1.1 SIMPLICISSIMUS

War under existing conditions compels all nations, even those professedly the most democratic, to turn authoritarian and totalitarian.

—JOHN DEWEY

 

The republic is lost.

—CICERO

EXCEPTIONS

The world is at war again, but things are different this time. Traditionally war has been conceived as the armed conflict between sovereign political entities, that is, during the modern period, between nation-states. To the extent that the sovereign authority of nation-states, even the most dominant nation-states, is declining and there is instead emerging a new supranational form of sovereignty, a global Empire, the conditions and nature of war and political violence are necessarily changing. War is becoming a general phenomenon, global and interminable.

There are innumerable armed conflicts waged across the globe today, some brief and limited to a specific place, others long lasting and expansive. ¹ These conflicts might be best conceived as instances not of war but rather civil war. Whereas war, as conceived traditionally by international law, is armed conflict between sovereign political entities, civil war is armed conflict between sovereign and/or nonsovereign combatants within a single sovereign territory. This civil war should be understood now not within the national space, since that is no longer the effective unit of sovereignty, but across the global terrain. The framework of international law regarding war has been undermined. From this perspective all of the world’s current armed conflicts, hot and cold—in Colombia, Sierra Leone, and Aceh, as much as in Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq—should be considered imperial civil wars, even when states are involved. This does not mean that any of these conflicts mobilizes all of Empire—indeed each of these conflicts is local and specific—but rather that they exist within, are conditioned by, and in turn affect the global imperial system. Each local war should not be viewed in isolation, then, but seen as part of a grand constellation, linked in varying degrees both to other war zones and to areas not presently at war. The pretense to sovereignty of these combatants is doubtful to say the least. They are struggling rather for relative dominance within the hierarchies at the highest and lowest levels of the global system. A new framework, beyond international law, would be necessary to confront this global civil war.²

The attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, did not create or fundamentally change this global situation, but perhaps they did force us to recognize its generality. There is no escaping the state of war within Empire, and there is no end to it in sight. The situation was obviously already mature. Just as the “defenestration of Prague” on May 23, 1618, when two regents of the Holy Roman Empire were thrown from a window of the Hradčany castle, ignited the Thirty Years’ War, the attacks on September 11 opened a new era of war. Back then Catholics and Protestants massacred each other (but soon the sides became confused), and today Christians seem to be pitted against Muslims (although the sides are already confused). This air of a war of religion only masks the profound historical transformation, the opening of a new era. In the seventeenth century it was the passage in Europe from the Middle Ages to modernity, and today the new era is the global passage from modernity to postmodernity. In this context, war has become a general condition: there may be a cessation of hostilities at times and in certain places, but lethal violence is present as a constant potentiality, ready always and everywhere to erupt. “So the nature of War,” Thomas Hobbes explains, “consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.”³ These are not isolated wars, then, but a general global state of war that erodes the distinction between war and peace such that we can no longer imagine or even hope for a real peace.

This world at war looks something like the one faced by Simplicissimus, the peasant protagonist of Johann Grimmelshausen’s great seventeenth-century novel.⁴ Simplicissimus is born in the midst of Germany’s Thirty Years’ War, a war in which one-third of the German population died, and true to his name Simplicissimus views this world with the simplest, most naive eyes. How else can one understand such a state of perpetual conflict, suffering, and devastation? The various armies—the French, Spanish, Swedish, and Danish, along with the different Germanic forces—pass through one after the other, each claiming more virtue and religious rectitude than the last, but to Simplicissimus they are all the same. They kill, they rape, they steal. Simplicissimus’s innocent open eyes manage to register the horror without being destroyed by it; they see through all the mystifications that obscure this brutal reality. A few years earlier, across the Atlantic in Peru, an Amerindian, Huamán Poma de Ayala, wrote a similar chronicle of even more devastating destruction.⁵ His text, composed in a mixture of Spanish, Quechua, and pictures, bears witness to conquest, genocide, enslavement, and the eradication of the Inca civilization. Huamán Poma could only humbly address his observations, his indictments, and his pleas for “good government” to King Philip III of Spain. Today in the face of interminable battles reminiscent of that earlier era, should we adopt something like Simplicissimus’s innocent perspective or Huamán Poma’s humble supplication to the ruling powers? Are those indeed our only alternatives?

The first key to understanding our brutal global state of war lies in the notion of exception or, specifically, in two exceptions, one Germanic and the other American in origin. We need to step back a moment and trace the development of our contemporary exceptions. It is no coincidence that our present situation should make us think of the earliest period of European modernity since European modernity was born, in certain respects, in response to generalized states of war, such as the Thirty Years’ War in Germany and the civil wars in England. One central component of the political project of modern theories of sovereignty—liberal and nonliberal alike—was to put an end to civil war and destroy the constant state of war by isolating war at the margins of society and limiting it to exceptional times. Only the sovereign authority—that is, the monarch or the state—could wage war and only against another sovereign power. War, in other words, was expelled from the internal national social field and reserved only for external conflicts between states. War was thus to be the exception and peace the norm. Conflicts within the nation were to be resolved peacefully through political interaction.

The separation of war from politics was a fundamental goal of modern political thought and practice, even for the so-called realist theorists who focus on the central importance of war in international affairs. Carl von Clausewitz’s famous claim that war is the continuation of politics by other means, for example, might suggest that politics and war are inseparable, but really, in the context of Clausewitz’s work, this notion is based, first of all, on the idea that war and politics are in principle separate and different. ⁶ He wants to understand how these separate spheres can at times come into relation. Second, and more important, “politics” for him has nothing to do with political relations within a society but rather refers exclusively to political conflicts between nation-states.⁷ War in Clausewitz’s view is an instrument in the state’s arsenal for use in the realm of international politics. It is thus completely external to the political struggles and conflicts that exist within a society. The same is true for the more general claim, also common to realist political thinkers, most notably Carl Schmitt, that all political actions and motives are based fundamentally on the friend-enemy distinction.⁸ Here too it may seem at first sight that politics and war are inseparable, but again the politics in question here is not that within a society but only between sovereign entities. The only real enemy, from this perspective, is a public enemy, that is, an enemy of the state, in most cases another state. Modern sovereignty was thus meant to ban war from the internal, civil terrain. This conception was common to all the dominant veins of modern thought, among liberals and non-liberals alike: if war is isolated to the conflicts between sovereign entities, then politics within each society is, at least in normal circumstances, free from war. War was a limited state of exception.

