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The 1AC confuses regulation with prohibition. The move to legalize merely regulates
transgression into impotency and creates new avenues for guilt, anxiety, and dominance.
Dean 7 - Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York (Jodi,
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/18/41, Why Žižek for Political
Theory?, 2007, Volume One, Number One - Why Žižek? pp 27-30) NAR
Žižek argues that the crucial feature of late capitalist societies is the way that transgression
has been normalized (Žižek 2003: 56). Rather
than conforming to stereotypes of responsible men in the public sphere and caring women in the private, contemporary subjects
are encouraged to challenge gender norms and boundaries. Men and women alike are enjoined to succeed
in the work force and in their family lives, to find fulfilling careers and spend quality time with their
children. Networked communication technologies (high speed internet, cell phones) enable parents to work harder even as they attend to familial
relationships. Similarly, emphases on the value of diverse cultural and ethnic traditions have replaced earlier
injunctions to assimilate. These emphases find material support in consumer goods ranging from clothing and
accessories targeted to specific demographic groups, to film, television, and print media, to, more recently, drugs and health plans designed
for particular populations. What is now quite clear is a shift in the understanding of social membership away from the worker/citizen and
toward the consumer. [4] Thus, what disciplinary society prohibited, contemporary consumerism encourages, indeed,
demands . Contemporary consumer culture relies on excess, on a general principle that more is better.[5] Excess drives the
economy: super-sized meals at McDonalds and Burger King, gargantuan SUVs, fashion magazines urging shoppers to pick up
“armloads” of the newest items, extreme sports, extreme makeovers, and, at the same time, bigger closets, the production of all sorts of organizing,
filing, and containing systems, and a booming business in mini-storage units all of which are supposed to help Americans deal with their excess stuff. These
makeovers, these fashions and accessories, provide material support for injunctions to be oneself, to create and express one’s free individuality, to become the
unique and valuable person one already is, to break the bounds of conformity. Excess also appears in other aspects of life under communicative capitalism:
24/7 news, 800 channel television, blockbuster films, television shows advertised as the “most unbelievable moment of the season” and the “unforgettable
series finale.” Self-help books tell us not just how to achieve sexual ecstasy, spiritual fulfillment, and a purpose-driven life—they tell us to achieve sexual
ecstasy, spiritual fulfillment, and a purpose-driven life. Exaggeration
is part of the very air we breathe. We are daily
enjoined to enjoy. Ours is a society of the superego. One might object at this point that Žižek’s emphases on contemporary
injunctions to enjoy is misplaced. Does not the rise of religious fundamentalism, for example, suggest just the opposite, that is, a return to old sexual
prohibitions? And, what about persistent warnings around health—don’t smoke, just say no to drugs, watch your weight, cut down on fat and
carbohydrates—what are these if not new forms of discipline? Žižek’s response is, first, that one
should not confuse regulations with
symbolic prohibitions, and, second, that so-called fundamentalism also relies on an injunction to enjoy (Žižek 2003: 56).
The regulations we encounter everyday, the guidance we come under as we navigate late capitalism, are not symbolic norms .
They are regulations that lack a claim to normative authority, but are instead installed by committees, by experts and pundits.
Everyone knows they are ultimately contestable , carrying no symbolic weight. Experts argue over all the time over proper diets, the
necessary amount of exercise, the benefits of red wine. In Žižek’s terms, these
regulations, then, are regulations of the very mode of
transgression ( Žižek 2003: 56). This makes sense when we recognize the way that these regulations fail to provide any real
breathing space, any relief from the injunction to enjoy. In fact, they function much more perversely insofar
as they never fail to remind us that we really aren’t enjoying properly, we really aren’t doing anything
right. Thus, they reinforce the malevolent superego, empowering it to torment us all the more. Žižek argues,
moreover, that contemporary fundamentalisms also enjoin jouissance. Their seeming adherence to law is driven by a superego injunction to transgress
contemporary regulations. I think of this in terms of a culture of cruelty. Opponents of gay marriage, in the name of family values, free their congregations to
hate; indeed, they organize themselves via a fascination with the sexual enjoyment of same sex couplings, thereby providing enjoyment. Opposition to gay
marriage gives opponents permission, in fact it encourages them, to find and weed out homosexual attraction. Might a boy be too artistic, too gentle? Might a
girl be too aggressive? Christian fundamentalists opposing gay marriage urge that ambiguous behavior be identified and corrected before it’s too late. If
necessary, of course, they can provide retraining, that is, they can install young people in camps and programs that will “turn them straight.” The
preoccupation with excess also characterizes the multiculturalism and political correctness associated with Left and liberal politics. Žižek argues liberal
tolerance is in fact a “zero tolerance” of the other in the excess of the other’s enjoyment (Žižek 2002: 174). If the other remains too tied to particular religious
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practices, say those that involve the subordination of women, the denial of medical treatment to children, the rejection of scientific findings regarding
evolution and global warming, well, this other cannot be tolerated. This other is incompatible with liberal pluralism; differently put, liberalism wants another
deprived of its otherness (Žižek 2003: 96, Žižek 2002: 11). White Leftist multiculturalists, even as they encourage the flourishing of multiple modes of
becoming, find themselves in a similar bind (one in which class difference is inscribed): their support of differentiated cultural traditions means that they
oppose the racism, sexism, and religiosity that bind together some poor whites. Just as the superego imperative operates in conservatism to encourage hate, so
can it be found in liberalism and Left multiculturalism as well. Correlative
to the pervasive intrusion of superego enjoyment is
a decline in the efficiency of symbolic norms, what Žižek refers to as the “collapse of the big Other.” [6] The decline of
symbolic efficiency refers to a fundamental uncertainty in our relation to the world, to the absence of a principle of charity that pertains across and through
disagreement. We don’t know on whom or what to rely, whom or what to trust. Arguments and pervasive in one context carry little weight in another. In
short, although the symbolic order is always and necessarily lacking, ruptured, today this lack is directly assumed. We no longer posit an overarching
symbolic. We
are so attuned to pretense and manipulation, “spin,” that we reject the very possibility of a truth
beneath the lie or of a truth that cuts through the assortment of lies and injunctions to enjoy constitutive
of the present ideological formation. What we presume instead are a variety of partial fillers, partial substitutes. Thus, in place of
symbolically anchored identities (structured in terms of conventions of gender, race, work, and national citizenship), we encounter
imaginary injunctions to develop our creative potential and cultivate our individuality, injunctions supported by
capital’s provisions of the ever new experiences and accessories we use to perform this self-fashioning (what Žižek refers to as the direct super-egoization of
the imaginary ideal). (Žižek 1999: 368) In
place of norms grounded in claims to universal validity, we have rules and
regulations that are clearly the result of compromises among competing parties or the contingent and
fallible conclusions of committees of experts. And, in place of the norms that relieve us of the duty to enjoy, that provide the
prohibitions that sustain desire, we find ourselves at the mercy of the superego’s injunction. We are expected to
have a good time, to have it all, to be happy, fit and fulfilled. This compulsion results in overwhelming
guilt and anxiety. On one hand, we are guilty both when we fail to live up to the superego’s injunction and
when we follow it. On another, we are anxious before the enjoyment of the other. Given our inabilities to enjoy, the
enjoyment of the other seems all the more powerful, all the more threatening. The other all too easily threatens our imaginary
balance . An ever present reminder that someone else has more, is more fulfilled, more successful, more attractive, more spiritual, the other makes our
own lack all the more present to us. That the fragility of contemporary subjects means others are experienced as
threats helps make sense of the ready availability of the imaginary identity of the victim—one of the few
positions from which one can speak. When others smoke, I am at risk. When others over-eat, make noise, flaunt their
sexuality, then my American way of life, my values, are under attack . Indeed, in the terms provided by the war on terror, to be “civilized”
today is to be a victim—a victim of fear of terrorism, a victim that has to be surveilled, searched, guarded, and protected from unpredictable violence. In all
these cases, the imaginary identity of the victim authorizes the subject to speak even as it shields it from responsibility toward another (Žižek 2003: 166-168).
The victim role, in other words, is one wherein the subject who speaks relies on and presupposes the other as an object enjoying in its stead, and, moreover, as
threatening, even unbearable, in that enjoyment. One
might have thought that the disintegration of restrictive symbolic
norms, especially in the context of the speed and flows of communicative capitalism, would have ushered in a time of remarkable
freedom. People in pluralist and pluralizing societies would be free to make the choices about who they want to be and how they want to live unhindered
by racist and patriarchal conventions. Žižek’s thesis, however, is that the decline of symbolic efficiency has introduced new
opportunities for guilt and anxiety, new forms of submission, dependence, and domination . His account of the
fixity of enjoyment explains why. Given that activity depends on passivity, that the very capacity to act relies on a nugget of enjoyment, the emergence of new
opportunities for domination makes sense. In
the face of injunctions to freedom, compulsions to individual self-creation,
demands to choose and decide even when there are no reliable grounds for a decision, subjects will cling
all the more desperately to the objects that sustain them , whether these objects are the myriad available momentary enjoyments
provided by capital or the others as objects enjoying in our stead. We depend on these contingent enjoyments to be at all. Indeed, Žižek argues
that
contemporary imperatives to freedom produce even more radical attachments to domination and
submission . This attachment repeats the simple dynamic of transgression. If authorities say don’t do X, then doing X will
provide enjoyment
(because prohibition relies on the fantasy that were it not for the prohibited object, one would enjoy).
authorities say, do X, then not doing X provides enjoyment.
Conversely, if
Thus, Žižek insists that contemporary
subjectivities
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confront an “obscene need for domination and submission” and he defends is point with reference to “the growth of
sadomasochistic lesbian couples.” (Žižek 1999: 360, 344) I think this example is absurd (and likely an instance of where Žižek’s own enjoyment irrupts in the
text). We can find much more powerful and widespread
examples of contemporary attachments to domination in
enthusiasm for coercive law, strict sentencing, the death penalty, and zero tolerance toward lawbreakers. And, we can better account for impulses to submission, for the surprising willingness of many to accept even the
most unconvincing pronouncements in a time of fear, uncertainty, and insecurity, by emphasizing, again, not
sexual anecdotes but the need for relief from the injunction to decide for oneself when one has no grounds for
choosing. Submission enables someone else to do what needs to be done for us, to be the object or
instrument of our will—and, precisely because we don’t even know what to will, we don’t even have to
will—we escape from the pressures of guilt and responsibility.
This interpolative force of the Big Other results in dehumanization and genocide.
Reed et. al 5 - Professor, Director of Command and Leadership Studies, U.S. Army War
College [Professor George E., Guy B. Adams, Professor, Public Affairs, University of Missouri-Columbia, Danny L. Balfour,
Professor, Public and Nonprofit Administration, Grand Valley State University, “Putting Cruelty First: Abu Ghraib, Administrative
Evil and Moral Inversion,” Paper prepared for presentation to “Ethics and Integrity of Governance: A Transatlantic Dialogue,”
Leuven, Belgium, June 2-5, 2005 http://soc.kuleuven.be/io/ethics/paper/Paper%20WS5_pdf/ Guy%20Adams.pdf, 24-28]
Total guard aggression increased daily, even after prisoners had ceased any resistance and deterioration
was visible. Prisoner rights were redefined as privileges, to be earned by obedient behavior. The
experiment was planned for two weeks, but was terminated after six days. Five prisoners were released because
of extreme emotional depression, crying, rage and/or acute anxiety. Guards forced the prisoners to chant filthy
songs, to defecate in buckets that were not emptied, and to clean toilets with their bare hands. They acted as if
the prisoners were less than human and so did the prisoners (Haney, Banks and Zimbardo, 1973, p.94): At
the end of only six days we had to close down our mock prison because what we saw was frightening. It was no
longer apparent to us or most of the subjects where they ended and their roles began. The majority had indeed
become "prisoners” or "guards," [were] no longer able to clearly differentiate between role-playing and
self. There were dramatic changes in virtually every aspect of their behavior, thinking and feeling. In less that a
week, the experience of imprisonment undid (temporarily) a lifetime of learning; human values were
suspended, self-concepts were challenged, and the ugliest, most base, pathological side of human nature
surfaced. We were horrified because we saw some boys ("guards") treat other boys as if they were despicable
animals, taking pleasure in cruelty, while other boys ("prisoners") became servile, dehumanized robots who
thought only of escape, of their own individual survival, and of their mounting hatred of the guards. This
experiment suggests that group and organizational roles and social structures play a far more powerful part in
everyday human behavior than most of us would consider. And we can see clearly how individual morality and
ethics can be swallowed and effectively erased by social roles and structures. One is rarely confronted with a
clear, up-or-down decision on an ethical issue; rather, a series of small, usually ambiguous choices are made,
and the weight of commitments and of habit drives out morality. One does not have to be morally degenerate
to become caught in a web of wrongdoing that may even cross the line into evil . The skids are further
greased if the situation is defined or presented as technical, or calling for expert judgment, or is
legitimated , either tacitly or explicitly, by organizational authority, as we shall see below. It becomes an
even easier choice if the immoral behavior has itself been masked, redefined through a moral inversion as
the "good" or "right" thing to do. Administrative Evil and Dehumanization The Stanford prison experiment
provides a fairly powerful explanation for at least some of what happened at Abu Ghraib. But it also does
not fully fit the specifics of the situation. Unlike the Stanford experiments, the guards did not act in an isolated
and controlled environment, but were part of a larger organizational structure and political environment.
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They interacted regularly with all sorts of personnel, both directly and indirectly involved with the prisoners.
They were in a remarkably chaotic environment, were by and large poorly prepared and trained for their roles,
and were faced with both enormous danger and ambiguity. However, like the Stanford Prison Experiment, tacit
permission was available to those who chose to accept it. In his ground-breaking book, The Destruction of the
European Jews, Raul Hilberg observed that a consensus for and the practice of mass murder coalesced
among German bureaucrats in a manner that (Hilberg, 1985, p.55), “…was not so much a product of laws
and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and
synchronization .” In another study of mid-level bureaucrats and the Holocaust, Christopher Browning
describes this process in some detail as he also found that direct orders were not needed for key
functionaries to understand the direction that policy was to take (Browning, 1992, pp. 141-142): Instead,
new signals and directions were given at the center, and with a ripple effect, these new signals set in
motions waves that radiated outward… with the situations they found themselves in and the contacts they
made, these three bureaucrats could not help but feel the ripples and be affected by the changing atmosphere
and course of events. These were not [unintelligent] stupid or inept people; they could read the signals,
perceive what was expected of them, and adjust their behavior accordingly… It was their receptivity to
such signals, and the speed with which they aligned themselves to the new policy, that allowed the Final
Solution to emerge with so little internal friction and so little formal coordination If something as horrific
and systematic as the Holocaust could be perpetrated based more on a common understanding than upon
direct orders, it should not be difficult to imagine how abuse of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere occurred,
with otherwise unacceptable behaviors substituting for ambiguous, standard operating procedures. While
the Nazi Holocaust was far, far worse than anything that has happened during the American occupation of Iraq,
it has been amply demonstrated that Americans are not immune to the types of social and organizational
conditions that make it possible and seemingly permissible to violate the boundaries of morality and
human decency, in at least some cases, without believing that they were doing anything wrong. It would be
naïve to assume that the “few bad apples” acted alone, and that others in the system did not share and
support the abuses as they went about their routines and did their jobs. Before and surrounding overt acts of
evil, there are many more and much less obviously evil administrative activities that lead to and support the
worst forms of human behavior. Moreover, without these instances of masked evil, the more overt and
unmasked acts are less likely to occur (Staub, 1992, pp. 20-21). The apparent willingness and comfort level
with taking photos and to be photographed while abusing prisoners seems to reflect the “normalcy” of the acts
within the context of at least the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib (and is hauntingly similar to
photos of atrocities sent home by SS personnel in World War II). In the camps and prisons run by the U.S.
military in Iraq and Afghanistan, orders and professional standards forbidding the abuse of prisoners and
defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior for prison guards could be found in at least some locations
posted on some walls, but were widely ignored by the perpetrators. Instead, we find a high stress situation, in
which the expectation was to It would be naïve to assume that the “few bad apples” acted alone, and that others
in the system did not share and support the abuses as they went about their routines and did their jobs. Before
and surrounding overt acts of evil, there are many more and much less obviously evil administrative activities
that lead to and support the worst forms of human behavior. Moreover, without these instances of masked evil,
the more overt and unmasked acts are less likely to occur (Staub, 1992, pp. 20-21). The apparent willingness
and comfort level with taking photos and to be photographed while abusing prisoners seems to reflect the
“normalcy” of the acts within the context of at least the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib (and is
hauntingly similar to photos of atrocities sent home by SS personnel in World War II). In the camps and prisons
run by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, orders and professional standards forbidding the abuse of
prisoners and defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior for prison guards could be found in at least some
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locations posted on some walls, but were widely ignored by the perpetrators. Instead, we find a high stress
situation, in which the expectation was to extract usable intelligence from detainees in order to help their
comrades suppress a growing insurgency, find weapons of mass destruction, and prevent acts of terrorism. In
this context, the power of group dynamics, social structures, and organizational ambiguities is readily seen. The
normal inhibitions that might have prevented those who perpetrated the abuses from doing these evil deeds may
have been further weakened by the shared belief that the prisoners were somehow less than human, and that
getting information out of them was more important than protecting their rights and dignity as human beings.
