What Next?

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Tory Case

East and West: China, Power, and the Future of Asia

Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths About World Affairs

Contents

Acknowledgements

My gratitude for help in writing this book runs wide and deep.

As ever, my thanks go first to my editor and friend Stuart Proffitt, who is diligent, learned and the most creative critic. He constantly prods me into trying harder without ever destroying my morale. This book would not have been written without him. My agent, Michael Sissons, brought his legendary wisdom to my support at every difficult turn in the road.

When I began research for the book, I needed help to assemble the raw material in order to educate myself about several subjects on which initially I knew too little. I had the assistance of two doctoral students at Oxford University, Taiye Tuakli-Wosomu and Richard Pan. Their help was invaluable.

As I started writing, my dependency level rose steeply. Two other postgraduates at Oxford, again recommended like the original two by Professor Sir Adam Roberts, came to the rescue. They provided overviews of complex issues, commented wisely on my draft and answered my questions with speed and accuracy. I cannot thank Emily Paddon and Andrew Baker enough. They are very clever, smart and sensible beyond their years, and exceptionally nice and decent people. They will have distinguished academic or public-service careers themselves. If you were ever to feel depressed about either the academic world or the future of free societies you would only need to meet either Emily or Andrew to cheer yourself up.

Several people have read and commented on parts of the draft, including Professor Roberts, for whose wise advice I am particularly grateful. I would also like to thank Anthony Cary and Edward Llewellyn. Professor Paul Younger of Newcastle University gave me excellent advice on the chapter on water and Professor Angela McLean of Oxford University told me what I should read about epidemic disease.

My favourite bookshop, alongside the Elliott Bay in Seattle, is in our London neighbourhood. The Barnes Bookshop, easier to get to than the one in Seattle, is the best possible example of the case for small bookstores. It is run by people who both love books – Isla Dawes and Mark Brighton – and have been hugely helpful in tracking down very quickly what I need and want to read. Their shop is one of my principal indulgences.

I write the first drafts of books by hand, which creates huge problems of translation for those who type the manuscript. Most of the work was done by my friend Jane Sigaloff in between writing her own witty novels. She was a friendly adviser and critic as well as an extraordinarily accurate interpreter of my tiny script. My youngest daughter Alice also typed parts of the book and my wife Lavender volunteered her services whenever we were under pressure. My eldest daughter Kate did the research for the chapter on drugs. My middle daughter Laura would have helped too had she not been looking after Elodie and having Willow.

So this volume has really been a ‘family and friends’ business, but full responsibility for all its failings must be taken by the capo di capi himself. Any plaudits should be widely shared.

The book is dedicated to my grandchildren, which is as good in a way as dedicating it to their loving and much-loved grandmother. Lavender has once again had to cope with a writing husband whose papers are scattered across desks, dining and kitchen tables and most available flat surfaces throughout the house, who loses the only one he needs with regularity and who is not much of a companion when in full flow. She deserves a medal, but all that I am now going to give her back is me.

1

Funny Old World

As Margaret Thatcher famously observed at her last cabinet meeting, ‘It’s a funny old world.’ She might have added that it seems to get funnier by the year, to be sliding out of order. Gone are the day before yesterday’s certainties, when the mutual assurance of destruction yoked together in a brittle truce what we called the Free World and its communist adversary. Gone too, apparently, is what followed those perilous decades: the acclaimed global triumph of liberal economic and political values, with the modernization of the world in America’s and Europe’s image and nothing much more to worry about. So what is it – blind but blogging – that slouches onstage instead? Is it denial of the authority of nation-states, which have been so far the political building blocks of our modern world? Is it the overthrow of the notion of sovereignty, which for over three and a half centuries has been ‘the organizing principle of international relations’?¹ Is it the rejection of the Western world’s view of modernization? Does economic globalization – and the social and environmental changes that accompany it – run too far ahead of the ability of politics to cope? What on earth is happening to us, and is it really new at all, or simply more of the drifting spied in his world-weary way by the late-Victorian statesman Lord Salisbury over a century ago?

