THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  In the market-state, the marketplace becomes the economic arena, replacing the factory. In the marketplace, men and women are consumers, not producers (who are probably offshore anyway).

  What can a hospital attendant, or a schoolteacher or a marriage counselor or a social worker or a television repairman or a government official be said to make?… More important than the producers… are the entrepreneurs—heroes of autonomy, consumers of opportunity—who compete to supply whatever all the other consumers want or might be persuaded to want… competing with one another to maximize everyone else's options.27

  Some entrepreneurs will fail; all consumers will find their options limited, to varying degrees, by their resources. But both failure and limitation are necessary to choosing; there can be no real choices without the possibility of getting it wrong, and indeed choice itself is a consequence of scarcity.

  Is governance easier in the market-state, because so much less is demanded of it, or more difficult because the habits of the good citizen are lost? Perhaps both. As is frequently pointed out, contemporary political reporting is not presented against an historical background of complex competing values, but increasingly in terms of the power relationships of the personalities involved, as if politics were like a simple sporting event—who's winning and who's losing, or, as shown by the little arrows in a popular news magazine, who's up and who's down. This is characteristic of the market-state, with its de-emphasis on the programmatic and legalistic aspects of governance.

  And is this not what politics is—not simply how it is reported—in the market-state? When the publics of nation-states, to say nothing of their leading individuals, believed wholeheartedly in the mere materiality of their history—that they were in the grip of vast causal forces, economic, psychological, sociological, over which they had no control—then politics for the public, like ethics for the individual, became mainly a matter of protecting the interest of the group within which one found oneself. When the publics of market-states come to believe that their histories are chosen, a matter of interpretation, deconstruction, and sometimes cosmetic reconstruction, then politics, again like ethics, becomes a matter of insurance—quantifiable and probabilistic. On the other hand, a meritocracy where no one can remember what the moral bases for merit were, but where it can be measured and ruthlessly assessed nonetheless, promises a competitive dynamism that few nation-states could match today.

  Recent movements in American jurisprudence—law and economics, feminism, critical legal studies—all agree on this first principle: power is the basis for legal decisions. Whatever the intellectual merits of such movements, a society that is strongly influenced by them is going to have a hard time finding nurses or teachers or soldiers without devoting vastly more financial resources to their recruitment and retention. And yet the diversion of more resources to the human services sector by the State is far less likely in a society that values entrepreneurial, material success above all. “The market is not a good setting for mutual assistance, for I cannot help someone else without reducing (for the short term at least) my own options.”28 On the other hand, teamwork and harmony are far better indicators of an organization's long-term prospects for success than many other indices, and so such a society may well excel at encouraging those institutions that are best able to motivate persons to cooperate.

  Long before the time of princes, long before there were states, “everywhere was an America,” John Locke wrote. By this he meant a world entirely free of any civilized institutions, as he believed America to have been when Columbus discovered it for European society, a world, that is, of opportunity, a world to be made. Perhaps we now stand at a similar moment of discovery.

  The market-state is, above all, a mechanism for enhancing opportunity, for creating something—possibilities29—commensurate with our imaginations. The rocket technology developed to deliver weapons in the Long War has propelled man into a perspective from space; his communications technology, also developed for strategic reasons, has sent back an image from that perspective.30 I am inclined to think that something of the market-state's indifference to fate and sensitivity to risk is related to this reorientation, where the illusion of limitless opportunity meets the reality of choice.

  Similarly, the decoding of human genetic material will change the way we look at excellence and achievement. We are inclined to forget that the doctrine of the divine right of kings rested on an admiration amounting to awe for the fatalistic assumption of chance; it was discredited when Enlightenment thinkers shifted the basis for the evaluation of that doctrine from one of the grateful acceptance of divine providence (for who could know better than God who should rule), which is actually confirmed by the apparent randomness of inherited merit, to a more self-confident, huma-istically centered basis in the rational assessment of ability. We are at present undergoing a similar shift as the basis for human assessment in the various competitions of the meritocracy shifts from a passive acceptance of inherited abilities to a quest for the enhanced, or engineered, faculties made possible by molecular biology. Here, too, the market-state's apparent indifference to the state's role in ensuring justice fits the new, wide open landscape of apparent opportunity. A State that tried to sort out who should be allowed to grow taller or be endowed with perfect pitch would soon find itself hopelessly overcommitted financially or the center of group warfare; in other words, it would find itself in the situation of the nation-state at present. The market-state, with its sublime indifference to such questions and its refusal to guarantee outcomes, is more survivable in the new world of genetic technologies. These technologies have the power to enhance autonomy as never before, freeing men and women from their own genes, and providing choices only dreamt of until now.

  In each of the phase transitions that we observed in the history of the modern state, a new form of strategic vision emerged to accompany the new constitutional order. As the State moved to state-nation from territorial state, for example, arguments derived from the premises of collective security arose to accompany those arguments that derived from the balance of power that, in a previous transition, had emerged to dominate other, earlier strategic arrangements. In this way, states added to the array of available strategic programs, as earlier strategic visions were replaced and decayed into mere policies.

