THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (16 page)

Authors: Philip Bobbitt

Between 1968 and 1980, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and deposed a communist regime in Prague; embarked on a breathtaking buildup of nuclear weapons; invaded Afghanistan, deposed and murdered its communist leader; attacked Chinese positions across the Ussuri River and maintained a force in readiness there of some fifty divisions; offered the United States a condominium in international affairs; and signed the
Helsinki Accords, effectively ratifying the Soviet sphere of influence over Eastern Europe. Many persons saw this period as one of Soviet dynamism, and from a certain perspective, this was undoubtedly so. But viewed from the perspective of the Long War, it represented a collapsing position. Mao's designated successor, Lin Piao, of all people, read this well enough when he observed:

Since Brezhnev came to power, with its baton becoming less and less effective and its difficulties at home and abroad growing more and more serious, the Soviet revisionist clique has been practicing imperialism more frantically than ever. Internally it has intensified its suppression of the Soviet people. Externally it has stepped up its collusion with the U.S., intensified its control over and its exploitation of the various east European countries… and intensified its threat of aggression against China. Its dispatch of hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Czechoslovakia, and its armed provocations against China are two [such] performances.
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What the Chinese clearly saw, and what the West appeared to miss, was that Russians were anxious to rid themselves of socialist solidarity in favor of a world role within, and legitimated by, the great power system.
²⁵

When Gorbachev succeeded Brezhnev in 1985, after two brief intervening premierships, the Soviet Union found a leader with the energy and will to break openly with the Communist method of total state planning. Gorbachev's initial goal was the restructuring of the Soviet economy, a restructuring that he originally advertised as a reorganization of the government bureaucracy to make it more efficient and to bring about greater quality control without fundamentally altering the basis of the command economy. This restructuring he called “perestroika.” Gorbachev's campaign of reform ran into such opposition within the bureaucracy and the Party, however, that in 1986 he called for greater openness in debate in order to mobilize public pressure for reform. This policy he called “glasnost.” Within the Soviet Union a civil breakdown began to occur as credibility drained away from the Communist Party; the economy worsened, and food shortages began to appear as uncertainty enveloped the underground market. In a second attempt to harness popular opinion in order to bring about reform, Gorbachev called for greater democracy and pluralism. This, however, prompted the Baltic states to agitate for their independence. In Poland, a noncommunist government was formed in the summer of 1989 and, in October, the communist government of Hungary bowed to demonstrations and accepted a new constitution. In the interim, Hungary had permitted East Germans to use the Hungarian borders to escape to Western Europe. This refugee exodus led to massive antigovernment
demonstrations within East Germany and, on November 9, 1989, crowds broke through the Berlin Wall. In October 1990 Germany was unified. By June 1990, democratic elections in Czechoslovakia had produced a noncommunist government, and a parliamentary constitution followed.
²⁶

The Long War was over. It officially ended in November 1990 when the thirty-four members of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)—including the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—met in Paris and signed an agreement providing for parliamentary institutions in all the participating states. This was the Charter of Paris, which was the centerpiece of the more comprehensive Peace of Paris.

Formal peace was signed with the agreements at Paris in November 1990. Then a reunited Germany, a chastened Soviet Union, a reconciled Poland and Czechoslovakia, a benevolent Britain, France and United States, all behaved with a rational civility hardly seen in European relations. Unfortunately because of the collapse of the Soviet Union shortly thereafter and the confusion that followed it, the event passed almost unnoticed.
²⁷

On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union formally dissolved. Now all the great powers that had begun the turbulent search in 1914 for a legitimate and legitimating constitutional order to succeed the empires of the nineteenth century had reached consensus. Between 1914 and 1990, the population of the world tripled—but an estimated 187 million persons, about 10 percent of the population of 1900—were killed or fated to die by human agency.
²⁸

The end of the Long War is not the end of the need for history-making by the State if by that one means the achievement of a final state paradigm, nor the end of war. But it does represent, as Francis Fukuyama memorably showed, the final “perfecting”—in the legal sense—of the nation-state.
²⁹

