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

Bobbitt, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375412921 ISBN 13: 9780375412929

Publisher: Knopf, 2002

Synopsis

"We are at a moment in world affairs when the essential ideas that govern statecraft must change. For five centuries it has taken the resources of a state to destroy another state . . . This is no longer true, owing to advances in international telecommunications, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. The change in statecraft that will accompany these developments will be as profound as any that the State has thus far undergone."
—from the Prologue

The Shield of Achilles is a classic inquiry into the nature of the State, its origin in war, and its drive for peace and legitimacy. Philip Bobbitt, a professor of constitutional law and a historian of nuclear strategy, has served in the White House, the Senate, the State Department, and the National Security Council in both Democratic and Republican administrations, and here he brings his formidable experience and analytical gifts to bear on our changing world. Many have observed that the nation-state is dying, yet others have noted that the power of the State has never been greater. Bobbitt reconciles this paradox and introduces the idea of the market-state, which is already replacing its predecessor. Along the way he treats such themes as the Long War (which began in 1914 and ended in 1990). He explains the relation of violence to legitimacy, and the role of key individuals in fates that are partially—but only partially—determined.

This book anticipates the coalitional war against terrorism and lays out alternative futures for the world. Bobbitt shows how nations might avoid the great power confrontations that have a potential for limitless destruction, and he traces the origin and evolution of the State to such wars and the peace conferences that forged their outcomes into law, from Augsburg to Westphalia to Utrecht to Vienna to Versailles.

The author paints a powerful portrait of the ever-changing interrelatedness of our world, and he uses his expertise in law and strategy to discern the paths that statehood will follow in the coming years and decades. Timely and perceptive, The Shield of Achilles will change the way we think about the world.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Bobbitt teaches constitutional law at the University of Texas, where he holds the A. W. Walker Centennial Chair. He was formerly the Anderson Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he was a member of the Modern History faculty. He was later the Marsh Christian Fellow in War Studies at King’s College, London. He has served as associate counsel to the president for intelligence and international security, legal counsel to the Senate Select Committee on the Iran-Contra Affair, the counselor on international law at the Department of State, as well as director of intelligence, senior director for critical infrastructure, and senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. He has written several previous books on nuclear strategy, social choice, and constitutional law. He lives in Austin, Washington, and London.

From the Back Cover

“Magisterial in its scope and ambition. . . . Bobbitt’s evolutionary map of warfare’s impact onteh state foreshadows the kinds of events still unfolding.” —The New York Times

“I take my hat off to the author for the boldness of his enterprise, for his scholarship, and for his capacity to get the reader to think along new lines. The Shield of Achilles may well become a classic.” —Paul Kennedy, The New York Review of Books

“Excellent . . . This book – with its masterly reappraisal of modern history and subtle elucidation of today’s geopolitics – should be on every desk in the State Department.” —National Review

“Philip Bobbit is to be saluted for undertaking an epic struggle to sort through an extraordinarily dynamic time in international affairs.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Once in a great while, there comes a book so ambitious in scope and so original in its insights that it challenges our comfortable patterns of thought and provokes widespread discussion in academic and political circles . . . a rare and important book.” —Fort Worth Star Telegram

“The Shield of Achilles should become required reading not only in the academy but for the military and civilian decision-makers of the industrialized world.” —The Weekly Standard

“[The Shield of Achilles] will be one of the most important works in international relations published during the last fifty years.” —Sir Michael Howard, author of War and the Liberal Conscience

“This is a bold book, a brave book, and a worthy primer for the essential study of where we go from here.” —The Times (London)

[The Shield of Achilles] will be one of the most important works in international relations published during the last fifty years.” –Sir Michael Howard, author of War and the Liberal Conscience

“This is a bold book, a brave book, and a worthy primer for the essential study of where we go from here.” –The Times (London)

“We are all about to have our view of the world turned upside down by this superb book.”–Chris Patten, The Guardian (UK)

“An extraordinarily sophisticated and comprehensive survey of war, peace, and nationhood. . . . Bobbitt has made a valuable contribution to wider understanding of how the world really works.”–The Dallas Morning News

“Remarkable. . . An audacious, massively informed analysis of the nature of the modern state and of modern war.”–Richard Overy, Literary Review

“A blockbuster on the history and future of the modern state. . . I defy you to read this and claim your understanding has not been enriched.”–Adam Roberts, The Independent (UK)

