PENGUIN BOOKS THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES ‘Wide-ranging, ambitiously conceived and intelligently argued… Bobbitt's future scenarios are based on an intelligent and cautiously realistic extrapolation of current security and political developments We ignore them at our peril' T G Otte, The Times Literary Supplement ‘Bobbitt's book is in many ways a remarkable one… breathtaking in its range of reference, forcefully written' David Runciman, London Review of Books ‘Bobbitt's thesis is controversial – but backed by a weight of historical evidence' Will Hutton, Observer ‘The world has changed… This is a bold book, a brave book, and a worthy primer for the essential study of where we go from here' Allan Mallinson, The Times ‘A polemic that challenges the fabric of all modern states' Angelique Chrisafis, Guardian ‘Philip Bobbitt is to be saluted for undertaking an epic struggle to sort through an extraordinarily dynamic time in international affairs' Thomas Donnelly, Washington Post ‘This book is immensely and deliberately provocative… a passionate and worthy effort to make sense of what is clearly a brand new world' Christopher Willcox, New York Sun ‘It is hard to imagine a book by a law professor that has had more immediate impact on world leaders… if you ever wonder what works from our era will be read as The Prince or Leviathan are read, think of The Shield of Achilles' Dennis Patterson, Michigan Law Review ABOUT THE AUTHOR Philip Bobbitt served as a senior adviser at the White House, the Senate and the State Department, and held several senior posts at the National Security Council, including Director for Intelligence and most recently as the Senior Director for Strategic Planning, in both Democratic and Republican administrations He holds the Walker Chair in constitutional law at the University of Texas He has been Anderson Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, where he was a member of the Oxford Modern History Faculty, and Marsh Christian Senior Fellow in War Studies at King's College, London He has written previous books on nuclear strategy, social choice and constitutional law He lives in Austin, Washington and London THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES WAR, PEACE AND THE COURSE OF HISTORY PHILIP BOBBITT PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com First published in the USA by Alfred A Knopf 2002 First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2002 Published in Penguin Books 2003 Copyright © Philip Bobbitt, 2002 All rights reserved The moral right of the author has been asserted The acknowledgements on pp 921 – constitute an extension of this copyright page Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser ISBN: 978-0-14-193794-6 To those by whose love God's grace was first made known to me and to those whose loving-kindness has ever since sustained me in His care CONTENTS Foreword, by Sir Michael Howard Prologue BOOK I: STATE OF WAR Introduction: Law, Strategy, and History PART I: THE LONG WAR OF THE NATION-STATE Thucydides and the Epochal War The Struggle Begun: Fascism, Communism, Parliamentarianism, 1914 – 1919 The Struggle Continued: 1919 – 1945 The Struggle Ended: 1945 – 1990 PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MODERN STATE AND ITS CONSTITUTIONAL ORDERS Strategy and the Constitutional Order From Princes to Princely States: 1494 – 1648 From Kingly States to Territorial States: 1648 – 1776 From State-Nations to Nation-States: 1776 – 1914 The Study of the Modern State PART III: THE HISTORIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE LONG WAR 10 The Market-State 11 Strategic Choices 12 Strategy and the Market-State 13 The Wars of the Market-State: Conclusion to Book I Plates I – V BOOK II: STATES OF PEACE Introduction: The Origin of International Law in the Constitutional Order PART I: THE SOCIETY OF NATION-STATES 14 Colonel House and a World Made of Law 15 The Kitty Genovese Incident and the War in Bosnia 16 The Death of the Society of Nation-States PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY OF STATES AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER 17 Peace and the International Order 18 The Treaty of Augsburg 19 The Peace of Westphalia 20 The Treaty of Utrecht 21 The Congress of Vienna 22 The Versailles Treaty 23 The Peace of Paris PART III: THE SOCIETY OF MARKET-STATES 24 Challenges to the New International Order 25 Possible Worlds 26 The Coming Age of War and Peace 27 Peace in the Society of Market-States: Conclusion to Book II Epilogue Postscript: The Indian Summer Appendix A Note on Eurocentrism A Note on Causality A Note on Periodicity Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Annotated Index The Iliad (Book XVIII, lines 558 – 720) And first Hephaestus makes a great and massive shield, blazoning well-wrought emblems all across its surface, raising