As for epochal wars and major peace settlements settling major questions about the international order, yes, they sometimes have-but mostly in a negative rather than positive way, doing more to clear the ground and establish what cannot be done than to establish what the new order will be. This is true of all the genuine epochal wars and peace settlements that Bobbitt discusses. The Thirty Years War, for example, ended any possibility of Spanish Habsburg dominance in Europe as a whole and of Austrian Habsburg-Imperial-Catholic rule in Germany; it thereby cleared the way for France's rise and for a different kind of confessional though not secular order for Germany. Mutatis mutandis, the same holds for the War of the Spanish Succession and the Peace of Utrecht: they ended Louis xiv's bid for hegemony and opened the way for a balance of power system, but they did not really establish it. That took 15 years of further war, crises, major adjustments and new or revised settlements. The same holds even for the far greater French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the most ambitious and comprehensive peace settlement ever attempted, at the Congress of Vienna. Together they ended the Napoleonic bid for empire and laid the basis for a new order based on legality and solidarity, but even this genuine effort to solve all Europe's problems at once did not really establish a durable constitutional order per se. Within five years the solidarity eroded; within 15 the settlement underwent major challenges and revisions.

This points up a further weakness in Bobbitt's world-historical scheme: its neglect of what follows the epochal wars and peace settlements he tries to link too neatly together. What counts most in every case is not simply the war itself and its results, or the provisions of the peace settlement, but what actually happens thereafter, what states and peoples do with the opportunities and challenges presented. In other words, the determinist strategic-constitutional paradigm makes less difference than the contingent responses and adaptations made by many different actors.

The same observation applies to Bobbitt's epochal war and settlement, the supposed single Long War of 1914-90 between parliamentarianism, fascism and communism over which would be the dominant constitutional form of the nation-state. In the end, words are defenseless things, and so is history, at least in some hands. Anyone may choose to see this period as one long war over this central issue if one wishes. But this pattern may not be used to explain the origins of World War I and II, as Bobbitt seeks to do, or explain away the great issue that was settled by those wars and the settlement of 1945. World War I was not caused by a clash between supposedly proto-fascist Germany and parliamentary France and Britain. The war arose out of power-political strategic rivalry between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, resulting from the fatal breakdown of their long triangular restraining alliance and leading to an acute security crisis for all three-especially for Austria-Hungary, which actually precipitated the war. The confrontation between parliamentarianism, fascism and communism was one result of the war, not its cause; and it was not the chief issue or cause of World War II either. In both wars, the central issue was a German bid to dominate the continent by power-political means, and that issue was finally solved once and for all in 1945. In the most important sense, therefore, 1914-90 was not one Long War.

A Saving Grace?

One question remains: If the main historical paradigm is not sound or helpful, what about the argument for an emerging new order based on a new kind of state, the market-state, and Bobbitt's discussion of new policies, strategies and paradigms necessary for that new era? How much is that worth?

Many of Bobbitt's individual thoughts and arguments seem to me sensible and insightful, many others foolish, some wrong, and one or two dangerous and even a bit sinister. The problem, however, once again, is that the whole discussion of the emerging market-state and the market-state international system is one long question-begging exercise; it assumes the point at issue that needs to be proved and argues from it as though it had been proved. Bobbitt greatly exaggerates the death of the nation-state, but more important, he does not render even comprehensible, much less probable or proved, the emergence and existence-indeed, the very definition and possibility-of his market-state. It is never defined by anything more concrete than an advertising slogan-"maximizing opportunity for all its citizens"-as if that were not a means by which many states of various kinds have often tried to promote welfare, improve their powers to govern and gain legitimacy. No serious attempt is made to show that the market, efficient for individual and corporate economic activity, can be made the basis for the governance of the state. The main evidence given for its emergence consists of selected extracts from speeches and press releases by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and the evidence offered to show that the historic transition to it has occurred is almost too ludicrous to discuss: the difference between the un-nato failure to stop the Bosnian Serb massacres at Srebrenica, supposed to prove the failure of nation-state principles to meet problems arising from nationhood, and NATO's intervention to stop Serbian "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo three years later, supposed to arise from new market-state principles. This is like arguing that the shift from Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler beginning in 1936 and the decision for war in 1939 shows a fundamental shift in the constitution of the society of states.

Readers may choose to believe that a new market-state society of states is emerging, and they may read this book for counsel on how to meet its challenges. They should not believe, however, that the course of history supports this prophecy.

Essay Types: Book Review