This modern strategy of isolating war to interstate conflict is less and less viable today given the emergence of innumerable global civil wars, in armed conflicts from Central Africa to Latin America and from Indonesia to Iraq and Afghanistan. This strategy is also undermined in a more general way to the extent that the sovereignty of nation-states is declining and instead at a supranational level is forming a new sovereignty, a global Empire. We have to reconsider in this new light the relation between war and politics. This situation might seem to realize the modern liberal dream—from Kant’s notion of perpetual peace to the practical projects that led to the League of Nations and the United Nations—that the end of war between sovereign states would be the end of the possibility of war altogether and thus the universal rule of politics. The community or society of nations would thus extend the space of domestic social peace to the entire globe, and international law would guarantee order. Today, however, instead of moving forward to peace in fulfillment of this dream we seem to have been catapulted back in time into the nightmare of a perpetual and indeterminate state of war, suspending the international rule of law, with no clear distinction between the maintenance of peace and acts of war. Because the isolated space and time of war in the limited conflict between sovereign states has declined, war seems to have seeped back and flooded the entire social field. The state of exception has become permanent and general; the exception has become the rule, pervading both foreign relations and the homeland.⁹

The “state of exception” is a concept in the German legal tradition that refers to the temporary suspension of the constitution and the rule of law, similar to the concept of state of siege and the notion of emergency powers in the French and English traditions.¹⁰ A long tradition of constitutional thought reasons that in a time of serious crisis and danger, such as wartime, the constitution must be suspended temporarily and extraordinary powers given to a strong executive or even a dictator in order to protect the republic. The founding myth of this line of thinking is the legend of the noble Cincinnatus, the elderly farmer in ancient Rome who, when beseeched by his countrymen, reluctantly accepts the role of dictator to ward off a threat against the republic. After sixteen days, the story goes, the enemy has been routed and the republic saved, and Cincinnatus returns to his plow. The constitutional concept of a “state of exception” is clearly contradictory—the constitution must be suspended in order to be saved—but this contradiction is resolved or at least mitigated by understanding that the period of crisis and exception is brief. When crisis is no longer limited and specific but becomes a general omni-crisis, when the state of war and thus the state of exception become indefinite or even permanent, as they do today, then contradiction is fully expressed, and the concept takes on an entirely different character.

This legal concept alone does not give us an adequate basis for understanding our new global state of war. We need to link this “state of exception” with another exception, the exceptionalism of the United States, the only remaining superpower. The key to understanding our global war lies in the intersection between these two exceptions.

The notion of U.S. exceptionalism has a long history, and its use in contemporary political discourse is deceptively complex. Consider a statement by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation.”¹¹ Albright’s phrase “because we are America” carries with it all the weight and ambiguity of U.S. exceptionalism. The ambiguity results from the fact that U.S. exceptionalism really has two distinct and incompatible meanings. ¹² On the one hand, the United States has from its inception claimed to be an exception from the corruption of the European forms of sovereignty, and in this sense it has served as the beacon of republican virtue in the world. This ethical conception continues to function today, for instance, in the notion that the United States is the global leader promoting democracy, human rights, and the international rule of law. The United States is indispensable, Albright might say, because of its exemplary republican virtue. On the other hand, U.S. exceptionalism also means—and this is a relatively new meaning—exception from the law. The United States, for example, increasingly exempts itself from international agreements (on the environment, human rights, criminal courts, and so forth) and claims its military does not have to obey the rules to which others are subject, namely, on such matters as preemptive strikes, weapons control, and illegal detention. In this sense the American “exception” refers to the double standard enjoyed by the most powerful, that is, the notion that the one who commands need not obey. The Unites States is also indispensable in Albright’s formulation simply because it is the most powerful.

Some might claim that these two meanings of U.S. exceptionalism are compatible and mutually reinforcing: since the United States is animated by republican virtue, its actions will all be good, hence it need not obey international law; the law instead must constrain only the bad nations. Such an equation, however, is at best an ideological confusion and more usually a patent mystification. The idea of republican virtue has from its beginning been aimed against the notion that the ruler, or indeed anyone, stands above the law. Such exception is the basis of tyranny and makes impossible the realization of freedom, equality, and democracy. Therefore the two notions of U.S. exceptionalism directly contradict each other.

When we say that today’s global state of exception, the curtailing of legal guarantees and freedoms in a time of crisis, is supported and legitimated by U.S. exceptionalism, it should be clear that only one of the two meanings of that term applies. It is true that the rhetoric of many leaders and supporters of the United States often relies heavily on the republican virtue that makes America an exception, as if this ethical foundation made it the historical destiny of the United States to lead the world. In fact, the real basis of the state of exception today is the second meaning of U.S. exceptionalism, its exceptional power and its ability to dominate the global order. In a state of emergency, according to this logic, the sovereign must stand above the law and take control. There is nothing ethical or moral about this connection; it is purely a question of might, not right. This exceptional role of the United States in the global state of exception serves only to eclipse and erode the republican tradition that runs through the nation’s history.

The intersection between the German legal notion of a state of exception and the exceptionalism of the United States provides a first glimpse of how war has changed in today’s world. This is not, we should repeat, simply a matter of being for or against the United States, nor is it even a choice between unilateralist and multilateralist methods. We will return to consider the specific role of the United States in our global state of war later, but first we will have to investigate much more deeply the changing relationships among war, politics, and global order.

GOLEM

A golem is haunting us. It is trying to tell us something.

The golem has become an icon of unlimited war and indiscriminate destruction, a symbol of war’s monstrosity. In the rich traditions of Jewish mysticism, however, the figure of the golem is much more complex. The golem is traditionally a man made of clay, brought to life by a ritual performed by a Rabbi. Golem literally means unformed or amorphous matter and its animation repeats, according to the ancient mystical tradition of the kabbalah, the process of God’s creation of the world recounted in Genesis. Since, according to Jewish creation myths, the name of God has the power to produce life, the golem can be brought to life by pronouncing over the clay figure the name of God in a series of permutations. Specifically, each letter of the alphabet must be combined with each letter from the tetragrammaton (YHWH), and then each of the resulting letter pairs must be pronounced with every possible vowel sound.¹³

Creating a golem is dangerous business, as versions of the legend increasingly emphasize in the medieval and modern periods. One danger expressed particularly in medieval versions is idolatry. Like Prometheus, the one who creates a golem has in effect claimed the position of God, creator of life. Such hubris must be punished.

In its modern versions the focus of the golem legend shifts from parables of creation to fables of destruction. The two modern legends from which most of the others derive date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In one, Rabbi Elijah Baal Shem of Chem, Poland, brings a golem to life to be his servant and perform household chores. The golem grows bigger each day, so to prevent it from getting too big, once a week the Rabbi must return it to clay and start again. One time the Rabbi forgets his routine and lets the golem get too big. When he transforms it back he is engulfed in the mass of lifeless clay and suffocates. One of the morals of this tale has to do with the danger of setting oneself up as master and imposing servitude upon others.

The second and more influential modern version derives from the legend of Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague. Rabbi Loew makes a golem to defend the Jewish community of Prague and attack its persecutors. The golem’s destructive violence, however, proves uncontrollable. It does attack the enemies of the Jews but also begins to kill Jews themselves indiscriminately before the rabbi can finally turn it back to clay. This tale bears certain similarities to common warnings about the dangers of instrumentalization in modern society and of technology run amok, but the golem is more than a parable of how humans are losing control of the world and machines are taking over. It is also about the inevitable blindness of war and violence. In H. Leivick’s Yiddish play, The Golem, for instance, first published in Warsaw in 1921, Rabbi Loew is so intent on revenge against the persecutors of the Jews that even when the Messiah comes with Elijah the Prophet the rabbi turns them away.¹⁴Now is not their time, he says, now is the time for the golem to bathe our enemies in blood. The violence of revenge and war, however, leads to indiscriminate death. The golem, the monster of war, does not know the friend-enemy distinction. War brings death to all equally. That is the monstrosity of war. “He came to save and yet he shed our blood,” puzzles the rabbi. “Are we chastised because we wished to save ourselves?” If we do nothing we are destroyed by our enemies, but if we go to war against them we end up destroying ourselves the same. Rabbi Loew recognizes the horrible paradox the golem presents us. Is there no alternative to war that is nonetheless capable of freeing us from persecution and oppression?

