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R       a        d i             C       a         l                    P         h          i       l         O          S O P                       h y
a      journal                  of        socialist                       and               feminist                          philosophy


159                                                CONTENTS                                                        jaNuaRy/fEbRuaRy 2010




Editorial collective                               COmmENTaRy
Claudia Aradau, Matthew Charles,
David Cunningham, Howard Feather,                  The Global Moment: Seattle, Ten Years On
Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart             Rodrigo Nunes ................................................................................................ 2
Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne,
Stella Sandford, Chris Wilbert
                                                   aRTiClE
Contributors
Rodrigo Nunes was involved in the first three      War as Peace, Peace as Pacification
World Social Forums. He recently completed         mark Neocleous .............................................................................................. 8
a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London,
on immanence in Foucault and Deleuze. He
is a member of the editorial committee of          dOSSiER The Postcommunist Condition
Turbulence (www.turbulence.org.uk).
                                                   Children of Postcommunism
Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique
of Political Economy at Brunel University. His     boris buden ................................................................................................... 18
most recent book is Critique of Security (2008).   Towards a Critical Theory of Postcommunism?
Boris Buden is the author of Die Zone des          Beyond Anticommunism in Romania
Übergangs: Vom Ende des Postkommunismus
(2009). He was a coordinator of Beyond             Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu ................................................................................... 26
Culture: The Politics of Translation (2005–08),    Down to Earth: Detemporalization in Capitalist Russia
European Institute of Progressive Cultural
Policies (http://translate.eipcp.net).             Svetlana Stephenson and Elena danilova ................................................. 33
Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu is editor of the              Sovereign Democracy: Dictatorship over Capitalism
Romanian journal of contemporary arts and          in Contemporary Russia
critical theory IDEA arts + society (www.
ideamagazine.ro). His book The Postcommunist       julia Svetlichnaja with james heartfield ................................................. 38
Colonization: A Critical History of the Culture
of Transition is forthcoming (2010).
                                                   COmmENT
Svetlana Stephenson teaches sociology
at London Metropolitan University, and is          Rentier Capitalism and the Iranian Puzzle
the author of Crossing the Line: Vagrancy,         dariush m. doust .......................................................................................... 45
Homelessness and Social Displacement in
Russia (2006). Elena Danilova works at the
Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of         REviEwS
Sciences, Moscow.
                                                   Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War
Julia Svetlichnaja and James Heartfield are
PhD candidates at the Centre for the Study of      alberto Toscano ........................................................................................... 50
Democracy, University of Westminster.              Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth
Dariush M. Doust is an Associate Professor         of the Self
at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, a         Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons
Lacanian psychoanalyst and head of the cultural    from the Biology of Consciousness
association Kurrents.                              benjamin james lozano ............................................................................. 53
                                                   Joanna Zylinksa, Bioethics in the Age of New Media
Copyedited and typeset by illuminati
www.illuminatibooks.co.uk                          Caroline bassett............................................................................................ 56
Layout by Peter Osborne                            Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the
Printed by Russell Press, Russell House,           Neoliberal Era
Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT          Claudia aradau.............................................................................................. 59
Bookshop distribution                              Sergei Prozorov, The Ethics of Postcommunism: History and Social Praxis in Russia
UK: Central Books,
115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN                     alexander astrov .......................................................................................... 61
Tel: 020 8986 4854                                 Filippo Del Lucchese, Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and
USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc.,                   Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation
607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217        jason E. Smith.............................................................................................. 63
Tel: 718 875 5491
                                                   Mahmood Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the
Front Cover image Éric Alliez, Communism
Explained to Children, 2009.
                                                   War on Terror
                                                   ahmed Rajab ................................................................................................ 64
Back Cover image Sergey Bratkov, Italian
School, no. 1, 2001 (courtesy Regina Gallery,
Moscow).                                           NEwS
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
                                                   Faint Signal: The Student Occupations in California
www.radicalphilosophy.com                          Nathan Coombs............................................................................................ 66

©   Radical Philosophy Ltd
COmmENTaRy

The global moment
Seattle, ten years on

Rodrigo Nunes




w
             hat are we to make of an anniversary that no one celebrates? The year 2009
             may be remembered for many things: the greatest capitalist crisis in over a
             century, the first year of the Obama presidency, the transformation of the G8
into a G20 (and the first massive geopolitical rearrangement since the fall of the Soviet
bloc), the ecological crisis definitively establishing itself as a widespread concern (even
if it means very different things to different groups). One thing, however, was conspicu-
ously absent from the year’s calendar: the tenth anniversary of the protests against the
World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, which made of 1999 the year when the
‘anti-’ or ‘alter-globalization’ movement, or ‘movement of movements’, or ‘global move-
ment’ became a visible phenomenon across the world.
    In 2009, of course, ‘celebration’ was not very high on the agenda, even – or espe-
cially – if looked at from the point of view of those protests. If anything, the problems
highlighted then seem more pressing now, the threats they pose more acute. More
importantly, while the danger grows, the redeeming power seems to recede. It is tempt-
ing to say that time has proved those protesters ten years ago right, but the capacity
for immediate action in the present seems ever more remote. Today, the liveliness of
debate, the wealth of different experiences and – more importantly – the intensity of
mobilization, the determination and the hope of those years seem far away. Surely this
is sufficient reason to revisit the period, as a source of inspiration and a way of stoking
whatever embers are left? in which case, should the silence be interpreted as yet another
symptom of the present lethargy? Or could it also be a sign of a something else: an
unspoken avoidance or implicit recognition of that period as a source of impasse, a
dead end?
    The failure of the 2003 anti-war mobilizations to stop the Iraq war opened the
season of public questioning regarding the effectiveness of ‘the movement’. Thus, for
instance, Paolo Virno:

    The global movement, from Seattle forward, appears as a battery that only half works: it
    accumulates energy without pause, but it does not know how or where to discharge it. It is
    faced with an amazing accumulation, which has no correlate, at the moment, in adequate
    investments. It is like being in front of a new technological apparatus, potent and refined,
    but ignoring the instructions for its use.1

   By 2007, a major player in the World Social Forum process wondered whether the
time had not come for it, ‘having fulfilled its historic function of aggregating and
linking the diverse counter-movements spawned by global capitalism… to give way to
new modes of global organization of resistance and transformation’.2 It became common
to hear that ‘the movement’ had failed to produce ‘proposals’ or ‘alternatives’, and
hence squandered its accumulated energy and opportunities to deliver on the promise



2       R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
that the blue-sky lightning of Seattle had suggested. There were many alleged culprits:
the incapacity to deal with diversity, or an absolute emphasis on diversity making politi-
cal definitions impossible, depoliticized ‘movementism’ and ‘life-stylism’, the atavistic
reformism of parties and unions (and of course NGOs).
   Yet if one asks the seemingly straightforward question of what has been achieved
since then, it is just as true to say ‘a lot’ as ‘not nearly enough’. The various blows to
the WTO project, successful anti-privatization campaigns such as the ones around water
and gas in Bolivia, the election of progressive governments across Latin America, the
opposition to the neoliberal constitution in Europe, the defeat of the CPE in France…
plus a huge number of local victories, small victories, partial victories, even defeats
that resulted in the creation of new possibilities that might one day result in victories.
One could certainly ask: what does any of this have to do with the ‘global movement’
as such? But this, precisely, takes us to the crucial difficulty in talking about a ‘global
movement’: how are we to tell it apart from its constituent parts? How are we to isolate
whatever these parts do as parts from what they do in conjunction with others, or the
aggregate effect of what all of them do?
   Take the struggles against the WTO – the one example from those above that can
be least problematically attributed to the ‘global movement’. Until the Seattle protests,
negotiations soldiered on with the time’s distinctive sense of inevitability, and govern-
ments would hardly bother to inform, let alone consult, their citizens. That sudden
crystallization managed to foreground a dissent that could have remained marginal
and powerless if not for that instant when certain forces recognized themselves in a
common struggle, and it certainly began to tilt the agenda. A series was opened that
made it possible for opposition to neoliberal policies to grow, for different movements
to communicate with and reinforce each other, for other moments of convergence to
occur, in a chain of positive feedbacks that undoubtedly contributed to, for example, the
election of progressive governments in Latin America. It may be that the effective cause
of the WTO’s ‘derailing’ was, in the end, the stronger stance taken by the governments
of some developing states around the negotiating table; this, however, would probably
not have happened had it not been for the presence of movements outside the gates, or
for the broader sequence at the turn of the century through which this series unfolded.
Nevertheless, at the time when these ultimate effects were produced, the ‘global move-
ment’ was already regarded by many of its participants as a spent force.
   How are we to think through this paradox: that its greatest victory arrived after its
wane? What if the reluctance to celebrate today comes from a difficulty in thinking of
a ‘global movement’ in any meaningful way? What if this, rather than dichotomies such
as ‘openness’ versus ‘decision-making’, is the impasse that is sensed? And what if – to
advance a hypothesis in the bluntest possible way – the global movement never existed?
What if it was a moment, rather than a movement?3

One world is possible
The most literal way of speaking of a ‘global movement’ would be as a reference to
those groups posing only explicit global goals, or whose space of action was essentially
transnational. In the face of the plethora of social forces mobilized around the world at
the time, however, such a definition seems scandalously narrow. (The greater currency
enjoyed among many by the phrase ‘global movement of movements’ was no doubt due
precisely to its indefinite, near-infinite inclusivity.) To limit the frame of reference in
such a way would turn ‘global movement’ into a very reductive synecdoche. Yet this
is exactly the pars pro toto logic that was (and is) often used by media commentators,
whereby the expression comes to refer to what, in the global North, was the period’s
most visible manifestation: the cycle of summit protests (Seattle, Prague, Quebec City,
Genoa and so on) and counter-summits (Social Fora and the like).



                                                                                          3
Avoiding this synecdoche is crucial, not only to stay close to the self-understanding
of the actors concerned, but also to undo the confusion at the source of the present
impasse. Thinking in terms of moment allows us to do so. This was a moment, first,
because there was an intensification of activity on various fronts, including mobiliza-
tions against structural adjustment and privatization (Bolivia, South Korea, various
African countries, Canada), against multinational corporations (oil companies, as in the
Niger Delta; sweatshop-based brands, as in the USA), against migration policies (the
sans papiers in France, various border camps in Europe, North America, Australia),
against GMOs (several Via Campesina campaigns around the world), and many more.
In most cases, these were not pitched as ‘global’ campaigns as such; they took place
in the space of local or national politics, had national legislation and policies as their
referents, and unfolded within a complex, multilayered field of relations and causal
series where their ‘global’ dimension was always filtered by local, national and regional
struggles, correlations of forces, institutional arrangements, conjunctures and contingent
events. In this case, speaking of a ‘global movement’ appropriately would refer to
nothing more than the sum total of these various forces’ activities, the outcome of
their political interventions and the transformation of social relations they managed to
produce. Except that ‘movement’ would still have a metaphorical sense, calling a whole
what is really only a collection: something whose only criteria for membership would
be existence on the same globe, something that could never be totalized or given any
kind of unitary shape or direction – a ‘wild’ in-itself, never to be fully appropriated
for-itself.
    However, there is one characteristic of the moment that began in the mid-1990s that
sets it apart from previous cycles of struggle that took place simultaneously in various
parts of the globe, such as those of
the 1840s, 1920s–30s and 1960s–70s.
In the sense disclosed by it, the
‘global movement’ would in fact exist
only for-itself, and this for-itselfness
would be the very quality making
its emergence unique: a for-itself
whose in-itself is not given. What
is the unique characteristic of that
emergence? This was the first cycle of
struggles that defined itself in terms
of its global dimension. The material
element determining this difference
was, of course, capitalist globalization
itself, which created and strengthened
structures and flows of communica-
tion, movements of people and goods
to such a scale that the potential for
connections between different local
realities became widely accessible
not only to the actors instrumental in
the advance of capital, but potentially
also to those who wished to resist it.
This expanded potential for exchange
and the production of commonalities
resulted in enhanced awareness of the
different impacts of neoliberal global-
ization, their interconnectedness, the



4
forms taken by resistance to them, and the ways in which these resistances could be
placed in relation with each other. This, in turn, enabled concrete exchanges and mutual
support between different local experiences, which, finally, conjured a potential: that of
momentarily focusing this localized political activity into moments of shared relevance,
whether at a global level (such as the mobilizations against the WTO or the Iraq war) or
more locally.
    These three factors – awareness, concrete exchanges and potential for convergence
– constitute that moment’s global dimension; and there is no contradiction between
affirming this dimension as its defining feature and the fact that most of the move-
ments and campaigns then active had local or national politics as their space of action
and main referents. As a matter of fact, these three factors are precisely what created
the mirage of a movement, when in fact what one had was a moment of rapidly
increased capacity for communication and coordination, and wide-eyed astonishment
at a just-discovered potential for channelling much of that activity into determinate
spatio-temporal coordinates, creating moments of convergence whose collective power
was much greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, while most of the activity effectively
occupied the national or local political space, the key characteristic of that period was
the widened perception of global processes. The ‘global movement’, in this sense, was
literally something that existed in people’s heads, and in the communication between
them.
    This is distinct from previous generations’ ‘internationalism’: it refers to a shared
belonging to an interconnected, interdependent world, rather than an aggregate of
nation-states to be revolutionized or reformed one by one.4 This means not only a
heightened awareness of the commonality of natural commons, but a clearer grasp of
the effects at a distance produced by a global market, and of the possibility of interven-
ing in relation to these effects in ways that are necessarily restricted neither to national
borders nor to the nation-state as the sole agency to be addressed. It is the increase
in types of connection today – supranational (multilateral organisms, information
networks), transnational (migrant networks) and infranational (among different regions
affected by the same problem, for example, dams) – that opens up the possibility of
interventions that need neither depart from the nation-state, nor retain it as their sole or
immediate referent.
    It has been argued that the famous ‘Earth rising’ photograph had an effect on the
development of environmentalism; and indeed there is enormous power in the idea that
‘there is only one world’: once a physical limit is placed on the capacity to universalize,
the rational operation of seeing one’s lot as necessarily tangled with others’ is given a
concrete outline. That this ‘concrete universalism’ is coupled with the increase in the
capacity to exchange and cooperate with ‘concrete others’ from all over the globe is one
of the novelties of ‘globalism’. Under its light, every struggle appears as neither exclu-
sively local nor exclusively global: all struggles communicate on different levels, while
no struggle can in practice subsume all others. There are no partial, ‘local’ solutions
that can stand in isolation, and there is no ‘global’ solution unless this is understood as
a certain possible configuration of local ones. What ended up being labelled as a ‘move-
ment’ (the cycle of summit protests and counter-summits) was therefore nothing but the
tip of the iceberg: the convergences produced by a much wider and deeper weft of con-
nections, both direct (as when groups engaged in communication and coordination with
each other) and indirect (when struggles resonated and reinforced each other without
any coordination), among initiatives that were sometimes very local, sometimes very
different, sometimes even contradictory.
    That there was no ‘movement’ as such does not mean that it did not produce
concrete effects; every moment of convergence fed back into these initiatives, creating
and reinforcing connections, and strengthening the globalism that defined the moment,



                                                                                          5
nourishing the (subjectively effective) notion that all of this belonged in the same move-
ment. This strength, however, would reveal itself as also being a weakness. The ‘we’
of that period became progressively stabilized as the ‘we’ of the summit protests and
counter-summits – certainly a multitudinous, diverse ‘we’, but one which managed to
sustain itself largely because of the short-lived nature of those convergences, their exter-
nally, negatively given object (where the ‘one no’ always had precedence over the ‘many
yeses’), and the positive feedback produced by their own spectacular, mediatic strength.
The more entrenched the synecdoche became, the more these convergences came to be
treated as an end in themselves, rather than strategic tools and tactical moments in what
should be the constitution of ‘another world’. 5


yes and no
That moment’s passing can be partially explained by the impossibility of inhabiting
the global level as such. The technological and tactical innovations (‘swarming’, the
‘diversity of tactics’ principle) that enabled large-scale convergences can only function
at such a scale when their objects are externally given and negatively defined: anti-
WTO, anti-war, and so on. The much-lamented lack of ‘proposals’ was never actually
that; there was a dizzying collection of proposals, and what was perceived as a lack was
in fact the impossibility of having ‘the movement’ subscribe to any of them as global
movement – that is, as a whole. Moreover, there is a serious difficulty in thinking of
global ‘proposals’ by analogy with those that can be placed in national political space,
given that at the global level there is no one to address directly. One cannot lobby or
influence transnational structures in the same way as national governments, as the
unaccountability and imperviousness of the latter to political process is structural
rather than contingent; whatever accountability they may have is ultimately mediated by
national structures.
   This became evident in 2005 in the attempt by a group of intellectuals associated
with the World Social Forum to elaborate what they saw as a distillation of that profu-
sion of ideas into a minimal, consensual programme.6 Ultimately, the main problem
with this document was not the way in which it was drafted, the lack of gender balance,
or any of the other criticisms raised at the time, but that it is entirely unclear what its
presumed target audience (the WSF, ‘the movement’) could actually do about proposals
pitched at such a global level – apart from organizing demonstrations incorporating
them as rallying points. They do not even function as demands, as there is no one to
demand them from. At this level, antagonism remains purely representative: expressing
a dissent that has no means of enforcement. This kind of dissent has some effectiveness
in a parliamentary democracy, of course, provided it corresponds to a large enough
constituency representing a relevant electoral variable. The problem is that, at the global
level, this is impossible. However crucial it is to keep open the potential to focus politi-
cal activity on singular global moments, such potential exists only as a consequence of
capacity built at the local level, not as its substitute; it is only to the extent that local
struggles enhance their capacity to act in their immediate environment that they can act
globally in meaningful ways. In fact, privileging convergences can sap resources from
local capacity-building, when the point should be precisely that the former reinforce the
latter. If they do not, antagonism, rather than being the other half of building autonomy,
comes to replace it; and, in doing so, it loses the grounds on which it can find support.
It becomes the expression of political contents from which it is impossible to draw
political consequences.
   There was another reason why the global became uninhabitable. The context in
which the ‘global moment’ unfolded changed drastically with the onset of the ‘war on
terror’. Not only was the main focus of conflict moved elsewhere (‘good’ versus ‘rogue’



