Good laws and good armies are the foundation of the state, said Machiavelli. The Shield of Achilles (Allen Lane), the book by American grand strategist Philip Bobbitt, is about just that: armies, laws and the state. To put it another way, this book is about legitimacy. The great wars around which the argument is structured were fought about different ideas of legitimacy; and the great peace settlements that ended them were attempts to embody the new legitimacy that emerged with victory.
Armies are vital to legitimacy. The first duty of the state is to protect its citizens from foreign attack. Failure against foreign invaders is the surest way to lose legitimacy-revolutions follow lost wars almost as surely as night follows day. The state's second duty is to protect its people from violence at home. Initially, when the main threat was from brigands, this also was a task for the army; later, police were invented. But behind the police there is still the military for use in emergencies (and perhaps Carl Schmitt was right that it is emergencies that bring out the true nature of the state). If you want to take over the state, you start with the headquarters of the army. If you then want to consolidate-even legitimate-your power, you will need to do so through laws and constitutions. As Bobbitt says, the outer dimension of the state is strategic, the inner dimension is constitutional. Force lies behind both.
Strategic requirements have had a profound influence on the development of the state. Bobbitt sees the origin of the modern state in Charles VIII's wars in Italy, where his artillery train demonstrated that, to quote Machiavelli, "no walls exist, however thick, that artillery cannot destroy in a few days." With the arrival of this new military technology, security required a more solid and lasting organisation than had been provided until then by the court of a renaissance prince. Out of this strategic necessity came the state as a corporate entity, more durable and better financed. And out of the same conjuncture came Machiavelli himself, the first theorist of the state, and then Grotius, father of the idea of a law of nations.
Bobbitt associates the emergence of what he calls the princely state with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Later wars and settlements, according to his classification, produced the kingly state following the thirty years' war and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; the territorial state following the wars of Louis XIV and the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713; the state-nation after Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15; and the nation state ratified at Versailles in 1919 after the first world war. In each case, advances in military techniques were translated into a new version of the state and a revised idea of legitimacy.
I share the central thesis of Bobbitt's book: that the state changes its shape, military technology and ideas of legitimacy play a part in this, and international order changes with it. But there are important points on which I do not agree. First, I do not think that the conflicts of the 20th century should be seen, as Bobbitt does, as a single event. Second, while I am broadly in sympathy with his view of the latest evolution of the state-"the market state," as he calls it-I do not think he is right to predict conflict between the states in this category. Third, he is too dismissive of international law and, finally, he may be too optimistic about the long-term survival of the state itself.
In one of the many stimulating asides in his book, Bobbitt says that leadership is not so much about setting a course for the future as shaping an interpretation of the past. So it is significant that he insists throughout on describing the events of 1914 to 1989 as "the long war" and the settlement that concluded them "the Peace of Paris." At first this seems merely artificial; by the end you begin to wonder if it does not represent a rather more significant difference.
The short 20th century can indeed be seen as a struggle between different versions of legitimacy-whether the nation state should be expressed in racial, class, or liberal parliamentary terms. Consistent with this, and equally valid, is Bobbitt's argument that Versailles was flawed, inter alia, because it did not settle on a single constitutional order and thereby excluded some states which were critical to the success of the system.
What at first sight seems odd is his omission of the settlement of 1945 to 1958. It is true that there was no great congress to match Vienna or Utrecht. But if you add together Bretton Woods, the treaties of Washington and Rome (throwing in San Francisco if you want-for all its weaknesses, the UN is a great survivor) it comes close to an international order. In fact, it constitutes a far more complete order than anything that had emerged from earlier peace conferences. Admittedly, it did not include everybody-but this was precisely what the cold war was about. That is why the 1990 Paris summit looms so small in our consciousness. The order was already established and all that was left was for those outside it, either by choice or ill luck, to sign up. This process is going on now as different countries join the WTO, Nato and the EU. It is not the Peace of Paris that has set the standards for democracy and the free market, but the WTO, Nato and, above all, the EU's Copenhagen criteria.
In fact, it is even more odd that in a book that is about state development and change in Europe, Bobbitt says little about the EU-surely a constitutional development of some importance. His demolition of the notion that the nation state is an eternal verity, and his picture of the state as a chameleon that adapts to a changing strategic and legal environment fits Europe admirably, as well as knocking away one of the props of the eurosceptic case.
