Many conflicts may lead states to war, but when these disputes implicate the basic legitimacy of states, we are led into the strategic whirlwinds that finally change the state system and its constituent constitutional archetypal orders. There are present in the current context three possibilities for this sort of conflict: wars between nation-states and market-states in which an exemplar of one of these forms challenges the other's assumptions about sovereignty, because these assumptions are not shared by the two orders; wars between one market-state and another, because the various forms of the market also differ with respect to fundamental ideas of sovereignty;* and war that spreads to the society of states from a civil war in one state where the partisans of the nation-state confront the partisans of the new market-state.
As an example of the first contingency, consider the possibility that a nation-state's nuclear testing program so endangered the global atmosphere that another state, a market-state or proto-market-state, assumed it had the right forcibly to halt the testing program, even though the tests were conducted solely on national territory. What is appropriate for the market-state—with its porous territorial concepts and its responsibility to preserve the opportunities for personal development, including, of course, access to a safe environment—seems to clash with the absolute sovereignty of a nation-state taking steps it alone can determine are necessary, within its territory, to protect the nation. Similarly, a war between the United States and China over Taiwan would present classic nation-state claims to territorial integrity and antisecession versus internationalist market-state claims that no state can be absorbed without its consent, and that its “national” ethnic basis is not conclusive as to statehood.
As an example of wars that might arise among or within market-states, consider three different sorts of such states—roughly characterized earlier as one working within traditions of individual rights, laissez-faire trading, and personal freedom, versus one coming from a tradition of group responsibility, state-managed trading, and rigid social stability, versus one within a communitarian tradition oriented to interest groups and social justice. Suppose these traditions came into conflict within a single great market-state, precipitating a revolutionary situation? Analogously this happened to some degree in all the great nation-states, but especially of course in Russia and Germany. Or suppose great powers, representing these three different approaches to the market-state, found themselves in conflict over an as-yet-undecided great power's constitutional valence, that is, the sort of market-state to emerge there? This also happened to the great nation-states; indeed I argued earlier that the Cold War, the last phase of the Long War, was fought by great powers representing different ideological approaches to the nation-state, over the constitutional destiny of the divided states of World War II—Korea, Viet Nam, and supremely, Germany. Political ideology determined the valence of the nation-state; with the market state, the valence is determined by differing views of retained* sovereignty—that sovereignty reserved to the People that is not delegated to government. An analogous sort of conflict might occur in the twenty-first century between different forms of market-states over the future of a divided state—China or Russia, for example—whose orientation toward these forms was undecided.
One object of a security paradigm to accompany the constitutional archetype that will take us into the twenty-first century is to avoid such a cataclysm. If we are to avoid another world-rending war, then my hopes lie with the entrepreneurial state. Only it offers the chance, through constant and costly vigilance, steadily to release the pressures attendant in the shifting distributions of global power among competitive states. Such a model increases the likelihood that the United States will share its technology and information resources, and it is by sharing rather than hoarding that we stave off competition. On the other hand, it must be noted that a mercantile market-state offers a better chance of enduring such an apocalypse should it come, because such states cultivate self-sufficiency. And the managerial state promises the greatest likelihood of recovering from such a conflict, because it strengthens the institutional basis necessary for reconstitution.
Most important, however, the entrepreneurial model offers the United States the best chance of developing, marketing, and “selling” the collective goods that will maintain American influence in the world. We have been powerful and wealthy in eras past and have had little influence on world events; this might well be the case again should we decide for a mercantile market-state. I believe an entrepreneurial state can provide the structure and the new point of view we will need in order to prevent superpower nuclear proliferation (to states like Germany and Japan) and protect the global environment (from states like Russia and China) and to avoid a coming cataclysm. If this is wishful thinking, let me put my conclusion another way: should the entrepreneurial state be unable to avoid such a cataclysm, the United States would have to shift its purposes entirely and concentrate on how to survive and prevail in such a terrible conflict. Mercantilism might offer a better chance of buying off conflict, at the expense of allies, than would cooperative, collective defense systems. Unlike the members of the great alliances forged by nation-states to win the Long War, market-states can act with greater tactical flexibility and the most (not the least) successful of them will do so, changing partners, bluffing, using nonstate actors as agents of compromise and deception, much as a contemporary corporation sometimes behaves. But for that reason, mercantile market-states will be vulnerable to the same sort of tactics that Napoleon trained on the coalitions of territorial states, picking each one off from the group and either coopting or destroying it. For most of us, except the most pessimistic, a safer ground surely lies in trying to avoid such a conflict, rather than in contorting our natural traditions in anticipation of such a catastrophe should it come.
If the United States, in the new context in which it finds itself, is to maintain its leadership in order to thrive as an entrepreneurial state, it will endeavor to do two things: to preserve its freedom of action abroad by limiting, to the greatest degree possible, the coercive harm other states can do to it; and to act consistently with its traditional moral aspirations but prudently within its means to “make the world available,” that is, to maximize the degree to which the persons of the world are able to choose their own destinies. If the security paradigm for the American nation-state was to make the world safe for democracy, then the paradigm of the American market-state must be to make a world that is hospitable to the individual conscience, that is, available. Individual goods, like economic opportunity and freedom of religion, do not exist in the world without nurturing practices. They are linked to “collective goods,” that is, things of benefit to the world as a whole.