Perhaps we need to listen more attentively to the golem’s message. The most remarkable thing about the golem in many of the modern versions is not its instrumentality or brutality but rather its emotional neediness and capacity for affection. The golem doesn’t want to kill, it wants to love and be loved. Most of the versions of the legend that derive from the Rabbi Loew story emphasize how the golem’s requests for comfort are constantly rebuffed by the rabbi and, moreover, how the golem’s expressions of affection for the rabbi’s daughter are met with horror, disgust, and panic. Rabbi Loew’s golem, of course, is not the only modern monster to suffer from unrequited love. Doctor Frankenstein’s monster too only wants affection, and his advances are similarly thwarted, in particular by the doctor himself, the most heartless of beings. One of the scenes of greatest pathos in Mary Shelley’s novel is when the monster befriends the blind man De Lacey in his cottage in the woods but is horribly rejected once De Lacey’s family sets eyes on him. The monsters in both of these tales are the ones with rich emotional lives and great capacities for human feeling, whereas the humans are emotional cripples, cold and heartless. They are just asking to be loved and no one seems to understand.

We need to find some way to heed the signs of warning and also recognize the potential in our contemporary world. Even the violent modern golems still carry all the mystery and wisdom of the kabbalah: along with the threat of destruction they also bring the promise and wonder of creation. Perhaps what monsters like the golem are trying to teach us, whispering to us secretly under the din of our global battlefield, is a lesson about the monstrosity of war and our possible redemption through love.

THE GLOBAL STATE OF WAR

Let us go back and start again from the basic elements of our global state of war. When the state of exception becomes the rule and when wartime becomes an interminable condition, then the traditional distinction between war and politics becomes increasingly blurred. The tradition of tragic drama, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, has continually emphasized the interminable and proliferating nature of war.¹⁵ Today, however, war tends to extend even farther, becoming a permanent social relation. Some contemporary authors try to express this novelty by reversing the Clausewitz formula that we cited earlier: it may be that war is a continuation of politics by other means, but politics itself is increasingly becoming war conducted by other means.¹⁶ War, that is to say, is becoming the primary organizing principle of society, and politics merely one of its means or guises. What appears as civil peace, then, really only puts an end to one form of war and opens the way for another.

Of course, theorists of insurrection and revolutionary politics, particularly in the anarchist and communist traditions, have long made similar claims about the indistinction of war and politics: Mao Zedong, for instance, claimed that politics is simply war without bloodshed, and Antonio Gramsci in a rather different framework divided political strategies between wars of position and wars of maneuver. These theorists, however, were dealing with exceptional social periods, that is, times of insurrection and revolution. What is distinctive and new about the claim that politics is the continuation of war is that it refers to power in its normal functioning, everywhere and always, outside and within each society. Michel Foucault goes so far as to say that the socially pacifying function of political power involves constantly reinscribing this fundamental relationship of force in a sort of silent war and reinscribing it too in the social institutions, systems of economic inequality, and even the spheres of personal and sexual relations. ¹⁷ War, in other words, becomes the general matrix for all relations of power and techniques of domination, whether or not bloodshed is involved. War has become a regime of biopower, that is, a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life.¹⁸ This war brings death but also, paradoxically, must produce life. This does not mean that war has been domesticated or its violence attenuated, but rather that daily life and the normal functioning of power has been permeated with the threat and violence of warfare.

Consider, as a symptom of the change in the nature of war today, how common public usage of the concept of war has changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The rhetoric of war has long been used, of course, to describe activities that are very different from war itself. In some cases, war metaphors are applied to forms of competition and relations of force that do not generally involve lethal violence or bloodshed, such as sports, commerce, and domestic politics. In all of these contests, one has competitors but never really enemies properly conceived. Such metaphorical usage serves to highlight the risks, competition, and conflict involved in these various activities, but it also assumes a fundamental difference from real war. In other cases, the metaphorical discourse of war is invoked as a strategic political maneuver in order to achieve the total mobilization of social forces for a united purpose that is typical of a war effort. The war on poverty, for example, launched in the United States in the mid-1960s by the Johnson administration, used the discourse of war to avoid partisan conflict and rally national forces for a domestic policy goal. Because poverty is an abstract enemy and the means to combat it are nonviolent, the war discourse in this case remains merely rhetorical. With the war on drugs, however, which began in the 1980s, and more so with the twenty-first-century war on terrorism, the rhetoric of war begins to develop a more concrete character. As in the case of the war on poverty, here too the enemies are posed not as specific nation-states or political communities or even individuals but rather as abstract concepts or perhaps as sets of practices. Much more successfully than the war on poverty, these discourses of war serve to mobilize all social forces and suspend or limit normal political exchange. And yet these wars are not so metaphorical because like war traditionally conceived they involve armed combat and lethal force. In these wars there is increasingly little difference between outside and inside, between foreign conflicts and homeland security. We have thus proceeded from metaphorical and rhetorical invocations of war to real wars against indefinite, immaterial enemies.

One consequence of this new kind of war is that the limits of war are rendered indeterminate, both spatially and temporally. The old-fashioned war against a nation-state was clearly defined spatially, even if it could at times spread to other countries, and the end of such a war was generally marked by the surrender, victory, or truce between the conflicting states. By contrast, war against a concept or set of practices, somewhat like a war of religion, has no definite spatial or temporal boundaries. Such wars can potentially extend anywhere for any period of time. Indeed, when U.S. leaders announced the “war against terrorism” they emphasized that it would have to extend throughout the world and continue for an indefinite period, perhaps decades or even generations. A war to create and maintain social order can have no end. It must involve the continuous, uninterrupted exercise of power and violence. In other words, one cannot win such a war, or, rather, it has to be won again every day. War has thus become virtually indistinguishable from police activity.

A second consequence of this new state of war is that international relations and domestic politics become increasingly similar and intermingled. In the context of this cross between military and police activity aimed at security there is ever less difference between inside and outside the nation-state: low-intensity warfare meets high-intensity police actions. The “enemy,” which has traditionally been conceived outside, and the “dangerous classes,” which have traditionally been inside, are thus increasingly indistinguishable from one another and serve together as the object of the war effort. We will focus extensively on the notion of “dangerous classes” in the next chapter, but here we should emphasize that its being identified with “the enemy” tends effectively to criminalize the various forms of social contestation and resistance. In this respect, the conceptual merging of war and policing poses an obstacle to all forces of social transformation.

