Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
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An early version of the territorial state was prematurely attempted in the sixteenth century by William the Silent with respect to the Low Countries, but absent the strategic innovations necessary to exploit the nationalism that Westphalia ultimately made possible, William was never able to make the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands into a viable federation. Instead the sectarian nature of the princely state repeatedly asserted itself. In 1579 the northern provinces formed a union to promote Protestantism, from which union the modern state of Holland ultimately emerged; in the same month the southern provinces concluded a treaty undertaking to maintain Catholicism in what has become Belgium.
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A translation of “Electus Romanus Imperator,” not, as is usually the case in English histories, the “Holy Roman Emperor.”
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Just as the Long War, discussed in Part I of Book I, was composed of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the wars in Southeast Asia, and other more minor conflicts and crises.
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This is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 20.
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Excluding of course the Ottoman Empire.
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Our word
martinet
comes from the name of an inspector general of this period who imposed rigid and exacting standards of training and discipline.
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Though he had renounced these, her dowry—agreed at the Peace of Pyrenees in 1659—had never been paid.
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Absurd interpretations were put on the Edict: Protestants were forbidden to hold burial services during the day because no clause in the Edict expressly permitted them; new churches were forbidden because the Edict merely ratified those in existence at the time.
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A more detailed account can be found in Chapter 21.
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“Europe forms a political system in which the [states] inhabiting this part of the world are bound together by their relations and various interests in a single body… [making] of modern Europe a sort of ‘
republique
' whose members—each independent, but all bound together by a common interest—united for the maintenance of order and the preservation of liberty. This is what has given rise to the well-known principle of the balance of power…” Vattel,
Le Droit des Gens
, Book III, Chapter 3, sections 47 – 48.
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“Unquestionably, there was never a time in the history of this country, when, from the situation in Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than at the present moment.” Quoted in John H. Rose,
William Pitt and the Great War
(G. Bell and Sons, 1911), 32.
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The estates being composed of those classes having a definite share in the body politic (nobles, clergy, commons). There was no permanent assembly of the Estates in Prussia at this time.
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Napoleonic imperialism was paid for by plunder… A nation proclaiming liberty, fraternity and equality was now… conquering non-French populations, stationing armies upon them, sequestering their goods, distorting their trade, raising enormous indemnities and taxes and conscripting their youth… In Italy between 1805 and 1812 about half the taxes raised went to the French.” Kennedy,
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers
, 133, 135.
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“In 1914 London declared war on Germany on behalf of the entire empire. But long before post – Second World War anti-colonial nationalism stripped away Britain's Asian and African colonies, the ‘white' dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were resisting rule from London. By the time of the Chanak crisis with Turkey, in 1922, London had discovered that it could not count on automatic support from the empire. After 1926 British military planners no longer considered the British Commonwealth to be a reliable basis for military plans.” Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “The Misleading Metaphor of Decline: Analogies between the United States and Post-Imperial Britain are Inaccurate and Mischievous,”
The Atlantic
265 (March 1990): 89.
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Which created the first state-nation.
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It was the resignation of the Pitt cabinet over the king's refusal to assent to a law removing the disabilities of Catholics that cleared the way for a treaty with the French.
New Cambridge Modern History
, vol. IX, 260.
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At the tomb of Frederick the Great Napoleon paid tribute to his predecessor. “Gentlemen,” he said to his assembled marshals, “take off your hats.
If he
were here,
we
would not be here.”
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And how it differed from the state-nation model created by Washington, Hamilton, and Madison.
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“By boring out the barrels instead of casting the bore into the piece [Gribeauval] achieved finer tolerances, with less windage (the difference between the diameter of the cannonball and the diameter of the bore) to sap the power of gunpowder. A ball of given weight thus required less powder and smaller powder charges and allowed the walls of the chamber to be thinner.” In addition, Gribeauval shortened barrels and also modified gun carriages to enhance mobility. John Lynn, “Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval,” in
The Reader's Companion to Military History
, ed. Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). The French also standardized the calibre of cannon and fabricated interchangeable parts.
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A similar argument might be made regarding the Peninsular Campaign by Wellington, who adopted tactics that would not have been politically feasible had he been a Spanish or even Portuguese commander.
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“Last night I toss'd and turned in bed, But could not sleep—at length I said, I'll think of Viscount C—stl—r—gh, And of speeches—that's the way.” Thomas Moore, “Insurrection of the Papers,” from Richard Kenin and Justin Wintle,
The Dictionary of Bibliographical Quotation
(Knopf, 1978), 146.
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“I met Murder on the way—/He had a mask like Castlereagh—/ Very smooth he looked, yet grim;/ Seven blood-hounds followed him; /All were fat, and well they might/Be in admirable plight, / For one by one, and two by two, / He tossed them human hearts to chew/ Which from his wide cloak he drew.” Percy Bysshe Shelley,
The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester
(Reeves and Turner, 1887), 57.
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And one that eluded much thinking about the United Nations in our own era: Article 51 of the U.N. Charter is either the sine qua non of a collective security regime, or the United Nations is really a vehicle to ensure the balance of power via the Security Council. Usually commentators get this point backwards, thinking Article 51 inimical to the integrity of the system.
