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Liberal governmentality’s economic engagement with Latin America is based on violent biopolitics- results
in the elimination of difference
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
Schmitt’s prophecy about the infinite plasticity of the
category of the foe as ‘proscribed by nature itself’ may be elaborated with reference to the naturalistic
political ontology of liberal government, discussed in Foucault’s analytics of governmentality and multiple post-Foucauldian studies in this field. In this section we shall argue that
it is precisely the combination of the universalist ethos, at work in the deployment of the category of humanity, with a naturalist political
ontology that accounts for the emergence of friend–foe ultra-politics in contemporary Western liberal democracies.¶ The radical innovation of
liberal governmentality, which emerged as a critique of the theory of ‘police science’ and the practice of ‘police states’ of the seventeenth to eighteenth
centuries, is the reinscription of the social order in terms of socio-economic processes, which, in the episteme of classical liberalism, are
deemed to be natural, self-regulating, antecedent to authority and as having an intrinsic logic of their own that is not fully transparent to state knowledge: ‘Inscribed within
the very logic of liberalism is a certain naturalism.’55 From this epistemic principle follows the central tenet of liberal government: the suspicion that
‘one always governs too much’.56 The liberal solution to this problem consists in adapting the techniques of government to the principles found
in the naturalised reality of the social and making government itself accountable to these principles of the ‘system of natural liberty’.57¶ At the same time,
liberal policies of laissez-faire are not a passive abandonment of an aboriginal reality to its own devices, but an elaborate activist and interventionist
course that secures natural liberty by taking necessary measures to correct its perversions. This ‘corrective’ aspect points to what Mitchell
Dean and Barry Hindess have respectively termed the ‘illiberality of liberalism’ and the ‘liberal government of unfreedom’.58 Within the ‘natural’ realm of the social, liberal
government has historically identified manifold categories of the population, whose properties or acts were ‘contrary to nature’ and had to
be rectified through governmental intervention, which historically has taken manifold forms, from the confinement of madmen to the
correction of juvenile delinquents.59 It is in this possibility of governmental ‘re-naturalisation’, which we have elsewhere described in terms of the ‘pedagogical technology’ of
liberalism60 that we may locate the condition of emergence of the figure of the foe as the ‘enemy of liberalism’. ¶ The centrality of pedagogical interventions to liberal governmentality demonstrates
that despite its avowed naturalism, liberalism remains conditioned by the constitutive, asymmetric and individualising ‘pastoral power’ that Foucault has famously identified as the condition of
emergence of modern governmentality as such.61 What
unites all the objects of liberal corrections, irrespectively of whether they are deemed to be evil, mentally disabled,
their functioning in the liberal discourse as beings, whose existence is deemed to be contrary to nature . On
the one hand, these individuals and groups belong to the social realm, cast as ontologically and axiologically prior to government in the liberal episteme. On the other hand,
however, their practices are not in accordance with the liberal vision of ‘natural liberty’ and thus require corrective interventions of liberal
morally deficient or simply ‘irrational’, is
government, whose modus operandi is itself adapted to the natural processes of the social. ‘Natural liberty’ is therefore not an aboriginal property of the subject, but an effect of governmental
Other, who was so generously let into the global liberal ‘homeland’ , is endowed with liberty only on condition of his or
her subjection to the corrective interventions that eradicate his or her alterity . This Foucauldian thesis parallels Schmitt’s critique of the ‘educational theory’
intervention. The
involved in the valorisation of liberal democracy:¶ The people can be brought to recognise and express their own will correctly through the right education. This means nothing else than that the
educator identifies his will at least provisionally with that of the people, not to mention that the content of education that the pupil will receive is also decided by the educator. The consequence of
this educational theory is a dictatorship that suspends democracy in the name of a true democracy that is still to be created.62 ¶ Thus, liberal government finds its condition of (im)possibility in the
generalised illiberality of pedagogical interventionism, which manifestly violates liberalism’s own naturalist presuppositions but is nonetheless essential to its existence, functioning in the manner of
this paradox makes liberalism a potentially ‘total’
modality of government, ‘because its program of self-limitation is linked to the facilitation and augmentation of the powers of civil
society and its use of these powers, in conjunction with the sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical powers of the state itself, to establish
a comprehensive normalisation of social, economic and cultural existence’.64 The naturalisation of a certain artefactual conception of the social permits
perpetual interventions in the name of its natural values, disavowing the constitutive and frequently violent character of
governmental practices . At the heart of liberal government we may therefore observe the aporia whereby the naturalist ontology is always contaminated by the logic of supplementarity
and every ‘natural liberty’ bears traces of governmental ‘corrective’ interventions.65 This relationship is at work not only in liberal domestic politics, but also, and with an even
greater intensity , in the international domain, where liberal governmentality is deployed in such diverse contexts as military interventions
‘in the name of democracy’, neoliberal programmes of development assistance and economic restructuring , and even the global
campaign for the promotion of ‘human rights’. As William Rasch argues in his reading of the discourse of human rights as a form of geopolitics, ‘the term “human” is
not descriptive, but evaluative . To be truly human, one needs to be corrected .’66 It is this object of liberal corrective interventions, whether
domestic or international, that epitomises the figure of the foe – a ‘not truly human’ being ‘proscribed by nature itself’. The ‘incomplete’ humanity of this
creature renders it infinitely inferior to the ‘fully’ liberal rights-holders, which justifies the deployment of asymmetric subject–object
relations in pedagogical practices of correction, while the ‘unnaturality’ of this creature provokes a degree of apprehension: even if the foe is infinitely weaker than ‘us’, any engagement with
him is dangerous, as one never knows what these ‘monsters’ are capable of. To recall our discussion in the previous section, the fear of the Other that animates Schmitt’s discourse on
enmity does not disappear in the liberal political ontology of monistic naturalism. Instead, it is supplemented with a violent project of
eradicating this dangerous alterity that liberalism has itself incorporated into its ‘universal homeland’ through manifold corrective, disciplinary and
the Derridean supplement, ‘a strange difference which constitutes [liberalism] by breaching it’.63 In Dean’s argument,
punitive practices, which have no rationality whatsoever in the Schmittian pluriverse of irreducible alterity. The foe is therefore, as it were, a double enemy: both a transcendental Other that is
intrinsically dangerous in Schmitt’s sense of radical alterity and an empirical Other, whose dangerousness is established by his or her actual resistance to the efforts of liberal government to purge
this alterity.
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Results in the most violent war without limits
Celermajer 7 If Islam is our other, who are 'we'? Celermajer, Danielle, director of Global Studies at the University of Sydney. She was
previously director of policy in the office of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Australian
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and ran a program funded by the Rockefeller foundation on human rights and religion
at Columbia University, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 42. 1 (Autumn 2007): 103-123,8.
war conducted in the name of humanity is the most dangerous, and potentially inhuman,
war of all (Schmitt 1996). War, Schmitt argued, is the modus operandi of sovereign States, because their essential dynamic is political, and politics
finds its grammar in the distinction between friend and enemy . International relations are not and cannot be rendered subordinate to a
morally-based international law because 'right' and 'good' belong to the realms of law and morality-independent realms that ultimately have no
authority over the political. Nevertheless, in the modern era, political relations between sovereign States gave rise to certain intrinsic limits .