Bobbitt dates the death of the nation state from the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. It is true that those horrific events helped wake us up to the fact that nationalism of this kind was as intolerable in the Balkans as in western Europe. But for most of us in Europe, Auschwitz and two world wars had already made nationalism intolerable 50 years earlier. Just as the wars of religion killed religion as the basis of the international order, so the wars of the nations, 1914 to 1945, killed the nation as an organising principle for the society of states. The second world war discredited nationalism; the cold war eliminated communism and the idea of the state as economic manager. The fact that the victor in each was the liberal state does not mean that the conflict was the same.
Is this just another of those academic disputes, like the ones about the origins of the industrial revolution or the renaissance? It would be nice to think so, because the alternative interpretation-that there is a political motive behind this way of looking at events -could be disturbing. If you think that the world began again in 1989, then you can dismiss 1945 to 1958 as an interim arr-angement which can be swept away with the final settlement. That means that the multilateral institutions of the postwar period were no more than a device to cement the alliances necessary for the second half of the "long war." In that case, whether they survive or not is a matter to be decided according to the convenience of the victor in that war-the US.
Some of this can be read in "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," a document recently presented to Congress by the Bush administration. This document is striking for its clarity, confidence and historical perspective-not many US government papers refer to the 17th century. A number of points in the text make one think that the authors have read Bobbitt. Perhaps Bobbitt may be right after all in seeing a single war in the 20th century and a single peace to end it. History is written by the victors to explain their peace settlements and the single superpower emerging from the cold war may be doing just that.
Although I prefer to think that the western victory in the cold war confirmed, rather than replaced, the settlement that followed the second world war, I agree with Bobbitt that it left the state weaker than before. A number of names have been coined for the resulting incarnation. I have called it "the postmodern state"; Bobbitt "the market state"; Mary Kaldor "the cosmopolitan state." Robert Kagan has written of European countries changing from nation states to member states. There is something to be said for each of these, but I think Bobbitt's name, "market state," is especially apposite, not least since it emerged from a conflict about whether private property and private profit were legitimate or not.
For most people, the object of life has ceased to be God or nation and has become personal consumption. Obesity is now a major cause of death in the US-300,000 a year and rising. Identity comes off the peg at clothes shops. Feminism reflects the market's indifference to status and hierarchy. Borders open up as the market's priorities beat those of the state/citizen. Violence has not yet been completely privatised but the number of private security companies is rising. So is terrorism and piracy.
Yet, markets do not like violent conflict, so one would expect market states to be exceptionally peace loving. For that reason, I do not find Bobbitt's suggestion that market states may fight about variants of market organisation convincing-he posits three versions of the market state, which look remarkably like the US, Germany and Japan. Between democracy and Nazism, or communism and capitalism, there was little possibility of compromise; and co-existence was problematic given the expansionary tendencies of all three. But market organisation allows room for flexibility, compromise, development and copying more successful forms. War seems an unnecessarily expensive way to resolve differences between Rhineland capitalism and the Anglo-Saxon variant.
The danger for the market state comes not from war but from the weakening of the state itself and the privatisation of violence. If the market state does have its own characteristic form of violence, it may be that it comes in a tendency towards state breakdown where rulers use the instruments of violence for private enrichment or political advantage. This is a deformed, primitive version of the market state where privatisation takes place without a political culture to support it. In some countries wars are run for profit, usually in the form of diamonds or other raw materials: these are not market states so much as failed states. But then what is a failed state but a place which has become all market and no state?
This prompts another concern: is not "market state" a term similar to "round square"? The state is one thing and the market another. If market state means a state that promotes and regulates the market, then that is nothing new. If it means more-that core functions of the state like the control of violence, making of law, administration of justice and regulation of markets are going to be put up for auction, then it means the dissolution of the state.
Where everything is for sale there is no state and, ultimately, no market either. The problem is that the market depends for its functioning on the existence of people-police, customs officers, judges, civil servants, who act not for profit but according to "Duty, Honour, Country," to quote the motto of West Point. As the values of the market come to dominate our culture, both the quantity and the quality of people willing to serve these non-market values will gradually reduce. This, more than a risk of interstate conflict amongst the market states, is one half of the unresolved problem of the postwar peace. If the state itself is up for sale, or if profit becomes a motive that defeats all others, then ruin may not be long in coming. Is this the message of Enron, WorldCom and the others? As Carl Schmitt said, the state that becomes marginal to the production of meaning is sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
In one sense, the market state-even in the less radical sense of a state devoted to promoting free markets-does have a tendency to wither away. Open borders mean that regulation has to be at a higher level than the state for it to be effective in a global marketplace. The logical conclusion of the evolution of the market state may be some form of world government.