A third consequence is a reorientation of the conception of the sides of battle or conditions of enmity. To the extent that the enemy is abstract and unlimited, the alliance of friends too is expansive and potentially universal. All of humanity can in principle be united against an abstract concept or practice such as terrorism.¹⁹ It should not be surprising, then, that the concept of “just war” has emerged again in the discourse of politicians, journalists, and scholars, particularly in the context of the war on terrorism and the various military operations conducted in the name of human rights. The concept of justice serves to universalize war beyond any particular interests toward the interest of humanity as a whole. Modern European political thinkers, we should keep in mind, sought to banish the concept of just war, which had been common throughout the Middle Ages, especially during the Crusades and the religious wars, because they thought it tended to generalize war beyond its proper scope and confuse it with other social realms, such as morality and religion. Justice does not belong to the modern concept of war.²⁰ When the modern realist theorists of war claimed that war is a means for political ends, for instance, they intended not only to link war to interstate politics but also separate it from other social realms, such as morality and religion. It is true that various other social realms have often throughout history been superimposed on war, especially in propaganda campaigns, such that the enemy might be presented as evil or ugly or sexually perverse, but the modern theorists insisted on this fundamental separation. War, they thought, could thus be isolated to its necessary and rational functions.

The “just” wars of the late twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries often carry explicit or implicit echoes of the old wars of religion. And the various concepts of civilizational conflict—the West versus Islam, for instance—that animate a strong vein of foreign policy and international relations theory are never far removed from the old religious paradigm of the wars of religion .²¹ It seems that we are back once again in the situation defined by the seventeenth-century motto, Cujus regio, ejus religio, that is, the one who rules also determines religious faith—a dangerous and oppressive situation against which all the great modern movements of tolerance struggled. Along with the renewed concept of just war, then, comes also, predictably, the allied concept of evil. Posing the enemy as evil serves to make the enemy and the struggle against it absolute and thus outside of politics—evil is the enemy of all humanity. (The category of a crime against humanity, which has in effect been transformed from an element of the Geneva Convention into global penal code, is perhaps the legal concept that most clearly makes concrete this notion of evil.) Modern European philosophers tried to put to rest this problem too, the problem of evil, the great Christian debate over theodicy, that is, the justification of God with respect to the evil, the question of how God could permit evil to exist.²² They tried to displace such problems or at least separate them from questions of politics and war. The postmodern recourse to notions of justice and evil in war may be simply irrational propaganda and moral-religious mystification, little different than old-fashioned calls to destroy the infidels or burn the witches, but since such mystifications do have very real effects, they must be confronted seriously, as was done by modern philosophers such as Voltaire. Tolerance, a central value of modern thought, is being dramatically undermined. And, more importantly for our purposes, these resurrected discourses of justice and evil are symptoms of the ways in which war has changed and lost the limitations that modernity had tried to impose on it.

We should be clear that the concept of terrorism does not (any more than the concept of evil) provide a solid conceptual or political anchor for the contemporary global state of war. Early in the twentieth century the term terrorism referred primarily to anarchist bombings in Russia, France, and Spain—instances of so-called propaganda of the deed. The current meaning of the term is a recent invention. Terrorism has become a political concept (a concept of war or, really, civil war) that refers to three different phenomena that are sometimes held separate and at others confused together: (1) the revolt or rebellion against a legitimate government; (2) the exercise of political violence by a government in violation of human rights (including, according to some, the rights of property); and (3) the practice of warfare in violation of the rules of engagement, including attacks on civilians. The problem with all of these definitions is that they vary according to who defines their key elements: who determines, for example, what is a legitimate government, what are human rights, and what are the rules of war. Depending on who defines these elements, of course, even the United States could be labeled a terrorist state.²³ Because of the instability of its definition, the concept of terrorism does not provide a solid foundation to understand the current global state of war.

The domestic face of just-war doctrines and the war against terrorism is a regime aimed at near complete social control, which some authors describe as a passage from the welfare state to a warfare state and others characterize as a so-called zero-tolerance society.²⁴ This is a society whose diminishing civil liberties and increasing rates of incarceration are in certain respects a manifestation of a constant social war. We should note that this transformation of methods of control coincides with an extremely strong social transformation, which we will describe in the next chapter in terms of biopolitical forms of production. The new forms of power and control operate increasingly in contradiction with the new social composition of the population and serve merely to block its new forms of productivity and expression. We claimed elsewhere that a similar obstruction of freedom and productive expression led to the implosion of the Soviet Union.²⁵ This is, in any case, a highly contradictory situation in which the actions of the ruling powers to maintain control tend to undercut their own interests and authority.

Finally, like justice, democracy does not belong to war. War always requires strict hierarchy and obedience and thus the partial or total suspension of democratic participation and exchange. “In wartime,” explains the legal theorist Hans Kelsen, “the democratic principle has to yield to a strictly autocratic one: everyone must pay unconditional obedience to the leader.”²⁶ In the modern period the wartime suspension of democratic politics was usually posed as temporary, since war was conceived as an exceptional condition.²⁷ If our hypothesis is correct and today the state of war has instead become our permanent global condition, then the suspension of democracy tends also to become the norm rather than the exception. Following John Dewey’s statement that serves as one of the epigraphs to this chapter, we can see that the current global state of war forces all nations, even the professedly most democratic, to become authoritarian and totalitarian. Some say that ours is a world in which real democracy has become impossible, perhaps even unthinkable.

BIOPOWER AND SECURITY

At this point we need to go back once again and try to understand this regime of biopower from another, more philosophical, perspective. Although global war, as we said, has become increasingly indistinct from global police action, it also now tends toward the absolute. In modernity war never had an absolute, ontological character. It is true that the moderns considered war a fundamental element of social life. When the great modern military theorists spoke of war, they considered it a destructive but inevitable element of human society. And we should not forget that war often appeared in modern philosophy and politics as a positive element that involved both the search for glory (primarily in aristocratic consciousness and literature) and the construction of social solidarity (often from the standpoint of the subaltern populations). None of this, however, made war absolute. War was an element of social life; it did not rule over life. Modern war was dialectical in that every negative moment of destruction necessarily implied a positive moment of the construction of social order.

War really became absolute only with the technological development of weapons that made possible for the first time mass and even global destruction. Weapons of global destruction break the modern dialectic of war. War has always involved the destruction of life, but in the twentieth century this destructive power reached the limits of the pure production of death, represented symbolically by Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The capacity of genocide and nuclear destruction touches directly on the very structure of life, corrupting it, perverting it. The sovereign power that controls such means of destruction is a form of biopower in this most negative and horrible sense of the term, a power that rules directly over death—the death not simply of an individual or group but of humanity itself and perhaps indeed of all being. When genocide and atomic weapons put life itself on center stage, then war becomes properly ontological.²⁸

War thus seems to be heading at once in two opposite directions: it is, on one hand, reduced to police action and, on the other, raised up to an absolute, ontological level by technologies of global destruction. These two movements, however, are not contradictory: the reduction of war to police action does not take away but actually confirms its ontological dimension. The thinning of the war function and the thickening of the police function maintain the ontological stigmata of absolute annihilation: the war police maintain the threat of genocide and nuclear destruction as their ultimate foundation.²⁹

Biopower wields not just the power of the mass destruction of life (such as that threatened by nuclear weapons) but also individualized violence. When individualized in its extreme form, biopower becomes torture. Such an individualized exercise of power is a central element in the society of control of George Orwell’s 1984. “ ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’ Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer, ’ he said. ‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough.’ ”³⁰ Torture is today becoming an ever more generalized technique of control, and at the same time it is becoming increasingly banalized. Methods for obtaining confessions and information through physical and psychological torments, techniques to disorient prisoners (such as sleep deprivation), and simple means of humiliation (such as strip searches) are all common weapons in the contemporary arsenal of torture. Torture is one central point of contact between police action and war; the torture techniques used in the name of police prevention take on all the characteristics of military action. This is another face of the state of exception and the tendency for political power to free itself from the rule of law. In fact, there are increasing numbers of cases in which the international conventions against torture and the domestic laws against cruel and unusual punishment have little effect.³¹ Both dictatorships and liberal democracies use torture, the one by vocation and the other by so-called necessity. According to the logic of the state of exception, torture is an essential, unavoidable, and justifiable technique of power.

