THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (118 page)

So much important work has been done to bring to the attention of the public the inherently transnational nature of environmental problems that it hardly seems necessary to stress that the society of market-states, like that of nation-states before it, will have to devise ways of coping, as a collectivity, with these matters. Here I want only to discuss two issues: environmental problems that have the potential for
disconcerting
the society of states, and the contribution that rapid computation, perhaps in conjunction with telecommunications, can make to the resolution of these problems.

Three major environmental events have occurred since 1970 that manifested this potential to bring about rapid and profound disquiet: the AIDS epidemic, the nuclear core accident at Chernobyl, and the scientific confirmation that the earth's ozone layer is being destroyed. Each of these events arose as a function of the interactions among the states of the new global economy, the mass movement of peoples and products, the transfer of previously familiar technologies to new settings, and the development of new technologies and materials.
³⁸
Part of what is disconcerting about these three events is precisely their links to this new world; the eruption of Mount Saint Helens perhaps had a greater environmental consequence than any of the three, but it did not have their unsettling quality.

AIDS is the physical condition of malaise leading to death that occurs as a consequence of an attack on a human being's immune system by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Its origin remains obscure, but it seems to have bridged the gap of space and culture from West Africa to the developed states in the late 1970s. One plausible explanation is that it was the result of the transfer to human beings of a retrovirus previously found in monkeys, through the use of hypodermic needles that were employed to inject monkey blood and plasma into human beings as part of a cultural ritual. This theory of origin, if true, places AIDS among those other diseases
with a technological component, such as toxic shock syndrome (caused by the superabsorbency of a tampon) and Lyme disease (caused by the changing ecology of suburban growth, reforestation, and the altered demographics of deer populations), the Hanta virus, the zebra mussel contamination in the Great Lakes, and the discovery of radon in homes.

Other infectious diseases have exposed residents of the temperate zones to tropical infections owing to increased travel in both regions, the global sources of the food supply, and the ever-increasing number of human hosts within which viruses may proliferate. Whatever its origin, AIDS has been widely spread among heterosexuals in the developed world by the use of hypodermics, and by sexual practices among both heterosexuals, mainly in underdeveloped states, and homosexuals in all states.

Its disconcerting nature has to do with at least three factors: first, such epidemics were widely believed to have been relegated to the past by modern antibiotics; second, AIDS has been invariably fatal, striking the young and otherwise healthy with a grim inexorability; third, although AIDS has been largely confined to groups that, for differing reasons, can be marginalized from the mainstream culture of the developed states, yet it has the potential to overwhelm the populations of those mainstream cultures. AIDS is now the leading cause of death among Americans under the age of twenty-one.

In 1976, the historian William McNeill, writing about the role of plagues in the past, presciently observed that

Thus AIDS is probably not the last of such disconcerting diseases. Unexpected outcomes of recombinant DNA activities, toxins developed for the purposes of biological warfare, obscure parasites sprung from their remote geographical niches, or even familiar viruses that have developed strains resistant to modern antibiotics are all candidates for the plagues of the twenty-first century. They pose a unique challenge for the society of market-states, as threatening in its way as the challenge posed to Christian faith by the bubonic plagues of Europe because developments in molecular biology—fueled by abundant investment made possible by the financial liberalizations of the market-state—have given many persons a faith in technology and in its ability to grant something like immortality to human beings.

The society of market-states will have to confront its fundamental ordering principle, the market, at a juncture where the market works poorly, the decision to whom to give life-saving medical care. If each state decides on its own, in the manner of current states, then some persons will be excluded from care because they are not members of the preferred groups of recipients, while others will be excluded for lack of personal or institutional resources. If, on the other hand, some multinational market is set up, then the wealthy from one country will sop up the health resources of others, as in the example of richer persons buying kidneys and other organs from impoverished donors.
⁴⁰