The moral tenor of the moment recalls Carl Schmitt's warning that
This was not because international politics were tamed by legal or moral principles, but rather through the pragmatics of politics itself. As modern international space came to be populated by
competing and partisan, independently constituted sovereigns, they provided each other their limits in what Schmitt thought of as a type of regulated rivalry. Thus, even
as we went to war
against other self-interested sovereigns, clear that they were our enemies, we also accorded them the same status as we claimed for
ourselves; they were, like us, independent sovereigns under the umbrella of humanity, acting politically to defend their particular interests as we were defending our own. Schmitt's explanatory
framework of a 'regulated rivalry' was, however, always only understood as applying to the jus publicum europeaum, the European States that agreed to some measure of civility in war amongst
themselves. Simultaneously, unlimited
enmity continued to be projected beyond the line into the non-European world, as evidenced by the unconstrained genocides
conducted in the name of civilization (Koskenniemi 2004). Nevertheless, in the ideological frame of modern international relations, we adopted the conceit that this net of limited
war, mediated through equality of sovereignty, had become universal. ¶ Understood in this way, the gravest danger does not arise when politics is unleashed to act outside the jurisdiction
of law and morality, but when a State claims that its war transcends the realm of politics altogether and stakes its justification in the realms of law
(just and unjust) and morality (right and wrong). The most dangerous State is not the one that declares openly that it is acting in its own partisan State interests, against other
partisan State interests, but the one that performatively assumes the mantle of universalistic abstractions like 'humanity'. This is because, far from actually
domesticating the sadistic tendencies of politics, such rhetorical depoliticization and false neutrality remove all constraints that the dialogical relationship with the enemy itself entails. This
claim to a transcendent war has, in Schmitt's words, "...incalculable effects , such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and
declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity" (Schmitt 1996:57). Thus, whereas wars between sovereigns entail a certain basic equality of political
right, the sovereign who, "...tries to identify itself with humanity...", or, as Schmitt observed, with a range of other grand justifications, including
peace, justice, progress, or civilization, monopolizes and 'usurps' these universal attributes and denies them to the enemy . This depoliticizing
ruse is, of course, an intensely political move that Schmitt, paraphrasing Proudhon, unmasked in the harshest realist terms-"[H]e who invokes the word 'humanity', wants to cheat." No longer
an enemy facing another enemy under the umbrella of international politics, where all are human, the enemy is now exiled from humanity itself
and can make no appeals to humanity, peace, justice, progress or civilization. The consequence, as we have seen all too explicidy in the withdrawal of prisoners
taken in the war against terror' from both international legal norms (the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture) and US domestic law, is the unconstrained exercise of State power
against an enemy with no legal, moral or political recourse. Those falling under the novel classification enemy combatant' are, in Schmitt's terms, the normless exception, subject to the pure decision
of the Executive.5
Vote negative to reject liberal universalism in favor of pluralism and proper relationships of enmity
Rasch 5 Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle, William Rasch, Professor of Germanic Studies, Ph.D. University of
Washington/Seattle, The South Atlantic Quarterly 104:2, Spring 2005
Schmitt, then, starts from the premise of imperfection and acknowledges an ontological priority of violence . If, he reasons, one starts with the rather
biblical notions of sin and guilt, not natural innocence, then homogeneity, being contingent, historical, and not the least natural, must be predicated on heterogeneity. That is, citizenship or
participation or community must be constructed, not assumed, and can only be local, circumscribed, not global. One recognizes one’s own in the face of
the other and knows the comfort of inclusion only as the necessary result of exclusion—though in modern, functionally differentiated society, those inclusions
and exclusions may be multiple, contradictory, and not necessarily tied to place. ‘‘An abso- lute human equality,’’ Schmitt writes in his Crisis of Parliamentary Democ- racy, ‘‘would
be an equality without the necessary correlate of inequality and as a result conceptually and practically meaningless, an indifferent equality. . . . Substantive inequalities would in no
way disappear from the world and the state; they would shift into another sphere, perhaps separated from the political and concentrated in the
economic , leaving this area to take on a new, disproportionately decisive importance.’’6 This, Schmitt’s, is not a popular sentiment, even if it echoes somewhat the Marxist distinc- tion
between a political and a social democracy, between a formal and sub- stantial equality. But if one acknowledges that at least within modernity all inclusion requires exclusion, that inclusions
and exclusions in addition to being unavoidable are also contingent and malleable, then rather than react with dismay, one might see in this
‘‘logical fact,’’ if fact it is, both the condition for the possibility of dissent and the condition for the possibility of recognizing in the one who resists
and disagrees a fellow human being and thus legitimate political opponent, not a Lyon or Tyger or other Sav- age Beast . For it is not that exclusions are
miraculously made absent once distinc- tions are not formally drawn. On the contrary, unacknowledged distinc- tions, and those who are distinguished by
them, simply go underground, become invisible, and grow stronger, more absolute, in their violent and explosive force . When the retrograde and
condemned distinction between the ‘‘Greek’’ and the ‘‘barbarian’’ becomes a simple, sanguine affirmation of humanity, this ideal affirmation actually turns out to be nothing other than a distinction
drawn between all those who, by their right behavior, show themselves to be truly ‘‘human’’ and those who, alas, by their per- verse dissent, have revealed themselves to be evildoers, to be
visible, ‘‘external’’ distinctions that demarcate a space in which a ‘‘we’’ can recognize its difference from a ‘‘they, ’’
marking that difference in a necessarily asymmetrical manner, are to be preferred , in Schmitt’s world, to the invisible and
unacknowledged distinctions that mark those who are exemplary humans from those who, by their political dissent, show themselves to be gratuitously perverse. For reasons, then,
of making difference visible, Schmitt favors lines drawn in the sand, or, in the ‘‘mythical language’’ used in The Nomos of the Earth, ‘‘firm lines’’ in the
‘‘soil,’’ ‘‘whereby definite divisions become apparent,’’ and, above them, on the ‘‘solid ground of the earth,’’ ‘‘fences, enclosures, boundaries, walls, houses, and other
‘‘inhuman.’’ Deliberate,
preferably without
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constructs,’’ so that the ‘‘orders and orientations of human social life become apparent’’ and the ‘‘forms of power and domination be- come
visible.’’7 In Nomos, Schmitt describes the now much maligned and seldom mourned European nation-state system as ‘‘the highest form of order within the scope of human power’’ (
).
Historically, the territorial state devel- oped as a response to the religious civil wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Once thought of as a unity called Christendom, Europe became
fractured by the events of the Reformation and Counter- Reformation. The old asymmetrical distinction between believers and non- believers that governed the relationship not only between
Christians and non-Christians, but also between Christian orthodoxy and heresy, now threatened to regulate the distinction between Catholics and Protestants. Yet, miraculously (one might be
tempted to say), with the conclusion of religious warfare in
, a symmetrical relationship among the European nation-states prevailed—in theory, if not always in fact. It is this symmetri- cal
ordering of internally differentiated Europe that Schmitt highlights. In effect—and Hobbes had already described it in these terms—the war of all individuals against all individuals in the state of
nature, which perennially threatens to resurface within the state as civil discord, is elevated into a war of all states against all states in a second-order state of nature.¶ In
theory and practice,
individual is protected from arbitrary and irrational, because incalculable, violence by states acting as moral persons living in an
unregulated but serendipitously achieved balance of power. We might best update Schmitt’s description of this order as an ideally anarchic, self-regulating
coexistence of antagonistic powers , an emergent, horizontal self-organization of sovereign systems with no one system serv- ing as
sovereign over all the others—a plurality of states that refused to coalesce into one single state but rather achieved relative security
without relinquishing autonomy. The ‘‘medium’’ of this self-organization was vio- lence (war); yet, by virtue of mechanisms of reciprocity, by virtue, that is, of
a similarly emergent self-regulation of violence called international law (the jus publicum Europaeum of which Schmitt sings his praises), the conduct of warfare among European states
was restrained and controlled. Thus, the nation-state way of organizing early modern Europe served as the katechon, the political as restrainer, establishing relative stability and
then, the
peace to stave off chaos and civil war. How is this possible? Despite its internal self-differentiation, Europe still saw itself as a unity because of a second major distinction, the one be- tween Europe
and the New World, where New World denotes the entire non-European world, but especially the newly ‘‘discovered’’ regions of the globe following Columbus’s three voyages. This distinction
was asymmet- rical; on the one side we find Christianity and culture, on the other only pagan ‘‘barbarians.’’ How did Europeans mark this difference between a self-differentiated ‘‘us’’ and a
homogenous ‘‘them’’? Through violence. Only now, violence was regulated hierarchically by the traditional ‘‘just war’’ doc- trine. Schmitt clearly marks
the difference between
symmetrical and asym- metrical modes of warfare (thus the difference between warfare ‘‘this side’’ versus the ‘‘other side’’ of so-called amity lines that separated Old Europe
from the New World) as the difference between wars fought against ‘‘just enemies’’ and those fought for a ‘‘just cause.’’ The former recognize a
com- monality among combatants that allows for reciprocity ; the latter does not. Wars fought against enemies one respects as occupiers of the same
cultural ‘‘space,’’ no matter how subdivided, allows for the desirable constraints on the conduct of war. Wars fought against infidels, pagans, and
barbarians, whether these barbarians deny the one God, the laws of nature, the truth of reason, or the higher morality of liberalism, are wars fought against those who are not
to be respected or accorded the rights granted equals.8 To be in possession of truth, no matter how much that truth is debated internally, allows one to stand over against the
other as a conglomerated unity. This self-differentiated unity can assume the restrained and restraining order of civilization because it has inoculated itself against outbreaks of ‘‘natu- ral’’ and
lawless violence by displacing them in the New World. America, as Hobbes and others imagined it, was the preeminent site of the feared state of nature; thus Europe was spared any recurrence of
the civil wars that had previously ravaged it.