For example, in an interview with the BBC on June 15, 2004, Brig. General Janis Karpinski stated that she was
told by General Geoffrey Miller – later placed in charge of Iraqi prisons and former commander at Guantanamo
Bay – that the Iraqi prisoners, “…are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more
than a dog then you’ve lost control of them.” Just as anti-Semitism was central to the attitudes of those who
implemented the policy of mass murder in the Holocaust, the abuses at Abu Ghraib may have been facilitated
by an atmosphere that dehumanized the detainees. In effect, these detainees, with their ambiguous legal status,
could be seen as a “surplus population,” living outside the protections of civilized society (Rubenstein, 1983).
And when organizational dynamics combine with a tendency to dehumanize and/or demonize a
vulnerable group, the stage is set for the mask of administrative evil.
In place of the Superego's injunction we posit our alternative: a community of believers.
Dean 6 - Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York (Jodi, Zizek's Politics, © 2006 by
Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1, p.174-7 ) NAR
In place of the obscene transgressions of the nightly law , Žižek posits a community of believers in a cause .
We saw in the example from Ballard’s Super Cannes the
idea of a community united through its transgressions . One
element of this unity emerged out of an enlivened moral sensibility, an invigorated and expanded sense of
the self in a moral world. As an alternative to such a community united through experiences of hatred, obscenity, and violence, the community
that sustains and supplements the public law, Žižek draws from the Pauline remnant to envision a connection that also enlivens one’s experience of the world
but that does so by eliminating law’s superego support. The Pauline law
of faith suspends “the obscene libidinal investment in
the Law, the investment on account of which the law generates/solicits its own transgression.”80 Rather
than having her relation to law mediated by superego, the Pauline believer alienates everything to the law,
becoming herself an object . The subject is compulsion, testimony to a cause that has
transformed it. Thus, Paul posits the new community of faith as following the law but not libidinally invested in it.
Accordingly, a crucial aspect of this community, one Žižek analogizes to a collective of outcasts, is that it has traversed or overcome the
fantasy that law is all powerful, all knowing, and always right. As Žižek points out, superego is precisely the
object that attempts to conceal the impotence of law and to fill it in with force .81 The new community
accepts that law is non-all, recognizing its limits as opportunities for love. Law will not solve all problems;
its abstractions, however, establish a space within which we struggle for solutions . One might respond by asking whether
withholding nothing and
different communities might understand and enact love in radically contrary ways, ways that do not simply differ from but actively oppose each other. What
is to prevent one kind of committed community from seeking to wipe out all others? Nothing. There are no guarantees. As Žižek explains with reference to
psychoanalysis, its ultimate goal “is not the confessionary pacification/gentrification of the trauma, but the acceptance of the very fact that our lives involve a
tragic kernel beyond redemption, that there is a dimension of our being which forever resists redemption-deliverance.”82 Submitting to the law, then, rests
not on being convinced of its reason or rightness; much more simply, it rests on an acknowledgment of where we are and of a working toward something
better from where we are. Bluntly put, leftist attempts to leave the law behind are basically provocations that have little to do with actually attempting to
exercise political power to effect change. Žižek’s treatment of Paul suggests another way, one that attacks the obscene supplement of law and works to
traverse the fantasies that attach us to law as it focuses on the task of building radical collectives.The Interpellation of the Legal Subject: To the Vitality of the
Engaged Activist Žižek
finds in Paul “a commitment, an engaged position of struggle, an uncanny
‘interpellation’ beyond ideological interpellation, an interpellation which suspends the performative force of our ‘normal’ ideological
interpellation that compels us to accept our determinate place within the sociosymbolic edifice.”83 Rather than involving recognition of oneself in the
ideological call or the seeing of one’s self from what one takes to be the perspective of law, “ uncanny”
interpellation disconnects the
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subject from its symbolic identity. This identity simply doesn’t matter; it cannot fill in the lack
constitutive of the subject. At best it provides a screen onto which are projected the images of whom can be counted or recognized in law, images
imbricated in the obscene fantasies that limit the law and images that we perpetually reject for their failure to account for who we “really are.” Uncanny
interpellation, however, suspends these fantasies and acknowledges the lack: only a lacking subject is capable of love. Thus,
Žižek reads Paul’s
account of the fulfillment of law in terms of a traumatic event that ruptures law from within; law
remains, but without its interpellative force . This trauma, moreover, unites a new collective, one engaged in the radical project of
enacting their faith. For this reason, Žižek takes from the Pauline message the political message to “practice utopia.” 84 The practice of a new
collective cannot rely on the old ways—on previously given norms or on the fantasies formerly
underpinning law . Instead, its practice is a new beginning out of the rupture with the old . As we have seen with
Paul and Lenin, this practice is in between the old and the new; it is a bringing into being of something else. Such a moment will be transitory. Indeed, this
very transience appears clearly in the fact that the institutions that might provide a symbolic identity are not yet present. To this extent, Žižek’s discussion of
love as the fulfillment of law suggests the possibility of building something new from within something old, in the course of a changed, transformed relation to
what has been. Conclusion: Hope in Law Such a building from within can also be understood as a moment already within law. If we return to the fact that
Žižek’s account of law is synchronic, we can recognize the way in which, like law’s founding, this possibility of a love that ruptures, this incompleteness, can
be understood as already present, as persisting in law in its utopian dimensions. There is in law something more than superego enjoyment that attaches us to
it; inhering in law, in its very circularity, in the irrationality of its injunction, is belief, or faith. What makes law law is a belief that there is more to law than
violence.In the monstrosity of their acts, Sethe and Keyser Soeze posit this other moment, this utopian alternative that inverts the existing order. In the case of
The Usual Suspects, the possibility of such an order is hinted at through the retroactive presentation of the murder of wife and daughter. The scene is murky,
indistinct, part of the fantastic, originary trauma constituting the mythic Keyser Soeze, who appears throughout the film as the singularly unimpressive,
indeed, “crippled” petty criminal, Verbal. The story of Sethe is clearly the more powerful. In Beloved, hope in a time and space of African-American freedom
is the dream—the tomorrow that persists once Beloved is forgotten.85 Belief in this dream is what enabled and even inspired Sethe to act. If we continue this
emphasis on the utopian fulfillment of law as persisting within it, we might understand as well Žižek’s emphasis on the letter of law. Yes, it is ambiguous and
indeterminate, but this opens it up for emancipatory as well as repressive meaning. Thus, when confronting a cynical age, an age when the worst, most
corrupt alternatives seem not simply to proliferate but no longer to surprise or outrage, finding a utopian dimension to inhere in law may be truly radical. To
this extent, the idea that law is law expresses more than the violence of the injunction; it captures the hope inspiring law as well. Belief in law is a belief that
violence is not everything. Just as the founding violence persists in law, so does the founding dream that things might be otherwise, and indeed, this dream
tends to be concealed as well, suppressed by injunctions to compromise, to accept the way things are, and to give up naïve belief in something better.
Ultimately, then,
the revolutionary fulfillment of law is contained within it. The task is thus to find ways to
attach ourselves to law through belief in the founding dream rather than through the enjoyment of
founding violence .
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TPA is top priority and will pass – PC is key
Farm Futures 12-26-14 (“Tide Changing on TPP Negotiations,” http://farmfutures.com/blogs-tidechanging-tpp-negotiations-9315, CMR)
the president’s recent call for passage of Trade
Promotion Authority is positive for passage in 2015, and he expects Congress to take up a bill early next year. TPA gives the President the ability to take any finalized trade deal to
TPA passage Dave Salmonsen, senior director of congressional relations at the American Farm Bureau Federation, said
Congress for just an up or down vote. Vetter said TPA is “critical to getting a trade deal across the finish line.” It allows negotiating partners to understand that whatever deal is agreed upon will be the one put into final
Leaders in the House and Senate have made strong commitments to advancing the legislation. She reported
the administration is working very closely with both houses of Congress in a bipartisan fashion in hopes to move
forward on TPA “ early next year .” Salmonsen added that technically TPA is a revenue bill, so will have to pass the House first. He expects the Senate could hold its own hearing prior
action.
to the House advancing a bill though.
The plan destroys Obama’s agenda
Romano,13 – attorney, founder of Massachusetts Marijuana Compliance ("Federal Legalization of Medical
Marijuana is Not on the Horizon", www.massachusettsmarijuanacompliance.com/white-house-response-tofederal-legalization-of-medical-marijuana-petition/)
Three petitions for the legalization or rescheduling of marijuana were responded to by the White House, and
they put zero effort into drafting the response. It is clear that this administration is not going to spend an
ounce of effort in dealing with the conflict between state and federal laws that exists over marijuana.
Although many people would argue that there is so much else going on – marijuana policy should not be at the
top of the list. But that does not mean it shouldn’t be on the list at all. The White House did nothing more than
quote a Barbara Walters interview with the president in responding to these petitions. The president said, “we’re
going to need to have is a conversation about how do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a
federal offense and state laws that say that it’s legal.” That is code for we aren’t going to do anything. No
mention of an executive task force or a date for this discussion that they need to have. Then in a totally
irrelevant bit of pandering rhetoric he said, “[w]hen you’re talking about drug kingpins, folks involved with
violence, people are who are peddling hard drugs to our kids in our neighborhoods that are devastated, there is
no doubt that we need to go after those folks hard….” In a nation with an overburdened criminal justice system,
common sense would dictate that removing the marijuana prosecutions would alleviate some of that pressure.
But that ignores the money that goes in to keeping marijuana illegal and the political motivations of all the
stakeholders, including major pharmaceutical. Further blog posts on this topic will be forthcoming.
Unfortunately, the rescheduling of medical marijuana will take an act of Congress. This author’s opinion is
that no member of Congress is willing to spend the political capital to begin the process. Law
enforcement wants marijuana to remain illegal in all its forms so that they can continue to use marijuana
as a basis to search and arrest people, and get them into the system. It is almost impossible to get elected if
law enforcement opposes one’s campaign.
TPA key to sustained economic recovery
Suominen 14 (Kati, adjunct fellow with the CSIS Europe Program, In 2010–2012, she was a resident fellow in
the Economics Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where she focused on U.S. and
global economic, trade, and financial policy, “Out of the Way, Congress,” foreign policy, Jan 14,
http://katisuominen.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/out-of-the-way-congress/)
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mega-regional free trade deals with Europe and 11 Asia-Pacific countries -- deals that could generate
hundreds of billions in revenue and keep the U.S. economy inching along the path to recovery. But
passage of the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill, which would allow the president to fast-track free trade deals, is bound to involve a bitter political fight
as several Democrats and members of the Tea Party have already lined up in opposition to the law. On the left, TPA raises the usual concerns for labor and the
environment, while on the far right it presents one more opportunity to jam up the president. Across the board, lawmakers have raised concerns about transparency. But without a trade promotion
authority, which expired in 2007, the United States will be unable to finalize the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and TransPacific Partnership (TPP), neither of which can be fully negotiated without an authority in place . (Europeans and Asians have indicated
Last week, U.S. lawmakers took a critical step toward inking
they are unwilling to negotiate the thorniest trade topics before they know TPA is in place requiring the U.S. Congress to vote up or down on future deals, rather than amending freshly negotiated texts.) So even if Congress is
justifiably angry about the unprecedented level of secrecy surrounding recent trade talks, it needs to see the bigger picture:
TPA is critical for American economy,
entrepreneurship, and global leadership . Here are five major reasons why: Growth and jobs. The U.S. economy is recovering, yet
headwinds lurk on the horizon -- from the Fed's unwinding to stagnating key export markets. Europe is battling low
growth and high unemployment; Japan's Abenomics has yet to deliver promised growth gains, in part due to persistent protectionism that the TPP would undo; and China's
economy is set to expand at its slowest pace in 15 years. While serious economic turmoil may have been averted, the trillion-dollar question remains:
Where is global growth going to come from in the future? Trade is a key place to look: The TTIP is
expected to generate an annual $130 billion in gains for the United States and $162 billion for Europe. The TPP, meanwhile,
will boost U.S. annual gains by $77 billion and Japan's by $104 billion. As such, the TTIP will raise U.S. household incomes
by $865 annually and create 750,000 new U.S. jobs, while the TPP would generate about $1,230 per household by 2025 -- a significant windfall without a dime of
deficit spending, and a strong bonus on the $10,000 in average annual income gains American households have already scored due to post-war trade opening. And by locking in first-rate rules and open markets, the trade
deals will give U.S. companies the confidence they need to dip into their $5 trillion in cash holdings -- enabling them buy American inputs and hire U.S. workers. Geocommercial edge. As gatekeepers of markets with two-
China, the world's largest
a TPP skeptic, is seriously considering joining the deal, now seen by various domestic interests as a means to counteract the economic slowdown and
drive much-needed reforms, especially of state-owned enterprises. Likewise, Brazil, the world's seventh largest economy, is being pushed by its business lobbies to
consider the TTIP and TPP -- a 180 degree turn for a country that completely missed the global wave of trade integration. With Brazil opening, the long-awaited U.S.-led Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA) idea could eventually become a reality. The bottom line for Congress: Once done, the U.S.-led deals will forever alter the strategic
landscape of the global trading system, with even some cantankerous BRICs falling in line. America will
have positioned itself to set the tone and tempo of global trade politics for decades to come. Digital economy gains. The old
thirds of total global spending power, the TPP and TTIP will amount to giant magnetic docking stations for current outsiders, especially emerging and frontier markets. Most remarkably,
trader and
U.S. trade agenda -- immortalized in such deals as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) -- prioritized corporate supply chains: It removed barriers to
trade in parts, components, and final products; opened foreign markets for U.S. investors; and sped up customs procedures. These objectives still matter, but physical supply chains will be less critical as 3-D printing and
nanotechnology expand. Manufacturers will increasingly be able to print parts and components right off the Web. Meanwhile, the arrival of the industrial Internet, e-commerce, e-invoicing, and online payments all mean that
the global economy will increasingly run not on ships but on the cloud. Few nations are as well-placed to profit from this new order as the United States. Yet barriers are sprouting. Countries such as TPP member Vietnam are
forcing U.S. companies to locate servers in their nations as a pre-condition for market access, while Europeans, incensed about the Snowden scandal, are bent on limiting the data that U.S. companies serving European
customers can access and transfer back to America. Too many developing nations are now cracking down on Web users for political and protectionist reasons. Ensuring a fair and unfettered digital economy requires
enlightened rules on cross-border e-commerce and data flows, intellectual property protections, dispute settlement mechanisms, and so on. The TPP and TTIP offer Washington an opportunity to establish such rules. But
small businesses
-- the backbone of U.S. economy -- also stand to gain. Giant corporations like Apple and GE still dominate U.S. exports, but small businesses are
on an export roll, riding the wave of past U.S. trade deals like NAFTA: Some 300,000 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) collectively
generate one third of U.S. exports. Study after study shows that these export-driven SMEs are the nation's fastest growing
and most productive companies. They also happen to be among the most vocal of TPA proponents. Moreover, as eunless Congress passes TPA, there will be no new rules -- at least not ones that are Made in the USA. Boost for Main Street exporters. Big business may be spearheading the TPA lobby, but
commerce, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, and other DIY technologies expand, Americans of all walks of life can become one (wo)man-multinationals -- designers, assemblers, and sellers of goods and services exported
millions of new American
jobs can be created and thousands of new businesses launched -- but only if smart trade rules are
established that open markets and level playing fields globally. The mega-regionals are a perfect venue to start this process. Restore
around the planet. This export opportunity will explode between now and 2025, as 5 billion new Internet users log-on across the developing world. In the process,
American leadership . The United States has for decades been the world's quarterback, brokering
differences between nations and providing critical global public goods: a global reserve currency, deep financial markets, vigorous
economic growth, and an open trade regime. Today, the devastating financial crisis, disappointing growth, and plain-dumb
bickering over the budget risk making "American leadership" an oxymoron. For an administration that
campaigned on renegotiating NAFTA and pausing the George W. Bush administration's vibrant trade agenda, the TPP and TTIP represent a stunning
about-face -- and the best chance for America to regain its global leadership role . It's time lawmakers stop
framing trade agreements as Trojan Horses that ship American jobs abroad, and start advocating for trade deals as instruments to secure an open
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and rules-based global trading system -- and to unshackle and empower U.S. companies, small businesses, and
garage entrepreneurs to drive America's economic recovery.
Global war
Royal 10 – Director of CTR Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction – U.S. Department of
Defense, “Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises”, Economics of War
and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, Ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-215
economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict
Less intuitive is how periods of
. Political science literature has contributed a
moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several
rhythms in the global
economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often bloody transition from
one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could usher in a redistribution of
relative power (see also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalc ulation (Feaver, 1995). Alternatively,
even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a
notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that
rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner. 1999). Separately, Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among
major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's (1996, 2000)
future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic
conditions and security behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of
future trade relations. However, if the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, the likelihood
for conflict increases, as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises
could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states.4 Third, others
have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level.
Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict,
particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write: The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing.
Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to
which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg & Hess, 2002. p. 89) Economic decline
has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess, & Weerapana, 2004), which has the capacity to spill across
borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government. “Diversionary theory" suggests that, when facing
unpopularity arising from economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate
external military conflicts to create a 'rally around the flag' effect. Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995). and Blomberg, Hess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic
decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary
tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack
of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the U nited S tates, and thus weak
theory of trade expectations suggests that '
are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates economic
integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links economic decline with external
conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels.5 This implied connection between integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economicPresidential popularity,
security debate and deserves more attention.
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China DA
The plan Drives a wedge between China and the United States.
