(блог) где ядро британской империи

Politics and Demographics in the 21st Century: Networks and Neo-Feudalism?

A GREAT DEAL WAS written at the turn of the millennium that the world had entered a post-state era. In this view, the forces of the Information Age and globalisation had created an era of neo-feudalism in which the Westphalian state would be one actor among many in a field cluttered with private entities, transnational organisations and localised ethnic groups.[120]

This environment, it was said, would usher in an era of post-Clausewitzian conflict in which the trinity of the people, the army and the state was no longer an effective framework with which to analyse conflict: warfare would take on a form in many regards difficult to distinguish from crime.[121]

The central flaw in this analysis was not that the trends that it identified were not real, but rather that the inferences it drew from these trends were inappropriate. The era of globalisation is not, as some have suggested, a post-Clausewitzian era in which states have been supplanted by armed bands and private organisations,[122] but one in which the nature of the state has altered to something resembling its pre-Westphalian form. The European states of the 15th century were coalition-managers who needed the support of the clergy, mercenary companies, and proxies across their borders to project power effectively. Movement towards a somewhat analogous state of affairs can now be seen across the world. As a result, states are faced with both constraints and opportunities. On the one hand, generating the resources and political will to sustain large-scale protracted conflict is likely to be more difficult than at any time since the Napoleonic era. Simultaneously, however, states can both substitute their own forces for non-state proxies, and also find allies beyond their borders more easily than might have been the case in a less information-rich environment characterised by stronger, hierarchical states. States can build supporting coalitions including both smaller states and a growing array of non-state actors, including insurgents, criminal groups and non-state political actors (for example, NGOs which, as former US Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, can act as ‘force multipliers’ by supporting a given state’s narrative). This has ramifications for where great powers can project force, against whom, and how. Against rival great powers, the conduct of direct operations on a large scale is likely to become increasingly infeasible for states that will, as shown below, see their capacity to sustain such action erode. Rather, the most common form of competition is likely to be indirect, supporting rival networks of proxies in fragile states throughout the Global South. When states do clash directly, they will have incentives to localise conflicts and, by extension, to form tacit or explicit agreements to limit their use of force. This logic of limited war may extend to cyberspace, despite the technical feasibility of all-out cyber war against an opponent’s homeland. For example, Chinese strategists explicitly insist that cyber warfare must be operational (targeting military facilities) and not target an opponent’s homeland because this would preclude the rapid de-escalation they hope for and bring reprisals in kind to China’s own vulnerable networks.[123]

A deduction from the previous two propositions is that mobility and flexibility are likely to matter more than power. If powerful states are mutually deterred from escalating competition above certain levels, then the characteristics critical to strategic success are the ability to deploy forces rapidly to win a localised clash and the ability to provide niche capabilities (air support, for example) to networks of allies who will act as a state’s primary tool of influence on the ground. The sort of approach outlined here is particularly amenable to liberal maritime powers, accustomed as they are to conceptualising strategy in precisely these terms. The Changing Nature of the StateStates have been joined in the economic, political and, to a degree the military domain by a plethora of non-state actors. In economic terms, the ability of corporations to shift their activities from one state to another has seen states (and, in some cases, local administrative units within states) compete for their presence – for example, altering their regulatory frameworks to attract investment.[124]

Similarly, the provision of public services is increasingly through contracted private actors. By way of an example, in 1997 the UK introduced private finance initiatives which stipulated that contractors should take on a substantial portion of the capital costs for public projects in which they were involved, in return for responsibility for a wider array of tasks – with some tasks such as IT-modernisation identified as being beyond the capacity of the state to capitalise or research, and thus contracted out entirely.[125]

The post-modern state has shifted from the business of government (the direct provision of goods and services) to governance (managing coalitions of actors to play this role). In the security sector, this trend has manifested itself in the increasing reliance of states on private sector research and development. As the recent controversy regarding the collaboration of Google with the US Department of Defense illustrates, private actors not wholly reliant on government orders, like the specialised arms firms of old, retain their autonomy.[126]

Moreover, private actors are increasingly at the tip of the spear. Military contractors have become a ubiquitous feature of modern warfare and, in areas such as the cyber domain, states have for some time been almost wholly reliant on the private sector – with one expert noting that information warfare may well be a mercenaries’ field.[127]

