I am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope to us now utterly inconceivable. For mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead…†
—Joseph Conrad
WAR IS NOT a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided. As we have seen in the preceding pages, and as Conrad also wrote, “the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of a really relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone.”‡ On September 11, 2001, the nascent community of market-states came to this knowledge as every society of states that preceded it has: through violence. In New York and in Washington, we slept that night among our own dead who were interred beneath rubble, as if on a battlefield.
The September attacks on the United States provide that country and its allies with an historic opportunity, even while they have dealt America an historic wound. That opportunity is the moment and the context in which to organize a grand coalition of states, with many of whose policies other than counterterrorism the United States differs. Such coalitions, whose precise composition will shift from time to time and threat to threat, can be created and managed to fight a new epochal war composed of interventions against a variety of challenges that include terrorism—both within the State, as in the example of Serbia, and against the State, as in the case of the September attacks, and even by one state against its neighbor, as in the case of Iraq's aggression against Iran and Kuwait.
If a coalitional war against international terrorism prompts the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies to conduct cooperative operations at the leading edge of modern technology this war could forestall the cataclysmic conflicts among great powers that modern technology makes possible. Indeed I would say that there can be no higher priority for the United States and the United Kingdom than to strengthen cooperation with Russia in a league against international terrorism, even to the extent of transforming NATO. NATO could become the meeting ground for coalitional warfare against this lethal, global menace, and could include Russia as a full member. The September attacks can be understood as the first battle in this new war. If, as some historians argue, the twentieth century began in August 1914 it may be that the twenty-first century will be said to have begun in September 2001.
The multinational mercenary terror network that Osama bin Laden and others have assembled is a malignant and mutated version of the market-state. Like other emerging market-states, it is a reaction to the strategic developments of the Long War that brought forth cultural penetration, the liberalization of trade and finance, and weapons proliferation, on an unprecedented scale. Like other states, this network has a standing army; it has a treasury and a consistent source of revenue; it has a permanent civil service; it has an intelligence collection and analysis cadre; it even runs a rudimentary welfare program for its fighters, and their relatives and associates. It has a recognizable hierarchy of officials; it makes alliances with other states; it promulgates laws, which it enforces ruthlessly; it declares wars.
This network, of which Al Qaeda is only a part, greatly resembles a multinational corporation but that is simply to say that it is a market-state, made possible by advances in international telecommunications and transit, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. Lacking contiguous territory, Al Qaeda is a kind of virtual state, which means that our classical strategies of deterrence based on retaliation will have to be rethought. That is another way of saying that even when Afghanistan is conquered and pacified, the war against terrorism will go on.
Deterrence, assured retaliation, and overwhelming conventional force enabled victory for the coalition of parliamentary nation-states in the war that began in 1914 and only finally ended with the Peace of Paris in 1990. These strategies cannot provide a similar victory at present because what threatens the states of the world now is too easy to disguise and too hard to locate in any one place. We cannot deter an attacker whose identity or location is unknown to us, and the very massiveness of our conventional forces makes it unlikely we will be challenged openly. As a consequence, we are just beginning to appreciate the need for a shift from the sole reliance on target, threat-based strategies to defensive, vulnerability-based strategies.
Realizing that we are fighting a virtual state and not just a stateless gang helps clarify our strategy. For one thing, it suggests that controlling and diminishing the revenue stream to bin Laden's network is far more impor-tant than capturing or killing any individual. For another, it clarifies the line between mere crime—which we use law, after the fact, to prosecute—and warfare, which we use strategy, before the fact, to anticipate.
The United States is at war no less than when a conventional state launched a surprise attack in 1941, and the assault this time has come for much the same reason. Now, as then, the United States aroused fear that her global presence would threaten the ambitions of a messianic state bent on regional subjugation and domination. Then as now the alliance of which the United States is a part faces a long and bitter struggle.
The world community faces its own historic challenge in creating a constitution for the international order that will emerge from this war. Will that community—the society of states—use the discredited multilateral institutions of the nation-state as a way of frustrating action in order to control the acts of its strongest member, the United States? Or will that society simply expect every state to defend itself as best it can, spiraling into a chaos of self-help, ad hoc interventions, and sabotage? Or will that community consist of islands of authoritarianism, whose institutions focus only inward in an attempt to prevent violence by harsh police methods? Or can we learn to produce collective goods—like shared intelligence and shared surveillance information from shared nanosensors and shared missile and cyber defenses? Indeed the production and distribution of collective goods*—such as the coalition against international terrorism itself—may be the only way for a market-state to forestall peer competition and defeat international terrorism at the same time.