This book will try to suggest what answers to these questions, and a number of others, might look like. I was motivated to write it by a number of factors. First, without ever believing that before the present Bush administration there were no problems in the conduct of foreign relations, like so many others I reacted with consternation and occasional rage to the policies pursued by Washington from 2000 to 2004. The partial retreat since then from the more mindless and dangerous forms of unilateralism has been a welcome though insufficiently comprehensive recognition of the costs of earlier failure and the impossibility for even the world’s greatest power of tackling every global problem on its own, or at least on entirely its own terms. President Bush and his vice-president are not ever-present visitors to these pages, but they do put in occasional appearances (when I discuss terrorism in Chapter 4 for example) and what they represent is never far away.

More important to me than the personalities and policies of an era which we shall soon, with relief, be able to speak of in the past tense, have been four lessons – not especially original ones, it has to be said – that I have learned over the years about international politics. I suppose they pretty well define me. I am not a particularly angry old man, and I have during a fairly long career at the heart and on the fringes of politics been called a lot of abusive things. I recall, for example, the prodigally right-wing Canadian columnist Mark Steyn (to his credit, a journalist who stood by his old patron Conrad Black in bad times as well as good) calling me ‘Chris Petain’ because of my rather moderate criticism at the time of the invasion of Iraq. Mr Steyn believed that its easy accomplishment had vindicated Donald Rumsfeld. Rather like this author on the tennis court, Mr Steyn and others like him must get tired of saying ‘sorry’. One can shrug off straightforward abuse such as ‘Petain’, but I did bridle when regularly described by others with a knowing sneer as a ‘liberal internationalist’ as though it were some sort of rash intellectual deformity or defect in my patriotism. To my mind there is nothing else for a sensible person to be. So I thought I should set out what this liberal internationalist thinks, and what he believes liberal internationalism means today. What are to me its main themes – all of them especially germane to coping with the problems of the twenty-first century – run like threads through the different chapters of this book.

First, liberal internationalism should encompass a strong belief in the rule of law, democratic government, open markets and free trade. I also reckon that it is a proper aim of foreign policy to pursue these desirable outcomes consistently, coherently and without a constant parade of double standards or a precisely delineated template into which every country has to fit. Many of the problems of the poorest parts of the world are the result of them being shut out of, or shutting themselves out of, competitive global markets. They also stem from bad governance, which is both a cause and a consequence of political instability and violence. Dependence on easily lootable resources like diamonds and oil, and the proliferation of small arms (Chapters 6 and 7) stoke and pay for conflict. We need to avoid future conflicts over water (Chapter 8).

Second, the global order established after the Second World War on the sort of lines advocated by Woodrow Wilson after the First, has been challenged in two major ways. Its institutions – the United Nations (UN) above all – work much less well than they should, and the power balances between countries especially in economic terms have recently changed with the re-emergence of Asian economic strength. We should not resile from trying to reform and reinvigorate the UN. But we cannot postpone international cooperation until a perfect UN has emerged from its chrysalis. Regional and global collaboration is essential to deal with issues like epidemic disease (Chapter 13) and, above all, the biggest challenge to the world: global warming and climate change (Chapter 12). America and Europe can no longer set the global agenda on their own. They have to involve China, India and others like Brazil and South Africa in the management of the world’s problems. Crucially, China has to be found a place at the table without the democracies accepting the validity of that country’s implied and sometimes explicit critique of the guiding values and standards of plural, free societies.

Third, I am convinced that good domestic policy is often the best foreign policy. Failure to deal adequately with the supply of drugs from broken-down states such as Afghanistan is, for example, part and parcel of the failure of domestic drugs policy in the West (Chapter 10).

Fourth, I am not convinced – liberal internationalist lapel badge notwithstanding – that the state has withered away because of globalization (Chapter 3), nor that it should. But I do not believe either that the definition of the state assumed in the seventeenth century (Chapter 2) is appropriate today. Individuals have rights as well as states. Nation-states continue to be the crucial links in any chain of effective global action against problems that cannot be dealt with by a single government. The authority and effectiveness of nation-states should come because we trust them to safeguard and represent ‘us’.

