'Everything we think about the wars on terror is wrong'

Matthew d'Ancona

20 May 2006

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Philip Bobbitt tells Matthew d’Ancona, we must start from scratch if we are to beat the terrorists

Step forward Philip Bobbitt, a tall, immaculately dressed 57-year-old Texan scholar, who now spends most of his time in London. Four years ago, this constitutional lawyer – who has held several senior posts on the National Security Council and is a professor at the University of Texas – won international acclaim for The Shield of Achilles, a 900-page exploration of war and peace in our times. The main text was completed before 9/11, though it foretold much of what followed that atrocity. Now Bobbitt is returning to the fray, working on a book that will demand that we rethink entirely our lazy assumptions about the war on terror.

A sneak preview of the sage’s new ideas reveals the following, devastating premise: his belief that ‘almost every widely held idea we currently entertain about 21st-century terrorism and its relationship to the wars on terror is wrong and must be thoroughly rethought’.

Gulp. So, I ask Bobbitt in an interview hosted by the think-tank Policy Exchange, what has gone wrong? The answer, he says, is that we do not understand either the enemy or, crucially, ourselves. We lack the ‘intellectual tools’.

At the heart of his analysis is the concept of the ‘market state’, the millennial successor to the nation state. He explains: ‘You can see it here in Britain – when states go from reliance on law and regulation, so characteristic of the nation state, to deregulating not only industries, but also women’s reproduction. When states move from conscription to an all-volunteer force to raise armies; in the UK you saw this development in the policy of top-up fees for college tuition. You see it in America with welfare reform when we go from direct transfers, and workmen’s compensation, to providing skills to enter the labour market. In all of these instances you are seeing the beginnings of a change in which the state says, “Give us power and we will maximise your opportunity. What you do with it – that’s up to you. We will not assure you equality, and we will not assure you steadily improving security, but the total wealth of the society will be maximised.”’

We are moving, in other words, to a new global constitutional order without fully realising it. He speaks of the ‘unique vulnerabilities of globalised, networked market states’. What does he mean?