THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (5 page)

While Book I treats the individual state, Book II, “States of Peace,” deals with the subject of the society of states. The society of states, as described notably by the late Hedley Bull, is to be distinguished from the state system. The state system is a formal entity that is composed of states alone and defined by their formal treaties and agreements. The society of states, on the other hand, is composed of the formal and informal customs, rules, practices, and habits of states and encompasses many entities—like the Red Cross and CNN—that are not states at all. International law is usually defined in terms of the state system. There are, of course, exceptions to this way of looking at international law, particularly in the work of Myres McDougal and his followers. In Book II, I treat international law as the practices of the society of states rather than as an artifact of the state system. I argue that international law is a symptom of the triumph of a particular constitutional order within the individual states of which that society consists (and is not therefore a consequence solely of the international acts of states). International law arises from constitutional law, not the other way around.

Part I of Book II, “The Society of Nation-States,” deals with the society of states in which we currently live. It traces the origins of this society to the abortive peace that followed World War I and the American program that attempted to superimpose the U.S. constitutional model on the society of states. Part I then brings this plan forward to its collapse in Bosnia in the 1990s, and concludes with the claim that the society of nation-states is rapidly decaying. Although it is not novel to encounter a claim that the nation-state is dying, my thesis is markedly different from others because it derives from my general conclusion that the dying and regeneration of its constitutional orders are a periodic part of the history of the modern state. Those who write that the nation-state is finished are usually also of the view that the nation-state is synonymous with the modern state itself. Thus they are committed to maintaining that the State is withering away, a highly implausible view in my judgment. Once one sees, however, that there have been many forms of the modern state, one can appreciate that though the nation-state is in fact dying, the modern state is only undergoing one of its periodic transformations.

Part II of Book II, “A Brief History of the Society of States and the International Order,” revisits the historic conflicts that have given the modern state its shape and which were the subject of Part II of Book I. In Book II, however, the perspective has changed. Here I am less concerned with epochal wars than I am with the peace agreements that ended those wars. Part II makes the claim that the society of modern states has had a series of constitutions, and that these constitutions were the outcome of the great peace congresses that ended epochal wars. The state conflicts discussed in Book I are taken up in Book II in terms of their peace conferences, culminating in the twentieth century with the Peace of Paris that ended the Long War in 1990. In these chapters, the emphasis is on international law rather than strategic conflict, though of course, consistent with my general thesis, the two subjects are treated as inextricably intertwined.

Part III, “The Society of Market-States,” depicts the future of the society of states. Its chapters hypothesize various possible worlds that depend on different choices we are even now in the process of making. Most of this Part is devoted to a series of scenarios about the future, adapting methods pioneered by the Royal Dutch Shell Corporation. Book II ends with the conclusion that, by varying the degree of sovereignty retained by the People, different societies will develop different forms of the market-state. The task ahead will be to develop rules for cooperation when these differ-ent approaches frustrate consensus or even invite conflict—a conflict that could threaten the very survival of some states.

Finally, I should like to provide some background regarding the title of this work. “The Shield of Achilles” is the name of a poem by W. H. Auden. At the end of this book I have reprinted that poem in full. It provides, in alternating stanzas, a juxtaposition of the epic description of classical heroic warrior society with a gritty, twentieth century depiction of warfare and civilian suffering. It is important to remember, in the discussions on which we are about to embark, that they ultimately concern violence, and that our moral and practical decisions have real consequences in the use of force, and all that the use of force entails for suffering and death. This is the first point to be suggested by the title.

The shield for which Auden named his poem and to whose description much of the poem is devoted is described by Homer in Book XVIII of the
Iliad, lines
558 – 720 (see pp.
ix – xiii
). Many readers will be familiar with this famous passage, which has inspired paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, West, and others as well as countless classical Greek depictions. It will be recalled that the Trojan hero Hector had claimed the armor worn by Patroclus when he slew Patroclus in battle; this armor had belonged to Achilles. Patroclus had borne Achilles armor into battle in an effort to inspire the Greeks by making them believe that Achilles himself had taken the field. Achilles then asked his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, to procure for him another set of armor from Hephaestus, the armorer of the gods, whose forge was beneath the volcano at Mount Etna.

Hephaestus's mirror, which showed the past, present, and future, might also come to the minds of some persons. It is my aim not only to support certain theses about strategy, law, and history with arguments drawing on the past, but to illuminate our present predicament and speculate about the choices the future will present us. This is another resonance of this title to which I wish to call attention.

Hephaestus created an elaborate shield on which he depicted a wedding and feasts, a marketplace, dancing and athletics, a law court, and a battle, along with other arts of culture, the cultivation of fields, and the making of wine. This is the main point that I wish my readers to bear in mind: war is a product as well as a shaper of culture. Animals do not make war, even though they fight. No less than the market and the law courts, with which it is inextricably intertwined, war is a creative act of civilized man with important consequences for the rest of human culture, which include the festivals of peace.

Many things ought to look different after one has finished reading this book: former U.S. President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who have been widely criticized in their respective parties, will be seen as architects attempting a profound change in the constitutional order of a magnitude no less than Bismarck's. As of this writing, U.S. President George W. Bush appears to be pursuing a similar course on many fronts. Foreign policy concerns, like the protection of the critical infrastructure of the developed world or the creation of intervention forces (such as those so discredited in Viet Nam and Somalia), which may now seem marginal, will be seen as centerpieces in the struggle to change, or at least manage, the shape of wars to come. The law-oriented methods of the nation-state will be seen as being replaced by the market-oriented methods of the market-state, setting controversies as different as abortion rights and affirmative action in a new context. For example, nation-states typically endorsed—or banned—prayers in public schools because such states used legal regulations on behalf of particular moral commitments. The market-state is more likely to provide an open forum for prayers from many competing sects, maximizing the opportunity for expression without endorsing any particular moral view. This is but one example of countless such contrasts.

Above all, the reader should get from this book a sense of the importance of certain choices that otherwise might be made in isolation but that will structure our future as thoroughly as similar choices in the last half millennium structured our past.

There are times when the present breaks the shackles of the past to create the future—the Long War of the twentieth century, now past, was one of those. But there are also times, such as the Renaissance—when the first modern states emerged—and our own coming twenty-first century, when it is the past that creates the future, by breaking the shackles of the present.
²

Still one more year of preparation
.

Tomorrow at the latest I'll start working on a great book

In which my century will appear as it really was.

The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.

Springs and autumns will unerringly return
,

In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay

And foxes will learn their foxy natures
.

And that will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies

Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse

In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank

Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk

Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.

No, it won't happen tomorrow. In five or ten years
.

I still think too much about the mothers

And ask what is man born of woman
.

He curls himself up and protects his head

While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running

He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit
.

Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.

I haven't learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.

With not-quite truth

and not-quite art

and not-quite law

and not-quite science

Under not-quite heaven

on the not-quite earth

the not-quite guiltless

and the not-quite degraded

—Czeslaw Milosz

(Book III, lines 111 – 125)

L
AW
, S
TRATEGY
, H
ISTORY
—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.