Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 2, April–May 2009, pp. 183–190
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Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century
Philip Bobbitt. London: Allen Lane, 2008. £25.00/$35.00. 672 pp.
We are living in a time of transition, indeed on the cusp of a new age, and these circumstances require us to have a radically changed view of strategy, of law and indeed of the state. This is the message of Philip Bobbitt’s remarkable mixture of description, prescription and prophecy. More particularly, Terror and Consent is about change in the constitutional order of states, and about ‘whether that change will result in the triumph of states of consent or states of terror’. This book has attracted some big-name support: the dust jacket includes notably warm commendations from Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger, General Rupert Smith and others. Does the book deliver what is promised and praised? Is it of the same standard as his earlier work, The Shield of Achilles (2002), in which he explored the links between the internal constitutional order of states and their role in the world? There are many grounds for criticism of the present work, and I will come to them later. First, however, it is necessary to outline the book’s central propositions. Without doing too much violence to Bobbitt’s wide-ranging survey, these can be reduced to eight.
1. The nation-state, which was the dominant constitutional order of the twentieth century, is being replaced by what Bobbitt calls the market state. The key difference is that whereas the nation-state ‘based its legitimacy on a promise to improve the material welfare of its people’, the market state ‘promises to maximize the opportunity of its people, tending to privatize many state activities and making representative government more responsible to consumers’. The market state is seen as ‘a minimal provider or redistributor’. It is likely to have an interest in enhancing the rule of law without which markets cannot flourish. However, if it is not careful it may ‘enable the commodification of weapons of mass destruction’. Thus, just as nation-states were far from being generally benevolent, so the market state can assume many different forms, some of which could be corrosive of internal and international order.
2. It has been possible, ever since the emergence of modern states at the time of the Renaissance, to draw a sharp distinction between states of consent and states of terror. ‘States of consent govern on the basis of authority freely derived from the unfettered consent of the governed, authority that must be regularly and frequently renewed and that can be withdrawn; states of terror govern by means of repression and are not bound by the freely given decision of the public.’ Both can evolve into market states. Thus, although many states of terror have been nation-states, it is quite possible that some could be market states: ‘al Qaeda is but a precursor of future market states of terror’.
3. The growth of terrorism, and the emerging availability of weapons of mass destruction through clandestine markets, are both a consequence of the change in the...
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Adam Roberts is President-elect of the British Academy and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Studies in Oxford University’s Department of Politics and International Relations. He is also an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He was the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University from 1986 to the end of 2007.
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