Sovereign political power can never really arrive at the pure production of death because it cannot afford to eliminate the life of its subjects. Weapons of mass destruction must remain a threat or be used in very limited cases, and torture cannot be taken to the point of death, at least not in a generalized way. Sovereign power lives only by preserving the life of its subjects, at the very least their capacities of production and consumption. If any sovereign power were to destroy that, it would necessarily destroy itself. More important than the negative technologies of annihilation and torture, then, is the constructive character of biopower. Global war must not only bring death but also produce and regulate life.

One index of the new, active, constituent character of war is the policy shift from “defense” to “security,” which the U.S. government has promoted, particularly as an element of the war against terrorism since September 2001.³² In the context of U.S. foreign policy, the shift from defense to security means the movement from a reactive and conservative attitude to an active and constructive one, both within and outside the national boundaries: from the preservation of the present domestic social and political order to its transformation, and similarly from a reactive war attitude, which responds to external attacks, to an active attitude that aims to preempt attack. We should keep in mind that modern democratic nations uniformly outlawed all forms of military aggression, and their constitutions gave parliaments power only to declare defensive wars. Likewise international law has always resolutely prohibited preventive or preemptive attacks on the basis of the rights of national sovereignty. The contemporary justification of preemptive strikes and preventive wars in the name of security, however, explicitly undermines national sovereignty, making national boundaries increasingly irrelevant.³³ Both within and outside the nation, then, the proponents of security require more than simply conserving the present order—if we wait to react to threats, they claim, it will be too late. Security requires rather actively and constantly shaping the environment through military and/or police activity. Only an actively shaped world is a secure world. This notion of security is a form of biopower, then, in the sense that it is charged with the task of producing and transforming social life at its most general and global level.

This active, constituent character of security is, in fact, already implicit in the other transformations of war we analyzed earlier. If war is no longer an exceptional condition but the normal state of affairs, if, that is, we have now entered a perpetual state of war, then it becomes necessary that war not be a threat to the existing structure of power, not a destabilizing force, but rather, on the contrary, an active mechanism that constantly creates and reinforces the present global order. Furthermore, the notion of security signals a lack of distinction between inside and outside, between the military and the police. Whereas “defense” involves a protective barrier against external threats, “security” justifies a constant martial activity equally in the homeland and abroad.

The concept of security only gestures partially and obliquely to the extensive transformative power involved in this passage. At an abstract, schematic level we can see this shift as an inversion of the traditional arrangement of power. Think of the arrangement of the elements of modern sovereign power like a Russian matrioshka doll, whose largest shell consists of disciplinary administrative power, which contains the power of political control, which in turn contains in the final instance the power to make war. The productive character of security, however, requires that the order and priority of these nested shells be reversed, such that war is now the outermost container in which is nestled the power of control and finally disciplinary power. What is specific to our era, as we claimed earlier, is that war has passed from the final element of the sequences of power—lethal force as a last resort—to the first and primary element, the foundation of politics itself. Imperial sovereignty creates order not by putting an end to “the war of each against all,” as Hobbes would have it, but by proposing a regime of disciplinary administration and political control directly based on continuous war action. The constant and coordinated application of violence, in other words, becomes the necessary condition for the functioning of discipline and control. In order for war to occupy this fundamental social and political role, war must be able to accomplish a constituent or regulative function: war must become both a procedural activity and an ordering, regulative activity that creates and maintains social hierarchies, a form of biopower aimed at the promotion and regulation of social life.

To define war by biopower and security changes war’s entire legal framework. In the modern world the old Clausewitz adage that war is a continuation of politics by other means represented a moment of enlightenment insofar as it conceived war as a form of political action and/or sanction and thus implied an international legal framework of modern warfare. It implied both a jus ad bellum (a right to conduct war) and a jus in bello (a legal framework to govern war conduct). In modernity, war was subordinated to international law and thus legalized or, rather, made a legal instrument. When we reverse the terms, however, and war comes to be considered the basis of the internal politics of the global order, the politics of Empire, then the modern model of civilization that was the basis of legalized war collapses. The modern legal framework for declaring and conducting war no longer holds. We are still nonetheless not dealing with a pure and unregulated exercise of violence. War as the foundation of politics must itself contain legal forms, indeed must construct new procedural forms of law. As cruel and bizarre as these new legal forms may be, war must nonetheless be legally regulative and ordering. Whereas war previously was regulated through legal structures, war has become regulating by constructing and imposing its own legal framework.³⁴

We should note that to say imperial war is regulative and ordering, and thus contains within itself a constructive element, does not mean that it is a constituent or foundational power in the proper sense. The modern revolutionary wars were indeed instances of constituent power; they were foundational insofar as they overthrew the old order and imposed from the outside new legal codes and new forms of life. The contemporary imperial regulative state of war, in contrast, reproduces and regulates the current order; it creates law and jurisdiction from the inside. Its legal codes are strictly functional to the constant reordering of imperial territories. It is constituent in the way, for example, that the implicit powers of the U.S. Constitution are or the activities of constitutional courts can be in closed juridical systems. These are functional systems that, above all in complex societies, serve as surrogates for democratic expression—and thus function against democracy. In any case, this reordering and regulating power has little to do with constituent power in the proper, foundational sense. It is rather a means to displace and suffocate it.³⁵

The political program of “nation building” in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is one central example of the productive project of biopower and war. Nothing could be more postmodernist and antiessentialist than this notion of nation building. It reveals, on the one hand, that the nation has become something purely contingent, fortuitous, or, as philosophers would say, accidental. That is why nations can be destroyed and fabricated or invented as part of a political program. On the other hand, nations are absolutely necessary as elements of global order and security. The international divisions of labor and power, the hierarchies of the global system, and the forms of global apartheid we will discuss in the next chapter all depend on national authorities to be established and enforced. Nations must be made! Nation building thus pretends to be a constituent, even ontological, process, but it is really only a pale shadow of the revolutionary processes out of which modern nations were born. The modern revolutions and national liberations that created nations were processes that arose from within the national societies, fruit of a long history of social development. The contemporary projects of nation building are by contrast imposed by force from the outside through a process that now goes by the name “regime change.” Such nation building resembles less the modern revolutionary birth of nations than it does the process of colonial powers dividing up the globe and drawing the maps of their subject territories. It resembles also, in a more benign register, the battles over redrawing electoral or administrative districts in order to gain control, cast now, of course, on a global scale. Nation building, in any case, illustrates the “productive” face of biopower and security.

