CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The means that nature employs to accomplish the development of all faculties is the antagonism of men in society, since this antagonism becomes, in the end, the cause of a lawful order of this society.
—Kant, Idea for a Universal History
with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784)
ALTHOUGH THERE ARE intended to be many parallels between the arguments and structure of Book I, “State of War,” and Book II, “States of Peace,” it is hoped that either book could stand alone. Book I addresses the State: its modern birth and its morphogenesis from chamberlains waiting on Renaissance princes to the complex and varied bureaucracies of the market-states of the twenty-first century. “States of Peace” is addressed to the collectivity of modern states. Because that collectivity is built out of individual states, the dynamic relation between strategy and constitutionalism that drove the development of the State is also reflected in the development of the society of states. There is, however, one profound difference: whereas it was violence and disorder that animated the development of the law and strategy of the State—the State's need to monopolize the control of legitimate violence within, and to be free of violent coercion outside its boundaries—it was peace and reconciliation that animated the development of the society of states—that society's need to find consensus on the legitimate basis for admission to the society and to maintain harmony and stability among its members. On November 9, 1989, twelve states met in Canberra and created the organization for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). On that same day the Berlin Wall came down. The first event belongs to Book II; the second, to Book I. Who can say today for which event November 9, 1989, will be remembered in twenty-five or fifty years' time?
Book I ended with the emergence of the market-state in its various forms. These variations are the result of different historical attitudes about the degree and nature of sovereignty that is retained by the people of the State. Such differences were reflected in different provisions for human rights and the differing responsibilities that were assumed by the State for the economic security of its citizens. Some states, like the United States, hold that all government power is derived directly from a portion of the sovereignty of the People. These states tend to enforce expansive human rights for individual expression but are less supportive of the assured status and income security of citizens. Others, like the city-state of Singapore, are more authoritarian because they hold that sovereignty lies in the State and rights are granted to the People. Still others, like France, hold that while sovereignty lies in the People, it has been wholly delegated to the State for the benefit of the People, and this responsibility is reflected in the public policies of such states, which tend to be more concerned with maintaining the social contract.
Imagine a society composed of such different kinds of market-states. How does such a society achieve consensus? Does it need to achieve consensus? What might such a consensus accomplish?
One necessary step is to factor the interests of the society of states into a state's calculations of its own vital interests. One of the barriers to the consideration of the interests of the society of states has been the nonterritoriality of that society. Where is it? Over what territory does its flag fly? Who speaks for its interests? Is its jurisdiction universal? If it is everywhere, then does it supplant the jurisdiction of the individual states? If the paradigm of the legitimate constitutional form of the state is the nation-state, then must the society of states be composed of one great nation—mankind, perhaps? If the domain of the society of states is not everywhere, then is it confined to the property around the U.N. and other global organizations? Or on the high seas, beyond the littoral claims of states, in what are called “international waters”?
If we concede that the society of states is not territorial, then presumably it cannot be a sovereign. If it is not a sovereign, then it cannot generate law nor make war. It cannot set up rules for intervention, or act on those rules. If, on the other hand, we accept that sovereignty is not necessarily a matter of territoriality where would this end? Would the Red Cross be a state? Or Citicorp? Or Al Qaeda?
Nation-states could only delegate sovereignty legitimately when a larger nation was created, as for example, by the union of Egypt and Syria, which was called the United Arab Republic, or when a previous state fragmented, as for example, when Ukraine, Russia, and other republics succeeded the USSR. International bodies, like the U.N. and the ICJ, were legal bodies composed of representatives of sovereigns. They were not sovereign themselves.
Market-states can legitimately augment these representatives with agents hired by contract, that is, through markets. Such agents are nonterritorial, like other market entities. On this basis some institutions, like the IMF, would have fiduciary responsibilities to some states; this responsibility, therefore, would not axiomatically be universal. Some institutions, like NATO, could—under the terms of a contract with its constitutive partners—even wage war, though they could not make peace settlements (because, as mere agents they cannot make law). Other institutions, like the U.N., or the World Bank or the ICJ, would lapse into more circumscribed, though still valuable, roles than the ones they occupy today as representatives of the society of nation-states.
What a pluralist society of states needs are practical means of cooperation—alternatives to the nation-state institutions that span the different forms of the market-state. Agreements to set up consortia among market-states might provide one such mechanism. The very process of hammering out such agreements could be a useful way of achieving consensus. The responsibilities of these various ad hoc consortia would include the protection and advancement of the interests of the society of states—though once again, the “case-law” generated by their practices would not be universal as it would apply only to voluntary participants, and the war-fighting functions of such groups would not admit of an independent peacemaking authority. These consortia will be modeled more on multinational corporations or cartels than on states, in part because they are nonterritorial. They can either be a force for consensus and harmony—because they effectively aid the efficient functioning of the global market, human rights, and the information that links the two—or they can harden into competing alliances with limitless capacity for conflict. Corporations, after all, are designed to compete.