6
states, ‘fundamentalism’ versus ‘democracy’, ‘Islam’ versus ‘the West’), it was displaced
to a level of confrontation no movements were willing or able to occupy (state appara-
tus versus ‘terror’). Moreover, the combination of an atmosphere of constantly reiterated
alarm, and the creep into spheres of legislative and policing measures that served to
criminalize social movements, had the subjective impact of reinforcing feelings of isola-
tion, fear and impotence. Many individuals abandoned political involvement altogether;
individuals and groups disengaged from the global level, refocusing on the local. In
other cases, investment in the global at the expense of the local led to a disconnection
between politics and life, representation (or antagonism) and capacity-building, burn-out,
or a replacement of slowly built consistency for the quicker, wider, but also less sustain-
able, effects of the media.
   Is the ‘global moment’ over? Yes and no. The material conditions that enabled it
remain, as do the elements of awareness of global processes and (the potential for)
concrete exchanges. There is no going back on this, as there is no going back on
‘globalism’, or the political consciousness of belonging to a single world. Whatever
movements appear in the future will in all likelihood share these features, and they will
do well to look back to those years and draw some lessons from what went right and
wrong. To say that the expectations then built around the use of information technology
(as almost a substitute for other forms of political action) were exaggerated does not
mean that their possibilities have been exhausted, the recent Iranian protests being a
good example. If anything, one would expect to see much more made of their potential
for diffuse initiative and rapid dissemination; yet the question will always be, once the
‘great nights’ they can produce have passed, how to give consistency to the excess they
throw up.
   On the other hand, these movements would do well to disarm some false dichotomies
that were strong then, such as the supposedly definitive choices between autonomy-
building and antagonism (the latter requires the former to exist, the former at various
junctures requires the latter to expand), or between absolute openness and capacity to
act (any movement, any decision always strikes a balance between the two), or even
‘taking’ or ‘not taking’ power (recognizing the limits of what the state can deliver does
not diminish the need to always push beyond them). It is far more important to develop
the collective capacity to choose what mediators to have, what mediation to accept, and
when. Building on these, managing to move beyond them; now that would be cause for
celebration.

Notes
 1. Paolo Virno, ‘Facing a New 17th Century’, 2004, www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno4.htm.
 2. Walden Bello, ‘The Forum at the Crossroads’, 2007, www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/noticias_textos.
    php?cd_news=395.
 3. This distinction is inspired by Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Harvard University
    Press, Cambridge MA, 1968.
 4. Even before the thesis of ‘socialism in only one country’ and the tactical retreat into nationalism, it
    was the case that proletarian universalism necessarily required the (national) communist party and
    trade-union movement as the initial supports and local agents of ‘world revolution’; solidarity and
    collaboration among revolutionary movements mirrored the bourgeois internationalism of solidarity
    among nation-states.
 5. One example of this entrenchment is the proposal for a permanent International Day of Action every
    two years. Tellingly, one proponent says of this idea – where ‘one central subject, which touches
    everyone in the world, can be commonly put forward once every two years’ as the theme for simul-
    taneous worldwide demonstrations – that the theme ‘could be global warming, trade, out-of-control
    finance, debt … I don’t even care what the theme is; it’s the principle of choosing it and of the unity
    that creates visibility that I think is important.’ Susan George, ‘Contribution to the Debate on the
    Future of the Social Forums and the Alter-globalization Movement’, 2008, www.tni.org/detail_page.
    phtml?&act_id=18081.
 6. VV.AA, ‘Porto Alegre Manifesto’, 2005, at www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005–02/20group_of_
    nineteen.cfm.
War as peace,
peace as pacification
mark Neocleous




    To stress one’s own love of peace is always the                                       The consensus is wide. From a diverse range of
    close concern of those who have instigated war. But
                                                                                       recent publications, let me just cite Daniel Ross’s
    he who wants peace should speak of war. He should
    speak of the past one … and, above all, he should                                  analysis of democratic violence in which he claims that
    speak of the coming one.1                                                          in democracies ‘peacetime and wartime … are increas-
                                                                                       ingly convergent’, Rey Chow’s suggestion that war
A remarkable consensus appears to have emerged on                                      is now the very definition of normality itself, Gopal
the Left: that in the context of the war on terror the                                 Balakrishnan’s claim that the invasion and policing of
distinction between war and peace has been destabi-                                    ‘rogue states’ means that ‘a long-term epistemic shift
lized. Alain Badiou suggests that the category of ‘war’                                seems to be occurring which is blurring older distinc-
has become so obscured that ancient capitals can be                                    tions between war and peace’, and François Debrix’s
bombed without serving notice to anyone of the fact                                    argument that the reason the war machine permeates
that war has been declared. ‘As such, the continuity of                                everyday culture is because the distinction between
war is slowly established, whereas in the past declaring                               peace and war has broken down. 3
war would, to the contrary, have expressed the present                                    I have no interest in challenging this account in itself;
of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity has rendered                              as will be seen, despite its apparent boldness it is in
war and peace indistinguishable.’ ‘In the end’, notes                                  fact a fairly uncontroversial position to hold. What I do
Badiou, ‘these American wars … are not really dis-                                     want to challenge, as my starting point at least, is the
tinguishable from the continuity of “peace”.’ Antonio                                  major historical assumption being made within it. For
Negri and Éric Alliez likewise comment that ‘peace                                     these accounts rely on an assumption of a ‘classical’ age
appears to be merely the continuation of war by other                                  in which war and peace were indeed distinguishable;
means’, adding that because peace, ‘otherwise known                                    they assume that the destabilization is somehow new
as global war … is a permanent state of exception’, war                                – hence the references to wars in ‘the past’, in the
now ‘presents itself as peace-keeping’ and has thereby                                 ‘old sense’ and in the ‘classical’ age. The nebulous
reversed their classical relationship. Their reference to                              nature of some of these phrases is remarkable, given
a concept made popular following Agamben’s State of                                    the implied radicalism of the insight being expressed.
Exception is far from unusual in this new consensus.                                   Worse, in accepting the very claim made by the USA
‘We no longer have wars in the old sense of a regu-                                    and its allies that everything has indeed changed from
lated conflict between sovereign states’, notes Žižek.                                 the time when the distinction between war and peace
Instead, what remains are either ‘struggles between                                    was categorical and straightforward, this account also
groups of Homo sacer … which violate the rules of                                      reinforces the general fetish of ‘9/11’ as the political
universal human rights, do not count as wars proper,                                   event of our time. Perhaps there really was a time ‘in
and call for “humanitarian pacifist” intervention by                                   the past’ when mass killing possessed a greater con-
Western powers’, or ‘direct attacks on the USA or other                                ceptual clarity; but I doubt it. Felix Grob’s Relativity
representatives of the new global order, in which case,                                of War and Peace, published in 1949, offers countless
again, we do not have wars proper, merely “unlawful                                    examples of states engaged in mass killing but either
combatants” criminally resisting the forces of universal                               denying or sometimes just not knowing whether or
order. Hence ‘the old Orwellian motto “War is Peace”                                   not they were at war, which explains why a wealth of
finally becomes reality.’2                                                             categories have existed to describe a condition that



8       R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
appears to be neither war nor peace or that might just       engagement between states and aping IR and strategic
be a little bit of both: reprisals, belligerency, state of   studies in becoming little more than a series of footnotes
hostilities, measures short of war, intermediate state,      to Clausewitz.6 One of the wider implications of this
quasi-war, and so on. And more than a few international      article, then, is to move discussion of war away from the
lawyers in the early- and mid-twentieth century pointed      fairly restrictive account found in liberal mythology,
out the artificial nature of the distinction between war     IR and strategic studies, and to expand it to include
and peace.4 It really is a bad sign when supposedly key      what is after all the most fundamental war in human
insights on the Left come half a century after the same      history: the social war of capital.
insights are made by international lawyers.                      To make this case I will begin with the birth of
   The first aim of this article is therefore to make        international law and end with some comments on
a historical point: that this consensus about a recent       the ideology of security. Why? Because the formal
elision of the difference between war and peace is           liberal position is that the decision about whether war
rooted in a deep historical misconception. Rather, I         exists is a legal one and that peace comes through
will aim to show that the distinction between war and        law. ‘Law is, essentially, an order for the promotion
peace has always been blurred. The second and more           of peace’, says Hans Kelsen in his lectures on inter-
political aim is to suggest that this blurring was part      national relations: ‘The law makes the use of force a
and parcel of an ascendant liberalism which found            monopoly of the community. And precisely by doing
an important political use for the language of peace         so, law ensures peace.’7 Thus the proclaimed purpose
within the context of international law. To accept the       of international organizations such as the United
idea that there was a ‘classical age’ where the distinc-     Nations is always peace, to be achieved through law
tion between war and peace did make sense is thus            and the legal regulation of war. And not just peace:
to accept one of liberalism’s major myths, one which         it is always ‘peace and security’ that are expected to
circulates widely in academic discourse as part of           come together; a conceptual couplet performing the
‘the liberal peace’ hypothesis: that peace is the focal      same ideological role internationally as ‘law and order’
dynamic of civil society, that the state exists in order     performs domestically. I therefore focus on the early
to realize this ‘liberal peace’ within civil society, and    period in international law (or, as it was, the law of
that international law exists to ensure peace between        nations), since this was the period in which liberalism
states. On this view, war is an exception to peace. As       found in law a way to articulate its vision of peace
a myth, this has served to gloss over liberalism’s own       and security. It did so in that crucible of capital’s civil
tendency to carry out systematic violence and to call it     war: colonialism.
peace; to gloss over, that is, the violence of the liberal
peace. I therefore argue that it has never made sense        The humanity of indians
for the Left to adopt a categorical distinction between      Although there is much debate about when inter-
war and peace.                                               national law first emerged, with many treating it as an
   This takes me to my third aim, which is to suggest        outcome of the Peace of Westphalia, there is a wide
that in accepting the major liberal assumptions about        enough agreement that prior to Westphalia there was
war and peace the Left has cut itself off from devel-        a ‘Spanish age’ of international law, 8 so called because
oping a concept of war outside of the disciplines of         the arguments developed at that point coincided with
International Relations (IR) and strategic studies (within   the rise of Spain as a colonial power. Spanish political
which, unsurprisingly, the idea of a ‘classical age’ is      thought was at this moment central to European intel-
also constantly reiterated). For the liberal argument to     lectual life and it is no coincidence that it became so
hold, war has to be understood as a phenomenon of            through its debates about war. In this context the work
the international sphere: as a confrontation between         of Francisco de Vitoria is crucial.
militarily organized and formally opposed states. Not           Vitoria’s work is regarded as one of the first state-
only does this contraction of the war concept ignore         ments of a universalist and humanitarian conception
the transnational nature of a great deal of warfare, it      of international law. He is often regarded as the first
also manages to obscure the structural and systematic        to have ‘proclaimed a “natural” community of all
violence through which liberal order has been consti-        mankind and the universal validity of human rights’,
tuted. 5 The Left has too easily bought into the idea of     and to have presented a ‘courageous defence of the
war as articulated in IR and strategic studies and has       rights of the Indians’ against the Spanish.9 This reading
thus been driven by an agenda not of the Left’s own          of Vitoria is rooted in his conception of ‘the whole
making, replicating the idea of war as formal military       world which is in a sense a commonwealth’ and the



                                                                                                                      9
idea of a law of nations which would have ‘the sanction     conjunction of violence and law running through the
of the whole world’.10 ‘Vitoria was a liberal’, notes       liberal imperialism which emerges, an imperialism in
James Brown Scott. Indeed, ‘he could not help being a       which the idea of peace becomes a key thematic.
liberal. He was an internationalist by inheritance. And         Inspired by the dynamics of Spanish territorial pos-
because he was both, his international law is a liberal     session, Vitoria places colonial domination – and thus
law of nations.’11 One reason for this interpretation is    dispossession – at the heart of international law. At
that Vitoria’s ‘humanist’ tendencies meant his work         the heart of this domination and dispossession are the
was established against the more explicitly violent         laws of war and peace and the question of ‘free trade’.
policies of Spanish colonialism: ‘No business shocks        According to Vitoria, the natural rights and duties of
me or embarrasses me more than the corrupt profits          the law of nations are society and fellowship, trade
and affairs of the Indies … I do not understand the         and commerce, communication, participation regarding
justice of the war.’12 A second reason is his claim         things in common, and the freedom to travel. Because
that the Indians had rights of dominium. Sinners and        trade is essential to human communication and to the
non-believers as they might be, they are nonetheless        exchange and development of human knowledge, the
‘not impeded from being true masters, publicly and pri-     right to maintain lines of communication through
vately’ and so ‘could not be robbed of their property’.13   trade and exchange is a right of natural law. Hence
One of the reasons they had rights of dominium, and         ‘the Spaniards have the right to travel and dwell
the third reason for the interpretation of Vitoria as one   in those countries, so long as they do no harm to
of the first statements of universal and humanitarian       the barbarians’, and ‘they may lawfully trade among
international law, is because they are human beings         the barbarians, so long as they do no harm to their
with reason: the Indians are not monkeys but ‘are           homeland.’ A refusal by the Indians to trade with the
men, and our neighbours’, so ‘it would be harsh to          Spaniards constitutes a refusal to maintain ‘natural’
deny to them … the rights we concede to Saracens            lines of communication, and is barbarism. Moreover,
and Jews’.14                                                ‘if there are any things among the barbarians which
   In suggesting that non-Christians are somehow            are held in common both by their own people and by
equal with Christians, Vitoria challenges the idea          strangers, it is not lawful for the barbarians to prohibit
of a universal Christian order administered by the          the Spaniards from sharing and enjoying them.’ The
Pope within which the Indians could be characterized        reason for this is based in part on the principle of
as heathens and their rights and duties determined          trade and in part on the idea that in natural law a thing
accordingly. He thereby disallows religion as the basis     which does not belong to anyone becomes the property
for war against the Indians or rule over them. Yet          of the first taker. What this means is that should the
although the Indians are like the Spanish, their social,    barbarians try to deny the Spaniards what is theirs by
economic and political practices, including nudity, the     the ‘law of nations’ – that is, by natural law – then
consumption of raw food and cannibalism, mean they          ‘they commit an offence against them’.16
diverge from universal norms in such a way as also to           If Vitoria’s argument is a major contribution to some
make them unlike the Spanish. The Indian appears to         kind of emergent international law of nations, then it
have some of the social and cultural characteristics of     is equally an important contribution to an emergent
civilized life, yet is markedly uncivilized; the Indian     discourse of political economy centred on commerce
shares the characteristics of a universal humanity, yet     and accumulation; it is through this contribution that
is also set clearly apart. Thus the ‘Indian problem’        Vitoria helps shape natural law arguments for con-
became the basis of a discussion about the relations        quest, for the right to engage in commerce and trade
between different groups of humans within a ‘republic       is for Vitoria a natural right. As Williams points out,
of all the world’. In effect, as Anthony Anghie points      within the totalizing discourse of a universally obliga-
out, the problem for Vitoria was not one of managing        tory natural law of nations, the profit motive occupies
order between formally equal sovereign states, but          an extremely privileged status, in the sense that not
of constituting order among culturally different enti-      engaging in trade is treated as contrary to the mutual
ties.15 It is this tension between the claims of natural    self-interests shared by all humankind.17 And this
law against behaviour that is somehow ‘unnatural’,          motivation must be allowed to triumph over common
and the necessity of understanding others within the        property rights. Put simply: customary land use by
framework of a universal humanity, which runs though        the Indians has to be treated as an illegitimate form
Vitoria’s two 1539 lectures on the Indians and on the       of property. Any indigenous ‘law of the commons’
laws of war. And it is this tension which reveals the       must therefore be abolished and replaced by the law