For another example of the productive nature and regulative legal capacity of biopower and global war, we can turn back to the renewed conception of “just war.” The current notion of just war should not be reduced to the right of the ruling power to unilateral decision-making and command that could correspond to old conceptions of raison d’etat, as it is used by some of the hawks who pursue today’s imperial wars. Neither should just war be reduced to a moral principle, as various religious thinkers and utopian legal theorists seem to want (with the danger that just war is transformed into fanaticism and superstition). These are both, in fact, merely old, premodern conceptions that have recently been resurrected. It is more instructive to look at a much more recent genealogy of just war and its constituent capacity, specifically the notion of just war associated with the cold war that served as the basis for the theories of containment promoted by strategists from George Kennan to Henry Kissinger. The cold war, as we will argue later, was indeed a war, but a war that introduced novel elements, often conducted through low-intensity conflicts simultaneously on various fronts throughout the world. What is relevant for our argument here is that these cold war theorists of containment reinterpreted the traditional morality of just war. The cold war was a just war in their view not because it could destroy the Communist and Soviet threats but because it could contain them. Just war in this case is no longer a moral justification for temporally limited acts of violence and destruction, as it was traditionally, but rather for maintaining a permanent stasis of global order. That cold war idea of justice and containment provides a key to both the indefinite duration and the regulative and ordering functions that imperial war can have today.

The cold war, however, never arrived at an ontological concept of war. Its notion of containment was static or perhaps dialectical. Only after the end of the cold war has war begun to become truly constructive. The Bush senior foreign policy doctrine, for example, was constitutive in the sense that the 1991 Persian Gulf War, although its primary objective was to restore Kuwait’s national sovereignty, was also part of a project to create a “new world order.” The Clinton administration’s policies of humanitarian wars, peacekeeping, and nation building had analogous aspects, aimed at constructing, for instance, a new political order in the Balkans. Both administrations promoted, at least in part, the moral criterion of just war as a constitutive element of politics in order to redraw the geopolitical map. Finally, the Bush junior administration, particularly after the attacks of September 11 and the policy shift from defense to security, has made explicit the global reach and the active, constituent function of war in global order, even though this remains an incomplete and uneven process that will advance and retreat for some time in various forms. Imperial war is charged with the task of shaping the global political environment and thus to become a form of biopower in the positive, productive sense. It may appear that we have arrived at the point of a reactionary revolution, when imperial war founds a new global order, but really this is merely a regulating process that consolidates the existing order of Empire.³⁶

LEGITIMATE VIOLENCE

We need to take one more approach toward our current global state of war, this time from the standpoint of the changing ways in which legitimate violence is conceived. One of the fundamental pillars of the sovereignty of the modern nation-state is its monopoly of legitimate violence both within the national space and against other nations. Within the nation, the state not only has an overwhelming material advantage over all other social forces in its capacity for violence, it also is the only social actor whose exercise of violence is legal and legitimate. All other social violence is illegitimate a priori, or at least highly delimited and constrained as is, for example, the kind of legitimate violence involved in a labor union’s right to strike, if indeed one considers the strike an act of violence at all. On the international scene, the various nation-states certainly have different military capacities, but in principle they all have equal right to use violence, that is, to conduct war. The legitimate violence wielded by the nation-state is grounded primarily in national, and later international, legal structures. (It is, in Max Weber’s terms, a legal authority rather than a traditional or charismatic one.) The violence of the police officer, jailer, and executioner within the national territory or the general and soldier outside are legitimate not because of the characteristics of the particular individuals but on the basis of the offices they occupy. The actions of these various state functionaries who wield legitimate violence are thus accountable, at least in principle, to the national and international legal orders on which they stand. All the theories in political science of the state of exception—the state of siege and constitutional dictatorship just like the corresponding notions of insurrection and coup d’état—are based explicitly on the state’s monopoly of violence.³⁷ The great actors and theorists of twentieth-century politics, on the right and left, agree on this point: Max Weber and Vladimir Lenin say, in almost identical words, that with regard to the use of force the state is always a dictatorship.³⁸

In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the mechanisms of the legitimation of state violence began to be seriously undermined. The developments of international law and international treaties, on one hand, put limits on the legitimate use of force by one nation-state against another, and on the accumulation of weapons. The nuclear nonproliferation agreements, for example, along with various limits on the development of chemical and biological weapons, maintained during the cold war the overwhelming advantage in military capabilities and the right to conduct war in the hands of the two superpowers, and thus out of the hands of the majority of nation-states.³⁹ On the other hand, particularly in the final decades of the twentieth century, the legitimate use of force has also eroded within nation-states. The discourse of human rights, along with the military interventions and legal actions based on it, was part of a gradual movement to delegitimate the violence wielded by nation-states even within their own national territory.⁴⁰ By the end of the twentieth century nation-states could not necessarily legitimate the violence they exercised, neither outside nor inside their territory. Today states no longer necessarily have a legitimate right to police and punish their own populations or pursue foreign war on the basis of their own laws. We should be clear that we are not claiming that the violence wielded by states against their own citizens and against other states has declined. On the contrary! What has declined instead is the means of legitimating that state violence.

The decline of the nation-state’s monopoly of legitimate violence reopens a series of troubling questions. If the violence wielded by the nation-state is no longer considered legitimate a priori, based on its own legal structures, then how is violence legitimated today? Is all violence equally legitimate? Do Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, for example, have the same legitimacy that the United States military has to exercise violence? Does the Yugoslav government have the same right to torture and murder portions of its population that the United States has to imprison and execute portions of its population? Is the violence of Palestinian groups wielded against Israeli citizens just as legitimate as the violence of the Israeli military against Palestinian citizens? Perhaps the declining ability of states to legitimate the violence they exercise can explain, at least in part, why there have appeared in recent decades increasingly strident and confused accusations of terrorism. In a world where no violence can be legitimated, all violence can potentially be called terrorism. As we noted earlier, the contemporary definitions of terrorism are all variable and depend on who defines their central elements: legitimate government, human rights, and rules of war. The difficulty of constructing a stable and coherent definition of terrorism is intimately linked to the problem of establishing an adequate notion of legitimate violence.

