THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  You should not be content to be king of Portugal, of Aragon and of Valencia and Count of Barcelona, but you should direct all your work and thought… to reduce the realms to the same order and legal systems as Castile. If your majesty succeeds in this you will be the most powerful prince in the world.36

  Leadership and dominance are the language of Olivares and Richelieu, just as they are the animating ambitions of the Habsburg emperors, who shattered the princely states of Italy, and the French kings who, in turn, destroyed the hegemonical dreams of imperial Catholicism and whose model inspired Olivares. It would have been idle of Charles V or Maximilian to think in nationalist terms; what nation—Spanish, Austrian, Italian, Burgundian—would it have been? Nor did the great alliance structures of the period presage a system of collective security, precisely because these structures were not institutional in nature, and spawned no congresses or conventions that outlived the conflicts that gave them birth. Even shared religious allegiances could not create an alliance structure that outlasted a particular conflict and placed the security of the whole as its highest responsibility. In the Thirty Years' War, Catholic France proved Catholic Spain's decisive enemy.

  It was the transition from kingly states to territorial states that introduced the paradigm of nationalism, as German princes became tied to particular peoples, in the slow working out of the consequences of the principle of cuius regio eius religio. Of course there persisted the continuing policies of the balance of power and of ideological hegemonism: the Treaty of Utrecht specifically cites the balance of power as its goal, and it was the thwarted ambitions of France to achieve hegemony that led to that treaty. But the “anarchic society” is a term one associates with Hobbes, not with his predecessors. It is he who insists that no individual is strong enough to guarantee his own security unaided, and that governments are required to do so in order to settle disputes that are not amenable to direct compromise or agreement among the parties. Conflict among states is the natural environment.

  When Rousseau argues that moral rule, in order to be moral, must be self-imposed and thus that the State must originate in self-government, he writes words that to us suggest popular sovereignty, but to his contemporaries would have suggested the transition to the state-nation. For he also writes that the good of each citizen must be distinguished from his temporary desires. The permanent aim of the citizen—the product of his rational, true, higher self—s distinguished from his passing impulses. Thus obedience to the state is an act of allegiance to the true self-will; by this means, in Rousseau's word, “I am forced to be free.” Because this higher good is the same for all rational citizens, their permanent selves are identical and can thus have a single will that is manifested in the State. Although it may shock us to think so, the view that would organize the powers of Europe on precisely the same bases that individual governments are constituted leads directly to Hegel and the deified State. For if states, collectively, are the only means of assuring security and concert, then is not the State the only vehicle for a realization of the nation, its protection and order?

  Because these transitions occur in the nature of the State itself, it is hardly surprising that the paradigms of statecraft to which they give birth should reflect ideas about the legitimate constitutional makeup of the State.

  Finally we come to the transition from state-nation to nation-state, which gave us the paradigm within which we currently strive. This may be stated thus: The State is constituted to improve the material well-being of the nation. Thus the nation-state bears within its legitimacy the problem of nationalities. Who can claim a state? What is a national people? Suppose the nation is itself divided—what means are permissible to coerce and legitimate unification? This is the program of the evangelist of democracy, and it is rightly associated with Lincoln and Wilson, but also with Otto von Bismarck and Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Gorbachev. Each of the three political philosophies that contested the Long War had a differ-ent answer to this issue, but for each it was the issue, whether it proposed submerging nationalism in the larger good owed to the international proletariat, or worshipping the nation as the authentic legatee of the volk, or placing at its disposal the procedures of legal process and representation. The United States has lived within a Wilsonian paradigm because that is the American understanding of the basis for the nation-state, but all the Great Powers lived within variations of the nation-state paradigm, whether Hitler's formulation or Stalin's. If, as I argued above, this paradigm has not withered away or been lost with the end of the Long War, why should we expect, much less search for, a new paradigm?

  It could be that the vacillation of American foreign policy has no deeper cause than the poverty of its leadership; it may be that the prevailing paradigm is sturdy enough to provide a basis for choosing among competing policies in the various contexts that current affairs bring forth, if only leaders of a higher caliber were doing the choosing. I doubt this: the predecessor to the Clinton administration had no better answers to Haiti, North Korea, Somalia, Yugoslavia, or Ukraine, all of which it made modestly worse by not having a policy and bequeathing acute problems that became chronic to its successor. If, as I believe, President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker will stand high in America's history for their contributions to unifying Germany and expelling Iraq from Kuwait, it can be seen already that the former was a problem in the endgame of the Long War, and that the latter did not even serve as a precedent for great power action a few months after Baghdad was surrounded when, for only the second time in the history of the U.N., a member state invaded another member state and annexed its territory. Virtually all of the Clinton administration's important achievements in foreign security policy—in China, Haiti, North Korea, Russia, Israel, Ireland, the former state of Yugoslavia—were at a tentative stage when the new Bush administration took office. The best that can be said of the Clinton initiatives is that they promised success even without a shared vision of the American role; the worst, that having lived by the expedient and the impromptu, we will find all these problems so much more troublesome when the arrangements that temporarily quieted them unravel.