10
of private property, and dispossession legitimized on       plundering the goods of the innocent, killing the
the grounds of natural law. As is well known, it is this    innocent, and enslaving the women and children, to
dispossession and replacement of common property            the point of absolute destruction:
with private property that becomes central to the
                                                               War is waged to produce peace, but sometimes
colonizing project and to bourgeois political economy          security cannot be obtained without the wholesale
thereafter. It is at this point that the question of war       destruction of the enemy. This is particularly the
becomes crucial, as the Spaniards have the right to            case in wars against the infidel, from whom peace
defend themselves against the offences committed               can never be hoped for on any terms; therefore the
by the Indians by availing themselves of the other             only remedy is to eliminate all of them who are
                                                               capable of bearing arms, given that they are already
main right of the law of nations: to go to war. ‘If the
                                                               guilty.20
barbarians … persist in their wickedness and strive
to destroy the Spaniards, they may then treat them no       Vitoria’s law of nations, then, gives us two options:
longer as innocent enemies, but as treacherous foes         permanent war in search of free trade or absolute
against whom all rights of war can be exercised.’18         destruction of the enemies of such trade.
                                                                In this light, James Brown Scott’s description of
                                                            Vitoria as a liberal is both interesting and historically
                                                            important. A leading law scholar, Scott was solicitor
                                                            to the US Department of State (1906–09), acted as
                                                            trustee and secretary to the Carnegie Endowment for
                                                            International Peace (1910–40), served as adviser to
                                                            the US delegation to the second Hague Peace Confer-
                                                            ence of 1907, was president of the American Institute
                                                            of International law (1915–40), wrote several major
                                                            works on international law and the various Hague
                                                            Peace conferences, edited and thereby made newly
                                                            available a series of translations of the ‘classics’ of
                                                            international law (including Vitoria), helped establish
                                                            the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1921,
                                                            and served under President Woodrow Wilson. In pur-
                                                            suing the idea that Vitoria is a liberal Scott sought to
                                                            draw a link between the liberalism of the sixteenth-
                                                            century law of nations and the liberalism of early-
                                                            twentieth-century US foreign policy, albeit mediated
                                                            by the Catholicism which he claimed also underpinned
                                                            international law. The ‘discovery’ of America, in his
                                                            view, gave birth to a modern law of nations which
                                                            was originally Catholic but had now become entirely
                                                            laicized in liberal form. For that reason, he sought
In making this argument Vitoria’s lecture broke new         to situate Vitoria within this liberal tradition. Now,
theoretical ground for Western colonizing thought,          Scott’s argument has been widely challenged. Arthur
providing a natural law source of Spain’s right – and       Nussbaum, for example, was one of the first of many
by implication any other state’s right – to engage in war   to respond to Scott by pointing out the decidedly
against native peoples and to rule in the New World         ‘illiberal’ things Vitoria has to say or tries to justify. 21
as a means of securing the right to commerce. If the        Yet the argument of Nussbaum and others is founded
law of nations emerged to deal with war, then the war       on the rather naive assumption that liberalism could
in question was one of accumulation.                        never engage in something so illiberal as systematic
   As a war of accumulation this was recognized from        violence against weaker and even unarmed opponents
the outset as permanent. ‘Our war against the pagans        for merely commercial reasons. But in that sense, and
is … permanent because they can never sufficiently          leaving aside some of the issues in Scott’s reading
pay for the injuries and losses inflicted.’19 Because of    of Vitoria, it seems to me that, without meaning to,
this ‘a prince may do everything in a just war which        Scott gets it more or less spot on: Vitoria is a liberal.
is necessary to secure peace and security’, including       But what Scott and his challengers fail to see is that



                                                                                                                      11
this is the very reason Vitoria defends the practice of     liberty needed for internal order. Empires of liberty
war against the Indians. To understand why, Vitoria         are always already empires of violence.
really needs to be understood in terms of the tradi-           As empires of liberty, however, this violence is
tion of liberal imperialism that was then becoming          carried out in the name of peace and security. ‘The
established in Europe.                                      aim of war is peace and security’, says Vitoria, over
                                                            and again. War is waged specifically for the defence of
                                                            property, for the recovery of property and in revenge
Peace, liberty, violence
                                                            for an injury, and it is waged more generally ‘to
Much has been made of what J.G.A. Pocock has                establish peace and security’.25 This is used to justify
called ‘the Machiavellian moment’ in the history of         offensive as well as defensive war.
political thought, in which a new language was forged          The purpose of war is the peace and security of the
addressing the problems associated with constituting           commonwealth … But there can be no security for
a republic of liberty through a dialectic of virtue            the commonwealth unless its enemies are prevented
and fortune.22 Mikael Hornqvist has shown that this            from injustice by fear of war. It would be altogether
republican ideal of freedom was deeply implicated              unfair if war could only be waged by a common-
                                                               wealth to repel unjust invaders from its borders, and
in the imperial project, in which acquisition becomes
                                                               never to carry the conflict into the enemies’ camp.
the touchstone of liberty. For in the century leading
up to Machiavelli, as well as in the years to follow,       Indeed, pre-empting the idea of a ‘humanitarian war’
writer after writer had stressed the importance of          that would emerge centuries later, Vitoria insists that
empire to liberty: Bruni on the right to lordship over      war might be carried out ‘for the good of the whole
the world; Dati on the centrality of empire to security     world’.26
and economic order; Palmieri on the links between               The significance of Vitoria’s idea that war is made
civic unity and increase of empire; Savonarola on the       for peace and security lies in the fact that it was
importance of the empire to ancient Rome; the list is       being articulated as a key principle in the emerging
long and well-documented by Hornqvist. Thus when            law of nations, that the ‘permanent’ colonial wars
Machiavelli lays down the basic tenets of Roman and         which gave rise to this law of nations were increas-
Florentine republicanism, namely that a city has two        ingly taking on the ideological form of peace, and
ends – one to acquire, the other to be free, he draws       that this was a key moment in the development and
on and summarizes a position that had become well           structural transformation of the state. The prolonged
established over the previous century. This tradition       cumulative effect of new weapons technology, new
assumes that liberty ‘entails a commitment to empire        disciplinary provisions, fortifications, increase in the
understood as a defence and a militant extension of         size of armies and navies, and the changes in tactics
true liberty in a hostile world’. In concrete terms,        and strategy which these developments aided and
this ‘translates into a pursuit of territorial security     abetted, including a fiscal centralization necessary to
which justifies the intervention in the political life of   sustain these developments, meant that not only was
neighbouring states and the subjugation and annexa-         the development of the state machine being accelerated
tion of foreign lands’. Far from being contrary values,     as the monarchs and republics of Europe centralized
notes Hornqvist, liberty and imperial acquisition are       and nationalized, most notably in the major colonizing
understood as together constituting the dual end of         powers of England, Spain, the Netherlands and France,
the healthy republic.23 The liberal and ‘humanitarian’      it was being accelerated as a war machine. War made
concept of a world of universal being presupposes an        the state and the state made war, as Charles Tilly puts
expansive polity, which, in generating a politics of        it.27 Concomitantly, this war machine received philo-
acquisition, in turn produces new enemies and thus          sophical legitimation in a variety of forms: from the
requires the exercise of violence. For there can be no      new and decidedly Machiavellian ‘military arithmetic’
empire of liberty without arms. The art of politics is      found in the work of writers such as Girolamo Cataneo
the art of war, as Machiavelli has it in the title of the   in Italy and Thomas Digges in England, to the most
only one of his major works to be published in his          sustained commentaries on the nature of sovereignty,
lifetime (in 1521). Or as he puts it in his better-known    such as Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonweal (1576)
work: the successful Prince ‘takes as his profession        and Botero’s Della ragion di stato (1589), both of
nothing else than war and its laws and discipline’. 24      which suggest that military discipline and training in
This art of war is in Machiavelli’s mind central to         arms are necessary for war with other nations and for
imperial politics but links back to the discipline of       disciplining one’s own subjects.



12
Within this ideological transformation, ‘peace’ came      his pseudonym Theodore Basille) could be retitled for
to be addressed as a political issue. Humanists such         its second edition later that year The True Defense
as Erasmus suggested that an unjust peace was better         of Peace and then reissued under its old title again
than a just war; statesmen and sovereigns came to            after Becon’s death without anyone finding anything
talk about a universal peace rather than perpetual war,      odd in the changes. The changes are indicative of the
some of them adopting beati pacifici (‘blessed are the       extent to which ‘peace’, as an increasingly seductive
peacemakers’) as their motto or styling themselves as        ideal to the martial mentality of the European ruling
rex pacificus, and pageants lauding peace increasingly       elites, had to be subsumed under the logic of war.
took place with a pomp and performance that would            Hence, on the one hand, a staunch ‘pacifist’ such as
have been unthinkable just a century earlier. Catherine      Erasmus ends up accepting the right to wage war,
de Medici, for example, took on the mantle of peace-         not least for the ‘tranquillity’ and ‘stability’ of the
maker using symbols of peace such as the rainbow or          Christian republic and to ‘punish delinquents’; that is,
the Juno (arranger of peace-bringing marriages), and         for dealing with internal dissent and rebellion. 32 On
Charles V fashioned himself as the new Augustus, the         the other hand, a staunch defender of the ‘art of war’
emperor of peace – the famous painting of him by             such as Machiavelli also writes of the ‘arts of peace’:
Titian has him riding through a landscape conveying          to be exercised externally against one’s enemies in the
the peaceful calm after a raging battle, while a sculp-      hope of breaking them down (due to the fact that ‘the
ture of him by Leone y Pampeo has him ‘dominating            cause of union is fear and war’) and internally as a
over fury’.28 The issue here is not just a monarchical       mechanism for internal order (his example is to have
jockeying for the image of ‘peacemaker’, for the ques-       the people believe in religion), and it is clear from his
tion of peace resonated culturally and intellectually – it   discussion that the arts of peace are continuous with
has been noted, for example, that the mid-sixteenth          the arts of war.33 The war machine is a peace machine;
century saw a proliferation of peace poetry. 29 As Ben       the peace machine is a war machine. Permanent war
Lowe has shown, by the sixteenth century ‘peace’ was         normalized as peace.
becoming more complex and adaptable as an idea and               This is nowhere truer than in that centrepiece of the
more entrenched as a societal ethic. In personal form        art of war: empire. The concept pax, appropriated from
it was associated with charity, mercy and piety; in its      the Pax Romana, was central to the articulation and
religious mode it connoted tranquillity as part of a         development of the imperial theme in this period (and
rigorous Christian ideal; in a more ‘political’ mode         would remain so through the further growth of empires
it meant the restoration of order and stability along        in the later Pax Britannica and Pax Americana). But in
with an end to lawlessness; and in becoming conjoined        the Roman tradition from where it hails pax has more
with a set of ideas associated with the rise of capital      affinity with the word ‘dominance’ than with modern
(‘commerce’, ‘prosperity’, ‘wealth’, ‘profit’) it con-       notions of ‘peace’. What is connoted by the word is
noted certain practical benefits to the nation. It was a     not simply an absence of conflict or making of a pact,
discourse of peace outside and distinct from ‘just war’      but the imposition of hegemony achieved through
doctrine and centred on the idea of the nation-state. 30     conquest and maintained by arms: the goddess Pax was
   Thus it is fair to say that amidst the ‘military          portrayed on Trajanic coins with her right foot on the
revolution’ of the sixteenth century, new ideas of peace     neck of a vanquished foe. Pax thus had unmistakable
were evolving as part of political discourse. As the         military and hegemonic overtones and was deeply
nineteenth-century liberal jurist Sir Henry Maine once       embedded in military codes and practices; it was and
commented, ‘War appears to be as old as mankind, but         is a victor’s peace, achieved by war and conquest.34 Pax
peace is a modern invention.’31 An invention, that is,       and imperium went hand in hand: peace as domination.
that came about amidst the increasing monopolization         Or, we might say, domination as pacification.
of violence by the developing state and one which
could be shaped and utilized by the state to help            Pacification, law, security
justify the violence under its control. The discourse        In his series of lectures from 1975 to 1976, the recent
of peace came to permeate the discourse of war in            translation of which has made them increasingly influ-
the very century in which war was being treated as an        ential, Foucault explored the ways in which we might
ineradicable feature of politics, as a necessity for the     consider war as the matrix for techniques of domina-
security of the state, and in which the ‘permanent-war       tion: the ways in which politics is the continuation of
machine’ was being perfected. A book such as Thomas          war by other means, rather than Clausewitz’s more
Becon’s New Pollecye of War (1542, published under           famous formulation. On this view, the task of political



                                                                                                                   13
power lies in the perpetual inscription of relations of       taken by many to be the definitive original document
force through a form of unspoken warfare. Far from            of international law, the Treaty of Westphalia, which
ending war, the ‘civil peace’ is in fact its continuation:    several times refers to itself as a Treaty of Pacifica-
‘If we look beneath peace, order, wealth, and authority       tion; from the pacification of Vietnam to the streets of
… will we hear and discover a sort of primitive and           Baghdad in the ‘war on terror’. If peace itself is a coded
permanent war?’ It is not so much ‘politics’ that is the      war, then pacification is core to the codification.
continuation of war by other means, then, but ‘peace’.           So too is law. ‘Law is not pacification’, says
That is, liberal peace, alterations in which are merely       Foucault. Well, no, not least because pacification is
episodes, factions and displacements in war. We there-        also very much about culture and ideology (‘hearts and
fore ‘have to interpret the war that is going on beneath      minds’), productivity and development (‘moderniza-
peace’, because ‘peace itself is a coded war’.35 Coded,       tion’), welfare and sexuality (from population censuses
we might say, as pacification.                                and surveys through to ‘erotic’ pamphlets), and much
    ‘Pacification’ is often thought to have been devel-       more, a range of activities which explain the numer-
oped as a term during the America–Vietnam war,                ous name changes undergone by specific pacifications
following its adoption in 1964–65 as a substitute             such as the war on Vietnam: Reconstruction, Rural
term for ‘counterinsurgency’. In fact, the term enters        Construction, Revolutionary Reconstruction, Land
political discourse in the context of the colonial wars       Development, Civic Action, and so on, all expressing
of the sixteenth century. In July 1573 Philip II came         the ‘productive side’ of power, as Foucault might have
to believe that the continued violence being meted out        said and President Johnson more or less did say. 39
in the conquest of the colonies was causing a certain         But that is not Foucault’s point. Rather, for Foucault,
discontent among his own people. He therefore pro-            law is not pacification because ‘beneath the law, war
claimed that all further extensions of empire be termed       continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power.’40
‘pacifications’ rather than ‘conquests’.                      With this comment, Foucault’s unwillingness to deal
                                                              properly with the question of law comes to the fore:
     Discoveries are not to be called conquests. Since we     looking ‘beneath’ the law is one of Foucault’s ways
     wish them to be carried out peacefully and charita-      of implying that law is not important to questions of
     bly, we do not want the use of the term ‘conquest’       power–war, a point he makes on many occasions in
     to offer any excuse for the employment of force
                                                              his attempt to move beyond the ‘juridico-discursive’
     or the causing of injury to the Indians … Without
                                                              concept of power. Yet to try to understand war without
     displaying any greed for the possessions of the
     Indians, they [the ‘discoverers’, ‘conquerors’] are to   recourse to the question of law is a serious mistake,
     establish friendship and cooperation with the lords      as Foucault himself came to acknowledge.41 It is far
     and nobles who seem most likely to be of assistance      more the case that through the law, war continues to
     in the pacification of the land.36                       rage. Such a claim does require grappling with law, as
                                                              it means grappling with the violence and war that take
    As Tzvetan Todorov notes, the conquests themselves        place through law but which law itself does so much to
are not to be stopped, but the idea of ‘conquest’ is          mask – not least because the violence of law is always
to be replaced with ‘pacification’, 37 a mystification        exercised in the name of ‘peace’.42 Contra Foucault,
still in place centuries later.38 The violence remains        law is pacification. Moreover, and even more contra
unchanged, but in taking from the Roman tradition of          Foucault, this was the crowning achievement of liberal
imperial glory through military domination, in which          contract theory.
pax implied ‘pacification’, it was understood in terms           The story told about this tradition is that war is
of the verb ‘pacificate’, now obsolete but which in the       replaced by law; the social contract sees the natural
seventeenth century meant ‘to make peace’. Playing on         right to use force given up to the state, which then
the constitution of internal order in ordinary language,      monopolizes the means of violence and thus the war
‘pacification’ quickly came to describe the enforcing of      power. This is the story told about the tradition by
a certain kind of peace, order and security. Pacifica-        IR and strategic studies and is also very much the
tion, then, is a police action: a military act dressed up     story told by Foucault: ‘basically, Hobbes’s discourse
as peace. Through pacification, (colonial) war becomes        is a certain “no” to war’.43 This view is reinforced in
(colonial) peace, a rhetorical move devised in the            Foucault’s more substantive works where he suggests
context of the wars of the sixteenth century and per-         an approach which ‘takes as its model a perpetual
fected over the centuries to follow: from the ‘Edicts of      battle rather than a contract’.44 But this is an incred-
Pacification’ of the late sixteenth century to the treaty     ibly one-dimensional reading of Hobbes and contract