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Two metaphors are helpful in understanding the State: (i) that the State acts as a network, conveying decisions made by the responsible parties so that it is both the medium of constitutional and strategic change, and also the expression of constitutional and strategic change; and (2) that the State depends on society the way a virus depends on the nuclear material of a cell, so that it is both made in time—has a birth and life and decay—and made of time, that is, what we know of it is the narrative of this morphology, the story of its adaptation to the conditions of society. The State, that is, both composes history (1) and is composed of history (2).
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And not just European politicians: Lincoln's nation-state was the first fully realized example of this constitutional order.
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The northern Papal states.
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Who, as the duke of Schleswig-Holstein was also a German prince (with such fateful consequences as we shall see).
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Ironically the general staff, who viewed Bismarck as a meddler, sarcastically referred to “civilians in cuirassiers' tunics,” a reference to Bismarck's habit of dressing in uniform, especially after 1870. Gall, 366.
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Quoted in Gall, 204. The very vividness of this remark aroused much criticism at the time. Von Treitscke, hardly a liberal, wrote his brother-in-law, “You know how passionately I love Prussia, but when I hear so shallow a country squire as this Bismarck bragging about the ‘iron and blood' with which he intends to subdue Germany, the meanness of it seems to me to be exceeded only by the absurdity” (Gall, 206). And even Bismarck's ally von Roon complained of “witty sallies” that did their cause little good.
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Indeed it was the military vote in 1864 that re-elected Lincoln. James M. McPherson,
Ordeal by Fire, Volume 2: The Civil War
(McGraw-Hill, 1993), 456 – 58.
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In the following discussion of the Schleswig-Holstein dispute, perhaps one should bear in mind Palmerston's remark: With regard to Schleswig-Holstein, he said, “only three men had grasped it in all its ramification: one was dead, the second had been driven mad by it, and the third, he himself, had forgotten all about it.” But the only way to understand Bismarck's adroit use of this strategic problem is to give at least some of the problem's complicated background.
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“It is not surprising that the principal legal codes of the world were introduced by the two greatest State builders of the 19th century: Napoleon and Bismarck,”
The Quality of Government
, R. La Porta, F. Lopez de Silanes, A. Shleifer, and R. Vishny (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1998).
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In 1870, while serving as an observer with the Prussian army during the Franco-Prussian War, the American civil war general Philip Sheridan advised Bismarck that his treatment of the French was too mild. You must cause the civilian “inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force their government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.” P. A. Hutton, “Paladin of the Republic,” in
With My Face to the Enemy
, Robert Cowley, ed. (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2001), 357.
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As Michael Doyle has observed, “The Europe of 1870, which was to retain its major features until 1914, was a Europe very different from that of 1815. It was almost exactly what the statesmen of 1815 feared Europe might become, though they would have been amazed to discover that many of the changes had been led by men of their own kind—the aristocratic (now nationalist leaders) [of the nation-state].” Michael W. Doyle,
Empires
(Cornell University Press, 1986), 242 – 43.
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See e.g., the Montevideo Convention.
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Chief among these is that the creation of states from proximate national elements can pose a threat to their neighbors. Thus Bismarck claimed that “restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any enemy that chooses to attack us.” Therefore, he concluded that Prussia should “smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to wipe them out.” Gall, v. 1, 59.
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Lincoln's multiethnic nation, founded on the principle of a nation of citizens—including African-American former slaves—was the antithesis of a European nation.
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This concern for the welfare of the citizen was reflected in military matters: the first systematic use of battle dress to hide rather than advertise a soldier's presence dates from this period. In contrast, the state-nation's exaltation of sacrifice to the State had caused uniforms to reach their ornamental peak. The British adopted khaki for colonial campaigns in 1880 and for home service in 1902. The Germans went to field gray in 1910. See John Lynn, “Camouflage,” in
The Reader's Companion to Military History
, 68.
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My colleague tax professor Calvin Johnson has reminded those of us who teach constitutional law of the crucial role taxation played in the framing of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed it was the failure of the Articles of Confederation to establish a revenue base that led to the Philadelphia proposal of 1789. But what were the taxes
for?
To wage war in order to defend the new American state against attack because that state faced potentially mortal threats on every front.
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An alternative to finding the common basis for legitimacy in contemporary constitutional orders is to compare the constitutions of various states. Comparative constitutional law courses are usually paralyzingly boring; they typically consist of arid comparisons of the provisions of different written constitutions—which ones protect trial by jury, which ones have a bicameral legislature, and so forth. In this, comparative constitutionalism resembles comparative religion where the lecturer professes to think that the anthropologically collected dogma of a particular sect more or less sums up the content of religious faith. Such comparative constitutional law courses (and I dare say the comparative religion ones too) are lifeless because they lack the animating aspect of the subject being studied. With respect to constitutionalism, they lack its link between the common method of legitimation (unique to that era) and the different values that characterize different states. People do not sacrifice their lives to protect the electoral college. Nor do people make the sacrifices asked by religious faiths because they share deep convictions on any but the most basic theological matters.