It is possible to live within the culture of war for so long that the end of a particular war seems like the end of all violent political struggle, and the temporary quiet that follows seems to promise a perpetual, peaceful, and exhausted stasis. This feeling is all the more likely if it accompanies what appears to be a moral consensus. The Long War was in a deep sense a moral struggle. Each of the three contending state systems was the out-come of a particular nineteenth and twentieth century attitude about mankind, attitudes that I will roughly call the biological, the sociological, and the legal. The fascists believed in a sort of social Darwinism for states, by which the competition for survival among species was mirrored in the
struggle among, and the domination of, genetically determined national groups among human beings. For all their differences about political action, on this fundamental social scientific point they were united. The communists took a sociological view of man, by which man could not only be wholly described according to his behavior in groups, but could be changed by manipulating the incentives of groups transcending states. Though they differed dramatically on many theoretical points, and endlessly debated whether socialism should be strengthened in a single state at the expense of world revolution, whether the Marx of the
Grundrisse
or the Marx of the later works was to be preferred, and so on—for the whole point was that the theoretical could guide the practical—they agreed on this assumption. The partisans of the liberal democracies also agreed on a basic element of the parliamentary attitude: that the impartial rule of law, and not simply the political power of the individual or group, should govern the outcome of state decisions. Each of these attitudes is not so much a reaction to the others, as it is to the nineteenth century self-consciousness that delegitimated the dynastic territorial states of the eighteenth century. Each tries to escape the problem of this loss of legitimacy by bringing an external, validating resource to bear. Each promises that it can best deploy the State to enhance the welfare of the nation. And to some degree, the residue of all these attitudes was present in every society—perhaps in every human heart—that contended in the Long War. What had ended was not just the Cold War, but a century of conflict over the basis of the State itself. And this accounts for the sense of bewilderment that followed. It wasn't like the usual end of an ordinary war but rather like the end of a way of living.

From a strategic point of view, the example of the West, and especially the United States, must rank among the most successful and skillful coor-dinations of force and statecraft for the achievement of political goals ever recorded. What Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert said of the Truman administration and the strategic campaigns of the late forties can be said of the U.S. presidents generally with respect to the Cold War:
³⁰

The effective mobilization of public support for its European commitments and the skillful use of economic resources to gain its objectives, and finally,… the imposition upon its military operations of limitations determined by political considerations—all in all [constitute] an exercise in strategy that would almost certainly have won Clausewitz' approbation.
³¹

For roughly forty-five years, across nine administrations drawn from both political parties, the Americans were able to summon great resources and—unusually, it is said, for a democracy—great stamina and great
restraint. What can be said of the United States–led Alliance during the Cold War can be said of the West generally with respect to the Long War.

When Clausewitz wrote his most famous and most widely misconstrued sentence, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,”
³²he intended to remind his readers that the destruction and human sacrifice that attends war could only be justified to the extent that war was absolutely necessary to accomplish political goals. One might go further and say that it is a corollary to this truth that if the political question that impels states to war is not resolved in that war, then the peace that ensues may be only a pause. Each of the campaigns of which the Long War was composed had strategic consequences for the next, just as the First World War set the stage for the Second, and so on. Now the fundamental constitutional problem of the Long War has been answered. Government by consent, freely given and periodically capable of being withdrawn, is what legitimates the nation-state. Government under law—not government that is above the law—provides the means by which states are legitimated.
*
So the next question intrudes itself: what are the
strategic
consequences of the peace?

What will this new world look like, and how should a state make its way in it? Will such a world be so chaotic without the overarching framework of the Long War that we will look back on the era of the Cold War as a golden age? By means of what new framework ought we to understand events and, ultimately, decide when to use force? These are the questions taken up in Part III, and they are on the minds of thoughtful persons throughout the world. Sometimes it is said that such questions are more difficult now that the armed struggle among great powers is over. If the conventional approach is to assess the threat then because the threat has changed—indeed, to a very large extent vanished—it is said we shall be at a loss until a new threat appears.

But this observation, which might be rephrased as “If No Copernicus, Then No Newton” (if no problem, then no answer), doesn't go to the issue of deciding per se. It might explain and even justify decisions that seem ad hoc, or patternless, but it neither explains nor justifies the abrupt and repeated reversals of policy in the West since the end of the Long War. While such an explanation might excuse the cynical apathy that governs so many Western foreign ministries, it scarcely excuses the loss of life and loss of confidence in our institutions that has been the result. The flip-flopping of Western decisions regarding Russia or Yugoslavia or Iraq is characteristic not so much of mystery as of changing incentives.

Then, it is sometimes said, it is a matter of “leadership.” In its first term
for example, the Clinton administration did not inspire critics by a slavish devotion to consistency in foreign policy. It is also said that the world is more complex now, that no single paradigm, such as that of containment that guided the West during the Long War and to which I have tried to draw attention, could possibly be useful today.

I am skeptical about these “explanations.” This is not the first time that an epochal war has ended, and certainly not the first time that profound constitutional questions have been decided by strategic developments, nor that constitutional innovations—like parliamentary democracy—have driven strategic change. In Part II, we will look at the strategic and constitutional consequences of earlier, state-shaping struggles. These make up a history, a way of understanding the development of the State, and of understanding the actual state we are currently in. Finally, in Part III, we examine the State we are becoming, the historic consequence of the Long War.

May 24, 1980