Читать книгу Foreign Policy of The 50 Stars - Ellias Aghili Dehnavi - Страница 7

FORCE AND THE STATE WHERE LAW IS MISSED

In the state of Anarchy, force is integral to foreign policy because military power can be wielded not only forcefully but also "peacefully." The forceful use of military power is physical: a state harms, cripples, or destroys the possessions of another state. The peaceful use of military power is intimidating: a state threatens to harm, cripple, or destroy, but does not actually do so. To use military power forcefully is to wage war; to use it peacefully is to threaten war. Only when diplomacy has failed is war generally waged. Mainly in the hope that war can be avoided are threats usually made. For any given state, war is the exception, not the rule, in its relations with other countries, because most of the time a given state is at peace, not war. Consequently, states use their military power more frequently in the peaceful than in the forceful mode.

When used forcefully, the effects of military power are easy to identify. A state unleashes its military forces, and it either achieves its objectives or fails to. The adversary is defeated and coerced; or it remains victorious and unbowed; or the battle is fought to a draw. Used in war, force is a blunt instrument, but it can achieve decisive results if wielded properly. When used peacefully, states employ their military power in more subtle, and therefore in less well-defined ways. Used peacefully, military power is held at the ready, and its exact influence on political outcomes becomes more difficult to trace. The warwaging use of military power is akin to a powerful flood: it washes away all before it. The peaceful use of military power is akin to a gravitational field among large objects in space: it affects all motion that takes place, but it produces its effects imperceptibly. The effects of floods are dramatic and easy to pinpoint; those of gravity seem more mundane and are harder to discern. A flood demonstrates its effects by its presence; a gravitational field, by its absence. Most of the time the effect of military power looks more like gravity than a flood; therefore, the usefulness of military power should not be equated simply with its physical use. Short of waging war or playing chicken in a crisis, then, military power shapes outcomes more by its peacetime presence than by its forceful use. Thus, to focus only on the physical use of military power is to miss most of what most states do most of the time with the military power at their disposal.

The peaceful use of military power may be less decisive than its wartime use, but that does not mean the peacetime effects are insignificant. To the contrary: the peaceful use of military power explains why it remains central to statecraft. Lurking behind the scenes, unstated but explicit, lies the military muscle that gives meaning to the posturing of the diplomats. Especially for great powers, but for the lesser ones, too, military power undergirds the other instruments of statecraft. Diplomacy is the striking of compromises by states with differing perspectives and clashing interests. There are many factors that go into the fashioning of diplomatic agreements, but central to each is fear about the consequences of failure. Fear of failure, combined with the knowledge that force can be used if agreement is not reached, help produce agreement. It is the ultimate ability of each state to use its military instrument that disciplines the diplomats. In this fashion the threat to use force plays the same role in bargaining among nations that the threat to strike plays in labor-management negotiations. The threat of either a destructive war or a prolonged strike represents a catastrophic breakdown that the parties would prefer to avoid. The fear of breakdown, together with the desire to avoid it, work to prevent it. Environments where nothing exists to prevent catastrophic breakdowns from occurring, other than the will of the parties, are called permissive realms. In such realms, the fear of failure becomes an essential ingredient for success.

In permissive realms the threat of breakdown need not be made explicit, but can be left implicit and still be effective. The threat to use force (or to strike) need not be articulated because all parties understand that it is an integral part of the situation. The threat cannot be disowned. The right to strike is an inherent feature of collective bargaining; similarly, the right of every state to resort to force is part and parcel of international politics.

In permissive realms, moreover, threats often can be more effective if left implicit. When one state makes an explicit threat, it raises the pressure on the state against which the threat has been directed to follow suit. Threat spawns counterthreat and, in turn, another threat, and so on. Voluntary agreement may be stymied in this escalatory process because threats stiffen the bargainers and harden their positions. Implicit threats, on the other hand, have a better chance of avoiding the escalatory dynamic and can more easily produce agreement, but only if the desire of both parties to avoid breakdown is strong. Whether explicit or implicit, threats remain an integral feature pf statecraft, and it is these threats that produce the gravitational effect of military power. That in turn imparts to the other instruments of statecraft more "punch" than they would otherwise have. In short, in a permissive realm like anarchy, where implicit threats in here, force bolsters diplomacy.

