THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  This quest leads us to the legitimating role of history: history is the medium by which the legitimacy of the constitutional structure is married to the success of the strategy of the state. For example, it was the constitutional order of the Habsburg state—dynastic, Catholic, multinational—that made the continued Spanish possession of the Netherlands so insistent a strategic goal, despite the fact that this region was far from Spain, and had different religious as well as different cultural and linguistic traditions. The Habsburg defeat not only ended the era of the princely state, it began the era of the kingly state of notably different constitutional arrangements. History gives the prestige of inevitability to decisive events, and cloaks state action, inner and outer, with legitimacy when a successful strategy is in harmony with the triumphant constitutional order. A crisis in legitimacy can be provoked either by external events or internal ones—usually the two go together—when the State becomes separated from its history. This happened to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late nineteenth century when it was unable to link its imperial state with any single national identity. A supple, flexible state will be portrayed in a way that allows for greater continuity with various strategic and constitutional innovations and thus offers a wider range of possible adaptations to necessity; a more rigid state will find its history is a straitjacket, confining it so tightly that only a political Houdini (like Bismarck) can break loose to survival.

  The interplay between the military revolution that won the Long War—the development of nuclear weapons, an international communications system, and the computer (which made possible strategic deception and intelligence penetration to unprecedented effect)—and the constitutional changes that are both the consequence of that development as well as its enabling structure provide the subject of Part III. Suffice it to say at this point that the sense of identity of the nation-state, a state that defines itself by its axiomatic linkage to a people and its portrayal as their benefactor, is under considerable assault. Few contemporary groups, except those, such as the Palestinians or the Kurds, who are without states, seek their fulfillment in a relationship between their ethnic group and the nation-state. Indeed it is increasingly difficult for the nation-state to fulfill the functions that it added to its portfolio when it superseded the state-nation: not simply the maintenance of an industrial war machine of immense cost that is unable to assure the physical security of its citizens, but also the maintenance of civil order by means of bargaining among constituencies, the administration of juridical norms that embodied a single national tradition, and above all the management of the economic growth of the society in order to provide a continuous improvement in the material conditions of life for all classes.

  These tasks were the nation-state's raison d'être. Yet today, market regulation by the State has become unpopular, many citizens have been effectively marginalized in the political life of their societies, and private business organizations have taken the initiative regarding international development. It is they who determine whether the economic policies of a state merit confidence and credit, without which no state can develop. At the same time, there are new security demands on the State that require ever greater executive authority, secrecy, and revenue. The constitutional shape that will emerge from this latest phase of transformation could be configured in several different ways. But before an understanding of these possibilities can be gained and the moral implications of the choices they present appreciated, we have needed to study in Part II the recurrent way in which the constitutional transformations of the State interact with its strategic innovations. Now we are in a position to ask what new demands for legitimation will be made upon the State, and how the experience of the Long War has fitted us to cope with these demands, to repeat the mixture of adaptation and innovation that has shaped the State heretofore.

  My aim in presenting such a narrative is not so much to provide a standard history—there are better books for this, cited in the notes—but to depict the story of particular individuals acting within the choices presented by history. This avoids, I hope, the technological determinism of much politico/military history, 3 and its attendant assumptions about progress, without pretending that statesmen could reinvent the choices that faced them, choices—but not decisions among those choices—dictated to a great degree by the relationship between constitutional forms and strategic capabilities. All the transitions that are charted in Part II trace the State's constitutional and strategic change as it adapts, metamorphoses, thrives, and decays in ever-changing strategic circumstances, always striving for legitimacy in the new context in which it must compete.*

  Over the long run, it is the constitutional order of the State that tends to confer military advantage by achieving cohesion, continuity, and, above all, legitimacy for its strategic operations. And it is these strategic operations, through continuous innovation, that winnow out unsuccessful constitutional orders.

