Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (61 page)
The United States can benefit immensely from this shift because we are well placed to thrive in a globalized political economy. Indeed a globalized society of market-states plays into and enhances American strengths to such a degree that it worries some states that the United States will become so dominant that no other state will be able to catch up to it. In many quarters, globalization is so deeply identified with the United States that it is anxiously perceived as an American cultural export. Such anxiety is reflected in contemporary international relations on many issues: for example, the principal opponent of the hardly unreasonable U.S. position regarding landmines was Canada; the most sarcastic attacks on the rather sensible U.S. opposition to an International Criminal Court came from traditional allies. Moreover, these anti-American political reactions will, in a society of market-states, spill over to reactions against U.S. businesses, and vice versa. Offense given by McDonald's will be repaid by antipathy to the United States. Antiglobalization reactions will inevitably become attacks on U.S. policies.
When we look ahead we can see the market-state already forming. With it comes a new set of choices arising from the interplay between the strategic and the constitutional. Which way this new constitutional order will develop, constitutionally and strategically, is a matter of human decision.
The answer to how we will develop a calculus for the use of force in the present era depends on choices yet to be made. Either our rules for the use of force will re-enforce world order, which will require a readiness to
undertake numerous, apparently endless small conflicts, or they will make larger wars more likely, risking the widening of small, seemingly irrelevant conflicts, or they will make a cataclysmic war inevitable when great regional blocs, with greatly differing views of their own sovereignty, find themselves the targets of events whose perpetrators they do not really know and cannot, even through harsh repression, really silence.
The calculus to be employed will become clear once we decide. The epochal war we are about to enter will either be a series of low-intensity, information-guided wars linked by a commitment to re-enforcing world order, or a gradually increasing anarchy that leads to intervention at a much costlier level or even a cataclysm of global proportions preceded by a period of relative if deceptive peace. It is ours to choose.
At noon in the desert a panting lizard
waited for history, its elbows tense
,watching the curve of a particular road
as if something might happen.
It was looking at something farther off
than people could see, an important scene
acted in stone for little selves
at the flute end of consequences
.There was just a continent without much on it
under a sky that never cared less
.Ready for a change, the elbows waited.
The hands gripped hard on the desert
.—William Stafford
PLATE I: THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDERS
PLATE II: THE EPOCHAL WARS
PLATE III: THE INTERNATIONAL ORDERS
PLATE IV: BASES FOR LEGITIMACY
PLATE V: HISTORIC STRATEGIC AND CONSTITUTIONAL INNOVATIONS
The following charts give a graphic if oversimplified representation of the six successive constitutional conventions of the international society of states. It will be immediately seen that these various periods correspond to those described in Book I: the eras of the princely state (1494 to 1620), the kingly state (1567 to 1702), the territorial state (1688 to 1792), the state-nation (1776 to 1914), the nation-state (1863 to 1991), and the emerging period of the market-state (1989). Each of these eras was defined by the triumph of one constitutional archetype for the State. The third chart shows the moment at which that dominant constitutional archetype was ratified by the society of states as the legitimate constitutional order: for example, this occurred with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which ratified the victory of the princely state and the defeat of a “universal” regime for Europe based on the premodern constitutional order of Christendom. It occurred again at Westphalia in 1648, where two peace treaties ended the Thirty Years' War and ratified the legitimacy of the secular, absolutist forms of the kingly state that had superseded the sectarian, dynastically plural forms of the princely state. The Peace of Utrecht in 1713 performed a similar constitutional function for the society of European states by enshrining a new security order in Europe based on the balance of power and recognizing the limited monarchies of the territorial state. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 ratified the success of one state-nation, Great
Britain, over another, the revolutionary Napoleonic Empire, and set up an international institutional system of the great powers with periodic congresses, while at the same time embracing the defeated French state-nation and integrating it into the new society. The Peace of Versailles performed the same function for the triumphant nation-state, which replaced the collapsing model of the imperial state-nation of the nineteenth century.
There have been six distinct constitutional orders of the State since it first emerged during the Renaissance.
Each epochal war brought a particular constitutional order to primacy
.
The peace treaties that end epochal wars ratify a particular constitutional order for the society of states
.
Each constitutional order asserts a unique basis for legitimacy.
A constitutional order achieves dominance by best exploiting the strategic and constitutional innovations of its era
.
TATES OF
P
EACE
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins