THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  That does not, however, decide the matter. Should the United States choose this option? What are the costs and benefits (for that is how the market-state will measure things) of being an entrepreneurial state? The entrepreneurial state would pursue the enhancement of universal opportunity through a nonmercantile, free-trade policy. An entrepreneurial state would allow for relatively free immigration so long as the costs imposed by immigrants did not significantly affect the wealth and wealth creation of those taxpayers already present. It would seek environmental protection and nuclear nonproliferation through any effective means, collective or unilateral—by force if necessary in extreme cases—because the general enrichment of mankind is a consequence of success, even if a single hostile state loses as a result. It would employ multilateral alliance systems, of which NATO is an example, 6 to expand collective security but be prepared to join ad hoc “coalitions of the willing”7 when collective security institutions are stymied. Paradoxically, such a state would be more prone to intervention—in cases of ethnic cleansing, humanitarian relief, support for the peoples of hijacked democracies, the destruction of terror networks— than the mercantile state, which husbands its violence to pursue more directly mercantile goals. If being an entrepreneurial state leads to more absolute wealth, does it actually encourage reinvestment of that wealth, or is this wealth frittered away in various adventures? Even more important, can the entrepreneurial state avoid cataclysmic war more successfully because it can remain armed without the constant friction of strategic competition inherent in a system of mercantile states? Is the aggressive mercantile state in fact more likely to be weak militarily because it is so desperate to throw its resources into economic competition, while at the same time it fails to develop the cooperative practices that can ameliorate crises and conflicts? And if it is, and the choice of the mercantile option by other competitive states actually becomes a source of comparative advantage to the United States, should we continue to produce collective security goods, like the creation of the coalition that fought the Gulf War?

  And what about the option of the managerial market-state? The United States is poorly situated geographically to lead a regional trading bloc. Canada represents a small market, Latin America an uncertain one, separated by language and culture from the United States. It is true that there is a large and rapidly growing Hispanic minority in the United States, but this pool of talented persons is not necessarily making the United States more congruent with the places they left. The day is far off when North Americans will grow up as bilingual as, say, people in Belgium or Denmark, where more than one ethnic community coexist.

  And why, in the age of the Internet, should physical proximity dictate the boundaries of regional trading blocs whose trade will be mainly in nonphysical items? Suppose the United States were part of a “virtual” region, composed of the United Kingdom, Singapore, India, the Philippines, and Canada. This might make the managerial model more palatable. The real question then becomes: Should the United States take the fateful step of creating a second E.U.—an “Economic Union” like the European Union—knowing that by so doing it hardens the lines of world competition and forfeits its unique, even transcendent role? If, as appears likely, the world will have an E.U. for the indefinite future, having two seems to be a step in the wrong direction that we should only take if we are compelled to do so.

  One proto-market-state that appears to be heading toward the role of managerial market-state is the new state of Germany. Although more truly multicultural than before, owing to the amalgamation of capitalist and socialist societies and the most open immigration policy of any E.U. member, Germany possesses a common language and a highly educated workforce. Germany's crucial roles in the E.U. and in NATO—linking economic and security interests, Atlantic and continental—give her the collaborative position that might have been Britain's (and under Tony Blair may still be). Unlike the United States, Germany has managed to maintain a strong currency and strong exports. Germany's venture into high debt is a model of imaginative investment in infrastructure because the proceeds of the borrowing went into the acquisition of East Germany and not into mere consumption. A collaborative foreign policy depends on refusing to tolerate or to become a free rider (that is, a mercantile state within a free trading system) and the willingness to use force to maintain world order and the ability to do so without exciting fear in other states. Germany has the self-discipline and the wealth to do both. Although Germany has been made the diplomatic scapegoat by her allies over Yugoslavia for her early recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, and although she has hitherto refused to take up security responsibilities outside the NATO area (as in Kuwait), it is noteworthy that she has since modified this policy and offered air force assets to protect the “safe areas” of Bosnia at a time when other NATO states were dithering. More recently, Germany offered military assistance to the coalition effort in Afghanistan. It remains to be seen whether Germany's wretched twentieth century history will be redeemed by her commitment to human rights in the twenty-first century or will cripple her altogether, making France's enforcer in Germany's more submissive periods and Eastern Europe's neocolonialist when German self-confidence asserts itself. NATO enlargement is one way the United States has encouraged the healthy development of the new German state.

  Absent an acute threat to American survival, the United States may simply lack the sense of purpose to be an effective entrepreneurial state. Perhaps more than at any time since the civil rights revolution, the United States needs political leadership to re-establish a national history that reflects our strengths of character, our inventiveness, our talents for cooperation and our benign ambition, and above all, our confidence in a common enterprise.8 President Clinton moved the United States far toward the market-state. President George W. Bush has entered office at a crucial time, and appears to be equally committed to this new constitutional order.

