THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  This famous address to the chamber reflected the new perspective and responsibility of the nation-state (of which Clemenceau, in opposition to the French imperialists of his day, was a passionate advocate). To a packed chamber (Winston Churchill was in the gallery) Clemenceau said,

  We present ourselves before you with the unique thought of total war… These Frenchmen whom we are forced to throw into battle, they have rights over us. They want none of our thoughts to be diverted from them, they want none of our acts to be foreign to them. We owe them everything, with no reservation. All for France bleeding on its glory, all for the apotheosis of law triumphant.3

  Similarly, in October 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt decided to produce an atomic bomb. Hitler4 and Stalin5 and the Japanese cabinet6 made similar decisions. Of these decisions there was little public knowledge at the time. But such decisions are entirely consistent with the entire strategic pattern of the nation-state.

  Certainly since Grant and Sherman, American commanders had accepted that modern wars—which is to say wars between modern societies capable of fielding and supporting vast modern armies—would not be won by the elegant Napoleonic maneuvers of a Lee or Jackson, isolating, distracting and dividing armies in the field, but by the relentless destruction of a society's ability to carry on. The theory of strategic bombing holds that air power will accelerate this process by leapfrogging the lines of defense and directly attacking the supporting society… The atomic bomb was developed [by the United States and the United Kingdom] as a weapon that, like other counter-city incendiary bombs, could be used to compel the Axis political structure to collapse.*

  Even though the development of nuclear weapons brought the strategy of the nation-state to its apogee of effectiveness—“the apotheosis of law triumphant”—and ended the Long War by stalemating the superpower military conflict, these weapons will progressively undermine the nation-state's ability to protect the nation from foreign attack. Even if most states cannot expect to match the American arsenal, an increasing number will have access to a variety of low-cost launchers, nuclear warheads, and other weapons of mass destruction. Of course such states would not be able to win an all-out war with the United States, Britain, Russia, France, or China (the largest members of the nuclear club), but by threatening to use such weapons against U.S. forces abroad, or her regional allies, or even against American continental territory, such states can paralyze American policy.

  As one commentator has observed, “Certainly had Saddam Hussein been possessed of a working nuclear arsenal, the United States would have been far less willing to station half a million troops, a sizable fraction of its air forces, and a large naval armada within easy reach of Iraq's borders,”7 an observation that will not be lost on most world leaders. The consequence of this development for the projection of conventional forces is profound. It's not so much that nuclear weapons render the promise of security to the citizens of the nation-state unbelievable per se; rather it is that only the possession of weapons of mass destruction can hope to validate that promise, with the unavoidable result that no nation-state can afford to be without the protection of such weapons, because their conventional forces are utterly vulnerable to threats from the states that do possess these weapons. With the Long War ended, once the nuclear umbrella of the United States ceases to be extended to cover Japan, Germany, and other states against attack, the drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction will become irresistible. Widespread nuclear proliferation may take time, and there are enormous domestic barriers in the developed world to proliferation to major states such as Germany and Japan. But the arrival of nuclear weapons to regional powers—Israel and Iraq, North and South Korea, India and Pakistan, the Central Asian former Soviet states and the non-Russian Slavic ones, Iran and others—will inevitably engage all the major states. In such a world, over whom is the United States supposed to extend its nuclear protection? For without this guarantee, the nation-states once protected will seek their own nuclear weapons. When this happens, the citizens of every nation-state that possesses such weapons become a target for nuclear attacks against which there is no defense, precisely because there is no other way to use force successfully against such states. This is an historical experience with which Americans have long lived, and one that has so greatly contributed to the demise of the nation-state here. Then the nation-state faces an impossible dilemma: if it does not have nuclear weapons, it cannot guarantee the security of its citizens from foreign attack; if it acquires such weapons, its civilian population will be specifically targeted for annihilation. Finally, it must also be noted that the presence of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of states motivates the development of other weapons of mass destruction—such as chemical, biological, and cyber weapons—as options that are less costly to obtain and the origin of whose use is easier to disguise. Here too it is the decisive impact of nuclear weapons in the Long War that now drives this development.