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Liberalism
Liberalism attempts to efface enmity though friendship resulting in violent demonization of the other
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
The emergence of ultra-politics as the hegemonic modality of enmity in the twentieth century can be viewed as the obscene underside of the
process that has almost without exception been deemed both teleologically and axiologically unproblematic – the disappearance of the
relationship of ‘just enmity’ within the ‘international society’ of liberal-democratic states. This phenomenon, conceptualised in IR theory on different levels in
terms of the ‘peace project’ of European integration, the formation of the ‘transatlantic security community’ and, ultimately, the emergence of a global ‘liberal peace’, is held
to supplant the relationship of the Westphalian ‘just enmity’ by what is avowedly a community of international ‘friendship’. Practically without exception, the
contemporary IR discourse takes enmity as an object of discourse only to the effect of its eventual effacement – enmity is discussed only
as something that ought to be transformed into friendship through a host of political, economic , social and cultural instruments.
Relations of enmity are thus subjected to a thorough discursive delegitimation ; it is as if enmity itself has become the enemy in
contemporary international relations.36¶ The discourse of the liberal ‘peace project’ is not merely oblivious to the relationship of enmity, but is in fact
constituted by this very oblivion – one can barely begin to speak of a global liberal-democratic community without effacing the
possibility of a legitimate relationship of enmity between any two groups, communities or states that may not be transformed into a friendship,
however abstract and impoverished in the affective sense. To recall Schmitt, enmity is the constitutive principle of the political not because of the existence of
any number of concrete enemies (which, after all, may always be done away with empirically), but because of an ever-present possibility of conflict which
arises out of the very existence of difference, implicit in the pluralistic structure of international relations. Thus, the oblivion of enmity
necessarily comes at the price of destabilising the very foundation of the discipline – the concept of ‘the international’.37 Exemplary in this regard is Alexander
Wendt’s argument on the inevitability of the world state,38 which brings the liberal ‘peace project’ to its logical conclusion: the effacement of
political enmity is only possible through the establishment of a global structure of authority that leaves no zone of exteriority in the
global political space and thus does away with the international as such. Similarly, the disavowal of enmity in the contemporary IR is only possible on the basis of an explicit or latent
universalism, which advocates, both teleologically and axiologically, the transformation of the international order into some form of ‘world unity’ , a self-immanent
system without an outside.39 It is at this point that Schmitt’s critique of the aporia of pluralism and monism in liberalism may be fully appreciated in its contemporary timeliness and
urgency, as ‘liberal internationalism’ increasingly becomes an oxymoron
The binary logic of liberalism creates friends and foes- which the latter constitutes an existential enemy in
need of destruction
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
In contrast, the barbarian is simply the savage who resists this civilising correction and thus forfeits his own nature, becoming a monstrous foe. The
barbarian is thus anyone who does
not feel at home in the universal liberal homeland and continues to assert his Otherness despite his inclusion in global civilisation. It is
thus resistance and daringness to resist that turns the savage, a mute and passive Other, into the most extreme form of the enemy, the enemy of both nature and
civilisation, insofar as in the liberal ontology the two function in a mutually supplementary manner. The enemy of liberalism is thus, by necessity, a foe, which entails that a
Schmittian relation of ‘just enmity’ is entirely foreclosed in the liberal political ontology. While in the latter relation a minimal identity of all interacting subjects
as sovereign states provided a common framework of legitimate equality between particularistic communities, liberalism is constituted by a strict dividing line between
societies that are in accordance with ‘natural liberty’ and those that are not . The latter may either function in the modality of the savage, the passively acquiescent
objects of pedagogical correctional practices, or, in the case of their resistance to such interventions, are automatically cast as inhuman and unnatural
foes , with whom no relationship of legitimate equality may be conceivable . If the transformation of the savage into a liberal subject functions as a condition for
‘liberal peace’, the ultra- political engagement with the foe may well be viewed as the continuation of the liberal peace by other means. ¶ Thus, the distinguishing feature of the
liberal ‘politics of enmity’ is that its utopian desire to eliminate enmity as such from the human condition inevitably leads to the return of
the foreclosed in the most obscene form – for liberalism, there indeed are no enemies, just friends and foes. President Bush’s infamous diatribe ‘you are
either with us or against us ’ should not be read as an extreme deviation from the liberal standard of tolerance, but rather as an expression, at an ‘inappropriate’ site of the
transatlantic ‘community of friends’, of the binary liberal logic. When both nature and humanity are a priori on the side of liberalism, there is no need for a Schmittian reflection on how
to manage co-existence with radical alterity for the purposes of limiting a permanently possible confrontation. One is either with ‘us’ or against ‘us’, and, in the latter case, one forfeits
not merely a place within ‘our’ community of friends, but also one’s belonging to nature and humanity
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Economics
Economic engagement with Latin America is based on colonial discourses of cosmopolitanism- papers over
difference
Thompson 12 Cosmopolitanism Sits in Places: Consumption and Cosmopolitics ¶ in Latin America, David THOMPSON, University
of Sydney, Volume 2, Issue 3, October 2012, 59--77, International Review of Social Research
The social and material conditions ¶ of Latin America offer a distinctive regional context from which to re-- think many of these ideas. The
influx of consumer goods
into Latin America, historically as well as in the contemporary world, has largely been directed by the United States and Europe,
following the same colonial routes as discourses of cosmopolitanism itself. As Arnold Bauer (2001) states, this provenance has imbued many
commodities in Latin America with a particular cachet that conditions their meanings and uses. In particular, Bauer’s historical analysis from pre--Columbian to
contemporary Latin America reveals the entrenchment of power relations in which ‘power and the reference for fashion are often
established by foreigners’ (2001: 9). From this domination arises the possibility of cosmopolitanisms which do not conform to any
emancipatory project, but rather form part of a profoundly unequal global society which shapes how many communities, mobile or not, make
tangible a concept as immaterial as human society. By moving beyond the utopian connotations of the term, ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitanisms grounded in
consumption appear as a challenge to contemporary theory. In Latin America, many ethnographies of poor or marginal communities have dealt with the
politics of consumption and demonstrated the importance of commodities in processes of identity construction (de Castro, 2006;; Gregory, 2007;; Perlman, 2007;; van Bavel
and Sell--Trujillo, 2003). These analyses have generally not linked such consumer identities and practices to cosmopolitanism, utilising other frameworks including local
political organisation, racial politics, and consumer citizenship. Nevertheless, they offer considerable insight into cosmopolitanism from the particular
historical and economic position of Latin America. The region has a unique history of rapid urbanisation and social transformations, coupled with successive
political and economic crises, which have created high rates of urban poverty and inequality (de la Rocha et al., 2004;; Hernández and Kellett, 2010;; Thorp, 1998). As such,
an emphasis on urban poverty specifically in Latin America offers insight into forms of cosmopolitanism embedded in conditions of marginality.