14
theory, in that it fails to recognize the extent to which      Thus despite Hobbes’s attempt to ‘annex’ war to the
seventeenth-century contract theorists retained a notion    state, he cannot give up the idea that the multitude is
of perpetual battle within their model of the contract      always already on the verge of rebellion, the people
and despite their attempt to say ‘no’ to war.               always already on the verge of revolution and thus civil
    It is usually said that Hobbes thinks the creation of   society always already on the verge of chaos. To grasp
the mighty Leviathan somehow resolves the problem           this Hobbes has to invoke once more the category war,
of war: the perpetual war of the state of nature can        and he does so not for relations between states but for
be overcome with the creation of a sovereign entity         the social order constituted by the contract. For all
which monopolizes the means of violence and thus            the talk about the ‘peace and security’ of the juridical
the powers of war. In so doing, wars between states         order generated by the Leviathan, then, in Hobbesian
come to be the ‘proper’ form of war and wars within         terms what one should really speak about is the paci-
states an ‘illegitimate’ form of violence. That is,         fication of an otherwise permanent civil war.
Hobbes’s argument legalizes one type of war and                The same logic of pacification is found in other
interpellates another type, civil war, as illegal or        writers in the social contract tradition which sup-
criminal. Yet there is more to be said about this. For      posedly sought to say ‘no’ to war, such as Locke.
the connection between the external–foreign relation        It appears in Locke’s acceptance of slavery, which
of war and the internal–domestic importance of peace        is ‘nothing else, but the State of war continued’
is centred on the exercise of violence, not just in Hob-    and which is then reincorporated into civil society
bes’s sense that men who worship ‘peace’ at home            through the place of the slave within the domestic
will do so in vain if they cannot defend themselves         situation. But it is most explicit in Locke’s theory of
against foreigners, but also because the control of         punishment, which stems from the idea that those
violence is always already turned inwards: in the           who commit crimes against us or even show enmity
form of law. ‘We must understand, therefore, that           towards us have ‘declared War against all Mankind’.
particular citizens have conveyed their whole right of      This argument about punishment in Chapter II of
war and peace unto some one man or council; and             the Second Treatise runs straight into the argument
that this right, which we may call the sword of war,        about war in Chapter III, where it is suggested that
belongs to the same man or council, to whom the             ‘Force without Right, upon a man’s Person, makes a
sword of justice belongs.’ Two swords: the sword of         State of War.’ This appears initially to concern the
war and the ancient sword of justice, held together         state of nature: ‘force … where there is no common
in one and the same ‘supreme authority’. On the one         Superior on Earth to appeal to for relief, is the State
hand, then, the violence monopolized by the state           of War’. Yet within a few lines Locke adds that
is expressed as war when directed against foreign           force without right makes a state of war ‘both where
powers and as law when exercised internally. The            there is, and is not, a common Judge’. This is war
concept of order being articulated here thereby sets        saturating the social body following the creation of
out its historical stall as offering peace through the      political society; indeed, war as a constitutive feature
restriction of war-making to the sovereign state. On        of political society. One might note that despite
the other hand, however, and this is the point missed       Locke twice suggesting that this account of punish-
by Foucault, the problem of civil war can not be            ment will seem to many a ‘strange doctrine’, it is
circumvented so easily, and thus remains for Hobbes         actually not far from the doctrine of punishment
a permanent feature of social order. Why? Because           held by Vitoria, and, moreover, when Locke comes
for Hobbes those who remain dissatisfied with their         to flesh out the theory of punishment he does so
sovereign and the contract end up ‘waging war’. One         in the context of colonialism and the right of war
must bear in mind that despite Hobbes’s state of            against the Indians.46 The introduction of govern-
nature often being interpreted as an abstraction, in        ment in Locke’s argument, then, often understood
De Cive he relates it explicitly to the civil war which     through the lens of the liberal search for peace, is in
had recently been affecting his country. Indeed, even       fact comprehensible only through the logic of war,
questioning the need for obedience on the part of           exercised in a permanent fashion against rebellious
subjects constitutes one of the ‘true forerunners of an     slaves, antagonistic Indians, wayward workers, and
approaching war’. In Leviathan this becomes clearer         criminals with something unsocial in mind: a liberal
still: the challenge to authority is ‘a relapse into the    war masquerading as liberal peace.
condition of warre, commonly called Rebellion … for            In other words, the civil society created by the
Rebellion, is but warre renewed’.45                         contract in the name of peace and security remains for



                                                                                                                 15
liberalism a space of war. Regardless of its desire to        this is true of the ‘war on terror’ so it has been true of
restrict war to the international realm, civil society is     the permanent social war of capital. Creative thinking
always already at war. On the one hand, and pace the          about war therefore also requires jettisoning naive
myth of peace and commerce as congenital twins, there         ideas about peace.
is the permanent war of capital (spelt out by Marx in
his treatise on this war, namely Volume 1 of Capital).        Notes
On the other hand, there are the manifold permanent            1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Peace Commodity’ (1926), in Walter
                                                                  Benjamin’s Archive, trans. Esther Leslie, Verso, London,
or semi-permanent wars against the various ‘enemies               2007, pp. 56–7.
within’: war on crime, war on drugs, war on poverty,           2. Alain Badiou, ‘Fragments of a Public Journal on the
war on unemployment, war on scroungers, and on it                 American War against Iraq’, 26 February 2003, in
goes until the war that has been articulated as the one           Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran, Verso, London, 2006,
                                                                  pp. 39–41; Antonio Negri and Éric Alliez, ‘Peace and
that will probably never end: the war on terror. All are          War’ (2002), in Antonio Negri, Empire and Beyond,
code for the permanent pacification required in/of the            trans. Ed Emery, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008, pp.
bourgeois polity and all are a product in one way or              54–6; Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real:
                                                                  Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, Verso,
another of the supreme concept of bourgeois society:
                                                                  London, 2002, pp. 93–4.
security. ‘Fundamental to pacification is security’,           3. Daniel Ross, Violent Democracy, Cambridge University
commented someone with more than a little first-hand              Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 12; Rey Chow, The Age of
experience.47 The demand for peace and security, then,            the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory and
                                                                  Comparative Work, Duke University Press, Durham NC,
is a demand for pacification.                                     2006, p. 34; Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capital-
                                                                  ism and Power in an Age of War, Verso, London, 2009,
beyond peace                                                      p. 104; François Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture,
                                                                  and Geopolitics, Routledge, London: Routledge, 2008,
In an essay on ‘African Grammar’, Roland Barthes                  p. 97.
once highlighted the ways in which official French             4. Fritz Grob, The Relativity of War and Peace: A Study
reports on African affairs functioned not as com-                 in Law, History, and Politics, Yale University Press,
                                                                  New Haven CT, 1949. For the lawyers: Quincy Wright,
munication but as intimidation, often employing that              ‘When Does War Exist?, American Journal of Inter-
standard tactic of bourgeois ideology: giving some-               national Law 26, 1932, pp. 362–8; Georg Schwarzen-
thing the name of its contrary.                                   berger, ‘Jus Pacis Ac Belli? Prolegomena to a Sociology
                                                                  of International Law’, American Journal of International
     GUERRE/WAR. – The goal is to deny the thing.                 Law, vol. 37, no. 3, 1943, pp. 460–79; Philip C. Jessup,
     For this, two means are available: either to name            ‘Should International Law Recognize an Intermediate
     it as little as possible (most frequent procedure);          Status between Peace and War?’, American Journal of
     or else to give it the meaning of its contrary (more         International Law, vol. 48, no. 1, 1954, pp. 98–103.
     cunning procedure, which is at the basis of almost        5. See Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War, Rowman 
                                                                  Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2006.
     all the mystifications of bourgeois discourse). War is
                                                               6. Recent attempts to shift the debate include Randy Mar-
     then used in the sense of peace, and pacification in
                                                                  tin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the
     the sense of war.48                                          Financial Logic of Risk Management, Duke University
                                                                  Press, Durham NC, 2007; Michael McKinley, Economic
Barthes’s insight is clearly gleaned from French colo-            Globalization as Religious War: Tragic Convergence,
nialism, but his point is a general one about one of the          Routledge, Abingdon, 2007; Peter Alexander Meyer,
most important mystifications which has accompanied               Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen, University
                                                                  of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008; Nelson Maldonado-
bourgeois power since its inception. As I have sug-               Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Mo-
gested here, this mystification concerning war and                dernity, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2008; Tarik
peace is far from being a product of the global war on            Kochi, The Other’s War: Recognition and the Violence
terror; rather, it is a long-standing ideological feature         of Ethics, Birkbeck Law Press, London, 2009. Also im-
                                                                  portant is Étienne Balibar’s unpublished lecture ‘Poli-
of the global war of capital.                                     tics as War, War as Politics: Post-Clausewitzian Varia-
   Recognizing this is but one move towards more                  tions’, Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities,
creative thinking about war; thinking has to be done              8 May 2006. I am grateful to John Kraniauskas and
                                                                  Philip Derbyshire for bringing Balibar’s lecture to my
outside and against the mystifications found in liberal-
                                                                  attention.
ism, IR and strategic studies. It is also thinking that        7. Hans Kelsen, Law and Peace in International Relations,
has to be done outside of the discourse of peace and              Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1942, pp. 1,
security. As noted by Retort in what is by far the best           11–12.
                                                               8. Wilhelm G. Grewe, The Epochs of International Law
analysis of the war in Iraq, the reality of a permanent           (1984), trans. Michael Byers, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin,
war on terror ‘renders inadequate the notion of “peace”           2000.
as an oppositional frame or strategy’.49 As much as            9. Julius Stone, Human Law and Human Justice, Maitland



16
Publications, Sydney, 1965, p. 62; James Leslie Brierly,         he could both enjoy peace and carry on war’ (p. 245).
      The Law of Nations, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955,           34. Ali Parchami, Hegemonic Peace and Empire: The Pax
      p. 26.                                                           Romana, Britannica, and Americana, Routledge, Lon-
10.   Francisco de Vitoria, ‘On Civil Power’ (c. 1528), in Vi-         don, 2009, pp. 15–17, 42, 62, 92–3.
      toria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jer-       35. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures
      emy Lawrance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,             at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey,
      1991, p. 40.                                                     Allen Lane, London, 2003, pp. 15–16, 46–8, 50–51.
11.   James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origin of International       36. Cited in Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America,
      Law: Francisco de Vitoria and his Law of Nations,                HarperPerennial, New York, 1984, p. 173.
      Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1934, pp. xvi, 280.                 37. Ibid., p. 174.
12.   Francisco de Vitoria, ‘Letter to Miguel de Arcos’, 8         38. During the war in Vietnam one ‘unofficial’ Pentagon
      November, 1534, Political Writings, pp. 331, 332.                spokesman, Hanson W. Baldwin, let slip the mystifica-
13.   Francisco de Vitoria, De Indis, in Political Writings, pp.       tion: writing in the New York Times of the ‘ink blot’
      246, 250–51.                                                     or ‘oil stain’ theory of pacification, in which like ink
14.   Francisco de Vitoria Vitoria, ‘Letter to Miguel de Arcos’,       blots or oil stains the operations from one base overlap
      p. 333; De Indis, p. 251.                                        those from another, he commented that ‘gradually the
15.   Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Mak-            area pacified or conquered covered the country’. Cited
      ing of International Law, Cambridge University Press,            in Joseph Hansen, ‘The Case Against “Pacification”’,
      Cambridge, 2005, pp. 15–22, 36–7.                                International Socialist Review, vol. 27, no. 4, 1966, pp.
16.   Vitoria, De Indis, pp. 278–80.                                   131–6, www.marxists.org/archive/hansen/1966/xx/paci-
17.   Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western               fication.htm.
      Legal Thought, Oxford University Press, New York,            39. ‘I want to have a war to build as well as to destroy’,
      1990, p. 102.                                                    said Johnson to his advisers about ‘the other war’, as he
18.   Vitoria, De Indis, pp. 282–3.                                    called pacification; cited in Frank L. Jones, ‘Blowtorch:
19.   Vitoria, De Indis Relectio Posterior, in Political Writ-         Robert Komer and the Making of Vietnam Pacification
      ings, p. 318.                                                    Policy’, Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly,
20.   Ibid., p. 321.                                                   vol. 35, no. 3, 2005, 103–18, p. 104. ‘Pacification had
21.   Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Na-             to be productive’, notes William Gibson, who in outlin-
      tions, Methuen, New York, 1961, pp. 74, 83, 296–306.             ing the ‘Eleven Criteria and Ninety-Eight Works for
22.   J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine              Pacification’ in Vietnam comments that ‘the list sounds
      Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition,         like a program for the construction of a liberal welfare
      Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1975.                  state’; The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, Grove
23.   Mikael Hornqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, Cambridge              Books, New York, 1986, pp. 281, 291.
      University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 61, 72, 74.           40. Foucault, ‘Society’, p. 50.
24.   Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532), in The Chief         41. ‘If God grants me life … the last thing that I would
      Works and Others, Vol. 1, trans. Allan Gilbert, Duke             like to study would be the problem of war … There
      University Press, Durham NC, 1989, p. 55.                        again I would have to cross into the problem of law’.
25.   Vitoria, De Indis, p. 283; De Indis Relectio Posterior,          Interview with André Bertin, 1983, published as ‘What
      p. 319.                                                          Our Present Is’, in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer,
26.   Vitoria, De Indis Relectio Posterior, p. 298.                    Semiotext(e), New York, 1996, p. 415.
27.   Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European       42. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920–21),
      State-Making’, in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of           trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1:
      National States in Europe, Princeton University Press,           1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jen-
      Princeton NJ, 1975, p. 42.                                       nings, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Cambridge
28.   Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the             MA, 1996, pp. 248–9.
      Sixteenth Century, Routledge  Kegan Paul, London,           43. Foucault, ‘Society’, pp. 17, 97.
      1975, pp. 133–4, 210; Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geog-        44. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
      raphy of Colonial American Literature: Empire, Travel,           Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan, Penguin, London,
      Modernity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,                1977, p. 26.
      2003, p. 44.                                                 45. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642), in Hobbes, Man and
29.   James Hutton, Themes of Peace in Renaissance Poetry,             Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1991,
      Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1984, p. 19.                pp. 103–4, 177–8; Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck,
30.   Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early Eng-               Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 219.
      lish Pacifist Ideas, Pennsylvania State University Press,    46. John Locke, Two Treatises, ed. Peter Laslett, Cambridge
      Pennsylvania, 1997.                                              University Press, Cambridge, 1988, I, sect. 130, 131; II,
31.   Sir Henry Sumner Maine, International Law: A Series of           sects. 10, 19, 24
      Lectures Delivered before the University of Cambridge,       47. General William C. Westmoreland reporting his experi-
      1887, John Murray, London, 1888, p. 8.                           ence in Vietnam, in A Soldier Reports, Doubleday, New
32.   José A. Fernández, ‘Erasmus on the Just War’, Journal of         York, 1976, p. 68. Robert McNamara likewise described
      the History of Ideas, vol. 34, no. 2, 1973, pp. 209–26.          Vietnam as a ‘pacification security job’; cited in Gibson,
33.   Erasmus, ‘Letter to Martin Bucer’, 11 November 1527,             Perfect War, p. 275.
      in J. Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation           48. Roland Barthes, ‘African Grammar’, in The Eiffel Tower
      (1924), Phoenix Press, London, 2002, pp. 288–92; Nic-            and Other Mythologies (1979), trans. Richard Howard,
      colò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of              University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. 105.
      Titus Livius (1513–17), in Chief Works, pp. 224, 399.        49. Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New
      Note too his comment on Ancus, a man ‘so gifted … that           Age of War, Verso, London, 2005, p. 94.