The phrase Indian Summer† usually evokes a pleasant sensation of warm autumn weather that gives us a second chance to do what winter will make impossible. The origin of this phrase, however, is more menacing. The early American settlers were often forced to take shelter in stockades to protect themselves from attacks by tribes of Native Americans. These tribes went into winter quarters once autumn came, allowing the settlers to return to their farms. If there was a break in the approaching winter—a few days or weeks of warm, summery climate—then the tribal attacks would be resumed, and the defenseless settlers became their prey. Once again the settlers were forced to band together or to become victims, attacked one by one.
The onslaughts in the autumn of 2001 on a warm, summerlike day on the East Coast of the United States are both the herald of further savagery and the call for defenses that, if they are sustained, offer the world's best hope of avoiding a world-rending cataclysm. States that otherwise might find themselves in a violent competition can take this opportunity to cooperate in a new security structure. States that otherwise have little in common in their foreign policies have this in common: all are subject to attacks by a virtual state because a virtual state is the neighbor of all. States whose relations with the United States have been fraught in the past could now become valuable partners; states whose relations with the United States have been warm and trusted can be even more relied upon for their counsel now that our fates are more closely bound together.
The foregoing book was completed well before September 11, but the terrible events of that day were not unexpected or even unprecedented, as the text of this book discloses. Rather one had hoped that we might be spared a little longer. If those horrors inspire us now to deal realistically and creatively with the threats we face, then the sacrifice of innocents on that day may yet yield a stronger and more resilient society of the survivors. In thinking about the past, we will remember our dead, and secure the future for which they died.
We are entering a fearful time, a time that will call on all our resources, moral as well as intellectual and material. It is not unlike periods in the past when there was “a sense of anticipation, a sense of conflict, a sense of dread, a sense of the unknown.”* As I write this, the world is in a mood of apprehension because many had expected that by this time other horrors would have been inflicted upon us, yet for a while little has happened. In a similar period, after the invasion of Poland but before the battles of France and Britain, King George VI spoke to his country in a radio broadcast. He spoke of the “hard… waiting, [that] waiting is a trial of nerve and discipline.” Finally he warned of the “dark times ahead of us.”
A new year is at hand. We cannot tell what it will bring. If it brings peace, how thankful we shall all be. If it brings us continued struggle we shall remain undaunted. In the meantime, I feel that we may all find a message of encouragement in the lines which, in my closing words, I would like to say to you:
I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year: “Give me a light, that I might tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
May that Almighty Hand guide and uphold us all.*
Philip Bobbitt
December 13, 2001
Perhaps
Perhaps these thoughts of ours
will never find an audience
Perhaps the mistaken road
will end in a mistake
Perhaps the lamps we light one at a time
will be blown out, one at a time
Perhaps the candles of our lives will gutter out
without lighting a fire to warm us.
Perhaps when all the tears have been shed
the earth will be more ertile
Perhaps when we sing praises to the sun
the sun will praise us in return
Perhaps these heavy burdens
will strengthen our philosophy
Perhaps when we weep for those in misery
we must be silent about miseries of our own.
Perhas
Because of our irresistible sense of mission
We have no choice.
—Shu Ting
(translated by Carolyn Kizer)
APPENDIX
I should like to append three notes in order to dispel—or at least to mitigate—the natural concerns of readers undertaking arguments and theses that are presented in the way I have chosen.
A NOTE ON EUROCENTRISM
As Steven Weinberg has thoughtfully pointed out to me in a letter, although I say that the Crimean War was the most deadly of any from 1815 to 1914, the Tai Ping Rebellion in China killed ten times as many people. Indeed throughout the historical discussion of constitutional forms, I concentrate almost entirely—until the twentieth century—on European examples. Similarly, although gunpowder was invented in Asia and conscription by force took place in tribal Africa, my discussion of strategic innovations is also confined to Europe, at least in the initial periods.
The reason for this is the State is a European political idea. The society of states first emerged in Europe at the time of the Renaissance and only in the late twentieth century encompassed the globe. The military and strategic innovations relevant to its development occurred in Europe and in those theatres of war with which European states were concerned. It has been suggested that it was the sheer bellicosity of Europe that accounted for its domination of the world political order. Without going so far, I will simply say that the exploitation of strategic innovation was certainly given impetus by the intense political competition among states, and vice versa. As a result, the forms of government developed in Europe were well situated to compete with other forms in the Americas and in Africa and Asia.