States recognize that it is not territoriality alone that they must defend, but rather also nonterritorial interests. Such a recognition runs against the grain of the leaders of states. Thinking of the State as essentially territorial comes naturally in light of how modern states began, and their close identification of sovereignty with the body of the prince. We even speak of the body politic, and also of the territorial integrity of the state when it is whole.
Nevertheless, threats like those posed to the critical infrastructure of states are fundamentally nonterritorial. The computer attack via the Internet that disables a power grid or a telecommunications link is not really a territorial attack. An attack on the critical superinfrastructure that binds the developed world ever more interdependently is actually an attack on the assets of the society of states, on which individual states may depend but which they do not own any more than they own a market in raw materials, or a market in currencies.
Such a change in attitude about the nonterritorial interests of states is bound to come with the advent of the market-state. Also, there will come changes in how territory itself is viewed. Each historic society of states has favored a particular means of resolving state disputes. Not surprisingly, the society of nation-states favored national partitions (quite unlike the partitions of Poland, for example, in the nineteenth century that made no pretext of accommodating national peoples). Market-states that are defined less by their territoriality and their nations will find other means appropriate to their constitutional form.
One may speculate that the umbrella, rather than the felt-tipped marker that once limned partition lines, will be one such means. The umbrella is a free-trade and/or defense zone that allows for a common legal jurisdiction as to some, but not all, issues. To put it differently, an umbrella is one out-come of a market in sovereignty. Different umbrellas may overlap. Small societies can shelter within such umbrellas—cultures too small to be viable as separate states—retaining for themselves control over essentially cultural matters.* For such umbrellas to work, however, we must weaken the promise of maximum identical human freedoms for all peoples, because the cultural control that a society wishes to retain (its religious character, for example) may infringe on maximum identical freedom. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter, “the maxim of civil government should be reversed and we should say: divided we stand, united we fall.”
Umbrellas of this kind might permit the reunion of states that were severed by partition: India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan; the Koreas; Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania; Ireland; Palestine—all the states whose insecurity threatens the stability of the society of states and, I might add, that of the United States so long as she chooses to exercise world leadership and thus inevitably attracts the hostility of otherwise remote parties. Moreover such umbrellas offer a constitutional mechanism for ameliorating one of the most significant shortcomings of the market-state, its indifference to community and to culture. Under a multicultural umbrella, many subcultures can dwell, appropriating the economic and defense advantages of a larger territorial scope while retaining the ability to develop different legal regimes within each specific domain. These subcultures will not be states, at least as we have understood the term. Let us call them “provinces.” These may be provinces where feminists or fundamentalist Christians or ethnic Chinese congregate, all within a larger sheltering area of trade and defense. This concept of overlapping jurisdictions offers another way in which consensus might be assisted once market-states emerge. Such markets in sovereignty can be liberating for groups that now feel confined within national sovereignties or ignored within multicultural states. But such markets can also lead to internal conflict as some groups within a state wish to trade sovereignty while others do not; and markets in sovereignty can lead to external conflict as some states feel alienated and marginalized by richer, more encompassing cartels of shared human values.*
Tentatively we may note these ten constitutional conditions for a society of market-states: (1) the maintenance of a force structure capable of defeating a challenge to peace; (2) the creation of security structures and alliances capable of dealing with the problems of population control, migration, and ecological stability; (3) a consensus among the great powers on the legitimacy of certain forms of the market-state; (4) a few clear, structural rules for any state's behavior that are enforced by arms if necessary, analogous to the society of nation-states' bar against the annexation of any territory without the consent of its inhabitants; (5) provisions for the financial assistance to great powers when these powers undertake to intervene on behalf of the peace and security of the society of states as a whole; (6) prohibitions against arms trading in nuclear materials, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and missile technology but that permit trade in some defensive, informational technologies; (7) practices for bribing states—by enhancing their security or their wealth—in order to prevent WMD proliferation to any state but especially to major states; (8) prohibitions against wholesale attacks by the state on its own populations; (9) some general prohibition on anticompetitive trade and financial practices; (10) a consensus on the rule that no state that meets the standards of the Peace of Paris—free elections, market economy, human rights—ought to be the subject of threats of force.