                                                                                                                              1
dOSSiER The PosTcommunisT condiTion

children of postcommunism
boris buden

A curious set of metaphors marks the jargon of post-                                  an ideology called ‘transitology’
communist transition: education for democracy, class-                                 The human being as a political child offers itself as
rooms of democracy, democratic exams, democracy                                       the almost perfect subject of a democratic restart.
that is growing and maturing, but which might still                                   Untroubled by the past and geared totally to the
be in diapers or making its first steps or, of course,                                future, it is full of energy and imagination, compli-
suffering from children’s illnesses.1 This language of                                ant and teachable. It emanates freedom as though its
postcommunism discloses a paradox that points at what                                 pure embodiment, but actually it is not free at all. A
is probably the greatest scandal of recent history: those                             child is dependent; it must be guided and patronized
who proved their political maturity in the so-called                                  by adults. However, this only makes it all the more
‘democratic revolutions’ of 1989–90 have become                                       suitable for serving society, as the perfect ground for a
thereafter, overnight, children! Only yesterday, they                                 new beginning. It neutralizes all the contradictions that
succeeded in toppling totalitarian regimes in whose                                   the sudden irruption of freedom lays bare in society,
persistency and steadfastness the whole so-called ‘free’                              above all between those who rule and the ruled. There
and ‘democratic’ world had firmly believed, until the                                 is no relation of domination that seems so natural and
very last moment, and whose power it had feared as                                    self-evident as the one between a child and its guard-
an other-worldly monster. In the struggle against the                                 ian, no mastery so innocent and justifiable as that over
communist threat, that world had mobilized all its                                    children. One does not take their freedom away, but
political, ideological and military forces, its greatest                              suspends it temporarily, postpones it, so to speak, for
statesmen and generals, philosophers and scientists,                                  the time being. A patronized child as political being
propagandists and spies, without ever really frightening                              enjoys a sort of delayed freedom. And in case one day
the totalitarian beast. Yet, despite that, it calls those                             the promise of freedom turns out to be a delusion, one
who chased it away with their bare hands ‘children’.                                  can always say that it was just a children’s fairy tale.
Only yesterday, those people got world history going                                      The repressive infantilization of the societies that
again, after it had been lying on its deathbed, and                                   have recently liberated themselves from communism
helped it to walk upright again, after so long. Yet                                   is the key feature of the so-called postcommunist
today, they themselves must learn their first steps.                                  condition. It comes to light in the ideology of the post-
Only yesterday, they taught the world a history lesson                                communist transition, a peculiar theory that addresses
in courage, political autonomy and historical maturity,                               itself to the task of understanding and explaining the
yet today they must assert themselves before their new                                postcommunist transition to democracy. Here, cyni-
self-declared masters as their obedient pupils. Only                                  cism becomes (political) science. From the perspective
yesterday, they were the saving remedy for fatally ill                                of this political science, postcommunism is under-
societies; today, they themselves suffer from children’s                              stood above all as a phase of transition – that is, as
illnesses, which they must survive in order to become                                 a process of transformation of an ‘actually socialist’
capable of living. What miracle happened overnight?                                   (realsozialistisch) society into a capitalist democratic
What wizard turned these people into children?                                        one.2 Political science finds no reason to understand
    Of course, it was politics. The child that was sud-                               this transition in terms of a specific historical epoch. It
denly recognized in these mature people is defined                                    lacks basic identity features: a specific postcommunist
neither by an early stage of psychological develop-                                   political subject or system, for instance, and a spe-
ment that was never really abandoned, nor as a result                                 cific postcommunist mode of production, or form of
of the psychopathological phenomenon of infantile                                     property. In fact, political science does not need the
regression, but as a political being, a zoon politicon                                concept of postcommunism at all. It prefers instead the
par excellence.                                                                       aforementioned concept of ‘transition to democracy’



18     R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
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children_of _postcommunism