  I am inclined to believe, however, that it is not simply the absence of a structuring idea, a shared way of understanding the challenges we face, that pervades all the current proposals and disquieting performances, but rather the clinging to a paradigm that has lost its usefulness. The Wilsonian pledge—to make the world safe for democracy—and the Wilsonian understanding—that national democracies offered the best chance to benefit the people of the world—have not failed us; they have succeeded beyond what Wilson would have dared attempt in parts of the globe untouched by the Fourteen Points. They have succeeded in providing political principles that could guide our strategic policies during the Long War in which those principles were contested and sorely tried. Now, with the Long War over, we are so sunk in the habits of strategic thinking that we ceaselessly bat about alternative security policies at a time when we are unable to make the simplest decision when to use force. We have lived in a state of war for so long that, paradoxically, we are unable to make appropriate security plans for peace. The noteworthy feature of the policies that bid to succeed containment is that they, like that policy, assume a certain frame of reference for strategic conflict. Because the roles of history and law have been so well defined during the Long War— indeed they set its terms, because the establishment of legitimacy for state regimes after the collapse of the nineteenth century system was what the Long War sought, by strategic means, to determine—we have become accustomed to think within the context of that war.

  In the next chapter I will offer some speculation as to what such a successor paradigm might look like, by examining current contexts analogous to those that provided paradigms to states in the past: the contexts of strategic innovation and constitutional change. Then it may be possible to answer the question posed in the Introduction: How ought the United States and its allies decide when to use fo
rce in the international arena?

  Preliminarily, however, the first thing one ought to observe about a new archetype is that it will not be something wholly new in form. For the United States, for example, there will be no new constitution. Americans will still be called “Americans,” though what image that word conjures up in their minds may not be the same as came to my father and his contemporaries. Indeed, perhaps the most serious impediment to creative thinking in this area has been our automatic impulse to assume that the next paradigm will involve something like a new kind of state, that is, a reiteration of the European state on a different scale. Articles such as “After the Nation-State, What?” capture this reaction, for they invariably posit a “superstate” or no state at all.37 Moreover, because so many of the challenges facing the nation-state are supranational in character—environmental threats, mass migration, capital speculation, terrorism, and cyber interference, to name just five—and because supranational solutions will be required, many assume that delegations of sovereignty must and will occur. This is a profound misreading of how such integration as has occurred in Europe came about. It is American involvement in Europe, through NATO and the Marshall Plan, that has, paradoxically, provided Western Europe with such capacity as it currently possesses to act as a unified political entity. It is difficult to imagine Britain ever delegating such a role to the bureaucratic machinery of Brussels or to the one state capable of dominating that machinery by virtue of its military and economic potential, Germany. The unification of the German state has, for the foreseeable future, put an end to the unification of Western Europe by creating a power that is actually capable of managing an integrated E.U.

  What critics writing in the security area have not contemplated is a change in the constitutional structures of the European (and other) states that does not surrender sovereignty to yet another state, but returns it even more radically to the people themselves.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Strategy and the Market-State

  If we are to create historical art, it is not enough to look back on history; we must be able to live history, to take part in public life.

  —Jacob Burckhardt, “Bericht uber die Kunstausstellung

  zu Berlin im Herbste 1842.”

  MARKET-STATES:

  MERCANTILE, ENTREPRENEURIAL, MANAGERIAL

  The fundamental choice for every market-state is whether to be (1) a mercantile state—i.e., one that endeavors to improve its relative position vis-à-vis all other states by competitive means, or (2) an entrepreneurial state, one that attempts to improve its absolute position while mitigating the competitive values of the market through cooperative means, or (3) a managerial market-state, one that tries to maximize its position both absolutely and relatively by regional, formal means (trading blocs, etc.). This choice will have both constitutional and strategic implications.