  Excerpt from “Elegy for the Departure of Pen, Ink and Lamp”

  I never believed in the spirit of history

  an invented monster with a murderous look

  dialectical beast on a leash led by slaughterers

  nor in you—four horsemen of the apocalypse

  Huns of progress galloping over earthly and heavenly steppes

  destroying on the way everything worthy of respect old and defenseless

  I spent years learning the simplistic cogwheels of history

  a monotonous procession hopeless struggle

  scoundrels at the head of confused crowds

  against the handful of those who were honest courageous aware

  I have very little left

  not many

  objects

  or compassion

  light heartedly we leave the gardens of childhood gardens of things

  shedding in flight manuscripts oil-lamp dignity pens

  such is our illusory journey at the edge of nothingness

  pen with an ancient nib forgive my unfaithfulness

  and you inkwell—there are still so many good thoughts in you

  forgive me kerosene lamp—you are dying in my memory like a deserted campsite

  I paid for the betrayal

  but I did not know then

  you were leaving forever

  and that it will be dark

  —Zbigniew Herbert

  (translated by Bogdana and John Carpenter)

  PART III

  THE HISTORIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE LONG WAR

  THESIS: THE MARKET STATE IS SUPERSEDING THE NATION-STATE AS A CONSEQUENCE OF THE END OF THE LONG WAR

  The end of the Long War has been quickly followed by the emergence of a new constitutional order. This new form is the market-state. Whereas the nation-state, with its mass free public education, universal franchise, and social security policies, promised to guarantee the welfare of the nation, the market-state promises instead to maximize the opportunity of the people and thus tends to privatize many state activities and to make voting and representative government less influential and more responsive to the market. The United States, a principal innovator in the development of the market-state, must fashion its strategic policies with this fundamental constitutional change in mind.

  Homage to a Government

  Next year we are to bring the soldiers home

  For lack of money, and it is all right.

  Places they guarded, or kept orderly,

  Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.

  We want the money for ourselves at home

  Instead of working. And this is all right.

  It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,

  But now it's been decided nobody minds.

  The places are a long way off, not here,

  Which is all right, and from what we hear

  The soldiers there only made trouble happen.

  Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

  Next year we shall be living in a country

  That
brought its soldiers home for lack of money.

  The statues will be standing in the same

  Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.

  Our children will not know it's a different country.

  All we can hope to leave them now is money.

  —Philip Larkin

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Market-State

  One has already to know (or be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing's name.

  —Ludwig Wittgenstein*

  DIFFERENT CONSTITUTIONAL orders are responsive to different demands for legitimacy. Legitimating characteristics, such as dynastic rights, that are sufficient for one constitutional order are inadequate for another. The reason that the constitutional order of the nation-state is undergoing a transformation is that it faces a crisis of legitimation. When the American state changes to reflect a new constitutional archetype, † it will do so in response to demands for new bases for legitimacy, demands that arise in part as a consequence of the strategic innovations that won the Long War. In light of this new constitutional form of the State, the Americans will desire an appropriate national security paradigm. The reason the United States needs a new national security paradigm is that the Wilsonian internationalism‡ that guided us throughout the Long War was derived from the constitutional order of the nation-state. Obviously, Wilsonian internationalism was not the only option available to nation-states as diverse as Fascist Italy and Communist China; perhaps less obviously, determining the rough shape of the new constitutional form the United States is in the process of adopting will not by itself determine how and when the U.S. should use force in international affairs. That determination will require an examination of the special situation of the United States, a unique state with unique advantages and burdens.

  These three subjects—the source of the constitutional crisis of legitimation and the nature of the new constitutional order; the practical choices a State faces in defining a national security paradigm; and the crafting of such a paradigm that is compatible with that order and responsive to our particular position—are the subjects of the three final chapters of Book I.

  THE CRISIS OF THE NATION-STATE

  As we saw in the historical narratives of Part II, the nation-state is a rela-tively recent structure. Indeed, the modern State itself is of fairly recent vintage in the life of civilized mankind, dating as it does from roughly the end of the fifteenth century.1 Before that period European governance divided jurisdiction among ecclesiastical authorities, independent cities, feudal rulers (whose own relationships were far from simple), and various oligarchies. Only when a strategic threat to the wealthy and sophisticated cities of Italy provoked a crisis of survival did these societies turn to the institutional bureaucratization of governing authority that became the modern state. The reification of the State that resulted conveyed to a state structure the two characteristics of sovereignty that had hitherto exclusively been possessed by the person of the prince—a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence domestically (the role of lawgiver) and the independence of will in foreign affairs (the right of sovereignty).