Godfrey 7/16
Will Godfrey (Editor-in-Chief @ Substance.com). “Will the US Start to Use Its Power Over World Drug Laws
for Good?” Huffington Post, 16 July 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/substancecom/will-the-us-start-touse-_b_5588726.html //dtac – Note: Trace = “current chariman of the International Drug Policy Consortium,
former deputy UK drug czar” and had “a spell at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna”
Still, we shouldn't expect global prohibition just to vanish. A lot of powerful interests are examining the
current momentum of the movement for change, Trace said, in order to identify "a stopping point -- the next
equilibrium." Blocs of countries with growing diplomatic influence, he added, including China and Russia,
"will not allow any liberalization of the drug treaties." In which case, national drug-law changes are more likely to be justified by flexible reinterpretations of the current international treaties -- based on those highly open-to-interpretation constitutional and public health-based opt-outs. Uruguay has taken this path, and other Latin
American countries, already engaged in high-level drug policy debates based on their desire to reduce violence, are likely to follow.
US-Sino cooperation key to solve warming
Adler 11-12-14 (Ben, “New U.S.-China climate deal is a game changer,” http://grist.org/climate-energy/newu-s-china-climate-deal-is-a-game-changer/, CMR)
In what may prove to be a watershed moment in the fight against climate change, President Obama and Chinese
President Xi Jinping announced from Beijing on Wednesday that they are pursuing ambitious new greenhouse gas emission
reductions. China and the U.S. are the world’s two largest emitters of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane, and their
cooperation is absolutely essential to the success of any global effort to scale back emissions and avert
catastrophic climate change. According to a statement from the White House press office, the U.S. will reduce emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, with “best efforts” to hit
the higher end of that range. China will have its CO2 emissions peak around 2030, “make best efforts to peak early,” and increase the share of non-fossil fuels in its energy portfolio to “around” 20 percent by 2030. You might
notice a lot of wiggle room in that language. There’s more. The White House release refers to these goals as statements of “intent.” They don’t promise or even “agree” to hit these targets, they merely “intend” to. That may
sound a little weak, but it’s necessary. Remember, foreign treaties require approval from a two-thirds supermajority of the U.S. Senate before they can be ratified. There’s no way Senate Republicans would vote for an
emission-reduction treaty. But by merely jointly announcing with China their intentions, the Obama administration avoids signing an actual treaty. So the Senate can’t formally stop this agreement. Both administrations have
their work cut out for them. As The Washington Post observes, “to meet its target, the United States will need to double the pace of carbon pollution reduction from 1.2 percent per year on average from 2005 to 2020 to 2.3 to
2.8 percent per year between 2020 and 2025.” And for China: “It must add 800 to 1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero-emission generation capacity by 2030 — more than all the coal-fired power plants that
exist in China today and close to the total electricity generation capacity in the United States.” At first glance, it may sound unfair that China does not have to start actually reducing its emissions yet while the U.S. has to
reduce emissions even more steeply than it has already planned. That’s certainly what Republicans will say. They will be wrong. Thanks to our longstanding development and wealth, the U.S. has produced 29.3 percent of
global cumulative carbon emissions, while China has been responsible for only 7.6 percent. What China is planning — starting on a path of renewable development, so that it can transition from fossil fuels as quickly as
the U.S. is sending a message to
those countries, and to the pro-fossil fuel governments in Canada and Australia, that we are serious about putting climate at the center of
our international relationships. The U.S. and China have also struck deals to reduce tariffs while Obama has been in Beijing. Other nations should take note that Obama is seeking climate
possible without damaging economic growth — lays out a model for emerging economies such as India, Brazil, and Indonesia to follow. Likewise,
cooperation from our trading partners, and they should feel the pressure to step up. The U.S. pledged under the 2009 Copenhagen Accord to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. We’ve already
achieved some reductions, and if the EPA’s proposed regulations to cut emissions from power plants go through, we would be just barely on track to meet those goals. Obama now wants to stretch those goals over the
following five years, up to 2025. From a scientific standpoint, this might be getting the U.S. close to the trajectory of cuts needed by 2050 to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, the internationally agreed-upon
goal. But what we have committed to previously is already under political attack. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has voted to repeal the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean
Air Act. The new Republican Senate will now do so as well. While that will be met with a presidential veto — if it even gets past a Democratic filibuster — it could set up a showdown, and government shutdown, if
Republicans tie it to the budget. Congress is also likely to take other unhelpful actions like passing bills to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Speaking of Keystone, this deal is especially interesting in light of the White
House recently declining to threaten a veto of Keystone approval if Congress passes it. Environmental leaders like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and the Natural Resources Defense Council immediately released
statements lauding the announcement from Beijing. But 350.org Executive Director May Boeve tied the news back to Keystone in her statement, saying, “The real proof will be in the pudding. There’s no way approving the
Keystone XL pipeline and additional fossil fuel development is compatible with this pathway.” Reaching the new emission-reduction targets is certainly technologically possible, and allowable under existing law — as long
as Congress doesn’t figure out a way to stop to it. Emissions have already declined, we’ve got new rules on tailpipes, and with the proposed power plant rules, we are almost there already. “I think it’s achievable,” says Tyson
Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. “They might have to make some tweaks [to the power-plant targets], but I don’t see it as being a radical rewrite of the goal.” It will be necessary to finalize power-plant
rules — the centerpiece of Obama’s Climate Action Plan — that are as strong, if not stronger, than what is already proposed. Other components of the plan, like possible rules to limit methane leakage from fracking, don’t
have the potential to achieve such big reductions. Still, moving forward with them will also be necessary. But any tightening of EPA regulations or introduction of new ones would risk inciting even stronger political backlash
or being overturned in court. Even Democrats in fossil fuel-producing red states ran away from the rules in this last election. (They still got clobbered.) Republicans are already mulling ways to impede the power-plant rules
by defunding the regulatory process. The stronger the rules get, the more childish they’ll act. And they will have the same reaction to anything else Obama tries to do through executive action. The administration is being coy
in its statements thus far. Secretary of State John Kerry wrote an op-ed about the announcement in Wednesday’s New York Times. All he says on the feasibility of the goal laid out is, “It is grounded in an extensive analysis
of the potential to reduce emissions in all sectors of our economy.” The White House leaked information about this new agreement to a handful of select reporters at elite national publications. The reporters asked how the
U.S. can hit the new targets given who’s in control of Congress, but seem not to have gotten much of an answer. Here’s the Post: “U.S. officials said they were confident the president possesses the authority to set the new
climate targets without additional authorization from Congress. They acknowledged that the Republican takeover of the Senate makes it unlikely that lawmakers will pass laws furthering carbon reductions and that the GOP
might attempt to roll back executive actions Obama already has taken to do so.” But just because they aren’t telling what it is yet doesn’t mean the White House doesn’t have a plan. The administration has apparently been
The U.S. and China are the world’s
two biggest economies, and showing that they will play their part in reducing emissions is essential to
working in secret on this deal with China for nine months, since Kerry first raised it during a visit to Beijing in February. This much we know:
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getting an international agreement at the next round of big climate negotiations in Paris in December
2015. Now the prospects are looking a lot better.
Extinction – outweighs every impact
Avery 14 (John Scales, received a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from MIT and an M.Sc. from the University of
Chicago, He later studied theoretical chemistry at the University of London, and was awarded a Ph.D. there in
1965, He is now Lektor Emeritus, Associate Professor, at the Department of Chemistry, University of
Copenhagen, “Preventing A Human-Initiated Sixth Geological Extinction Event,” May 2,
http://www.countercurrents.org/avery020514.htm)
Geologists studying the strata of rocks have observed 5 major extinction events. These are moments in geological time when most of the organisms then living suddenly become extinct. The largest of these was the PermianTriassic extinction event, which occurred 252 million years ago. In this event, 96 percent of all marine species were wiped out, as well as 70 percent of all terrestrial vertebrates. In 2012, the World Bank issued a report
without quick action to curb CO2 emissions, global warming is likely to reach 4 degrees C during
the 21st century. This is dangerously close to the temperature which initiated the Permian-Triassic extinction event: 6 degrees C above normal. Here is a link to the World Bank report:
warning that
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-change-report-warns-dramatically-warmer-world-this-century The Permian-Triasic thermal maximum seems to have been triggered by global warming and
CO2 release from massive volcanic eruptions in a region of northern Russia known as the Siberian Traps. The amount of greenhouse gases produced by these eruptions is comparable to the amount emitted by human
once the temperature passed 6 degrees C above normal, a feedback loop was initiated in which
methane hydrate crystals on the ocean floors melted, releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The more methane released the more methane hydrate crystals were
destabilized, raising the temperature still further, releasing more methane gas, and so on in a vicious circle. This feedback loop raised
the global temperature to 15 degrees C above normal, causing the Permian-Triassic mass extinction . Here is a link to a short, important and
activities today. Scientists believe that
clear video discussing the danger that a 6th mass extinction event could be caused by human activities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRGVTK-AAvw Other videos discussing this very grave danger can be found on the
following links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVwmi7HCmSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjZaFjXfLec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_aMbM20mbg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6pFDu7lLV4 No reputable doctor who diagnoses cancer would keep this knowledge from the patient. The reaction of the patient may be to reject the diagnosis and get another doctor,
the scientific community, when aware of
a grave danger to our species and the biosphere, has a duty to bring this knowledge to the attention of as broad a public as possible,
even at the risk of unpopularity. The size of the threatened catastrophe is so immense as to dwarf all other considerations .
but no matter. It is very important that the threatened person should hear the diagnosis, because, with treatment, there is hope of a cure. Similarly,
All possible efforts must be made to avoid it. Consider what may be lost if a 6th mass extinction event occurs, caused by our own actions: It is possible that a few humans may survive in mountainous regions such as the
the family trees of virtually all of the people, animals
will end in nothing. The great and complex edifice of human civilization is a treasure whose
value is almost above expression; and this may be lost unless we give up many of our present enjoyments. Each living organism, each animal or plant, is
product of three billion years of evolution, and a miracle of harmony and complexity; and most of these will perish if we persist in
our folly and greed. Let us, for once, look beyond present pleasures, and acknowledge our duty to preserve a future world in which all
forms of life can survive.
Himalayas, but this will be a population of millions rather than billions. If an event comparable to the Permian-Triassic thermal maximum occurs,
and plants alive today
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CP
The United States Congress should discontinue expanding federal criminal law and direct
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal agencies to focus on the
investigation and prosecution of espionage and terrorism.
The United States Judiciary should deepen and expand exchanges with judiciaries around
the world, emphasizing the importance of judicial independence.
The United States Judiciary should enforce the principle of federalism enshrined in the
United States v. Lopez decision, distinguishing the precedent in Gonzales v. Raich to its
facts.
The United States should not legalize marijuana.
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Treaty
Regionalism coming now – best model, no big war – locally activates the aff warrants for
cooperation solving the aff impact-list better
Krishnan Srinivasan, "International Conflict and Cooperation in the 21st Century," THE ROUND TABLE v.
98 n. 400, 2--09, pp. 37-47.
The new world order of the first half of the present century will be one of peaceful mutual
accommodation between the big powers located in the East and West, North and South. The priority for
these powers will be for economic progress and regional order , with defence expenditure being used to build
technological capacity for deterrence against the other big powers and as an enabler for their self-appointed but
globally recognized role as regional enforcers. In this neo-Hobbesian world system, the lesser states will come
to their own bilateral arrangements with the local regional hegemon upon whom they will be dependent
not only for their security but for economic, technical and trading facilitation. Some of these lesser entities
will enjoy economic prosperity, depending on their ability to maintain internal cohesion, to turn globalization to
their advantage, and to control the socio-economic consequences of climate change, but they will not be able
to mount a challenge to the hierarchical nature of international society. They will have far greater recourse
to the United Nations than the major powers, who will prefer to apply unilateral methods with the connivance
and consent of their peers. The debate between Westphalian national sovereignty and the right to intervene to
breach the sovereignty of other states on the grounds of preventing threats to international peace and security
will not be resolved. Political and economic inequality between nations will be drawn in ever sharper focus.
Regional institutions will be dominated by the local big power. Reform of the United Nations will be
incomplete and unappealing to the vast majority of member states. The world’s hegemonic powers will lose
faith in the Security Council as an effective mechanism to deliberate issues of peace and security. World
bodies will be used for discussion of global issues such as the environment and climate change, pandemic
disease, energy and food supplies, and development, but resulting action will primarily devolve on the
big powers in the affected regions . This will particularly be the case in the realm of peace and security in
which only the regional hegemon will have the means, the will and the obligation, for the sake of its own
status and security, to ensure resolution or retribution as each case may demand. Even in a globalized
world, regional and local action will be the prime necessity and such action will be left to the power best
equipped to understand the particular circumstances, select the appropriate remedy and execute the
action required to administer it. Conflict will be contained and localized . There will be no menace of war
on a world-wide scale and little fear of international terrorism. Private-enterprise terrorist actions will continue
to manifest political, social and economic frustrations, but they will be parochial, ineffective and not statesponsored. There will be far less invocation of human rights in international politics, since these will be
identified with a western agenda and western civilization: there will be an equal recognition of community
rights and societal values associated with Eastern and other traditions. Chinese artists, Indian entrepreneurs,
Russian actors, Iranian chefs, South African song-writers and Brazilian designers will be household names;
models on the fashion cat-walk and sporting teams from all major countries will be distinctly multi-racial,
reflecting the immigration to, but also the purchasing power of, the new major powers. National populations
will show evidence of mixed race more than ever before in history. Climate change will be an acknowledged
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global challenge and all countries, led by the regional hegemons , will undertake binding restraints on
carbon emissions. The world will become acutely conscious of the essentiality of access to fresh water. The
pace of technological innovation will accelerate at dizzying speed, further accentuating inequalities. There will
be very rapid steps taken to develop alternative sources of energy in the face of dwindling and costly oil
supplies. Western industrialized nations, to remain competitive, will vacate vast areas of traditional
manufacturing in favour of new technologies and green engineering. The world will be a safer and stable place
until one of the hegemons eventually develops an obvious ascendancy first regionally, then continentally and
finally globally over all the others.
The Multilateral order emboldens rogue states and causes extinction.
Therese Depeche, author and senior French government official, “Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century,
CATO, 2012. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2012/RAND_MG1103.pdf
In sharp contrast with the 20th century, the 21st century started as the age of small powers. This is partly
because the post–Cold War world encompasses approximately 184 states—a record—and partly because
some small states appear to be dangerously empowered : North Korea, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and
Syria fell or still fall into this category. This does not mean that the century will end with the same
denomination, since great powers may make a comeback after an interlude. But it is striking to witness the
time, energy, and effort devoted in the 1990s to the Balkans or today to nations like Iran, Syria, and
North Korea. It is also astonishing to consider the challenges those nations can inflict on regional and
international security with their ballistic missile WMD programs—as well as, increasingly and more
discreetly, with their cyber capabilities.2 Equally, the attention given in the media to any statement issued in
Tehran or in Pyongyang looks disproportionate. Obviously, small states can achieve a high level of
international involvement and a high potential for global disturbance . Their smallness is somehow
compensated for with international linkages, illicit trafficking, clandestine nuclear programs, and
repeated challenges to the current world order . Even leaving aside the tricky problems posed by nonstate
actors,3 which have demonstrated since September 2001 their ability to pose more than minor tactical threats to
big powers (this would become far clearer in a case of nuclear terrorism), analysts acknowledge that the
extraordinary situation originated in what is now called asymmetric strategies from small states. The
leverage provided to states—otherwise unremarkable for their achievements—by their acquisition of
antiaccess technologies and WMD programs is already a major regional problem in the Middle East and
in East Asia, where neighbors anticipate the advent of new nuclear powers. Such acquisition could also
complicate Western power projection whenever needed . And finally, the fear of clandestine programs in
additional nations may trigger an unwelcome chain reaction . The two regions mentioned above are not
easy to manage under current circumstances and risk becoming completely unmanageable with multiple nuclear
centers.
Effective diplomacy and legitimacy are PARALLEL – failure of U.S.-led order preserves
the trend toward regionalism – aff can’t reverse this, America just gets soft-balanced
within a hollow global framework
Michael J. Mazarr, Professor, National Security Strategy, U.S. National War College, "The Risks of Ignoring
Strategic Insolvency," WASHINGTON QUARTERLY v. 35 n. 4, Fall 2012, p. 14-15.
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Diplomacy increasingly fails . A parallel risk has to do with the ebbing force of U.S. diplomacy and
influence. International power is grounded in legitimacy , and in many ways it is precisely the legitimacy
of the leading power’s global posture that is under assault as its posture comes into question. Historically,
rising challengers gradually stop respecting the hegemon’s right to lead, and they begin to make choices
on behalf of the international community , in part due to strategies consciously designed to frustrate the
leading power’s designs . Germany, under Bismarck and after, is one example: It aspired to unification and to
its ‘‘rightful place’’ as a leading European power as its power and influence accumulated, its willingness to
accept the inherent legitimacy of the existing order as defined by other states, and the validity and force of their
security paradigms, declined proportionately. At nearly all points in this trajectory, German leaders did not seek
to depose the international system, but to crowd into its leadership ranks, to mute the voices of others relative to
its own influence, and to modify rather than abolish rules.¶ We begin to see this pattern today with regard to
many emerging powers, but especially of course, China ’s posture toward the United States.31 As was
predicted and expected in the post-Cold War context of growing regional power centers, the legitimacy of a
system dominated by the United States is coming under increasing challenge. More states (and,
increasingly, non-state actors) want to share in setting rules and norms and dictating outcomes.¶ The
obvious and inevitable result has been to reduce the effectiveness of U.S. diplomacy. While measuring the
relative success of a major power’s diplomacy over time is a chancy business (and while Washington continues
to have success on many fronts), the current trajectory is producing a global system much less subject to
the power of U.S. diplomacy and other forms of influence. Harvard’s Stephen Walt catalogues the enormous
strengths of the U.S. position during and after the Cold War, and compares that to recent evidence of the
emerging limits of U.S. power. Such evidence includes Turkey’s unwillingness to support U.S. deployments in
Iraq, the failure to impose U.S. will or order in Iraq or Afghanistan, failures of nonproliferation in North Korea
and Iran, the Arab Spring’s challenges to long-standing U.S. client rulers, and more.32 As emerging powers
become more focused on their own interests and goals, their domestic dynamics will become ever more
self-directed and less subject to manipulation from Washington, a trend evident in a number of major
recent elections.¶ Washington will still enjoy substantial influence, and many states will welcome (openly or
grudgingly) a U.S. leadership role. But without revising the U.S. posture, the gap between U.S. ambitions
and capabilities will only grow. Continually trying to do too much will create more risk of demands
unmet, requests unfulfilled, and a growing sense of the absurdity of the U.S. posture . Such a course
risks crisis and conflict . Similarly, doubt in the threats and promises underpinning an unviable U.S. security
posture risks conflict: U.S. officials will press into situations assuming that their diplomacy will be capable of
achieving certain outcomes and will make demands and lay out ultimatums on that basis only to find that their
influence cannot achieve the desired goals, and they must escalate to harsher measures. The alternative is
to shift to a lesser role with more limited ambitions and more sustainable legitimacy.
