Philip C. Bobbitt

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

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.