  The very nature of the entrepreneurial state, however, with its decentralization, its economic evaluation of all policy, its meritocratic competitiveness, and, above all, its taste for irony and amusement, will not make either leading or following easy. It is, however, a sense of purpose that is most required by the entrepreneurial state, because only such a sense—cultural, intellectual, artistic, as well as political—can endow a national history sufficient to move our distracted people to take up the distant and abstract burdens of such a state. We usually imagine leadership to be concerned with the future, but in fact it is the shaping of the past in the crucible of the present that empowers leadership because it gives an identity and a common perspective to those who would follow. We must feel that we are the heirs to the responsibilities the entrepreneurial state would impose on us, that they are our natural inheritance. Only history can do this, for it unites strategy and law by telling a story that provides us with a basis for legitimacy, that is, with some other self-image than the one in the narcissistic mirror of the present.

  Finally, we must determine which of these three choices, managerial, entrepreneurial, or mercantile, better reflects our role in the world, as it is and as we wish it to be. Which method of pursuing the goals we have embraced will evoke from our people those resources of will and unity and common enterprise that enabled us to prevail in the Long War? A mercantile state can unite us against a common foe and give us a central purpose, but it turns our people into an instrument. Education is undertaken for the enrichment of the business enterprise, not the intellect. Defense is belabored because it cannot show a bottom line, while our streets and our cities become more precarious than many theatres of war, and security itself becomes privatized by house alarms and psychiatrists. A movement toward a mercantile market-state by the United States will effect a decline in interstate cooperation at the very time when successfully opposing terrorism, international crime cartels, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction requires international collaboration.

  On the other hand, an entrepreneurial state is not without its risks. Co
nstitutionally, such an American state would reverse two of the impor-tant developments of late twentieth century American jurisprudence: the weakening of the executive and the decline of state and local government. An entrepreneurial state must have the executive authority to use force expeditiously and to keep its security secrets, two things an American president is hard-pressed to do today. The transparency in governmental affairs that is demanded by the citizens and the media of the market-state make its entrepreneurial form especially difficult to achieve. Yet such capabilities for secrecy are crucial for the entrepreneurial state because it is committed to enhancing world stability and thus even relatively abstract challenges—nuclear proliferation, ethnic cleansing in remote regions, international terrorism, environmental depredation—must nevertheless be dealt with decisively, which often means without previous public exposure of operations and plans.

  At the same time, the experimentation and innovation so dear to the market-state may thrive more abundantly under the federalism of the entrepreneurial state than under an omnicompetent government characteristic of managerial market-states. An entrepreneurial state might encourage the locality as a laboratory and even tolerate wide variations in, for example, welfare benefits and criminal sanctions that would be inimical to the managerial state. But simply increasing the authority of local governments, which will be whipsawed by corporations demanding tax and environmental concessions, on the one hand, and special-interest groups attempting to heighten regulation, on the other, is no answer. The smaller the jurisdiction, the greater its vulnerability. Perhaps only a managerial, continent-sized state like the United States can withstand the alternating threats to relocate (by the corporation) or frustrate (by the special-interest groups). In an entrepreneurial state, invariably there will be wide differences in local laws. In a country as tormented by race as ours, such variations are bound to produce invidious inequalities and discrimination. Can we afford to sacrifice the unity that a managerial state provides, even in peacetime? An entrepreneurial state, which we have so richly earned, could be an era of renewal for the United States in which enrichment means more than positive trade flows. But it could also lead to the disintegration of the State into regional, quasi-racial, and religious enclaves, devoid of any sense of overarching identity.

  Of course no state in the real world will embody 100 percent of any of these caricatures. Some states seem historically tilted toward one model: France, for example, appears to want to lead the E.U. into becoming a managerial superstate. Others, Britain and the United States for example, incline toward the entrepreneurial model. Still others, notably Japan and China, seem to have thrown their futures in with a more mercantile approach. Whatever choice we make, we will have to find a way to compensate for the market-state's inherent weaknesses—its lack of community, its extreme meritocracy, its essential materialism and indifference to heroism, spirituality, and tradition. The entrepreneurial state attempts to ameliorate the effects of the market through ad hoc institutions of maximum flexibility; the mercantile state compensates for the market by calling on national elements of competitiveness and achievement. The managerial state falls back on regulation to achieve stability and the ever-elusive “level playing field” so beloved of lobbyists who seek advantage, not neutrality, for their clients. All three models must cope with citizenries that are increasingly alienated from the State itself, indeed from the very societies that share the scope of the modern state—too large to comport with postmodern identities, too small to be viable on their own. There is a direct, although often obscured, line between the ever-presence of the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the immediacy of television images everywhere on the globe, and the very immanence of economic vulnerability, on the one hand, and the constitutional evolution of the State from a state focused on the people as a whole to one focused on persons, on the other.

  This need not be a cause for despair. American society has much less invested in its identity as an ethnic group,* if indeed it has had such an identity since the Civil War; it has less to lose by shedding this constitutional form.† It is well placed to make the transition from nation-state to market-state. In the passage to a legitimacy conveyed by assuring opportunity—with its need for transparency in government operations, its enhanced possibilities for enrichment, its meritocratic egalitarianism—the United States could develop a more responsive government, acting in fewer areas with greater confidence.

