The Long War is a name proposed by Philip Bobbitt in The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, to describe the series of major conflicts fought from the start of the First World War in 1914 to the decline of the Soviet Union in 1990. As proposed by Bobbitt, the Long War includes the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, as well as the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese Civil War, the Spanish Civil War and the Cold War. These wars were all fought over a single set of constitutional issues, to determine which form of constitution – liberal democracy, fascism or socialism – would replace the colonial ideology of the imperial states of Europe that had emerged after the epochal Napoleonic Wars that had dominated the world between the Congress