So who do I mean by that conveniently all-purpose, unexplained ‘us’? Who am I talking about? Who are ‘we’? The ‘we’ who are both formed by events and capable of forming them, too. The definition of ‘we’ is one of the starting points on any historical or political journey, and it is therefore at the heart of this book. ‘We’ starts small and ends big, though when used by an individual these days it will never go quite as far as Alexis de Tocqueville thought it travelled for French kings before the Revolution. These Bourbons assumed that the state was simply an extension of themselves. ‘L’Etat, c’est moi,’ Louis XIV, the Sun King, is claimed to have remarked in 1655 – apocryphal this may have been, yet he certainly believed it. For most of us today, the question is which ‘we’ when? Small children delight in writing galactic addresses for themselves: ‘A. Smith, 10, Station Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Europe, Earth, Solar System, Universe.’ Even that leaves out plenty of identification marks that are not contained in any address: ‘C of E’ or Muslim, Arsenal supporter or Chelsea fan, Boy Scout or Girl Guide. We are all members of several groups, with mixed loyalties and muddled connections.

These are the borderlands in which I have spent much of my political life. A Catholic conservative from Irish immigrant stock, my first ministerial post was in Northern Ireland, where I quickly caused a stir by making the sign of the cross after grace at a civic lunch in Derry, something I had done ever since childhood. This apparently was a public signal of my Catholicism. Did not Protestants cross themselves? And was I actually in Catholic Derry – Catholic, that is, unless you were a Protestant playing for the Derry rugby team – or was I in Protestant Londonderry – Protestant that is, unless you were a Catholic member of the Londonderry Chamber of Commerce? No wonder it was called – London/Derry – ‘stroke’ city. Inadequate sensitivity to these theological niceties meant that I badly misjudged denominational differences in kneecappings on my first visit to the Accident and Emergency Unit at a hospital in Belfast. When I protested at reference to a ‘Protestant’ kneecapping, it was patiently explained to me that there really was a tribal though admittedly not a liturgical difference. Catholics, I was told, used a shotgun for this system of unofficial ‘justice’; Protestants used a Black and Decker drill. These were not issues that concerned papal authority, but they did differentiate ‘our’ knees from ‘theirs’.

As the last governor of a large British colony (we called it a territory, which sounded a little more neutral) I found myself wielding authority over mainly ethnically Chinese men and women, in an exercise of anonymous sovereignty that was recognized in quiet practice, though not in public declaration, by the future sovereign power in Beijing, a sovereign power from whose authority a large proportion of Hong Kong’s population had once fled. Having handed over a colony, I then went to Brussels to hand over a nation-state to foreign rule: at least, that is how it played in Rupert Murdoch’s biggest selling British newspaper. My appointment in 1999 as a European Commissioner was marked by a ‘cartoon’ in the Sun showing two sketches – in the first I wept over the Union Flag in Hong Kong; in the second I surrendered it to the nameless bureaucratic führers in Brussels. A Commissioner’s life at the heart of the European Union (EU) certainly brought me into sharp contact with what exactly national sovereignty means today, how it can be made more effective by being shared, and how disengaged political rhetoric about this whole process can be from public practice and private emotion.

Plainly, whatever the defects of national institutions, we identify with them before we connect with the organizations established to manage shared or pooled sovereignty, from the Commission in Brussels to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva to the UN in New York. Nation-states, which are both the reason for and the result of the modern world, have absorbed our tribal memories; they subsume our narrower identities; they have become our ‘imagined communities’, the main (if occasionally crumbling) pillars in our political world.² They often make bogus claims to historical integrity and tribal cohesion. Consider, for instance, the question of borders, and take the example of the country whose name – Ukraine – literally means ‘borderland’. Joseph Conrad, the novelist, was born south-west of Kiev. His earliest surviving work is a note to his grandmother, thanking her for some cakes. It is signed ‘grandson, Pole, Catholic, gentleman’, though there is no reference to the continent or the planet.³Conrad, of course, the Pole from the Ukraine who wrote his famous novels in English, died in Kent and is buried in Canterbury. Kent, bordered on three sides by the Thames Estuary and the English Channel, has not known the dramatic border reconfigurations that have been the stuff of Ukrainian history, its customs posts and defensive fortifications moving hither and yon over the Carpathian mountains and Galicia. Lviv, lying fifty miles east of today’s Polish-Ukrainian border, was Lemberg when part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it became Lwow when Polish from i9i8to 1945, Lvov when the Russians took it after the Second World War and Lviv when Ukraine became independent in 1991. Go there and while chewing your poppy-seed bun, ask who are ‘we’? In Lviv, if you ask me, ‘we’ are Mitteleuropeans.

