The Shield of Achilles by Philip Bobbitt
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It takes a certain amount of dedication to plow through a book about the history and future of international law and “the modern state” that, even in the recently released paperback editions, weighs in at close to a kilo.
But those who persevere are likely to find it worth the effort. “We are at a moment in world affairs when the essential idea that governed statecraft must change. For five centuries it has taken the resources of a state to destroy another state … This is no longer true,” says Philip Bobbitt in his introduction.
Many people more knowledgeable than I in this subject have taken issue with Bobbit’s conclusions and predictions. Nevertheless, it is a book which deals with important issues and themes, and at the very least deals with them at levels far deeper than one is likely to find in newspaper or television commentary.
For one thing, it will cure the common tendency to extrapolate the recent past into the future—“it has never happened before” or “we never expected …” being common excuses among world leaders for sins of omission. Philip Bobbitt convincingly demonstrates that many of today’s assumptions about the way the world works, and will continue to work, are in fact of relatively recent vintage.
The Shield of Achilles has several theses, some of which are easier to grasp than others. One of these is the idea that there was only one major war in the 20th century—the “Long War”—which began in 1914 and ended with the end of the Cold War in 1990. Other “epochal wars”, as Philip Bobbitt calls them, have gone on for decades with long periods of relative peace; this latest one was a struggle for legitimacy between “the three models of the nation-state—the parliamentary, the communist, and the fascist”.
It was already clear that the end of the Cold War did not in fact bring about the “end of history”. Bobbit makes clear that it only ended one phase of history and argues that the next phase is not necessarily going to be very stable or secure.
Bobbit’s major thesis, however, is that the period of the “nation-state” (a period he says only started with the American Civil War and the establishment of Germany, i.e. some 130-140 years ago) is drew to a close with the end of the “Long War”, and is being replaced by the “market-state”.
Bobbit goes back to the 15th century (before which he says that there were not really “states” as such) and defines a history of statehood: starting with the “princely state” and the “kingly state” (King Louis XIV being an example of the latter). These were not “countries” as we would recognize them today: borders were not important; lineages were. This was replaced by the “territorial state” where countries first began to be defined by their borders and then by the “state-nation” (of which Napoleonic France and the United States were two early examples). State-nations differ from nation-states, the later development, in that the former exists to forge the identity of the nation (i.e. “people”), while the latter exists to better the welfare of the people.
The market-state, on the other hand, exists to maximize the opportunities of its citizens: and this is the period that Bobbit says we are entering now a period where citizens are expected to ask “What can my country do for me?”
Along the way, Bobbit discusses the development of international law in theory and in practice, explains why almost all modern political thought and, indeed, practice seems to emanate from Europe and America, argues that nuclear proliferation might in fact create greater stability and includes a potted biographies of some of the leading actors and playesr (notably Colonel House, Woodrow Wilson’s right-hand man).
Bobbit says we can see national boundaries, i.e. the strict identification of a people with a state, breaking down. The EU has already seen a ceding of sovereignty on the one hand, but also an increase in sovereignty among smaller groups (Catalans, Scots) who did not previously have a country. And the nation-state model seems to have failed Yugoslavia completely.
Bobbit also claims that the modern transnational movement of capital, information and, increasingly people, means that states are increasingly unable to control, or at least micro-manage, their economies and borders.
These are perhaps not very exceptional claims; Bobbit has however succeeded in putting together a structure going back five centuries which might give his analysis some predicative power. The result is not very comforting. Bobbit argues that war is pretty much inevitable and that, for the first time (this was written before September 11th), the enemy might not be what we traditionally consider a “state”.
One cannot help reading this book and ponder what it means for China. It’s not good enough to discard this is an eurocentric view: Bobbitt makes a good case that the patterns he has discerned are universal, and that some countries and parts of the world are just farther down the curve. For market-states, “if the acquisition of more territory is less important thnt before to garnering wealth, the luring of people and capital by the most attractive state policies is absolutely crucial. For China, holding on to Tibet may someday become irrelevant, but incorporating Hong Kong increased Chinese GDP by 26 percent at a single stroke.”
Bobbitt also casts doubt that a capitalist and democratic China will, by the mere fact of being capitalist and democratic, necessarily toe more closely what we currently consider a “Western” line.