Product Description

Cooper shows that the key question confronting postmodern states is how they should deal with a world in which missiles and terrorists ignore borders and where the certainties of the Cold War alliances no longer exist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99122 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Folks who like their global political analysis presented in snippy sound-bite form can hurry along to the Carvilles and Coulters and find plenty of reading material. Robert Cooper's The Breaking of Nations is designed for those who appreciate the complex tapestry of security issues and international affairs.

The present-day world, posits Cooper, is divided into three types of nations: premodern (often third world and politically unstable), modern and postmodern. While the present-day Europe Union exists as a postmodern model, with each country relying on others to facilitate prosperity, most other large nations, including, for the moment, the United States, are stuck in a merely modern capacity, still viewing foreign policy as essentially a way of keeping enemies at bay and maintaining the status quo. As terrorism grows more powerful and the "premodern" world more unstable, sophisticated weaponry becomes more readily available to terrorist organisations. It then falls to the enlightened "postmodern" countries to intervene militarily, taking a pre-emptive approach when necessary, to contain threats, root out bad guys and defend the world. With this scenario in mind, Cooper urges EU members to increase their military capability to better measure up to the status and power of the American military forces. But as technology makes weapons of mass destruction more readily available around the planet, a more aggressive diplomatic strategy, Cooper says, is crucial to effectively dealing with the build up of weaponry and he presents five "maxims" to illustrate how such a diplomacy should be organised.

While Cooper cogently presents his vision of where the world is and where the powerful nations need to take it, he also acknowledges the vagaries of a shifting world and as such presents The Breaking of Nations more as a rumination on complex issues than a ready-made solution. --John Moe, Amazon.com

Review
"'A fluent, stimulating and often original book' Brendan Simms, Sunday Times; 'An excellent new analysis of the cracks in today's geopolitical landscape.' Philip Stephens, Financial Times; 'Intelligent and stylish' Robert Skidelsky, New Statesman; 'A seminal work: a brilliant and successful attempt to bring intellectual order to the chaos of the twenty-first century.' Francois Heisbourg, International Institute for Strategic Studies"

New Republic
'An original and controversial analysis of power and violence by ‘the foremost commentator on the strategic issues of our age'

Customer Reviews

A practitioner speaks
Cooper is in the rare position of being a practitioner who has taken the time to write it all down, and tell us what he is doing. His is the sort of writing that helps us understand a) what is going on in the world politically and also b) what we can to to try and change things.

Cooper divides the world into three categories: pre-modern, where chaos reigns; modern, where the ideals of the Treaty of Westphalia stil operate; and post-modern, as typified by the European Union and Japan, where interdependence has replaced the desire for independence. The USA, of course, is in a peculiar place, as a state which is the most powerful in the world and yet stuck between modern and post-modern paradigms. It's a flexible typology.

How can the diplomat from country X seek to influence the behaviour of country Y? Cooper is blunt: "states have at their disposal three main instruments of influence: words, money and force. They can persuade, they can bribe or they can coerce." This is followed by several impressive pages on the pros and cons of economic sanctions and military action, leading to the conclusion that unless you can change the mind-set of the people you want to influence, deploying cash and weapons to reinforce your case is probably a waste of time.

There's lots of good stuff here, about power, domestic imperative, economic motives, and the clash of civiliastions (in more or less that order of priorities). One particular point that leapt off the page at me: his observations on international protectorates, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, which depend on international cooperation and the voluntary acquiescence of the locals in question: "...not as efficient as traditional imperialism... Nevertheless, in a postmodern era... nothing else will work."

The only slightly less-than-excellent part of the book is the twenty-page coda on the virtues of a Europe-wide armaments policy. In a work which is otherwise devoted to grand strategy it seemed odd to have so much prominence given to a single point if admittedly an important one. Indeed, if one considers the book as a collection of three different essays, it probably works OK; it's just that the first 150 pages work so well as an organic whole that the last 20 stand out rather.

In conclusion - very strongly recommended, if you want to find out what is really going on in the world rather than take refuge in the romantic fantasies either of the Left or the Right.

Essential reading for those interested in contemporary foreign policy
As a career diplomat, Cooper's working life is to a large extent dominated by the issues he explores in this book; unusually, he has taken the time to consider those issues objectively and, even more unusually, chosen to share his conclusions with the wider world. The result is a book that would make even the most interested, well-informed internationalist reconsider some of his frames of reference.

I won't rehearse what the other reviewer here has written, which sums up the book's contents pretty well, except to disagree with his assessment of the final section.

Unlike him, I believe that the discussion of Europe's (and, by extension, the post-modern world's) defence policy, and its willingness to engage in force if necessary, was a logical conclusion to the discussions of "grand strategy" in the first two sections. Cooper's point is that although post-modern solutions are an ideal goal, they are perhaps ultimately unattainable, at least on a global level, and it is no longer reasonable for the 450m citizens living in post-modern Europe to rely for their defence on the 250m taxpayers of the (modern nation state) United States. In a sense, Cooper seems to me to be recognising the limits of the post-modern approach he espoused in the first two sections - i.e. force is often still needed when dealing with pre-modern and modern states - and that post-modern entities like Europe and Japan should invest accordingly. Inevitably, such conclusions lack the majestic sweep of historical analysis, but as a thought piece over "What next?", I think it is both persuasive and appropriate.

Kagan is right - this book takes the geopolitical discussion a step further. Highly recommended.

Insightful, intelligent and well-written
This short book explores the new world of the early 21st century. Cooper sees the defining moment in the end of the Cold War in 1989, which changed the state system that had defined world politics since the treaty of Westphalia, and that a new world is emerging with new challenges. This premise is quite generally accepted, but it is more interesting when he qualifies the new world order as a mixture between the old and the new, where new security threats/challenges are emerging in a world divided between "pre-modern", "modern" and "post-modern" states.
The challenges and solutions in the new world order lie in the interrelations between these types of states.
The most interesting part of the book is when Mr. Cooper enumerates his five maxims for conditions for world peace: (1) the need to understand "foreigners" better (being a foreigner myself in relation to Mr. Cooper, I would rather change the argument to understanding one another...); (2) the primacy of domestic politics; (3) the difficulty in influencing foreign governments; (4) the definition of interests in international relations; (5) redefinition the concept of identity in international relations.
The more detailed discussions of each of these maxims are extremely insightful and interesting, but I found his argumentation in line with social-constructivist models of international relations, that states identity is the most important thing in defining interests, extremely useful and relevant for the understanding of international politics: "Much more important than the question of how countries pursue their interests is the question of how they define them" (page 137).
Mr. Cooper's road to condition for peace in the 21st century is not one of a question between a balance of power or of power-hegemony (he completely parts with Mr. Kissinger in this regard), but states that it is about reaching a post-modern collective security model, where his clear source of inspiration is the European Union, which has achieved an unprecedented level of peace in only 50 years, but after centuries of bloody conflict. He is not blind to the challenges and difficulties though; Mr. Cooper is not a naïve pacificist, nor a hard-core "realist", and that is perhaps what makes him most in touch with reality in his argumentation: peace can be achieved, but one must not forget that there are real threats and dilemmas in balancing them, and that the use of military force should never be excluded as the "continuation of politics by other means" for the achievement of legitimate goals.
One can see the huge level of academic research behind the book and the argumentations: he obviously knows his history and theories of international relations, and that makes the book is suberbly well-written, getting around such broad issues in a coherent and brief manner that it can make the often too-academic and heavy literature on these subjects so simple, accessible and yet without losing the balance and seriousness of the issues at hand.
Fabulous book.