  • 1. R a d i C a l P h i l O S O P h y a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy 159 CONTENTS jaNuaRy/fEbRuaRy 2010 Editorial collective COmmENTaRy Claudia Aradau, Matthew Charles, David Cunningham, Howard Feather, The Global Moment: Seattle, Ten Years On Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart Rodrigo Nunes ................................................................................................ 2 Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Chris Wilbert aRTiClE Contributors Rodrigo Nunes was involved in the first three War as Peace, Peace as Pacification World Social Forums. He recently completed mark Neocleous .............................................................................................. 8 a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, on immanence in Foucault and Deleuze. He is a member of the editorial committee of dOSSiER The Postcommunist Condition Turbulence (www.turbulence.org.uk). Children of Postcommunism Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University. His boris buden ................................................................................................... 18 most recent book is Critique of Security (2008). Towards a Critical Theory of Postcommunism? Boris Buden is the author of Die Zone des Beyond Anticommunism in Romania Übergangs: Vom Ende des Postkommunismus (2009). He was a coordinator of Beyond Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu ................................................................................... 26 Culture: The Politics of Translation (2005–08), Down to Earth: Detemporalization in Capitalist Russia European Institute of Progressive Cultural Policies (http://translate.eipcp.net). Svetlana Stephenson and Elena danilova ................................................. 33 Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu is editor of the Sovereign Democracy: Dictatorship over Capitalism Romanian journal of contemporary arts and in Contemporary Russia critical theory IDEA arts + society (www. ideamagazine.ro). His book The Postcommunist julia Svetlichnaja with james heartfield ................................................. 38 Colonization: A Critical History of the Culture of Transition is forthcoming (2010). COmmENT Svetlana Stephenson teaches sociology at London Metropolitan University, and is Rentier Capitalism and the Iranian Puzzle the author of Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, dariush m. doust .......................................................................................... 45 Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia (2006). Elena Danilova works at the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of REviEwS Sciences, Moscow. Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War Julia Svetlichnaja and James Heartfield are PhD candidates at the Centre for the Study of alberto Toscano ........................................................................................... 50 Democracy, University of Westminster. Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth Dariush M. Doust is an Associate Professor of the Self at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, a Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons Lacanian psychoanalyst and head of the cultural from the Biology of Consciousness association Kurrents. benjamin james lozano ............................................................................. 53 Joanna Zylinksa, Bioethics in the Age of New Media Copyedited and typeset by illuminati www.illuminatibooks.co.uk Caroline bassett............................................................................................ 56 Layout by Peter Osborne Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Neoliberal Era Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT Claudia aradau.............................................................................................. 59 Bookshop distribution Sergei Prozorov, The Ethics of Postcommunism: History and Social Praxis in Russia UK: Central Books, 115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN alexander astrov .......................................................................................... 61 Tel: 020 8986 4854 Filippo Del Lucchese, Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc., Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 jason E. Smith.............................................................................................. 63 Tel: 718 875 5491 Mahmood Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the Front Cover image Éric Alliez, Communism Explained to Children, 2009. War on Terror ahmed Rajab ................................................................................................ 64 Back Cover image Sergey Bratkov, Italian School, no. 1, 2001 (courtesy Regina Gallery, Moscow). NEwS Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. Faint Signal: The Student Occupations in California www.radicalphilosophy.com Nathan Coombs............................................................................................ 66 © Radical Philosophy Ltd
  • 2. COmmENTaRy The global moment Seattle, ten years on Rodrigo Nunes w hat are we to make of an anniversary that no one celebrates? The year 2009 may be remembered for many things: the greatest capitalist crisis in over a century, the first year of the Obama presidency, the transformation of the G8 into a G20 (and the first massive geopolitical rearrangement since the fall of the Soviet bloc), the ecological crisis definitively establishing itself as a widespread concern (even if it means very different things to different groups). One thing, however, was conspicu- ously absent from the year’s calendar: the tenth anniversary of the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, which made of 1999 the year when the ‘anti-’ or ‘alter-globalization’ movement, or ‘movement of movements’, or ‘global move- ment’ became a visible phenomenon across the world. In 2009, of course, ‘celebration’ was not very high on the agenda, even – or espe- cially – if looked at from the point of view of those protests. If anything, the problems highlighted then seem more pressing now, the threats they pose more acute. More importantly, while the danger grows, the redeeming power seems to recede. It is tempt- ing to say that time has proved those protesters ten years ago right, but the capacity for immediate action in the present seems ever more remote. Today, the liveliness of debate, the wealth of different experiences and – more importantly – the intensity of mobilization, the determination and the hope of those years seem far away. Surely this is sufficient reason to revisit the period, as a source of inspiration and a way of stoking whatever embers are left? in which case, should the silence be interpreted as yet another symptom of the present lethargy? Or could it also be a sign of a something else: an unspoken avoidance or implicit recognition of that period as a source of impasse, a dead end? The failure of the 2003 anti-war mobilizations to stop the Iraq war opened the season of public questioning regarding the effectiveness of ‘the movement’. Thus, for instance, Paolo Virno: The global movement, from Seattle forward, appears as a battery that only half works: it accumulates energy without pause, but it does not know how or where to discharge it. It is faced with an amazing accumulation, which has no correlate, at the moment, in adequate investments. It is like being in front of a new technological apparatus, potent and refined, but ignoring the instructions for its use.1 By 2007, a major player in the World Social Forum process wondered whether the time had not come for it, ‘having fulfilled its historic function of aggregating and linking the diverse counter-movements spawned by global capitalism… to give way to new modes of global organization of resistance and transformation’.2 It became common to hear that ‘the movement’ had failed to produce ‘proposals’ or ‘alternatives’, and hence squandered its accumulated energy and opportunities to deliver on the promise 2 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
  • 3. that the blue-sky lightning of Seattle had suggested. There were many alleged culprits: the incapacity to deal with diversity, or an absolute emphasis on diversity making politi- cal definitions impossible, depoliticized ‘movementism’ and ‘life-stylism’, the atavistic reformism of parties and unions (and of course NGOs). Yet if one asks the seemingly straightforward question of what has been achieved since then, it is just as true to say ‘a lot’ as ‘not nearly enough’. The various blows to the WTO project, successful anti-privatization campaigns such as the ones around water and gas in Bolivia, the election of progressive governments across Latin America, the opposition to the neoliberal constitution in Europe, the defeat of the CPE in France… plus a huge number of local victories, small victories, partial victories, even defeats that resulted in the creation of new possibilities that might one day result in victories. One could certainly ask: what does any of this have to do with the ‘global movement’ as such? But this, precisely, takes us to the crucial difficulty in talking about a ‘global movement’: how are we to tell it apart from its constituent parts? How are we to isolate whatever these parts do as parts from what they do in conjunction with others, or the aggregate effect of what all of them do? Take the struggles against the WTO – the one example from those above that can be least problematically attributed to the ‘global movement’. Until the Seattle protests, negotiations soldiered on with the time’s distinctive sense of inevitability, and govern- ments would hardly bother to inform, let alone consult, their citizens. That sudden crystallization managed to foreground a dissent that could have remained marginal and powerless if not for that instant when certain forces recognized themselves in a common struggle, and it certainly began to tilt the agenda. A series was opened that made it possible for opposition to neoliberal policies to grow, for different movements to communicate with and reinforce each other, for other moments of convergence to occur, in a chain of positive feedbacks that undoubtedly contributed to, for example, the election of progressive governments in Latin America. It may be that the effective cause of the WTO’s ‘derailing’ was, in the end, the stronger stance taken by the governments of some developing states around the negotiating table; this, however, would probably not have happened had it not been for the presence of movements outside the gates, or for the broader sequence at the turn of the century through which this series unfolded. Nevertheless, at the time when these ultimate effects were produced, the ‘global move- ment’ was already regarded by many of its participants as a spent force. How are we to think through this paradox: that its greatest victory arrived after its wane? What if the reluctance to celebrate today comes from a difficulty in thinking of a ‘global movement’ in any meaningful way? What if this, rather than dichotomies such as ‘openness’ versus ‘decision-making’, is the impasse that is sensed? And what if – to advance a hypothesis in the bluntest possible way – the global movement never existed? What if it was a moment, rather than a movement?3 One world is possible The most literal way of speaking of a ‘global movement’ would be as a reference to those groups posing only explicit global goals, or whose space of action was essentially transnational. In the face of the plethora of social forces mobilized around the world at the time, however, such a definition seems scandalously narrow. (The greater currency enjoyed among many by the phrase ‘global movement of movements’ was no doubt due precisely to its indefinite, near-infinite inclusivity.) To limit the frame of reference in such a way would turn ‘global movement’ into a very reductive synecdoche. Yet this is exactly the pars pro toto logic that was (and is) often used by media commentators, whereby the expression comes to refer to what, in the global North, was the period’s most visible manifestation: the cycle of summit protests (Seattle, Prague, Quebec City, Genoa and so on) and counter-summits (Social Fora and the like). 3
  • 4. Avoiding this synecdoche is crucial, not only to stay close to the self-understanding of the actors concerned, but also to undo the confusion at the source of the present impasse. Thinking in terms of moment allows us to do so. This was a moment, first, because there was an intensification of activity on various fronts, including mobiliza- tions against structural adjustment and privatization (Bolivia, South Korea, various African countries, Canada), against multinational corporations (oil companies, as in the Niger Delta; sweatshop-based brands, as in the USA), against migration policies (the sans papiers in France, various border camps in Europe, North America, Australia), against GMOs (several Via Campesina campaigns around the world), and many more. In most cases, these were not pitched as ‘global’ campaigns as such; they took place in the space of local or national politics, had national legislation and policies as their referents, and unfolded within a complex, multilayered field of relations and causal series where their ‘global’ dimension was always filtered by local, national and regional struggles, correlations of forces, institutional arrangements, conjunctures and contingent events. In this case, speaking of a ‘global movement’ appropriately would refer to nothing more than the sum total of these various forces’ activities, the outcome of their political interventions and the transformation of social relations they managed to produce. Except that ‘movement’ would still have a metaphorical sense, calling a whole what is really only a collection: something whose only criteria for membership would be existence on the same globe, something that could never be totalized or given any kind of unitary shape or direction – a ‘wild’ in-itself, never to be fully appropriated for-itself. However, there is one characteristic of the moment that began in the mid-1990s that sets it apart from previous cycles of struggle that took place simultaneously in various parts of the globe, such as those of the 1840s, 1920s–30s and 1960s–70s. In the sense disclosed by it, the ‘global movement’ would in fact exist only for-itself, and this for-itselfness would be the very quality making its emergence unique: a for-itself whose in-itself is not given. What is the unique characteristic of that emergence? This was the first cycle of struggles that defined itself in terms of its global dimension. The material element determining this difference was, of course, capitalist globalization itself, which created and strengthened structures and flows of communica- tion, movements of people and goods to such a scale that the potential for connections between different local realities became widely accessible not only to the actors instrumental in the advance of capital, but potentially also to those who wished to resist it. This expanded potential for exchange and the production of commonalities resulted in enhanced awareness of the different impacts of neoliberal global- ization, their interconnectedness, the 4
  • 5. forms taken by resistance to them, and the ways in which these resistances could be placed in relation with each other. This, in turn, enabled concrete exchanges and mutual support between different local experiences, which, finally, conjured a potential: that of momentarily focusing this localized political activity into moments of shared relevance, whether at a global level (such as the mobilizations against the WTO or the Iraq war) or more locally. These three factors – awareness, concrete exchanges and potential for convergence – constitute that moment’s global dimension; and there is no contradiction between affirming this dimension as its defining feature and the fact that most of the move- ments and campaigns then active had local or national politics as their space of action and main referents. As a matter of fact, these three factors are precisely what created the mirage of a movement, when in fact what one had was a moment of rapidly increased capacity for communication and coordination, and wide-eyed astonishment at a just-discovered potential for channelling much of that activity into determinate spatio-temporal coordinates, creating moments of convergence whose collective power was much greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, while most of the activity effectively occupied the national or local political space, the key characteristic of that period was the widened perception of global processes. The ‘global movement’, in this sense, was literally something that existed in people’s heads, and in the communication between them. This is distinct from previous generations’ ‘internationalism’: it refers to a shared belonging to an interconnected, interdependent world, rather than an aggregate of nation-states to be revolutionized or reformed one by one.4 This means not only a heightened awareness of the commonality of natural commons, but a clearer grasp of the effects at a distance produced by a global market, and of the possibility of interven- ing in relation to these effects in ways that are necessarily restricted neither to national borders nor to the nation-state as the sole agency to be addressed. It is the increase in types of connection today – supranational (multilateral organisms, information networks), transnational (migrant networks) and infranational (among different regions affected by the same problem, for example, dams) – that opens up the possibility of interventions that need neither depart from the nation-state, nor retain it as their sole or immediate referent. It has been argued that the famous ‘Earth rising’ photograph had an effect on the development of environmentalism; and indeed there is enormous power in the idea that ‘there is only one world’: once a physical limit is placed on the capacity to universalize, the rational operation of seeing one’s lot as necessarily tangled with others’ is given a concrete outline. That this ‘concrete universalism’ is coupled with the increase in the capacity to exchange and cooperate with ‘concrete others’ from all over the globe is one of the novelties of ‘globalism’. Under its light, every struggle appears as neither exclu- sively local nor exclusively global: all struggles communicate on different levels, while no struggle can in practice subsume all others. There are no partial, ‘local’ solutions that can stand in isolation, and there is no ‘global’ solution unless this is understood as a certain possible configuration of local ones. What ended up being labelled as a ‘move- ment’ (the cycle of summit protests and counter-summits) was therefore nothing but the tip of the iceberg: the convergences produced by a much wider and deeper weft of con- nections, both direct (as when groups engaged in communication and coordination with each other) and indirect (when struggles resonated and reinforced each other without any coordination), among initiatives that were sometimes very local, sometimes very different, sometimes even contradictory. That there was no ‘movement’ as such does not mean that it did not produce concrete effects; every moment of convergence fed back into these initiatives, creating and reinforcing connections, and strengthening the globalism that defined the moment, 5
  • 6. nourishing the (subjectively effective) notion that all of this belonged in the same move- ment. This strength, however, would reveal itself as also being a weakness. The ‘we’ of that period became progressively stabilized as the ‘we’ of the summit protests and counter-summits – certainly a multitudinous, diverse ‘we’, but one which managed to sustain itself largely because of the short-lived nature of those convergences, their exter- nally, negatively given object (where the ‘one no’ always had precedence over the ‘many yeses’), and the positive feedback produced by their own spectacular, mediatic strength. The more entrenched the synecdoche became, the more these convergences came to be treated as an end in themselves, rather than strategic tools and tactical moments in what should be the constitution of ‘another world’. 5 yes and no That moment’s passing can be partially explained by the impossibility of inhabiting the global level as such. The technological and tactical innovations (‘swarming’, the ‘diversity of tactics’ principle) that enabled large-scale convergences can only function at such a scale when their objects are externally given and negatively defined: anti- WTO, anti-war, and so on. The much-lamented lack of ‘proposals’ was never actually that; there was a dizzying collection of proposals, and what was perceived as a lack was in fact the impossibility of having ‘the movement’ subscribe to any of them as global movement – that is, as a whole. Moreover, there is a serious difficulty in thinking of global ‘proposals’ by analogy with those that can be placed in national political space, given that at the global level there is no one to address directly. One cannot lobby or influence transnational structures in the same way as national governments, as the unaccountability and imperviousness of the latter to political process is structural rather than contingent; whatever accountability they may have is ultimately mediated by national structures. This became evident in 2005 in the attempt by a group of intellectuals associated with the World Social Forum to elaborate what they saw as a distillation of that profu- sion of ideas into a minimal, consensual programme.6 Ultimately, the main problem with this document was not the way in which it was drafted, the lack of gender balance, or any of the other criticisms raised at the time, but that it is entirely unclear what its presumed target audience (the WSF, ‘the movement’) could actually do about proposals pitched at such a global level – apart from organizing demonstrations incorporating them as rallying points. They do not even function as demands, as there is no one to demand them from. At this level, antagonism remains purely representative: expressing a dissent that has no means of enforcement. This kind of dissent has some effectiveness in a parliamentary democracy, of course, provided it corresponds to a large enough constituency representing a relevant electoral variable. The problem is that, at the global level, this is impossible. However crucial it is to keep open the potential to focus politi- cal activity on singular global moments, such potential exists only as a consequence of capacity built at the local level, not as its substitute; it is only to the extent that local struggles enhance their capacity to act in their immediate environment that they can act globally in meaningful ways. In fact, privileging convergences can sap resources from local capacity-building, when the point should be precisely that the former reinforce the latter. If they do not, antagonism, rather than being the other half of building autonomy, comes to replace it; and, in doing so, it loses the grounds on which it can find support. It becomes the expression of political contents from which it is impossible to draw political consequences. There was another reason why the global became uninhabitable. The context in which the ‘global moment’ unfolded changed drastically with the onset of the ‘war on terror’. Not only was the main focus of conflict moved elsewhere (‘good’ versus ‘rogue’ 6
  • 7. states, ‘fundamentalism’ versus ‘democracy’, ‘Islam’ versus ‘the West’), it was displaced to a level of confrontation no movements were willing or able to occupy (state appara- tus versus ‘terror’). Moreover, the combination of an atmosphere of constantly reiterated alarm, and the creep into spheres of legislative and policing measures that served to criminalize social movements, had the subjective impact of reinforcing feelings of isola- tion, fear and impotence. Many individuals abandoned political involvement altogether; individuals and groups disengaged from the global level, refocusing on the local. In other cases, investment in the global at the expense of the local led to a disconnection between politics and life, representation (or antagonism) and capacity-building, burn-out, or a replacement of slowly built consistency for the quicker, wider, but also less sustain- able, effects of the media. Is the ‘global moment’ over? Yes and no. The material conditions that enabled it remain, as do the elements of awareness of global processes and (the potential for) concrete exchanges. There is no going back on this, as there is no going back on ‘globalism’, or the political consciousness of belonging to a single world. Whatever movements appear in the future will in all likelihood share these features, and they will do well to look back to those years and draw some lessons from what went right and wrong. To say that the expectations then built around the use of information technology (as almost a substitute for other forms of political action) were exaggerated does not mean that their possibilities have been exhausted, the recent Iranian protests being a good example. If anything, one would expect to see much more made of their potential for diffuse initiative and rapid dissemination; yet the question will always be, once the ‘great nights’ they can produce have passed, how to give consistency to the excess they throw up. On the other hand, these movements would do well to disarm some false dichotomies that were strong then, such as the supposedly definitive choices between autonomy- building and antagonism (the latter requires the former to exist, the former at various junctures requires the latter to expand), or between absolute openness and capacity to act (any movement, any decision always strikes a balance between the two), or even ‘taking’ or ‘not taking’ power (recognizing the limits of what the state can deliver does not diminish the need to always push beyond them). It is far more important to develop the collective capacity to choose what mediators to have, what mediation to accept, and when. Building on these, managing to move beyond them; now that would be cause for celebration. Notes 1. Paolo Virno, ‘Facing a New 17th Century’, 2004, www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno4.htm. 2. Walden Bello, ‘The Forum at the Crossroads’, 2007, www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/noticias_textos. php?cd_news=395. 3. This distinction is inspired by Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1968. 4. Even before the thesis of ‘socialism in only one country’ and the tactical retreat into nationalism, it was the case that proletarian universalism necessarily required the (national) communist party and trade-union movement as the initial supports and local agents of ‘world revolution’; solidarity and collaboration among revolutionary movements mirrored the bourgeois internationalism of solidarity among nation-states. 5. One example of this entrenchment is the proposal for a permanent International Day of Action every two years. Tellingly, one proponent says of this idea – where ‘one central subject, which touches everyone in the world, can be commonly put forward once every two years’ as the theme for simul- taneous worldwide demonstrations – that the theme ‘could be global warming, trade, out-of-control finance, debt … I don’t even care what the theme is; it’s the principle of choosing it and of the unity that creates visibility that I think is important.’ Susan George, ‘Contribution to the Debate on the Future of the Social Forums and the Alter-globalization Movement’, 2008, www.tni.org/detail_page. phtml?&act_id=18081. 6. VV.AA, ‘Porto Alegre Manifesto’, 2005, at www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005–02/20group_of_ nineteen.cfm.
