THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (52 page)

Because these transitions occur in the nature of the State itself, it is hardly surprising that the paradigms of statecraft to which they give birth should reflect ideas about the legitimate constitutional makeup of the State.

Finally we come to the transition from state-nation to nation-state, which gave us the paradigm within which we currently strive. This may be stated thus: The State is constituted to improve the material well-being of the nation. Thus the nation-state bears within its legitimacy the problem of nationalities. Who can claim a state? What is a national people? Suppose the nation is itself divided—what means are permissible to coerce and legitimate unification? This is the program of the evangelist of democracy, and it is rightly associated with Lincoln and Wilson, but also with Otto von Bismarck and Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Gorbachev. Each of the three political philosophies that contested the Long War had a differ-ent answer to this issue, but for each it was
the
issue, whether it proposed submerging nationalism in the larger good owed to the international proletariat, or worshipping the nation as the authentic legatee of the
volk
, or placing at its disposal the procedures of legal process and representation. The United States has lived within a Wilsonian paradigm because that is the American understanding of the basis for the nation-state, but
all
the Great Powers lived within variations of the nation-state paradigm, whether Hitler's formulation or Stalin's. If, as I argued above, this paradigm has not withered away or been lost with the end of the Long War, why should we expect, much less search for, a new paradigm?

It could be that the vacillation of American foreign policy has no deeper cause than the poverty of its leadership; it may be that the prevailing paradigm is sturdy enough to provide a basis for choosing among competing policies in the various contexts that current affairs bring forth, if only leaders of a higher caliber were doing the choosing. I doubt this: the predecessor to the Clinton administration had no better answers to Haiti, North Korea, Somalia, Yugoslavia, or Ukraine, all of which it made modestly worse by not having a policy and bequeathing acute problems that became chronic to its successor. If, as I believe, President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker will stand high in America's history for their contributions to unifying Germany and expelling Iraq from Kuwait, it can be seen already that the former was a problem in the endgame of the Long War, and that the latter did not even serve as a precedent for great power action a few months after Baghdad was surrounded when, for only the
second
time in the history of the U.N., a member state invaded another member state and annexed its territory. Virtually all of the Clinton administration's important achievements in foreign security policy—in China, Haiti, North Korea, Russia, Israel, Ireland, the former state of Yugoslavia—were at a tentative stage when the new Bush administration took office. The best that can be said of the Clinton initiatives is that they promised success even without a shared vision of the American role; the worst, that having lived by the expedient and the impromptu, we will find
all these problems so much more troublesome when the arrangements that temporarily quieted them unravel.

I am inclined to believe, however, that it is not simply the absence of a structuring idea, a shared way of understanding the challenges we face, that pervades all the current proposals and disquieting performances, but rather the clinging to a paradigm that has lost its usefulness. The Wilsonian pledge—to make the world safe for democracy—and the Wilsonian understanding—that national democracies offered the best chance to benefit the people of the world—have not failed us; they have succeeded beyond what Wilson would have dared attempt in parts of the globe untouched by the Fourteen Points. They have succeeded in providing political principles that could guide our strategic policies during the Long War in which those principles were contested and sorely tried. Now, with the Long War over, we are so sunk in the habits of strategic thinking that we ceaselessly bat about alternative security policies at a time when we are unable to make the simplest decision when to use force. We have lived in a state of war for so long that, paradoxically, we are unable to make appropriate security plans for peace. The noteworthy feature of the policies that bid to succeed containment is that they, like that policy, assume a certain frame of reference for strategic conflict. Because the roles of history and law have been so well defined during the Long War— indeed they set its terms, because the establishment of legitimacy for state regimes after the collapse of the nineteenth century system was what the Long War sought, by strategic means, to determine—we have become accustomed to think within the context of that war.

In the next chapter I will offer some speculation as to what such a successor paradigm might look like, by examining current contexts analogous to those that provided paradigms to states in the past: the contexts of strategic innovation and constitutional change. Then it may be possible to answer the question posed in the Introduction: How ought the United States and its allies decide when to use force in the international arena?

