THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  *As well as Tojo, by the way.

  †Much as in our day the similar vision animating the U.N. has been discredited by its performance in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and elsewhere.

  *Indeed Hitler despised capitalism because the State does not control free markets.

  *And Hitler was sustained in power by a broad base of popular support, based on fulfilling the fascist assumption of the nation-state social contract. Only Nazi Germany, of all the Western states, eliminated unemployment during the depression years of 1933 – 1938. Moreover, contrary to conventional assessments, this was done not by means of rearmament but in order to enable rearmament. See Dan Silverman, Hitler's Economy: Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933 – 1936 (Harvard, 1998); see also R. J. Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932 – 1938 (Cambridge, 2d edn., 1996).

  *The revolution in 1868 replaced a regime similar in many ways to the princely states of Europe that were succeeded by kingly states, as will be discussed in Part II. The Tokugawa had no standing army, no centralized bureaucracy embracing the various territorial components of the state, no permanent legations. David L. Howell, “Territoriality and Collective Identity in Tokugawa Japan,” Daedalus 127 (Summer 1998): 105.

  *The term was suggested to Roosevelt by Churchill, who quoted the following stanza from Byron: “Thou fatal Waterloo/Millions of tongues record thee, and anew/Their children's lips shall echo them, and say—/ ‘Here, where the sword united nations drew, / Our countrymen were warring on that day!’/ And this is much, and all which will not pass away.” (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 3, stanza 35.)

  †As Philip Bell has put it, “In the perspective produced by the Cold War, it became easy to think of that alliance as consisting of the Americans and British over against the Soviet Union; but this was a false picture of events at the time. The truth was of a meshing of interests and a criss-cross of disputes; not a clear divide, but a sort of cat's cradle of tangled threads. Roosevelt sought to work closely with Stalin, and so did Churchill. Each was prepared to do so, on occasion, against the other.” P.M.H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe (Addison Wesley Longman, 1986).

  *“Our presence in West Berlin, and our access thereto, cannot be ended by any act of the Soviet Government… The [Western Alliance] had been built in response to challenges:… European chaos in 1947; of the Berlin blockade in 1948; of Communist aggression in Korea in 1950.” Broadcast by President John F. Kennedy, July 25, 1961.

  *By contrast, the Soviet deployment presaged a shift in the correlation of nuclear threats, opening up the future possibility of accurate, ground-launched weapons minutes away from the U.S. offensive sites, and potentially under the control of a satellite state.

  *Thus, “[a]rmies in Europe by the later eighteenth century thus concerned themselves predominantly with problems of siegecraft, fortification, marches, and supply… Most of their time was passed in profoundest peace.” Michael Howard, War in European History, 72.

  *Chief Soviet expert and the Counselor of the U.S. Department of State; later U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

  †Head of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State (1950 – 53), and principal author of the highly influential National Security Council document (NSC-68) that provided a blueprint for Allied resistance to the Soviet Union.

  *And for this reason, the communist leadership of the People's Republic has the most to fear from internal dissent.

  *Roberts was criticized for slighting developments in naval warfare and charged with underestimating the continuing impact of siege warfare throughout the century, overestimating the impact of Gustavus Adolphus's reforms and ignoring altogether the similar, parallel changes made in the French, Dutch, and Habsburg armies. See Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1 – 2, citing among others David Parrott, “Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years War: The Military Revolution,” Militargeschichtliche Mittelungen XVIII 2 (1985): 7 – 25 and John Lynn, “Tactical evolution in the French army, 1560 – 1660,” XIV French Historical Studies 14 (1985): 176 – 91. See also David Parrott, “The Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe,” History Today 42 (1992): 21 – 27; and John A. Lynn, “The Trace Italienne and the Growth of Armies: The French Case,” Journal of Military History 55 (1991): 297.

  * Although the ecclesiastical electors were usually cardinals within the Church, their status as electors was derived from their authority as archbishops of the sees of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier.

  *This was also true of British intellectual life; one has only to think of von Hayek, Gombrich, Popper, Pevsner, among others.

  *As John U. Nef put it, “[t]he early founders, whose task had been to fashion bells that tolled the message of eternal peace… contributed unintentionally to the discovery of one of man's most terrible weapons.” Quoted in Bernard and Fawn Brodie, From Crossbow to H-Bomb (Indiana University Press, 1973), 48.

