Philip Bobbitt
If you haven't read Bobbitt's book Shield of Achilles, you should. If you want to brush up on his core ideas, go here.
Excerpt: Five Developments that Threaten the Constitutional Order of National States
The State is changing, and this change in the State will be constitutional in nature, by which I mean we will change our views as to the basic raison d'etre of the State, that legitimating purpose that justifies the State and sets the terms of the State's strategic endeavours.
At present our model of statecraft links the sovereignty of a state to its territorial borders. Within these borders the state is supreme with respect to its law, and beyond its border the state earns the right of recognition and intercourse to the extent that it can defend its borders. Today this model confronts several deep challenges. And because the international order is constructed on the foundation of this model of state sovereignty, events that cast doubt on that sovereignty call the entire system into question.
Five such developments do so: (1) the recognition of human rights as norms that require domestic adherence by all states, regardless of their internal laws; (2) the development of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, which render the defense of State borders ineffectual for the protection of a society; (3) the emerging recognition of global and transnational threats that transcend state borders, such as those that damage the environment, or threaten states through migration, population expansion, and disease or famine; (4) the growth of a world economic regime that ignores borders in the movement of capital investment to a degree that effectively curtails states in the management of their economic affairs; (5) the threat to national cultures posed by the revolution in international communication, linking all cultures to one language that competes with local forms and penetrates borders electronically. As a consequence, a constitutional order will arise that reflects these five developments and indeed exalts them as requirements that only this new order can meet. The emergence of a new basis for the State will also change the constitutional framework of international society, a framework that derives from the domestic constitutional orders of its constituent members.
Excerpt: The Relationship Between Military Innovations and Changes in the Constitutional Order
Ever since Max Weber, scholars have debated whether a revolution in military affairs brought forth the modern State by creating an acute necessity for an organized system of finance and administration in order to wage war successfully. Accepting this premise, however, it is unclear precisely which revolution in military affairs actually brought the modern State into being. Was it the development of mobile artillery in the 16th century that abruptly rendered the castles and moats of the middle ages useless? Or was it the Gunpowder Revolution of the 17th century that replaced the shock tactics of pikemen with musket fire? Or the rise in professionalism within the military in the 18th century and the cabinet wars this made possible (or was it the change in tactics that accompanied mass conscription in the 19th)? One important consequence of asking this question in this way, however, is that it assumes that there has been only one form of the modern State – the nation-state. If, as many believe, the nation-state is dying owing to the five developments mentioned above, then this scholarly debate about the birth of the State implies that the reign of the State itself is now ending.
But if we see, on the contrary, that each of the important revolutions in military affairs enabled a political revolution in the fundamental constitutional order of the State, then we will not only be able to better frame the scholarly debate but also better able to appreciate that the death of the nation-state by no means presages the end of the State. Moreover, we will then be able to see aright the many current political conflicts that arise from the friction between the decaying nation-state and the emerging market-state, conflicts that have parallels in the past when one constitutional order was replaced by another and led to civil strife within the State. Finally, we will be better prepared to craft new strategies for the use of force that are appropriate to this new constitutional order.
Excerpt: The Relationship Between the Constitutional Order and the International Order
Every society has a constitution. Of course not all of these are written constitutions – the British constitution, for example, is unwritten. Nor does every society happen to be a State. But every society – the Martha's Vineyard Yacht Club no less than the Group of Eight – has a constitution because to be a society is to be constituted in some particular way. Each great peace conference that ended an epochal war wrote a constitution for the society of states. If a revolution in military affairs enables the triumphs of a particular constitutional order then the peace conferences that ratify such triumphs set the terms for admission to the society of legitimate states, a society that is reconstituted after each great epochal war.
Yet all constitutions also carry within themselves the seeds of future conflict. The 1789 U.S. constitution was pregnant with the 1860 civil war because it contained, in addition to a bill of rights, provisions for slavery and state sovereignty. Similarly the international constitutions at Wesphalia in 1648 no less than at Vienna in 1815 or Versailles in 1919 set the terms for the conflict to come even while they settled the conflict just ended. The importance of this idea in our present period of transition is that we can shape the next epochal war if we appreciate its inevitability and also the different forms it may take. I believe that we face the task of developing practices that will enable us to undertake a series of low intensity conflicts. Failing this, we will face an international environment of increasingly violent anarchy and, possibly, a cataclysmic war in the early decades of the next century.
While it is commonly assumed that the nuclear great powers would not (because they need not) use nuclear weapons in an era in which they do not threaten each other, in fact the new era which we are entering makes the use of nuclear weapons by a great power more likely than in the last half century.
