The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (10 page)

American economist Mancur Olson describes the rise of states another way, using the metaphor of banditry. Bandits survive by plundering the goods of others and moving on to their next victims. At some point, the bandit decides that roving the countryside in search of loot is too fatiguing and chooses instead to “loot in place” by forcibly taking over a community and extorting the locals for wealth under the heavy hand of tyranny, like a warlord, while enjoying a stable life not “on the run.” However, this gives the stationary bandit an incentive to provide some semblance of government to ensure that people continue to produce wealth and also protect them from roving bandits.
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In this way, a state is a “stationary bandit” that evolved from “roving bandits.”

For Tilly and Olson, states arose from their superior ability to use force and eliminate nonstate rivals, rendering the distinction between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” force ambiguous, elastic, and invented. For them, might made right, and states were the mightiest. Monikers such as
legitimate
and
just
used to sanction state force were probably only internalized once states became the dominant political authority in Europe, recognizing no other authority except other states.

Many and perhaps most international relations scholars believe the modern world order is inherently stable. They describe Westphalian sovereignty as a “system” or “society” of states that govern the world, and a good example of this today is the United Nations, whose voting members are states alone. Stability is sustained by natural balancing within the system, as rival powers cooperate to prevent any single state from gaining too much power. States check one another’s power through the Machiavellian calculus of national interests and balance-of-power politics, with military might as the ultimate arbiter. Hence the Westphalian order maintains global governance with the state as the prime actor of international relations.

The implications of 1648 are profound for international relations, because it served as the beginning of a new world order, ruled by states. It resolved the
medieval problem of overlapping authorities and allegiances by marrying sovereignty to physical territory, organized by state, and stateless authorities such as the papacy retained no authority at all. Perhaps this is why Pope Innocent X referred to the Peace of Westphalia as “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane and devoid of meaning for all time.”
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Unfortunately for Innocent, the following four centuries saw the Westphalian order grow from a European model to a worldwide one, partly because European powers exported it through colonization. Gradually, the state dominated all other forms of international authority. The papacy, once the powerful adversary of kings and princes in the Middle Ages, lost all territorial control by 1870, and its authority was largely relegated to the sphere of morality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Westphalian state system had completely replaced the medieval order.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, European states were empires of such strength that they could successfully make claims to controlling territory and monopolizing violence beyond their borders and into Africa, Asia, and the Americas. From 1880 to 1914, European state politics played out on a global scale, in the crises of Fashoda, various Balkans wars on the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier, the Great Game of Anglo-Russo rivalry in central Asia, economic competition in China, and the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 that settled the scramble for Africa. New and non-European states also sought a place in the new world order, as the United States and Japan embarked on colonial conquests and even bested European powers on occasion, in the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). European state hegemony went so far that France, under the Second Republic, declared Algeria an integral part of its own territory.

World Wars I and II remain the greatest expression of Westphalian war, in both scope and destruction, and their battlefields spanned the globe, by then mostly colonized by European states. In addition to the horrific losses of life, World War I also claimed the Habsburg and Ottoman empires as casualties, and the Treaty of Versailles seriously enfeebled Germany. However, this destructive test of the Westphalian order did not invalidate it. In one generation, Japan’s imperial pursuits put it in direct competition with the United States, Italy’s imperial conquests took it deep into northeast Africa, and Germany rebounded to threaten European powers once more under the Nazi regime.

On September 1, 1939, World War II erupted and perhaps marked the zenith of the Westphalian order. The Axis countries of Germany and Japan suffered total defeat and occupation by other states, and Italy was rendered ineffectual as a world power. The Allied countries of Britain and France were also grievously wounded and retreated from their colonies in the decades to follow. The Suez Canal crisis in 1956 demonstrated that Britain and France, the last of the old
European powers, were no longer leading actors on the world stage, replaced by the younger United States and Soviet Union. However, international relations had changed, because warfare had changed. Armed with world-destroying nuclear weapons, the US and Soviet superpowers sought power without tempting direct confrontation and therefore fought a cold war through allied states, proxy wars, and economic competition.

Today the normative biases of the state-centric Westphalian order are so strong that they form the DNA of international law, politics, and scholarship. For instance, the primacy of states is ensconced in
international law
, a term literally meaning “law between states.” The three tenets of Westphalian sovereignty are codified in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Article 2 (1) of the UN Charter, rulings by the International Court of Justice,
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and other legal documents.

In the Westphalian world order, states are the only actors in international politics, the only subjects of international law, and the only entities that can legitimately use force to impose their authority. Consistent with Tilly and Olson, nonstate actors who employ violence are criminalized as “rebels,” “terrorists,” “insurgents,” “mercenaries,” and so on, despite the fact that some states use similar tactics, as frequently seen by government crackdowns on dissidents. If captured, these nonstate fighters are not afforded any privileges, such as “prisoner of war” status, as outlined in the Geneva Conventions, because they are not “lawful combatants.” Such privileges are reserved exclusively for the club of states and their soldiers.