The structural devolution of state functions to other actors in the Information Age has been accompanied by challenges to the state and citizen identity. The late 20th century saw local and transnational identities both rise to compete with national identity. Polls from across the developed world over the past two decades indicate a steady decline in the number of people who state that their national identity is a primary identity, as opposed to either a transnational value-based community (for example, a pacifist or an environmentalist) or a parochial local identity.[128]

The degree to which citizens will, in this context, sacrifice either blood or treasure for a state that no longer is a source of primary identity might then be questioned. Of course, we should not overstate the retreat of the state in the developed world – state revenues as a percentage of GDP are significantly higher than they were in the early to mid-20th century, and states are still the single most powerful actor in interactions with smaller partners. Indeed, public–private partnerships may have enhanced the state’s efficiency by eliminating wasteful redundancies in their systems. However, reliance on a multiplicity of actors, many of which are gaining greater agency in their interactions with the state and do not concede its primacy in all matters, means that what Clausewitz dubbed as ‘friction’ – the numerous impediments to the use of force in a direct and overwhelming manner – is now more prevalent in the minds of policymakers than ever before. In parts of the developing world, the state is being hollowed out in an altogether different manner. The most common form of conflict since the end of the Cold War has been intra-state conflict in the developing world. This absolute and relative increase has multifarious causes. These include the withdrawal of Cold War superpower patronage; the need to alter the state’s economic role to attract foreign investment, which has removed old patronage networks that sustained local economies; and the Information Age, which has reinvigorated ethnic and localised sub-state or transnational identities that had lain (for the most part) dormant while the nation state had a relative monopoly on information.[129]

The salient point is that this trend is likely to both intensify and take new forms as it interacts with great-power competition. Urbanisation will concentrate populations in mega-cities, which are predicted to contain over half the Earth’s population under 30 years of age by 2035, potentially straining the infrastructure of the developing world’s urban centres and exceeding the capacity of public services to respond. Within these circumstances, if history is any guide, the likely providers of the public goods that national authorities cannot provide will often be criminals, warlords and strongmen ruling over localised fiefdoms.[130]

The services of these actors, though they may be more criminal than political, will be invaluable to actors looking to generate influence in wartime. By way of an example, Al-Qa’ida in Iraq outsourced the task of kidnappings to local criminal gangs to generate revenue. In a similar vein, it is not unlikely that a great power looking to project power will rely on such actors to provide their forces with information and supplies and to garrison and control areas that they are already familiar with – a point noted by Russian strategists such as Vladislav Surkov and Valery Gerasimov.[131]

The idea that forces should cooperate with local allies is not a new one, but the array of non-state partners, the fluidity of transactional relationships formed, and the limited aims that kinetic force will serve in this context are worthy of note. Domestic PolarisationThe second trend that has emerged and then intensified because of globalisation is the gap between those capable of adapting to the 21st century and those left behind. As the pace of change within societies erodes or eliminates traditional ways of generating income, huge swathes of societies will be left unmoored and directionless, which will fuel polarisation. This matters because a society’s capacity to maintain a political consensus determines its capacity to project force credibly. As Harry Summers notes in his analysis of the Vietnam War, military action in the absence of this cohesion is simply unsustainable in the long term.[132]

While political polarisation is hardly new (the Vietnam example is an old one, after all), it is likely to intensify in an age of economic displacement and reification of political views caused by new technology. Moreover, as mentioned above, the salience of national identity has declined substantially. As such, the challenges that Summers identified will likely be more salient than ever.This presents a challenge at the grand-strategic level. The pace of technological change has challenged one of the key underpinnings of the liberal world order, in what John Ruggie called its ‘embeddedness in local politics’. [133]

In 1950 the average American had an incentive to care about what happened in Europe, for example, because exports to Europe constituted their own bread and butter. Moreover, expansive welfare states and institutions such as trade unions created a compromise between market forces and societies that was relatively stable. Grand ideological narratives, such as the Washington Consensus, were viable precisely because they were well aligned with the local interests of people who cared little for the long arc of history. As the current century progresses, however, this is increasingly untrue for significant proportions of many societies. Those segments of a society that are dependent on and benefit from a viable globalised economy, such as the well educated, still have a stake in the order that underpins it. However, many people see globalisation as having eroded rather than enhanced their own lives. This represents not a failure of the liberal world order per se, but an oversight of the key fact that as economies technologically innovate, they become less dependent on the labour of most citizens to function – such is the nature of efficiency itself. For example, a study by McKinsey estimates that by 2030, 35% of manufacturing jobs in the developed world will be lost to automation.[134]