Deterrence and assured retaliation, which laid the basis for the victory of the parliamentary nation-state in the Cold War era, cannot provide a similar stability in the era of the market state to come because the source of the threats to a state are now at once too ubiquitous and too easy to disguise. We cannot deter an attacker whose identity is unknown to us. As a consequence, we are just beginning to appreciate the need for a shift from target, threat-based assessments to vulnerability analyses. What is less appreciated is the consequent loss of intra-war deterrence and the implications of this loss with respect to the actual use of nuclear weapons. Or to illustrate this paradoxical phenomenon by means of a different example: nuclear weapons do not deter biological weapons and yet they are probably the only feasible means of destroying a biological stockpile that is easy to hide and fortify. Ironically the possibility of cataclysmic war is more threatening in the 21st century yet defensive systems can play a far more useful role than they could in the previous period, when they tended to weaken deterrence.
At the same time we have experienced these quiet yet disturbing changes in the strategic environment, there have been ongoing low intensity conflicts of the kind we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Palestine and elsewhere, that are being transformed by the information revolution. Remote, once local tribal wars have engaged the values and interests of all the great powers because these conflicts have been exported into the domestic publics of those powers through immigration, empathy and terrorism.
What are rarely noted are the relation between cataclysmic and low-intensity wars – and their relation to the constitution of the society of market states that will have to fight them. There can be no peace settlement without war. But if we can successfully manage consensus interventions on the part of the great powers, as we have done, finally, in the former state of Yugoslavia, we will have written a new constitution for the society of market states and avoid thereby the systemic breakdown that provokes more generally catastrophic war. It may be that the very vulnerability of the critical infrastructures of the developed world which invites, even necessitates, great power cooperation will then provide a basis for strengthening the society of states through political consensus and market cooperation.
Excerpt: How to Understand the Emerging World of the Market States
There is a widespread sense that we are at a pivotal point in history: but why is it pivotal? The Shield of Achilles provides an answer – that we are at one of a half-dozen moments when the way societies are organized for governance is undergoing a fundamental change. This book identifies that change and shows how it is similar and related to the five previous such pivotal moments of change that began with the emergence of the modern State at the time of the Renaissance. It lays bare the neglected relationship between the military-strategic and the political-constitutional – the outer and inner faces of the State. Moreover this book is just as concerned with the future as it is with the past, laying out alternative possible worlds that are achievable but incompatible – worlds, that is, that will come into being at the cost of alternatives. This book spells out the important choices this change will force on us as we create a new form of the state in the 21st century.
The emergence of a new form of the state and the decay of an old one is part of a process that goes back to the very beginning of the State, perhaps to the beginning of civil society itself. That process is the fusing of the inner and outer dominions of authority – law and strategy. The modern state came into existence when it proved necessary to organize a constitutional order that could wage war more effectively than the feudal and mercantile orders it replaced. Whether war or law was the initial subject of innovation, constitutional and strategic change followed, and new forms of the state were the result of this interaction. Each new form of the State was distinguished by its unique basis for legitimacy – the historical claim it made that entitled the State to power.
Not only the world in which we live, but also the world that is now emerging, are more comprehensible once this historical development is appreciated and explored for the implications it holds for the fate of civilization. As has occurred in the past, a great epochal war has just ended. With the end of this war, a new form of the state, the market state, is coming into being. Where the various competing systems of the contemporary nation state all took their legitimacy from the promise to better the material welfare of their citizens, the market state offers a different covenant: it will maximize the opportunity of its people.
The emergence of the market state will produce conflict in every society as the old ways of the superseded nation state (its use of law to enforce morals, for example) fall away. This emergence will produce alternative systems, too, that follow different versions of the market state in Washington, Singapore and Berlin, and this development also will lead to conflict. Most importantly, however, the global society of market states will face lethal security challenges that its habits of intense competition do not naturally suit it to deal with.
The society of market states is, on the other hand, good at setting up markets. This facility could characterize an international system that rewards peaceful states and stimulates opportunity in education, productivity, investment, environmental protection and public health by sharing the technologies that are crucial to advancement in these areas. And these habits of collaboration can provide precedents for security cooperation: for example, the United States can develop ballistic missile technology or fissile material sensors that can be licensed to threatened countries. The technology for safer nuclear energy can be provided as a way, perhaps the only way, of halting global warning while assisting third world economic development.
The decisions that lead to these choices are already, or will soon be, upon us, but they look different if they are seen in the context of this new form of the State.
Excerpt: The Future of the State
The pattern of epochal wars and state formation, of peace congresses and international constitutions, has played out for five centuries to the end of this millennium. A new constitutional order – the market state – is about to emerge. But if the pattern of earlier eras is to be repeated, then we await a new, epochal war with state-shattering consequences. It is my conclusion that we can shape this war, even if we cannot avoid it. We can take decisions that will determine whether the next epochal war is either a general cataclysm or a never-ending, low intensity conflict. An apocalyptic war is in many respects easier to deter, and can be waged by few states, but it risks the annihilation of the developed world. An endless low-intensity conflict can be fought with asymmetrical means, that is, with weapons that defy retaliation or deterrence, and employ tactics like terrorism and cyber-attacks on the critical infrastructures of the developed states, while requiring expensive expeditionary forces of those states.
Whichever course of action is decided upon will be both constitutional and strategic in nature because these are the two faces of the modern State – the inner and the outer, the face the State turns towards its own citizens, and the face it turns towards the outside world of its competitors. Each State develops its own constitutional order (its inward facing profile) as well as its strategic paradigm (its outwardly turned silhouette), and these two forms are logically and topologically inseparable. A state threatened with cyber attacks on its interdependent infrastructures can protect itself by virtually abolishing privacy or by expensively decentralizing; either has profound constitutional consequences. A state that privatizes most of its functions will inevitably defend itself by employing its own people as mercenaries-with equally profound strategic consequences.
The history of our cell-to-tissue-to-organ evolution is defined by competition giving way to cooperation. I think the development of homo societus can be understood in much the same way. Except whereas in the cell the organizational movement was along the spectrum of chemistry, the organizational evolution of society is entirely in the realm of the mind.
A cell that relates to other cells by cannibalizing them will never be fit to cooperate in tissue. A man that cannibalizes other men will never be fit for society. In both, the constitutional structure determines the outer strategy. For the cell, the constitutional structure is its genetic makeup and phenotypic functionality, and it's outer strategy is derivative and incidental. For Man, his constitutional structure is his beliefs and motivations; his outer strategy is derivative and intentional.
A society, as a complex system of 'outer strategies' and inner parameters, can be analyzed in much the same way.
Excerpt: Five Developments that Threaten the Constitutional Order of National States
The State is changing, and this change in the State will be constitutional in nature, by which I mean we will change our views as to the basic raison d'etre of the State, that legitimating purpose that justifies the State and sets the terms of the State's strategic endeavours.
At present our model of statecraft links the sovereignty of a state to its territorial borders. Within these borders the state is supreme with respect to its law, and beyond its border the state earns the right of recognition and intercourse to the extent that it can defend its borders. Today this model confronts several deep challenges. And because the international order is constructed on the foundation of this model of state sovereignty, events that cast doubt on that sovereignty call the entire system into question.
Five such developments do so: (1) the recognition of human rights as norms that require domestic adherence by all states, regardless of their internal laws; (2) the development of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, which render the defense of State borders ineffectual for the protection of a society; (3) the emerging recognition of global and transnational threats that transcend state borders, such as those that damage the environment, or threaten states through migration, population expansion, and disease or famine; (4) the growth of a world economic regime that ignores borders in the movement of capital investment to a degree that effectively curtails states in the management of their economic affairs; (5) the threat to national cultures posed by the revolution in international communication, linking all cultures to one language that competes with local forms and penetrates borders electronically. As a consequence, a constitutional order will arise that reflects these five developments and indeed exalts them as requirements that only this new order can meet. The emergence of a new basis for the State will also change the constitutional framework of international society, a framework that derives from the domestic constitutional orders of its constituent members.
Excerpt: The Relationship Between Military Innovations and Changes in the Constitutional Order
Ever since Max Weber, scholars have debated whether a revolution in military affairs brought forth the modern State by creating an acute necessity for an organized system of finance and administration in order to wage war successfully. Accepting this premise, however, it is unclear precisely which revolution in military affairs actually brought the modern State into being. Was it the development of mobile artillery in the 16th century that abruptly rendered the castles and moats of the middle ages useless? Or was it the Gunpowder Revolution of the 17th century that replaced the shock tactics of pikemen with musket fire? Or the rise in professionalism within the military in the 18th century and the cabinet wars this made possible (or was it the change in tactics that accompanied mass conscription in the 19th)? One important consequence of asking this question in this way, however, is that it assumes that there has been only one form of the modern State – the nation-state. If, as many believe, the nation-state is dying owing to the five developments mentioned above, then this scholarly debate about the birth of the State implies that the reign of the State itself is now ending.