Liberalism uses the promise of equality and peace to camouflage political power displacing it in the realm of
economics
Rasch 5 Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle, William Rasch, Professor of Germanic Studies, Ph.D. University of
Washington/Seattle, The South Atlantic Quarterly 104:2, Spring 2005
In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt concludes that ‘‘ all
genuine politi- cal theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but
a dangerous and dynamic being.’’2 This anthropological fiction—and Schmitt is aware of the claim’s fictional status—serves as the logical prem- ise that secures
Schmitt’s definition of the political as the friend/enemy distinction. We live in a world , he says, in which associations with like- minded
others are our only means of security and happiness. Indiscrimi- nate concourse of all with all cannot be the foundation for necessary politi- cal discriminations. Thus, the
anthropological presupposition of evil, guilt, and violence is designed to expose what Schmitt sees as the duplicity of liberal theory, which consists
in using the promise of formal equality to camouflage political power by displacing it in the realms of economics and morality. Liberal
theory denies original enmity by assuming the innate goodness of the human being. Those—communitarians and liberals alike— who say there is no
war presuppose a counterfactual ‘‘ontological priority of non-violence,’’ a ‘‘state of total peace’’3 that invites universal inclusion based on
the ‘‘essential homogeneity and natural virtue of mankind.’’4 If, in such a benign state of nature, violence were to break out, such violence would be
considered a perversion and, if all else were to fail, would have to be extir- pated by an even greater violence . To cite John Locke, this ‘‘State of perfect
Freedom’’ and universal ‘‘Equality,’’ governed solely by reason and natural law, can be disturbed only by an ‘‘Offender’’ who ‘‘declares himself to live by another Rule, than that of reason and
common Equity.’’ Such a ‘‘Criminal’’ has ‘‘declared War against all Mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a Lyon or a Tyger, one of those wild
Savage Beasts, with whom Men can have no Society nor Security.’’5 The political, on this view, emerges only as the result of the Fall—that is, emerges only to fight the war against war, a war
Should one
demur and find the perfect state to be less than advertised , then one’s demurral would most assuredly be recog-nized not as legitimate
political opposition, but rather as evidence of greed, moral perversity, or some other pathological behavior. With its pacific
presuppositions, liberalism, according to Schmitt, dis- solves the specificity of the political and hides the necessarily asymmetric power
relations that mark all political maneuverings. By way of an anthro- pological sleight of hand, liberalism represents itself as an ethos, a moral and economic
emancipation, and not as what it really is, namely, a power- political regime with traditional power-political aims. For Schmitt, distinc- tions,
rather than the effacement of distinctions, structure the space within which we live, including the space of the political. Only within structured
space, space literally marked by human activities, by human groupings and the boundaries they draw, do terms achieve their meanings. Norms, he repeatedly stated, are
derived from situations, normal situations; they are not derived logically from underived first principles. Categories like ‘‘lib- erty’’ and ‘‘equality’’ can have political
significance only when defined and delineated within the sphere of the political . They are neither natural nor innately human qualities; they are not self-evident
truths. Consequently, Schmitt’s suspicion of liberalism, pacifism, or any other -ism that denies an initial and therefore ever-present potential war
of all against all is a suspi- cion of those who wish to make their operative distinctions invisible, and thus incontestable, by claiming the
immorality or illegality of all distinction. Schmitt’s insistence, then, on our ‘‘evil’’ nature is evidence neither of his existential misanthropy nor even, necessarily, of his conservative
authori- tarianism, but rather of his desire to secure the autonomy and necessity of that human mechanism called ‘‘the political. ’’ To the question of whether there is a war,
Schmitt emphatically answers ‘‘yes’’—by which he means to affirm not armed conflict or bloodshed as a virtue in and of itself, but rather the
necessity of the view that the proverbial state of nature is, as Hobbes knew, a state marked by imperfection , and that this imperfection
manifests itself as violence and the guilt associated with it.
always initiated by a sinful or bestial other. It seeks to make itself superflu- ous by restoring or, more progressively, establishing for the first time this natural order of peace.
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Promotion of free trade is an attempt to promote liberal hegemony and squash enmity
Noorani 5 The Rhetoric of Security, Yaseen Noorani, University of Arizona, CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 5, Number 1,
Spring 2005, pp. 13-41, Published by Michigan State University Press, DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2005.0036
Reshaping the world order goes beyond this as well: it entails the disci- plining of the members of this order, whose tendencies toward laxity and fragmentation
provide openings for terrorism. The United States must¶ bring the world into ever greater conformity with the values that will pre- serve and
advance the world. This means not only securing cooperation for U.S. military and police actions by “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities”
(National Security 2002, 6), but reor- ganizing the world according to the principles of free enterprise and free trade . Political antagonism can be
eliminated through its transformation into economic competition. “We have our best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world
where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war” (Bush 2002b). A world order based on economic competition instead of military competition
enables the reign of the politics of civil relations, leading to peace and pros- perity for all. In this order, no nation will need any longer to worry about the
politics of self-preservation—that is, no nation but the United States.
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Hegemony
Hegemony projects liberal monism as the rejection of difference- results in imperial interventions
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
Schmitt’s objection to the liberal monism of the ‘homeland of humanity’ is therefore two-fold. First, the effacement of ontological pluralism,
which subsumes radical alterity under the ‘universal homeland’, must logically entail the suppression of difference through the establishment of a
world autocracy that would no longer be political due to its disavowal of the constitutive criterion of enmity. ‘The day world politics comes to the earth, it will be transformed in a world
police power.’46 This ominous prophecy finds a perfect contemporary illustration in Wendt’s argument on the effacement of political enmity in the world state: ‘Since even a world state would not
be a closed system, it would always be vulnerable to temporary disruptions. However, a world state would differ from anarchy in that it would constitute such disruptions as crime, not as politics or
history. The possibility of crime may always be with us, but it does not constitute a stable alternative to a world state.’47 ¶ Thus, struggles
against hegemony or domination,
which indeed have constituted politics and history as we know them, are recast as a priori criminal acts in the new order of the world state,
calling for global police interventions rather than interstate war. ‘The adversary is no longer called an enemy, but a disturber of peace
and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity .’48 The exclusionary potential of universalism is evident: theoretically, we may easily
envision a situation where a ‘world state’ as a global police structure does not represent anything but itself; not merely anyone, but ultimately
everyone may be excluded from the ‘world unity’ without any consequences for the continuing deployment of this abstract universality as an instrument of legitimation. In Zygmunt
Bauman’s phrase, ‘the “international community” has little reality apart from the occasional military operations undertaken in its name’.49 Thus, for Schmitt, if the monistic project of
liberalism ever succeeded, it would be at the cost of the transformation of the world into a terrifying dystopia of a self-immanent, totally
administered world without an outside and hence without a possibility of flight.
Hegemony means liberalism becomes the universal standard upon which all other states are judged- allows
just wars against non-liberal societies
Rasch 3 Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy, Rasch William, Professor of
Germanic Studies, Ph.D. University of Washington/Seattle, Cultural Critique, 54, Spring 2003, pp. 120-147, Published by University of
Minnesota Press, DOI: 10.1353/cul.2003.0040
In the past, we/they, neighbor/foreigner, friend/enemy polarities were inside/outside distinctions that produced a plurality of worlds ,
separated by physical and cultural borders. When these worlds col- lided, it was not always a pretty picture, but it was often possible to
maintain the integrity of the we/they distinction, even to regulate it by distinguishing between domestic and foreign affairs. If “they” dif- fered, “we” did not
always feel ourselves obliged to make “them” into miniature versions of “us,” to Christianize them, to civilize them , to make of them good
liberals. Things have changed . With a single- power global hegemony that is guided by a universalist ideology, all relations have become,
or threaten to become, domestic. The inner/ outer distinction has been transformed into a morally and legally determined
acceptable/unacceptable one, and the power exists (or is thought to exist), both spiritually and physically, to eliminate the unacceptable once and
for all and make believers of everyone. The new imperative states: the other shall be include d. Delivered as a promise, it can only be received, by some, as an
ominous threat .¶ In his The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov approaches our relationship to the “other” by way of three interlocking distinctions, namely, self/other, same/different,
and equal/unequal. A simple superposition of all three distinctions makes of the other someone who is different and therefore unequal. The problem we have been discussing, however, comes to
This form of the universalist ideology is assimilationist . It denies the
other by embracing him. Of the famous sixteenth-century defender of the Indi- ans, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Todorov writes,¶ [his] declaration of the equality of men is made in the name
light when we make of the other someone who is equal because he is essentially the same.