Many politicians, activists, and scholars invoke morality and values today as the basis of legitimate violence outside the question of legality or, rather, as the basis of a new legal structure: violence is legitimate if its basis is moral and just, but illegitimate if its basis is immoral and unjust. Bin Laden, for example, asks for legitimation by presenting himself as the moral hero of the poor and oppressed of the global South. The United States government similarly asks for legitimation of its military violence on the basis of its values, such as freedom, democracy, and prosperity. In a more general way, numerous discourses of human rights suggest that violence can be (and can only be) legitimated on moral grounds. The set of human rights, whether assumed to be universal or determined through political negotiation, stands as a moral structure above the law or as a substitute for the legal structure itself. Many traditional concepts posed human rights against all forms of violence, but in the shadow of the Holocaust and clearly after the “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo this view shifted toward what might be called the “Annan Doctrine” after the UN secretary-general. The majority human rights position now advocates violence in the service of human rights, legitimated on its moral foundation and conducted by the blue helmets of the UN military.⁴¹

Such moral claims do achieve a certain kind of legitimation today, but one should keep in mind that such legitimation rests precariously on the radical plurality of moral frameworks and judgments. In 1928, as part of a disarmament campaign, Winston Churchill told a parable to illustrate the catastrophic consequences of presuming one’s own use of violence to be universal.⁴² Once upon a time all the animals in the zoo decided they would disarm and renounce violence. The rhinoceros proclaimed that the use of teeth was barbaric and ought to be prohibited but that the use of horns was mainly defensive and should be allowed. The stag and porcupine agreed. The tiger, however, spoke against horns and defended teeth and even claws as honorable and peaceful. Finally the bear spoke up against teeth, claws, and horns. The bear proposed instead that whenever animals disagreed all that was necessary was a good hug. Each animal, Churchill concludes, believes its own use of violence to be strictly an instrument of peace and justice. Morality can only provide a solid basis to legitimate violence, authority, and domination when it refuses to admit different perspectives and judgments. Once one accepts the validity of different values, then such a structure immediately collapses.

Legal structures have traditionally provided a more stable framework for legitimation than morality, and many scholars insist today that national and international law remain the only valid bases for legitimate violence. ⁴³ We should keep in mind, however, that international criminal law consists of a very meager set of treaties and conventions with only minimal mechanisms of enforcement. Most efforts to apply international criminal law have been fruitless. The legal proceedings against Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet in British and Spanish courts, for instance, were attempts to establish the precedent that war crimes and crimes against humanity are subject to universal jurisdiction and can potentially be prosecuted under national law anywhere in the world. There are similar calls to prosecute former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger for war crimes in Laos and Cambodia, but these calls have, predictably, received no legal action. New institutions are emerging to punish illegitimate violence. These institutions extend well beyond the old schema of national and international law and include such bodies as the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, established by the UN Security Council in 1993 and 1994, and (more important), founded at the Hague in 2002, the permanent International Criminal Court (which the United States has refused to join, substantially undermining its powers). Whereas the old international law was based on the recognition of national sovereignty and the rights of peoples, the new imperial justice, for which the conception of crimes against humanity and the activities of the international courts are elements, is aimed at the destruction of the rights and sovereignty of peoples and nations through supranational jurisdictional practices. Consider, for example, the charges brought against Slobodan Milošević and the other Serbian leaders in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The fact of whether the violence the Serbian leaders exercised violated the law of the Yugoslavian state is not at issue—in fact, it is completely irrelevant. Their violence is judged illegitimate in a framework outside of the national and even international legal context. These were crimes not against their own national laws or international laws, in other words, but against humanity. This shift signals the possible decline of international law and the rise in its stead of a global or imperial form of law.⁴⁴

Undermining international law in this way is not, in our view, in itself a negative development. We are perfectly aware of how often international law served in the twentieth century merely to legitimate and support the violence of the strong over the weak. And yet the new imperial justice, although the axes and lines have shifted somewhat, seems similarly to create and maintain global hierarchies. One has to recognize how selective this application of justice is, how often the crimes of the least powerful are prosecuted and how seldom those of the most powerful are. Arguing that the most powerful must also abide by imperial law and sanctions seems to us a noble but increasingly utopian strategy. The institutions of imperial justice and the international courts that punish crimes against humanity, as long as they are dependent on the ruling global powers, such as the UN Security Council and the most powerful nation-states, will necessarily interpret and reproduce the political hierarchy of Empire. The refusal of the United States to allow its citizens and soldiers to be subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court illustrates the unequal application of legal norms and structures.⁴⁵ The United States will impose legal sanctions on others, either through normal domestic systems or ad hoc arrangements, such as the extraordinary imprisonment of combatants at Guantanamo Bay, but it will not allow its own to be subject to other national or supranational legal bodies. The inequality of power seems to make it impossible to establish equality before the law. In any case, the fact is that today accordance of violence with either established international law or the emerging global law does not guarantee legitimation, and violation does not mean it is considered illegitimate—far from it. We need to look beyond these legal structures for other mechanisms or frameworks that are effective today as the basis for legitimate violence.

Violence is legitimated most effectively today, it seems to us, not on any a priori framework, moral or legal, but only a posteriori, based on its results. It might seem that the violence of the strong is automatically legitimated and the violence of the weak immediately labeled terrorism, but the logic of legitimation has more to do with the effects of the violence. The reinforcement or reestablishment of the current global order is what retroactively legitimates the use of violence. In the span of just over a decade we have seen the complete shift among these forms of legitimation. The first Gulf War was legitimated on the basis of international law, since it was aimed officially at restoring the sovereignty of Kuwait. The NATO intervention in Kosovo, by contrast, sought legitimation on moral humanitarian grounds. The second Gulf War, a preemptive war, calls for legitimation primarily on the basis of its results.⁴⁶ A military and/or police power will be granted legitimacy as long and only as long as it is effective in rectifying global disorders—not necessarily bringing peace but maintaining order. By this logic a power such as the U.S. military can exercise violence that may or may not be legal or moral and as long as that violence results in the reproduction of imperial order it will be legitimated. As soon as the violence ceases to bring order, however, or as soon as it fails to preserve the security of the present global order, the legitimation will be removed. This is a most precarious and unstable form of legitimation.

The constant presence of an enemy and the threat of disorder are necessary in order to legitimate imperial violence. Perhaps it should be no surprise that when war constitutes the basis of politics, the enemy becomes the constitutive function of legitimacy. Thus this enemy is no longer concrete and localizable but has now become something fleeting and ungraspable, like a snake in the imperial paradise. The enemy is unknown and unseen and yet ever present, something like a hostile aura. The face of the enemy appears in the haze of the future and serves to prop up legitimation where legitimation has declined. This enemy is in fact not merely elusive but completely abstract. The individuals invoked as the primary targets—Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, Mu’ammar Gadhafi, and Manuel Noriega among others—are themselves very limited threats, but they are blown up into larger-than-life figures that serve as stand-ins for the more general threat and give the appearance of traditional, concrete objects of war. They serve perhaps as a pedagogical tool (or mystifying facade) by presenting this new kind of war in the old form. The abstract objects of war—drugs, terrorism, and so forth—are not really enemies either. They are best conceived rather as symptoms of a disordered reality that poses a threat to security and the functioning of discipline and control. There is something monstrous in this abstract, auratic enemy. This monstrosity is a first indication of the fact, which we will shortly explore at length, that the asymmetry and imbalances of power in the world cannot be absorbed within the new legitimation of imperial power. For now, suffice it to say that the enemy is an example or, better, an experimentum crucis for the definition of legitimacy. The enemy must serve as a schema of reason in the Kantian sense, but in the opposite direction: it must demonstrate not what power is but what power saves us from. The presence of the enemy demonstrates the need for security.