But if we see, on the contrary, that each of the important revolutions in military affairs enabled a political revolution in the fundamental constitutional order of the State, then we will not only be able to better frame the scholarly debate but also better able to appreciate that the death of the nation-state by no means presages the end of the State. Moreover, we will then be able to see aright the many current political conflicts that arise from the friction between the decaying nation-state and the emerging market-state, conflicts that have parallels in the past when one constitutional order was replaced by another and led to civil strife within the State. Finally, we will be better prepared to craft new strategies for the use of force that are appropriate to this new constitutional order.
Excerpt: The Relationship Between the Constitutional Order and the International Order
Every society has a constitution. Of course not all of these are written constitutions – the British constitution, for example, is unwritten. Nor does every society happen to be a State. But every society – the Martha's Vineyard Yacht Club no less than the Group of Eight – has a constitution because to be a society is to be constituted in some particular way. Each great peace conference that ended an epochal war wrote a constitution for the society of states. If a revolution in military affairs enables the triumphs of a particular constitutional order then the peace conferences that ratify such triumphs set the terms for admission to the society of legitimate states, a society that is reconstituted after each great epochal war.
Yet all constitutions also carry within themselves the seeds of future conflict. The 1789 U.S. constitution was pregnant with the 1860 civil war because it contained, in addition to a bill of rights, provisions for slavery and state sovereignty. Similarly the international constitutions at Wesphalia in 1648 no less than at Vienna in 1815 or Versailles in 1919 set the terms for the conflict to come even while they settled the conflict just ended. The importance of this idea in our present period of transition is that we can shape the next epochal war if we appreciate its inevitability and also the different forms it may take. I believe that we face the task of developing practices that will enable us to undertake a series of low intensity conflicts. Failing this, we will face an international environment of increasingly violent anarchy and, possibly, a cataclysmic war in the early decades of the next century.
While it is commonly assumed that the nuclear great powers would not (because they need not) use nuclear weapons in an era in which they do not threaten each other, in fact the new era which we are entering makes the use of nuclear weapons by a great power more likely than in the last half century.
Deterrence and assured retaliation, which laid the basis for the victory of the parliamentary nation-state in the Cold War era, cannot provide a similar stability in the era of the market state to come because the source of the threats to a state are now at once too ubiquitous and too easy to disguise. We cannot deter an attacker whose identity is unknown to us. As a consequence, we are just beginning to appreciate the need for a shift from target, threat-based assessments to vulnerability analyses. What is less appreciated is the consequent loss of intra-war deterrence and the implications of this loss with respect to the actual use of nuclear weapons. Or to illustrate this paradoxical phenomenon by means of a different example: nuclear weapons do not deter biological weapons and yet they are probably the only feasible means of destroying a biological stockpile that is easy to hide and fortify. Ironically the possibility of cataclysmic war is more threatening in the 21st century yet defensive systems can play a far more useful role than they could in the previous period, when they tended to weaken deterrence.
At the same time we have experienced these quiet yet disturbing changes in the strategic environment, there have been ongoing low intensity conflicts of the kind we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Palestine and elsewhere, that are being transformed by the information revolution. Remote, once local tribal wars have engaged the values and interests of all the great powers because these conflicts have been exported into the domestic publics of those powers through immigration, empathy and terrorism.
What are rarely noted are the relation between cataclysmic and low-intensity wars – and their relation to the constitution of the society of market states that will have to fight them. There can be no peace settlement without war. But if we can successfully manage consensus interventions on the part of the great powers, as we have done, finally, in the former state of Yugoslavia, we will have written a new constitution for the society of market states and avoid thereby the systemic breakdown that provokes more generally catastrophic war. It may be that the very vulnerability of the critical infrastructures of the developed world which invites, even necessitates, great power cooperation will then provide a basis for strengthening the society of states through political consensus and market cooperation.
Excerpt: How to Understand the Emerging World of the Market States
There is a widespread sense that we are at a pivotal point in history: but why is it pivotal? The Shield of Achilles provides an answer – that we are at one of a half-dozen moments when the way societies are organized for governance is undergoing a fundamental change. This book identifies that change and shows how it is similar and related to the five previous such pivotal moments of change that began with the emergence of the modern State at the time of the Renaissance. It lays bare the neglected relationship between the military-strategic and the political-constitutional – the outer and inner faces of the State. Moreover this book is just as concerned with the future as it is with the past, laying out alternative possible worlds that are achievable but incompatible – worlds, that is, that will come into being at the cost of alternatives. This book spells out the important choices this change will force on us as we create a new form of the state in the 21st century.
