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yelling Huns in saddles
,
worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter
,
planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables
,
guzzled everything save dry water.
I've admitted the sentries' third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it's stale and warty
.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl
;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit
.
Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx
,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.
    —Joseph Brodsky, 1980
    (translated by the author)
     

PART II
     

     

A B RIEF H ISTORY OF T HE M ODERN S TATE AND I TS C ONSTITUTIONAL O RDERS
     
    THESIS: THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN STRATEGIC AND CONSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION CHANGES THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER OF THE STATE.
    Epochal wars produce fundamental challenges to the State. A warring state that is unable to prevail within the then-dominant strategic and constitutional practices will innovate. In such wars, successful innovations—either strategic or constitutional—by a single state are copied by other, competing states. This state mimicry sweeps through the society of states and results in the sudden shift in constitutional orders and strategic paradigms in the aftermath of an epochal war. By this means, a new dominant constitutional order emerges with new bases of legitimacy, and older forms decay and disappear.

A History Lesson
     
    Kings
    like golden gleams
    made with a mirror on the wall.
    A non-alcoholic pope
,
    knights without arms,
    arms without knights
.
    The dead like so many strained noodles
,
    a pound of those fallen in battle,
    two ounces of those who were executed
,
    several heads
    like so many potatoes
    shaken into a cap
—
    Geniuses conceived
    by the mating of dates
    are soaked up by the ceiling into infinity
    to the sound of tinny thunder,
    the rumble of bellies
,
    shouts of hurrah,
    empires rise and fall
    at the wave of a pointer,
    the blood is blotted out
—
    And only one small boy
,
    who was not paying the least attention
,
    will ask
    between two victorious wars
:
    And did it hurt in those days too?
     
    — Miroslav Holub
    (translated by George Theiner)

CHAPTER FIVE
     

     

Strategy and the Constitutional Order
     
    T HE IDEA OF a “military revolution” in Europe was first introduced by Michael Roberts in his now-famous inaugural lecture at the Queen's University of Belfast in January 1955. 1 Roberts identified four profound changes in warfare in the period 1560 – 1660. First was a revolution in tactics, as archers and then infantry armed with muskets ended the dominance of feudal knights and massed squares of pikemen. To put this in other words,
fire
replaced
shock
as the decisive element on the battlefield. Second, a dramatic increase in the size of armies occurred, with the forces of several states increasing ten times between 1500 and 1700. Third, strategies changed as the possibility of decisive action in the field replaced the static and inconclusive siege tactics of the previous century. Fourth, war became more of a depredation on the civilian society: the vastly greater costs required to field such larger armies, the damage wrought by foraging troops, and the destructiveness of battles made civil life grimly more like that of Brecht's
Mother Courage
, written of the Thirty Years' War, than of
Lepanto
, Chesterton's brightly lit account of the famous naval battle of a century before.
    Roberts's thesis quickly achieved the status of orthodoxy—Sir George Clark enthusiastically adopted it unqualifiedly in his
War and Society in the Seventeenth Century
published three years later 2 —and thus became a target for various qualifying theses * in the ensuing years. But by far the most important development was the claim that the need for cash and anadministrative infrastructure to fund and manage the larger armies and new