  The mercantile state seeks market share above all else, in order to gain relative dominance in the international market; the entrepreneurial state seeks leadership through the production of collective goods that the world's states want; the managerial state seeks power through its hegemony within a regional economic zone. One is not more moral or necessarily more benign than another. There are pitfalls in each position: the entrepreneurial state may be tempted to abdicate its leadership and initiative out of mingled pique and national self-absorption, as the American nation-state did after World War I; the managerial state always risks the dilution of responsibility that goes with cooperative systems—by just such means did the society of nation-states watch as genocidal campaigns proceeded in Libya, in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Bosnia, in the Sudan; the mercantile state risks retributive reactions of the kind practiced by nation-states that so greatly worsened the depression of the 1930s. The entrepreneurial state may become so intoxicated with its own absolute position that it fails to prepare itself—by not deferring consumption in order to invest in infrastructure—for relative challenges from states whose competitive drive is masked by the improved wealth positions of all major players; by just such developments have great states routinely been displaced by hungrier antagonists. The mercantile state is subject to an analogous fate, however; Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is largely devoted to documenting the fall of mercantile states whose balance sheets between economic reinvestment and military expenditure tipped them into relative, and eventually absolute, decline. The mercantile state may also forgo the benefits of cultural and political cooperation that eras of peace can bring. Like the famous, faceless player in the Prisoner's Dilemma,1 the mercantile state will routinely make suboptimal competitive choices out of the fear and suspicion that is conditioned in a society that has accustomed itself to long periods of conflict and is inept at collaboration. The managerial state will inevitably resort to re-regulation as a means of dampening conflict within its regional institutional group, and this is likely to lead to suboptimal economic performance.

  One market-state already appears to have opted for the role of mercantile state: Japan. With its literate and educated people, largely devoid of ethnic conflict and possessing the most restrictive immigration laws of any major state, Japan is well placed to conduct a campaign of relative increase in enrichment at the expense of its trading partners. With a history of high savings rates, Japan can avoid some of the intergenerational conflict that otherwise accompanies state borrowing. Japan can also avoid the public order problems that seem to dog every multiethnic society, including the problems associated with immigration that are tolerated by societies that depend on a fresh source of cheap labor that Japan does not yet need owing to its practice of rigorous self-denial in personal consumption.* A mercantile trading policy depends on control of one's currency, which is supported by strictly enforced limits on public spending, and the presence of value-added industries that dominate the terms of trade. Japan has to a large degree been able to pursue such a policy. The difficulty with this course, as Japan's experience shows, is the rigidity and self-dealing that infest a mercantile state, transforming its markets by secretive, deceptive, and even corrupt practices. An entire banking sector run on the model of the military-industrial complex, for example, is unlikely to be the most efficient agent of domestic growth.

  Is the mercantile role an appropriate choice for the United States? There is some doubt, in any case, whether the United States will be able to maintain a workforce capable of successfully operating in the high-technology industries that give a state favorable terms of trade. With the most relaxed immigration laws of any major state, the United States both adds to its welfare expenses and fragments its cultural unity.* Because of its decentralized social and political structures, the United States is unable to curtail individual consumption, leaving it with a high trade deficit (which results from lowering the costs of goods to the consumer through imports), a decade of high budget deficits (which results from lowering the costs of government to the taxpayer through borrowing), and a high national debt3 that will have to be repaid even if, as some predict, the budget deficits might cease (the result of the interaction of the first two phenomena as money from imported capital and tax rebates fueled a period of rapid growth). There is little prospect for a change in course: indeed, if the market-state is constituted to enrich the opportunities of individuals (and not simply to enrich the people as a whole) why should a multicultural, multiethnic state like the United States impose austerity measures that address these problems? Most individuals, including especially the children of the poor, are far better off under current U.S. policies than they would be under taxes and monetary rules that penalized borrowing and importing. Only the children of the future are penalized, and multicultural market-states appear to feel somewhat less responsibility toward the unborn. In this way the market-state plays to American weaknesses as well as to our strengths.

  In one respect, however, those particular weaknesses tend to undermine the maneuverability so crucial to the market-state. That weakness has to do with the “fo
llowership” traits of the American people at this time, traits that are indispensable to a successful mercantile state. An August 1995 poll of Americans revealed that 59 percent said that there was not a single elected official that they admired. Of the 36 percent who said they could think of one, the president was named by 6 percent, his then opponent the majority leader was named by 5 percent, and the new Speaker of the House by 4 percent.4 Such coolness toward authority does not evidence the sort of social adhesion to the State that wins multistate conflicts.

  But to say that the United States is not well situated, considered in the abstract, to be a mercantile state in the era of market-states, is not to say it could not prevail in this role. It need only be relatively well situated, vis-à-vis its competitors, and here the size of the American market, its role as currency provider for the developed world, and its abundant natural resources still ensure that, should it choose, it could dominate Japan or the E.U. or any other such competitor in a mercantile competition (so long as it could prevent the formation of an anti-American cartel, such as might occur between the E.U. and Japan). Precisely because we were so unsuccessful at developing exports—which account for less than 25 percent5 of GNP—the United States has far less to suffer, in relative terms, from a decline in world trade and retaliation against American mercantile practices. We could be a successful mercantile state, as a market-state, as we were, despite our many shortcomings, a successful mercantile state as a state-nation.