At the least, it surely requires an important role for international law and institutions (like the EU), things Bobbitt tends to dismiss. The essence of the postmodern state was its co-operative approach to security-via transparency-and its willingness to accept interference in internal affairs and to resolve disputes peacefully. All of these imply an important role for government and a strong system of legal obligations. Bobbitt's market state, by contrast, seems ready to impose its view of how things should be by force. If the truth is told, the difference between my postmodern state and his market state is uncannily similar to the difference between European countries and the US.
What about Bobbitt's original stress on the determining role the military can play in shaping the state? At first sight, one might have thought that the development of nuclear weapons-a strategic revolution if ever there was one-would lead to something rather different from the market state. The mass armies of Napoleon and then the first world war required a state which incorporated and eventually enfranchised the masses. In the nuclear age, such armies could be seen as irrelevant: should we not expect states to be based instead on scientific and strategic oligarchies? Perhaps the Soviet state followed this pattern; if so it is a demonstrable failure. In fact, the nuclear age has influenced the state in quite a different way. After some false starts, the principal nuclear powers concluded that nuclear weapons were unusable for any military purpose except that of deterring attack. They therefore did their best to avoid fighting each other. Thus they created the best possible conditions for the emergence of the market state: markets having a strong preference for peace. And in the end, the cold war was won as much by markets as anything-by the superior productive capacity of the market economy and the superior legitimacy which a good supply of consumer durables now seems to confer.
Although different from any other weapon system in history, nuclear weapons have proved compatible with the market/postmodern state. It is speculation whether the logic of deterrence will hold for all future owners of nuclear weapons: both the US and the Soviet Union came from the rationalist traditions of the enlightenment (admittedly a distorted version in the latter case). Not all future nuclear powers may behave in the same way. Nevertheless there are reasons for guessing that they may. Nuclear weapons are always likely to be owned by states. The complexity of producing and handling enriched uranium make this so-and, as corporate bodies, states have an interest in long-term survival.
The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" is in some respects misleading. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are very different. Put crudely, chemical weapons, while very nasty, make most sense as battlefield weapons-although they can also be used against civilian populations. They are capable of causing hundreds, possibly thousands of deaths, but nothing on the scale of nuclear weapons. Biological weapons, on the other hand, are potentially weapons of mass destruction. If an epidemic took hold of a population the results could be devastating. The difficulty with biological weapons is that it is hard to see how a state could use them as part of a strategic plan. Who would want to march into a state whose population had just been eliminated by anthrax?
The other important difference is that unlike nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons are well within the grasp of non-state actors. Aum Shinrikyo has already demonstrated this in the case of chemical weapons. This is quite new. Since the middle ages the most powerful instruments of force have been in the hands of the state. To do serious damage to a society you needed an army, probably with professional training, artillery and so on. Once established, the state's monopoly on the means of violence has been relatively easy to maintain. We may be entering a period where this ceases to be so. As the US National Security Strategy says: "Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. Now shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank." This is an enormous change: first the market and then the technology of violence are redistributing power away from the state and towards individuals-reversing the trends of 500 years. Civilisation has been possible because the majority of people want to live orderly lives and have banded together against the few who want to disrupt this.
If the lesson of Bobbitt's book and of history is that the means of force have a determining influence on the shape of the state, what can we say about a world where massive destructive technologies will be available to almost anyone? One possibility is that this blows both the market state and the postmodern state out of the water and what we have to look forward to is rather more like the police state. How else might we deal with small groups capable of mass destruction? One suspects that the bomber may always get through. And if the bomber more often than not is foreign, then the police state at home may be accompanied by a heavy-handed imperialism abroad. By whom? America alone? Or will Europe, Russia, China and others act together? Whatever the answer, the result looks unpleasant.
Bobbitt says that his message is not that the state is coming to an end but that it is in a continuous process of transformation. But if the above analysis is correct, the future looks much more difficult and chaotic than Bobbitt suggests. In the coming century we may see the values on which the state depends undermined from within and its monopoly of force undermined from without.
