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