Preliminarily, however, the first thing one ought to observe about a new archetype is that it will not be something wholly new in form. For the United States, for example, there will be no new constitution. Americans will still be called “Americans,” though what image that word conjures up in their minds may not be the same as came to my father and his contemporaries. Indeed, perhaps the most serious impediment to creative thinking in this area has been our automatic impulse to assume that the next paradigm will involve something like a new kind of state, that is, a reiteration of the European state on a different scale. Articles such as “After the Nation-State, What?” capture this reaction, for they invariably posit a “superstate” or no state at all.
³⁷
Moreover, because so many of the
challenges facing the nation-state are supranational in character—environmental threats, mass migration, capital speculation, terrorism, and cyber interference, to name just five—and because supranational solutions will be required, many assume that delegations of sovereignty must and will occur. This is a profound misreading of how such integration as has occurred in Europe came about. It is American involvement in Europe, through NATO and the Marshall Plan, that has, paradoxically, provided Western Europe with such capacity as it currently possesses to act as a unified political entity. It is difficult to imagine Britain ever delegating such a role to the bureaucratic machinery of Brussels or to the one state capable of dominating that machinery by virtue of its military and economic potential, Germany. The unification of the German state has, for the foreseeable future, put an end to the unification of Western Europe by creating a power that is actually capable of managing an integrated E.U.

What critics writing in the security area have not contemplated is a change in the constitutional structures of the European (and other) states that does not surrender sovereignty to yet another state, but returns it even more radically to the people themselves.

The fundamental choice for every market-state is whether to be (1) a mercantile state—i.e., one that endeavors to improve its
relative
position vis-à-vis all other states by competitive means, or (2) an entrepreneurial state, one that attempts to improve its
absolute
position while mitigating the competitive values of the market through cooperative means, or (3) a managerial market-state, one that tries to maximize its position
both absolutely and relatively
by regional, formal means (trading blocs, etc.). This choice will have both constitutional and strategic implications.

The mercantile state seeks market share above all else, in order to gain relative dominance in the international market; the entrepreneurial state seeks leadership through the production of collective goods that the world's states want; the managerial state seeks power through its hegemony within a regional economic zone. One is not more moral or necessarily more benign than another. There are pitfalls in each position: the entrepreneurial state may be tempted to abdicate its leadership and initiative out of mingled pique and national self-absorption, as the American nation-state did after World War I; the managerial state always risks the dilution of responsibility that goes with cooperative systems—by just such means did the society of nation-states watch as genocidal campaigns proceeded in Libya, in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Bosnia, in the Sudan; the mercantile state risks retributive reactions of the kind practiced by
nation-states that so greatly worsened the depression of the 1930s. The entrepreneurial state may become so intoxicated with its own absolute position that it fails to prepare itself—by not deferring consumption in order to invest in infrastructure—for relative challenges from states whose competitive drive is masked by the improved wealth positions of all major players; by just such developments have great states routinely been displaced by hungrier antagonists. The mercantile state is subject to an analogous fate, however; Paul Kennedy's
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
is largely devoted to documenting the fall of mercantile states whose balance sheets between economic reinvestment and military expenditure tipped them into relative, and eventually absolute, decline. The mercantile state may also forgo the benefits of cultural and political cooperation that eras of peace can bring. Like the famous, faceless player in the Prisoner's Dilemma,
1
the mercantile state will routinely make suboptimal competitive choices out of the fear and suspicion that is conditioned in a society that has accustomed itself to long periods of conflict and is inept at collaboration. The managerial state will inevitably resort to re-regulation as a means of dampening conflict within its regional institutional group, and this is likely to lead to suboptimal economic performance.