Do not grant them a risk of solvency – causal effects of norms are impossible to determine
Daniel Abebe, "The Global Determinants of U.S. Foreign Affairs Law," 49 Stanford Journal of International
Law 1 (2013). http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1890&context=journal_articles
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Similarly, shared norms are difficult to define and instrumentalize to show a causal effect in
constraining state behavior. Of course, it is true that shared norms¶ change over time and that such norms
shape the background in which individuals and states act. 1 For example, the emergence of international human
rights¶ norms,' the rise of international organizations and courts,'39 and the prominence of¶ democratic
governance 40 are surely reflective of both shared norms among states¶ and the interests of the states capable of
effecting the change. But it is difficult to predict the content of newly shared norms, the likelihood of their
emergence, and their causal effect on state behavior. The United States and the EU have used these¶ norms,
courts, and organizations as tools to pursue their interests, but it is unclear if the norms are antecedent to or
epiphenomenal of great power interests. These problems make shared norms difficult to evaluate and
even less helpful as a metric ¶ to measure the level of ECs on great powers.
International law does not respond to rising pluralism – no shared interest or
enforcement, misuse of consent
Acharya 13 – Associate Professor of Law, Gonzaga University School of Law (Upendra D., May,
“GLOBALIZATION, DEREGULATION, POWER, AND AGENCY: GLOBALIZATION AND HEGEMONY
SHIFT: ARE STATES MERELY AGENTS OF CORPORATE CAPITALISM?” 36 B.C. Int'l & Comp. L. Rev.
937, Lexis)
I. PROCESS OF HEGEMONY: INTERNATIONAL LAW, POWER, AND DETERRITORIALIZATION ¶ ¶
Discussions of hegemonic international law posit that international law is relatively weak , that it is
nothing more than epiphenomenal, [*940] merely a production of normative standards that mirror the
interests of powerful states. n14 The hegemonic international law theory also posits that hegemons (powerful
nations among the many sovereign states) define the course of states' behavior by creating and influencing
international law to give effect to the hegemons' interests and condone actions that support those interests. n15
This Part critically observes hegemons' techniques and methods of consolidating power, n16 leading to the next
Part's discussion addressing an emerging corporate-centric hegemonic international law, a new form of
international law contrasted to Vagts's state-centric hegemonic international law. n17¶ ¶ Because international
law is based on the mutual consent of sovereign states, each participating state must have common values
and interests for international law to be effective. n18 Political, cultural, religious, [*941] and economic
traditions were naturally varied among states before the implementation of international law. n19
Because of this variation, the powerful Western states superimposed self-styled Western values such as
democracy, a definitive structure of rule of law, industrial development, perception of peace, and eventually
capitalism on less-influential or less-powerful states. n20 Western hegemons present these values as though
they are prerequisites for stability. n21 In reality, however, formal consent to these values allows (in the
creation of international law) the hegemon to disrupt existing value structures--an inherently
destabilizing action --and take advantage of the less-powerful states' resources. n22 This process of
obtaining consent is so sophisticated that it frequently requires engaging lawyers and legal scholars to guide
less-powerful states. n23 These scholars typically represent Western education and ideologies within the scope
of the broader interests of hegemons, imposing Western legal traditions on non-Western states. n24¶ ¶ Despite
maintaining consent to superimposed Western norms, international law lacks a formal enforcement and
compliance authority. n25 Nevertheless, fragmented informal or non-legal authority has been institutionalized
through means controlled by hegemons that can make others comply with the norms. n26 In this scattered
and pseudo-legal compliance mechanism , hegemons may comply with international law when faced with
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worldwide pressure and opposition from competing [*942] hegemons. n27 For non-hegemons, a hint of
pressure, economic or otherwise, is sometimes sufficient to force compliance with the regime. n28¶ ¶ According
to Antonio Gramsci:¶ ¶ [H]egemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of
the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be
formed--in other words, that the leading group [hegemons] should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate
kind. But . . . such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential . . . [they] must necessarily be
based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. n29 ¶
¶ ¶ ¶ B.S. Chimni also noted the current influence of what he terms the "transnational capitalist class," that
produces a culture in which "the third world counterparts essentially act as 'transmission belts and filtering
devices for the imposition of the transnational agenda.'" n30¶ ¶ [*943] International law, in its creation and
application, has been a victim of the hegemonic power consolidation process. n31 Rather than
recognizing and respecting the common goals and values of a pluralistic world , international law deems
hegemons' values those of "true" civilization, held in esteem and aspired to by all others at the expense of
unique and insightful non-Western thought. n32 Now in the era of globalization, evolving hegemonic
international law theory warrants questioning whether states are really the hegemons in today's world. In order
to address this question, it is important to analyze the processes of hegemony in the development of
international law and to identify when the course of the hegemonic process departed from state-centric to
corporate-centric hegemony.
U.S. defaults to smooth transition – won’t fight to maintain hegemony during decline.
Charles A. Kupchan Fall 1999 World Policy Journal "Life after pax Americana"
The bad news is that the global stability that unipolarity has engendered will be jeopardized as power becomes
more equally distributed in the international system. The good news is that this structural change will
occur through different mechanisms than in the past, and therefore may be easier to manage peacefully.
The rising challenger is Europe, not a unitary state with hegemonic ambitions. Europe's aspirations will be
moderated by the self-checking mechanisms inherent in the EU and by cultural and linguistic barriers to
centralization. In addition, the United Statesis likely to react to a more independent Europe by stepping back
and making room for an EU that appears ready to be more self-reliant and more muscular. Unlike reigning
hegemons in the past, the United States will not fight to the finish to maintain its primacy and prevent its
eclipse by a rising challenger. On the contrary, the United States will cede leadership willingly as its
economy slows and it grows weary of being the security guarantor of last resort. The prospect is thus not
one of clashing titans, but of no titans at all. Regions long accustomed to relying on American resources and
leadership to preserve the peace may well be left to fend for themselves. These are the main reasons that the
challenge for American grand strategy as the next century opens will be to wean Europe and East Asia of their
dependence on the United States and put in place arrangements that will prevent the return of competitive
balancing and regional rivalries in the wake of an American retrenchment.
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Rico
Regulation
Their ev is shit - no ev that says prosecution solves for terrorism
Also - lone wolf not solved by state enforcement, only offers post-hoc remedies, no
sollution.
Lone wolves can't get the tech and have no expertise.
Noah ‘9 /Timothy, senior writer at Slate, “The Burden-of-Success Theory,” Slate.com, 2-28
http://www.slate.com/id/2211997/?from=rss
In fact, the likelihood of nuclear terrorism isn't that great. Mueller points out that Russian "suitcase bombs," which
figure prominently in discussions about "loose nukes," were all built before 1991 and ceased being operable after three
years. Enriched uranium is extremely difficult to acquire; over the past decade, Mueller argues, there were
only 10 known thefts. The material stolen weighed a combined 16 pounds, which was nowhere near the amount
needed to build a bomb. Once the uranium is acquired, building the weapon is simple in theory (anti-nuclear
activist Howard Morland published a famous 1979 article about this in the Progressive ) but quite difficult in practice,
which is why entire countries have had to work decades to acquire the bomb, only sometimes meeting with
success. (Plutonium, another fissile material, is sufficiently dangerous and difficult to transport that
nonproliferation experts seldom discuss it.) Gathering material for a biological weapon may be somewhat
easier, but actually fashioning that weapon would be harder, as witnessed by the fact that such weapons have
scarcely ever been deployed, even by nations. On the rare occasions when they have been,they'vefailed to live up to their
billing as weapons of mass destruction. "Perhaps the greatest disincentive to using biological weapons," John
Parachini of the RAND Corporation testified before Congress in 2001, "is that terrorists can inflict (and have
inflicted) many more fatalities and casualties with conventional explosives than with unconventional
weapons." The same argument applies to chemical weapons. In theory, journalist Gregg Easterbrook has noted
(citing a congressional report), under perfect conditions,one ton of sarin could kill up to 8,000 people. But it's
"reasonably unlikely" that a terrorist group could acquire that much sarin, and perfect conditions mean no wind
and no sun. Even light winds would reduce casualties to 800. You'd be better off detonating a conventional
bomb in a city square.
Judicial Independence
Aff isn't key to JI - no ev they make a lasting shift in precedent.
No internal link – democratic rollback will not result from the loss of judicial
independence alone – this claim is empirically denied
John Shattuck, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and J. Brian Atwood, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, March/April
1998 Foreign Affairs
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Equally fallacious is the claim that democracy develops from some preconceived formula, with one ingredient
preceding another. Zakaria's view that the development of constitutional liberalism must come before
electoral democracy simply ignores the facts. There are many countries in which representative
government predated the protection of civil and political liberties. South Korea and Taiwan are recent
examples. The related argument that economic development must precede democracy ignores the fact that
many countries, from Costa Rica and Poland to the Philippines and Botswana, have found that the road to
democracy also leads to economic prosperity. The successful democratic transitions in African nations such
as Benin, Mali, South Africa, and Namibia further demonstrate that neither a tradition of equal
opportunity nor widely distributed wealth must come before political freedom. In short, political
liberalization, economic development, and the protection of human rights are all tied together. For this reason,
U.S. policy addresses them simultaneously, not in sequence. Finally, Zakaria and others have contended
that without constitutional liberalism, electoral democracy invariably leads to ethnic strife. This
argument is belied by the effects of electoral pluralism in providing a safety valve for ethnic differences in
many central and east European states and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. By
the same token, some degree of pluralism and more moderate leadership have resulted from the series of
elections in Bosnia over the last two years. In fact, in January 1998, Milorad Dodik, an avowed moderate with
Western sympathies, was elected prime minister of the Bosnian Serb Republic. Elections have also allowed
Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsi,c to stake out more moderate positions, breaking with the Pale leadership.
Opposition parties have won as much as 30 percent of the vote in municipal elections, a sign that the extreme
hard-line nationalists loyal to wartime Serb leader Radovan Karadzic are losing ground.
Its anti-thetical to democracy.
Re 99 (Edward, Chief Judge Emeritus of the United States Court of International Trade and Distinguished
Professor of Law, St. John's University School of Law, Summer, 14 St. John's J.L. Comm. 79, lexis)
Judicial independence was meticulously established by the framers of the Constitution and jealously
guarded by all concerned with the administration of justice. 2 Past mechanisms designed to protect that
independence, however, may have created the appearance of an insulated, privileged branch of
government. Quite apart from legal considerations, the presence of such a class of persons, however small
or exceptional, is an anachronism in a modern democracy. Comparatively recent congressional efforts to
provide accountability for Federal judges, without infringing on the bounds of necessary judicial independence,
culminated in the enactment of the Judicial Councils Reform and Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980. 3
Democracies are not more prone to peaceful cooperation – statistical manipulation
Rosato 11 PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago The
Handbook on the Political Economy of War By Christopher J. Coyne, Rachel L. Mathers
The claim that democracies rarely if ever go to war with one another is either incorrect or unsurprising. A
careful review of the evidence suggests that contrary to the assertions of democratic peace proponents,
there have been a handful of wars between democracies and these can only be excluded by imposing a
highly restrictive definition of democracy . This would not pose a problem were it not for the fact that by
raising the requirements for a state to be judged democratic, the theory's defenders reduce the number of
democracies in the analysis to such an extent that the finding of no war between them is wholly to be
expected.
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Federalism
US legal modeling fails- can’t shape norms
Law and Versteeg ’12 [David S. Law, Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, Washington
University in St. Louis. B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Stanford University; J.D., Harvard Law School; B.C.L. in European
and Comparative Law, University of Oxford, Mila Versteeg, Associate Professor, University of Virginia School
of Law. B.A., LL.M., Tilburg University; LL.M., Harvard Law School; D.Phil., University of Oxford, “The
Declining Influence of the United States Constitution,” New York University Law Review, Vol. 87, No. 3, pp.
762-858, June 2012, online]
The appeal of American constitutionalism as a model for other countries appears to be waning in more
ways than one. Scholarly¶ attention has thus far focused on global judicial practice: There is a¶ growing sense,
backed by more than purely anecdotal observation,¶ that foreign courts cite the constitutional jurisprudence of
the U.S.¶ Supreme Court less frequently than before.247 But the behavior of¶ those who draft and revise
actual constitutions exhibits a similar pattern.¶ Our empirical analysis shows that the content of the U.S.¶
Constitution is becoming increasingly atypical by global standards.¶ Over the last three decades, other countries
have become less likely to¶ model the rights-related provisions of their own constitutions upon¶ those found in
the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, global adoption of key structural features of the Constitution, such as
federalism, presidentialism, and a decentralized model of judicial review, is at best¶ stable and at worst
declining. In sum, rather than leading the way for¶ global constitutionalism, the U.S. Constitution appears
instead to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere. The¶ idea of adopting a
constitution may still trace its inspiration to the¶ United States, but the manner in which constitutions are
written¶ increasingly does not.¶ If the U.S. Constitution is indeed losing popularity as a model for¶ other
countries, what—or who—is to blame? At this point, one can¶ only speculate as to the actual causes of this
decline, but five possible hypotheses suggest themselves: (1) the advent of a superior or more¶ attractive
competitor; (2) a general decline in American hegemony;¶ (3) judicial parochialism; (4) constitutional
obsolescence; and (5) a creed of American exceptionalism.¶ With respect to the first hypothesis, there is little
indication that¶ the U.S. Constitution has been displaced by any specific competitor.¶ Instead, the notion that a
particular constitution can serve as a dominant¶ model for other countries may itself be obsolete. There is
an¶ increasingly clear and broad consensus on the types of rights that a¶ constitution should include, to the point
that one can articulate the¶ content of a generic bill of rights with considerable precision.248 Yet it is difficult to
pinpoint a specific constitution—or regional or international¶ human rights instrument—that is clearly the
driving force¶ behind this emerging paradigm. We find only limited evidence that global constitutionalism
is following the lead of either newer national¶ constitutions that are often cited as influential, such as those
of¶ Canada and South Africa, or leading international and regional¶ human rights instruments such as the
Universal Declaration of¶ Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.¶ Although Canada in
particular does appear to exercise a quantifiable¶ degree of constitutional influence or leadership, that influence
is not¶ uniform and global, but more likely reflects the emergence and evolution¶ of a shared practice of
constitutionalism among common law¶ countries.249 Our findings suggest, instead, that the development of¶
global constitutionalism is a polycentric and multipolar process that is¶ not dominated by any particular
country.250 The result might be likened¶ to a global language of constitutional rights, but one that has¶ been
collectively forged rather than modeled upon a specific¶ constitution.¶ Another possibility is that America’s
capacity for constitutional¶ leadership is at least partly a function of American “soft power” more¶ generally.251
It is reasonable to suspect that the overall influence and appeal of the United States and its institutions have a
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powerful spillover¶ effect into the constitutional arena. The popularity of American¶ culture, the prestige of
American universities, and the efficacy of¶ American diplomacy can all be expected to affect the appeal of¶
American constitutionalism, and vice versa. All are elements of an¶ overall American brand, and the strength of
that brand helps to determine¶ the strength of each of its elements. Thus, any erosion of the¶ American brand
may also diminish the appeal of the Constitution for¶ reasons that have little or nothing to do with the
Constitution itself.¶ Likewise, a decline in American constitutional influence of the type¶ documented in this
Article is potentially indicative of a broader decline in American soft power.¶ There are also factors specific
to American constitutionalism that¶ may be reducing its appeal to foreign audiences. Critics suggest that¶ the
Supreme Court has undermined the global appeal of its own jurisprudence¶ by failing to acknowledge the
relevant intellectual contributions of foreign courts on questions of common concern252 and by¶ pursuing
interpretive approaches that lack acceptance elsewhere.253¶ On this view, the Court may bear some
responsibility for the declining¶ influence of not only its own jurisprudence, but also the actual U.S.¶
Constitution: One might argue that the Court’s approach to constitutional¶ issues has undermined the appeal of
American constitutionalism¶ more generally, to the point that other countries have become¶ unwilling to look
either to American constitutional jurisprudence or¶ to the U.S. Constitution itself for inspiration.254¶ It is
equally plausible, however, that responsibility for the¶ declining appeal of American constitutionalism lies with
the idiosyncrasies¶ of the Constitution itself rather than the proclivities of the¶ Supreme Court. As the oldest
formal constitution still in force and one of the most rarely amended constitutions in the world,255 the U.S.¶
Constitution contains relatively few of the rights that have become¶ popular in recent decades.256 At the same
time, some of the provisions¶ that it does contain may appear increasingly problematic, unnecessary,¶ or even
undesirable with the benefit of two hundred years of¶ hindsight.257 It should therefore come as little surprise if
the U.S.¶ Constitution strikes those in other countries—or, indeed, members of¶ the U.S. Supreme Court258—as
out of date and out of line with global¶ practice.259 Moreover, even if the Court were committed to interpreting¶
the Constitution in tune with global approaches, it would still¶ lack the power to update the actual text of the
document. Indeed,¶ efforts by the Court to update the Constitution via interpretation may¶ actually reduce the
likelihood of formal amendment by rendering such¶ amendment unnecessary as a practical matter.260 As a
result, there is¶ only so much that the U.S. Supreme Court can do to make the U.S.¶ Constitution an attractive
formal template for other countries. The¶ obsolescence of the Constitution, in turn, may undermine the appeal¶
of American constitutional jurisprudence. Foreign courts have little¶ reason to follow the Supreme Court’s lead
on constitutional issues if¶ the Supreme Court is saddled with the interpretation of an unusual¶ and obsolete
constitution.261 No amount of ingenuity or solicitude for¶ foreign law on the part of the Court can entirely
divert attention from¶ the fact that the Constitution itself is an increasingly atypical¶ document. One way to put a
more positive spin on the U.S. Constitution’s¶ status as a global outlier is to emphasize its role in articulating
and¶ defining what is unique about American national identity. Many¶ scholars have opined that formal
constitutions serve an expressive¶ function as statements of national identity.262 This view finds little¶ support
in our own empirical findings, which suggest instead that constitutions¶ tend to contain relatively standardized
packages of rights.263¶ Nevertheless, to the extent that constitutions do serve such a function,¶ the
distinctiveness of the U.S. Constitution may reflect the uniqueness¶ of America’s national identity. In this vein,
various scholars have¶ argued that the U.S. Constitution lies at the very heart of an¶ “American creed of
exceptionalism,” which combines a belief that the¶ United States occupies a unique position in the world with a
commitment¶ to the qualities that set the United States apart from other countries.¶ 264 From this perspective,
the Supreme Court’s reluctance to¶ make use of foreign and international law in constitutional cases¶ amounts
not to parochialism, but rather to respect for the exceptional¶ character of the nation and its constitution.265¶
Unfortunately, it is clear that the reasons for the declining influence¶ of American constitutionalism cannot be
reduced to anything as¶ simple or attractive as a longstanding American creed of exceptionalism.¶ Historically,
American exceptionalism has not prevented other¶ countries from following the example set by American
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constitutionalism.¶ The global turn away from the American model is a relatively recent development that
postdates the Cold War. If the U.S.¶ Constitution does in fact capture something profoundly unique about¶ the
United States, it has surely been doing so for longer than the last¶ thirty years.¶ A complete explanation of the
declining influence of American¶ constitutionalism in other countries must instead be sought in more¶ recent
history, such as the wave of constitution making that followed¶ the end of the Cold War.266 During this period,
America’s newfound¶ position as lone superpower might have been expected to create¶ opportunities for the
spread of American constitutionalism. But this¶ did not come to pass.¶ Once global constitutionalism is
understood as the product of a¶ polycentric evolutionary process, it is not difficult to see why the U.S.¶
Constitution is playing an increasingly peripheral role in that process. ¶ No evolutionary process favors a species
that is frozen in time. At¶ least some of the responsibility for the declining global appeal of¶ American
constitutionalism lies not with the Supreme Court, or with a¶ broader penchant for exceptionalism, but rather
with the static character¶ of the Constitution itself. If the United States were to revise the¶ Bill of Rights
today—with the benefit of over two centuries of experience,¶ and in a manner that addresses contemporary
challenges while¶ remaining faithful to the nation’s best traditions—there is no guarantee¶ that other
countries would follow its lead. But the world would¶ surely pay close attention.
