the beginning of the modern state system’, or perhaps ‘since the beginnings of
mankind’. This development ‘presages the end of the territorial protective function
of state power and territorial sovereignty’ and the ‘chief external function of the
modern state therefore seems to have vanished’.^32
Hans Morgenthau also came, after much tortured reflection and evolution in
this thinking, to a view of the situation very similar to Herz’s.^33 In the 1960s he
advanced the argument that nuclear weapons had produced such high levels of
violence interdependence on a global scale as to make the nation-state militarily
obsolete and a world state necessary.^34 Although well-known for his role in
synthesizing and propagating realism in the United States, Morgenthau’s nuclear
violence interdependence argument has been largely abandoned by his many
followers. He speaks in terms quite similar to Herz’s: ‘The feasibility of all-out
atomic war has completely destroyed this protective function of the nation-state.
No nation-state is capable of protecting its citizens and its civilization against all-out
atomic attack’.^35 He also agreed with the world federalist view that only a world
state with a monopoly of violence could solve the problem of insecurity created by
nuclear weapons. In Politics Among Nationshe observed: ‘There can be no permanent
international peace without a state coextensive with the confines of the political
world.’^36 The observation that only a world state can bring permanent peace has
been acknowledged by many realists, but Morgenthau went a decisive step beyond
this view to argue that the state-system and modes of consciousness it has gener-
ated need to be radically changed because of the change in the level of violence
interdependence. ‘Instead of trying in vain to assimilate nuclear power to the
purposes and instrumentalities of the nation-state’, there was a need ‘to adapt these
purposes and instrumentalities to the potentialities of nuclear power’. Doing this,
however, ‘requires a radical transformation – psychologically painful and politically
risky – of traditional moral values, modes of thought, and habits of action’. Without
such a transformation ‘there will be no escape from the paradoxes of nuclear strategy
and the dangers attending them’.^37 Morgenthau, however, doubted that a world
state could be created soon, because world community was weak and national
communities were strong. The resulting tragic impasse stems from the disjunction
between inherited political arrangements and emergent material realities, rather than
from timeless flaws in human nature.^38
The realist argument about the evolution of violence interdependence as it
appears in the analyses of Herz and Morgenthau is essentially ‘Hobbes set to nuclear
history’. The industrial and nuclear revolutions altered the scale at which a state-of-
nature situation of mutual vulnerability existed. Coupled together, these historical
contextual-materialist realist arguments suggest a simple pattern of change. Before
the industrial revolution, security was consistent with a state-of-war anarchy on the
regional scale of Europe. But the mature industrial revolution produced a state-of-
nature anarchy at the regional scale, at the same time that it produced a second state-
of-war anarchy on a global scale, marked by the end of the loosely coupled and
quasi-isolated multi-system world order of the pre-industrial era. The nuclear
revolution, as first interpreted by realists, replicated this process, changing a second
28 Anarchy and violence interdependence