These conditions are not the same as those that aimed to ensure stability in the Long War. They are not the same as those sought by the U.S. policy of containment that successfully ended that war. These conditions give greater priority to peripheral conflicts and require greater consensus. They may not cost any less, but they allocate expenditures differently. They address a new class of security problems that will not be resolved any more easily, and possibly not any more quickly, than those of the Long War. Finally, these conditions presuppose a commitment to pluralism that is inconsistent with either relativism or exceptionalism. By pluralism is meant the view that some values are to be preferred to others, and that these preferred values are those democratic and peaceful institutions that permit individuated and diverse cultural development in the context of nonaggressive relations. The reason why the political system of the West is preferred is that it is the only system that allows all states, Western or not, to develop their own cultures. In a society of states committed to pluralism there are preferred values (as opposed to relativism) but no preferred states (as opposed to exceptionalism).
The above list of conditions also suggests a way in which states can decide when to use force to achieve or maintain peace, that is, it implies a calculus analogous to the Weinberger Doctrine.1 This program assumes that states will have to reconfigure and retrain their forces to function in ambiguous environments, where the threat may not come from another state or even an identifiable aggressor, and where the line between war and crime has been smudged.
We ask the same questions that we asked before. Which crises demand consideration for intervention? Those with significant costs to world public order, that system of state legitimacy that relies on the ten conditions for peace outlined above. When do these crises profit from intervention?When intervention is likely to make a decisive difference at a cost/reward ratio that is commensurate with the significance of the risk to world public order. Who should intervene? Those states with the largest stakes in world public order. What objectives should be pursued? Restoring and maintaining the conditions for a civil society. How is this accomplished? By voluntary coalitions of essentially mercenary forces, compensated by contributions from all states having a stake in the outcome.2 In Europe (and perhaps the Near East) this might mean the use of NATO forces; in Africa, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) troops, augmented as necessary, and so on. The United States should take the lead in assembling such mercenary teams. As Joseph Nye has rightly said:
the United States has to recognize a basic proposition of public-goods theory: if the largest beneficiary of a public good (such as international order) does not provide disproportionate resources toward its maintenance, the smaller beneficiaries are unlikely to do so.3
Such is the calculus of the society of states of peace. It is no more than a rather formulaic rendering of the commonsense judgments statesmen make every day, with the factors made a bit more perspicuous. This calculus recognizes the State's interest in a peaceful order. It contrasts with the classic calculus of a state of war, that is, that the State should not intervene when the risks of intervention in a crisis exceed the State's vital interests in the outcome.*
Expressing these rules of decision so plainly helps to determine the selection of the war aim, which we can define as that objective such that its relation to world public order yields a stake for the intervening state that exceeds the share of the risks—political and military—it is asked to bear. Such rules can also help determine the weapons to be deployed and the command structure to be used. These rules prompt leaders to offer realistic justifications for the courses of action they choose. It should not be necessary to pretend disingenuously that contemporary interventions obey the classic calculus of a state of war when the historical context for these deci-sions comes after the end of the Long War and in contemplation of preventing another such cataclysm. Leaders can forthrightly explain why they are intervening in situations that previously would not have been thought appropriate for intervention. To take one example: the U.S. president's speech explaining the situation in Kosovo when NATO air attacks began ought also to have explained our criteria for undertaking such attacks. The U.S. president's speech to Congress explaining our taking up arms against terrorism did so.
We have long been accustomed to think of the imperatives of the State as basically strategic, and of the issues that engage the society of states as fundamentally questions of law. We have long been accustomed to deny that a State can be compelled by other states to obey its own laws, and we usually deny that the society of states has any particular strategic objectives.
The developmental picture of the State that I have presented, however, portrays the constitutional and the strategic dimensions as intimately and inextricably interconnected. This interconnectedness between law and strategy is also a fundamental feature of the society of states. Within a single state the constitutional order determines the ways conflict is managed and rationalized domestically and abroad. For the international society of states, peace treaties perform a similar role, by attempting to solve the puzzles created by wars. In both instances, constitutions provide a society—whether it is a society of citizens or the society of states—with the means to choose among values when there is no one optimum solution. When the choices to be made are among incommensurate values, a constitution records and determines how those choices are to be made in order for them to be accorded legitimacy.
We have thought of international law as providing a largely stable background to the spread of the model of the European state around the globe. Some particular doctrines may change, but the idea of a law of nations is supposed to be more or less constant, ever expanding until it has become universal. On the basis of the portrait I have given of international law, however, this description is unjustified. International law has developed in a turbulent periodicity, changing its most basic precepts as its constituent parties, states, underwent dramatic and fundamental constitutional change. One consequence of this different understanding is that universalism no longer seems inevitable, and we can entertain the idea that the reversibility of this universalism does not mean the retrenchment or death of international law itself.