For all the often fake claims of nation-states, and for all the vast mistakes that they made in the last century, they remain the principal arbiters of politics. We are prepared to accept that their actions in our name – we, the citizens of Britain, or Australia, or the United States, or India, or China – can still secure our best interests as individuals and as members of a national group. Increasingly, we also understand (borrowing from Lord Palmerston) that while our nation-states may not have permanent friends, they do have permanent interests which include cooperation to cope with problems that one state cannot deal with on its own. The ‘we’ crosses frontiers. There is increasingly a ‘we’ that is global, a ‘we’ that feels itself part of the international community, a ‘we’ that knows about the big issues on the international agenda. These larger problems, which form the main part of this book, are often the product, as though part of a Hegelian dialectic, of the solution of previous problems. We have today lost the order brought on by our response to xenophobic nationalism and preserved in an uneasy truce for forty years between two mightily armed powers, one democratic, the other totalitarian.

Today’s problems can be solved, doubtless at the cost of the emergence of new problems. There is no inevitability about disaster, even though some predict that survival until the end of the twenty-first century is now no better than an even-ways bet.⁴ We – nation-states working together in different and varying formations – have to steer a course between all too many rocks and hard places. There is no simple formula for survival, no global plan waiting to be set in place, no institution that will provide compass and captain for the world. But there is hope and there is reason. As ever in human affairs, there are better and there are worse ways of going about coping with the predicament of living together on this planet. So do not expect this book to provide a manifesto or manual for survival. What it aims to do is to suggest ways in which realistic liberal internationalists should try to answer today’s and tomorrow’s principal problems and shape a better future.

As I have already argued, the state is pivotally important in political life. It binds a society to territory, which is clearly delineated on every map. See, for example, the border of Iraq, drawn above all by Britain with an eye to the discovery of oil reserves as she shared out Ottoman territory with France after the First World War. This invented border defines a state that presently runs from Kurdistan in the north across the plateau that separates the Tigris from the Euphrates to the flood plains and marshlands in the south. Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria are on the other side of the Iraqi state’s borders, and they too have borders of their own marked out by geography, chance and the retreat of old empires. The society and the territory that in human and geographical terms comprise the state are in their turn bound to the exercise of authority. What the German political economist Max Weber regarded as the state’s internal monopoly of the use of force (theoretical at least, though not, as in Iraq, always actual) gives it the principal element for government across its territory and the basis on which the fundamental political identity and loyalty of individuals living within its borders are defined. With the ultimate authority to govern – that is to tax, regulate, protect and defend –states have traditionally been the cause and the community for which people ‘mobilize, kill others and commit their lives’.⁵

Because of their supposed ability to impose order within their territories – their jurisdictions, as the lawyers put it – states have been the main recognized actors in international affairs for five hundred years. Each state accepts other states’ authority and supreme discretion over their jurisdiction. Relations between states rest on the theoretical premise of recognized equality such that ‘none is entitled to command; none is required to obey’.⁶ States may agree to share their sovereignty up to limits that they themselves determine: the limits are pushed a fairly short distance in the UN, rather further in the EU. But the state itself is the authority that determines where and how the sharing is done. The state is supreme within its territory, and outside it states are theoretically equal though plainly not always so in practice.