of a spe- ciWc religion, Christianity. . . . Hence, there is a potential danger of seeing not only the Indians’ human nature asserted but also their Christian “nature.” “The natural laws and rules and
rights of men,” Las Casas said; but who decides what is natural with regard to laws and rights? Is it not speciWcally the Christian religion? Since Christianity is universal- ist, it implies an essential
non-difference on the part of all men. We see the danger of the identiWcation in this text of Saint John Chrysostrom, quoted and defended at Valladolid: “Just as there is no natural differ- ence in the
creation of man, so there is no difference in the call to salva- tion of all men, barbarous or wise, since God’s grace can correct the minds of barbarians, so that they have a reasonable
understanding.”12¶ Once
again we see that the term “human” is not descriptive, but eval- uative. To be truly human, one needs to be
corrected . Regarding the relationship of difference and equality, Todorov concludes, “If it is incontestable that the prejudice of superiority is an obstacle in the road to knowledge, we must also
prejudice of equality is a still greater one, for it consists in identifying the other purely and simply with one’s own ‘ego ideal’
(or with oneself )” (1984, 165). Such identification is not only the essence of Christianity, but also of the doctrine of human rights preached by enthusiasts
like Habermas and Rawls. And such identification means that the other is stripped of his otherness and made to conform to the universal ideal of
what it means to be human. And yet, despite—indeed, because of—the all-encompassing embrace, the detested other is never allowed to leave the stage alto- gether. Even as we seem on
admit that the
the verge of actualizing Kant’s dream, as Habermas puts it, of “a cosmopolitan order” that unites all peoples and abolishes war under the auspices of “the states of the First World” who “can afford
to harmonize their national interests to a certain extent with the norms that deWne the halfhearted cosmopolitan aspi- rations of the UN” (1998, 165, 184), it is still fascinating to see how the
barbarians make their functionally necessary presence felt. John Rawls, in his The Law of Peoples (1999), conveniently divides the world into well-ordered peoples and those who are not well
ordered. Among the former are the “reasonable liberal peoples” and the “de- cent hierarchical peoples” (4). Opposed to them are the “outlaw states” and other “burdened” peoples who are not
worthy of respect. Liberal
peoples, who, by virtue of their history, possess superior insti- tutions, culture, and moral character (23–25), have not only the
right to deny non-well-ordered peoples respect , but the duty to extend what Vitoria called “brotherly correction” and Habermas “gentle compulsion”
(Habermas 1997, 133).13 That is, Rawls believes that the “refusal to tolerate” those states deemed to be outlaw states “is a consequence of liberalism and decency.” Why? Because outlaw states
violate human rights. What are human rights? “What I call human rights,” Rawls states, “are ... a proper subset of the rights possessed by citizens in a liberal constitutional democratic regime, or of
the rights of the members of a decent hierarchical society” (Rawls 1999, 81). Because of their violation of these liberal rights, nonliberal,
nondecent societies do not even have
the right “to protest their condemnation by the world society” (38), and decent peoples have the right, if necessary, to wage just wars against
them . Thus, liberal societies are not merely contingently established and histori- cally conditioned forms of organization; they become the universal standard against
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which other societies are judged. Those found want- ing are banished, as outlaws, from the civilized world. Ironically, one of the signs of their outlaw
status is their insistence on autonomy, on sovereignty. As Rawls states, “Human rights are a class of rights that play a special role in a reasonable Law of Peoples: they restrict the justifying reasons
for war and its conduct, and they specify limits to a regime’s internal autonomy. In this way they reXect the two basic and historically profound changes in how the powers of sovereignty have been
conceived since World War II” (79). Yet, what Rawls sees as a postwar development in the notion of sovereignty—that is, its restriction—could not, in fact, have occurred had it not been for the
unrestricted sovereign powers of the victors of that war, especially, of course, the supreme power of the United States. The limitation of (others’) sovereignty is an imposed limitation, imposed by a
sover- eign state that has never relinquished its own sovereign power. What for Vitoria was the sovereignty of Christendom and for Scott the sovereignty of humanity becomes for Rawls the simple
but uncon- tested sovereignty of liberalism itself.14
The U.S. casts itself as the sole defender of the liberal order- externalizing itself- justifying any violent action
in its defense
Noorani 5 The Rhetoric of Security, Yaseen Noorani, University of Arizona, CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 5, Number 1,
Spring 2005, pp. 13-41, Published by Michigan State University Press, DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2005.0036
The U.S. government’s rhetoric of global security draws its power from simultaneously instantiating Schmitt’s vision of the political as non- normative national selfpreservation and the liberal vision of the political as normative civil relations. The consequence is not that this rhetoric dis- avows political antagonism
within the nation, as Schmitt would have it (though there is an element of this), but that it disavows political antagonism on the global level. I argued above that the positing of a nonnormative situ- ation of national self-preservation, the same as that of a person being mur- dered, is insupportable due to the inescapable presence of a moral ideal in defining the nation’s self and
The U.S. rhetoric of security, however, lifts the paradox to a global
level, and illustrates it more forcefully, by designating the global order’s moral ideal, its “way of life” that is under threat, as civil relations, freedom and peace,
but then making the fulcrum of this way of life an independent entity upon whose survival the world’s way of life depends —the United States.
deciding what threatens it. This applies to all justifications of action grounded in national security.
Just as an aggressor puts himself outside of normativity by initiating violence, so is the victim not bound by any norms in defending his life. As the location of the self of the world order that must
be preserved, the
United States remains unobligated by the norms of this order as long as it is threatened by terrorism. So long as it struggles for the
United States remains external to this order, just as terrorism remains external to the world order so long as it
threatens a universal state of war .¶ Without the United States everyone is dead. Why should this be? The reason is that the United States fully embodies the
life of the world order, therefore, the
values underlying world peace—“freedom, democracy, and free enterprise” (National Security 2002, i)—and is the key to their realization in the global domain. These values are universal, desired
by all and the standard for all. “[T]he United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere” (National Security 2002, 3). The fact that
the United States “possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world” (1) cannot therefore be fortuitous. It cannot but derive from the very founding of the United States
in universal principles of peace and its absolute instantiation of these principles. This results in “unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity” (1). In other words, the United States as a
nation stands, by virtue of its internal constitution, at the forefront of world history in advancing human freedom. It is the subject of history. Its own principle of organization is the ultimate desire of
human- ity, and the development of this principle is always at its highest stage in and through the United States. For this reason, the values of the United States and its interests always coincide, and
these in turn coincide with the interests of world peace and progress. The requirements of American secu- rity reflect “the union of our values and our national interests,” and their effect is to “make
the world not just safer but better” (1).¶ The United States therefore is uniquely charged by history to maintain and advance world peace and universal freedom. ¶ America is a nation with a mission,
and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace—a peace founded upon the dignity and
rights of every man and woman. America acts in this cause with friends and allies at our side, yet we understand our special calling: This great republic will lead the cause of freedom. (Bush
2004a)¶ America can lead the cause of freedom because it is the cause of freedom. “American values and American interests lead in the same direction: We stand for human liberty” (Bush 2003b).
It undertakes actions, like the
invasion of Iraq, that further no motive but the cause of humanity as a whole . “We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that
country to its own people” (Bush 2003a). In this way, the United States is distinct from all other nations, even though all of humanity espouses the same values. Only the United States
can be depended upon for ensuring the endurance of these values because they are the sole basis of its existence . “Others might flag in the face of the
inevitable ebb and flow of the campaign against terrorism. But the American people will not” (NSCT 2003, 29).¶ Any threat to the existence of the United States is
therefore a threat to the existence of the world order, which is to say, the values that make this order possible. It is not merely that the United States, as the most powerful
nation of the free world, is the most capable of defending it. It is rather that the United States is the supreme agency advancing the underlying principle of
the free order. The United States is the world order’s fulcrum, and there- fore the key to its existence and perpetuation. Without the United States, freedom, peace, civil relations among
For this reason, it has no “ambi- tions,” no private national interests or aspirations that would run contrary to the interests of the world as a whole.
nations, and the possibility of civil society are all under threat of extinction. This is why the most abominable terrorists and tyrants single out the United States for their schemes and attacks. They
know that the United States is the guardian of liberal values. In
the rhetoric of security, therefore, the survival of the United States, its sheer existence, becomes the
content of liberal values. In other words, what does it mean to espouse liberal values in the context of the present state of world affairs? It means to desire fervently and promote
energetically the survival of the United States of America. When the world order struggles to preserve its “self,” the self that it seeks to preserve, the primary location of its being, is the United
States.¶ Conferring
this status upon the United States allows the rhetoric of security to insist upon a threat to the existence of the world order
as a whole while confining the non-normative status that arises from this threat to the United States alone. The United States—as the self
under threat— remains external to the normative relations by which the rest of the world continues to be bound . The United States is both a
specific national exis- tence struggling for its life and normativity itself, which makes it coexten- sive with the world order as a whole. For this reason, any challenge to U.S. world
dominance would be a challenge to world peace and is thus imper- missible . We read in The National Security Strategy that the United States will “promote a
balance of power that favors freedom” (National Security¶ 2002, 1). And later, we find out what is meant by such a balance of power. ¶ The United States must and will maintain the capability to
defeat any attempt by an enemy—whether a state or non-state actor—to impose its will on the United States, our allies, or our friends. . . . Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential
adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States. (National Security 2002, 30)¶ The relationship between the United States and the
world order, then, is similar to the relationship in Hobbes between the Leviathan and the civil society that it embodies and represents. The individual members of this civil society are collectively the
author of all of the acts of the Leviathan. Yet they have no authority to influence or oppose the actions of the Leviathan, because they have contracted with each other to give over all of their powers to it. The Leviathan itself remains outside their social contract. Similarly, insofar as the United States embodies the normativity of the world order and ensures its existence, the members of this
when America’s own existence is at stake, they
cannot question the decisions it takes to preserve itself, even when these decisions impinge on their own autonomy .15¶ The externality of the United
order have implicitly agreed to its protection of their civil existence, since this is the only rational thing to do. Therefore,
States to the world order, its national sta- tus as the agent of freedom, means that it must both enhance its independ- ence and autonomy, and reshape the world in its own image. “We are protected
from attack only by vigorous action abroad, and increased vigi- lance at home” (Bush 2002a). Enhancing its own agency means making itself more free, but what this requires is increased selfdiscipline. The United States must become more impervious to fear and external coercion by eliminating its internal vulnerabilities to them. The effect of this imper- ative is to provide justification
for bringing an ever greater number of domains of national life within the purview of national security. At the same time, the United States must make the world more like itself by spreading
freedom abroad. “We know that free peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies” (Bush 2004b). This
requires the strengthening of
American military power and the use of this power against enemies. “We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the
per- ception of weakness” (Bush 2003c). The primary field for the exercise of U.S. power in reshaping the world is the Middle East, because this is the region most engulfed in the state of war. The
Middle East thereby remains outside of the world order and threatens its dissolution. ¶ The Middle East will either become a place of progress and peace, or it will be an exporter of violence and
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terror that takes more lives in America and in other free nations. The triumph of democracy and tolerance in Iraq, in Afghanistan and beyond would be a grave setback for international terror- ism. .
