A Papier-Mache Fortress.

• Author: Schroeder, Paul W.
• Position: Books

Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 921 pp., $40.

PHILIP BOBBITT's The Shield of Achilles is a bad book. It is error strewn, it suffers from grand delusions of theoretical adequacy; and it is unscholarly. This judgment, however, being evidently a minority one, imposes an obligation not only to render the work's aim, thesis and argument fairly before criticizing it, but also to account for the book's evident appeal to the public, as well as to several distinguished historians who have endorsed it.

The former task is not easy, given the book's great length and convoluted development, but is aided by repeated statements of the author's aims and theses. The book, Bobbitt writes in his prologue, concerns the evolution of the modern state, in particular "the relationship between strategy and the legal order as this relationship has shaped and transformed the modern state and the society composed of these states." Wars and the attendant revolutions in military affairs, he argues, have been the engine of change in the constitutional order of states since the Renaissance: "each of the important revolutions in military affairs enabled a political revolution in the fundamental constitutional order of the State."

Bobbit holds that four great epochal wars transformed the dominant constitution of states in previous eras (Habsburg-Valois, the Thirty Years' War, the wars of Louis XIV and the French Revolutionary wars). Now the most recent epochal war, the Long War of 1914-90, has "brought into being a new form of the state--the market-state"--and put "the constitutional order of the nation-state...everywhere under siege." Major new developments--human rights as a universal norm, weapons of mass destruction, global and transnational threats, globalization of the economy, and global communications networks penetrating all states and societies--threaten both the sovereignty of individual states and the legitimacy of the international order by making it impossible for nation-states to fulfill their legitimating purpose--namely, to maximize the welfare of their citizens. What Bobbitt calls market-states, however, promise instead to maximize opportunity.

In an instance of the elliptical exposition that characterizes the book throughout, Bobbitt begins the substantive historical defense of this thesis at the end, presenting 1914-90 as a single Long War between fascism, communism and parliamentarianism to decide the dominant constitutional form of the modern nation-state. A brief excursus summarizing the historiographical debate over the revolutions in military affairs in the 15th-18th centuries is followed by three longer chapters covering the history of the state from the Renaissance to 1914. These chapters, together with the one on the Long War, comprise the historical core of the book, called Book I: The State of War, and the basis for its projections about the present and future. With them come five "plates" that depict in simplified form the patterns and correlations the author detects in history and that encapsulate his essential arguments.

Plate 1 lists six distinct constitutional orders of the state since the Renaissance--princely, kingly, territorial, state-nation, nation-state, and (emerging) market-state. Plate 2 links these to Bobbit's five epochal wars that "brought a particular constitutional order to primacy." Plate 3 lists the peace treaties that "end epochal wars [and] ratify a particular constitutional order for the society of states" -- Augsburg, Westphalia, Utrecht, Vienna, Versailles and Paris (1990).

The last two plates concern Bobbitt's most crucial theses, those that tie strategic, military and constitutional factors tightly together. Plate 4 illustrates how "each constitutional order asserts a unique basis for legitimacy." In the princely state "the State confers legitimacy on the dynasty", whereas in the kingly state "the dynasty confers legitimacy on the State." The territorial state is legitimated by its claim to manage the country efficiently; the state-nation by its claim to forge the identity of the nation; the nation-state by its promise to better the welfare of its citizens; and the emerging market-state by its promise to maximize the opportunities of its citizens. Plate 5, "Historic, Strategic, and Constitutional Innovations", illustrates how "a constitutional order achieves dominance by best exploiting the strategic and constitutional innovations of its era"; it does this by linking the claimed innovations and dominant political characteristics of each era with their respective military innov ations and leading features. For example, the absolutism and secularism characteristic of kingly states is linked to the gunpowder revolution, lengthy sieges and standing armies, while the trade control and aristocratic leadership that feature in the territorial state are tied to professional armies and limited cabinet wars; and so on with the other main types.

This historical basis laid, Bobbitt turns to the current crisis. The challenge to the nation-state from the current revolution in military affairs, and the nation-state's rapid loss of legitimacy, demands deep thought about the concrete transformations this will require of the new market-state in terms of security; politics and welfare. He surveys what he typologizes as the five policy choices now being offered for the United States after the Cold War--new nationalism, new internationalism, new realism, new evangelism (i.e...