  We then saw a series of changes in the structure of states, a morphology of constitutional orders or archetypes. These changes culminated in the form of the nation-state late in the nineteenth century. It was only then that the idea took hold that a State is properly—that is to say, legitimately— formed by the boundaries of its national people and not simply by the conquered or inherited territory of rulers. At each stage in this morphology, constitutional change was accompanied by strategic innovation, as those states that were able to consolidate power within a unitary jurisdiction of taxation, regulation, and administration developed new strategies or copied the strategic breakthroughs of their competitors. It was the strategic successes of the European state that made its archetypal constitutional structures the models for the world until finally the most recent form—that of the nation-state—was turned against a receding form, the colonial state-nation, and the European model became global and virtually universal.*

  Why should it be that now, at the moment of its most widespread adoption, this model should be superseded? We have seen how the constitutional archetype of the nation-state presented states with three competing options: fascism, liberal parliamentarianism, and communism. The unresolved issue as to which of these options would best assure the legitimacy of the nation-state caused the Long War to persist for most of this century; now, at the moment of resolution, why would a new constitutional question be put to the conflict-weary states of the world?

  It was only in 1989 that Francis Fukuyama wrote:

  What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.†

  How can it be that, so soon after this historic success, the fundamental form of the nation-state, of which the liberal democracies are a triumphant exemplar, would metamorphose into a new archetypal model? The reason lies in the Long War itself and the strategic innovations by which that war was won by the liberal democracies.

  The nation-state has accumulated various responsibilities. The legitimating promises of earlier, preceding constitutional forms are often inherited by successive archetypes as entrenched expectations and entitlements. The princely state promised external security, the freedom from domination and interference by foreign powers. The kingly state inherited this responsibility and added the promise of internal stability. The territorial state added the promise of expanding material wealth, to which the state-nation further added the civil and political rights of popular sovereignty. To all these responsibilities the nation-state added the promise of providing economic security and public goods to its people. The failure of the Soviet Union to live up to this expectation, as much as any other cause, contributed to its delegitimation in the eyes of its nation. Very simply, the strategic innovations of the Long War will make it increasingly difficult for the nation-state to fulfill its responsibilities. That will account for its delegitimation. The new constitutional order that will supersede the nation-state will be one that copes better with these new demands of legitimation, by redefining the fundamental compact on which the assumption of legitimate power is based.

  Three strategic innovations won the Long War: nuclear weapons, international communications, and the technology of rapid mathematical computation. Each has wrought a dramatic change in the military, cultural, and economic challenges that face the nation-state. In each of these spheres, the nation-state faces ever increasing difficulty in maintaining the credibility of its claim to provide public goods for the nation.

  SECURITY

  The State exists to master violence: it came into being in order to establish a monopoly on domestic violence, which is a necessary condition for law, and to protect its jurisdiction from foreign violence, which is the basis for strategy. If the State is unable to deliver on these promises, it will be changed; if the reason it cannot deliver is rooted in its constitutional form, then that form will change. A State that could neither protect its citizens from crime nor protect its homeland from attack by other states would have ceased to fulfill its most basic reason for being.

  The Long War was characterized by many strategic innovations, two of which are especially pertinent to the problem of maintaining external and internal security. First, the Long War was a total war, that is, a struggle in which war was waged directly on the civilian societies supporting the states at war. Without the “total participation [of the belligerent populations] in field and factory as well as in the armed forces, the struggle could not be carried on at all.”2

  The strategy of total war is, as has been noted, characteristic of the nation-state. Indeed in the constitutional transition that accompanied the American Civil War, we can observe one state (the Confedera
cy) that represented an earlier order (the state-nation, whose strategies are indistinguishable from those of Napoleon) fighting another state (the Union) that came to stand for a new insurgent order, the nation-state, whose strategies (such as Sherman's March to the Sea) prefigure those of the Long War. The nation-state mobilizes the total resources of the society in pursuit of its political goals, and it is the nation of its adversary that it attacks in order to achieve victory.

  In November 1917 Georges Clemenceau was summoned, at age seventy-six, to be prime minister of France in the midst of World War I. His speech to the Chamber of Deputies was composed the night before he assumed office. He wrote with a quill, at his bedside table, wearing a small silk cap. He began, “Nous nous présentons devant vous dans l'insigne pensée d‘une défense integrale…” for he had long been a critic of the previous administration's divided command arrangements, in which the Allies were responsible for their own sectors. But then he scratched out “défense” and replaced it with “guerre.” Not “total defense” but “total war.”