  • 8. War as peace, peace as pacification mark Neocleous To stress one’s own love of peace is always the The consensus is wide. From a diverse range of close concern of those who have instigated war. But recent publications, let me just cite Daniel Ross’s he who wants peace should speak of war. He should speak of the past one … and, above all, he should analysis of democratic violence in which he claims that speak of the coming one.1 in democracies ‘peacetime and wartime … are increas- ingly convergent’, Rey Chow’s suggestion that war A remarkable consensus appears to have emerged on is now the very definition of normality itself, Gopal the Left: that in the context of the war on terror the Balakrishnan’s claim that the invasion and policing of distinction between war and peace has been destabi- ‘rogue states’ means that ‘a long-term epistemic shift lized. Alain Badiou suggests that the category of ‘war’ seems to be occurring which is blurring older distinc- has become so obscured that ancient capitals can be tions between war and peace’, and François Debrix’s bombed without serving notice to anyone of the fact argument that the reason the war machine permeates that war has been declared. ‘As such, the continuity of everyday culture is because the distinction between war is slowly established, whereas in the past declaring peace and war has broken down. 3 war would, to the contrary, have expressed the present I have no interest in challenging this account in itself; of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity has rendered as will be seen, despite its apparent boldness it is in war and peace indistinguishable.’ ‘In the end’, notes fact a fairly uncontroversial position to hold. What I do Badiou, ‘these American wars … are not really dis- want to challenge, as my starting point at least, is the tinguishable from the continuity of “peace”.’ Antonio major historical assumption being made within it. For Negri and Éric Alliez likewise comment that ‘peace these accounts rely on an assumption of a ‘classical’ age appears to be merely the continuation of war by other in which war and peace were indeed distinguishable; means’, adding that because peace, ‘otherwise known they assume that the destabilization is somehow new as global war … is a permanent state of exception’, war – hence the references to wars in ‘the past’, in the now ‘presents itself as peace-keeping’ and has thereby ‘old sense’ and in the ‘classical’ age. The nebulous reversed their classical relationship. Their reference to nature of some of these phrases is remarkable, given a concept made popular following Agamben’s State of the implied radicalism of the insight being expressed. Exception is far from unusual in this new consensus. Worse, in accepting the very claim made by the USA ‘We no longer have wars in the old sense of a regu- and its allies that everything has indeed changed from lated conflict between sovereign states’, notes Žižek. the time when the distinction between war and peace Instead, what remains are either ‘struggles between was categorical and straightforward, this account also groups of Homo sacer … which violate the rules of reinforces the general fetish of ‘9/11’ as the political universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, event of our time. Perhaps there really was a time ‘in and call for “humanitarian pacifist” intervention by the past’ when mass killing possessed a greater con- Western powers’, or ‘direct attacks on the USA or other ceptual clarity; but I doubt it. Felix Grob’s Relativity representatives of the new global order, in which case, of War and Peace, published in 1949, offers countless again, we do not have wars proper, merely “unlawful examples of states engaged in mass killing but either combatants” criminally resisting the forces of universal denying or sometimes just not knowing whether or order. Hence ‘the old Orwellian motto “War is Peace” not they were at war, which explains why a wealth of finally becomes reality.’2 categories have existed to describe a condition that 8 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
  • 9. appears to be neither war nor peace or that might just engagement between states and aping IR and strategic be a little bit of both: reprisals, belligerency, state of studies in becoming little more than a series of footnotes hostilities, measures short of war, intermediate state, to Clausewitz.6 One of the wider implications of this quasi-war, and so on. And more than a few international article, then, is to move discussion of war away from the lawyers in the early- and mid-twentieth century pointed fairly restrictive account found in liberal mythology, out the artificial nature of the distinction between war IR and strategic studies, and to expand it to include and peace.4 It really is a bad sign when supposedly key what is after all the most fundamental war in human insights on the Left come half a century after the same history: the social war of capital. insights are made by international lawyers. To make this case I will begin with the birth of The first aim of this article is therefore to make international law and end with some comments on a historical point: that this consensus about a recent the ideology of security. Why? Because the formal elision of the difference between war and peace is liberal position is that the decision about whether war rooted in a deep historical misconception. Rather, I exists is a legal one and that peace comes through will aim to show that the distinction between war and law. ‘Law is, essentially, an order for the promotion peace has always been blurred. The second and more of peace’, says Hans Kelsen in his lectures on inter- political aim is to suggest that this blurring was part national relations: ‘The law makes the use of force a and parcel of an ascendant liberalism which found monopoly of the community. And precisely by doing an important political use for the language of peace so, law ensures peace.’7 Thus the proclaimed purpose within the context of international law. To accept the of international organizations such as the United idea that there was a ‘classical age’ where the distinc- Nations is always peace, to be achieved through law tion between war and peace did make sense is thus and the legal regulation of war. And not just peace: to accept one of liberalism’s major myths, one which it is always ‘peace and security’ that are expected to circulates widely in academic discourse as part of come together; a conceptual couplet performing the ‘the liberal peace’ hypothesis: that peace is the focal same ideological role internationally as ‘law and order’ dynamic of civil society, that the state exists in order performs domestically. I therefore focus on the early to realize this ‘liberal peace’ within civil society, and period in international law (or, as it was, the law of that international law exists to ensure peace between nations), since this was the period in which liberalism states. On this view, war is an exception to peace. As found in law a way to articulate its vision of peace a myth, this has served to gloss over liberalism’s own and security. It did so in that crucible of capital’s civil tendency to carry out systematic violence and to call it war: colonialism. peace; to gloss over, that is, the violence of the liberal peace. I therefore argue that it has never made sense The humanity of indians for the Left to adopt a categorical distinction between Although there is much debate about when inter- war and peace. national law first emerged, with many treating it as an This takes me to my third aim, which is to suggest outcome of the Peace of Westphalia, there is a wide that in accepting the major liberal assumptions about enough agreement that prior to Westphalia there was war and peace the Left has cut itself off from devel- a ‘Spanish age’ of international law, 8 so called because oping a concept of war outside of the disciplines of the arguments developed at that point coincided with International Relations (IR) and strategic studies (within the rise of Spain as a colonial power. Spanish political which, unsurprisingly, the idea of a ‘classical age’ is thought was at this moment central to European intel- also constantly reiterated). For the liberal argument to lectual life and it is no coincidence that it became so hold, war has to be understood as a phenomenon of through its debates about war. In this context the work the international sphere: as a confrontation between of Francisco de Vitoria is crucial. militarily organized and formally opposed states. Not Vitoria’s work is regarded as one of the first state- only does this contraction of the war concept ignore ments of a universalist and humanitarian conception the transnational nature of a great deal of warfare, it of international law. He is often regarded as the first also manages to obscure the structural and systematic to have ‘proclaimed a “natural” community of all violence through which liberal order has been consti- mankind and the universal validity of human rights’, tuted. 5 The Left has too easily bought into the idea of and to have presented a ‘courageous defence of the war as articulated in IR and strategic studies and has rights of the Indians’ against the Spanish.9 This reading thus been driven by an agenda not of the Left’s own of Vitoria is rooted in his conception of ‘the whole making, replicating the idea of war as formal military world which is in a sense a commonwealth’ and the 9
  • 10. idea of a law of nations which would have ‘the sanction conjunction of violence and law running through the of the whole world’.10 ‘Vitoria was a liberal’, notes liberal imperialism which emerges, an imperialism in James Brown Scott. Indeed, ‘he could not help being a which the idea of peace becomes a key thematic. liberal. He was an internationalist by inheritance. And Inspired by the dynamics of Spanish territorial pos- because he was both, his international law is a liberal session, Vitoria places colonial domination – and thus law of nations.’11 One reason for this interpretation is dispossession – at the heart of international law. At that Vitoria’s ‘humanist’ tendencies meant his work the heart of this domination and dispossession are the was established against the more explicitly violent laws of war and peace and the question of ‘free trade’. policies of Spanish colonialism: ‘No business shocks According to Vitoria, the natural rights and duties of me or embarrasses me more than the corrupt profits the law of nations are society and fellowship, trade and affairs of the Indies … I do not understand the and commerce, communication, participation regarding justice of the war.’12 A second reason is his claim things in common, and the freedom to travel. Because that the Indians had rights of dominium. Sinners and trade is essential to human communication and to the non-believers as they might be, they are nonetheless exchange and development of human knowledge, the ‘not impeded from being true masters, publicly and pri- right to maintain lines of communication through vately’ and so ‘could not be robbed of their property’.13 trade and exchange is a right of natural law. Hence One of the reasons they had rights of dominium, and ‘the Spaniards have the right to travel and dwell the third reason for the interpretation of Vitoria as one in those countries, so long as they do no harm to of the first statements of universal and humanitarian the barbarians’, and ‘they may lawfully trade among international law, is because they are human beings the barbarians, so long as they do no harm to their with reason: the Indians are not monkeys but ‘are homeland.’ A refusal by the Indians to trade with the men, and our neighbours’, so ‘it would be harsh to Spaniards constitutes a refusal to maintain ‘natural’ deny to them … the rights we concede to Saracens lines of communication, and is barbarism. Moreover, and Jews’.14 ‘if there are any things among the barbarians which In suggesting that non-Christians are somehow are held in common both by their own people and by equal with Christians, Vitoria challenges the idea strangers, it is not lawful for the barbarians to prohibit of a universal Christian order administered by the the Spaniards from sharing and enjoying them.’ The Pope within which the Indians could be characterized reason for this is based in part on the principle of as heathens and their rights and duties determined trade and in part on the idea that in natural law a thing accordingly. He thereby disallows religion as the basis which does not belong to anyone becomes the property for war against the Indians or rule over them. Yet of the first taker. What this means is that should the although the Indians are like the Spanish, their social, barbarians try to deny the Spaniards what is theirs by economic and political practices, including nudity, the the ‘law of nations’ – that is, by natural law – then consumption of raw food and cannibalism, mean they ‘they commit an offence against them’.16 diverge from universal norms in such a way as also to If Vitoria’s argument is a major contribution to some make them unlike the Spanish. The Indian appears to kind of emergent international law of nations, then it have some of the social and cultural characteristics of is equally an important contribution to an emergent civilized life, yet is markedly uncivilized; the Indian discourse of political economy centred on commerce shares the characteristics of a universal humanity, yet and accumulation; it is through this contribution that is also set clearly apart. Thus the ‘Indian problem’ Vitoria helps shape natural law arguments for con- became the basis of a discussion about the relations quest, for the right to engage in commerce and trade between different groups of humans within a ‘republic is for Vitoria a natural right. As Williams points out, of all the world’. In effect, as Anthony Anghie points within the totalizing discourse of a universally obliga- out, the problem for Vitoria was not one of managing tory natural law of nations, the profit motive occupies order between formally equal sovereign states, but an extremely privileged status, in the sense that not of constituting order among culturally different enti- engaging in trade is treated as contrary to the mutual ties.15 It is this tension between the claims of natural self-interests shared by all humankind.17 And this law against behaviour that is somehow ‘unnatural’, motivation must be allowed to triumph over common and the necessity of understanding others within the property rights. Put simply: customary land use by framework of a universal humanity, which runs though the Indians has to be treated as an illegitimate form Vitoria’s two 1539 lectures on the Indians and on the of property. Any indigenous ‘law of the commons’ laws of war. And it is this tension which reveals the must therefore be abolished and replaced by the law 10
  • 11. of private property, and dispossession legitimized on plundering the goods of the innocent, killing the the grounds of natural law. As is well known, it is this innocent, and enslaving the women and children, to dispossession and replacement of common property the point of absolute destruction: with private property that becomes central to the War is waged to produce peace, but sometimes colonizing project and to bourgeois political economy security cannot be obtained without the wholesale thereafter. It is at this point that the question of war destruction of the enemy. This is particularly the becomes crucial, as the Spaniards have the right to case in wars against the infidel, from whom peace defend themselves against the offences committed can never be hoped for on any terms; therefore the by the Indians by availing themselves of the other only remedy is to eliminate all of them who are capable of bearing arms, given that they are already main right of the law of nations: to go to war. ‘If the guilty.20 barbarians … persist in their wickedness and strive to destroy the Spaniards, they may then treat them no Vitoria’s law of nations, then, gives us two options: longer as innocent enemies, but as treacherous foes permanent war in search of free trade or absolute against whom all rights of war can be exercised.’18 destruction of the enemies of such trade. In this light, James Brown Scott’s description of Vitoria as a liberal is both interesting and historically important. A leading law scholar, Scott was solicitor to the US Department of State (1906–09), acted as trustee and secretary to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1910–40), served as adviser to the US delegation to the second Hague Peace Confer- ence of 1907, was president of the American Institute of International law (1915–40), wrote several major works on international law and the various Hague Peace conferences, edited and thereby made newly available a series of translations of the ‘classics’ of international law (including Vitoria), helped establish the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1921, and served under President Woodrow Wilson. In pur- suing the idea that Vitoria is a liberal Scott sought to draw a link between the liberalism of the sixteenth- century law of nations and the liberalism of early- twentieth-century US foreign policy, albeit mediated by the Catholicism which he claimed also underpinned international law. The ‘discovery’ of America, in his view, gave birth to a modern law of nations which was originally Catholic but had now become entirely laicized in liberal form. For that reason, he sought In making this argument Vitoria’s lecture broke new to situate Vitoria within this liberal tradition. Now, theoretical ground for Western colonizing thought, Scott’s argument has been widely challenged. Arthur providing a natural law source of Spain’s right – and Nussbaum, for example, was one of the first of many by implication any other state’s right – to engage in war to respond to Scott by pointing out the decidedly against native peoples and to rule in the New World ‘illiberal’ things Vitoria has to say or tries to justify. 21 as a means of securing the right to commerce. If the Yet the argument of Nussbaum and others is founded law of nations emerged to deal with war, then the war on the rather naive assumption that liberalism could in question was one of accumulation. never engage in something so illiberal as systematic As a war of accumulation this was recognized from violence against weaker and even unarmed opponents the outset as permanent. ‘Our war against the pagans for merely commercial reasons. But in that sense, and is … permanent because they can never sufficiently leaving aside some of the issues in Scott’s reading pay for the injuries and losses inflicted.’19 Because of of Vitoria, it seems to me that, without meaning to, this ‘a prince may do everything in a just war which Scott gets it more or less spot on: Vitoria is a liberal. is necessary to secure peace and security’, including But what Scott and his challengers fail to see is that 11
  • 12. this is the very reason Vitoria defends the practice of liberty needed for internal order. Empires of liberty war against the Indians. To understand why, Vitoria are always already empires of violence. really needs to be understood in terms of the tradi- As empires of liberty, however, this violence is tion of liberal imperialism that was then becoming carried out in the name of peace and security. ‘The established in Europe. aim of war is peace and security’, says Vitoria, over and again. War is waged specifically for the defence of property, for the recovery of property and in revenge Peace, liberty, violence for an injury, and it is waged more generally ‘to Much has been made of what J.G.A. Pocock has establish peace and security’.25 This is used to justify called ‘the Machiavellian moment’ in the history of offensive as well as defensive war. political thought, in which a new language was forged The purpose of war is the peace and security of the addressing the problems associated with constituting commonwealth … But there can be no security for a republic of liberty through a dialectic of virtue the commonwealth unless its enemies are prevented and fortune.22 Mikael Hornqvist has shown that this from injustice by fear of war. It would be altogether republican ideal of freedom was deeply implicated unfair if war could only be waged by a common- wealth to repel unjust invaders from its borders, and in the imperial project, in which acquisition becomes never to carry the conflict into the enemies’ camp. the touchstone of liberty. For in the century leading up to Machiavelli, as well as in the years to follow, Indeed, pre-empting the idea of a ‘humanitarian war’ writer after writer had stressed the importance of that would emerge centuries later, Vitoria insists that empire to liberty: Bruni on the right to lordship over war might be carried out ‘for the good of the whole the world; Dati on the centrality of empire to security world’.26 and economic order; Palmieri on the links between The significance of Vitoria’s idea that war is made civic unity and increase of empire; Savonarola on the for peace and security lies in the fact that it was importance of the empire to ancient Rome; the list is being articulated as a key principle in the emerging long and well-documented by Hornqvist. Thus when law of nations, that the ‘permanent’ colonial wars Machiavelli lays down the basic tenets of Roman and which gave rise to this law of nations were increas- Florentine republicanism, namely that a city has two ingly taking on the ideological form of peace, and ends – one to acquire, the other to be free, he draws that this was a key moment in the development and on and summarizes a position that had become well structural transformation of the state. The prolonged established over the previous century. This tradition cumulative effect of new weapons technology, new assumes that liberty ‘entails a commitment to empire disciplinary provisions, fortifications, increase in the understood as a defence and a militant extension of size of armies and navies, and the changes in tactics true liberty in a hostile world’. In concrete terms, and strategy which these developments aided and this ‘translates into a pursuit of territorial security abetted, including a fiscal centralization necessary to which justifies the intervention in the political life of sustain these developments, meant that not only was neighbouring states and the subjugation and annexa- the development of the state machine being accelerated tion of foreign lands’. Far from being contrary values, as the monarchs and republics of Europe centralized notes Hornqvist, liberty and imperial acquisition are and nationalized, most notably in the major colonizing understood as together constituting the dual end of powers of England, Spain, the Netherlands and France, the healthy republic.23 The liberal and ‘humanitarian’ it was being accelerated as a war machine. War made concept of a world of universal being presupposes an the state and the state made war, as Charles Tilly puts expansive polity, which, in generating a politics of it.27 Concomitantly, this war machine received philo- acquisition, in turn produces new enemies and thus sophical legitimation in a variety of forms: from the requires the exercise of violence. For there can be no new and decidedly Machiavellian ‘military arithmetic’ empire of liberty without arms. The art of politics is found in the work of writers such as Girolamo Cataneo the art of war, as Machiavelli has it in the title of the in Italy and Thomas Digges in England, to the most only one of his major works to be published in his sustained commentaries on the nature of sovereignty, lifetime (in 1521). Or as he puts it in his better-known such as Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonweal (1576) work: the successful Prince ‘takes as his profession and Botero’s Della ragion di stato (1589), both of nothing else than war and its laws and discipline’. 24 which suggest that military discipline and training in This art of war is in Machiavelli’s mind central to arms are necessary for war with other nations and for imperial politics but links back to the discipline of disciplining one’s own subjects. 12
  • 13. Within this ideological transformation, ‘peace’ came his pseudonym Theodore Basille) could be retitled for to be addressed as a political issue. Humanists such its second edition later that year The True Defense as Erasmus suggested that an unjust peace was better of Peace and then reissued under its old title again than a just war; statesmen and sovereigns came to after Becon’s death without anyone finding anything talk about a universal peace rather than perpetual war, odd in the changes. The changes are indicative of the some of them adopting beati pacifici (‘blessed are the extent to which ‘peace’, as an increasingly seductive peacemakers’) as their motto or styling themselves as ideal to the martial mentality of the European ruling rex pacificus, and pageants lauding peace increasingly elites, had to be subsumed under the logic of war. took place with a pomp and performance that would Hence, on the one hand, a staunch ‘pacifist’ such as have been unthinkable just a century earlier. Catherine Erasmus ends up accepting the right to wage war, de Medici, for example, took on the mantle of peace- not least for the ‘tranquillity’ and ‘stability’ of the maker using symbols of peace such as the rainbow or Christian republic and to ‘punish delinquents’; that is, the Juno (arranger of peace-bringing marriages), and for dealing with internal dissent and rebellion. 32 On Charles V fashioned himself as the new Augustus, the the other hand, a staunch defender of the ‘art of war’ emperor of peace – the famous painting of him by such as Machiavelli also writes of the ‘arts of peace’: Titian has him riding through a landscape conveying to be exercised externally against one’s enemies in the the peaceful calm after a raging battle, while a sculp- hope of breaking them down (due to the fact that ‘the ture of him by Leone y Pampeo has him ‘dominating cause of union is fear and war’) and internally as a over fury’.28 The issue here is not just a monarchical mechanism for internal order (his example is to have jockeying for the image of ‘peacemaker’, for the ques- the people believe in religion), and it is clear from his tion of peace resonated culturally and intellectually – it discussion that the arts of peace are continuous with has been noted, for example, that the mid-sixteenth the arts of war.33 The war machine is a peace machine; century saw a proliferation of peace poetry. 29 As Ben the peace machine is a war machine. Permanent war Lowe has shown, by the sixteenth century ‘peace’ was normalized as peace. becoming more complex and adaptable as an idea and This is nowhere truer than in that centrepiece of the more entrenched as a societal ethic. In personal form art of war: empire. The concept pax, appropriated from it was associated with charity, mercy and piety; in its the Pax Romana, was central to the articulation and religious mode it connoted tranquillity as part of a development of the imperial theme in this period (and rigorous Christian ideal; in a more ‘political’ mode would remain so through the further growth of empires it meant the restoration of order and stability along in the later Pax Britannica and Pax Americana). But in with an end to lawlessness; and in becoming conjoined the Roman tradition from where it hails pax has more with a set of ideas associated with the rise of capital affinity with the word ‘dominance’ than with modern (‘commerce’, ‘prosperity’, ‘wealth’, ‘profit’) it con- notions of ‘peace’. What is connoted by the word is noted certain practical benefits to the nation. It was a not simply an absence of conflict or making of a pact, discourse of peace outside and distinct from ‘just war’ but the imposition of hegemony achieved through doctrine and centred on the idea of the nation-state. 30 conquest and maintained by arms: the goddess Pax was Thus it is fair to say that amidst the ‘military portrayed on Trajanic coins with her right foot on the revolution’ of the sixteenth century, new ideas of peace neck of a vanquished foe. Pax thus had unmistakable were evolving as part of political discourse. As the military and hegemonic overtones and was deeply nineteenth-century liberal jurist Sir Henry Maine once embedded in military codes and practices; it was and commented, ‘War appears to be as old as mankind, but is a victor’s peace, achieved by war and conquest.34 Pax peace is a modern invention.’31 An invention, that is, and imperium went hand in hand: peace as domination. that came about amidst the increasing monopolization Or, we might say, domination as pacification. of violence by the developing state and one which could be shaped and utilized by the state to help Pacification, law, security justify the violence under its control. The discourse In his series of lectures from 1975 to 1976, the recent of peace came to permeate the discourse of war in translation of which has made them increasingly influ- the very century in which war was being treated as an ential, Foucault explored the ways in which we might ineradicable feature of politics, as a necessity for the consider war as the matrix for techniques of domina- security of the state, and in which the ‘permanent-war tion: the ways in which politics is the continuation of machine’ was being perfected. A book such as Thomas war by other means, rather than Clausewitz’s more Becon’s New Pollecye of War (1542, published under famous formulation. On this view, the task of political 13
