THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (42 page)

Next year we are to bring the soldiers home

For lack of money, and it is all right.

Places they guarded, or kept orderly
,

Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly
.

We want the money for ourselves at home

Instead of working. And this is all right
.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen
,

But now it's been decided nobody minds.

The places are a long way off, not here,

Which is all right, and from what we hear

The soldiers there only made trouble happen.

Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country

That brought its soldiers home for lack of money
.

The statues will be standing in the same

Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.

Our children will not know it's a different country
.

All we can hope to leave them now is money.

—Philip Larkin

One has already to know (or be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing's name.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein
*

As we saw in the historical narratives of Part II, the nation-state is a rela-tively recent structure. Indeed, the modern State itself is of fairly recent vintage in the life of civilized mankind, dating as it does from roughly the end of the fifteenth century.
¹
Before that period European governance divided jurisdiction among ecclesiastical authorities, independent cities, feudal rulers (whose own relationships were far from simple), and various oligarchies. Only when a strategic threat to the wealthy and sophisticated cities of Italy provoked a crisis of survival did these societies turn to the institutional bureaucratization of governing authority that became the modern state. The reification of the State that resulted conveyed to a state structure the two characteristics of sovereignty that had hitherto exclusively been possessed by the person of the prince—a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence domestically (the role of lawgiver) and the independence of will in foreign affairs (the right of sovereignty).

We then saw a series of changes in the structure of states, a morphology of constitutional orders or archetypes. These changes culminated in the form of the nation-state late in the nineteenth century. It was only then that the idea took hold that a State is properly—that is to say, legitimately— formed by the boundaries of its national people and not simply by the conquered or inherited territory of rulers. At each stage in this morphology, constitutional change was accompanied by strategic innovation, as those states that were able to consolidate power within a unitary jurisdiction of taxation, regulation, and administration developed new strategies or copied the strategic breakthroughs of their competitors. It was the strategic successes of the European state that made its archetypal constitutional structures the models for the world until finally the most recent form—that
of the nation-state—was turned against a receding form, the colonial state-nation, and the European model became global and virtually universal.
*

Why should it be that now, at the moment of its most widespread adoption, this model should be superseded? We have seen how the constitutional archetype of the nation-state presented states with three competing options: fascism, liberal parliamentarianism, and communism. The unresolved issue as to which of these options would best assure the legitimacy of the nation-state caused the Long War to persist for most of this century; now, at the moment of resolution, why would a new constitutional question be put to the conflict-weary states of the world?

It was only in 1989 that Francis Fukuyama wrote:

How can it be that, so soon after this historic success, the fundamental form of the nation-state, of which the liberal democracies are a triumphant exemplar, would metamorphose into a new archetypal model? The reason lies in the Long War itself and the strategic innovations by which that war was won by the liberal democracies.

The nation-state has accumulated various responsibilities. The legitimating promises of earlier, preceding constitutional forms are often inherited by successive archetypes as entrenched expectations and entitlements. The princely state promised external security, the freedom from domination and interference by foreign powers. The kingly state inherited this responsibility and added the promise of internal stability. The territorial state added the promise of expanding material wealth, to which the state-nation further added the civil and political rights of popular sovereignty. To all these responsibilities the nation-state added the promise of providing economic security and public goods to its people. The failure of the Soviet Union to live up to this expectation, as much as any other cause, contributed to its delegitimation in the eyes of its nation. Very simply, the strategic innovations of the Long War will make it increasingly difficult for the nation-state to fulfill its responsibilities. That will account for its delegitimation. The new constitutional order that will supersede the
nation-state will be one that copes better with these new demands of legitimation, by redefining the fundamental compact on which the assumption of legitimate power is based.

Three strategic innovations won the Long War: nuclear weapons, international communications, and the technology of rapid mathematical computation. Each has wrought a dramatic change in the military, cultural, and economic challenges that face the nation-state. In each of these spheres, the nation-state faces ever increasing difficulty in maintaining the credibility of its claim to provide public goods for the nation.

The State exists to master violence: it came into being in order to establish a monopoly on domestic violence, which is a necessary condition for law, and to protect its jurisdiction from foreign violence, which is the basis for strategy. If the State is unable to deliver on these promises, it will be changed; if the reason it cannot deliver is rooted in its constitutional form, then that form will change. A State that could neither protect its citizens from crime nor protect its homeland from attack by other states would have ceased to fulfill its most basic reason for being.

The Long War was characterized by many strategic innovations, two of which are especially pertinent to the problem of maintaining external and internal security. First, the Long War was a total war, that is, a struggle in which war was waged directly on the civilian societies supporting the states at war. Without the “total participation [of the belligerent populations] in field and factory as well as in the armed forces, the struggle could not be carried on at all.”
²

The strategy of total war is, as has been noted, characteristic of the nation-state. Indeed in the constitutional transition that accompanied the American Civil War, we can observe one state (the Confederacy) that represented an earlier order (the state-nation, whose strategies are indistinguishable from those of Napoleon) fighting another state (the Union) that came to stand for a new insurgent order, the nation-state, whose strategies (such as Sherman's March to the Sea) prefigure those of the Long War. The nation-state mobilizes the total resources of the society in pursuit of its political goals, and it is the
nation
of its adversary that it attacks in order to achieve victory.

In November 1917 Georges Clemenceau was summoned, at age seventy-six, to be prime minister of France in the midst of World War I. His speech to the Chamber of Deputies was composed the night before he assumed office. He wrote with a quill, at his bedside table, wearing a small silk cap. He began, “
Nous nous présentons devant vous dans l'insigne pensée d‘une défense integrale
…” for he had long been a critic of the previous administration's divided command arrangements, in which the Allies
were responsible for their own sectors. But then he scratched out “
défense
” and replaced it with “
guerre
.” Not “total defense” but “total war.”

This famous address to the chamber reflected the new perspective and responsibility of the nation-state (of which Clemenceau, in opposition to the French imperialists of his day, was a passionate advocate). To a packed chamber (Winston Churchill was in the gallery) Clemenceau said,

Similarly, in October 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt decided to produce an atomic bomb. Hitler
⁴
and Stalin
⁵
and the Japanese cabinet
⁶
made similar decisions. Of these decisions there was little public knowledge at the time. But such decisions are entirely consistent with the entire strategic pattern of the nation-state.

Even though the development of nuclear weapons brought the strategy of the nation-state to its apogee of effectiveness—“the apotheosis of law triumphant”—and ended the Long War by stalemating the superpower
military conflict, these weapons will progressively undermine the nation-state's ability to protect the nation from foreign attack. Even if most states cannot expect to match the American arsenal, an increasing number will have access to a variety of low-cost launchers, nuclear warheads, and other weapons of mass destruction. Of course such states would not be able to win an all-out war with the United States, Britain, Russia, France, or China (the largest members of the nuclear club), but by threatening to use such weapons against U.S. forces abroad, or her regional allies, or even against American continental territory, such states can paralyze American policy.

As one commentator has observed, “Certainly had Saddam Hussein been possessed of a working nuclear arsenal, the United States would have been far less willing to station half a million troops, a sizable fraction of its air forces, and a large naval armada within easy reach of Iraq's borders,”
⁷
an observation that will not be lost on most world leaders. The consequence of this development for the projection of conventional forces is profound. It's not so much that nuclear weapons render the promise of security to the citizens of the nation-state unbelievable per se; rather it is that
only
the possession of weapons of mass destruction can hope to validate that promise, with the unavoidable result that no nation-state can afford to be without the protection of such weapons, because their conventional forces are utterly vulnerable to threats from the states that do possess these weapons. With the Long War ended, once the nuclear umbrella of the United States ceases to be extended to cover Japan, Germany, and other states against attack, the drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction will become irresistible. Widespread nuclear proliferation may take time, and there are enormous domestic barriers in the developed world to proliferation to major states such as Germany and Japan. But the arrival of nuclear weapons to regional powers—Israel and Iraq, North and South Korea, India and Pakistan, the Central Asian former Soviet states and the non-Russian Slavic ones, Iran and others—will inevitably engage all the major states. In such a world, over whom is the United States supposed to extend its nuclear protection? For without this guarantee, the nation-states once protected will seek their own nuclear weapons. When this happens, the citizens of every nation-state that possesses such weapons become a target for nuclear attacks against which there is no defense, precisely because there is no other way to use force successfully against such states. This is an historical experience with which Americans have long lived, and one that has so greatly contributed to the demise of the nation-state here. Then the nation-state faces an impossible dilemma: if it does not have nuclear weapons, it cannot guarantee the security of its citizens from foreign attack; if it acquires such weapons, its civilian population will be specifically targeted for annihilation. Finally, it must also be noted that the presence of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of states motivates the devel
opment of other weapons of mass destruction—such as chemical, biological, and cyber weapons—as options that are less costly to obtain and the origin of whose use is easier to disguise. Here too it is the decisive impact of nuclear weapons in the Long War that now drives this development.

I will write in a subsequent section about the failure of the nation-state to provide internal security against crime and terrorism. For now, let me suggest that this is a consequence of the
national
character of nation-states, which isolates and alienates substantial minorities of their citizens even to the point of defining some criminal behavior in essentially ethnic ways. For example, why in the West is marijuana criminalized but martinis are not? Why is polygamy criminalized but not divorce? The ethnic focus of the nation-state, its pervasive analogy to the family, creates a role for antisocial elements, “misfits,” that is connected to violence because violence is the currency of the state. In every society there are such people, and such groups; in the nation-state they become the enemy of the State (and vice versa), because the State itself is fused to a national conception of the culture. Nevertheless, without the Long War and the strategic concept of total war the horrors of present urban life might not have come into being, for much of contemporary crime is a kind of protowar against the State, waged against civilians. Groups of bored and armed young men, quasi-mercenaries (as in Colombia) or quasi-soldiers (as in Somalia), are not so different in kind from the small bands that fought the wars of the Middle Ages, except that in the Middle Ages chivalry to some degree tempered the impact on noncombatants, whereas today “terrorists”—as the nation-state calls them—specifically target civilians.
⁸
Bandits, robbers, guerrillas, gangs have always been part of the domestic security environment. What is new is their access to mechanized weapons, another product of the technological environment of the Long War, and the unique political role of such groups, which pits them against noncombatants as a means of war against the State itself.
⁹
Against these threats, the nation-state is too muscle-bound and too much observed to be of much use. The mobilization of the industrial capacity of a nation is irrelevant to such threats; the fielding of vast tank armies and fleets of airplanes is as clumsy as a bear trying to fend off bees.