The emergence of a new form of the state and the decay of an old one is part of a process that goes back to the very beginning of the State, perhaps to the beginning of civil society itself. That process is the fusing of the inner and outer dominions of authority – law and strategy. The modern state came into existence when it proved necessary to organize a constitutional order that could wage war more effectively than the feudal and mercantile orders it replaced. Whether war or law was the initial subject of innovation, constitutional and strategic change followed, and new forms of the state were the result of this interaction. Each new form of the State was distinguished by its unique basis for legitimacy – the historical claim it made that entitled the State to power.
Not only the world in which we live, but also the world that is now emerging, are more comprehensible once this historical development is appreciated and explored for the implications it holds for the fate of civilization. As has occurred in the past, a great epochal war has just ended. With the end of this war, a new form of the state, the market state, is coming into being. Where the various competing systems of the contemporary nation state all took their legitimacy from the promise to better the material welfare of their citizens, the market state offers a different covenant: it will maximize the opportunity of its people.
The emergence of the market state will produce conflict in every society as the old ways of the superseded nation state (its use of law to enforce morals, for example) fall away. This emergence will produce alternative systems, too, that follow different versions of the market state in Washington, Singapore and Berlin, and this development also will lead to conflict. Most importantly, however, the global society of market states will face lethal security challenges that its habits of intense competition do not naturally suit it to deal with.
The society of market states is, on the other hand, good at setting up markets. This facility could characterize an international system that rewards peaceful states and stimulates opportunity in education, productivity, investment, environmental protection and public health by sharing the technologies that are crucial to advancement in these areas. And these habits of collaboration can provide precedents for security cooperation: for example, the United States can develop ballistic missile technology or fissile material sensors that can be licensed to threatened countries. The technology for safer nuclear energy can be provided as a way, perhaps the only way, of halting global warning while assisting third world economic development.
The decisions that lead to these choices are already, or will soon be, upon us, but they look different if they are seen in the context of this new form of the State.
Excerpt: The Future of the State
The pattern of epochal wars and state formation, of peace congresses and international constitutions, has played out for five centuries to the end of this millennium. A new constitutional order – the market state – is about to emerge. But if the pattern of earlier eras is to be repeated, then we await a new, epochal war with state-shattering consequences. It is my conclusion that we can shape this war, even if we cannot avoid it. We can take decisions that will determine whether the next epochal war is either a general cataclysm or a never-ending, low intensity conflict. An apocalyptic war is in many respects easier to deter, and can be waged by few states, but it risks the annihilation of the developed world. An endless low-intensity conflict can be fought with asymmetrical means, that is, with weapons that defy retaliation or deterrence, and employ tactics like terrorism and cyber-attacks on the critical infrastructures of the developed states, while requiring expensive expeditionary forces of those states.
Whichever course of action is decided upon will be both constitutional and strategic in nature because these are the two faces of the modern State – the inner and the outer, the face the State turns towards its own citizens, and the face it turns towards the outside world of its competitors. Each State develops its own constitutional order (its inward facing profile) as well as its strategic paradigm (its outwardly turned silhouette), and these two forms are logically and topologically inseparable. A state threatened with cyber attacks on its interdependent infrastructures can protect itself by virtually abolishing privacy or by expensively decentralizing; either has profound constitutional consequences. A state that privatizes most of its functions will inevitably defend itself by employing its own people as mercenaries-with equally profound strategic consequences.
The history of our cell-to-tissue-to-organ evolution is defined by competition giving way to cooperation. I think the development of homo societus can be understood in much the same way. Except whereas in the cell the organizational movement was along the spectrum of chemistry, the organizational evolution of society is entirely in the realm of the mind.
A cell that relates to other cells by cannibalizing them will never be fit to cooperate in tissue. A man that cannibalizes other men will never be fit for society. In both, the constitutional structure determines the outer strategy. For the cell, the constitutional structure is its genetic makeup and phenotypic functionality, and it's outer strategy is derivative and incidental. For Man, his constitutional structure is his beliefs and motivations; his outer strategy is derivative and intentional.
A society, as a complex system of 'outer strategies' and inner parameters, can be analyzed in much the same way.
posted by John Aristides at 8/15/2006 08:38:00 PM
1 Comments:
Neal Stephenson was right: the future 'state' will be a non-geographic, cultural and socio-economic contract between like-minded individuals. Islam - in many ways a 'state' only incidentally divided by national boundaries imposed on it by the West - already looks at the world this way. (By contrast, the West tends to think of geographic states first and foremost and thus is able to envision a pluralistic melange of religions and cultures within each one. Looked at from Islam's point of view, that's simply nonsensical.
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