We have thought of the history of the nation-state as having begun at Westphalia. Here, too, the portrait I have drawn is somewhat different. This, too, is freeing, because it allows us to imagine that the nation-state may indeed be dying (as seems to many to be the case) without having to concede that the State itself is withering away (as seems improbable).
The Long War of the nation-state is over, having destroyed every empire that participated in it, every political aristocracy, every general staff, as well as much of the beauty of European and Asian life. Of that brief period after world markets brought relative comfort and security and before world ambition brought the destruction of societies that in retrospect appear so very unworldly, we can only say: such a period could not exist in our age.
I have called this conflict the Long War not simply because of its duration but because this length connects the world of many centuries—feudal, national, imperial, mercantile, and religious—with the world that is yet to be, the new century's world that is being born.
Two tasks lie before us: to decide, as states, when it is appropriate to use force in this new world; and to determine, as a society of states, when to collectively sanction the use of that force in this world. This is a matter of creating precedents and case law. It amounts to deploying the habits of law on behalf of strategy, and of course vice versa.
These precedents and case law, however, are not those generated by courts. We may accomplish in Bosnia a successful, long-term intervention by the society of states on world-public-order grounds; if we do, then the Yugoslav Wars will become as much a precedent in the future as the Gulf War is now. The same is true of our war on international terrorism. The rules of collective engagement will be based on how the last similar problem was approached, and on what basis we would like to see the next, future problem resolved. I believe that the combination of improvised constitutional instruments with increasingly settled case law is the appropriate method for the society of market-states. This combination is a reversal of the method of the nation-state (and to that extent may take place outside the U.N.).
This case law of the society of states must be consciously crafted. It will require political, business, and media leaders to think in terms of following and creating precedents rather than in terms of the impromptu. It will require that leaders forthrightly explain their decisions by means of doctrine, and not simply in emotive phrases. We are now in a position to write this case law through our decisions; some day, through an inability to achieve international consensus, we may no longer be in such a position, and we will regret having wasted an opportunity that would have avoided a world-rending war.
The views on international security generally prevailing today, however, are far from those that reflect a commitment to creating such case law. These views are at once very narrow and very ambitious. They are narrow because they have up to now excluded the nonterritorial threats to the State that are becoming increasingly dangerous; they are complacently ambitious because they do not recognize that the power of states to ensure their own security by conventional strategies is rapidly waning.
States are losing control of their sovereignty, especially if this is conceived in territorial terms. Once the territorial membrane collapses, then the distinction between law and strategy—the separate inner and outer modalities of the State—seems to weaken. In fact, this membrane was always a reflection of the interconnectedness of these two ideas, not of their independence. Because it was always so, implicitly, it should not alarm us now that we contemplate a world in which it is explicitly so. Like the union of time and space that once seemed so counterintuitive, the union of law and strategy is compelled by its usefulness. We simply cannot understand the development of the State and the society of states by holding either of these concepts in isolation from the other.
The threats we will soon be facing are not easily categorized as state aggressions. Indeed for the first time since the birth of the State, a state structure is no longer necessary in order to organize violence on a scale that is devastating to a society. And yet, perhaps ironically, this development makes the role of the State all the more crucial in achieving international peace and national security. This is because the shift away from retaliatory, threat-based strategies to defensive, vulnerability-based strategies will require a State—indeed will require a society of states—to successfully execute. Acting alone, the market can never coordinate the defensive tactics I have described into a general strategy. A market-state is required.
In the new era we are entering, the State will be as indispensable to peace as it was in the era of invasions that gave it birth. To stop a state's aggressions, especially against its own people, and to build international defenses against aggression that can, but need not, come from official governments will require strong states. If these missions are avoided or postponed, a new, horrifying kind of conflict may emerge in which an authoritarian market-state challenges the contentment of the rest because they are weak, and because their weakness is a threat, enabling nonstate terrorists and aggressors they cannot suppress to bring chaos everywhere. The market that encouraged this passivity will have destroyed the market-state.
So we begin a new millennium—not in terror but not in tranquility either; with faith and hope, but with wariness and an anxious foreboding, also. Law, strategy, and history continue, as before, to set the terms of legitimacy for the State. Although technology has changed the context for each of these fate-shaping institutions of godlike creation, the terms of legitimacy are human terms, not technological ones, written in human acts, and broken or mended by human deeds.
To act is to understand; every act reflects an understanding. My aim has been to enhance an understanding that has been called upon perhaps no more than a half dozen times in the last five hundred years to create a new world from the inherited political institutions of the old. Will we lay a long siege against ourselves or master the craft of the armorer when shields are made of secrets and not of bronze?
Advice to a Prophet
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?
Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
—Richard Wilbur