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October 17, 2004
In the previous post I indicated Paul Monk's argument that the significance of 9/11 is that the Australian Government will need to confront the outmoded premises of its existing strategic doctrine and adapt and modernize it. Monk bases his argument on Philip Bobbitt's thesis in his The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History. Monk argues that there are three central premises to Bobbitt’s argument and that he draws four powerful inferences from them.
The first premise is that modern history is best understood as a series of epochal wars that have shaped both state constitutions and the international society of states. The struggle between Athens and Sparta was not merely a series of wars but a prolonged, fundamental conflict, which shaped the whole future of the Greek world. Similarly with other epochal wars: – the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Punic Wars. Epochal wars put the constitutional basis of the participants in play and do not truly end until the underlying constitutional questions are resolved.
The inference drawn from this that the wars of the twentieth century between liberalism, communism and facism was an epochal wars. It was fought to determine which form of constitution – liberal parliamentary, fascist or communist – would replace the imperial states of Europe that had emerged after the epochal war of the Napoleonic period and had dominated the world between the Congress of Vienna and August 1914.
The second premise is that strategy, law (both constitutional and international) and history (as a study) are inextricably intertwined, since they shape one another. Properly speaking, none can be understood without close reference to the others. It is stated by Bobbit thus:
"Law cannot come into being until the state secures a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Strategy cannot be formulated unless law prevails, for in its absence there is only civil war or banditry....Yet the legitimacy necessary for law and for strategy derives from history, the understanding of past practices that characterizes a particular society.”
The inference drawn from this is that that the key technologies produced by the epochal war fo the 20th century - weapons of mass destruction, information technology and global communications - are undermining the very possibility of nation states in the twentieth century sense at just the point when its liberal parliamentary form had triumphed over its rivals for primacy.
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In a strange way, this argument sounds Marxian. The very conditions necessary for the promotion of free trade are constantly being undermined by free trade. Long Live Neo-liberalism, Liberalism is dead!