This is an insight too often forgotten. It is also too often dismissed as no longer applicable because international conditions have supposedly changed. To dismiss the central role of force in a permissive realm is wrong, however, because force is an integral component of all political realms, whether permissive like international politics, or nonpermissive like domestic politics. To make the point, let us consider the role that force plays in the domestic realm and then compare its role there to the international realm. The comparison will show that governance domestically and statecraft internationally both require coercion based on force, but the latter realm needs more of it than the former.

Three factors produce effective governance within a state: legitimacy, commonality of interests, and coercion. Legitimacy means that the government, together with its rules and procedures, are widely accepted by the citizenry. Commonality of interests means that the citizenry share many of the same values and goals. Coercion means that the state possesses the power to punish transgressors of the rules. The exact blend of legitimacy, shared goals, and coercion varies among states and even within a given state over time. For our purposes what matters is not the various blends, but rather that there is an element of coercion in each of them. Force helps to create and maintain the political framework within which political interactions occur. Within a state, the law does not automatically enforce itself. Behind the force of the law lies the coercive power of the state. If the law did not require coercion, the state could disband its police force. The state may need to use its policing power infrequently and only against a small number of its citizens who break the laws. This does not mean, however, that the policing power is marginal to domestic order. People obey the laws they have legislated because they believe them to be both legitimate and enforceable. For our analysis, enforceability is key: the bulk of the citizens obey the laws because they believe that the few who do not will be caught and punished. Otherwise, if punishment were absent, the number of transgressors would grow, because the benefits of breaking the law would increase while the benefits of observing it would decline. To be good in a world when others are bad and when there is no sanction for being bad is to be at a severe competitive disadvantage. Therefore, the bulk of the citizens will obey the laws because they expect that the bulk of citizens will obey the laws. The policing power of the state helps create this expectation. It is the state's ultimate ability to coerce its citizenry that helps preserve the rules, the norms, and, most importantly, the 'predictable expectations which, in turn, mold everyday political behavior within its borders.

Coercion, therefore, is to a political framework what a political framework is to a market: the necessary, but not the sufficient precondition for its effective functioning. An efficient market depends upon the expectation by its participants that the rules governing their economic interactions will be stable and fair. It is the political framework in which markets exist that provides these rules. Without such a framework, markets function poorly. If, for example, seizure of assets is arbitrary and frequent, private investment will be discouraged. If a state can alter the prices of goods at will, investments will be skewed. If no punishment exists for stock market fraud, then either fraud will become rampant, or would-be buyers of stock will need to hire their own stock fraud screeners. To function well, then, free markets must be embedded in a political framework that enforces the rules for stable economic exchanges. As the British historian E. H. Carr put it: "The science of economics presupposes a given political order, and cannot be profitably studied in isolation from politics."

Similarly, the study of politics cannot be profitably studied in isolation from coercion. Political structures, domestic or international, cannot exist apart from it. Within a state, if any group can get its way through the use of force, then public order will break down, might will make right, mafiosos will replace government, and constant warfare will ensue until lines are drawn, power balances are established, and uneasy peace ensue. When the coercive power of government breaks down, force becomes privatized. When force is privately held, it creates gangsterism; when publicly held, it creates government. It is a state's legitimate monopoly on the use of force that creates the bedrock condition for a stable domestic political order.

Thinking about the role that coercion plays in domestic affairs therefore helps us to understand why it plays an even larger role in a permissive realm like international politics. If force is an important element in politics within nations, then it must be all the more so for politics among nations. When interests clash domestically, matters usually do not get out of hand, because all sides know that there is the ultimate discipline of forceful coercion by the state. When interests clash internationally, reasonableness, persuasion, and logic carry much less weight than they do domestically, because there is no central government standing in the background to enforce them. Instead, there are separate states, each of which possesses its own coercive power, although in varying amounts. International politics is not gangsterism, but it resembles it in at least one respect: all states have the need to be privately armed because there is no legitimate, public coercive authority above them. As Kenneth Waltz aptly put it: "In politics force is said to be the ultima ratio. In international politics force serves, not only as the ultima ratio, but indeed as the first and constant one." In domestic politics force has been subjected to central governmental control; in international politics it has not. Consequently, states in anarchy cannot dispense with something that even national governments cannot do without.

Thus, the fact that the great powers in this new era of international politics may physically resort to military power less frequently than in past eras does not mean that it is less useful to them. To believe that is to conflate the physical and peaceful uses of military power and to equate effect (infrequent physical use) with cause (little utility).