Once it seemed that with the end of the cold war we had also left behind the age of total war-where we fought wars of annihilation for nation or ideology. We were going to return, therefore, to something like the rationality of the 18th century where limited wars were fought for limited objectives. Now it seems instead as if we must look for our future back to the 14th century when, after the hundred years war, order broke down in Europe and populations were subject to attack from armed gangs under the control of neither state nor church. This is not a further mutation of the state, but a return to chaos.
However benign the world order, we will never be able to eliminate all discontent. Even if we tried our utmost (and we show no signs of doing that) there would probably still be many people who felt a legitimate anger at their condition. The spread of the message of modernisation-that you do not have to accept fate passively but can change the world yourself-together with the spread of destructive technology means there are always likely to be more terrorists than we can cope with; and, in the future, those small numbers may possess great destructive power. Combine this with our open and vulnerable society, itself weakened by the triumph of the values of the marketplace, and the future looks unappetising. Is there any comfort to be found? Only that most predictions are wrong.
The reason why pessimistic predictions are usually mistaken is that they underestimate the resourcefulness of people in tackling problems. Once something is identified as a real threat to the security of ordinary people and to the survival of the state we can count on a massive effort to deal with it and large popular support for whatever is necessary to enable people to live reasonably safe and orderly lives. We have become used to luggage being searched at airports and in many office buildings. We know why it is done and very few complain. Many of us now wear security passes with photographs and magnetic codes. What if they include fingerprint or other data in the future? I doubt if anyone will mind. We may also have to become used to bank accounts and e-mail files being searched too. Provided the state does not abuse the information it acquires, most people will see the sense in this. Perhaps government agencies will keep DNA information about us. If that helps catch the occasional rapist too, would there be any reason to complain? Meanwhile technology may be developed to help detection of the agents used in biological and chemical attack; and the reservations of the US pharmaceutical industry about challenge inspection should be swept away. With this will go many other things that we have not thought of. If a problem is serious enough there are usually ways to tackle it.
All states are police states in some degree. That is what the state is for. The difference is between states that are hostile to their people, that are unpredictable, that govern through fear and those who decide that the best way to deal with threats is to secure the cooperation of your people. This difference is usually something to do with democracy. If the state needs to read your e-mails it would be smart of it not to betray your (unimportant) secrets. Nor would it surprise ordinary householders by waking them up at three o'clock in the morning. In dealing with terrorists, legitimacy is the most vital of all weapons for the state, and the authorities would be foolish to throw it away. If the police and intelligence agencies behave intelligently, most of us would not mind more intrusive methods provided they would reduce the chances of being gassed, blown up, or of being infected by anthrax.
If these methods fail we could be in real trouble. In the first place, we lived in the world according to Hobbes: the war of all against all. Then came the state-the world of Grotius and the law of nations. Just when it seemed that we were entering the world of Kant-individual freedom and cosmopolitan values-we now find that history has played a nasty joke and that this new world is much more like the Hobbesian starting point. But with a difference: the war of all against all now threatens to become international and it will need an international Leviathan to master it. For that job there is only one candidate-and even the US might not succeed.
This brings us back to the US National Security Strategy. It is a document of broad vision and ruthless intellectual clarity. Most attention has gone to the doctrine of pre-emptive attack included in the strategy; but this is not such a historical innovation as people think: what else was the Schlieffen plan about? Or the British doctrine of not allowing a single power to dominate the European continent? The War of the Spanish Succession was in a sense a preventative war, designed to prevent the emergence of a power on the European continent too big for the others together to be able to contain it. The acquisition by a country hostile to the status quo of weapons of mass destruction would be something like the modern equivalent of this. And the nature of weapons of mass destruction means that the costs of delaying action could be prohibitive.
Just as interesting in the US National Security Strategy is the recognition that trade and development play a part in security, and an implicit admission that nation-building may sometimes be needed. Most striking, however, is the reference in the first sentence to: "a single sustainable model for national success." This is definitely the market state; no postmodernist would claim that sort of exclusivity. However much one admires the US, this is rather strong, lacking both modesty and historical perspective.
But the main problem with the National Security Strategy is that it is a national strategy for dealing with an international problem. Allies and cooperative approaches are mentioned, but as an option which the US can take or leave as it chooses. This mirrors the reality of US military dominance; but for how long? In the end, conflicts are about legitimacy; government rests on legitimacy; and the international order requires international legitimacy. This will not be obtained by a single power taking decisions on its own and in its own interest. That also might be a lesson of Philip Bobbitt's interesting book.