In an age of polarisation it will be more difficult to convince sceptical publics that are largely concerned with parochial issues to support the expenditures that accompany a strategic effort. If exploited by opponents skilled in information warfare, social divisions could be an even greater impediment to force projection and the maintenance of a coherent and stable grand strategy. Challenges and Opportunities for Great PowersThe diffusion of power to a multiplicity of actors has thus both enhanced and weakened powerful states. Powerful states are the only entities that can coordinate large coalitions of disparate actors and use the loyalties of proxies and private actors to project power cheaply. On the other hand, the challenges of securing the transient loyalties of these players, and the managerial challenge posed by the need to leverage increasingly complex domestic coalitions, means that the capacity of the state to wage long, drawn-out conflict has eroded relative to the 20th century. A caveat might be added here. In a 2018 publication, the US Department of Defense identified a category of state that it dubbed ‘digital authoritarian states’ that might actually have their power enhanced by the digital age.[135]

The technologies that abet fragmentation in either an open or a weak society can enhance the control of a strong centralised state capable of centrally directing managing information flows. Big data, artificial intelligence, and increasingly ubiquitous surveillance of nationally controlled information ecosystems could reinforce the power of such states. However, such states – although more capable of securing the political quiescence needed for decisive action than either of their post-modern or developing counterparts – have their own barriers to resource extraction for military ends. For example, as Michael Beckley points out, estimating the power of states such as China using GDP excludes the input costs of generating output in an inefficient centralised context, the rising costs of human welfare, and the costs of maintaining internal security (especially in an authoritarian context).[136]

As such, Beckley argues, the capacity of a centralised state to rapidly generate and sustain the income needed for war-making for expansive ends against a rival great power is questionable. As such, then, centralised states are as constrained as their post-modern counterparts – albeit for different reasons. The emphasis of Chinese strategists on fighting local, limited wars would seem to validate this point.[137]

**The Future of War**
Does this mean that great-power competition is impractical, then? Arguably not. Rather, if an analogous period is any guide, we are likely to see long-running competition between states that is characterised by limited direct conflict for limited stakes; indirect feuding through proxies; and relatively fluid networks of state and non-state actors forming kaleidoscopic alliances. As the feudal era progressed, those states capable of securing internal cohesion – such as France under Louis XIV and Sweden under Charles XII – were able to command networks based on loyalties such as religion or ethnicity alongside purely transactional relationships with mercenaries and warlords in the more fragile, less united parts of Europe such as Germany and Italy. Developments such as the printing press – and with it a deluge of easily accessible, often inflammatory, religious and political literature – made weaker societies more volatile and created narratives that allowed segments of their populations to be co-opted by great powers. As such, easy access to information, and the social fragmentation it wrought, made the indirect use of force an appealing option to states that were too internally constrained to use direct force for anything but the most limited ends. Of course, any analogy has its limits, and there are many contextual differences between the late feudal era and today. However, potential futures can be usefully identified by way of an analogy with another period in which states existed alongside multiple sub-state actors (including guilds, mercenaries and the clergy) and could not readily draw on their publics to sacrifice themselves en masse in the name of an overarching identity, and had to cope with an information revolution. Social changes thus point to an increasing emphasis on the sort of indirect, limited conflict seen in the pre-Westphalian era. States which cannot use force for large-scale, direct conflict without eroding their own domestic consensus will have to rely on the use of proxies and private actors such as mercenaries to compete for influence over fragile, divided societies which lack a strong state. When force is used directly, it will likely be in limited offensives in support of proxies and private actors in competition with another great power and its own network of proxies. The jockeying between multiple great powers and their respective proxies in Syria is a case in point. Unlike proxy conflicts of the Cold War, moreover, the stake is not control of the state but select portions of it (the Russian and Syrian offensive focused exclusively on consolidating the regime’s control of parts of Syria, for example). Absent the Cold War’s overarching ideological narratives, alliances are relatively fluid and liable to change – consider, for example, the Iraqi Kurdish leadership’s willingness to work with both the US and Iran at different junctures. What is unlikely to be seen, however, is direct high-intensity conflict between states. To the extent that the forces of great powers clash directly, it will be in limited skirmishes. Even in potential theatres of great-power war, such as the Western Pacific, strategists plan for short, sharp engagements followed by de-escalation. Indeed, the PLA explicitly builds de-escalation into its war planning at all levels when considering conflict with the US. Thus, for example, the fact that the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile can achieve a mission kill without sinking a carrier is cited as a major advantage for its ‘counterintervention’ role: it can cripple a response while not doing so much damage, and so make rapid deconfliction possible.[138]