EU model and training solve Iraqi institution-building
EUJUST 10 - designed to address critical needs of the Iraqi criminal justice system by providing training and
professional development opportunities to senior Iraqi judiciary, police and penitentiary officials
(EU Justice, “Subject: EUJUST LEX – Iraq, more than 3.400 officials trained,”
The E uropean U nion’s rule of law mission for Iraq, EUJUST LEX‐Iraq is ¶ mandated to provide
support and training for officials for high and mid level ¶ officials in the senior management and criminal
investigation. The support ¶ and training aim at improving the Iraqi criminal justice system, as well as the ¶
co‐ordination and collaboration between its different components: police, ¶ judiciary and penitentiary. ¶ ¶
The Mission has built up an impressive record since its launch in 2005. To ¶ date, July 2010, more than
3,400 Iraqi judges, investigating magistrates, ¶ senior police and penitentiary officers in mid‐ and senior
management ¶ positions have participated in over 140 integrated and specialist courses and ¶ practical work
experience secondments. ¶ ¶ Until recently most of its training activities were held in Europe and has been ¶
carried out on the basis of curricula developed to meet the specific needs of ¶ the ICJS, while maintaining a
focus on human rights. In addition, since the ¶ summer of 2009, the Mission has organized twenty trainings
and provided ¶ support to rule of law activities throughout Iraq. These in‐country activities ¶ are supposed
to be continued and expanded. ¶ d and mentored: ¶ ¶ More specifically, the Mission has trained, advise¶ ¶ imately 4
% of senior Iraqi police officers)¶ 805 judges (or over 60% of the Iraqi judiciary) ¶ 1702 senior police officers
(approx ¶ 03 prison officers (nearly 80% of the Iraqi Correctional Service senior ¶ taff). ¶ 9¶ s¶ ¶ 122he proposed
activities for the mission over the next 2 years will increase its ¶ presence and visibility in Iraq, as well as
more specialized and alumni follow ¶ up training in country, building upon the success of recent pilot
activities. In ¶ the near future, EU JUST LEX‐ Iraq will expand the number of Mission staff ¶ permanently
stationed in the region in order to facilitate and improve the ¶ coordination of Mission’s activities . This
includes establishing a new office in ¶ Erbil, Kurdistan Region, strengthening the Baghdad Office and setting up
an ¶ extension of the Baghdad Office in Basra, Southern Iraq. Currently, EUJUST ¶ LEX‐Iraq has a
Coordination Office in Brussels, Belgium.
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No Iraq impact
Maloney 7 –Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Suzanne 2007. “Why
the Iraq War Won’t Engulf the Mideast”.
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2007/0628iraq_maloney.aspx
Long before the Bush administration began selling "the surge" in Iraq as a way to avert a general war in
the Middle East, observers both inside and outside the government were growing concerned about the
potential for armed conflict among the regional powers. Underlying this anxiety was a scenario in which
Iraq's sectarian and ethnic violence spills over into neighboring countries, producing conflicts between
the major Arab states and Iran as well as Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government. These wars
then destabilize the entire region well beyond the current conflict zone, involving heavyweights like
Egypt. This is scary stuff indeed, but with the exception of the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds,
the scenario is far from an accurate reflection of the way Middle Eastern leaders view the situation in
Iraq and calculate their interests there. It is abundantly clear that major outside powers like Saudi Arabia, Iran
and Turkey are heavily involved in Iraq. These countries have so much at stake in the future of Iraq that it is
natural they would seek to influence political developments in the country. Yet, the Saudis, Iranians,
Jordanians, Syrians, and others are very unlikely to go to war either to protect their own sect or ethnic group or to
prevent one country from gaining the upper hand in Iraq. The reasons are fairly straightforward. First, Middle
Eastern leaders, like politicians everywhere, are primarily interested in one thing: self-preservation. Committing
forces to Iraq is an inherently risky proposition, which, if the conflict went badly, could threaten domestic
political stability. Moreover, most Arab armies are geared toward regime protection rather than
projecting power and thus have little capability for sending troops to Iraq. Second, there is cause for concern
about the so-called blowback scenario in which jihadis returning from Iraq destabilize their home countries,
plunging the region into conflict. Middle Eastern leaders are preparing for this possibility. Unlike in the
1990s, when Arab fighters in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union returned to Algeria, Egypt and
Saudi Arabia and became a source of instability, Arab security services are being vigilant about who is
coming in and going from their countries. In the last month, the Saudi government has arrested
approximately 200 people suspected of ties with militants. Riyadh is also building a 700 kilometer wall
along part of its frontier with Iraq in order to keep militants out of the kingdom. Finally, there is no
precedent for Arab leaders to commit forces to conflicts in which they are not directly involved. The Iraqis and
the Saudis did send small contingents to fight the Israelis in 1948 and 1967, but they were either
ineffective or never made it. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arab countries other than Syria, which had a
compelling interest in establishing its hegemony over Lebanon, never committed forces either to protect
the Lebanese from the Israelis or from other Lebanese. The civil war in Lebanon was regarded as
someone else's fight. Indeed, this is the way many leaders view the current situation in Iraq. To Cairo,
Amman and Riyadh, the situation in Iraq is worrisome, but in the end it is an Iraqi and American fight.
As far as Iranian mullahs are concerned, they have long preferred to press their interests through proxies
as opposed to direct engagement. At a time when Tehran has access and influence over powerful Shiite
militias, a massive cross-border incursion is both unlikely and unnecessary. So Iraqis will remain locked
in a sectarian and ethnic struggle that outside powers may abet, but will remain within the borders of
Iraq. The Middle East is a region both prone and accustomed to civil wars. But given its experience with
ambiguous conflicts, the region has also developed an intuitive ability to contain its civil strife and prevent local
conflicts from enveloping the entire Middle East. Iraq's civil war is the latest tragedy of this hapless region,
but still a tragedy whose consequences are likely to be less severe than both supporters and opponents of
Bush's war profess.
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Cyberattacks nearly impossible – empirics and defenses solve
Rid 12 (Thomas Rid, reader in war studies at King's College London, is author of "Cyber War Will Not Take Place" and co-author of "Cyber-Weapons.",
March/April 2012, “Think Again: Cyberwar”, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/cyberwar?page=full)
"Cyberwar Is Already Upon Us." No way. "Cyberwar
is coming!" John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt predicted in a celebrated Rand paper back in 1993.
Since then, it seems to have arrived -- at least by the account of the U.S. military establishment, which is busy competing over who should get what share
of the fight. Cyberspace is "a domain in which the Air Force flies and fights," Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne claimed in 2006. By 2012, William J. Lynn III, the
deputy defense secretary at the time, was writing that cyberwar
is "just as critical to military operations as land, sea, air, and
space." In January, the Defense Department vowed to equip the U.S. armed forces for "conducting a combined arms campaign across all domains -- land, air,
maritime, space, and cyberspace." Meanwhile, growing piles of books and articles explore the threats of cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism, and how to survive them. Time
for a reality check: Cyberwar is still more hype than hazard. Consider the definition of an act of war: It has
to be potentially
violent, it has to be purposeful, and it has to be political. The cyberattacks we've seen so far, from Estonia to the Stuxnet virus,
simply don't meet these criteria. Take the dubious story of a Soviet pipeline explosion back in 1982, much cited by cyberwar's true believers as the
most destructive cyberattack ever. The account goes like this: In June 1982, a Siberian pipeline that the CIA had virtually booby-trapped with a socalled "logic bomb" exploded in a monumental fireball that could be seen from space. The U.S. Air Force estimated the explosion at 3 kilotons, equivalent to a small
nuclear device. Targeting a Soviet pipeline linking gas fields in Siberia to European markets, the operation sabotaged the pipeline's control systems with software from
a Canadian firm that the CIA had doctored with malicious code. No
one died, according to Thomas Reed, a U.S. National Security Council aide at the time who
only harm came to the Soviet economy. But did it really happen? After Reed's
account came out, Vasily Pchelintsev, a former KGB head of the Tyumen region, where the alleged explosion supposedly
took place, denied the story. There are also no media reports from 1982 that confirm such an explosion,
though accidents and pipeline explosions in the Soviet Union were regularly reported in the early 1980s.
revealed the incident in his 2004 book, At the Abyss; the
Something likely did happen, but Reed's
book is the only public mention of the incident and his account relied on a single document .
Even after the CIA declassified a redacted version of Reed's source, a
note on the so-called Farewell Dossier that describes the effort to provide
the Soviet Union with defective technology, the agency did not confirm that such an explosion occurred.
The available evidence on the Siberian pipeline blast is so thin that it shouldn't be counted as a proven case of a successful
cyberattack. Most other commonly cited cases of cyberwar are even less remarkable. Take the attacks on
Estonia in April 2007, which came in response to the controversial relocation of a Soviet war memorial , the Bronze
Soldier. The well-wired country found itself at the receiving end of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that emanated from up to 85,000 hijacked computers
and lasted three weeks. The attacks reached a peak on May 9, when 58 Estonian websites were attacked at once and the online services of Estonia's largest bank were
taken down. "What's the difference between a blockade of harbors or airports of sovereign states and the blockade of government institutions and newspaper websites?"
asked Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip. Despite his analogies, the
attack was no act of war. It was certainly a nuisance and
an emotional strike on the country, but the bank's actual network was not even penetrated; it went down
for 90 minutes one day and two hours the next. The attack was not violent, it wasn't purposefully aimed
at changing Estonia's behavior, and no political entity took credit for it. The same is true for the vast majority of
cyberattacks on record. Indeed, there is no known cyberattack that has caused the loss of human life . No cyberoffense has
ever injured a person or damaged a building. And if an act is not at least potentially violent, it's not an act
of war. Separating war from physical violence makes it a metaphorical notion; it would mean that there is no way to distinguish between World War II, say, and the
"wars" on obesity and cancer. Yet those ailments, unlike past examples of cyber "war," actually do kill people. "A Digital Pearl Harbor Is Only a
Matter of Time." Keep waiting. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta delivered a stark warning last summer: "We could face a cyberattack that could be
the equivalent of Pearl Harbor." Such alarmist predictions have been ricocheting inside the Beltway for the past two decades, and some
scaremongers have even upped the ante by raising the alarm about a cyber 9/11. In his 2010 book, Cyber War, former
White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke invokes the specter of nationwide power blackouts, planes falling out of the sky, trains derailing, refineries burning,
pipelines exploding, poisonous gas clouds wafting, and satellites spinning out of orbit -- events that would make the 2001 attacks pale in comparison. But the
empirical record is less hair-raising, even by the standards of the most drastic example available. Gen. Keith
Alexander, head of U.S. Cyber Command (established in 2010 and now boasting a budget of more than $3 billion), shared his worst fears in an April
2011 speech at the University of Rhode Island: "What I'm concerned about are destructive attacks," Alexander said, "those that are coming." He then invoked a
remarkable accident at Russia's Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant to highlight the kind of damage a cyberattack might be able to cause. Shortly after midnight
on Aug. 17, 2009, a 900-ton turbine was ripped out of its seat by a so-called "water hammer," a sudden surge in water pressure that then caused a transformer explosion.
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The turbine's unusually high vibrations had worn down the bolts that kept its cover in place, and an offline sensor failed to detect the malfunction. Seventy-five people
died in the accident, energy prices in Russia rose, and rebuilding the plant is slated to cost $1.3 billion. Tough luck for the Russians, but here's what the head of Cyber
Command didn't say: The ill-fated turbine had been malfunctioning for some time, and the plant's management was notoriously poor. On top of that, the key event that
ultimately triggered the catastrophe seems to have been a fire at Bratsk power station, about 500 miles away. Because the energy supply from Bratsk dropped,
authorities remotely increased the burden on the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant. The sudden spike overwhelmed the turbine, which was two months shy of reaching the
end of its 30-year life cycle, sparking the catastrophe. If anything, the
Sayano-Shushenskaya incident highlights how difficult a devastating
attack would be to mount. The plant's washout was an accident at the end of a complicated and unique chain
of events. Anticipating such vulnerabilities in advance is extraordinarily difficult even for insiders; creating
comparable coincidences from cyberspace would be a daunting challenge at best for outsiders. If this is the most drastic
incident Cyber Command can conjure up, perhaps it's time for everyone to take a deep breath. " Cyberattacks Are Becoming Easier." Just the
opposite. U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper warned last year that the volume of malicious software on
American networks had more than tripled since 2009 and that more than 60,000 pieces of malware are now discovered every day. The
United States, he said, is undergoing "a phenomenon known as 'convergence,' which amplifies the opportunity
for disruptive cyberattacks, including against physical infrastructures." ("Digital convergence" is a snazzy term for a simple thing: more and more
devices able to talk to each other, and formerly separate industries and activities able to work together.) Just because there's more malware,
however, doesn't mean that attacks are becoming easier. In fact, potentially damaging or life-threatening cyberattacks
should be more difficult to pull off. Why? Sensitive systems generally have built-in redundancy and safety systems,
meaning an attacker's likely objective will not be to shut down a system, since merely forcing the shutdown of one
control system, say a power plant, could trigger a backup and cause operators to start looking for the bug. To
work as an effective weapon, malware would have to influence an active process -- but not bring it to a
screeching halt. If the malicious activity extends over a lengthy period, it has to remain stealthy. That's a
more difficult trick than hitting the virtual off-button. Take Stuxnet, the worm that sabotaged Iran's nuclear program in 2010. It
didn't just crudely shut down the centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility; rather, the worm subtly
manipulated the system. Stuxnet stealthily infiltrated the plant's networks, then hopped onto the protected control systems, intercepted input values from
sensors, recorded these data, and then provided the legitimate controller code with pre-recorded fake input signals, according to researchers who have studied the worm.
Its objective was not just to fool operators in a control room, but also to circumvent digital safety and monitoring systems so it could secretly manipulate the actual
processes. Building
and deploying Stuxnet required extremely detailed intelligence about the systems it was
supposed to compromise, and the same will be true for other dangerous cyberweapons. Yes, "convergence,"
standardization, and sloppy defense of control-systems software could increase the risk of generic
attacks, but the same trend has also caused defenses against the most coveted targets to improve steadily and has
made reprogramming highly specific installations on legacy systems more complex, not less.