  I will write in a subsequent section about the failure of the nation-state to provide internal security against crime and terrorism. For now, let me suggest that this is a consequence of the national character of nation-states, which isolates and alienates substantial minorities of their citizens even to the point of defining some criminal behavior in essentially ethnic ways. For example, why in the West is marijuana criminalized but martinis are not? Why is polygamy criminalized but not divorce? The ethnic focus of the nation-state, its pervasive analogy to the family, creates a role for antisocial elements, “misfits,” that is connected to violence because violence is the currency of the state. In every society there are such people, and such groups; in the nation-state they become the enemy of the State (and vice versa), because the State itself is fused to a national conception of the culture. Nevertheless, without the Long War and the strategic concept of total war the horrors of present urban life might not have come into being, for much of contemporary crime is a kind of protowar against the State, waged against civilians. Groups of bored and armed young men, quasi-mercenaries (as in Colombia) or quasi-soldiers (as in Somalia), are not so different in kind from the small bands that fought the wars of the Middle Ages, except that in the Middle Ages chivalry to some degree tempered the impact on noncombatants, whereas today “terrorists”—as the nation-state calls them—specifically target civilians.8 Bandits, robbers, guerrillas, gangs have always been part of the domestic security environment. What is new is their access to mechanized weapons, another product of the technological environment of the Long War, and the unique political role of such groups, which pits them against noncombatants as a means of war against the State itself.9 Against these threats, the nation-state is too muscle-bound and too much observed to be of much use. The mobilization of the industrial capacity of a nation is irrelevant to such threats; the fielding of vast tank armies and fleets of airplanes is as clumsy as a bear trying to fend off bees.

  WELFARE

  The revolution in modern communications that began with the telegraph changed warfare and virtually ensured the emergence of the nation-state.* Ultimately, developments in communications technology also were decisive in the Long War. It has been argued, by Mary Fulbrook among others, that it was the manifest incompetence of the East European regimes, as reflected in the implicit contrasts made available by West European television to the publics of those regimes, that ultimately delegitimated the governments of the Warsaw Pact.12 Eric Helleiner's book, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s, 13 convincingly argues that the government policies of nation-states have played a decisive role in the stunning globalization of commodity pricing, interest rates, and the availability and pricing of credit.14 I should like to connect these works of scholarship by suggesting that it was the change in the nature of the states fighting the Long War, a change brought about in part by communications technology, that moved those states gradually and then rapidly to shift away from controls on the private movement of capital and ultimately to permit the virtually u
ninhibited flow of capital among developed states. Very simply, the victorious Western nation-states of the Long War, plus West Germany and Japan, by relying on the market to allocate resources efficiently within their domestic economies effectively extrapolated this approach to all the states of their alliance. What had been true within a single state proved true among states. The attempt to control currencies and investment in the socialist states turned out to be a crippling mistake, draining away investment that might have been indifferent to the human rights shortcomings of such regimes, and walling those states off from international trade that required convertible currency. The nation-state, which had established its reputation as a provider of welfare to the nation by guaranteeing a unified national market and providing protection against foreign competition and access to foreign markets, was supercharged when the liberal democracies applied the same principles to their interstate trade and finance. The effect of the reduction on direct controls and taxes on capital movements, the liberalization of long-standing regulatory constraints on financial services, the expansion of relationships with offshore financial harbors, and the disintermediation that accompanied these steps made states much wealthier. At a price.*

  The price these states were compelled to pay is a world market that is no longer structured along national lines but rather in a way that is transnational and thus in many ways operates independently of states. At the micro level, this is true of the multinational firm, which moves its location to optimize conditions for its operation, taking into account the nation-state only as a source of tax breaks and incentives to be sought, or as a nettle of regulations to be avoided. Far from being dependent on the local government, these corporations are seen as providing desperately needed jobs and economic activity, so that the state is evaluated on whether its workforce has the necessary skills, and whether its infrastructure has been suitably configured to attract the corporation. At the macro level, this development applies to capital flows, in the face of which every country appears powerless to manage its monetary policy. Walter Wriston, the former chairman of Citibank, described and defended the process of capital decontrol as follows:

  The gold standard [of the nineteenth century], replaced by the gold exchange standard, which was replaced by the Bretton Woods arrangements, has now been replaced by the information standard. Unlike the other standards, the information standard is in place, operating, will never go away and has substantially changed the world. What it means, very simply, is that bad monetary and fiscal policies anywhere in the world are reflected within minutes on the Reuters screens in the trading rooms of the world. Money only goes where it's wanted, and only stays where it's well treated, and once you tie the world together with telecommunications and information, the ball game is over. It's a new world, and the fact is, the information standard is more draconian than any gold standard… For the first time in history the politicians of the world can't stop it.15

  Approximately four trillion dollars—a figure greater than the entire annual GDP of the United States—is traded every day in currency markets. The consequences of these trades for the economic well-being of any particular nation-state can be decisive. There is a grotesque disparity between the rapid movement of international capital and the ponderous and territorially circumscribed responses of the nation-state, as clumsy as a bear chained to a stake, trying to chase a shifting beam of light.

  Finally, communications—in the broadest sense of that term, encompassing all human logistics—have increased the dangers posed by transnational threats (like those of new diseases once confined to remote incubators, or wounds to the global environment that once took centuries to materialize, or abrupt population shifts and migrations that were once locally confined, to take but three examples). Moreover, the global communications network itself presents a new and fraught fragility as to which merely national protection is pathetically inadequate.