  • 14. power lies in the perpetual inscription of relations of taken by many to be the definitive original document force through a form of unspoken warfare. Far from of international law, the Treaty of Westphalia, which ending war, the ‘civil peace’ is in fact its continuation: several times refers to itself as a Treaty of Pacifica- ‘If we look beneath peace, order, wealth, and authority tion; from the pacification of Vietnam to the streets of … will we hear and discover a sort of primitive and Baghdad in the ‘war on terror’. If peace itself is a coded permanent war?’ It is not so much ‘politics’ that is the war, then pacification is core to the codification. continuation of war by other means, then, but ‘peace’. So too is law. ‘Law is not pacification’, says That is, liberal peace, alterations in which are merely Foucault. Well, no, not least because pacification is episodes, factions and displacements in war. We there- also very much about culture and ideology (‘hearts and fore ‘have to interpret the war that is going on beneath minds’), productivity and development (‘moderniza- peace’, because ‘peace itself is a coded war’.35 Coded, tion’), welfare and sexuality (from population censuses we might say, as pacification. and surveys through to ‘erotic’ pamphlets), and much ‘Pacification’ is often thought to have been devel- more, a range of activities which explain the numer- oped as a term during the America–Vietnam war, ous name changes undergone by specific pacifications following its adoption in 1964–65 as a substitute such as the war on Vietnam: Reconstruction, Rural term for ‘counterinsurgency’. In fact, the term enters Construction, Revolutionary Reconstruction, Land political discourse in the context of the colonial wars Development, Civic Action, and so on, all expressing of the sixteenth century. In July 1573 Philip II came the ‘productive side’ of power, as Foucault might have to believe that the continued violence being meted out said and President Johnson more or less did say. 39 in the conquest of the colonies was causing a certain But that is not Foucault’s point. Rather, for Foucault, discontent among his own people. He therefore pro- law is not pacification because ‘beneath the law, war claimed that all further extensions of empire be termed continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power.’40 ‘pacifications’ rather than ‘conquests’. With this comment, Foucault’s unwillingness to deal properly with the question of law comes to the fore: Discoveries are not to be called conquests. Since we looking ‘beneath’ the law is one of Foucault’s ways wish them to be carried out peacefully and charita- of implying that law is not important to questions of bly, we do not want the use of the term ‘conquest’ power–war, a point he makes on many occasions in to offer any excuse for the employment of force his attempt to move beyond the ‘juridico-discursive’ or the causing of injury to the Indians … Without concept of power. Yet to try to understand war without displaying any greed for the possessions of the Indians, they [the ‘discoverers’, ‘conquerors’] are to recourse to the question of law is a serious mistake, establish friendship and cooperation with the lords as Foucault himself came to acknowledge.41 It is far and nobles who seem most likely to be of assistance more the case that through the law, war continues to in the pacification of the land.36 rage. Such a claim does require grappling with law, as it means grappling with the violence and war that take As Tzvetan Todorov notes, the conquests themselves place through law but which law itself does so much to are not to be stopped, but the idea of ‘conquest’ is mask – not least because the violence of law is always to be replaced with ‘pacification’, 37 a mystification exercised in the name of ‘peace’.42 Contra Foucault, still in place centuries later.38 The violence remains law is pacification. Moreover, and even more contra unchanged, but in taking from the Roman tradition of Foucault, this was the crowning achievement of liberal imperial glory through military domination, in which contract theory. pax implied ‘pacification’, it was understood in terms The story told about this tradition is that war is of the verb ‘pacificate’, now obsolete but which in the replaced by law; the social contract sees the natural seventeenth century meant ‘to make peace’. Playing on right to use force given up to the state, which then the constitution of internal order in ordinary language, monopolizes the means of violence and thus the war ‘pacification’ quickly came to describe the enforcing of power. This is the story told about the tradition by a certain kind of peace, order and security. Pacifica- IR and strategic studies and is also very much the tion, then, is a police action: a military act dressed up story told by Foucault: ‘basically, Hobbes’s discourse as peace. Through pacification, (colonial) war becomes is a certain “no” to war’.43 This view is reinforced in (colonial) peace, a rhetorical move devised in the Foucault’s more substantive works where he suggests context of the wars of the sixteenth century and per- an approach which ‘takes as its model a perpetual fected over the centuries to follow: from the ‘Edicts of battle rather than a contract’.44 But this is an incred- Pacification’ of the late sixteenth century to the treaty ibly one-dimensional reading of Hobbes and contract 14
  • 15. theory, in that it fails to recognize the extent to which Thus despite Hobbes’s attempt to ‘annex’ war to the seventeenth-century contract theorists retained a notion state, he cannot give up the idea that the multitude is of perpetual battle within their model of the contract always already on the verge of rebellion, the people and despite their attempt to say ‘no’ to war. always already on the verge of revolution and thus civil It is usually said that Hobbes thinks the creation of society always already on the verge of chaos. To grasp the mighty Leviathan somehow resolves the problem this Hobbes has to invoke once more the category war, of war: the perpetual war of the state of nature can and he does so not for relations between states but for be overcome with the creation of a sovereign entity the social order constituted by the contract. For all which monopolizes the means of violence and thus the talk about the ‘peace and security’ of the juridical the powers of war. In so doing, wars between states order generated by the Leviathan, then, in Hobbesian come to be the ‘proper’ form of war and wars within terms what one should really speak about is the paci- states an ‘illegitimate’ form of violence. That is, fication of an otherwise permanent civil war. Hobbes’s argument legalizes one type of war and The same logic of pacification is found in other interpellates another type, civil war, as illegal or writers in the social contract tradition which sup- criminal. Yet there is more to be said about this. For posedly sought to say ‘no’ to war, such as Locke. the connection between the external–foreign relation It appears in Locke’s acceptance of slavery, which of war and the internal–domestic importance of peace is ‘nothing else, but the State of war continued’ is centred on the exercise of violence, not just in Hob- and which is then reincorporated into civil society bes’s sense that men who worship ‘peace’ at home through the place of the slave within the domestic will do so in vain if they cannot defend themselves situation. But it is most explicit in Locke’s theory of against foreigners, but also because the control of punishment, which stems from the idea that those violence is always already turned inwards: in the who commit crimes against us or even show enmity form of law. ‘We must understand, therefore, that towards us have ‘declared War against all Mankind’. particular citizens have conveyed their whole right of This argument about punishment in Chapter II of war and peace unto some one man or council; and the Second Treatise runs straight into the argument that this right, which we may call the sword of war, about war in Chapter III, where it is suggested that belongs to the same man or council, to whom the ‘Force without Right, upon a man’s Person, makes a sword of justice belongs.’ Two swords: the sword of State of War.’ This appears initially to concern the war and the ancient sword of justice, held together state of nature: ‘force … where there is no common in one and the same ‘supreme authority’. On the one Superior on Earth to appeal to for relief, is the State hand, then, the violence monopolized by the state of War’. Yet within a few lines Locke adds that is expressed as war when directed against foreign force without right makes a state of war ‘both where powers and as law when exercised internally. The there is, and is not, a common Judge’. This is war concept of order being articulated here thereby sets saturating the social body following the creation of out its historical stall as offering peace through the political society; indeed, war as a constitutive feature restriction of war-making to the sovereign state. On of political society. One might note that despite the other hand, however, and this is the point missed Locke twice suggesting that this account of punish- by Foucault, the problem of civil war can not be ment will seem to many a ‘strange doctrine’, it is circumvented so easily, and thus remains for Hobbes actually not far from the doctrine of punishment a permanent feature of social order. Why? Because held by Vitoria, and, moreover, when Locke comes for Hobbes those who remain dissatisfied with their to flesh out the theory of punishment he does so sovereign and the contract end up ‘waging war’. One in the context of colonialism and the right of war must bear in mind that despite Hobbes’s state of against the Indians.46 The introduction of govern- nature often being interpreted as an abstraction, in ment in Locke’s argument, then, often understood De Cive he relates it explicitly to the civil war which through the lens of the liberal search for peace, is in had recently been affecting his country. Indeed, even fact comprehensible only through the logic of war, questioning the need for obedience on the part of exercised in a permanent fashion against rebellious subjects constitutes one of the ‘true forerunners of an slaves, antagonistic Indians, wayward workers, and approaching war’. In Leviathan this becomes clearer criminals with something unsocial in mind: a liberal still: the challenge to authority is ‘a relapse into the war masquerading as liberal peace. condition of warre, commonly called Rebellion … for In other words, the civil society created by the Rebellion, is but warre renewed’.45 contract in the name of peace and security remains for 15
  • 16. liberalism a space of war. Regardless of its desire to this is true of the ‘war on terror’ so it has been true of restrict war to the international realm, civil society is the permanent social war of capital. Creative thinking always already at war. On the one hand, and pace the about war therefore also requires jettisoning naive myth of peace and commerce as congenital twins, there ideas about peace. is the permanent war of capital (spelt out by Marx in his treatise on this war, namely Volume 1 of Capital). Notes On the other hand, there are the manifold permanent 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Peace Commodity’ (1926), in Walter Benjamin’s Archive, trans. Esther Leslie, Verso, London, or semi-permanent wars against the various ‘enemies 2007, pp. 56–7. within’: war on crime, war on drugs, war on poverty, 2. Alain Badiou, ‘Fragments of a Public Journal on the war on unemployment, war on scroungers, and on it American War against Iraq’, 26 February 2003, in goes until the war that has been articulated as the one Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran, Verso, London, 2006, pp. 39–41; Antonio Negri and Éric Alliez, ‘Peace and that will probably never end: the war on terror. All are War’ (2002), in Antonio Negri, Empire and Beyond, code for the permanent pacification required in/of the trans. Ed Emery, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008, pp. bourgeois polity and all are a product in one way or 54–6; Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, Verso, another of the supreme concept of bourgeois society: London, 2002, pp. 93–4. security. ‘Fundamental to pacification is security’, 3. Daniel Ross, Violent Democracy, Cambridge University commented someone with more than a little first-hand Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 12; Rey Chow, The Age of experience.47 The demand for peace and security, then, the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory and Comparative Work, Duke University Press, Durham NC, is a demand for pacification. 2006, p. 34; Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capital- ism and Power in an Age of War, Verso, London, 2009, beyond peace p. 104; François Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics, Routledge, London: Routledge, 2008, In an essay on ‘African Grammar’, Roland Barthes p. 97. once highlighted the ways in which official French 4. Fritz Grob, The Relativity of War and Peace: A Study reports on African affairs functioned not as com- in Law, History, and Politics, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1949. For the lawyers: Quincy Wright, munication but as intimidation, often employing that ‘When Does War Exist?, American Journal of Inter- standard tactic of bourgeois ideology: giving some- national Law 26, 1932, pp. 362–8; Georg Schwarzen- thing the name of its contrary. berger, ‘Jus Pacis Ac Belli? Prolegomena to a Sociology of International Law’, American Journal of International GUERRE/WAR. – The goal is to deny the thing. Law, vol. 37, no. 3, 1943, pp. 460–79; Philip C. Jessup, For this, two means are available: either to name ‘Should International Law Recognize an Intermediate it as little as possible (most frequent procedure); Status between Peace and War?’, American Journal of or else to give it the meaning of its contrary (more International Law, vol. 48, no. 1, 1954, pp. 98–103. cunning procedure, which is at the basis of almost 5. See Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War, Rowman Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2006. all the mystifications of bourgeois discourse). War is 6. Recent attempts to shift the debate include Randy Mar- then used in the sense of peace, and pacification in tin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the the sense of war.48 Financial Logic of Risk Management, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2007; Michael McKinley, Economic Barthes’s insight is clearly gleaned from French colo- Globalization as Religious War: Tragic Convergence, nialism, but his point is a general one about one of the Routledge, Abingdon, 2007; Peter Alexander Meyer, most important mystifications which has accompanied Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008; Nelson Maldonado- bourgeois power since its inception. As I have sug- Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Mo- gested here, this mystification concerning war and dernity, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2008; Tarik peace is far from being a product of the global war on Kochi, The Other’s War: Recognition and the Violence terror; rather, it is a long-standing ideological feature of Ethics, Birkbeck Law Press, London, 2009. Also im- portant is Étienne Balibar’s unpublished lecture ‘Poli- of the global war of capital. tics as War, War as Politics: Post-Clausewitzian Varia- Recognizing this is but one move towards more tions’, Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, creative thinking about war; thinking has to be done 8 May 2006. I am grateful to John Kraniauskas and Philip Derbyshire for bringing Balibar’s lecture to my outside and against the mystifications found in liberal- attention. ism, IR and strategic studies. It is also thinking that 7. Hans Kelsen, Law and Peace in International Relations, has to be done outside of the discourse of peace and Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1942, pp. 1, security. As noted by Retort in what is by far the best 11–12. 8. Wilhelm G. Grewe, The Epochs of International Law analysis of the war in Iraq, the reality of a permanent (1984), trans. Michael Byers, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, war on terror ‘renders inadequate the notion of “peace” 2000. as an oppositional frame or strategy’.49 As much as 9. Julius Stone, Human Law and Human Justice, Maitland 16
  • 17. Publications, Sydney, 1965, p. 62; James Leslie Brierly, he could both enjoy peace and carry on war’ (p. 245). The Law of Nations, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955, 34. Ali Parchami, Hegemonic Peace and Empire: The Pax p. 26. Romana, Britannica, and Americana, Routledge, Lon- 10. Francisco de Vitoria, ‘On Civil Power’ (c. 1528), in Vi- don, 2009, pp. 15–17, 42, 62, 92–3. toria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jer- 35. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures emy Lawrance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey, 1991, p. 40. Allen Lane, London, 2003, pp. 15–16, 46–8, 50–51. 11. James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origin of International 36. Cited in Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, Law: Francisco de Vitoria and his Law of Nations, HarperPerennial, New York, 1984, p. 173. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1934, pp. xvi, 280. 37. Ibid., p. 174. 12. Francisco de Vitoria, ‘Letter to Miguel de Arcos’, 8 38. During the war in Vietnam one ‘unofficial’ Pentagon November, 1534, Political Writings, pp. 331, 332. spokesman, Hanson W. Baldwin, let slip the mystifica- 13. Francisco de Vitoria, De Indis, in Political Writings, pp. tion: writing in the New York Times of the ‘ink blot’ 246, 250–51. or ‘oil stain’ theory of pacification, in which like ink 14. Francisco de Vitoria Vitoria, ‘Letter to Miguel de Arcos’, blots or oil stains the operations from one base overlap p. 333; De Indis, p. 251. those from another, he commented that ‘gradually the 15. Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Mak- area pacified or conquered covered the country’. Cited ing of International Law, Cambridge University Press, in Joseph Hansen, ‘The Case Against “Pacification”’, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 15–22, 36–7. International Socialist Review, vol. 27, no. 4, 1966, pp. 16. Vitoria, De Indis, pp. 278–80. 131–6, www.marxists.org/archive/hansen/1966/xx/paci- 17. Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western fication.htm. Legal Thought, Oxford University Press, New York, 39. ‘I want to have a war to build as well as to destroy’, 1990, p. 102. said Johnson to his advisers about ‘the other war’, as he 18. Vitoria, De Indis, pp. 282–3. called pacification; cited in Frank L. Jones, ‘Blowtorch: 19. Vitoria, De Indis Relectio Posterior, in Political Writ- Robert Komer and the Making of Vietnam Pacification ings, p. 318. Policy’, Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly, 20. Ibid., p. 321. vol. 35, no. 3, 2005, 103–18, p. 104. ‘Pacification had 21. Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Na- to be productive’, notes William Gibson, who in outlin- tions, Methuen, New York, 1961, pp. 74, 83, 296–306. ing the ‘Eleven Criteria and Ninety-Eight Works for 22. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Pacification’ in Vietnam comments that ‘the list sounds Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, like a program for the construction of a liberal welfare Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1975. state’; The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, Grove 23. Mikael Hornqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, Cambridge Books, New York, 1986, pp. 281, 291. University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 61, 72, 74. 40. Foucault, ‘Society’, p. 50. 24. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532), in The Chief 41. ‘If God grants me life … the last thing that I would Works and Others, Vol. 1, trans. Allan Gilbert, Duke like to study would be the problem of war … There University Press, Durham NC, 1989, p. 55. again I would have to cross into the problem of law’. 25. Vitoria, De Indis, p. 283; De Indis Relectio Posterior, Interview with André Bertin, 1983, published as ‘What p. 319. Our Present Is’, in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 26. Vitoria, De Indis Relectio Posterior, p. 298. Semiotext(e), New York, 1996, p. 415. 27. Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European 42. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920–21), State-Making’, in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1: National States in Europe, Princeton University Press, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jen- Princeton NJ, 1975, p. 42. nings, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Cambridge 28. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the MA, 1996, pp. 248–9. Sixteenth Century, Routledge Kegan Paul, London, 43. Foucault, ‘Society’, pp. 17, 97. 1975, pp. 133–4, 210; Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geog- 44. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the raphy of Colonial American Literature: Empire, Travel, Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan, Penguin, London, Modernity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977, p. 26. 2003, p. 44. 45. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642), in Hobbes, Man and 29. James Hutton, Themes of Peace in Renaissance Poetry, Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1991, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1984, p. 19. pp. 103–4, 177–8; Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck, 30. Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early Eng- Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 219. lish Pacifist Ideas, Pennsylvania State University Press, 46. John Locke, Two Treatises, ed. Peter Laslett, Cambridge Pennsylvania, 1997. University Press, Cambridge, 1988, I, sect. 130, 131; II, 31. Sir Henry Sumner Maine, International Law: A Series of sects. 10, 19, 24 Lectures Delivered before the University of Cambridge, 47. General William C. Westmoreland reporting his experi- 1887, John Murray, London, 1888, p. 8. ence in Vietnam, in A Soldier Reports, Doubleday, New 32. José A. Fernández, ‘Erasmus on the Just War’, Journal of York, 1976, p. 68. Robert McNamara likewise described the History of Ideas, vol. 34, no. 2, 1973, pp. 209–26. Vietnam as a ‘pacification security job’; cited in Gibson, 33. Erasmus, ‘Letter to Martin Bucer’, 11 November 1527, Perfect War, p. 275. in J. Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation 48. Roland Barthes, ‘African Grammar’, in The Eiffel Tower (1924), Phoenix Press, London, 2002, pp. 288–92; Nic- and Other Mythologies (1979), trans. Richard Howard, colò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. 105. Titus Livius (1513–17), in Chief Works, pp. 224, 399. 49. Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Note too his comment on Ancus, a man ‘so gifted … that Age of War, Verso, London, 2005, p. 94. 1
  • 18. dOSSiER The PosTcommunisT condiTion children of postcommunism boris buden A curious set of metaphors marks the jargon of post- an ideology called ‘transitology’ communist transition: education for democracy, class- The human being as a political child offers itself as rooms of democracy, democratic exams, democracy the almost perfect subject of a democratic restart. that is growing and maturing, but which might still Untroubled by the past and geared totally to the be in diapers or making its first steps or, of course, future, it is full of energy and imagination, compli- suffering from children’s illnesses.1 This language of ant and teachable. It emanates freedom as though its postcommunism discloses a paradox that points at what pure embodiment, but actually it is not free at all. A is probably the greatest scandal of recent history: those child is dependent; it must be guided and patronized who proved their political maturity in the so-called by adults. However, this only makes it all the more ‘democratic revolutions’ of 1989–90 have become suitable for serving society, as the perfect ground for a thereafter, overnight, children! Only yesterday, they new beginning. It neutralizes all the contradictions that succeeded in toppling totalitarian regimes in whose the sudden irruption of freedom lays bare in society, persistency and steadfastness the whole so-called ‘free’ above all between those who rule and the ruled. There and ‘democratic’ world had firmly believed, until the is no relation of domination that seems so natural and very last moment, and whose power it had feared as self-evident as the one between a child and its guard- an other-worldly monster. In the struggle against the ian, no mastery so innocent and justifiable as that over communist threat, that world had mobilized all its children. One does not take their freedom away, but political, ideological and military forces, its greatest suspends it temporarily, postpones it, so to speak, for statesmen and generals, philosophers and scientists, the time being. A patronized child as political being propagandists and spies, without ever really frightening enjoys a sort of delayed freedom. And in case one day the totalitarian beast. Yet, despite that, it calls those the promise of freedom turns out to be a delusion, one who chased it away with their bare hands ‘children’. can always say that it was just a children’s fairy tale. Only yesterday, those people got world history going The repressive infantilization of the societies that again, after it had been lying on its deathbed, and have recently liberated themselves from communism helped it to walk upright again, after so long. Yet is the key feature of the so-called postcommunist today, they themselves must learn their first steps. condition. It comes to light in the ideology of the post- Only yesterday, they taught the world a history lesson communist transition, a peculiar theory that addresses in courage, political autonomy and historical maturity, itself to the task of understanding and explaining the yet today they must assert themselves before their new postcommunist transition to democracy. Here, cyni- self-declared masters as their obedient pupils. Only cism becomes (political) science. From the perspective yesterday, they were the saving remedy for fatally ill of this political science, postcommunism is under- societies; today, they themselves suffer from children’s stood above all as a phase of transition – that is, as illnesses, which they must survive in order to become a process of transformation of an ‘actually socialist’ capable of living. What miracle happened overnight? (realsozialistisch) society into a capitalist democratic What wizard turned these people into children? one.2 Political science finds no reason to understand Of course, it was politics. The child that was sud- this transition in terms of a specific historical epoch. It denly recognized in these mature people is defined lacks basic identity features: a specific postcommunist neither by an early stage of psychological develop- political subject or system, for instance, and a spe- ment that was never really abandoned, nor as a result cific postcommunist mode of production, or form of of the psychopathological phenomenon of infantile property. In fact, political science does not need the regression, but as a political being, a zoon politicon concept of postcommunism at all. It prefers instead the par excellence. aforementioned concept of ‘transition to democracy’ 18 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )