THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER AND
THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER

 

Every society has a constitution. Of course not all of these are written constitutions—the British constitution, for example, is unwritten. Nor does every society happen to require a state. But every society—the Vineyard Haven Yacht Club no less than the Group of Eight—has a constitution because to be a society is to be constituted in some particular way. If a revolution in military affairs enables the triumph of certain constitutional order in war, then the peace conferences that ratify such triumphs set the terms for admission to the society of legitimate states, a society that is reconstituted after each great epochal war on the basis of a consensus among states. Each great peace conference that ended an epochal war wrote a constitution for the society of states.

Yet all constitutions also carry within themselves the seeds of future conflict. The 1789 U.S. constitution was pregnant with the 1861 civil war because it contained, in addition to a bill of rights, provisions for slavery and provincial autonomy. Similarly the international constitution created at Westphalia in 1648, no less than those created at Vienna in 1815 or Utrecht in 1713, set the terms for the conflict to come even while it settled the conflict just ended. The importance of this idea in our present period of transition is that we can shape the next epochal war if we appreciate its inevitability and also the different forms it may take. I believe that we face the task of developing cooperative practices that will enable us to undertake a series of low-intensity conflicts. Failing this, we will face an international environment of increasingly violent anarchy and, possibly, a cataclysmic war in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

While it is commonly assumed that the nuclear great powers would not (because they need not) use nuclear weapons in an era in which they do not threaten each other, in fact the new era that we are entering makes their use by a great power more likely than in the last half century. Deterrence and assured retaliation, as well as overwhelming conventional force, which together laid the basis for the victory of the coalition of parliamentary nation-states in the Cold War era, cannot provide a similar stability in the era of the market-state to come because the source of the threats to a state are now at once too ubiquitous and too easy to disguise. We cannot deter an attacker whose identity is unknown to us, and the very massiveness of our conventional forces makes it unlikely we will be challenged openly. As a consequence, we are just beginning to appreciate the need for a shift from target, threat-based assessments to vulnerability analyses.* What is less appreciated is the consequent loss of intrawar deterrence and the implications of this loss with respect to the actual use of nuclear weapons. To illustrate this paradox consider this example: Nuclear weapons do not deter biological warfare (because its true perpetrators can be easily disguised), and yet a nuclear strike is probably the only feasible means of destroying a biological stockpile that is easy to hide and fortify in a subterranean vault. As we shall see, the possibilities of nuclear pre-emptive strikes, draconian internal repression, and fitful retaliation all accompany the scenarios of weakened deterrence and disguised attacks, and all can lead to cataclysmic wars between states that would otherwise studiedly avoid such confrontations. Even though the possibility of cataclysmic war threatens the twenty-first century, however, defensive systems can play a far more useful role than they could in the previous period, when they tended to weaken deterrence.

At the same time that we have experienced these quiet yet disturbing changes in the strategic environment, there have been ongoing low-intensity conflicts of the kind we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Palestine, and elsewhere, which are being transformed by the information revolution. Remote, once local tribal wars have engaged the values and interests of all the great powers because these conflicts have been exported into the domestic populations of those powers through immigration empathy, and terrorism.

What is rarely noted is the relation between cataclysmic and low-intensity wars and the constitution of the society of market-states that will have to fight them. There can be no peace settlement without war, but there can be peace making. If we can successfully manage the consensus interventions of the great powers in low-intensity conflicts—as we have done, finally, in the former state of Yugoslavia—we will have constructed a new constitution for the society of market-states, thereby avoiding the systemic breakdown that provokes more generally catastrophic war. It may be that the very vulnerability of the critical infrastructures of the developed world, which invites, even necessitates, great-power cooperation, will then provide a basis for strengthening the society of states through information sharing and market cooperation.