The flags that flutter bravely outside the UN’s skyscraper in Manhattan’s September breeze, when heads of state and government from all around the world attend that body’s annual General Assembly, represent the 192 countries which are members. Each has its own national anthem, few as stirring as Italy’s ‘Fratelli d’ltalia’; each its own symbols and system of governance; each its own pretensions to authority. Bogota and Tirana claim to control their own national frontiers; Kinshasa and Mogadishu feign to levy taxes and dispense justice across their terrain; Queen Elizabeth’s writ purportedly runs in Northern Ireland’s Crossmaglen and President Hu’s among the Uigurs in China’s far north-west. When states cooperate, their jointly exercised authority fills in the cracks that may appear from time to time between the manifestations of individual state sovereignty, so that a threat that one state on its own cannot overcome may be resolved by collective action by several states. In taking such action, although the United States, Bangladesh and Belgium are notionally equal, the power – especially the military and economic muscle – of the world’s only superpower gives it a greater authority than others in shaping the world for better and conceivably for worse. The superpower can, like every previous big country in history, throw its weight around and get its own way. It has been a feature of what communist apologists first called American hegemony – a feature that has served to sustain it since the Second World War – that the US has usually been extraordinarily restrained in using its own power.

Unswerving belief in the efficacy of states and sovereignty seems to have been scattered like thistledown in a gale as the last century turned into the present one. How much these days can states do and achieve on their own? Can they secure the welfare and safety of their citizens, policing borders, regulating economic activity, protecting public health, avoiding environmental catastrophe? As the vocabulary of state aspiration becomes more ambitious, with political leaders promising almost every sort of fulfilled happiness, the capacity of states to deliver on these promises appears to become ever more suspect. A peaceful life, let alone a happy one, often seems more problematic than rhetoric suggests should be the case.

America’s Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) underlined this point in its assessment of the last year of the last century. It raised, for example, the threat of organized crime, noting that criminal groups were involved in buying, selling and moving around the world humans, narcotics, arms, metals, minerals, endangered flora and fauna, and even Freon gas (a chlorofluorocarbon used in commerce and industry). It went on to note that these groups were engaged in large-scale money laundering, fraud, extortion, bribery, economic espionage, smuggling of embargoed commodities, multinational auto theft, international prostitution, industrial and technological espionage, bank fraud, financial market manipulation, counterfeiting, contract murder and corruption. This insidious threat, as the Institute calls it, ‘covertly challenges the state’s prerogatives and control over its own activities’.⁷ I’ll say. All this is complex and baffling, though we see every day its consequences in our newspapers and in our own lives. We read about poisonings and the murky activities of ‘retired’ KGB agents in London restaurants and on London streets. A friend of mine from Hong Kong, visiting Beijing, found by identifying cigarette burns on the leather upholstery that he was being chauffeured in the Chinese capital in his own car, recently stolen back home. Driving from the centre of Tirana to its airport five years ago, I counted one by one over 350 Mercedes – a limousine crop harvested by Albanian entrepreneurs (of a sort) in Europe’s rich north. In Naples, our fellow Europeans await the nod from the Mafia to collect the mounds of refuse from the gutters.

Crime groups organize networks of drug producers, processors, traffickers and street sellers which often work closely together. The INSS cited an example identified by French researchers which described a network involving criminals from Latin America, eastern Europe, Israel, Africa and Pakistan. Hashish that came originally from Pakistan was carried to Mombasa, Kenya, where it was put into cargoes of tea and reshipped to Haifa, Israel, through Durban, South Africa. The drugs were then put on to a ship that carried cargo to Constanza, Romania, every two weeks. From Constanza it was transported by way of Bratislava, Slovakia, to Italy for consumption there. The head of the network was a German citizen of Ugandan origin who worked for a Romanian company. Each of the countries through which the hashish was moved has its own border police, internal police, customs regulations, drug-enforcement agencies and other manifestations of sober and serious sovereignty.

