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Best get used to war
(Michael Howard, The Guardian, January 13, 2003)
But in 19th-century Germany a different analysis had been developed by Hegel and his disciples. As the state had come into being through war, they argued, so it could only survive through war. . . . This is Bobbitt's starting point: "Law and strategy," he writes, "are mutually affecting." Legitimacy itself "is a constitutional idea that is sensitive to strategic events" - not least to one so cataclysmic as losing a war. Nevertheless, although wars create states, it is the state that creates legitimacy and it is legitimacy that maintains "peace." If states can no longer maintain their legitimacy, there will be another war, the outcome of which will create a new legitimacy. To ignore the legal aspect of international order is a recipe for permanent war preached by Hitler. To ignore the strategic aspect, as did Woodrow Wilson, is at best to forfeit the capacity to create an international order reflecting one's own value system; at worst, to see it destroyed. . . . So as the development of guns had destroyed the feudal order, and the development of railways the dynastic order, now the development of computers has destroyed the nation-state. Now nation-states are mutating into what Bobbitt terms "market states". Bobbitt provides no single scenario for the future but multiples: we are required to choose among a range of dystopias. We are also required to choose among a range of possible wars, because Bobbitt is under no illusion that market-states will provide perpetual peace. At worst there may be cataclysms, at best a continuation of the low-key global violence to which we have become accustomed over the past 10 years and from which not even the most powerful communities will be able to escape. The best they can do is reduce their vulnerability, and the only victory they can look forward to is avoidance of defeat. . . . Bobbitt believes that mankind could be facing a tragedy without precedent in its history. It is not clear that he is wrong.

posted by LoZo 5:26 PM