  The most important consequence of these developments is that the State seems less and less credible as the means by which a continuous improvement in the welfare of its people can be achieved. Many states, including most notably the United States, have experienced considerable difficulty in achieving stability even regarding their own budgets. Their difficulties with chronic deficits and ever-mounting debt are instructive. Of course there is nothing wrong with a state taking on debt. Every corporation does this. If taxes can be analogized to equity contributions, then it can properly be said that a state should maintain the balance of debt and equity it thinks appropriate at any given time. During the development of the American West, and during the Second World War, the U.S. government acquired debt as an even greater proportion of its national wealth than today. What marks the current period as different is the way in which the funds thus acquired have been used: the proceeds of this borrowing have been returned as consumption—that is, to improve the immediate welfare of the people—rather than to fund investment in infrastructure; and much of that consumption has been expatriated as earnings to foreign firms. A nation-state government simply finds itself unable to either balance its budget (because it cannot reduce welfare outlays to all sectors) or redirect the proceeds of its borrowing, because only by borrowing money can it continue plausibly to claim that it is bettering the welfare of its people, much as the manager of a Ponzi scheme, by distributing to investors the proceeds of fresh participants, can continue to claim that his stock portfolio is thriving. Such policies have an inevitable end, as everyone recognizes. There is no reason why a state cannot grow out of its deficit, but to do so, however, it will have to increasingly abandon the objective of the government's maintaining the ever-improving welfare of its citizens.* That is, it will have to change the crucial element of the basis for its legitimacy as a nation-state. As we will see in a later discussion, this is precisely what the Bush administration in the United States and the Blair government in Great Britain were in the midst of doing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.16 From this perspective President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher were among the last nation-state leaders. Although they offered radically new policies, they appealed to the same basis on which to judge those policies—whether they improved the welfare of the people—as did their great welfare-state predecessors. Bush and Blair, however, are among the first market-state political leaders. They appeal to a new standard—whether their policies improve and expand the opportunities offered to the public—because this new standard reflects the basis for a new form of the State.

  Although it may surprise many readers, the corporation was a nation-state vehicle to improve the welfare of its citizens. Replacing the great trusts and partnerships of the state-nation, the corporation bureaucratized the management of business, making it feasible for the State, through regulation, to temper the profit motive with concern for the public welfare, replacing the enterprising if ruthless entrepreneur with the modern manager. This varied in degree from nation-state to nation-state, but through-out the First World the corporation was the legal structure by which the political objective of improving welfare was grafted onto the market.

  The revolution in debt financing of the 1980s dramatically changed this. By mobilizing hitherto uninvolved shareholders and drawing on capital raised by high-yield (junk) bonds that promised—and delivered—excellent rates of return, wave after wave of mergers and takeovers transformed the management of large corporations. The “fat” that new managers were able to squeeze out of the companies they took over in order to pay the interest on the debt by means of which they had bought a controlling percentage of shares, in some measure came from the nonprofit, public welfare role of the corporation. Huge savings did not accrue through shutting down private dining rooms, whatever the corporate raiders said. Savings on this scale came from downsizing and layoffs. The productivity gains made possible by the computer chip and the immediacy of information brought about by the revolution in communications combined to replace corporate managerial control (which tended to favor stability over enhanced com
petitiveness) with control by the capital markets. The corporation had failed to maximize the opportunities of its shareholders because it insulated business decisions from competition. Indeed there was really no way that even the most enlightened managers could both protect the welfare of the community and create the lean, nimble enterprises capable of prevailing in the global marketplace.

  CULTURE

  The third promise of the nation-state was that it would protect the cultural integrity of the nation. Whether this applied to national liberation movements in Third World colonies whose cultures had been suppressed or to ethnic groups like the Czechs or Poles, who found themselves submerged within a larger national culture, or to the Germans, whose culture was fragmented among many states, or to the Italians, to whom all of these disabilities at one time applied, the nation-state promised a wholeness. One nation, one state.

  Here too the strategic innovations of the Long War played a transformative role. Mass electronic communications made possible mass ideological propaganda on a scale and of an immediacy hitherto impossible. Of course propaganda has long been a military tool: Napoleon's battle dispatches no less than his calls for liberty and equality were studiedly drafted to move public opinion. Romanticizing war-making served his political goals. Napoleon did not believe that public opinion would decide the issue at Waterloo or Austerlitz or Borodino, however. By contrast, the morale of the entire nation is crucial to the prosecution of twentieth century warfare. That is why the morale of any enemy public—as opposed to the morale of the army and its ruling elites for Clausewitz and Napoleon—must be crushed by the nation-state at war. For the same reason the morale of one's own nation must be inspired and reassured.17 The globalization of communications, however, wrests control of this morale from the instrumentalities of the nation-state. Foreign broadcasts, for example, are the primary news source for 60 percent of educated Chinese, despite the efforts of the People's Republic of China to control the content of information going to its public. Access to the Internet will inevitably increase this figure.