One market-state already appears to have opted for the role of mercantile state: Japan. With its literate and educated people, largely devoid of ethnic conflict and possessing the most restrictive immigration laws of any major state, Japan is well placed to conduct a campaign of relative increase in enrichment at the expense of its trading partners. With a history of high savings rates, Japan can avoid some of the intergenerational conflict that otherwise accompanies state borrowing. Japan can also avoid the public order problems that seem to dog every multiethnic society, including the problems associated with immigration that are tolerated by societies that depend on a fresh source of cheap labor that Japan does not yet need owing to its practice of rigorous self-denial in personal consumption.
*
A mercantile trading policy depends on control of one's currency, which is supported by strictly enforced limits on public spending, and the presence of value-added industries that dominate the terms of trade. Japan has to a large degree been able to pursue such a policy. The difficulty with this course, as Japan's experience shows, is the rigidity and self-dealing that infest a mercantile state, transforming its markets by secretive, deceptive, and even corrupt practices. An entire banking sector run on the model of the military-industrial complex, for example, is unlikely to be the most efficient agent of domestic growth.

Is the mercantile role an appropriate choice for the United States? There is some doubt, in any case, whether the United States will be able to maintain a workforce capable of successfully operating in the high-technology industries that give a state favorable terms of trade. With the most relaxed immigration laws of any major state, the United States both adds to its welfare expenses and fragments its cultural unity.
*
Because of its decentralized social and political structures, the United States is unable to curtail individual consumption, leaving it with a high trade deficit (which results from lowering the costs of goods to the consumer through imports), a decade of high budget deficits (which results from lowering the costs of government to the taxpayer through borrowing), and a high national debt
3
that will have to be repaid even if, as some predict, the budget deficits might cease (the result of the interaction of the first two phenomena as money from imported capital and tax rebates fueled a period of rapid growth). There is little prospect for a change in course: indeed, if the market-state is constituted to enrich the opportunities of individuals (and not simply to enrich the people as a whole) why should a multicultural, multiethnic state like the United States impose austerity measures that address these problems? Most individuals, including especially the children of the poor, are far better off under current U.S. policies than they would be under taxes and monetary rules that penalized borrowing and importing. Only the children of the future are penalized, and multicultural market-states appear to feel somewhat less responsibility toward the unborn. In this way the market-state plays to American weaknesses as well as to our strengths.

In one respect, however, those particular weaknesses tend to undermine the maneuverability so crucial to the market-state. That weakness has to do with the “followership” traits of the American people at this time, traits that are indispensable to a successful mercantile state. An August 1995 poll of Americans revealed that 59 percent said that there was not a single elected official that they admired. Of the 36 percent who said they could think of one, the president was named by 6 percent, his then opponent the majority leader was named by 5 percent, and the new Speaker of the House by 4 percent.
⁴
Such coolness toward authority does not evidence the sort of social adhesion to the State that wins multistate conflicts.

But to say that the United States is not well situated, considered in the abstract, to be a mercantile state in the era of market-states, is not to say it
could not prevail in this role. It need only be
relatively
well situated, vis-à-vis its competitors, and here the size of the American market, its role as currency provider for the developed world, and its abundant natural resources still ensure that, should it choose, it could dominate Japan or the E.U. or any other such competitor in a mercantile competition (so long as it could prevent the formation of an anti-American cartel, such as might occur between the E.U. and Japan). Precisely because we were so unsuccessful at developing exports—which account for less than 25 percent
5
of GNP—the United States has far less to suffer, in relative terms, from a decline in world trade and retaliation against American mercantile practices. We could be a successful mercantile state, as a market-state, as we were, despite our many shortcomings, a successful mercantile state as a state-nation.

That does not, however, decide the matter. Should the United States choose this option? What are the costs and benefits (for that is how the market-state will measure things) of being an entrepreneurial state? The entrepreneurial state would pursue the enhancement of universal opportunity through a nonmercantile, free-trade policy. An entrepreneurial state would allow for relatively free immigration so long as the costs imposed by immigrants did not significantly affect the wealth and wealth creation of those taxpayers already present. It would seek environmental protection and nuclear nonproliferation through any effective means, collective or unilateral—by force if necessary in extreme cases—because the general enrichment of mankind is a consequence of success, even if a single hostile state loses as a result. It would employ multilateral alliance systems, of which NATO is an example,
⁶
to expand collective security but be prepared to join ad hoc “coalitions of the willing”
⁷
when collective security institutions are stymied. Paradoxically, such a state would be more prone to intervention—in cases of ethnic cleansing, humanitarian relief, support for the peoples of hijacked democracies, the destruction of terror networks— than the mercantile state, which husbands its violence to pursue more directly mercantile goals. If being an entrepreneurial state leads to more absolute wealth, does it actually encourage reinvestment of that wealth, or is this wealth frittered away in various adventures? Even more important, can the entrepreneurial state avoid cataclysmic war more successfully because it can remain armed without the constant friction of strategic competition inherent in a system of mercantile states? Is the aggressive mercantile state in fact
more
likely to be weak militarily because it is so desperate to throw its resources into economic competition, while at the same time it fails to develop the cooperative practices that can ameliorate crises and conflicts? And if it is, and the choice of the mercantile option by other competitive states actually becomes a source of comparative advantage
to the United States, should we continue to produce collective security goods, like the creation of the coalition that fought the Gulf War?

And what about the option of the managerial market-state? The United States is poorly situated geographically to lead a regional trading bloc. Canada represents a small market, Latin America an uncertain one, separated by language and culture from the United States. It is true that there is a large and rapidly growing Hispanic minority in the United States, but this pool of talented persons is not necessarily making the United States more congruent with the places they left. The day is far off when North Americans will grow up as bilingual as, say, people in Belgium or Denmark, where more than one ethnic community coexist.

And why, in the age of the Internet, should physical proximity dictate the boundaries of regional trading blocs whose trade will be mainly in nonphysical items? Suppose the United States were part of a “virtual” region, composed of the United Kingdom, Singapore, India, the Philippines, and Canada. This might make the managerial model more palatable. The real question then becomes: Should the United States take the fateful step of creating a second E.U.—an “Economic Union” like the European Union—knowing that by so doing it hardens the lines of world competition and forfeits its unique, even transcendent role? If, as appears likely, the world will have an E.U. for the indefinite future, having two seems to be a step in the wrong direction that we should only take if we are compelled to do so.

One proto-market-state that appears to be heading toward the role of managerial market-state is the new state of Germany. Although more truly multicultural than before, owing to the amalgamation of capitalist and socialist societies and the most open immigration policy of any E.U. member, Germany possesses a common language and a highly educated workforce. Germany's crucial roles in the E.U. and in NATO—linking economic and security interests, Atlantic and continental—give her the collaborative position that might have been Britain's (and under Tony Blair may still be). Unlike the United States, Germany has managed to maintain a strong currency and strong exports. Germany's venture into high debt is a model of imaginative investment in infrastructure because the proceeds of the borrowing went into the acquisition of East Germany and not into mere consumption. A collaborative foreign policy depends on refusing to tolerate or to become a free rider (that is, a mercantile state within a free trading system) and the willingness to use force to maintain world order and the ability to do so without exciting fear in other states. Germany has the self-discipline and the wealth to do both. Although Germany has been made the diplomatic scapegoat by her allies over Yugoslavia for her early recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, and although she
has hitherto refused to take up security responsibilities outside the NATO area (as in Kuwait), it is noteworthy that she has since modified this policy and offered air force assets to protect the “safe areas” of Bosnia at a time when other NATO states were dithering. More recently, Germany offered military assistance to the coalition effort in Afghanistan. It remains to be seen whether Germany's wretched twentieth century history will be redeemed by her commitment to human rights in the twenty-first century or will cripple her altogether, making France's enforcer in Germany's more submissive periods and Eastern Europe's neocolonialist when German self-confidence asserts itself. NATO enlargement is one way the United States has encouraged the healthy development of the new German state.

Absent an acute threat to American survival, the United States may simply lack the sense of purpose to be an effective entrepreneurial state. Perhaps more than at any time since the civil rights revolution, the United States needs political leadership to re-establish a national history that reflects our strengths of character, our inventiveness, our talents for cooperation and our benign ambition, and above all, our confidence in a common enterprise.
⁸
President Clinton moved the United States far toward the market-state. President George W. Bush has entered office at a crucial time, and appears to be equally committed to this new constitutional order.