The encouraging fact is that a society of market-states will be better prepared to evaluate, analyze, and treat such diseases because it will most efficiently allocate resources to the task and have a worldwide charter to do so. The mere fact of a state boundary will not stand in the way of ad hoc groups, authorized by the society of such states, who act to protect the world from an apocalyptic pestilence. But this too will test the legitimacy of that system, as it assumes authority—by what right?—that the peoples of the world have not given it by any recognizable plebiscite, or other method approved by the nation-state. Moreover, actions by a society of market-states will inevitably bring the values of the market to bear—espe-cially pricing—on goods (such as life itself) that we have tried to treat as priceless.
*

Chernobyl was not the first such health event to result from the introduction of dangerous technologies into contemporary life. The nuclear release at Three Mile Island; the chemical releases at Seveso, Italy; the explosion at Bhopal, India; and the pollution of the water table at Love Canal in the United States all come to mind.

The disturbing nature of these events is traceable to their origin in the malfunctions of human-designed and -maintained machines. Unlike the infectious retrovirus, the operations of a nuclear reactor are well understood. Similarly, the effects of the toxic gas used in the production of pesticides at Bhopal were perfectly predictable. In such cases, a series of human errors and equipment failures combined to bring about the disaster. At both Chernobyl and Bhopal there was little oversight or effective regulation. Mandated safety standards by the state were ignored owing partly to a lack of the technical and institutional resources necessary to achieve compliance.

This sort of crisis strikes at a weak point in the political superstructure of the society of market-states, its moral vulnerability. At Bhopal, Chernobyl, and elsewhere, the lives of persons whose economic worth was negligible were put at risk in order to provide cheap chemicals to agriculture or cheap power to electricity consumers. So long as it is profitable to do so, we can expect multinational corporations to draw the calculus of safety no more expensively than the global possibilities of relocation demand, and we can expect state enterprises to do the same (because even though they cannot relocate, they must compete against the global multinationals).

Here too, however, there is hope. Chernobyl was a national failure, prompted as much by the shortcomings of Russian technology as by the inevitability of accidents. The society of market-states would be able in principle to deploy technicians within a global market, denying dangerous technologies to those states that do not provide adequate safeguards and helping poorer states to maintain the complex equipment that may be located there.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are synthetic chemical compounds first developed in 1928 to replace the hazardous refrigerants, such as ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide then in use.
⁴¹
By the 1970s CFCs—nontoxic, nonflammable—had completely transformed the refrigeration industry, replacing chemicals in refrigerators and launching the fledgling air-conditioning industry. Eventually CFCs were adopted as propellants in ubiquitous aerosol spray cans for everything from whipped cream to hair spray.

When, in 1974, two scientists published a technical paper suggesting that CFCs might threaten the environment, the world was producing almost a billion kilograms of CFCs a year, with the amount doubling every five years. These scientists hypothesized that CFCs were slowly drifting upward into the stratosphere where, having broken down molecularly, they were releasing chlorine atoms that destroy stratospheric ozone, causing higher levels of ultraviolet radiation to reach the surface of the Earth. This might lead to a deadly rise in the occurrence of skin cancers.

Robert Kates picks up the story here and sketches the ironic turn of events that ensued:

The unnerving aspect of the ozone case lies in its grotesque transformation of something ordinary and benignly mundane into something unexpectedly malignant. Similar shifts have occurred with respect to cigarette smoke, asbestos fibers, and lead in paint and gasoline. In the market-state, there are powerful lobbies with a stake in persuading the public and public officials that there is really nothing to worry about, and a no less powerful media and public interest alliance anxious to detect an alarming new crisis as frequently as possible. The lobbies depend upon companies whose sale of the dubious substance is threatened, but the media and public-interest groups also have a material stake in the matter, because the market-state requires that they make their way on the basis of public contributions,
*
which requires an ever-escalating hyperbole to stimulate giving. In the ozone-depletion case, public reaction first outran and then lagged behind the science of the matter.