“Awe-inspiring. An alarming glimpse of our future. . . argumentative, opinionated, brilliant. . . A triumph.”–Evening Standard

“One of the key texts at the birth of the new century.”–Philip Ziegler

“Wide-ranging, ambitiously conceived, and intelligently argued. . . . Bobbitt’s future scenarios are based on an intelligent and cautiously realistic extrapolation of current security and political developments. We ignore them at our peril.”–The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Remarkable. . . Breathtaking in its range of reference, forcefully written.”–London Review of Books

“Fascinating. . . This book will certainly stimulate a needed discussion of America’s foreign policy.”–Christian Science Monitor

“Immensely and deliberately provocative. . . A passionate and worthy effort to make sense of what is clearly a brand new world.”–New York Sun

“Detailed and provocative. . . . A valuable and intriguing look at where we have been and where we are going.”–Booklist

“A brilliant, disquieting essay on geopolitics, warfare and the future of the state. . . . Few historical studies are as daring and engaging as this.”–Kirkus Reviews



From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

"We are at a moment in world affairs when the essential ideas that govern statecraft must change. For five centuries it has taken the resources of a state to destroy another state . . . This is no longer true, owing to advances in international telecommunications, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. The change in statecraft that will accompany these developments will be as profound as any that the State has thus far undergone."
—from the Prologue

The Shield of Achilles is a classic inquiry into the nature of the State, its origin in war, and its drive for peace and legitimacy. Philip Bobbitt, a professor of constitutional law and a historian of nuclear strategy, has served in the White House, the Senate, the State Department, and the National Security Council in both Democratic and Republican administrations, and here he brings his formidable experience and analytical gifts to bear on our changing world. Many have observed that the nation-state is dying, yet others have noted that the power of the State has never been greater. Bobbitt reconciles this paradox and introduces the idea of the market-state, which is already replacing its predecessor. Along the way he treats such themes as the Long War (which began in 1914 and ended in 1990). He explains the relation of violence to legitimacy, and the role of key individuals in fates that are partially—but only partially—determined.

This book anticipates the coalitional war against terrorism and lays out alternative futures for the world. Bobbitt shows how nations might avoid the great power confrontations that have a potential for limitless destruction, and he traces the origin and evolution of the State to such wars and the peace conferences that forged their outcomes into law, from Augsburg to Westphalia to Utrecht to Vienna to Versailles.

The author paints a powerful portrait of the ever-changing interrelatedness of our world, and he uses his expertise in law and strategy to discern the paths that statehood will follow in the coming years and decades. Timely and perceptive, The Shield of Achilles will change the way we think about the world.

Reviews

The world is at a pivotal point, argues Bobbitt, as the nation-state, developed over six centuries as the optimal institution for waging war and organizing peace, gives way to the market-state. Nation-states derive legitimacy from promising to improve the material welfare of their citizens, specifically by providing security and order. Market-states offer to maximize the opportunity of their people. Nation-states use force and law to bring about desired results. Market-states use various forms of market relationships. Bobbitt, who has an endowed chair at the University of Texas and has written five previous books on constitutional law and on nuclear strategy, argues in sprawling fashion that this paradigm shift is essentially a consequence of the "Long War" of 1914-1990, a struggle among communism, fascism and parliamentarism that, through innovation and mimicry, generated a fundamentally new constitutional and strategic dynamic that in turn generated a fundamentally new "society of states." Central to Bobbitt's thesis is the postulate that international order is a consequence of domestic order. In the work's most stimulating section, Bobbitt discusses three possible ways of reorganizing the latter. The "Meadow," essentially an extrapolation of socio-political patterns currently dominant in the U.S., features high levels of individualism around the world at the expense of collective behavior at any level. The "Park," based on a European alternate, emphasizes regionalism. The "Garden" predicates successful market states disengaging from international affairs and emphasizing renewed internal community. None of these systems will eliminate war, but the nation-state is declining, Bobbitt argues, essentially because nonstate actors confront the nation-state with threats it cannot effectively respond to. This big book is provocative and richly textured, but too often Bobbitt's arguments are obscured by his historically digressive presentation.

