, there was agreement on two expectations: that science and technology would make war impossible and that international law would govern the relationships among states.15 In retrospect we might say that these expectations were direct extrapolations from the new prestige of applied science and from the successes of the Concert of Europe. It was, we are apt to conclude, rather naïve to believe that the constitutional order of the society of the great state-nations of the nineteenth century would proceed indefinitely toward perfection.

  Today public expectations about the century to come are also likely to reflect our recent past. There is a widespread consensus that the future will be framed around conflicts, 16 and there is an unquestioned belief that governments will continue indefinitely to shape events in the international arena. In fact, governments are steadily being weakened with respect to their capacity to control international events, and the kind of security problems state
s will face in the twenty-first century are more likely to be about managing cooperation than triumphing through conflict. One can already see this in recent wars: the United States was not in direct conflict with Iraq or Serbia or Somalia or Haiti or Panama or even Afghanistan, though its armed forces attacked or occupied all of these states. Rather, the use of force was deployed through intervention to prevent “ethnic cleansing,” to halt famine, to reverse the gains of aggression, to restore democracy, and to punish terrorism.

  The great powers will repeatedly face five questions regarding the use of force in the twenty-first century, and none of them are usefully characterized in the zero-sum, conflictual way of strategic warfare. These questions are whether to intervene, when to do so, with what allies, with what military and nonmilitary tools, and for what goals.17 Mass refugee migrations, international crimes, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, ethnic cleansing and other terrorist atrocities, environmental catastrophes—all will provide potential occasions for intervention. The great powers will be called upon to distribute help and re-establish order, not to secure raw materials and key ports as in the nineteenth century, nor to spread their ideology, as in the twentieth.

  The market-state requires that we think in terms of global relations rather than international relations. The relations between governments will only partly determine events within the society of states. As a result NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), criminal conspiracies, terrorist groups, humanitarian philanthropies, and special-interest lobbies will all become significant participants in interstate affairs. It will therefore be crucial for the United States and other great powers to create global networks of non-governmental resources they can draw on. It is already the case that NGOs like CARE, Amnesty International, and the major environmental funds have budgets and influence greater than those of many states. The same can be said of terrorism, which can now rely on an infrastructure that was previously only available to the secret agencies of states.

  The difficulty in relying on private actors, however, is that their legitimacy as international agents is in question. Whom do they represent? Who appointed them? To whom are they responsible? The market-state attempts to solve this problem of accountability by a test that is, in its way, as characteristic of the market-state as the Montevideo Convention test for state recognition is characteristic of the nation-state. For the nation-state, controlling territory by the consent of the governed assured legitimacy. In the new information age that has brought about the market-state, institutions can exist and wield power in a nonterritorial space. Therefore the market-state's test of the accountability of the NGO is simply this: they are accredited if they can raise enough money to finance successful operations that do not violate international law. Thus in the market-state, there will be the problem of distinguishing crime from capitalism (the cocaine cartel claims, for example, that they ought to have the same legal status as the growers and marketers of tobacco), whereas for the nation-state the characteristic definitional problem was the distinction between the terrorist and the freedom fighter.

  In this new era, looking at the world in terms of conflict—looking at the world, that is, from the perspective of the state of war—doesn't fully protect states because many highly dangerous threats don't come from adversaries but from systemic collapse. Power outages, epidemics, computer viruses, financial panics, overpopulation, deforestation, water pollution, and energy “famines” (so named because they arise from hoarding) might be exploited by our adversaries, but they will arise whether or not there is a mastermind behind them. Of course, peoples have always faced these or analogous threats; the plague of the fourteenth century, and the great famines of the Indian subcontinent in the twentieth century are examples. But these events rarely posed mortal threats to the state system. Today, however, because the system is both globalized and highly interdependent, nonmilitary events in remote regions as well as among nonstate actors can cascade, bringing states to the point of collapse.

  The emergence of the market-state has not occurred in an instant but rather over a couple of decades. Within the most prominent market-states, the groundwork was laid by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who did so much to discredit the welfare rationale for the nation-state. The rationale that underpins the legitimacy of the market-state, by contrast, is that it maximizes opportunity. President Clinton was the leader who led the United States into this new constitutional order (just as Prime Minister Blair has done for Britain and Chancellor Schroeder has attempted to do for Germany).