The society of market-states is vulnerable to such threats to the environment and yet in some ways better equipped than the society of nation-states to deal with them. This new society is vulnerable because it places such a high value on the autonomy of the market. CFCs are, after all, a cheap and otherwise safe method of refrigeration and vapor propulsion; there will be some countries that choose to continue their use, noting along the way that because their impact is so minor compared to that of market giants like the United States, little harm will result to the atmosphere. Global marketing will allow the transfer of such products to those countries whose publics are not so sensitive (or who feel they cannot afford to be sensitive) to charges of environmental degradation.

At the same time, the global corporation is itself vulnerable to reports in its major markets disclosing practices it would like to confine to marginal markets. Boycotts, not laws, led to the original decline in CFC use in the United States. The problem is how to organize the actions of the society of market-states in much the way nation-states were able to mobilize multilateral
legal regulation. Law will continue to be a resource available to state but it will occupy a very different role in the world of market-states than it did in the world of nation-states.

The Long War was won by strategic innovations that we might nowadays call the development of weapons of mass destruction, the globalization of communications, and the international integration of finance and trade. These strategic innovations have brought with them new challenges that now face the society of states that the end of the Long War is bringing into being. Three fundamental choices confront the society of market-states with respect to each of these challenges. Until they have been made, we will live in a period of transition.

These choices are (1) regarding weapons of mass destruction: (a) whether to attempt affirmatively to check the proliferation of such weapons, through extended deterrence, and to suppress proliferation through ad hoc intervention, or (b) whether to rely on multilateral arms-control agreements, accepting as inevitable that some proliferation will occur outside these agreements, or (c) whether to rely on the wholesome effects of internal liberalization through economic growth and mutual deterrence to contain this proliferation; (2) with respect to the globalization of communications: (a) whether to address the linked issues of immigration and human rights by encouraging a global network of economic growth premised on the transparency of sovereignty, or (b) whether to cultivate the fragmentation of states within “umbrella” megastates, or (c) whether to strengthen the protection of national cultures and the regionalization of international law; (3) with regard to the international integration of finance and trade: (a) whether to increase the absolute wealth of the society of market-states, taken as a whole, without regard for distributional effects, or (b) whether to manage growth with an eye to short- and medium-term distributional effects, or (c) whether to encourage economic stability through growth tempered by a regard for long-term balance.

Some market-states will doubtless attempt to mix and match these alternative policies but as a general matter one or another set of mutually supporting policies—(a/a/a) or (b/b/b) or (c/c/c)—will rise to dominance in each state because these options reflect different views of state sover-eeignty. A state that relies on pre-emption to thwart nuclear proliferation is all the more likely to support transparency in sovereignty when it comes to human-rights violations. A state that is anxious to preserve the cultural integrity of its minority groups is unlikely to pursue economic strategies that shred the social contract. Inevitably, one of these sets of approaches—entrepreneurial, managerial, or mercantile—will dominate the constitution of the society of market-states, because a society of states that pursued
policies that were inconsistent with respect to state sovereignty would produce an incoherent and unstable constitution.

Which model of the market-state is best? I would answer by recalling the moving scene
*
in Act III of Gotthold Lessing's dramatic poem, “Nathan the Wise.” Lessing was a German author of the Enlightenment;
†
the play is his last major work.

Nathan, a Jew, is summoned before Saladin, the great Muslim warrior. Saladin asks him which religion is the true one—Islam, Christianity, or Judaism—hoping to trap Nathan into either denying his own faith or insulting Islam by implication, in which case his property will be confiscated.

In reply, Nathan narrates the parable of the Three Rings.
‡
A wise king possessed a ring, the wearer of which was said to be beloved of God and man. He had three sons, to each of whom he promised the ring. When the king died, each heir was given a ring, and all three rings appeared to be identical to that of the old king. When the sons went to the royal judge and demanded to know which ring was the real one, the judge said to them:

While it is likely, as we will see in the following chapter, that states may choose different forms of the market-state—and experiment with hybrid forms—each state must decide on the basis of the constraints on its resources, its heritage, and its destiny what archetypal form best confers legitimacy.