Bobbitt (constitutional law, Univ. of Texas; Constitutional Interpretation) attempts to foresee the shape of the 21st century in this study of the nation-state and how it evolves through politics and war. Bobbitt believes that the nation-state, which has dominated the last 200 years, is about to fade away and be replaced by what he calls the market state. He sees what he calls the long war of the nation-state, begun in 1914 and not ended until 1990 with the Treaty of Paris, as the major political event of the 20th century. However, the nation-states that survived this protracted struggle are seeing their legitimacy, linked to specific territories and borders, challenged by modern communications, global migration patterns, and organizations with no single territorial base. The result of these trends will be the emergence of the market state, which will be structured to maximize economic opportunities by opening markets rather than maintaining large governing establishments that attempt to maintain uniformity by means of legislation. Bobbitt's arguments are based solidly on his extensive knowledge of international security and constitutional law, and his book will be of interest to anyone concerned with foreign relations and the evolution of society. Recommended for all academic and larger public libraries. Robert J. Andrews, Duluth P.L., MN
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The past five centuries have witnessed the slow, often tortuous, and violent buildup of powerful nation-states. During the past century, the cataclysmic violence of two world wars has largely been the work of these relatively unified and centralized states. Now, with the decline of the ideologies of fascism and communism and rise of global economic and political institutions, it is possible that new relationships must evolve between states and between citizens and their national governments. Bobbitt teaches constitutional law at the University of Texas and has served as a governmental expert on international law and security. His massive, detailed, and provocative work examines the growth and evolution of nation-states, considers the role of warfare in that evolution, and suggests the possibilities for new political and economic structures for the future. Bobbitt assumes the reader has a solid knowledge of modern world history. For those who do, this work will be a valuable and intriguing look at where we have been and where we might be going. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

BOOK I
State of War

Paradise Lost
(Book III, lines 111—125)

. . . They therefore as to right belonged,
so were created, nor can justly accuse
their maker, or their making, or their fate,
as if predestination overruled
their will, disposed by absolute decree
or high foreknowledge: they themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I: if I foreknew,
foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
which had no less proved certain unforeknown.
So without least impulse or shadow of fate,
or aught by me immutably foreseen,
they trespass, authors to themselves in all
both what they judge and what they choose; for so
I formed them free, and free they must remain,
till they enthrall themselves . . .

--John Milton


Introduction:
Law, Strategy, and History

Law, Strategy, History--three ancient ideas whose interrelationship was perhaps far clearer to the ancients than it is to us, for we are inclined to treat these subjects as separate modern disciplines. Within each subject we expect economic or political or perhaps sociological causes to account for developments; we are unlikely to see any necessary relation among these three classical ideas. They do not appear to depend upon each other.

Of course we understand, from the point of view of any one of these three disciplines, how events in one can affect events in another. A war is won, and international law changes, as at the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II and called to account those who had obeyed orders they believed to be lawful. Or a war is lost, with the consequence that a new constitutional structure is imposed, as happened to Japan after World War II. Thus does strategy change law--and we call it history. Or the law of a state changes--as by the French Revolution, for example--and this change brings about the levée en masse that enables a Napoleon to conquer Europe through strategic genius; thus does law change strategy, and this too we call history. Or history itself brings new elements into play--a famine drives migration across a continent or technological innovation provides the stirrup--and an empire falls, and with its strategic collapse die also its laws. With all these examples we are familiar, but we understand this interrelationship as the by-product of cause and effect, the mere result of wars, famine, revolution, in which history is simply the record of events, organized according to the usual subject matters. We scarcely see that the perception of cause and effect itself--history--is the distinctive element in the ceaseless, restless dynamic by means of which strategy and law live out their necessary relationship to each other. For law and strategy are not merely made in history--a sequence of events and culminating effects--they are made of history. It is the self-portrayal of a society that enables it to know its own identity. (1) Without this knowledge a society cannot establish its rule by law because every system of laws depends upon the continuity of legitimacy, which is an attribute of identity. Furthermore, without such a self-portrayal, no society can pursue a rational strategy because it is the identity of the society that strategy seeks to promote, protect, and preserve. One might say that without its own history, its self-understanding, no society can have either law or strategy, because it cannot be constituted as an independent entity.

History, strategy, and law make possible legitimate governing institutions. For five centuries, the operation of these institutions has been synonymous with the presence of the modern state, and so we may be inclined to think of the subjects of these disciplines--history, strategic studies, jurisprudence--as mere manifestations of the State. Such a reaction is natural enough with respect to law: some writers, such as Kelsen (2) and Austin, (3) have held that there is no law without the State. And other writers, such as Machiavelli (4) and Bodin, (5) present strategy as an aspect of the State, for it is the State that sets the terms of engagement pursued by generals, that fields their armies and declares their wars or announces their capitulations. It is even plausible to regard history in this way: for this reason, Hegel wrote that history ended at the Battle of Jena, with the birth of the state-nation, for history ends with the creation of an institution that makes the Absolute attainable. (6) These reactions are understandable but they are misguided.

The State exists by virtue of its purposes, and among these are a drive for survival and freedom of action, which is strategy; for authority and legitimacy, which is law; for identity, which is history. To put it differently, there is no state without strategy, law, and history, and, to complicate matters, these three are not merely interrelated elements, they are elements each composed at least partly of the others. The precise nature of this composition defines a particular state and is the result of many choices. States may be militaristic, legalistic, and traditional to varying degrees, but every state is some combination of these elements and can be contrasted with every other state--and with its own predecessors--in these ways.

The legal and strategic choices a society confronts are often only recombinations of choices confronted and resolved in the past, now remade in a present condition of necessity and uncertainty. Law cannot come into being until the state achieves a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Similarly, a society must have a single legitimate government for its strategic designs to be laid; otherwise, the distinction between war and civil war collapses, and strategy degenerates into banditry. Until the governing institutions of a society can claim for themselves the sole right to determine the legitimate use of force at home and abroad, there can be no state. Without law, strategy cannot claim to be a legitimate act of state. Only if law prevails can it confer legitimacy on strategic choices and give them a purpose.* Yet the legitimacy necessary for law and for strategy derives from history, the understanding of past practices that characterizes a particular society.

Today, all major states confront the apparently bewildering task of determining a new set of rules for the use of military force. Commentators in many parts of the world have observed a curious vacillation and fecklessness on the part of the great powers at the very time those powers ought to be most united in their goals, for the Long War that divided them has now ended. Or perhaps it is the end of the Long War that accounts for such widespread confusion. Because the ideological confrontation that once clearly identified the threats to the states of either camp has evaporated, it has left these states uncertain as to how to configure, much less deploy, their armed forces. (7) What seems to characterize the present period is a confusion about how to count the costs and benefits of intervention, preparedness, and alliance. What does the calculus for the use of force yield us when we have done our sums? Only an unconvincing result that cannot silence the insistent question: "What are our forces for?" (8) Because no calculus can tell us that. We are at a moment when our understanding of the very purposes of the State is undergoing historic change. Neither strategy nor law will be unaffected. Until this change is appreciated, we will continue the dithering and the ad hockery, the affectations of cynicism and the placid deceit that so typifies the international behavior of the great powers in this period, a period that ought to be the hour of our greatest coherence and conviction. It is not that the United States did or did not decide to go into Somalia or Bosnia; it's that the United States has made numerous decisions, one after the other, in both directions. And the same thing may be said of the pronouncements of the other great powers regarding North Korea, Iraq, and Rwanda. "Ad hoc strategies" is almost a contradiction in terms, because the more states respond to the variations of the hour, the less they benefit from strategic planning.

The reason the traditional strategic calculus no longer functions is that it depends on certain assumptions about the relationship between the State and its objectives that the end of this long conflict has cast in doubt. That calculus was never intended to enable a state to choose between competing objectives: rather, that calculus depends upon the axiomatic requirement of the State to survive by putting its security objectives first. We are now entering a period, however, in which the survival of the State is paradoxically imperiled by such threat-based assumptions because the most powerful states do not face identifiable state-centered threats that in fact imperil their security. Having vanquished its ideological competitors, the democratic, capitalist, parliamentary state no longer faces great-power threats, threats that would enable it to configure its forces by providing a template inferred from the capabilities of the adversary state. Instead, the parliamentary state manifests vulnerabilities that arise from a weakening of its own legitimacy. This constitutional doubt is only exacerbated by the strategic confusion abroad for which it is chiefly responsible. So the alliance of parliamentary great powers,* having won their historic triumph, find themselves weaker than ever, constantly undermining their own authority at home by their inability to use their influence effectively abroad. With a loosening grip on their domestic orders, these powers are ever less inclined to devote themselves to maintaining a world order. The strategic thinking of states accustomed to war does not fit them for peace, which requires harmony and trust, nor can such thinking yet be abandoned without risking a collapse of legitimacy altogether because the State's role in guaranteeing security is the one responsibility that is not being challenged domestically and thus the one to which it clin...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375412921
• ISBN 13: 9780375412929
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 960