  A few representative quotations from President Clinton will suffice to illustrate the change:

  The mission of this administration from day one has been to increase economic opportunity and maintain national security; to empower the individuals of this country to assume personal responsibility for their own futures.18

  I do believe that the most important thing we can be doing today as a nation to create opportunity for our people is to give them the tools they need to succeed. In a global economy, the government cannot give anybody a guaranteed success story, but you can give people the tools to make the most of their own lives.19

  I saw my job when I became President to create a structure of opportunity for the 21st century, so that every American would be able to make the most of their own lives.20

  We must be committed to the pursuit of opportunity… And we must be committed to a new kind of Government, not to solve all our problems for us but to give our people, all our people, the tools they need to make the most of their own lives.21

  As times change, so Government must change. We need a new Government for a new century, humble enough not to try to solve all our problems for us but strong enough to give us the tools to solve our problems for ourselves… Yet where it can stand up for our values and interests around the world, and where it can give Americans the power to make a real difference in their everyday lives, Government should do more, not less. The preeminent mission of our new government is to give all Americans an opportunity, not a guarantee but a real opportunity, to build better lives.22

  Similar statements have been made by President George W. Bush:

  The old way in Washington is to believe that the more you spend, the more you care. What mattered was the size of the line in the budget, not the effect of that line on real people's lives. My administration takes a new approach.*

  Good jobs must be the aim of welfare reform. As we reauthorize these important reforms, we must always remember the goal is to reduce dependency on government and offer every American the dignity of a job… Government doesn't create jobs, but it can encourage an environment in which jobs are created.*

  Government has a role, and an important one. Yet, too much government crowds out initiative and hard work, private charity and the private economy. Our new governing vision says government should be active, but limited; engaged, but not overbearing.†

  Government has great responsibilities for public safety and public health, for civil rights and common schools. Yet compassion is the work of a nation, not just a government… America, at its best, is a place where personal responsibility is valued and expected.‡

  The United States can benefit immensely from this shift because we are well placed to thrive in a globalized political economy. Indeed a globalized society of market-states plays into and enhances American strengths to such a degree that it worries some states that the United States will become so dominant that no other state will be able to catch up to it. In many quarters, globalization is so deeply identified with the United States that it is anxiously perceived as an American cultural export. Such anxiety is reflected in contemporary international relations on many issues: for example, the principal opponent of the hardly unreasonable U.S. position regarding landmines was Canada; the most sarcastic attacks on the rather sensible U.S. opposition to an International Criminal Court came from traditional allies. Moreover, these anti-American political reactions will, in a society of market-states, spill
over to reactions against U.S. businesses, and vice versa. Offense given by McDonald's will be repaid by antipathy to the United States. Antiglobalization reactions will inevitably become attacks on U.S. policies.

  When we look ahead we can see the market-state already forming. With it comes a new set of choices arising from the interplay between the strategic and the constitutional. Which way this new constitutional order will develop, constitutionally and strategically, is a matter of human decision.

  The answer to how we will develop a calculus for the use of force in the present era depends on choices yet to be made. Either our rules for the use of force will re-enforce world order, which will require a readiness to undertake numerous, apparently endless small conflicts, or they will make larger wars more likely, risking the widening of small, seemingly irrelevant conflicts, or they will make a cataclysmic war inevitable when great regional blocs, with greatly differing views of their own sovereignty, find themselves the targets of events whose perpetrators they do not really know and cannot, even through harsh repression, really silence.

  The calculus to be employed will become clear once we decide. The epochal war we are about to enter will either be a series of low-intensity, information-guided wars linked by a commitment to re-enforcing world order, or a gradually increasing anarchy that leads to intervention at a much costlier level or even a cataclysm of global proportions preceded by a period of relative if deceptive peace. It is ours to choose.

  At the Bomb Testing Site

  At noon in the desert a panting lizard

  waited for history, its elbows tense,

  watching the curve of a particular road

  as if something might happen.

  It was looking at something farther off