THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Read Free

reached at Paris in 1990 that concluded both the Second World War and the Cold War that followed it might have been expected, like its predecessors at Vienna, Utrecht, and Westphalia, to introduce another long period of stable peace. Both Germany and Russia were now democratic nation-states and accepted “Western values”; not only the rule of law legitimized by democratic consent, but a further criterion of legitimacy that had developed in the West during the struggle against totalitarianism—the recognition of universal “human rights”: a major derogation from the state sovereignty that had been the basis of international relations since the Peace of Westphalia. But there was another and yet more fundamental difference between this peace settlement and its predecessors. Those had established a stability between nations that rested on a balance between the powers. This recognized not so much the triumph of Western democratic values as the overwhelming and apparently unchallengeable power of the United States: its supremacy in the weapons systems created by nuclear and information technology, its enormous wealth, and the universal attractiveness of its popular culture. America's European allies were at best subordinate and dependent associates. This, so it was hoped, would be a unipolar world of a kind not seen since the fall of the Roman Empire; but like the Roman Empire, it would be based on a rule of law.
    What went wrong? It is here that Bobbitt's thesis becomes fascinating and controversial. One obvious feature of the Paris treaties was that, although they may have settled the problems that had tormented Europe for the past hundred years, Europe was now only one region in a global system whose complexities that settlement did not begin to address. Even within Europe, the settlement could not deal with the fallacy that had invalidated the Wilsonian world vision from the very beginning. Nation-states, the building blocks of the international community, are not “given”: they have to be created. Nations—self-conscious ethnic communities—do not create states, though they can certainly destroy them. On the contrary, with few exceptions, states create nations. Even in Europe the problem of “state-building” in the Balkans remained, and remains, unsolved, while elsewhere in the world stable nation-states are the exception rather than the rule. More common are states that have signally failed to create nations, and can barely function as “states” at all.
    Further, even the great nation-states that possessed the cohesion and discipline to fight and survive the two World Wars were already becoming obsolete. It did not require a mass effort of national dedication to produce the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor could a similar effort have preserved them. It was largely the realization of their reciprocal vulnerability that prevented the conflict between the West and the Soviet Union from erupting into violence, and made it possible for the Soviet Union to be defeated by American “soft power.” For if weapons of mass destruction could so easily penetrate the conventional defenses of the nation-state—and to nuclear there were to be added chemical and biological threats—so could, in peacetime, economic strength and cultural dominance. Instant communications made possible by information technology were creating a global society that, though far from homogenous, was increasingly interdependent, and within which no nation-state, however powerful, could regard itself as independent and invulnerable: not even the United States, as it discovered on September 11, 2001.
    So as the development of guns had destroyed the old feudal order, and the development of railways the old dynastic order, now the development of computers has destroyed the nation-state. Not the State itself, as Bobbitt is at pains to show: the State will always be necessary to provide security, fiscal organization, and law. But in