Organized crime and the trafficking of drugs – a more valuable traded international commodity than iron and steel – are only two examples of a more general phenomenon: the impact of globalization on the pretensions of the nation-state (Chapters 9 and 10). What can states do on their own to cope with the problems that threaten their citizens, for instance epidemic disease, the threat of which causes so much apprehension? I recall flying through Singapore at the height of the SARS scare in 2003. My plane to Australia was almost as empty as the Mary Celeste. The globalization of threats comes in many forms. We recall the antecedents of the 9/11 terrorists, all citizens of a new, more open and interdependent world. The leader of the terrorist cell, Mohammed Atta, for example, was an urban planner from Cairo who worked in Hamburg with the three friends who trained with him in Afghanistan for the murderous attacks in the USA. Recent environmental surveys estimate that about one third of the toxic mercury pollutants (produced by the burning of coal) that get into American soil and waterways come from other countries, especially China.

The ‘father’ of the Pakistan nuclear weapon, A. Q. Khan (whose activities are covered in Chapter 5), toured the world in the late 1990s trying to peddle home-made tool kits to construct weapons of mass destruction. He helped Iran, among others. North Korea, shorn of anything to sell save counterfeit money and drugs, was thought to harbour the ambition to hawk bespoke if primitive bombs to any state or terrorist group that could afford to buy. Globalization was said to be a principal vector of the triumph of pluralism in the last century. But today the dark side of globalization seems to be a threat to the sovereignty of all states, including those that have embraced liberal values.

Even the mighty have taken a tumble. Well before its blood and treasure drained away so incontinently into the sands of Mesopotamia, American leadership and technological hubris had already been discomfited. After al-Qaeda’s attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in August 1998, Washington rained Tomahawk missiles on suspected terrorist sites in Sudan and Afghanistan. Over three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of cruise missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical factory near Khartoum and a terrorist training camp near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. At the latter, probably six terrorists were killed. Many of the missiles failed to explode. Russian intelligence reported that Osama bin Laden sold a number of these unexploded missiles to China for over $10 million. Other missiles landed in Pakistan. Two Pakistanis were killed, according to General Hamid Gul, the former head of his country’s military intelligence, and the Pakistanis are believed to have used the missiles that failed to explode in their country for designing their own missiles. This abortive venture was entitled Operation Infinite Reach.⁸ The reach may be infinite, if inaccurate, but the hegemony can no longer be exercised with confident and magisterial military swagger.

Economics appears for a time to pass all this political turbulence and uncertainty by, heedless of headlines. The five years after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon saw further bombings in Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid and London. There were wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and heavy fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, primarily in Lebanon. Iran and North Korea were locked in arguments with America and other countries about their nuclear ambitions. The Middle East peace process was deadlocked. Russia’s relations with her neighbours grew increasingly fractious. The price of oil soared. Yet the world economy during this period grew faster than in any comparable period since the mid-seventies. GDP growth per head went up by 3.2 per cent a year, the highest figure that has ever been recorded. What did markets then know that worried political leaders overlooked? They recognized perhaps that growth in China and India was leading a deflationary boom similar to that triggered by Chicago and the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century. And what did markets know as an asset bubble grew and grew in America and the princes of banking harnessed their glittering wagons to its effervescent ascent? But before America’s banking crash in late 2007 and early 2008 the global economy had swept tens of millions of the hitherto poor into relative prosperity. They could eat better, dress better, live longer, be better educated, buy their children Nikes and iPods. What did the crumbling of age-old political truths matter to them? Why should they worry about the fragmentation of the political authority that had once kept them safe, or the globalization that made them better off?

Political scientists have their own explanations for what has happened, shaping meaning out of random events, conceptualizing from incidents enacted by individuals. Is this really a science at all? It has method, but how much do the docketing and enumeration capture the essence of what is happening? We know that political science cares little for the length of Cleopatra’s nose, so how much can it comprehend what Jorge Luis Borges called an ‘impulse more profound than reason’?⁹ We can trace the origin of the modern state to the seventeenth-century Peace of Westphalia. We can study the accumulation of capital, the development of central banking, the rise of centralized bureaucracies, the industrialization of war in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We can tick off the great changes in our democracies – winning the right to vote, mass education, the coming of welfare capitalism. But how do we explain the events of St Vitus’ Day 1914 in Sarajevo, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s Graf & Stift limousine that took the wrong turning, the mental state of the 19-year-old consumptive student Gavrilo Princip, who suddenly found the archduke and his wife in the sights of his revolver? According to Claud Cockburn, there used to be a game played at the end of each year in the 1920s and 30s in the editorial room of The Times. Journalists would compete to devise the most improbable imaginary headline. The winner one year was – ‘Archduke Found Alive; First World War Fought In Vain’. No Princip, no car losing its way – would history have been different? ‘The terrible Ifs accumulate’, as Winston Churchill wrote.¹⁰