The Westphalian order is also the dominant paradigm of global politics. The primacy of the state is so ingrained in policymakers’ understanding of world affairs that after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, many in the United States found it inconceivable that a nonstate actor, al-Qaida, could orchestrate such an attack without help from a state. No less a figure than James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, said it was unlikely—if not impossible—for al-Qaida to act alone and without state sponsorship. In an interview with the television show
Good Morning America
, he said, “We particularly need to look hard at whether there may be some state—in my mind, most likely, Iraq—that is working together with bin Laden’s group.”
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Nor was the CIA director alone. Others at the highest levels of the US government spent years misguidedly looking for links between al-Qaida and states like Iraq, but to no avail. The United States invaded Iraq in part because of suspected ties between the regime and the terrorist organization. For example, in the
lead-up to the Iraq War, US President George W. Bush alleged that Iraq President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida had “high-level contacts that go back a decade” and that “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.”
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Many policymakers remain paradigm prisoners of the Westphalian order.

In terms of scholarship, the canonical reading of the Westphalian world order has dominated international relations theory in Europe and North America for the last fifty years. In 1948, on the three-hundredth anniversary of Westphalia, legal scholar Leo Gross published a widely read article that described the treaty in utopian terms as “the majestic portal which leads from the old into the new world” and credited it with “the outstanding place … [in] the evolution of international relations.”
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Hans Morgenthau, a leading scholar of international relations in the twentieth century, explained that the “rules of international law were securely established in 1648,” and “the Treaty of Westphalia … made the territorial state the cornerstone of the modern state system.”
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According to
The Penguin Dictionary of International Relations
, “a number of important principles, which were subsequently to form the legal and political framework of modern interstate relations, were established at Westphalia. It explicitly recognized a society of states based on the principle of territorial sovereignty.”
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The list of quotes goes on.
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Such is the strength of the Westphalian orthodoxy and fervent bias toward states as the central political unit of international relations in law, politics, and scholarship.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Cold War ended, leaving only a single superpower standing, the United States. To some observers, this signified the everlasting triumph of the liberal-democratic state over all others and the Darwinian resolution of the Westphalian system. In a best-selling book,
The End of History and the Last Man
, scholar Francis Fukuyama asserted that the end of the Cold War was nothing short of the “end of history.” Inspired by Hegelian dialectics, referring to nineteenth-century philosopher Georg Hegel and his idea of history, Fukuyama argued that the United States’ Cold War victory signaled “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
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World peace was finally at hand.

Unfortunately for Fukuyama’s argument, the future also had a say. With a single victor under the Westphalian order, the world grew more chaotic. The liberal-democratic enterprise did not spread to weaker states within the
international system, naturally buttressing it; instead, many weaker states faltered even more. Some states lost control of their territory, as in the conflicts in the Balkans, Indonesia, and Sudan. Other states, such as Liberia and Somalia, failed altogether. Many lost their monopoly of force, resulting in civil wars and large swaths of ungoverned spaces in which armed nonstate actors—separatist groups in northern Mali, warlords in eastern Congo, and violent extremists in Yemen—have almost free rein. Some states, such as Guinea Bissau in West Africa, are co-opted by drug cartels and become “narco-states,” a literal manifestation of Olson’s stationary bandit. Transnational terrorists such as al-Qaida threaten weak and strong states alike, and in 2013 declared the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham, an independent emirate that spans across Iraq and Syria. In fact, so worrisome was the rise of weak states by 2002 that the United States declared it was “now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.”
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Sovereignty is not only eroding inside states, but it is also being corroded from outside them. After the Cold War ended, nonstate actors such as the UN began to interfere in the domestic politics of countries in direct contravention of its own charter, which enshrines the core Westphalian principles in Article 2.
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In theory, the UN and similar institutions represent the collective will of states, which make up the UN’s membership. But in reality, some of these international organizations have transcended into global actors in their own right, in a “sum is greater than the parts” trend.

For instance, a year after the Soviet Union formally capitulated, then–UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali boldly declared that “the time of absolute sovereignty … has passed; its theory was never matched by reality.” Here the word
sovereignty
is code for “states,” referring to the Westphalian order. His solution was a new order managed by a muscular UN that administrated above states, and cautioned: “The Organization must never again be crippled as it was in the era that has now passed.”
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Since then, the UN has authorized military interventions into a state’s territory against its will—a violation of Westphalian sovereignty—as seen in northern Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia), Haiti, Liberia, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone. From 1945 to 1989, the UN authorized seventeen such interventions, yet from 1990 to 2006, it approved more than twenty
per year
.
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Such actions would be unthinkable in a strong Westphalian system.

In the twenty years since Fukuyama’s end of history, it seems that state sovereignty is eroding on most fronts, and thus, the Westphalian order with it. This has spawned a surge in debate among experts. Some have pronounced the state dead, while others dismiss this, like reports of Mark Twain’s death, as an exaggeration.
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Many have begun to question the orthodoxy of 1648. Some, like Philip Bobbitt and Robert Jackson, argue that the state is transforming from a land-based authority into something else.
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Others, such as Jörg Friedrichs and S. J. Korbin,
suggest that the Westphalian order is a historical anomaly. For them, the state is neither timeless nor natural, and history is replete with alternative models of human political organization, from tribes to kingdoms to empires.
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Still others contend that Westphalia is a myth altogether. Edward Keene, Andreas Osiander, and others describe 1648 as a figment of the nineteenth-century imagination and reified in twentieth-century academic theories.
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In fact, the language of the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück does not articulate an international system of states. One scholar even compares the Westphalian world to Narnia.
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