Precedent means nothing because 2 decisions are never alike, precedents always conflict,
and precedents must be interpreted – judges inevitably decide on their own
Schanck, Professor of Law at Kansas University, 1992 Peter, Southern California Law Review, 65 S. Cal. L.
Rev. 2505
The early CLS theorists resembled legal realists in rejecting legal formalism. 286 Legal realists maintained
that judicial decisions are not logically deduced from precedent, legal rules, or legal doctrine, but are the
result of any number of other factors: judges' political orientations, their class, their psychological makeup,
what they had for breakfast that [*2579] day, etc. They argued that decisions cannot be deduced from
precedent for a number of reasons, including (1) that no two cases are identical, and thus the
question whether a decision is bound by the holding of an earlier precedent always involves
discretion; (2) that precedents always conflict; and (3) that precedents and their legal rules must
themselves be interpreted. 287 Furthermore, legal doctrines, reasoned the legal realists, cannot serve
as a source of logically deduced decisions because they lack concrete meaning and substance.
Concepts like equal protection, proximate cause, consideration, and corporate personality appear to
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have definite meaning, but when examined more closely, they can be seen to be essentially vacuous
and therefore manipulable by the conscious or unconscious designs of lawyers and judges. 288
A wide variety of precedents and interpretations allow judges to “pick and choose” what
they want to follow
Kairys, Professor of Sociology at U. Penn, 1982 David, The Politics of Law, p. 14
Thus, stare decisis neither leads to nor requires any particular results or rationales in specific cases.
A wide variety of precedents and a still wider variety of interpretations and distinctions are available
from which to pick and choose. Social and political judgments about the substance, parties, and
context of the case guide such choices, even when they are not the explicit or conscious bases of
decision.
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Kritik
1.) Our critique is the only relevant education we get from debate - it illuminates our
position in a swirling soup of ideology.
Dean 6 - Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York (Jodi, Zizek's Politics, © 2006 by Taylor &
Francis Group, LLC, 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1, p.XVIII-XIX ) NAR
Žižek emphasizes that Lacan conceptualized this excessive place, this place without guarantees, in his formula for “the discourse of the analyst” (which I set out in
Chapter Two). In
psychoanalysis, the analyst just sits there, asking questions from time to time. She is some kind of object
or cipher onto which the analysand transfers love, desire, aggression, and knowledge. The analysand, in
other words, proceeds through analysis by positing the analyst as someone who knows exactly what is
wrong with him and exactly what he should do to get rid of his symptom and get better. But, really, the analyst does not know .
Moreover, the analyst steadfastly refuses to provide the analysand with any answers whatsoever. No ideals, no moral
certainty, no goals, no choices. Nothing. This is what makes the analyst so traumatic, Žižek explains, the fact that she refuses to establish a law or set a limit, that she
does not function as some kind of new master .7 Analysis is over when the analysand accepts that the
analyst does not know, that there is not any secret meaning or explanation, and then takes responsibility
for getting on with his life. The challenge for the analysand, then, is freedom, autonomously determining his own limits, directly assuming his own
enjoyment. So, again, the position of the analyst is in this excessive place as an object through which the analysand works through the analytical process.Why is the
analyst necessary in the first place? If
she is not going to tell the analysand what to do, how he should be living, then why does
he not save his money, skip the whole process, and figure out things for himself? There are two basic answers. First, the analysand
is not self-transparent. He is a stranger to himself , a decentered agent “struggling with a foreign kernel.”8 What is
more likely than self-understanding, is self-misunderstanding, that is, one’s fundamental misperception of one’s own condition.
Becoming aware of this misperception, grappling with it, is the work of analysis. Accordingly, second, the analyst is that
external agent or position that gives a new form to our activity. Saying things out loud, presenting them to another, and confronting
them in front of this external position concretizes and arranges our thoughts and activities in a different way, a way that is more difficult to escape or avoid. The
analyst then provides a form through which we acquire a perspective on and a relation to our selves. Paul’s
Christian collectives and Lenin’s revolutionary Party are, for Žižek, similarly formal arrangements, forms “for a new type of knowledge linked to a collective political
subject.”9 Each provides an external perspective on our activities, a way to concretize and organize our spontaneous experiences. More strongly put, a political Party is
necessary precisely because politics is not given; it does not arise naturally or organically out of the multiplicity of immanent flows and affects but has to be produced,
arranged, and constructed out of these flows in light of something larger. In my view, when Žižek draws on popular culture and inserts himself into this culture, he is
This excessive position is that of
the analyst as well as that of the Party. Reading Žižek as occupying the position of the analyst tells us that it is wrong to expect Žižek to tell us
what to do, to provide an ultimate solution or direction through which to solve all the world’s problems. The analyst does not provide the
analysand with ideals and goals; instead, he occupies the place of an object in relation to which we work
these out for ourselves. In adopting the position of the analyst, Žižek is also practicing what he refers to as “ Bartleby politics ,” a politics
rooted in a kind of refusal wherein the subject turns itself into a disruptive (of our peace of mind!) violently passive
object who says, “ I would prefer not to.”10 Thus, to my mind, becoming preoccupied with Žižek’s style is like becoming preoccupied with
what one’s analyst is wearing. Why such a preoccupation? How is this preoccupation enabling us to avoid confronting the truth
of our desire, our own investments in enjoyment? How is complaining that Žižek (or the analyst) will not tell us
what to do a way that we avoid trying to figure this out for ourselves?11 Reading Žižek in terms of an excessive object also
means see ing his position as analogous to the formal position of the Party. Here it tells us that rather than a set of answers or dictates, Žižek is
providing an intervention that cuts through the multiplicity of affects and experiences in which we find
ourselves and organizes them from a specific perspective. As we shall see, for Žižek, this perspective is anchored in class struggle as
the fundamental antagonism rupturing and constituting the social. So again, he does not give us an answer; he does not know what we
taking the position of an object of enjoyment, an excessive object that cannot easily be recuperated or assimilated.
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should do, but his thought provides an external point in relation to which we can organize, consider, and
formalize our experiences as ideological subjects.
2.) The role of the analyst creates politically engaged subjects, we are a pre-requisite to
policy education.
Hajer & Wagenaar 3 - Professor of Political Science at the Universiteit van Amsterdam
(Maarten & Hendrik, “Editors’ Introduction,” Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the
Network Society,, p. 32-33) NAR
The third section, Methods and Foundations of Deliberative Policy Analysis, contains three papers addressing the philosophical assumptions and professional
implications of a post- empiricist, deliberative policy analysis. Their common theme is that one cannot understand the practical failings of traditional policy
professionalism, nor formulate a viable alternative, without a firm grasp of the philosophical underpinnings of both approaches. Fischer’s contribution is a case in point.
He begins his paper with the familiar observation that traditional policy science has failed to live up to its ambition: to contribute to an understanding, let alone
amelioration, of the kind of wicked problems that confronts modern society. He argues that the cause of this failure resides in the misconceived epistemological and
methodological nature of traditional policy science.
Locked inside a positivist image of science, traditional policy analysis, he
failed to understand the socially constructed, pragmatically driven nature of scientific knowledge
production, a point that is picked up and extended by Gottweis in his chapter. The facts and concepts of policy analysis, both authors
argue, are ‘inscribed’ upon the social and natural world through practices of scientific representation. Our
grasp of the objects of policy analysis, these authors conclude, rests on contextually situated, normatively-driven,
practical reasoning. As Yanow puts it succinctly in her chapter, the understanding of public policy “requires local knowledge – the very mundane, but still
expert understanding of, and practical reasoning about, local conditions derived from lived experience”. Policy objects, as these authors argue, are essentially
contested. The representation of an issue (unemployment, global warming, genetic engineering, airport noise) is the
argues, has
issue. The object of post-empiricist policy analysis (as Fischer calls it) is therefore not only fundamentally dispersed (No longer self-evidently located in the halls
of government, but instead spread out over the communities of citizens, administrators, and executive agencies. As Gottweis calls it, governing is the resultant of a “
regime of practices”.), but also recast (Policy analysis is, above all, concerned with the communicative, deliberative nature of political activity.). All three authors in this
section, sketch the implications of these insights for the object and role of policy analysis. The
objects of analysis, far from being unproblematic entities in
seen as the outcome of complex, socially patterned, processes of articulation by, and
contestation between, shifting groups of actors. Policy analysis is in this sense fundamentally interpretative and
the political landscape, are
reflexive . Yanow draws out what an interpretative approach implies for the role of the analyst. She demonstrates that interpretative analysis is just as systematic
and methodical as traditional methods (‘interpretative is not impressionistic’, as she formulates it), and discusses at length the various methods that are available to the
interpretative analyst. Gottweis explores the reflexive implications of post-empiricist policy analysis. Instead of assuming governability and policy making, the complex
appreciations and political judgments that constitute it must itself be posed as a problem. Second, as both Fischer and Yanow explain, in the essentially discursive and
fragmented field of policymaking, the
role of the analyst is not to suggest effective or efficient solutions that bring political
discussions to an end. Instead his role should be to facilitate the citizen’s and client’s capacity for democratic
deliberation and collective learning: about value and preferences, about assumptions of self and others,
about mutual dependencies and power differentials, about opportunities and constraints, about the
desirability of solutions and outcomes, in sum, about what it means to be an engaged citizen . In this way, these
three authors, in conjunction with the other contributors to this book, give new meaning to Harold Lasswell’s ideal of a ‘policy science of democracy’
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Perm
The permutation is premised on transfiguring psychoanalysis into one more signifier in
the 1AC's signifying chain - reject the perm to maintain the theory.
Stavrakakis 99 - Teaching fellow at the department of Government at the University of Essex
and Acting Director of the MA program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis. (Yannis, 1999,
LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, ISBN 0-203-22426-4, p. 112-121) NAR
A crucial problem which still remains open is the hegemonic efficacy of a political project based on this anti-utopian recognition of the very impossibility of society. It
The idea of the impossibility of
society, for example, as Sean Homer argues, ‘may make for good theory but…does it make for good politics?’ (Homer,
1996:101). In other words, Homer’s fear is that Lacanian political theory, although successful as a theoretical enterprise, leads to a
dangerous no-way-out in terms of political praxis (Homer, 1996:102). This is because, in Homer’s view, the recognition of the
is necessary to tackle this problem before engaging in a detailed way with our Lacanian account of democracy.
impossibility of society leads to the impossibility of politics: ‘what is occluded in the elision between object a and the social as an impossible object is the possibility of
politics itself’ (Homer, 1996:102). Psychoanalytic political theory is presented by Homer as politically impotent since it does not articulate itself as an ideological
discourse. And, of course, although psychoanalysis and theorists such as Laclau criticise and even unmask the gap between our symbolic fictions and the real, this gap
will always be filled by new ideological discourses, and so on and so forth: Marx recognized this in what I have termed his prophetic discourse, a discourse that is,
according to Laclau, radically inconsistent with both Marxism’s and psychoanalysis’s critical impulse but is, I suggest politically necessary. For i f
psychoanalysis cannot articulate or envisage a move beyond the impasse I have delineated, that is to say, if it cannot
function as an ideological discourse, then there are plenty of other, more often than not stridently antipsychoanalytic, theories and ideologies waiting to fill the vacuum. (Homer, 1996:108, my emphasis) This becomes all the more
necessary because ‘to dwell on the impossibility of the subject or society is also to facilitate the possibility of potentially more conservative and reactionary positions’
(ibid.: 109). For Žižek, lack and antagonism are constitutive and thus all utopian constructions, including Marx’s prophetic discourse in the Communist Manifesto and
elsewhere, that is to say his utopian impulse, are missing the point. Nevertheless, Homer is determined to ‘repeat that error today’ (Homer, 1996:107). Not that he is in a
position to fully envisage utopia. This, as he recognises, is, in Lacanian terms, ‘structurally impossible’ (ibid.)—it is well known that Lacan considered Aufhebung as a
sweet dream of philosophy. But it seems to him as the only way ‘to go beyond the impasse of the impossible, and to link theory back to practice’ (ibid.). Homer’s
position seems extremely interesting in its simplifying clarity. Let me extract the basic moments in his argumentation as I understand them: 1 Psychoanalytic political
theory, by concentrating on the irreducible lack in the Other, on the impossibility of society, does not permit itself to engage in an ideological—utopian is the correct
word here—attempt to cover over that lack. 2 If psychoanalytic political theory does not engage in ideological construction, in trying to fill the gap in the social, other
ideologies and discourses do and will continue to do so. 3 Thus, by
being politically impotent, since politics is identified with constructing ideological
utopias or quasi-utopian ‘heuristic devices’, Lacanian political theory leaves the road open for other (conservative) political
ideologies. 4 What becomes necessary is the articulation of a psychoanalytic ideology or maybe a Lacanian quasi-utopia. This is the only way, according to
Homer, to move beyond the current impasse of psychoanalytic political theory and to articulate a truly psychoanalytic politics. In other words ‘utopia strikes back’.
Needless to say, Homer’s
argument is only the most recent in a long series of voices on the left that resist abandoning
the legacy of the 1960s— epitomised by Marcuse—and want ‘to insist very strongly on the necessity of the reinvention of the utopian
vision in any contemporary politics’ (Jameson, 1991:159). Now it is possible to examine the plausibility of these points one by one. First of all it is
of course true that Lacanian political theory is a discourse on impossibility. But it could be also argued that impossibility constitutes the nodal point of the most
interesting part of Lacanian theory in general, insofar as the real is understood as the impossible par excellence, that is to say, impossible to represent in the imaginary
or the symbolic plane. The examples are countless. Does not the phrase ‘there is no sexual relationship’ mean that every relationship between the sexes only takes place
against the background of a fundamental real impossibility? (Žižek, 1994a:155). It is clearly no accident that this recognition is something denied in utopian writing. In
Campanella’s utopia for example, fat girls are matched with thin men in order for a harmony between the sexes to be restored. To provide a more contemporary
illustration, this close relation between the political promise of utopia and the relationship between the sexes is clearly shown in the grandiose sculpture of V.Mukhina
installed in the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition; a sculpture representing the harmonious union between an industrial worker (the male
stereotype according to socialist realism, depicted holding the hammer) and a collective farm girl (the female equivalent, depicted holding the sickle and thus
supplementing a kind of harmonious yin and yang representation of the sexual relationship) in their march towards Stalin’s utopia. Against this utopian fantasy of the
sexual relationship Lacanian theory stresses the constitutive impossibility of a harmonious sexual relationship. In the film Sesso Matto by the Italian director Dino Risi,
Giancarlo Gianini falls in love with a married transvestite prostitute who is revealed to be his long lost brother. His position is perhaps the only reflection on sexual
harmony that can be accepted within a Lacanian perspective: Except for the fact that you’re married; except for the fact that you are a whore and not a nice girl; and
except for the fact that you’re my brother and not…for example…my cousin…we’re perfect for each other, and our love would be ideal. (Benvenuto, 1996:126) We can
also approach this constitutive play between possibility and impossibility through the example of communication. What Lacan argues, and here his difference from
Habermas is most forcefully demonstrated, is that it is exactly because total communication is impossible, because it is exposed as an impossible fantasy, that
communication itself becomes possible. Lacan starts from the assumption that communication is always a failure: moreover, that it has to be a failure, and that’s the
reason we keep on talking. If we understood each other, we would all remain silent. Luckily enough, we don’t understand each other, so we keep on talking.