So how do we explain what is arbitrary, villainous, poetic, unique? Was it only long-term economic weakness and bureaucratic overreach which brought down the Berlin Wall? To be sure, there were short- and long-term sources of Soviet malaise and colonial weariness; there was also more immediately Hungary’s announcement in 1989 that its recently undertaken obligations under the UN Convention on Refugees were incompatible with its secret treaty on refugees with East Germany. But the action itself, the destruction of the wall stone by stone, the unwillingness of the soldiers to open fire, makes no more sense than Luther on All Souls Eve in 1517 nailing his arguments against indulgences (so tradition tells us) to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church. At least, these actions make no sense unless we recognize that they were personal, emotional, passionate, in a sense lyrical. They were the poetry of the deed. Ultimately, while some prescient individual scholars predicted what would happen, most theories and branches of political science failed miserably in 1989. They failed too, when well-educated, middle-class Muslims from strongly governed states – not poor, uneducated, unemployed boys from failed states –turned civil aircraft into precision guided weapons and flew them into the symbolic heart of America’s global commercial and military power. So political scientists rarely tell us more than part of the story. But they still help to explain how the world got to where it is today, and why the gap between presumption and reality is growing, as nation-states so often flex and flail their imagined autonomous sovereignty like boxers beating the air with their gloved fists.

2

The Journey So Far

The search for the origins of the state, for the opening up of the modern world, yields numerous answers. Adam Smith, in Book IV of The Wealth of Nations, in the second half of the eighteenth century, decided the clock should start at the end of the fifteenth century, with the momentous discoveries of the Americas and of a passage to the East Indies via the Cape of Good Hope – in Smith’s words, ‘the two greatest and most important events in the history of mankind’. This great age of European sea power was later to be dubbed the ‘Columbian Age’, ended only by the invention and spread of the railway and telegraph.

For Machiavelli the starting point for the modern age was Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494 with a French army that looked like a professional force. The French cavalry was not the feudal host of old, even though its members might ape past codes of chivalric conduct. They moved and fought in formation, with clear lines of command, ready to deliver the coup de grace to opposing infantry formations once their gunners had scattered these pike-men. Cities long considered strong surrendered at the approach of the new bronze cannon that Charles brought in his train. Charles’s soldiers were not mercenaries, paid bands under the command of a contractor (condottieri), rather like today’s navvies on a building site, though there were many such operating in Italy at the time. They were officers of the French Crown paid out of the royal treasury and deployed in organized and mutually supportive formations and combinations. It was an army whose composition would later have been recognized by Marlborough and Wellington.

