The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History - Hardcover

Bobbitt, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375412921 ISBN 13: 9780375412929

Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

A political insider explores the changing nature of the nation-state, arguing that the world war that began in 1914 did not end until 1990, when both fascism and communism were finally overcome, signally the emergence of the West and the new "market state." 20,000 first printing.

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Philip Bobbitt teaches constitutional law at the University of Texas, where he holds the A. W. Walker Centennial Chair. He was formerly the Anderson Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he was a member of the Modern History faculty. He was later the Marsh Christian Fellow in War Studies at King s College, London. He has served as associate counsel to the president for intelligence and international security, legal counsel to the Senate Select Committee on the Iran-Contra Affair, the counselor on international law at the Department of State, as well as director of intelligence, senior director for critical infrastructure, and senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. He has written several previous books on nuclear strategy, social choice, and constitutional law. He lives

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BOOK I
State of War

Paradise Lost
(Book III, lines 111—125)

. . . They therefore as to right belonged,
so were created, nor can justly accuse
their maker, or their making, or their fate,
as if predestination overruled
their will, disposed by absolute decree
or high foreknowledge: they themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I: if I foreknew,
foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
which had no less proved certain unforeknown.
So without least impulse or shadow of fate,
or aught by me immutably foreseen,
they trespass, authors to themselves in all
both what they judge and what they choose; for so
I formed them free, and free they must remain,
till they enthrall themselves . . .

--John Milton


Introduction:
Law, Strategy, and History

Law, Strategy, History--three ancient ideas whose interrelationship was perhaps far clearer to the ancients than it is to us, for we are inclined to treat these subjects as separate modern disciplines. Within each subject we expect economic or political or perhaps sociological causes to account for developments; we are unlikely to see any necessary relation among these three classical ideas. They do not appear to depend upon each other.

Of course we understand, from the point of view of any one of these three disciplines, how events in one can affect events in another. A war is won, and international law changes, as at the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II and called to account those who had obeyed orders they believed to be lawful. Or a war is lost, with the consequence that a new constitutional structure is imposed, as happened to Japan after World War II. Thus does strategy change law--and we call it history. Or the law of a state changes--as by the French Revolution, for example--and this change brings about the levée en masse that enables a Napoleon to conquer Europe through strategic genius; thus does law change strategy, and this too we call history. Or history itself brings new elements into play--a famine drives migration across a continent or technological innovation provides the stirrup--and an empire falls, and with its strategic collapse die also its laws. With all these examples we are familiar, but we understand this interrelationship as the by-product of cause and effect, the mere result of wars, famine, revolution, in which history is simply the record of events, organized according to the usual subject matters. We scarcely see that the perception of cause and effect itself--history--is the distinctive element in the ceaseless, restless dynamic by means of which strategy and law live out their necessary relationship to each other. For law and strategy are not merely made in history--a sequence of events and culminating effects--they are made of history. It is the self-portrayal of a society that enables it to know its own identity. (1) Without this knowledge a society cannot establish its rule by law because every system of laws depends upon the continuity of legitimacy, which is an attribute of identity. Furthermore, without such a self-portrayal, no society can pursue a rational strategy because it is the identity of the society that strategy seeks to promote, protect, and preserve. One might say that without its own history, its self-understanding, no society can have either law or strategy, because it cannot be constituted as an independent entity.

History, strategy, and law make possible legitimate governing institutions. For five centuries, the operation of these institutions has been synonymous with the presence of the modern state, and so we may be inclined to think of the subjects of these disciplines--history, strategic studies, jurisprudence--as mere manifestations of the State. Such a reaction is natural enough with respect to law: some writers, such as Kelsen (2) and Austin, (3) have held that there is no law without the State. And other writers, such as Machiavelli (4) and Bodin, (5) present strategy as an aspect of the State, for it is the State that sets the terms of engagement pursued by generals, that fields their armies and declares their wars or announces their capitulations. It is even plausible to regard history in this way: for this reason, Hegel wrote that history ended at the Battle of Jena, with the birth of the state-nation, for history ends with the creation of an institution that makes the Absolute attainable. (6) These reactions are understandable but they are misguided.

The State exists by virtue of its purposes, and among these are a drive for survival and freedom of action, which is strategy; for authority and legitimacy, which is law; for identity, which is history. To put it differently, there is no state without strategy, law, and history, and, to complicate matters, these three are not merely interrelated elements, they are elements each composed at least partly of the others. The precise nature of this composition defines a particular state and is the result of many choices. States may be militaristic, legalistic, and traditional to varying degrees, but every state is some combination of these elements and can be contrasted with every other state--and with its own predecessors--in these ways.

The legal and strategic choices a society confronts are often only recombinations of choices confronted and resolved in the past, now remade in a present condition of necessity and uncertainty. Law cannot come into being until the state achieves a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Similarly, a society must have a single legitimate government for its strategic designs to be laid; otherwise, the distinction between war and civil war collapses, and strategy degenerates into banditry. Until the governing institutions of a society can claim for themselves the sole right to determine the legitimate use of force at home and abroad, there can be no state. Without law, strategy cannot claim to be a legitimate act of state. Only if law prevails can it confer legitimacy on strategic choices and give them a purpose.* Yet the legitimacy necessary for law and for strategy derives from history, the understanding of past practices that characterizes a particular society.

Today, all major states confront the apparently bewildering task of determining a new set of rules for the use of military force. Commentators in many parts of the world have observed a curious vacillation and fecklessness on the part of the great powers at the very time those powers ought to be most united in their goals, for the Long War that divided them has now ended. Or perhaps it is the end of the Long War that accounts for such widespread confusion. Because the ideological confrontation that once clearly identified the threats to the states of either camp has evaporated, it has left these states uncertain as to how to configure, much less deploy, their armed forces. (7) What seems to characterize the present period is a confusion about how to count the costs and benefits of intervention, preparedness, and alliance. What does the calculus for the use of force yield us when we have done our sums? Only an unconvincing result that cannot silence the insistent question: "What are our forces for?" (8) Because no calculus can tell us that. We are at a moment when our understanding of the very purposes of the State is undergoing historic change. Neither strategy nor law will be unaffected. Until this change is appreciated, we will continue the dithering and the ad hockery, the affectations of cynicism and the placid deceit that so typifies the international behavior of the great powers in this period, a period that ought to be the hour of our greatest coherence and conviction. It is not that the United States did or did not decide to go into Somalia or Bosnia; it's that the United States has made numerous decisions, one...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375412921
• ISBN 13: 9780375412929
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 919
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar