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Soldiers of the State. - The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History - book review

National Review, Sept 30, 2002 by Michael Knox Beran

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, by Philip Bobbitt (Knopf, 919 pp., $40)

Robert Stewart, second viscount Castlereagh, was the British foreign minister from 1812 to 1822. A member of the Irish peerage, melancholy, aloof, in many ways mysterious, he won a place in the British cabinet; there he labored, during the last decade of his life, to turn the coalition of Great Powers leagued against France into a peacetime alliance capable of establishing, and preserving, order in Europe.

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To a large extent he succeeded. In 1814 the allied powers -- Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia -- pledged to maintain a collective-security arrangement that would survive the defeat of Bonaparte's France. This "Concert of Europe" was ratified a short time later by the Congress of Vienna; Castlereagh dared to hope that its very existence would tend to promote the stability of Europe. In the future an aspiring conquistador, eager to emulate Bonaparte or Louis XIV, would no longer be able to rely, as those princes had, on a strategy of divide and conquer; he must consider instead that any attempt to enlarge his country's territory would draw upon him the wrath of a united coalition.

Reviled as a malignant schemer, a diplomatist deep in the cabals of Metternich and Talleyrand, Castlereagh was as misunderstood, in his own day, as the farsighted man tends to be -- or so Philip Bobbitt argues in his excellent new book, The Shield of Achilles. On August 12, 1822, Castlereagh committed suicide, but his contributions to the theory and practice of collective security outlived him, and retain their value even today. Bobbitt believes that alliances formed on the viscount's logic -- NATO, for example -- will continue to be effective in the new era we are entering, while other approaches to order -- such as the United Nations and the European Union -- will prove even more useless in the future than they have in the past.

The thoughtfulness of Bobbitt's portrait of Castlereagh will give the reader some idea of the interest and intelligence of this book. The author's ability to bring a diplomatic drama to life is doubtless related to his own experience; he is a rare combination of philosopher and public servant. He has taught not only at the University of Texas, but also at Oxford and the University of London; he has served as a counselor to presidents on matters of national security, and to senators in connection with the Iran-Contra affair. He has been sensitive to each of these environments, and this sensitivity is reflected in the worldliness of his analyses. His urbanity is not merely intellectual; he has a highly developed and quite unacademic feeling for power, a feeling attainable, perhaps, only by those who have had some share in its exercise.

The state exists, Bobbitt notes with characteristic lack of sentimentality, because it is able to hurt people. Violence is its metier. It is this, the state's ability to act violently, that enables it to protect its inhabitants both from external threats (foreign enemies) and internal violence (criminals). But the forms that violence assumes are not static; new, more concentrated, and more lethal forms of violence are continually being developed. If a particular state is to survive, it must adapt to the changed realities, and find ways both to defend against and to deploy the new machineries of violence.

In the 15th century the Ottoman Turks assembled artillery powerful enough to pound the walls of Constantinople into rubble. In 1453 the city fell, and European princes trembled. No wall exists, Machiavelli wrote, "however thick, that artillery cannot destroy." This innovation in weaponry, Bobbitt shows, produced a corresponding revolution in the state. In order to defend against the new threat, the Italian princes implemented a series of far-reaching policy changes. The resulting renovation marked the emergence of a new form of constitutional order, the "princely state."

The Shield of Achilles traces the successive revolutions in strategy and constitutional thought that created, over time, the modern state. Innovations in tactics sometimes drove constitutional change. The infantry countermarch of the 17th century, for example, solved problems caused by delay in the reloading of muskets; but this elaborate drill could only be performed by closely disciplined troops. Armies capable of maintaining such esprit de corps could not be accommodated within the structures of a princely state, and intelligent statesmen set out to remodel their outmoded constitutions. In France, Cardinal Richelieu worked to transform the "princely" Valois constitution into a "kingly" Bourbon one -- the instrument that enabled Louis XIV to field, for a time, the most powerful armies in Europe.

In some cases, constitutional developments dictated changes in tactics. Bonaparte, for example, was at the head of an army in the revolutionary turmoil that made France what Bobbitt calls a "state-nation." Even the Corsican, with all his military genius, could not hope, in such conditions, to impose upon his troops the rigorous discipline of Frederick the Great. He instead found ways to channel into the army the immense patriotic enthusiasm inspired by the French Revolution. He exploited the strategic possibilities inherent in the levee en masse, or universal male conscription; and for a time his gigantic citizen- armies were irresistible in Europe.

Soldiers of the State. - The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History - book review

National Review, Sept 30, 2002 by Michael Knox Beran

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