The Shield of Achilles – Prologue, and the nation-state as it exists today

Shield of Achilles is about the modern nation-state; past, present, and future. The focus is not on the state itself as much as it lies on the key relationships which make the state whole: the relationship between the history of the state and war, the relationship between constitutional (state) and international law, and the relationship between war and the international legal order.

The state today is different from the traditional model of sovereignty, so much different one would be foolish to consider that a state does have true sovereignty within its own territory. Yet that is the model the international legal order is based on, established in 1914, reinforced in 1945, and seen through to success in 1990. Bobbitt gives five main challenges to the sovereign state:

1) universal human rights

2) nuclear weapons and other WMD’s and the ability with such weapons to render the state defense of civil society impotent (much less state borders)

3) trans-border threats, such as environmental damage, migration, and disease

4) economic freedom, leaving states out of the management of economics

5) global communications network which bypasses traditional network paradigms for the transmittal of news

While the initial state was created because it was a better way to finance a larger army (extrapolate this notion from buying a few cannon to the timetabled armies of World War I to get the full effect of the idea of the state), today even armies are outsourced under point 4, or are out of limits of state control, #3, but remain protected by that state due to the notion of sovereignty. Coupled with #2, this causes a huge problem in the way modern nation-states act: deterrence works in a threat-based strategic environment, but not when the threat hides amongst the people.

There is more, and probably will be more, but the basic notion is thus: the nation-state as we know it is undergoing a transformation. Most often, throughout history, this turbulence in the international legal order resulted in war to establish a new order; with the growing interdependency between nation-states, the legal order can be reset with growing political cooperation.

There is more in the prologue, but it deals with visions of the future as well as the structure of the book; overall the key point taken from the prologue is the changing conception of the nation-state. It’s difficult to think of the nation-state in terms of absolute sovereignty, yet that is what we define it as. For the past…at least 19 years, and maybe longer, the various states of the world have agreed on an international forum (at the least) and some semblance of international legal order without any mechanism of enforcement. Given the notion of the sovereign state, there does not need to be any mechanism, but given the idea of ‘state-sponsored terrorists organizations’ what does a nation-state do when the threat remains hidden in another state which is incapable or unwilling to deal with it?