A NOTE ON CAUSALITY
In this work I have described a recurring pattern: long periods of over a century in which the international order of states is stable, broken by an abrupt shift to epochal war that puts the constitutional basis of the warning states in play, followed by the renovation of the international order as states copy the constitutional order of the winning states, and the ratification of this new order by international congresses of peace. I have traced these patterns from the Renaissance into the twenty-first century. But I do not believe that I have discovered an historical law of general application.
Far from it. Rather I believe that at each juncture, things might have gone differently. It is the decisions of those persons who guide the State that determine whether stability or innovation will ensue. True, these deci-sions are confined by the “genetic material” of the State: its culture and resources. But within these constraints many real choices are possible with respect to the two dominant, mutually affecting dimensions of the State, law and strategy. The society of states we have today has been brought into being by countless acts of decision making that were not compelled by larger structures, but rather that constituted those structures. It is precisely because these choices could have been different that legitimacy is conferred—or withdrawn—by their outcome. History is the name we put to choices made.
I came across this manifesto by Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwil that seems to me very largely right on this issue. They write:
Domestic and international actors reproduce or alter systems through their actions. Any given international system does not exist because of immutable structures, but rather the very structures are dependent for their reproduction on the practices of the actors. Fundamental change of the international system occurs when actors, through their practices, change the rules and norms constitutive of international interaction…. Fundamental changes in international politics occur when beliefs and identities of domestic actors are altered thereby also altering the rules and norms that are constitutive of their political practices. To the extent that patterns emerge in this process, they can be traced and explained, but they are unlikely to exhibit predetermined trajectories to be captured by general historical laws, be they cyclical or evolutionary.1
Causes of war will vary with particularity, owing to the local historical context, and yet will also be, very broadly, the same as ever. My claim is that the strategic innovations that prove decisive in epochal wars (most recently, the advances in international telecommunications, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction that won the Long War) interact with the struggle over the constitutional order (most recently, as the decaying nation-state is superseded by the emerging market-state), creating new forms of government (for example, the virtual, multinational nonterritorial regime, like the terrorist Al Qaeda) and new tactics (such as asymmetrical warfare using the latest communications technology, cartel-like coalitions, daring weapons of mass destruction that match the lucrative targets amassed by the market-state, like the World Trade Center towers, with manned cruise missiles such as fuel-fire commercial airliners).
War is inevitable not because of this interaction but because of the nature of the State, which operationalizes and magnifies a group's ability to wage conflict, and the nature of man in groups. Given that wars will occur, this historical interaction—more descriptive than causal—can manifest itself in many different events. This is a matter of human agency. Epochal wars could be great power cataclysms, or coalitional low-intensity conflicts, or high-technology nonexplosive attacks that induce economic and social collapse. This book tries to help us make choices, not forecasts.
A NOTE ON PERIODICITY
The periods I describe, and the forms of government to which they are attached, are given sharper edges than might otherwise be the case were my perspective less lengthened. But like the black border on a hemline in a Sargent painting that dissipates into streaks and then into disconnected islands of paint as one approaches the canvas more closely, my categories are composed of many disparate elements that are drawn together by my vision of their purpose.
In the states we have studied, each period is typified by great constitutional forms—princely, kingly, territorial, imperial, national—whose elements include bureaucratic establishments, the expectations of citizens as to what the State is for, the views of those citizens and of foreigners of the source of the State's legitimacy, the State's role in transnational institutions, and other matters. Like the traits shared by a family, many mixtures are possible and it may be that no single state shares with another every single element of its form. Moreover, in any period there are members of the society of states who typify earlier periods, some that are in transition, and some that are evidence of a new, challenging form.
For these reasons, it may appear that I am trying to shoehorn a complicated history into a rigid taxonomy. Sophisticated readers may find their minds flooded with counterexamples as they proceed through the historical/analytical parts of the narrative.
Indeed I am quite aware of this reaction; I tend to be a skeptical reader myself, one who suspends counterargument with difficulty. My only defense, if such it be, is this: if my general characterizations are useful, and if the reader finds himself adding examples to those periods and forms I have described, then I will feel my rather arbitrary constructions have been worthwhile. If not, I invite amendment.