This is partially due to the inherent risks of great-power war, but also because few great powers can guarantee the level of societal cohesion and resources needed to prosecute a protracted conflict in the modern era. Conclusion: The Era of Transactions, Flexibility and AgilityThese changes are likely to give rise to an order which, like the pre-Westphalian order, is one of persistent low-level conflict between state-led networks. Crucially, low-level conflict is not bloodless – protracted competition can kill more people over a long time than wars of decisive battles. Proxies or smaller states may well switch flexibly between these networks based on situational needs. In a context where no clear ideology exists to either delineate permanent friends or enemies, or to galvanise publics to support long-term commitments, the conduct of warfare is likely to revolve around the use of indirect means and very limited direct force in the fragile states of the developing world. Given that, for great powers at least, the kinetic phase of conflict will by necessity be brief and the object of military force will be to support a coalition of proxies and private actors, mobility rather than raw power is of the essence. Being able to deliver decisive support to key allies for limited periods of time – as Russia’s Caspian flotilla did in support of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime during the siege of Aleppo – will be more important than mobilising for protracted conflict with peer competitors. To the extent that the forces of great powers do clash, it will likely be in localised contexts in which each party restricts its use of force and duration. As such, the mobility needed to generate favourable local force balances will matter more than the aggregate balance of power between states. Forces will likely need to be structured accordingly, with rapid-deployment forces and maritime power projection playing a particularly critical role in a state’s force posture. In some senses, this is a form of warfare familiar to maritime powers accustomed to eschewing cumbersome armies for forces that could be rapidly deployed to a conflict at a critical juncture or a vital location.

---------
120. Kenichi Ohmae, Managing a Borderless World (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1989).
121. Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1991).
122. Ibid.
123. David C Gompert and Martin Libicki, ‘Cyber Warfare and Sino-American Crisis Instability’, Survival(Vol. 56, No. 4, 2014), pp. 7–22.
124. Leonard Seabrooke and Duncan Wigan, ‘Global Wealth Chains in the International Political Economy’, Review of International Political Economy (Vol. 21, No. 1, 2014), pp. 257–63.
125.Patrick Dunleavy et al., Digital Era Governance: IT Corporations, the State, and e-Government(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 197.
126. Frank Hoffman, ‘The Hypocrisy of the Techno-Moralists in the Coming Age of Autonomy’, War on the Rocks, 6 March 2019.
127. Thomas Adams, ‘The New Mercenaries and the Privatization of Conflict’, Parameters (Vol. 29, No. 2, 1999), p. 103.
128. Pippa Norris, ‘Global Governance and Cosmopolitan Citizens’, in Joseph S Nye Jr and Elaine Kamarck, Globalization and Governance (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press), p. 177; Franco Zappettini and Ruxandra Comanaru, ‘Bottom-up Perspectives on Multilingual Ideologies in the EU: The Case of a Transnational NGO’, Journal of Contemporary European Research (Vol. 10, No. 4, 2014), pp. 402–22.
129. Peter Singer, ‘Corporate Warriors: The Rise and Ramifications of the Privatized Military Industry’, International Security (Vol. 26, No. 3, Winter 2001–02), pp. 186–220.130. Christopher Coker, Future War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).
131. Peter Pomerantsev, ‘How Putin is Reinventing War’, Foreign Policy, 5 May 2014; Kier Giles, ‘Russia’s “New” Tools for Confronting the West: Continuity and Innovation in Moscow’s Exercise of Power’, Research Paper, Chatham House, London, 2016.
132. Harry Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (New York, NY: Random House, 1995).
133. John G Ruggie, ‘Embedded Liberalism and the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organization (Vol. 36, No. 2, 1982), pp. 379–415.
134. James Manyika et al., ‘Jobs Lost Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation’, McKinsey Global Institute, December 2017.
135. Nicholas D Wright (ed.), ‘AI, China, Russia, and the Global Order: Technological, Political, Global, and Creative Perspectives’, White Paper, US Department of Defense Joint Staff, 2019, pp. 20–35.
136. Michael Beckley, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), pp. 55–60.
137. M Taylor Fravel, ‘China’s New Military Strategy: “Winning Informationized Local Wars”’, China Brief(Vol. 5, No. 13, July 2015).
138. Andrew S Erickson, Chinese Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile (ASBM) Development: Drivers, Trajectories and Strategic Implications (Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation, 2013), p. 45