Get Ready for the Next Long War

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It may someday be said that the 21st century began on Sept. 11, 2001. That will be true if the attacks turn out to be harbingers of a new, epochal war and the extreme change in the constitutional order that follows such a war. Al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the attacks that day, represents a new and profoundly dangerous kind of organization--one that might be called a "virtual state." The virtual state has many of the characteristics of other states (a trained standing army and intelligence cadre; a treasury and a source of revenue; a civil service and even a rudimentary welfare system for the families of its fighters) but is borderless; it declares wars, makes alliances with other states and is global in scope but lacks a definable location on the map.

On Sept. 11, a virtual state proved that modern societies are vulnerable as never before--vulnerable because both the advanced technologies and civil openness they have worked so successfully to develop can be used against them. The U.S. has learned over the years how to deter threats from adversaries like the Soviet Union; now it must learn how to stop the more elusive threat posed by virtual states. To understand how protracted such struggles can be, it's worth taking a quick look back.

The 20th century is often said to have begun on Aug. 1, 1914, with the opening attacks of what became the Long War--a war that eventually encompassed the First and Second World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the cold war. When the Long War finally ended, with the reunification of Germany and the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, we thought we would have peace because we had resolved the question that bound all these wars into one: What form of the nation-state--fascist, communist or parliamentarian--would succeed the imperial states of the 19th century? When this was answered by the triumph of parliamentarian democracy, some thought the "end of history" had come, that the struggle to achieve a final constitutional order had ended.

But what was ending was not history itself but the history of the nation-state--a constitutional order characterized by governments that promised to better the material well-being of a historically defined people. F.D.R., Stalin and Hitler each promised this, even if they had radically different notions of what constituted a nation and how to achieve the objective. Yet within the triumph of the parliamentary nation-state lay the seeds of its eventual demise. A universal system of human rights defied its sovereignty and undermined its ability to control its citizens. An international system of trade and finance removed its control over national currencies. Global communi- cations threatened its national cultures. Transnational threats such as aids or the depletion of the ozone layer were beyond the scope of any nation-state to control. And the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction rendered hopelessly inadequate the notion of defending national borders from invading armies.