In The Art of War, the only book that Machiavelli published in his own lifetime, he argued that the ability to wage war depended less and less on a small professional class – whether made up of aristocrats or mercenaries – and more and more on the ability of a whole society to put effective military forces into the field. He reacted strongly against the predominance in Italy in his own time of mercenary forces, the campagnie de ventura, led by a condottiere. The richest of the great powers in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were the Italian city-states; their mastery lay in their treasuries which were filled to the brim with ready cash. This made Italy a magnet, an El Dorado, for the mercenaries, the ‘free lancers’, who were useful to trading states like Florence or Milan which lacked the vast agricultural hinterlands necessary to feudalism and the feudal knight-based military. But by the end of the fifteenth century, it was obvious – at least to Machiavelli – that the mercenary era was ending. The careers of some of the most notable of these soldiers of fortune showed why. The Essex man Sir John Hawkwood, the most notorious mercenary of his age (the second half of the fourteenth century), had extorted money from terrified city-states, offering his bloody sword to the highest bidder.¹ Disloyalty, dishonesty, greed and unheroic caution were usually associated with men like Hawkwood, who nevertheless was immortalized in a magnificent fresco by Paolo Uccello in the cathedral in Florence – the city fathers wanted him, for their own purposes, to represent civic virtues rather different from the reality of his life. Machiavelli regarded the Englishman as a typical example of the military system that could not and should not last: the condottieri were unreliable; they were blackmailers; they were deserters; when they were unemployed, off the books of a city-state, it was difficult to distinguish between them and brigands. For the condottiere, his company of armed men was an irreplaceable investment. He was therefore reluctant to get them to do what they were paid to do, namely to fight. They were cautious professionals, with a wary, even comradely regard for others in their trade. The ability to wage war successfully clearly depended more and more on the power to put an army of the state into the field, to maintain it and to command it. This required states with the sort of immense power commanded by Francis I of France and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Machiavelli worried about how a republic could survive in a world like this. He rightly thought it would need an army of well-drilled conscripts.

This is the point of modern departure. Between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, the distinction grew between those states able to keep up to date with the latest military technology, the latest fortifications, the latest tactics – all of which called for huge cash investment – and those states unable to do so. As a result of their weakness, the poorer states that were left behind in this military revolution were subjugated or destroyed. This was the ultimate military means test. Those that passed the test emerged as strong states having suppressed, usually violently, those feudal relics that might try to rival their own power. The mercenary story does not, incidentally, end here. We shall come back to the use of mercenaries when we consider later the deployment of modern military forces by states that cannot afford to put in the field traditional armies of the size needed to accomplish their security objectives, or cannot persuade enough young men and women (now that the draft is largely ended) to serve professionally in the uniforms of the state at the price that the state is prepared to pay them.

The second great dividing line to emerge between the medieval and the modern world – it follows from the first – was money. As Robert de Balsac, a veteran of the Italian campaigns of Charles VIII, wrote: ‘Most important of all, success in war depends on having enough money to provide whatever the enterprise needs.’² It was cash that saved some of the smaller nations of Europe, such as the United Provinces, from being swept away entirely by the bigger states. Money in the sixteenth century came from trade, and the control of trade became the critical precondition of war. Making war and trading were therefore almost synonymous. The privateer with his ‘letter of marque’, giving him an official warrant to raid and capture the merchant shipping of an enemy nation, was the maritime equivalent of the condottiere, and it was hard to tell the difference between privateer and pirate. I recall a tour of the great cathedral in Santiago de Compostela that contains a plaque referring to Sir Francis Drake. Our Spanish guide introduced him to us as ‘the English pirate’, hardly surprising since he had raided the Galician coast. ‘I think you mean the seafaring hero and explorer,’ an English friend intervened. The exploits of privateers were given official licence by mid-sixteenth-century negotiations that proposed two great ‘Amity lines’, establishing zones west of the Azores and south of the Tropic of Cancer where naval warfare could take place, in the name of trade, without jeopardizing the peace of Europe. In the Cold War, there was a similar understanding that proxy wars could be fought in the Third World without disturbing the uneasy peace between East and West in Europe.

Trade was only part of the picture. How could a sixteenth-century warrior prince turn the wealth gained from trade into power? It was possible to bring spices from the New World to the Old, but what happened then? Traditionally, a prince raised money through sacking an opponent’s cities or foraging in enemy countryside, which defrayed the costs of campaigning. This provided the ready resources to pay mercenaries until there had been a military victory. As borders were to some extent stabilized (though in many places they remained pretty fluid until the Second World War), order was established and trade was developed; taxation became the rationalized means of legal despoliation. But neither pillage nor (as became clear in the seventeenth century) taxation really provided the certainty and continuity that a prince needed. The breakthrough came with the development of credit and finance.

The early masters of this evolution were the Dutch. The bankers of Antwerp lent money, for example, to the famous merchant family,