Philip C. Bobbitt

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History

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.