a rim around it, glittering, triple-ply with a silver shield-strap run from edge to edge and five layers of metal to build the shield itself, and across its vast expanse with all his craft and cunning the god creates a world of gorgeous immortal work There he made the earth and there the sky and the sea and the inexhaustible blazing sun and the moon rounding full and there the constellations, all that crown the heavens, the Pleiades and the Hyades, Orion in all his power too and the Great Bear that mankind also calls the Wagon: she wheels on her axis always fixed, watching Orion, and she alone is denied a plunge in the Ocean's baths And he forged on the shield two noble cities filled with mortal men With weddings and wedding feasts in one and under glowing torches they brought forth the brides from the women's chambers, marching through the streets while choir on choir the wedding song rose high and the young men came dancing, whirling round in rings and among them the flutes and harps kept up their stirring call — women rushed to the doors and each stood moved with wonder And the people massed, streaming into the marketplace where a quarrel had broken out and two men struggled over the blood-price for a kinsman just murdered One declaimed in public, vowing payment in full— the other spurned him, he would not take a thing— so both men pressed for a judge to cut the knot The crowd cheered on both, they took both sides, but heralds held them back as the city elders sat on polished stone benches, forming the sacred circle, grasping in hand the staffs of clear-voiced heralds, and each leapt to his feet to plead the case in turn Two bars of solid gold shone on the ground before them, a prize for the judge who'd speak the straightest verdict But circling the other city camped a divided army gleaming in battle-gear, and two plans split their ranks: to plunder the city or share the riches with its people, hoards the handsome citadel stored within its depths But the people were not surrendering, not at all They armed for a raid, hoping to break the siege— loving wives and innocent children standing guard on the ramparts, flanked by elders bent with age as men marched out to war Ares and Pallas led them, both burnished gold, gold the attire they donned, and great, magnificent in their armor—gods for all the world, looming up in their brilliance, towering over troops And once they reached the perfect spot for attack, a watering place where all the herds collected, there they crouched, wrapped in glowing bronze Detached from the ranks, two scouts took up their posts, the eyes of the army waiting to spot a convoy, the enemy's flocks and crook-horned cattle coming… Come they did, quickly, two shepherds behind them, playing their hearts out on their pipes—treachery never crossed their minds But the soldiers saw them, rushed them, cut off at a stroke the herds of oxen and sleek sheep-flocks glistening silver-gray and killed the herdsmen too Now the besiegers, soon as they heard the uproar burst from the cattle as they debated, huddled in council, mounted at once behind their racing teams, rode hard to the rescue, arrived at once, and lining up for assault both armies battled it out along the river banks— they raked each other with hurtling bronze-tipped spears: And Strife and Havoc plunged in the fight, and violent Death— now seizing a man alive with fresh wounds, now one unhurt, now hauling a dead man through the slaughter by the heels, the cloak on her back stained red with human blood So they clashed and fought like living, breathing men grappling each other's corpses, dragging off the dead And he forged a fallow field, broad rich plowland tilled for the third time, and across it crews of plowmen wheeled their teams, driving them up and back and soon as they'd reach the end-strip, moving into the turn, a man would run up quickly and hand them a cup of honeyed, mellow wine as the crews would turn back down along the furrows, pressing again to reach the end of the deep fallow field and the earth churned black behind them, like earth churning, solid gold as it was—that was the wonder of Hephaestus' work And he forged a king's estate where harvesters labored, *The idea of a state-owned press or television, while the norm in the nation-states of the past, is becoming a rarity in the market-states of the present *Scene †He also wrote an essay on the shield of Achilles ‡This story is drawn from Boccaccio's Decameron §I have simplified this enchanting parable considerably Please consult the endnotes for a fuller text *Though not incomparable; see Mathew Adler, “Review of Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason,” XIX Philosophy in Review (June 1999): 168 *And the most recent experience, as of this writing, in Afghanistan suggests that while NATO and the U.N have important political roles, the actual management of