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May 20, 2007
Just prior to the Second Punic War, Rome's greatest diplomatic weapon was its military projection and the Pax Romana it could provide. Rome did not conquer so much, as city-states and kingdoms willingly placed them self into the Pax Romana and allowed Roman military projection to protect their borders and interests. Spain was largely conquered in this way, as was Greece.
In 221 BC Rome had provinces in Sicily and Sardinia. To their west was the military power of Carthage, and to their east the fractured remnants of Alexander's Macedonian Empire. Both of whom could threaten, not Rome's military power, but its Pax Romana. We see a different Senatorial policy from this point on, which was also reflected in Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus' military policy toward Carthage. It was not enough for Carthage to be beaten, it had to be beaten so well that it was in permanent submission and not able to threaten Roman military projection - ie Pax Romana.
This policy led to the Senate seeking to declare war on Phillip of Macedon immediately after the defeat of Hannibal near Zama. The assemblies declined the first declaration of war - they had after all been fighting the Carthaginians for close to twenty-five years, not to mention enduring sixteen years of Hannibal invading southern Italy and managing to have several cities in Campania revolt to the Carthaginian cause. Taxes were high, the land was under-producing, cities were just coming back under the Roman peace, and the population was tired of war.
But this has become a Senatorial policy of preventative warfare. This can be compared to the campaign against the Illyrian pirates and the Illyrian state that support the piracy, It only became an issue for Rome when their merchant ships were being plundered. A successful campaign was conducted against the piracy, but Illyria was not invaded or conquered. The goal wasn't expansion, it was protecting the Roman peace. However with Carthage, Macedon and later Antiochus; we see preventative and aggressive wars being conducted against possible military competitors to Roman military projection.
Does this Roman policy choice in 221 BC have any modern parables to Pax Brittania and Pax Americana?
The British peace was pre market-state, and the agrarian form of colonisation which was tied by the Royal Navy's control of the oceans became too expensive to maintain. This is when Britain began exporting responsible government rather than Naval colonies and governships - a process Australia knows well. Prior to the industrial revolution, and its leading to the establishment of market-states (non-mercantilist), Britain followed the Pitt Doctrine, via Arthur Herman:
But as a statesman in the 1750s, Pitt would turn the standard formula of sea-power and trade inside out. Instead of seeing the navy as a weapon for getting and defending overseas empire, he saw overseas empire as a tool for the navy, giving it the bases it needed to defend British mercantile interests and to increase its own global reach.
Again we see the British peace being based upon military projection, rather than the ability to conquer and take land. Napoleon tried the latter route, conquering continental Europe, and despite the success of Frankish militarism effectively made an unsustainable French Empire. Each time France or Spain came into loggerheads with Britain, the Royal Navy would blockade those nations - their projection power stopping any incursion of France and Spain into Pax Brittania.
What of the United States? It is the undisputed power in military projection and many American politicians , such as Al Gore, have restated the purpose of the American military as being able to bring peace and security to the oceans such that globalised trade is protected from disturbances. As an example of American power, the Australian Defence Force [ADF] has enough projection that any nation-state seeking to coerce Australia militarily can be stopped in the ocean approaches or the air-sea gap: except the United States. One American super-carrier would be a match for the ADF, two would mean the complete loss of Australian projection power.
However Pax Americana is a westphalian construct, heavily entrenched in the mores and norms of the nation-state organisational structure. The natural development of the market-state its reach, globalisation, erode that central political and military power. This makes the National Security Strategy Paper from 2002 extremely interesting. How is the United States responding to the non-Westphalian threats to the American peace?
From the NSS:
For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat—most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.
We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction—weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning.
Combined with the Doctrine of Pre-emption this is an attempt to re-establish, possibly by coercion, possibly not, a Westphalian organisational arrangement by spreading, not democracy and freedom, but Westphalian political structures, such as a Parliament in Iraq and the dominance of the Lebanese Parliament over Hezbollah. This includes the removal of pan-Westphalian structures such as the United Nations, who are not within the Westphalian system either.
We can probably look at the NSS Paper as being a recognition of the limitations of how the American Peace can be maintained in a globalised market-state world, which has increasing decentralisation, local innovation, and low barriers of entry for capitalisation. We are actually seeing in some areas, such as South Lebanon, that a nation-state is not necessary for some semblance of civil order and peace to be maintained. It may produce inferior governance outcomes to a nation-state, but in a globalised market-state system that is not as necessary, if anything the overlapping and tenuous control of a non-state body provides greater liberty such that greater innovation outside of regulatory regimes can occur.
The problem is a Hobbesian outcome, but it seems the non-state bodies provide services such as health, education, etc to maintain their legitimacy so this does not always seem to happen. The continuing disorder in Mogadishu is a warning of what can happen in that situation, but it doesn't have a competing nation-state body and non-state body with overlapping sovereignty competing against each other to provide services.
The symbolic threat to the westphalian American Peace was Sept 11th. Under Bush and Cheney the United States has responded by operating outside of the westphalian international system. It has conducted wars of aggression, established a domestic state of emergency (or exception) and dropped the pretense of the rule of law. The argument is that in this emergency we don't have time or the need to act within the parameters of the westphalian order as the enemies of the American Peace do not follow it at all.
But we are moving into the organisational order of global market-states. This is having an effect on how we judge violence and sovereignty. Centralised political organisation, such as the nation-state is being challenged and constantly required to justify itself, its overhead and cost. This is post-westphalian in that sovereignty can be over-lapping, and political/legal institutions compete for legitimacy through services. It also means that the peace through military projection is easily stifled. Iraq is a good example of this, that kind of peace can only come through a domestic embrace of Pax, which was a large part of Roman, British and American success.
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Reading this,was suddenly jerked by memory as to an excerpt of Cicero's "Letters", read at uni.
These described the Great Man's time as governor of the Roman province of Cilicia, roughly, southern Turkey, about 50 BC( yes,I prefer the"old" measure ).
Apart from its sophistication as to its own style, I was stunned at the subtle descriptions of the urbanity of Roman rule.
This in cluded massive graft and corruption involving the most powerful Romans of the time, like Pompey and other generals, gearing up for yet another civil war.
And most interesting was the description of techniques one only requires the slightest imagination to realise apply in the modern Pax Americana, as with the older Pax Britannica".
Techniques mentioned included, for one, the forced "legal" indebting of beggared provinces to recover from already severe taxation, assented to by installed local stooges. These were easily scapegoated and inevitably dinpensed with when civil unrest invariably broke out, as a sop to the mobs. The exent of interest repayments let alone the principal, meant the all the wealth of a province could be sequestered at whatever rate the Romans decided was suitable to their own purposes, legally verifiable with in a self- referential "governance" system alibiied by alleged local incompetence.
At roughly the same time This writer was doing an "Intro to IR" course, and was stunned at the equivilancies/ identicalities between Roman times and our era, reference Third World/ Dependency Theory and things like Trade "Reform" involving the World Bank and IMF employing instruments like GATT to induce "accidents" like the Asian Meltdown "of a decade ago.
Much changes and nothing changes.