(Verhaeghe, 1995:81) The utopian fantasy of a perfect universal language, a language common to all humanity, was designed to remedy this lack in communication
insofar as it is caused by the different idioms and languages in use (Eco, 1995:19). The perfect language was conceived as the final solution to this linguistic confusion,
the confusio linguarum, which inscribed an irreducible lack at the heart of our symbolic universe, showing its inability to represent the real. It entailed a fantasmatic
return to a pre-confusion state in which a perfect language existed between Adam and God. This was a language that mirrored reality, an isomorphic language which
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had direct and unmediated access to the essence of things: ‘In its original form…language was an absolutely certain and transparent sign for things, because it
resembled them. The names of things were lodged in the things they designated…. This transparency was destroyed at Babel as a punishment for men’ (Foucault,
1989:36). Human imagination never stopped longing for that lost/impossible state when language, instead of the agency of castration, was the field of a perfect
harmony; hence all the attempts to construct a perfect language, to realise fantasy: Umberto Eco in his Search for the Perfect Language recounts the history of all these
attempts within European culture, from St. Augustine’s fantasy, in which the distance between object and symbol is annulled,17 up to Dante, a priori philosophical
languages and Esperanto. This history is, of course, a genealogy of failures, the history of the insistence on the realisation of an impossible dream, a dream, however,
that was designed as a perfect solution to the inherent division of the social. As Eco points out, linguistic confusion is conceived as standing at the root of religious and
political division, even of difficulties in economic exchange (Eco, 1995:42–3). In that sense, the achievement of perfect communication is articulated as the perfect
solution to all these problems. This is clearly a utopian problematic. Alas, as Antonio Gramsci points out in his text ‘Universal Language and Esperanto’, no advent of a
universal language can be planned in advance: the present attempts at such a language belong only in the realm of Utopia: they are the product of the same mentality
that wanted Falangists and happy colonies. In history and social life nothing is fixed, rigid and final. There never will be…this flow of molten volcanic matter, burns
and annihilates the Utopias built on arbitrary acts and vain delusions such as those of a universal language and of Esperanto. (Gramsci, 1975:33) The main point here is
that society and history are all the time constituted and reconstituted through this unending play between possibility and impossibility, order and disorder: ‘society is
nothing but a web of social relations that is constantly being spun, broken, and spun again, invariably (unlike a spider’s web) in slightly different form’ (Wrong,
1994:45). As we have already seen in Chapter 2, our encounters with the real, the moments of failure and dislocation of our discursive constructions, have both a
destructive and a productive dimension. Baudrillard even argues that catastrophes, crises and dislocations might be a certain strategy of our species. By bringing to the
fore the possibility or the idea of a total catastrophe they stimulate a series of processes—in the economy as well as in politics, art and history—that attempt to patch
things up (Baudrillard, 1996:81). Homer
is correct and consistent with his psychoanalytic framework when he argues that the filling of
the gap in the social field will always be the aim of numerous discourses and ideologies; this is the way things
generally work. It is also true that if no psychoanalytic ideology emerges to (try to) suture that gap, other discourses and ideologies will. Since, however, Lacanian
political theory aims at bringing to the fore, again and again, the lack in the Other, the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to
mask, it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. Is it really
possible and consistent to point to the lack in the Other and, at the same time, to attempt to fill it in a quasi-utopian move? Such a question can also be posed in ethical
or even strategic terms. It could be argued of course that Homer’s vision of a psychoanalytic politics does not foreclose the recognition of the impossibility of the social
but that in his schema this recognition, and the promise to eliminate it (as part of a quasi-utopian regulative principle) go side by side; that in fact this political promise
is legitimised by the conclusions of psychoanalytic political theory. But this coexistence is nothing new. This recognition of the ‘impossibility of society’, of an
antagonism that cross-cuts the social field, constitutes the starting point for almost every political ideology. Only if presented against the background of this ‘disorder’
the final harmonious ‘order’ promised by a utopian fantasy acquires hegemonic force. The problem is that all
this schema is based on the
elimination of the first moment, of the recognition of impossibility. The centrality of political dislocation is always repressed in
favour of the second moment, the utopian promise. Utopian fantasy can sound appealing only if presented as the final
solution to the problem that constitutes its starting point. In that sense, the moment of impossibility is
only acknowledged in order to be eliminated. In Marx, for instance, the constitutivity of class struggle is
recognised only to be eliminated in the future communist society. Thus, when Homer says that he wants to repeat Marx’s error
today he is simply acknowledging that his psychoanalytic politics is nothing but traditional fantasmatic politics articulated with the use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary.
Homer’s psychoanalytic politics are nothing but ‘politics as such’—this is his own phrase—and what is ‘politics as such’ if not the return
of something very old, the ‘reoccupation’ of traditional radical politics. I use here the term ‘reoccupation’ as it is introduced by Hans
Blumenberg in his book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Blumenberg, 1983). The term is introduced in connection with the relation between pre-modernity and
modernity and has to do with the way modernity reproduces the mistakes or problems of pre-modernity.18 As the translator of Blumemberg’s book argues: Christianity,
he [Blumenberg] says, through its claim to be able to account for the overall pattern of world history in terms of the poles of creation and eschatology, had put in place a
new question, one that had been (as Löwith so forcefully insists) unknown to the Greeks: the question of the meaning and pattern of world history as a whole. When
modern thinkers abandoned the Christian ‘answers’ they still felt an obligation to answer the questions that went with them—to show that modern thought was equal to
any challenge, as it were. It was this compulsion to ‘reoccupy’ the ‘position’ of the medieval Christian schema of creation and eschatology—rather than leave it empty,
as a rationality that was aware of its own limits might have done—that led to the grandiose constructions of the philosophy of history. (Wallace, 1985:xx–xxi) As
Ernesto Laclau has put it, by ‘reoccupation’ we mean a process by which certain notions, linked to the advent of a new vision and new problems, ‘have the function of
replacing ancient notions that had been formed on the ground of a different set of issues, with the result that the latter end up imposing their demands on the new
notions and inevitably deforming them’ (Laclau, 1990:74). What I want to suggest is that in Homer’s schema psychoanalytic
politics ‘reoccupies’
the ground of traditional fantasmatic politics. The result is that this fantasmatic conception of politics
ends up imposing its demands on the psychoanalytic part of the argumentation . Thus, this latter part is
necessarily deformed: if it is not recognised in its radical constitutivity, the impossibility of society, the irreducibility of the real within the social, loses all
its power. In that sense, the ultimate consequence of Homer’s argumentation is the following: the absorption of
Lacanian political theory by radical quasi-utopianism will offer left-wing radicalism the hegemonic
appeal entailed in the articulation of one more signifier (‘psychoanalysis’) in its signifying chain, but
psychoanalytic political theory has nothing to gain beyond its own deformation. Well, it doesn’t sound like a very good
deal. In fact, articulating Lacanian theory with fantasmatic politics is equivalent to affirming the irrelevance
of Lacanian theory for radical politics since this articulation presupposes the repression of all the
political insights implicit in Lacan’s reading and highlighted in this book. The alleged irrelevance of Lacan for radical
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politics is also the argument put forward by Collier in a recent article in Radical Philosophy. Collier’s argument is that since it is capitalism that shatters our wholeness
and disempowers us (as if without capitalism we would be on the road to utopia; obviously, capitalism occupies the structural position of the antichrist in this sort of
leftist preaching), then Lacan’s theory is, in fact, normalising capitalist damage, precisely because alienation is so deep for Lacan that nothing can be done to eliminate
it (‘Lacan is deeply pessimistic, rejecting cure or happiness as possible goals’, my emphasis).19 Thus Lacan has nothing to offer radical politics. Something not entirely
surprising since, according to Collier, psychological theory in general has no political implications whatsoever. The conclusion is predictable: ‘Let us go to Freud and
Klein for our psychotherapy [Lacan is of course excluded] and to Marx and the environmental sciences for our politics, and not get our lines crossed’ (Collier, 1998:41–
3). Surprisingly enough this is almost identical with Homer’s conclusion :
Lacanian theory is OK as an analytical tool but let us go
back to Marx for our ideological seminar and our utopian catechism! It is clear that from a Lacanian point of view it is
necessary to resist all such ‘reoccupations’ of traditional fantasmatic politics. At least this is the strategy that Lacan
follows on similar occasions. Faced with the alienating dimension of every identification, Lacan locates the end of analysis beyond identification. Since utopian or
quasi-utopian constructions function through identification it is legitimate, I think, to draw the analogies with the social field. If analysis resists the ‘reoccupation’ of the
traditional strategy of identification—although it recognises its crucial, but alienating, role in the formation of subjectivity—why should psychoanalytic politics, after
unmasking the crucial but alienating character of traditional, fantasmatic, identificatory politics, ‘reoccupy’ their ground? This rationale underlying the
Lacanian position is not far away from what Beardsworth articulates as a political reading of Derrida. For Beardsworth, deconstruction also refuses to
implicate itself in traditional politics, in the ‘local sense of politics’ in Beardsworth’s terminology: In its affirmative refusal to advocate a politics,
deconstruction forms, firstly, an account of why all political projects fail. Since the projection of any decision has ethical implications, deconstruction in fact generalizes
what is meant by the political well beyond the local sense of politics. In this sense it becomes a radical ‘critique’ of institutions. (Beardsworth, 1996:19) Similarly, the
radicality and political importance of the Lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its distance
from fantasmatic politics, from politics in the traditional sense; which is not the same as saying that psychoanalysis is
apolitical : in fact, it becomes political precisely by being critical of traditional politics, exactly because, as argued in the
previous chapter, the political is located beyond the utopian or quasi-utopian sedimentations of political reality. One final point before concluding our argumentation in
this chapter. There is a question which seems to remains open. It is the following: if we resist the ‘reoccupation’ put forward by Homer and others does that mean that
we accept the supposed political impotence of psychoanalytic political theory? Assuming that psychoanalytically inspired political theory is based on the recognition of
the political as an encounter with the real (although he doesn’t formulate it in exactly these terms), Rustin argues that ‘it seems likely that a politics constructed largely
on this principle will generate paranoid-schizoid states of mind as its normal psychic condition’. If we prioritise the ‘negative’ ‘what kind of progressive political or
social project can be built if the “positive”—that is concepts, theories, norms and consistent techniques—is to be refused as innately inauthentic?’ (Rustin, 1995:241–3).
Political impotence seems to be the logical outcome. Homer’s argument seems finally vindicated. Yet this conclusion is accurate only if we identify progressive
political action with traditional fantasmatic utopian politics. This is, however, a reductionist move par excellence. This idea, and Homer’s whole argumentative
construction, is based on the foreclosure of another political possibility which is clearly situated beyond any ‘reoccupations’ and is consistent with psychoanalytic
theory instead of deforming it. This is the possibility of a post-fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics. The best example is democratic politics. It is true that democracy
is an essentially contested term and that the struggle for a ‘final’ decontestation of its meaning constitutes a fundamental characteristic of modern societies. It is also
true that in the past these attempts at decontestation were articulated within an essentialist, foundationalist framework, that is to say, democracy was conceived as a
natural law, a natural right, or even as something guaranteed by divine providence. Today, in our postmodern terrain, these foundations are no longer valid. Yet
democracy did not share the fate of its various foundations. This is because democracy cannot be reduced to any of these fantasmatic positive contents. As John Keane,
among others, has put it, democracy is not based on or guided by a certain positive, foundational, normative principle (Keane, 1995:167). On the contrary, democracy is
based on the recognition of the fact that no such principle can claim to be truly universal, on the fact that no symbolic social construct can ever claim to master the
impossible real. Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real
impossibility which cannot be sutured. Instead
of attempting this impossible suture of the social entailed in every
utopian or quasi-utopian discourse, democracy envisages a social field which is unified by the recognition
of its own constitutive impossibility. As Chaitin points out, democracy provides a concrete example of what we
would call a post-fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics: most significant [in terms of Lacan’s importance for literary, ethical and
cultural theory and political praxis], perhaps, is the new light his analysis of the interaction of the universal and the particular has begun to shed on the question of
maintaining a democratic social order which can safeguard universal human rights while protecting the difference of competing political and ethnic groups. (Chaitin,
1996:11) Thus, a whole political project,
the project of radical democracy, is based not on the futile fantasmatic
suture of the lack in the Other but on the recognition of its own irreducibility .20 And this is a political possibility totally
neglected by Homer.21 Today, it seems that we have the chance to overcome or limit the consequences of traditional fantasmatic politics. In that sense, the collapse of
utopian politics should not be the source of resentment, disappointment or even nostalgia for a supposedly lost harmony. On the contrary, it is a development that
enhances the prospects for radicalising modern democracy. But this
cannot be done for as long as the ethics of harmony are still
hegemonic. What we need is a new ethical framework . This cannot be an ethics of harmony aspiring to realise a fantasy construction; it
can only be an ethics that is articulated around the recognition of the ultimate impossibility of such an idea and follows this recognition up to its political—and, in fact,
democratic—consequences. In the next chapter I will try to show that Lacanian theory is absolutely crucial in such an undertaking. Not only because some Lacanian
societies tend to be more democratic than other psychoanalytic institutions (the École Freudienne de Paris was, in certain of its aspects, an extremely democratic
society) nor because psychoanalysis is stigmatised or banned in almost all anti-democratic regimes. Beyond these superfluous approaches,
can offer a non-fantasmatic grounding for radical democracy
Lacanian ethics
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Their federalism advantage reproduces the drama of Oedipal relationships on a national
scale - they place states within the position of the child - the impact is resentment and an
increase in Federal Power which turns the whole aff this card is amazing.
Schoenfeld 73 - BA, LL.B, LL.M (C.G, 1973, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE LAW, ISBN-13:
9780398026561 Publisher: Thomas, Charles C. Publisher, Ltd. Publication date: 2/28/1973, Hard Copy, p. 2014) NAR
To return, however, to the problem of securing a proper balance between the powers of the Federal Government
and those of the states, it will be recalled that symbolization (the use of a person, idea or object to represent some other person, idea or object) is a salient
characteristic of unconscious mentation. 205 It will also be recalled that nations and their leaders: often serve as unconscious parent symbols and
as such tend to have parent-oriented desires and feelings displaced onto them.206 Indeed, psychoanalysts believe that the
relationship between a nation (or its leaders) and its citizens is frequently equated unconsciously with the relationship between parents and their children; and
psychoanalysts believe that as a result, the attitudes, emotions and behavior of a people are likely to reflect the influence of this unconscious identification of the nation
citizen relationship with the parent-child relationship.207 These facts bring to mind the possibility that, like the relationship between a nation and its citizens, the
relationship in the United States between the Federal Government and the various state governments may be
unconsciously regarded at times as though it were a parent-child relationship.208 If so, then attempts to find a
proper balance
between federal and state powers may
symbolize on an unconscious level attempts to find a proper balance
between the powers of parents and their children . Consequently, adjustments of the federal-state power
balance, especially if accomplished at the expense of the states, may well stir up in the unconscious vestiges of the intense feelings of
childhood regarding the relative powers of parents and children. For example, decisions of the Supreme Court
limiting the freedom of action of the states by forcing them to conform to certain federal standards (as in
Mapp v. Ohio) 209 may be unconsciously equated with demands during childhood that children renounce their
freedom regarding certain matters and, instead, obey parental rules of conduct. As a result, such decisions by
the Court may stir up in the unconscious vestiges of the outraged feelings and accompanying rage and fury that parents so frequently
engender in a child when they try to train him too early or, indeed, when they may simply restrict his freedom and demand (often quite
rightly) that he obey the rules they formulate. In like manner, decisions of the Supreme Court enlarging federal powers in certain areas and
effecting a reduction of the powers of the states in these areas (as in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka) 210 may well be unconsciously
interpreted as an expansion of parental powers at the expense of the powers of their children. If so, then
unconscious remnants of the great parent-child power struggle of early childhood-the Oedipal conflictmay be revived , including remnants of the intense wishes and powerful emotions that originally accompanied this struggle. The old anger, hostility and rage
of childhood may be aroused once again as the enlargement of federal powers and the corresponding reduction of state powers is unconsciously reacted to as though it
were a replay of the Oedipal struggle in which the child was ultimately forced (in large measure because of overwhelming parental power) to renounce his fervently
desired Oedipal goals. 211 It will be recalled, however, that children tend to identify
themselves with a parent-in a sense, to "become"
this parent unconsciously212 ; and as a result, children may unconsciously tend to regard accretions in parental
power as accretions in their own power . If so, then an expansion in the powers of the Federal
Government may (as indicated above) not only be equated unconsciously with an expansion of parental powers
but may also be unconsciously interpreted, especially by a person who had identified himself strongly with a
parent during childhood, as an expansion of the person's own powers . Indeed, herein may be found a major unconscious
reason why a man may not only fail to oppose but may actually champion increases in federal powers-as, for example, John Marshall championed increases in federal
powers during his thirty-five years as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.213 To the extent that a man (because of a strong self-identification with a
parent or for some other reason) unconsciously equates the enlargement of the powers of the Federal Government with the enlargement of his own powers, he would
probably fail to such extent to regard unconsciously any increase in the powers of the states as an increase in his own powers. Nevertheless, insofar as the relationship
between the Federal Government and the various state governments continues to symbolize for him on an unconscious level the relationship between parents and their
children, he would presumably still tend unconsciously to interpret any emphasis upon or addition to the rights and powers of the states as an emphasis upon or an
addition to the rights and powers of the other children in the family of childhood-his brothers and sisters, especially. Hence,
situations in which the
Supreme Court emphasizes or expands the rights and privileges of the states (as in Erie R.R. Co. v. Tompkins) 214 may
be identified unconsciously with childhood situations in which parents emphasized or expanded the rights
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and privileges of siblings. Consequently, Supreme Court rulings stressing the rights and privileges of the states may stir up
unconscious vestiges of the furious jealousy, hostility and rage that parental stress upon the rights and privileges of siblings once evoked-vestiges that,
when aroused, are all too capable of producing intense emotional storms.To suggest further ways in which the balancing of federal and state powers may stir up
unconscious remnants of the ideas and emotions of early childhood requires little perspicacity, for unconscious reactions to adjustments in the federalstate power
balance are, certainly in an individual sense, at least as numerous as there are people who react unconsciously to these adjustments. Detailing such further possible
unconscious reactions to the balancing of federal and state powers would appear to be unnecessary, however, to reveal that insofar as the federal-state relationship is
unconsciously equated with the parent-child relationship, attempts to balance federal and state powers are likely to stir up vestiges of the desires and feelings of early
childhood regarding the relative powers of parents and children-vestiges of desires and feelings
so primitive, irrational and emotion-laden that their
arousal would seem almost inevitably to lead to emotional outbursts of great intensity.
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alt
Refusing an existing symbolic order is crucial.