  *The impact on the constitutional shape of the State of these intricate, often elegant fortress designs is a matter of some scholarly dispute28 but even the most eloquent of Parker's critics concedes that “war compelled the state to grow in power if it was not to perish. France's 17th century conflicts became wars of attrition, during which the Bourbons fielded ever larger forces. In such contests, when victory depended upon the ability to maintain huge armies in the field for years on end, resource mobilization held the key. Greater armies demanded greater quantities of funds, food, and fodder so the existing state apparatus scrambled to mobilize them. Despite its efforts, the state fell short of satisfying the army's appetite and was forced into a turbulent but necessary transformation in order to muster and maintain its troops. The process brought into being the centralized bureaucratic monarchy.”29

  *Which is to say a multiethnic army; throughout I will use the term nation as referring to a cultural, ethnic group that may or may not have a state. The Kurds, for example, constitute a nation though they as yet have no national state; the state of Aruba is composed of only a fragment of a nation, even though it is a member state of the United Nations. The Hebrew nation long antedates the founding of Israel and survived Roman occupation. The Cherokee nation never had a state. Nationalism is a political movement of peoples, not states. Recall Jonah's cry, “Of what nation are you?”

  *“I was not invested with the imperial crown in order to take over yet more territories, but to ensure the peace of Christendom and so to unite all forces against the Turks for the glory of the Christian faith.” Charles V in 1521, quoted in Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (HarperCollins, 2000), 93.

  *An early version of the territorial state was prematurely attempted in the sixteenth century by William the Silent with respect to the Low Countries, but absent the strategic innovations necessary to exploit the nationalism that Westphalia ultimately made possible, William was never able to make the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands into a viable federation. Instead the sectarian nature of the princely state repeatedly asserted itself. In 1579 the northern provinces formed a union to promote Protestantism, from which union the modern state of Holland ultimately emerged; in the same month the southern provinces concluded a treaty undertaking to maintain Catholicism in what has become Belgium.

  *A translation of “Electus Romanus Imperator,” not, as is usually the case in English histories, the “Holy Roman Emperor.”

  *Just as the Long War, discussed in Part I of Book I, was composed of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the wars in Southeast Asia, and other more minor conflicts and crises.

  *This is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 20.

  *Excluding of course the Ottoman Empire.

  *Our word martinet comes from the name of an inspector general of this period who imposed rigid and exacting standards of training and discipline.

  *Though he had renounced these, her dowry—agreed at the Peace of Pyrenees in 1659—had never been paid.

  *Absurd interpretations were put on the Edict: Protestant
s were forbidden to hold burial services during the day because no clause in the Edict expressly permitted them; new churches were forbidden because the Edict merely ratified those in existence at the time.

  *A more detailed account can be found in Chapter 21.

  †“Europe forms a political system in which the [states] inhabiting this part of the world are bound together by their relations and various interests in a single body… [making] of modern Europe a sort of ‘republique' whose members—each independent, but all bound together by a common interest—united for the maintenance of order and the preservation of liberty. This is what has given rise to the well-known principle of the balance of power…” Vattel, Le Droit des Gens, Book III, Chapter 3, sections 47 – 48.

  *“Unquestionably, there was never a time in the history of this country, when, from the situation in Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than at the present moment.” Quoted in John H. Rose, William Pitt and the Great War (G. Bell and Sons, 1911), 32.

  *The estates being composed of those classes having a definite share in the body politic (nobles, clergy, commons). There was no permanent assembly of the Estates in Prussia at this time.

  *Napoleonic imperialism was paid for by plunder… A nation proclaiming liberty, fraternity and equality was now… conquering non-French populations, stationing armies upon them, sequestering their goods, distorting their trade, raising enormous indemnities and taxes and conscripting their youth… In Italy between 1805 and 1812 about half the taxes raised went to the French.” Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, 133, 135.

  †“In 1914 London declared war on Germany on behalf of the entire empire. But long before post – Second World War anti-colonial nationalism stripped away Britain's Asian and African colonies, the ‘white' dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were resisting rule from London. By the time of the Chanak crisis with Turkey, in 1922, London had discovered that it could not count on automatic support from the empire. After 1926 British military planners no longer considered the British Commonwealth to be a reliable basis for military plans.” Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “The Misleading Metaphor of Decline: Analogies between the United States and Post-Imperial Britain are Inaccurate and Mischievous,” The Atlantic 265 (March 1990): 89.

  *Which created the first state-nation.

  *It was the resignation of the Pitt cabinet over the king's refusal to assent to a law removing the disabilities of Catholics that cleared the way for a treaty with the French. New Cambridge Modern History, vol. IX, 260.

  *At the tomb of Frederick the Great Napoleon paid tribute to his predecessor. “Gentlemen,” he said to his assembled marshals, “take off your hats. If he were here, we would not be here.”

  *And how it differed from the state-nation model created by Washington, Hamilton, and Madison.