  STRATEGY AND THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKET-STATE:

  A SECURITY PARADIGM FOR THE UNITED STATES

  Many conflicts may lead states to war, but when these disputes implicate the basic legitimacy of states, we are led into the strategic whirlwinds that finally change the state system and its constituent constitutional archetypal orders. There are present in the current context three possibilities for this sort of conflict: wars between nation-states and market-states in which an exemplar of one of these forms challenges the other's assumptions about sovereignty, because these assumptions are not shared by the two orders; wars between one market-state and another, because the various forms of the market also differ with respect to fundamental ideas of sovereignty;* and war that spreads to the society of states from a civil war in one state where the partisans of the nation-state confront the partisans of the new market-state.

  As an example of the first contingency, consider the possibility that a nation-state's nuclear testing program so endangered the global atmosphere that another state, a market-state or proto-market-state, assumed it had the right forcibly to halt the testing program, even though the tests were conducted solely on national territory. What is appropriate for the market-state—with its porous territorial concepts and its responsibility to preserve the opportunities for personal development, including, of course, access to a safe environment—seems to clash with the absolute sovereignty of a nation-state taking steps it alone can determine are necessary, within its territory, to protect the nation. Similarly, a war between the United States and China over Taiwan would present classic nation-state claims to territorial integrity and antisecession versus internationalist market-state claims that no state can be absorbed without its consent, and that its “national” ethnic basis is not conclusive as to statehood.

  As an example of wars that might arise among or within market-states, consider three different sorts of such states—roughly characterized earlier as one working within traditions of individual rights, laissez-faire trading, and personal freedom, versus one coming from a tradition of group responsibility, state-managed trading, and rigid social stability, versus one within a communitarian tradition oriented to interest groups and social justice. Suppose these traditions came into conflict within a single great market-state, precipitating a revolutionary situation? Analogously this happened to some degree in all the great nation-states, but especially of course in Russia and Germany. Or suppose great powers, representing these three different approaches to the market-state, found themselves in conflict over an as-yet-undecided great power's constitutional valence, that is, the sort of market-state to emerge there? This also happened to the great nation-states; indeed I argued earlier that the Cold War, the last phase of the Long War, was fought by great powers representing different ideological approaches to the nation-state, over the constitutional destiny of the divided states of World War II—Korea, Viet Nam, and supremely, Germany. Political ideology determined the valence of the nation-state; with the market state, the valence is determined by differing views of retained* sovereignty—that sovereignty reserved to the People that is not delegated to government. An analogous sort of conflict might occur in the twenty-first century between different forms of market-states over the future of a divided state—China or Russia, for example—whose orientation toward these forms was undecided.

  One object of a security paradigm to accompany the constitutional archetype that will take us into the twenty-first century is to avoid such a cataclysm. If we are to avoid another world-rending war, then my hopes lie w
ith the entrepreneurial state. Only it offers the chance, through constant and costly vigilance, steadily to release the pressures attendant in the shifting distributions of global power among competitive states. Such a model increases the likelihood that the United States will share its technology and information resources, and it is by sharing rather than hoarding that we stave off competition. On the other hand, it must be noted that a mercantile market-state offers a better chance of enduring such an apocalypse should it come, because such states cultivate self-sufficiency. And the managerial state promises the greatest likelihood of recovering from such a conflict, because it strengthens the institutional basis necessary for reconstitution.

  Most important, however, the entrepreneurial model offers the United States the best chance of developing, marketing, and “selling” the collective goods that will maintain American influence in the world. We have been powerful and wealthy in eras past and have had little influence on world events; this might well be the case again should we decide for a mercantile market-state. I believe an entrepreneurial state can provide the structure and the new point of view we will need in order to prevent superpower nuclear proliferation (to states like Germany and Japan) and protect the global environment (from states like Russia and China) and to avoid a coming cataclysm. If this is wishful thinking, let me put my conclusion another way: should the entrepreneurial state be unable to avoid such a cataclysm, the United States would have to shift its purposes entirely and concentrate on how to survive and prevail in such a terrible conflict. Mercantilism might offer a better chance of buying off conflict, at the expense of allies, than would cooperative, collective defense systems. Unlike the members of the great alliances forged by nation-states to win the Long War, market-states can act with greater tactical flexibility and the most (not the least) successful of them will do so, changing partners, bluffing, using nonstate actors as agents of compromise and deception, much as a contemporary corporation sometimes behaves. But for that reason, mercantile market-states will be vulnerable to the same sort of tactics that Napoleon trained on the coalitions of territorial states, picking each one off from the group and either coopting or destroying it. For most of us, except the most pessimistic, a safer ground surely lies in trying to avoid such a conflict, rather than in contorting our natural traditions in anticipation of such a catastrophe should it come.