. . Everywhere that freedom takes hold, terror will retreat. (Bush 2003c)¶ In other words, the Middle East can either become a reflection of the United States or remain its polar opposite. In the latter
mode, however, it mirrors the United States more fully, though inversely. As a state of war outside the world order, it has the capacity to transform the world just as the United States does. Just as
the United States exports peace and freedom, in the form of military conquests and economic goods, the Middle East exports violence and terror. Whereas the United States is free of “ambitions” in
its actions, the terrorists of the Middle East are driven by “hateful ambitions.” The Middle East, in effect, signifies the absence of all the values embodied by the United States, and herein lies its
supreme danger. Yet it is in no way irredeemable. Once the Middle East is reshaped into a lesser replica of the United States, it will take its humble position in the world order. The tam- ing of the
Middle East, therefore, requires intensive military action there, but also requires preventing the Middle East and its state of war from pen- etrating the borders of the United States.¶ Reshaping
the world order goes beyond this as well: it entails the disci- plining of the members of this order, whose tendencies toward laxity and fragmentation provide openings
for terrorism. The United States must bring the world into ever greater conformity with the values that will pre- serve and advance the
world. This means not only securing cooperation for U.S. military and police actions by “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities” (National Security 2002, 6),
but reor- ganizing the world according to the principles of free enterprise and free trade. Political antagonism can be eliminated through its transformation into economic competition. “We have our
best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war” (Bush 2002b). A world order based on
economic competition instead of military competition enables the reign of the politics of civil relations, leading to peace and pros- perity for all. In this order, no nation will need any longer to worry
about the politics of self-preservation—that is, no nation but the United States.¶ Reshaping
the world order means above all the exertion of greater con- trol and
surveillance over individuals worldwide. For the rhetoric of secu- rity is at bottom a discourse of our own redemption from the irrational tendencies that threaten collective
existence, which is the whole purpose of creating civil authority in the first place. Now that individuals who have succumbed to irrationality are capable of destroying civilization, national existence
must be organized not just to fend off the threat of other nations but the threat of any individual. This means that the internal moral strug- gle of all individuals all over the world comes under the
purview of U.S. national security. As we have seen, the ultimate threat “lies at the cross- roads of radicalism and technology” (National Security 2002, ii). “Radical- ism” here simply means the
irrational desire for violence, and “technology” is the dangerous power that can free us or enslave us. The United States has superior technology. This technology enables the United States to wage
wars against tyranny with minimal injury to the innocent and to its own forces, and to neutralize the desire for violence and the fear that inhabit everyone. So long as morally disordered individuals
the world authority that we have erected has the capacity to remove
violence and irrationality from the political realm and restore to us our agency, with- out which we are as good as dead. This will not happen any time soon, however. The war
may possess inordinate power, we all come under their thrall due to the fear that we feel. But
against terror- ism will continue “for the foreseeable future” (NSCT 2003, 5). Indeed, vic- tory in this war is not achieved through its conclusion, but through its very prosecution. “Victory,
therefore, will be secured only as long as the United States and the international community maintain their vigilance and work tirelessly to prevent terrorists from inflicting horrors like those of
September 11, 2001” (NSCT 2003, 12). This is because we can only affirm our love of freedom and peace by opposing enslavement and war. If peace reigned absolutely everywhere, it would no
longer be a value that anyone need espouse. We
redeem ourselves of our irrational urges when we suc- cessfully oppose them in ourselves and in
others. The war on terrorism, therefore, is good for us. Its salutary effects are already evident.¶ This time of adversity offers a unique moment of opportunity—a moment
we must seize to change our culture. Through the gathering momentum of millions of acts of service and decency and kindness, I know we can over- come evil with greater good. And we have a
great opportunity during this time of war to lead the world toward the values that will bring lasting peace. (Bush 2002a)¶ Bush here invokes the recurrent American anxiety that Americans are too
individualistic, too materialistic, and therefore lacking in solidarity and conviction. This is the worry that America has become a collection of self- centered consumers motivated by private wants
Through the war on terror, Americans can manifest their
agency and solidarity by empowering the U.S. government to fulfill their agency and solidarity by leading the world to peace . To do this,
however, they must engage in the war themselves by recognizing the threat of terrorism and by feeling the fear for it, deeply. Only in this
way can they redeem themselves from this fear through the moral struggle waged on their behalf by the gov- ernment. Conversely, it is no accident
rather than real agency. The war on terror allows America to show that this is not so, and to make it not so.
that the Middle East is the source of the threat they must fear. Recall that Schmitt stipulates that the enemy is “the other, the stranger . . . existentially something different and alien” (1996, 27).
This is the irreducible enemy, whom one can only, if conflict arises, fight to the death. The Middle East can be cast as this sort of enemy
because it can be easily endowed with characteristics that make it the antipode of the United States, intrinsically violent and irrational . But it
is, at the same time, a region of peoples yearning for freedom who can be redeemed through their submission to moral order and brought into the fold of civilization. So in order to redeem the
Middle East and ourselves from fear and violence, we must confront the Middle East for the foresee- able future with fear and violence.¶ It is important to recognize that the
rhetoric of
security with its war on terrorism is not a program for action, but a discourse that justifies actions.
The United States is not bound to take any specific
action implied by its rhetoric. But this rhetoric gives the United States the prerogative to take whatever actions it decides upon for whatever purpose as long as these actions come within the
It increases fear while claim- ing that the goal is to eliminate fear. It
increases insecurity by pronouncing ever broader areas of life to be in need of security. It increases political antagonism by justifying U.S.
interests in a language of universalism. It increases enmity toward the United States by according the United States a special status over
and above all other nations. The war against terror itself is a notional war that has no existence except as an umbrella term for vari- ous
military and police actions. According to a report published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army, “the global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is
rhetoric’s purview. Judged by its own standards, the rhetoric of security is counterproductive.
dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious” (Record 2003, 41). This assessment assumes that the actions comprehended under the rubric of the “war on terrorism” are designed to achieve a coherent military objective. The
impossible “absolute security,” feared by the report’s author to be the “hopeless quest” of current policy (46), may be useless as a strategic objective, but it
is eminently effective in organizing a rhetoric designed to justify an open-ended series of hegemonic actions. ¶ The rhetoric of security,
then, provides the moral framework for U.S. political hegemony through its grounding in the idea of national agency and in the absolute
opposition between the state of civility and the state of war. Designating the United States as the embodiment of the world order’s underlying principle and the guarantor of
the world order’s existence, this rhetoric places both the United States and terrorism outside the normative relations that should inhere within the world order as a whole. The United States
is the supreme agent of the world’s war against war ; other nations must simply choose sides. As long as war threatens to dissolve the peaceful order of
nations, these nations must submit to the politics of “the one, instead of the many.” They must accept the United States as “something godlike ,” in that in questions of its
own security—which are questions of the world’s security—they can have no authority to influence or oppose its actions. These questions can be decided by the United
States alone. Other nations must, for the foreseeable future, suspend their agency when it comes to their existence . Therefore, the rhetoric of security
allows the United States to totalize world politics within itself in a manner that extends from the relations among states down to the
inner moral struggle experienced by every human being.