  *“By boring out the barrels instead of casting the bore into the piece [Gribeauval] achieved finer tolerances, with less windage (the difference between the diameter of the cannonball and the diameter of the bore) to sap the power of gunpowder. A ball of given weight thus required less powder and smaller powder charges and allowed the walls of the chamber to be thinner.” In addition, Gribeauval shortened barrels and also modified gun carriages to enhance mobility. John Lynn, “Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval,” in The Reader's Companion to Military History, ed. Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). The French also standardized the calibre of cannon and fabricated interchangeable parts.

  *A similar argument might be made regarding the Peninsular Campaign by Wellington, who adopted tactics that would not have been politically feasible had he been a Spanish or even Portuguese commander.

  *“Last night I toss'd and turned in bed, But could not sleep—at length I said, I'll think of Viscount C—stl—r—gh, And of speeches—that's the way.” Thomas Moore, “Insurrection of the Papers,” from Richard Kenin and Justin Wintle, The Dictionary of Bibliographical Quotation (Knopf, 1978), 146.

  †“I met Murder on the way—/He had a mask like Castlereagh—/ Very smooth he looked, yet grim;/ Seven blood-hounds followed him; /All were fat, and well they might/Be in admirable plight, / For one by one, and two by two, / He tossed them human hearts to chew/ Which from his wide cloak he drew.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester (Reeves and Turner, 1887), 57.

  *For a more detailed discussion of the Congress, see Chapter 22.

  *And one that eluded much thinking about the United Nations in our own era: Article 51 of the U.N. Charter is either the sine qua non of a collective security regime, or the United Nations is really a vehicle to ensure the balance of power via the Security Council. Usually commentators get this point backwards, thinking Article 51 inimical to the integrity of the system.

  *Two metaphors are helpful in understanding the State: (i) that the State acts as a network, conveying decisions made by the responsible parties so that it is both the medium of constitutional and strategic change, and also the expression of constitutional and strategic change; and (2) that the State depends on society the way a virus depends on the nuclear material of a cell, so that it is both made in time—has a birth and life and decay—and made of time, that is, what we know of it is the narrative of this morphology, the story of its adaptation to the conditions of society. The State, that is, both composes history (1) and is composed of history (2).

  *And not just European politicians: Lincoln's nation-state was the first fully realized example of this constitutional order.

  *The northern Papal states.

  *Who, as the duke of Schleswig-Holstein was also a German prince (with such fateful consequences as we shall see).

  *Ironically the general staff, who viewed Bismarck as a meddler, sarcastically referred to “civilians in cuirassiers' tunics,” a reference to Bismarck's habit of dressing in uniform, especially after 1870. Gall, 366.

  †Quoted in Gall, 204. The very vividness of this remark aroused much criticism at the time. Von Treitscke, hardly a liberal, wrote his brother-in-law, “You know how passionately I love Prussia, but when I hear so shallow a country squire as this Bismarck bragging about the ‘iron and blood' with which he intends to subdue Germany, the meanness of it seems to me to be exceeded only by the absurdity” (Gall, 206). And even Bismarck's ally von Roon complained of “witty sallies” that did their cause little good.

  *Indeed it was the military vote in 1864 that re-elected Lincoln. James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, Volume 2: The Civil War (McGraw-Hill, 1993), 456 – 58.

  *In the following discussion of the Schleswig-Holstein dispute, perhaps one should bear in mind Palmerston's remark: With regard to Schleswig-Holstein, he said, “only three men had grasped it in all its ramification: one was dead, the second had been driven mad by it, and the third, he himself, had forgotten all about it.” But the only way to understand Bismarck's adroit use of this strategic problem is to give at least some of the problem's complicated background.

  *“It is not surprising that the principal legal codes of the world were introduced by the two greatest State builders of the 19th century: Napoleon and Bismarck,” The Quality of Government, R. La Porta, F. Lopez de Silanes, A. Shleifer, and R. Vishny (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1998).

  *In 1870, while serving as an observer with the Prussian army during the Franco-Prussian War, the American civil war general Philip Sheridan advised Bismarck that his treatment of the French was too mild. You must cause the civilian “inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force their government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.” P. A. Hutton, “Paladin of the Republic,” in With My Face to the Enemy, Robert Cowley, ed. (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2001), 357.

  *As Michael Doyle has observed, “The Europe of 1870, which was to retain its major features until 1914, was a Europe very different from that of 1815. It was almost exactly what the statesmen of 1815 feared Europe might become, t
hough they would have been amazed to discover that many of the changes had been led by men of their own kind—the aristocratic (now nationalist leaders) [of the nation-state].” Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Cornell University Press, 1986), 242 – 43.

  †See e.g., the Montevideo Convention.

  ‡Chief among these is that the creation of states from proximate national elements can pose a threat to their neighbors. Thus Bismarck claimed that “restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any enemy that chooses to attack us.” Therefore, he concluded that Prussia should “smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to wipe them out.” Gall, v. 1, 59.