Butler 2010 Rex, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Media Studies and Art History at the
University of Queensland International Journal of Zizek Studies 4.1
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/228/321
What is common to these four situations? It is the idea that, like Bartleby, we have an “I prefer not to”, without
the reasons for this being given or even able to be given. It is a feeling or affect that in a way precedes reasons,
that is unable to be justified, that has no place within the existing symbolic order. It is the feeling of an injustice
or of something that is missing, without necessarily having the language to express it. And certainly it proposes
no immediate solution, no way of making things better within the existing order. It is in fact a dissatisfaction
with the currently existing order as such. This grievance, indeed, might be compared to the “melancholy” that
Zizek sees in Fellini’s Satyricon, in which the revellers are haunted by the sense that something is missing
without being able to say what it is, and in fact without anything “objectively” being missing. There is a kind of
“withdrawal” or distancing at stake here even at the height of the characters’ immersion in the world (indeed,
even allowing their immersion in the world). As Zizek writes: Melancholy is not primarily directed at the
paradisiacal past of organic balanced Wholeness which was lost due to some catastrophe, it is not a sadness
caused by this loss; melancholy proper, rather, designates the attitude of those who are still in Paradise but are
already longing to break out of it; of those who, although still in a closed universe, already possess a vague
premonition of another dimension which is just out of their reach (Zizek 2000: 88-89). And yet, as Zizek goes
onto argue in Parallax View, the symbolic order precisely stands in for the possibility of this withdrawal. That is
– and this is to go back to our earlier point as to how thought is not simply an exception within a pre-existing
order of things, but also brings this order about – the symbolic order arises as the effect of a positing that could
also not have happened. In other words, what is being experienced at the moment of grievance is the repetition
of the forced choice. It is the possibility of experiencing – necessarily within the symbolic – what must be
excluded, foreclosed, in order to found the symbolic order. It is a way of remarking, as though from the outside,
the symbolic order as such, although this is obviously impossible. And it is a way of resisting it, in speaking of,
or better feeling, what is lost by it. Grievance is first of all not a grievance concerning any particular wrong, but
the very inability to speak of any particular wrong, the fact that any attempt to articulate it within the symbolic
is necessarily to lose it. In a parallactic way, we might say that it is grievance that arises at the lack of any
grievance, grievance that gives rise both to itself and to the circumstances at which it is aggrieved.
Zizek 93 Slavoj Zizek, philosopher, 1993. [Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 1-2]
The most sublime image that emerged in the political upheavals of the last years-- and the term "sublime" is to be conceived here in the strictest Kantian sense-- was
undoubtedly the unique picture from the time of the violent overthrow of Ceauşsescu in Romania: the
rebels waving the national flag with the
red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole in
its center. It is difficult to imagine a more salient index of the "open" character of a historical situation"in its
becoming," as Kierkegaard would have put it, of that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it has
already lost the hegemonical power, has not yet been replaced by the new one . The sublime enthusiasm this picture bears
witness to is in no way affected by the fact that we now know how the events were actually manipulated (ultimately it had to do with a coup of Securitate, the
Communist secret police, against itself, against its own signifier; that is, the old apparatus survived by casting off its symbolic clothing): for us as well as for most of the
participants themselves, all this became visible in retrospect, and what really matters is that the
masses who poured into the streets of Bucharest
"experienced" the situation as "open," that they participated in the unique intermediate state of passage from one discourse (social link) to
another, when, for a brief, passing moment, the hole in the big Other, the symbolic order, became visible. The enthusiasm which carried them
was literally the enthusiasm over this hole, not yet hegemonized by any positive ideological project; all ideological appropriations (from the
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nationalistic to the liberal-democratic) entered
the stage afterwards and endeavored to"kidnap" the process which
originally was not their own. At this point, perhaps, the enthusiasm of the masses and the attitude of a critical intellectual overlap for a brief moment.
And the duty of the critical intellectual-- if, in today's"postmodern" universe, this syntagm has any meaning left-- is precisely to occupy
all the time, even when the new order (the"new harmony") stabilizes itself and again renders invisible the hole as
such, the place of this hole, i.e., to maintain a distance toward every reigning Master-Signifier. In this precise
sense, Lacan points out that, in the passage from one discourse (social link) to another , the"discourse of the analyst" always emerges for
a brief moment: the aim of this discourse is precisely to"produce" the Master-Signifier, that is to say, to render
visible its "produced," artificial, contingent character. 1 This maintaining of a distance with regard to the
Master-Signifier characterizes the basic attitude of philosophy. It is no accident that Lacan, in his Seminar on Transference, refers
to Socrates,"the first philosopher," as the paradigm of the analyst: in Plato's Symposium, Socrates refuses to be identified with agalma, the hidden treasure in himself,
with the unknown ingredient responsible for the Master's charisma, and persists in the void filled out by agalma. 2 It is against this background that we have to locate
the "amazement" that marks the origins of philosophy: philosophy
begins the moment we do not simply accept what exists as
given ("It's like that!", "Law is law!", etc.), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible. What
characterizes philosophy is this"step back" from actuality into possibility-- the attitude best rendered by Adorno's and
Horkheimer's motto quoted by Fredric Jameson:"Not Italy itself is given here, but the proof that it exists." 3 Nothing is more antiphilosophical than the well-known
anecdote about Diogenes the cynic who, when confronted with the Eleatic proofs of the nonexistence and inherent impossibility of movement, answered by simply
standing up and taking a walk. (As Hegel points out, the standard version of this anecdote passes over in silence its denouement: Diogenes soundly thrashed his pupil
who applauded the Master's gesture, punishing him for accepting the reference to a pretheoretical factum brutum as a proof.) Theory involves
the power to
abstract from our starting point in order to reconstruct it subsequently on the basis of its
presuppositions, its transcendental "conditions of possibility"-- theory as such, by definition, requires the
suspension of the Master-Signifier.
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case
No risk of Middle East war
Maloney and Takeyh, 7 – *senior fellow for Middle East Policy at the Saban Center for Middle East Studies at
the Brookings Institution AND **senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
(Susan and Ray, International Herald Tribune, 6/28, “Why the Iraq War Won't Engulf the Mideast”,
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2007/0628iraq_maloney.aspx)
Yet, the Saudis, Iranians, Jordanians, Syrians, and others are very unlikely to go to war either to protect
their own sect or ethnic group or to prevent one country from gaining the upper hand in Iraq. The reasons are
fairly straightforward. First, Middle Eastern leaders, like politicians everywhere, are primarily interested in
one thing: self-preservation. Committing forces to Iraq is an inherently risky proposition, which, if the
conflict went badly, could threaten domestic political stability. Moreover, most Arab armies are geared
toward regime protection rather than projecting power and thus have little capability for sending troops
to Iraq. Second, there is cause for concern about the so-called blowback scenario in which jihadis returning
from Iraq destabilize their home countries, plunging the region into conflict. Middle Eastern leaders are
preparing for this possibility. Unlike in the 1990s, when Arab fighters in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet
Union returned to Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and became a source of instability, Arab security services
are being vigilant
about who is coming in and going from their countries. In the last month, the Saudi government has arrested
approximately 200 people suspected of ties with militants. Riyadh is also building a 700 kilometer wall along
part of its frontier with Iraq in order to keep militants out of the kingdom. Finally, there is no precedent for
Arab leaders to commit forces to conflicts in which they are not directly involved. The Iraqis and the
Saudis did send small contingents to fight the Israelis in 1948 and 1967, but they were either ineffective or
never made it. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arab countries other than Syria, which had a compelling interest in
establishing its hegemony over Lebanon, never committed forces either to protect the Lebanese from the Israelis
or from other Lebanese. The civil war in Lebanon was regarded as someone else's fight. Indeed, this is the
way many leaders view the current situation in Iraq. To Cairo, Amman and Riyadh, the situation in Iraq is
worrisome, but in the end it is an Iraqi and American fight. As far as Iranian mullahs are concerned, they have
long preferred to press their interests through proxies as opposed to direct engagement. At a time when Tehran
has access and influence over powerful Shiite militias, a massive cross-border incursion is both unlikely and
unnecessary. So Iraqis will remain locked in a sectarian and ethnic struggle that outside powers may abet, but
will remain within the borders of Iraq. The Middle East is a region both prone and accustomed to civil
wars. But given its experience with ambiguous conflicts, the region has also developed an intuitive ability
to contain its civil strife and prevent local conflicts from enveloping the entire Middle East.
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No risk of conflict escalation in Latin America – regional organizations check
Miami Herald ‘13
(“UN, Latin American leaders stress regional cooperation for global peace” August 6)
UNITED NATIONS Hoping to improve peace and security around the world, Argentine President Cristina
Fernández led a day-long Security Council meeting Tuesday where she and other leaders said regions in
turmoil could learn from how Latin American and the Caribbean have settled internal conflicts.¶ “The
lessons that we have learned, in terms of our regional and sub-regional organizations, (suggest) collaborating
with the Security Council, with the United Nations, is a very useful way of finding solutions,” said Fernández,
citing a number of resolved conflicts in South America, including the trade dispute between neighbors
Colombia and Venezuela.¶ Fernandez chaired the meeting as the representative of Argentina, which has taken
over the rotating chairmanship of the Security Council for August.¶ Representatives from regional organizations
— the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the Union of South American Nations
(UNASUR), the Mercosur trading bloc, and the Organization of American States — boasted of benefits to
working within the U.N. system.¶ “South America is a region in which we can say there is no risk of
interstate conflicts involving threats to peace and security and extreme violence,” said Eda Rivas, Peru’s
foreign minister. “However, UNASUR member states recognize that peace and security must be preserved
permanently and all South Americans are convinced that the best way to do this is to strive for an
integration based on respect for the fundamental principles of international law.Ӧ U.N. Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon praised CELAC and UNASUR and said he was pleased with last month’s U.N.-Caribbean
Community meeting, which included discussions of how to tackle transnational organized crime and security.¶
But the U.N. chief stressed how cooperation with regional organizations could improve, particularly in the
Middle East and Africa, where conflicts in Syria and Sudan continue to strain U.N. peacekeeping and mediation
efforts.¶ “There is always room for improvement,” Ban said. “We are better at sharing information and analysis
on brewing crises, but we have to work harder on swift response and long-term prevention” of regional
conflict.¶ Several Latin American ministers pointed to participation in the U.N. stabilization mission in Haiti as
an examples of their commitment to cooperation.¶ Haitian Foreign Minister Pierre Richard Casimir lauded the
U.N. peacekeeping activities in his country.¶ “Haiti will continue to work with all those who believe the
involvement of regional organizations are essential to continuing to grow the future,” Casimir said. “I trust this
debate will give us food for thought in the U.N. and in regional organizations.Ӧ U.S. Ambassador Samantha
Power, who attended her first Security Council meeting since her confirmation last week, said the Obama
administration was pleased with the coalition in Haiti.¶ “The United States applauds states around the region,
including many represented in this room, for the essential support they give to Haiti through contributing
troops to MINUSTAH, providing development assistance and helping build Haitian capacity,” she said.
More link ev – collapse of American-centered order encourages regionalism
Leon T. Hadar, Cato Institute, "Welcome to the Post-Unipolar World: Great for the U.S. and for the Rest,"
HUFFINGTON POST, 7--8--10, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11967
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In a way, the collapse of the American-controlled unipolar system — and before that, the end of
the bipolar system of the Cold War — should help us recognize that international relations
have ceased to be a zero-sum-game under which gains of other global powers become by
definition a loss for America, and vice versa. It was inevitable that former members of the
Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc like Ukraine, Poland, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia
will try to stabilize their diplomatic and economic ties with Russia, while at the same time
deterring powerful Russia by expanding cooperation with other players: Poland with
Ukraine with Germany; Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia with Turkey and Iran, and all
of these countries with the U.S and the European Union (EU).¶ Similarly, Washington
should welcome — not discourage — the growing diplomatic and economic role that
Turkey is playing in the Middle East, which could help bring stability to Iraq (and allow
for American military to start withdrawing from there), moderate the policies of Iran
(and prevent a military conflict with the U.S.), encourage negotiations between Israel and
Syria, and lead eventually to the creation of a more stable Middle East where Turkey,
Iran, the Arabs states and Israel will be more secure and prosperous.¶ It is not surprising
those representatives of economic and bureaucratic interests in Washington, and some of
America’s client states that draw benefits from American interventionist policy, operate
under the axiom that the U.S. should always be prepared to “do something” to “resolve” this or that
conflict, here, there, and everywhere. That kind of never-ending American
interventionism only discourages regional powers , counting on Washington to come to their aid, from
actually taking steps to resolve those conflicts that end-up drawing-in other regional and global players,
ensuring that America will never leave Japan and Korea (to help contain China), Iraq (to
deter Iran), Afghanistan (to deal with Pakistan). And that is exactly what the prointerventionists in Washington want when they suggested that America is the
“indispensable power.”¶ In any case, the notion that American hegemony is a precondition for global
peace and security and that Washington needs therefore to extend its military
commitments in Europe, the Middle East, Caucus, East Asia and elsewhere is not very
practical — America does not have the resources in order to play that ambitious role — and
is not very helpful, considering the most recent U.S. experience in the Middle East. The
U.S. should not retreat from the world. But by embracing a policy of “constructive
disengagement” from some parts of the world, America could help itself and the rest of
the world Further, American involvement hinders development of regionalism but doesn’t
stabilize the transition to globalism
Michael J. Mazarr, Professor, National Security Strategy, U.S. National War College, "The Risks of Ignoring
Strategic Insolvency," WASHINGTON QUARTERLY v. 35 n. 4, Fall 2012, p. 12-13.
Global strategies and specific military plans lose credibility. As the leading power is overtaken by others,
if it refuses to prioritize and attempts instead to uphold all its commitments equally, the credibility of its
regional plans, postures, and threats is destined to erode. Recent literature on credibility argues that it is
not based merely on past actions, but from an adversary’s calculations of the current power capabilities
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at a state’s disposal. When Hitler’s Germany was considering whether to take seriously the pledges and
commitments of the Western allies, for example, he paid much more attention to their existing capabilities, their
current national will, and the perceived feasibility of their strategic posture than to reputations formed over
years or decades of actions. Indeed, such judgments seem to derive not from a checklist of a rival’s defense
programs or military actions, but from a much more diffuse and visceral sense of the trajectory of a state’s
power relative to its current posture.¶ What is now clear is that the consensus of such perceptions is shifting
decisively against the tenability of the existing U.S. paradigm of global power projection. It is, in fact, natural
for rising challengers to see weakness in the leading power’s capacities as a by-product of the growing
self-confidence and faith in their own abilities. There is already abundant evidence of such perceptual
shifts in the assertive leaders and elites of rising powers today, who while respecting continuing U.S.
strengths and expecting the United States to remain the primus inter pares for decades to come, perhaps
indefinitely nonetheless see current U.S. global commitments as excessive for a debt-ridden and
‘‘declining’’ power.¶ In China, as a leading example, senior officials and influential analysts view the
United States as troubled, overextended, and increasingly unable to fulfill its defense paradigm. They
believe that the United States will continue as a global power, but expect it to be in a different guise .
Conversations with business, government, and military officials from burgeoning powers such as India, Turkey,
Brazil, and Indonesia produce the same broad theme: Structural trends in economics, politics, and military
affairs are undermining the degree of American predominance and the sustainability of the existing
paradigm of U.S. influence. A leading theme is a growing belief in the social and economic decay of the
U.S. model and the inability of U.S. political system to address major issues. Recent polls and studies of
opinion in emerging powers come to many of the same conclusions.¶ These perceptions will be fed and nurtured
by parallel actions and trends which will undercut the viability of the existing paradigm. Critics at home are
already suggesting that the United States will be unable to sustain the demands of its ‘‘strategic tilt to Asia’’
given planned budget cuts, or meet the requirements of both Middle East and Asian contingencies. As the
United States is forced to pursue cost-saving measures, such as cancellations of major weapons systems or
troop reductions from key regions, the sense of a paradigm in free-fall will accelerate . We see this already in
the recommendations in many reports, even those arguing for a general promotion of forward deployment, for a
reduction if not elimination of the U.S. force presence in Europe.¶ In addition to a loss of global credibility, a
paradigm in crisis also threatens the credibility of specific U.S. military and foreign policy doctrines.
When concepts and doctrines flow from stressed conventional-wisdom worldviews, those concepts and
doctrines begin to take on the air of empty rhetoric. A good parallel was the British ‘‘two-power’’ doctrine (the
notion that the Royal Navy should match the world’s next two best fleets combined), which eventually became
a form of self-reassurance without strategic significance. After a certain point, Aaron Friedberg explains,
‘‘official analyses of Britain’s position took on an air of incompleteness and unreality.’’ One can begin to sense
this tendency in some recent U.S. conceptual statements, such as AirSea Battle: from all the public evidence,
this concept appears to respond to growing challenges to U.S.
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Link Debate
The plan is an instances of US reforming the international institution in order to fit themproves that regionalism is better than 1 size fits all
Vezirgiannidou, 13 - Lecturer in International Organizations, University of Birmingham (SEVASTIELENI, “The United States and rising powers in a post-hegemonic global order,” International Affairs, May,
Wiley Online)
The current US approach to rising powers, which engages them as equals in informal forums with little
‘hard’ law capabilities, while being passive or hesitant in reforming international institutions where it has a
primary role (and a veto), exemplifies its own commitment to sovereignty and freedom of action in international politics.
The US is just as reluctant as the BRICS to be bound by hard law commitments. It also indicates a
lukewarm commitment to sharing its power with rising powers in hard law institutions. Some of this reluctance
may be attributable to the constraints of congressional politics (and American exemptionalism); its strength can
also depend on who sits in the White House and who his advisers are.118 Irrespective of the cause, this
reluctance to share power formally while promoting multilateralism in informal settings is likely to have
transformative implications on global order if it continues.¶ Specifically, the resulting order will become
more plurilateral than multilateral , with the exclusion of minor powers and most decision-making moving
into forums like the G20. It will also shift to more ‘soft law’ policy­making, as informal institutions will be less
intrusive on sovereignty but also less able to move far beyond political declarations followed up on a voluntary
basis. Finally, it is also likely to be more fragmented , as each power establishes a ‘sphere of influence’ in its
region. This kind of order will not necessarily be more unstable, but even in such an order the US will have
to accept some limits to its exercise of power abroad; it will not, though, be limited in its domestic policies, thus
satisfying the exemptionalists in Congress. However, US policy-makers should be aware of the direction in
which their current choices are moving global order; if they do not desire such an order, they should question
their strategy towards both rising and minor powers and should show more leadership in the reform of formal
institutions.
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