crises in international society will fall, as predicted, to ad hoc coalitions *“Bonaparte's victory bulletin was typical in every respect of the many hundreds that were to follow in the course of the next thirteen years—the eagerly awaited bulletins, from Germany, from Austria, from Poland, from Russia, from Spain; the bulletins that set the imagination of young boys on fire and whose memory made the postwar years seem so drab and dull to them; the bulletins that old couples and young wives and mistresses and sisters would pore over, wondering whether the digits and the ciphers representing the crippled and the dead, the brave who were immortalized in an anonymous glory, included those they loved; the bulletins to which there seemed to be no end, as if henceforth the purpose of men's lives would be forever the gain of honor at the price of death; the bulletins that spoke, in lapidary yet incandescent prose, of the beauty of battlefields, the splendor of cities aflame; the glorious, hateful bulletins, with their exhilarating statistics of captured flags and guns, of enemies killed and wounded, of individual acts of bravery, that form the stanzas of the epic of Napoleon.” J C Herold, The Age of Napoleon (American Heritage, 1963); “To lie like a bulletin” was a proverbial expression in Napoleon's army, Ibid., 408 See also Louis-Leopold Boilly's painting of the French family poring over one of these bulletins *Which is not to say that political partisanship is dead It thrives in the transitional environment from one constitutional order to another But this partisanship is programmatic (it is a right-wing conspiracy, or left-wing, or some other) whereas press opposition is nonsubstantive, in the sense that it objects, period It poses no alternatives *The U.S force in Kosovo was one-tenth the size of the Desert Storm force in the Gulf War, yet it used a hundred times the bandwidth *A conception quite different from the egalitarianism of the nation-state, where equality meant treating all citizens equally because citizenship was granted equally to all *Compare the Hungarian proposals for a “contractual nation,” a range of government agencies and foundations that link ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries to Hungary “According to this view, Hungarians abroad should be able to claim Budapest as their cultural center, Bratislava or Belgrade as their state capitals, Cluj-Napoca or Novi Sad as their regional centers, and so on.” Zsuzsa Csergo and James Goldgrier, “Virtual Nationalism,” Foreign Policy (July/August 2001): 76 *Some of the key cases to watch are the communities of the Walloons (Belgium), the Turks (Bulgaria), the Quebecois (Canada), Germans (Czech Republic), Magyars (Romania), the Basques and Catalans (Spain), the Irish, Welsh, and Scots (United Kingdom), and the Lombards (Italy) *Compare Homer's description of the two cities—the City at Peace and the City at War—in his depiction of scenes on the shield of Achilles, The Iliad, Book XVIII, lines 491 – 549 *Written after the attacks on New York and Washington, September 11, 2001 † Joseph Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (Pennsylvania State University, 2001), 17 – 18 ‡lbid *Described in Chapter 12 †See, for example, Boris Pasternak, “Indian Summer,” in The Poems of Dr Zhivago (Kansas City, 1967), 26 (trans E M Kayden) *Peter Gomes, Sundays at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass: 1995), 23 *Quoted in John W Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign (St Martin's Press, New York, 1958), 429 – 30 *I should also like to thank the copyeditor, Susanna Sturgis, for whose labors I am grateful and of whom I thought when I came across this passage in a letter from the English critic James Agate: “Dear Cardus:—Re your Ten Composers Have corrected your spelling Also your Italian, German, French and occasionally your English Have put your French accents right Have emended your quotations… Titivated your titles In places made the clumsy felicitious Verified your keys Rationalized your punctuation… In short, I have put this entrancing book right in all matters of fact and left only its errors of taste and judgment.” Jacques Barzun, “James Agate and His Nine Egos,” in A Jacques Barzun Reader, 94 (New York, 2002) ... THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES WAR, PEACE AND THE COURSE OF HISTORY PHILIP BOBBITT PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin... The Death of the Society of Nation-States PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY OF STATES AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER 17 Peace and the International Order 18 The Treaty of Augsburg 19 The Peace... as The Prince or Leviathan are read, think of The Shield of Achilles' Dennis Patterson, Michigan Law Review ABOUT THE AUTHOR Philip Bobbitt served as a senior adviser at the White House, the