  What strategic motto will dominate this transition from nation-state to market-state? If the slogan that animated the liberal, parliamentary nation-states was to “make the world safe for democracy” (the security paradigm that decayed into the policy of democratic enlargement, among others), what will the forthcoming motto be? Perhaps “making the world available,” which is to say creating new worlds of choice and protecting the autonomy of persons to choose.

  Universalizing opportunity, however, does not mean making every state rich; nor does it even mean making sure no state becomes poorer. Rather, it means the opening up of opportunities on the largest scale possible in the expectation that this will maximize the growth of wealth generally. It may require that every state refrain from steps that would make any other state poorer to a degree greater than the gain in enrichment taken as a whole, but this is not as onerous as it may at first appear. For example, the state that develops a substitute for oil may well make another state, one that produces oil, poorer. But the gain in the total enrichment of the global environment is greater than the loss, because there are now two sources of energy supplies where before there was only one. A state need not be required to subsidize the growth of other states—as perhaps the oil-producing states once did when oil prices were artificially low—even if a rise in prices may harm some states while benefiting others, and even if the total balance sheet of world wealth is static, i.e., only a transfer of wealth is accomplished, one without net growth to the world taken as a whole. For in this case, the state that became poorer is not poorer than it would have been had the subsidy never occurred. Some states are going to be poorer in a world of market-states, but they need not be poorer
than they would have been absent the emergence of the market-state; indeed, within the world of nation-states, the poorest states are already getting poorer.

  The transition to the market-state is bound to last over a long period and put into conflict the ideals of the old and new orders. It should be emphasized that just what particular form of the State ultimately emerges from this process cannot confidently be predicted. It is a failure of imagination, however, to assume that the only thing that will replace the nation-state is another structure with nation-state-like characteristics, only larger. It is in some ways rather pathetic that the visionaries in Brussels can imagine nothing more forward-looking than equipping the E.U. with the trappings of the nation-state. Just now, it seems to be the Euro, a currency that, like all currencies, will be reduced to an accounting mechanism in the face of the ubiquitous Visa card. The key idea of the modern state is the exclusiveness of its jurisdiction. It is natural that commentators then should infer from the exclusivity of membership in the E.U. that jurisdictional exclusiveness must follow, but this rather misses the point of the modern state's development in the first place, its ability to deliver legitimacy. Facing the pressures described in this chapter, the State is likelier to resort to the pattern of accommodation and change we have seen in earlier periods than to self-destruct by dissolution into a larger mass. If the E.U. were to persist in its current course, it would be attempting to thwart the emergence of a market-state. Instead, it may be that the Union itself will adapt, enabling rather than attempting to suppress this new constitutional order.

  It should also be emphasized that I have not argued, and do not wish to argue, that the State has changed in the precise ways it has because of strategic challenges to itself. Many elements in the development of the State account for the fact that it has changed in exactly the ways it has; moreover, the State might have innovated in other ways; the innovations that did occur might have occurred anyway. I claim only that a coherent and helpful account can be given of the constitutional changes the State has undergone in periods of strategic threat, and of the strategic innovations that accompanied the new constitutional orders that have emerged. That said, what guesses can we make about how states will adapt to this new form?

  The market-state will live within three paradoxes: (i) it will require more centralized authority for government, but all governments will be weaker, having greatly contracted the scope of their undertakings, having devolved or lost authority to so many other institutions, including deregulated corporations, which are in but not of the State, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations such as the Red Cross, the MacArthur Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council), which are in but not of the market, and clandestine military networks and terrorist groups, which set up proto-markets in security and function as proto-states at war; (2) there will be more public participation in government, but it will count for less, and thus the role of the citizen qua citizen will greatly diminish and the role of citizen as spectator will increase; (3) the welfare state will have greatly retrenched, but infrastructure security, epidemiological surveillance, and environmental protection—all of which are matters of general welfare—will be promoted by the State as never before. These three paradoxes derive from the shift in the basis of legitimacy from that of the nation-state to that of the market-state. Let me speculate about possible policies for one state, the United States, within this new constitutional order.

  SECURITY

  Some consequences of the strategic innovations that won the Long War require a stronger and more centralized government than before. For example, nuclear weapons strategy, clandestine intelligence collection, and covert action sometimes require a level of secrecy that is incompatible with open government or even the relation been parliamentary oversight and the citizenry that links government to the people. Unless the president has the authority to launch nuclear weapons, the system of assured annihilation is changed into a very different scheme of risk taking that might well tempt an adversary into making threats—or executing them—in the hope of paralyzing the United States. It is simply absurd to think that a system of nuclear deterrence could be maintained if the president had to go to Congress for a declaration of war before launching a retaliatory or pre-emptive strike. But how can the difficult problem of nuclear command and control be reconciled with the new constitutional demands of the market-state for transparency and citizen participation? The answer may lie in changing our expectations about what legitimate delegation consists in and accepting very broad predelegations of authority, as it were, that can be withdrawn by the normal statutory process but that otherwise remain in place. This changes the burden between the branches of government, admittedly; after such a predelegation, the Congress would have to muster a two-thirds majority to remove power from the president by overriding his veto of legislation repealing the delegation, should he choose to resist. We are already moving from a system in which the State is the principal actor on behalf of the nation to one in which the State is the facilitator of practical affairs. The market-state seeks a role as enabler and umpire, and shuns the role of provider and judge. Broad legislative delegations—such as “fast track” trade authorizations and the consolidated budget—are above all simply practical and efficient. Increasingly, the justification for state action will turn on its relation to minimizing transaction costs. Redistributive and meliorist policies will come under intense attack on these grounds.

  This decoupling of state apparat and national community is consistent with developments in war itself. If war becomes again, as it once was, an affair of states rather than of peoples—if it becomes, in Michael Howard's words, “denationalized”—this may not be such a bad thing. It is true that this move tends to isolate the executive from the body politic, making it “a severed head conducting its intercourse with other severed heads according to its own laws.”31 There will be little sense of the mass participation that characterized the Long War and that united nationalism and militarism in the creation of the nation-state. But if this is no longer a military necessity, should our constitutional forms continue to demand it? Can participation be supplanted by mere observation, coupled with Internet opinion polling, rather than voting and serving? What seems likeliest is that expectations will change, ultimately corresponding to the change in strategic requirements that no longer require vast armies of conscripts—though again I note that the precise way in which this accommodation will play out is not predestined.

  Other responsibilities of the market-state may also lead to a similar delegation of power, e.g., the monitoring of epidemics and diseases, of inter-national migration, of terrorism, of espionage, and of threats to the environment. All of these spheres of governmental activity are ill-suited to effective oversight by the market. Some depend on maintaining the secrecy of crucial information, while others require a single governmental voice in a dialogue with other governments. In both cases, transparency and public knowledge are sacrificed.

  The successful discharge of the responsibilities just discussed is only possible in a constitutional system with a powerful, centralized, and, above all, trusted executive. Innovations of the 1970s, like the independent counsel, or detractions from the unitary executive generally, as well as the contempt with which claims of executive privilege are customarily greeted, are hardly compatible with the kind of decisive executive demanded by the market-state. It's not that the president must be above that law: that would be utterly and obviously contradictory of the principles of the American constitution. Nor should the presidency be inferior to the judiciary, the Congress, or the press, the executive's principal competitors. It's rather that our expectations about what the law should be have been shaped by the endgame of the nation-state and its close identification of the State with the nation. When these expectations change, the glamour and prestige of the presidency will suffer. As an institution, it will find itself in competition with the media to a greater degree even than with its traditional competitors in the other two
branches. It will be important to ensure that the president's ability to govern, in the limited areas of responsibility given to the market-state, be enhanced. Fragmenting the constitutionally unitary executive branch can scarcely be a positive step in the direction of enhanced presidential authority.

  Some areas of responsibility are amenable neither to complete determi-nation by market processes nor to handling by the federal government. These might devolve to the states and localities with the expectation that they will be delegated to associations, NGOs, nonprofit foundations, charities, and the like that operate with the greatest legitimacy at the local level because participation seems more available to local citizens.

  The important difference between the devolving federal state and the local state is that the latter can experiment in the market. In some local states genetic research, abortion, and sexual orientation will be largely unregulated; in others, regulations governing these activities will be enforced by market actors licensed by the local state; and in some states the regulations will be enforced by police sanction. What is all too clear, however, is that a federal police presence is far too unwieldy, too nonlocal to handle the single issue most American citizens fault their government over, the issue of crime. If there was any doubt about this, it was settled in the public's mind by the U.S. government's handling of the Branch Davidian case in Waco, Texas, where eighty-one persons, thirteen of them children, died as a consequence of the government's efforts to serve a warrant.32 Nor has the continuing futility of the government's “war” on drug use redeemed its prestige.

  The devolution and the licensing of private firms to enforce regulations are troubling in a society that has steadily moved to make its criminal laws nationally uniform and to restrict the legitimate use of force to trained men and women acting under strict official discipline. In this, however, as in much else the United States can more easily adapt to such devolution than other states. Its system of federalism provides a ready structure for devolving power out of Washington; virtually all law enforcement is already a matter of state jurisdiction. Moreover, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—aptly termed by one distinguished constitutional scholar “the embarrassing second amendment”33 for the discomfort it causes persons who are accustomed to supporting both gun control and civil liberties—reflects a fundamental, residual locus of armed force in the people themselves.34 If, as Martin van Creveld speculates, “the day-to-day burden of defending society from low-intensity conflict will be transferred to the booming security business,”35 this mixture of devolution and privatization will become commonplace in the market-state. This is a harrowing prospect, but one with which we may have to learn to cope.