We should be clear here that security in itself does not necessarily imply repression or violence. We will analyze at length in part 2 the new forms of social labor that are based on immaterial products, such as intelligence, information, and affects. These forms of labor and the social networks they create are organized and controlled internally, through cooperation. This is a real form of security. The concept of security we have been discussing, which is based on a notion of abstract enemies and serves to legitimate violence and restrict freedoms, is imposed externally. The two notions of security, the one based on cooperation and the other grounded in violence, are thus not only different but stand in direct conflict with one another.⁴⁷

There were almost two thousand sustained armed conflicts on the face of the earth at the beginning of the new millennium, and the number is growing. When, along with the monopoly of legitimate force, the sovereign functions of nation-states decline, conflicts begin to rise behind an infinity of emblems, ideologies, religions, demands, and identities. And in all these cases, legitimate violence, criminality, and terrorism tend to become indistinguishable from one another. This does not mean that all wars and all armed parties have become the same, nor does it mean that we cannot understand the causes of wars. It means rather that the modern terms of evaluation tend to collapse: the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate violence, between wars of liberation and wars of oppression, tend to blur. All violence fades to gray. War itself, regardless of the distinctions one tries to make, is oppressing us. This is Simplicissimus’s cynical perspective.

Consider, for example, the barbaric, genocidal war between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda in the early 1990s. The causes of the conflict can certainly be understood, for example, in terms of the legacy of the Belgian colonial system that privileged the minority Tutsis as a colonized race superior to the majority Hutus.⁴⁸ Such explanations of the causes do not, of course, lead to justification, nor do they define a path to liberation. Hutu violence and Tutsi violence are both devoid of legitimacy. The same is true of Croat and Serb violence in the Balkans as well as Hindu and Muslim violence in South Asia. They all tend to become equally illegitimate and oppressive.

We can, of course, still categorize present wars according to various axes—for example, wars of the rich versus the poor, the rich versus the rich, and the poor versus the poor—but these categories tend not to matter. They matter to the participants, certainly, but not in the framework of our current global order. Only one distinction does matter, and it is superimposed over all others: violence that preserves the contemporary hierarchy of global order and violence that threatens that order. This is the perspective of the new imperial war, which we will investigate in detail in the next section. Numerous contemporary wars neither contribute to nor detract from the ruling global hierarchy, and thus Empire is indifferent to them. That does not mean they will cease, but it may help explain why they are not the object of imperial intervention.

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, GEHEIMRAT

The great modern works of political science all provide tools for transforming or overthrowing the ruling powers and liberating us from oppression. Even Machiavelli’s The Prince, which some read as a guidebook for nefarious rulers, is in fact a democratic pamphlet that puts the understanding of violence and the cunning use of power in the service of republican intelligence. Today, however, the majority of political scientists are merely technicians working to resolve the quantitative problems of maintaining order, and the rest wander the corridors from their universities to the courts of power, attempting to get the ear of the sovereign and whisper advice. The paradigmatic figure of the political scientist has become the Geheimrat, the secret adviser of the sovereign.

Samuel Huntington may be the best example of an imperial Geheimrat, the one who has most successfully gotten the ear of the sovereign. In 1975, together with Michel Crozier and Joji Watanuki, he published a volume for the Trilateral Commission on the “crisis of democracy.”⁴⁹Huntington’s diagnosis was that “democracy” in the United States has since the 1960s been put in danger by too much participation and too many demands from organized labor and newly activated social groups, such as women and African Americans. Too much democracy, he claimed paradoxically, has made U.S. democracy sick, resulting in a “democratic distemper.” Perhaps such contradictory reasoning could be seen to make sense only during the cold war, when capitalist social rule, in whatever political form it took, was necessarily considered “democratic” against the threat of Soviet totalitarianism. In fact, Huntington’s text is a resolutely antirepublican, antidemocratic gospel that preaches the defense of sovereignty against the threats of all social forces and social movements. What Huntington feared most, of course, and this is the central thrust of his argument, is democracy in its proper sense, that is, as the rule of all by all. Democracy, he claimed, must be tempered with authority, and various segments of the population must be kept from participating too actively in political life or demanding too much from the state. Huntington’s gospel did, in fact, serve as a guide in the subsequent years for the neoliberal destruction of the welfare state.

Twenty years later the Geheimrat Huntington is again whispering in the ear of the sovereign. The needs of power have changed and thus so too has his advice. The cold war had been a stable principle that had organized nation-states into allies and enemies, thus defining global order, but that is now gone. At the end of the twentieth century, when the cold war is over and even the sovereignty of nation-states is in decline, it is unclear how global order can be configured and how the violence necessary to maintain that order can be deployed and legitimated. Huntington’s advice is that the organizing lines of global order and global conflict, the blocs that cluster nation-states in allied and enemy camps, should be defined no longer in “ideological” terms but rather as “civilizations.”⁵⁰Welcome back Oswald Spengler. The old mole of reactionary thought resurfaces again. It is very unclear what these bizarre historical identities called civilizations might be, but in Huntington’s conception they are largely defined, it turns out, along racial and religious lines. The generic character of civilizations as criteria of classification makes it all the easier to subordinate “science” to political tactics and to use them to redraw the geopolitical map. The “secret adviser” of the sovereign here draws on an old reactionary hypothesis that casts political groupings as fusional communities (Gemeinschaften) and locates the reality of power (Machtrealitäten) within spiritual entities. He has conjured up the phantasm of these civilizations to find in them a grand schema that rearranges the friend-enemy division that is basic to politics. Those who belong to our civilization are our friends; other civilizations are our enemies. Gather round and hear the good news: war has become a clash of civilizations! Spinoza aptly called this conjuring up of enemies and fear superstition, and such superstition, he knew well, will always lead to the ultimate barbarity of perpetual war and destruction.

Huntington’s brilliance as Geheimrat in the 1970s was to anticipate the needs of the sovereign, providing beforehand an antidemocratic how-to manual for the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions. Similarly his thesis of a “clash of civilizations” preceded September 11 and the subsequent war against terrorism, which was immediately conceived by the media and the major political powers, sometimes with prudent disclaimers but often not, as a conflict of the West against Islam. In this context, in fact, the hypothesis of a clash of civilizations seems to be not so much a description of the present state of the world but rather an explicit prescription, a call to war, a task that “the West” must realize.⁵¹Instead of being primordial or spiritual or even historical, in other words, these civilizations are political and strategic dictates that have to generate real political bodies in order to serve as friends and enemies in the permanent state of war.

This time Huntington has missed the mark, and the sovereign has turned his back on him. Ah, the cruel fortunes of the Geheimrat, subject to the whims of the sovereign! The U.S. government has repeated insistently since September 11 that its global security strategy has nothing to do with a clash of civilizations.⁵²This is not primarily because U.S. political leaders are sensitive to the racist implications of Huntington’s hypothesis/proposal, but rather because the notion of a civilization is too limited for their global vision. Huntington remains stuck in the old paradigm of world order, seeking to configure new clusters of nation-states, now in civilizations, to substitute for the cold war blocs. The vistas of Empire, however, are more vast. All of humanity must come under its rule. In this new world, Huntington’s imagined civilizations and the boundaries that divide them are merely obstacles. There is something sad about an eager adviser who has been spurned by the sovereign and cast out of the court.