The aff’s drive for universal security based around American internationalist leadership results in endless
wars
Zhang 4 Multiplicity or Heterogeneity? The Cultural-Political Paradox in the Age of Globalization, Professor of Comparative Literature
and Chinese and Chair of Department of East Asian Studies at New York University, Xudong, 2004, Cultural Critique, No. 58
One of the more convincing points one can find in Empire is this new political animal's interest not in waging war but in maintaining peace. But this, too, can be understood more forcefully in light
of the Schmittian observation that any
totalistic construction of a homogeneous concept of "us" is based, unwittingly or not, upon a false, apolitical, and
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unattainable illusion of the "total security" of our way of life, our being. The peace-seeking drive indeed touches on a fundamental feature of all
civilizational-imperial orders of "our way of life." From the Great Wall of China to the U.S. national missile defense system, we witness the fantasy about total security. The Great Wall
of China, which had already been penetrated time and again by hordes of nomads even before it gets symbolically "battered down" by the "cheap commodities of the bourgeoisie," in that splendid
passage from The Communist Manifesto, stands to be rebuilt again and again, symbolically or otherwise. Total
security, as Schmitt tells us, is itself built upon the notion of the
enemy as the negated Other ; the Wall denies their existence as human beings while secretly acknowledging the real threat this negated,
dehumanized enemy poses to our wellbeing both from outside and within. The "gap" of the Manhattan skyline left by the destruction of the Twin Towers of World Trade
Center is so profoundly disturbing, a daily reminder for New Yorkers, because it indicates both the increasing impossibility and the increasing necessity of
the Wall: The Wall of modernization and modernity, of classical notions of security and protection, of a sheltered and protected life requires not only the apathy, indifference, and selfindulgence of wealth and power, but also, and more crucially, the work of the state that maintains the physical distance, separation, and destruction of the enemy.
The political homogeneity required by the age of homeland security may prove alarming and ominous to those who cherish civil liberty and civil rights, but there is no denying
that it is intrinsic to the very notion of freedom and wellbeing assumed by globalization and postmodernism as conventionally understood. In this particular sense
one may concede that globalization and postmodernism as ideological discourses represent one more attempt to form a homogenous and exclusive selfidentity by which to manage human conditions in the name of freedom, diversity, and multiplicity, by forming and producing subjectivity and the concept
of human nature as such. In this sense, the Deleuzian philosophy of affirmativity, internal differentiation, and the multiplicity of sameness-all argued against the classical Hegelian notions of
binary opposite and dialectic contradiction-is likely to become a new philosophical ground of ideological and cultural-political contention (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Deleuze 1994). This concept
offers opportunities for the culturalist concept of the liberal-democratic selfhood and sovereignty to deterritorialize and reterritorialize, to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, to exist as the
"body without organs," and to function as the ultimate machine of becoming political in the battle of defining the universal in terms of the par- ticular. With increased communication and interaction
the exclusion upon which the necessary, though disguised, political
has been constructed must be defined in terms of the radical otherness of civilization and humanity as such. If
terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism did not exist, they would have been invented ; the Iraqis, the Serbs, and to some degree the Chinese have been there, as has
between different human groups at a certain level (that is to say, within certain class strata across the world),
cohesiveness and homogeneity
the African continent, in a less visible but, by virtue of its being kept out of sight, more frightening way. In this respect, too, there is little new. And Schmitt, too, has something ready to offer: At the
end of The Conceptof the Political, he observes (and this was 1932): War
is condemned but executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications,
protection of treaties, international police, and measures to assure peace remain . The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a
disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity. A war waged to protect or expand economic power must, with the aid of propaganda, turn
into a crusade and into the last war of humanity. This is implicit in the polarity of ethics and economics, a polarity astonishingly systematic and consistent. But this allegedly non-political
and apparently even antipolitical system serves existing or newly emerging friend-and-enemy groupings and cannot escape the logic of the political.
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Terrorism
Liberalism attempts to address terrorism miss the fact that terrorism is a byproduct of its political ontology
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
Secondly and consequently, the
‘war on terror’ is of particular interest, insofar as the perception of this fundamental inequality is arguably
constitutive of the very subject-position of the ‘terrorist’ foe. Indeed, contemporary terrorist violence may be grasped as a retort of the foe, a
paradoxical refusal of the subject-position, imposed on the enemy of liberalism, through its assumption in a hyperbolic and excessive manner, whereby the foe ‘acts
out’, with a vengeance, an identity attributed to him or her. Let us suggest that the specificity of terrorist violence is not derivative of extra-political factors that may
function as its background motives (poverty, economic inequality, underdevelopment, lack of education, etc.), but is rather a direct
expression of a properly political grievance, a retort against the humiliation, incurred in not being recognised as a legitimate enemy. Our
demonstration of the monistic nature of liberal pluralism and the artefactual character of liberal naturalism points to the fact that the subject-position of the foe is preconstituted in the political
ontology of liberalism, insofar as the appropriation
of the capacity to adjudicate what is human and what, within humanity, is natural makes exclusion
and stigmatisation a permanently available option for dealing with expressions of dissent. The image of the terrorist foe is thus both entirely
contingent from the standpoint of a Schmittian transcendental function of enmity and always-already articulated within the ontological edifice of liberalism. While the
motives for particular acts of terrorism might be distinct in each particular case, we may suggest that all these acts, first, take place in the
preconstituted subject position of the ‘enemy of liberalism’ and , secondly, target precisely this subject position as a priori inferior . Terrorism
is little more and nothing less than the resentful acceptance by the Other of the ultra-political terms of engagement, if only because there is
no other way that the present global order can be legitimately opposed : the refusal to be liberalism’s ‘noble savage’ inevitably turns one into a barbarian. If our
enemy can only be a monster, should we be surprised that the acts of our enemies are so monstrous? The uncanny effect of the liberal
negation of pluralistic antagonism is that in the eyes of its adversaries liberalism may no longer be opposed other than by murderous
and meaningless destruction. To the oft-cited empirical claims that contemporary terrorism has been produced as an effect of Cold War
policies of Western powers, we must add a conceptual thesis: terrorism is the practical expression of that mode of enmity which the
liberal West has constituted as the sole political possibility due to its appropriation of both nature and humanity. The ‘war on terror’ is not
an accidental deviation from the maxims of Western liberalism but rather an exemplary model of the only kind of ‘war’ that the liberal
foreclosure of political enmity permits, i.e. a war against an a priori ‘unjust enemy’ . It should therefore not be surprising to see this model generalised beyond
its original articulation, whereby it becomes a standard response to the worldwide expressions of anti-liberal dissent. For this reason, one gains nothing by attempting to battle
terrorism either on its constitutive ultra-political terms or, as much of critical thought suggests, on the extra-political fronts of development, poverty
relief, civic education, democratisation, etc. Instead, any authentic confrontation with terrorism must logically pass through the stage of
questioning what confrontation, struggle and antagonism actually mean today, who we fight, how we fight and, possibly, whether we still have any
meaningful willingness to fight. During the 1970s, Foucault frequently lamented that the proverbial ‘class struggle’ tended to be theorised in critical thought in terms of ‘class’ rather than ‘struggle’,
the latter term functioning as a mere metaphor.71 The same problem is still with us today – the proliferation of metaphors (‘culture wars’, ‘wars on drugs’, ‘fight against poverty’) is increasingly
obscuring the reflection on the concrete meaning of antagonism in contemporary political life.
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Human Rights
Liberalism’s invocation of absolute humanity creates the inhuman category- guarantees its annihilation
Rasch 3 Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy, Rasch William, Professor of
Germanic Studies, Ph.D. University of Washington/Seattle, Cultural Critique, 54, Spring 2003, pp. 120-147, Published by University of
Minnesota Press, DOI: 10.1353/cul.2003.0040
For Schmitt, the Christianity of Vitoria, of Salamanca, Spain, 1539, represents a concrete, spatially imaginable order, centered (still) in Rome and, ultimately, Jerusale m. This, with its divine
revelations, its Greek philosophy, and its Roman language and institutions, is the polis. This is civilization, and outside its walls lie the barbarians. The humanism
that Schmitt opposes
is, in his words, a philosophy of absolute humanity . By virtue of its universality and abstract norma- tivity, it has no localizable polis, no
clear distinction between what is inside and what is outside. Does humanity embrace all humans? Are there no gates to the city and thus no barbarians
outside? If not, against whom or what does it wage its wars? We can understand Schmitt’s concerns in the following way: Christianity distinguishes between believers and
nonbelievers. Since nonbelievers can become believers, they must be of the same category of being. To be human, then, is the horizon within which the distinction between believers and
nonbelievers is made. That is, humanity
per se is not part of the distinction, but is that which makes the distinction possible. How- ever, once the term
used to describe the horizon of a distinction also becomes that distinction’s positive pole, it needs its negative opposite . If humanity is
both the horizon and the positive pole of the distinction that that horizon enables , then the negative pole can only be something that lies
beyond that horizon, can only be something completely antithetical to horizon and positive pole alike—can only, in other words, be inhuman .
As Schmitt says:¶ Only with the concept of the human in the sense of absolute humanity does there appear as the other side of this concept a
specially new enemy, the inhuman. In the history of the nineteenth century, setting off the inhuman from the human is followed by an even deeper split, the one between the
superhuman and the subhuman. In the same way that the human creates the inhuman, so in the history of humanity the superhuman brings about with a dialectical necessity the subhuman as its
enemy twin.9¶ This
“two-sided aspect of the ideal of humanity” (Schmitt 1988, Der Nomos der Erde, 72) is a theme Schmitt had already developed in his
critiques of liberal pluralism (e.g., 1988, Positionen und Begriffe, 151–65). His complaint there is that liberal pluralism is in fact
not in the least pluralist but reveals itself to be an overriding monism, the monism of humanity. Thus, despite the claims that pluralism
allows for the individual’s freedom from illegitimate constraint, Schmitt presses the point home that political opposition to liberalism is itself
deemed illegitimate. Indeed, liberal pluralism, in Schmitt’s eyes, reduces the political to the social and economic and thereby nullifies all truly
political opposition by simply excommunicating its opponents from the High Church of Human- ity. After all, only an unregenerate
barbarian could fail to recognize the irrefutable benefits of the liberal order.
The Concept of the Political (1976) and his
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Turns Case
Neoliberalism causes leftist backlash- flips aff solvency
Kaltwasser 11 TOWARD POST-NEOLIBERALISM IN LATIN AMERICA? Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Social Science Research
Center Berlin, Latin American Research Review, Vol. 46, No. 2. © 2011 by the Latin American Studies Association
All six books offer rich explanations of Latin
America’s turn to the left and of the rise of political forces that, through the ballot box or popu- lar
mobilization, seek to abandon the neoliberal paradigm . Borrowing the notion of contentious politics from McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly,1 Silva constructs, in three initial
chapters, a theoretical framework that he then applies to four positive (Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela) and two counterfactual examples (Chile and Peru). He argues that market
reforms created significant economic and social exclusion , thus leading to grievances and demands for change from the popular sector
and, in some cases, from the middle class. However, these episodes of neoliberal contention depended on two factors: on the one hand, the development of
associational power (creating new organizations and recasting exist- ing ones), and on the other hand, horizontal linkages between new and traditional
movements, as well as between different social classes. Both factors are decisive in explaining why there has been either substantial or little motivation
for anti-neoliberal protest. Silva finds, for example, that in Peru, “significant insurrectionary movements and a turn to authoritarian- ism that closed political space during Fujimori’s
presidency inhibited the formation of associational power and horizontal linkages among social movement organizations” (231). This explanation is shared by Roberts, who, in the introduction to
Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America?, states that a
bottom-up perspec- tive helps us understand that market reforms may unintentionally have sown
the seeds for protest . That is, the Washington Consensus may have brought with it demands by and on behalf of the poor and
disadvantaged. Lucero explains in this regard that “the neoliberal moment in Latin Amer- ica, understood as one providing new political opportunities, increased economic
threats, and clear targets, provided the conditions and catalysts for a new wave of indigenous mobilization throughout the region” (in Burdick et al.,
64). Goldfrank, in Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America?, similarly contends that the decentralization arising from neoliberalism created new political arenas,
which made municipal governments more relevant as potential showcases for leftist actors. Though different in du- ration and design, Goldfrank’s case studies
of the United Left in Lima, the Workers’ Party in Porto Alegre, the Broad Front in Montevideo, the Radical Cause in Caracas, and the Party of the Democratic Revolution in Mexico City all
illustrate that the
left could learn how to develop and im- plement a new political agenda from the challenges it has faced.
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Bare Life
Liberal monism treats the enemy as inhuman resulting in bare life
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
At the same time, the practical implementation of such a project is hardly conceivable as encountering no resistance. The project of world unity and the effacement
of exteriority is
to have its own enemies, insofar as alterity is ontologically ineradicable. Letting the Other into the global ‘homeland’ does
not eliminate the ‘most extreme possibility’ of violent conflict but makes it impossible to manage it through the pluralistic disjunction of the Self
and the Other. In the world in which there is ‘only a homeland’, radical alterity has no place, both literally and figuratively. In this setting, conflict appears no longer
merely possible but actually inevitable , as the Other is certain to resist its violent inclusion into the homeland of liberal humanity. Yet,
having disposed of genuine political pluralism, liberalism finds itself lacking in any instruments to protect its universal homeland other than
the absolute existential negation of the Other that parallels the conceptual negation of alterity in liberal monism. Thus, the universalisation of the liberal
disposition to embrace the entire humanity actualises the ‘most extreme possibility’ either by exposing the Self to the resentful violence of the Other or by
annihilating the Other to eliminate the former existential threat. It is here that enmity, foreclosed in the symbolic register of liberalism with its monistic universalism, returns
with a vengeance, since the sole consequence of the deployment of the concept of humanity as the referent of the liberal political project
is the inevitable designation of the adversaries of this project in terms of the negation of humanity as, in a strict sense, inhuman beings:¶ When
a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a
universal concept against its military opponent. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as
one can misuse peace, justice, progress and civilisation in order to claim these as one’s own and to deny the same to the enemy.50¶ Indeed,
denial is a central category in the discursive transformation of the enemy into the foe – through manifold gestures of denial the enemy is reduced to the purely negative figure
that reminds us of Agamben’s homo sacer , a bare life that is both worthless and undesirable: ‘The enemy is easily expropriated of his
human quality . He is declared an outlaw of humanity. ... The absolute enemy encounters an undivided humanity that regards him as already always proscribed by God or
by nature.’51 The effect of the liberal foreclosure of enmity, i.e. its bracketing off from the political discourse, is ironically the de-bracketing of violence, its
deregulation and intensification, whereby the enemy is absolutised as the inhuman monster, ‘the negative pole of the distinction, [that] is to be fully and finally consumed without
therefore bound
remainder’.52 In line with Zizek’s diagnosis of ultra-politics, depoliticisation brings about nothing other than an extreme politicisation, which can no longer be contained within the symbolic
dimension of potentiality but must pass into the actuality of existential negation: “Depoliticisation is a political act in a particularly intense way.”53 It is thus the liberal ‘peace project’ itself that
produces its own opposite or perhaps reveals its own essence in the guise of its antithesis.
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Total War
Liberalism engenders a return to the discriminatory concept of war- causes total wars of annihilation
Odysseos 8 Against Ethics? Iconographies of Enmity and Acts of Obligation in Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan, Dr. Louiza
Odysseos, University of Sussex, Department of International Relations, 22 March 2008, prepared for the panel WC63: Practices of Ethics:
Relating/Responding to Difference in International Politics, Annual Convention, International Studies Association
humanity ‘is a polemical word that negates its opposite’
‘excludes the concept of the enemy , because the enemy does
not cease to be a human being’ (1996a: 54). However, in his 1950 book with an international focus, The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt noted how only when ‘man appeared to
be the embodiment of absolute humanity, did the other side of this concept appear in the form of a new enemy : the inhuman’ (2003a: 104). It
becomes apparent that, historically examined, the concept of humanity engenders a return to a ‘discriminatory concept of war’, by which Schmitt meant that it
reintroduces the legitimacy and need for substantive causes of justice in war (Schmitt 2003b: 37-52). This in turn disallows the notion of justus hostis, of
a ‘just enemy’ – explored in section three – associated with the notion of non-discriminatory interstate war which took the shape of guerre en forme (Schmitt 2003a:
142-144). The concept of humanity, therefore, shatters the formal concept of justus hostis, allowing the enemy to now be designated substantively as an
enemy of humanity as such. This leaves the enemy of humanity with no value and open to dehumanisation and political and physical
annihilation (Schmitt 2004: 67). In discussing the League of Nations, Schmitt highlights that, compared to the kinds of wars that can be waged on behalf of
humanity, the¶ interstate European wars from 1815 to 1914 in reality were regulated ; they were bracketed by the neutral Great Powers and were
completely legal procedures in comparison with the modern and gratuitous police actions against violators of peace, which can be
dreadful acts of annihilation (Schmitt 2003a: 186). Enemies of humanity cannot be considered ‘just and equal’. Moreover, they cannot claim
neutrality: one cannot remain neutral in the call to be for or against humanity or its freedom; one cannot, similarly, claim a right to resist or defend oneself, in the sense we understand this right
‘Humanity as such’, Schmitt noted, ‘cannot wage war because it has no enemy’, (1996a: 54), indicating that
(Kennedy 1998: 94; emphasis added). In The Concept of the Political Schmitt argued that humanity
to have existed in the international law of Europe (the jus publicum Europeaum). Such a denial of self-defence and resistance ‘can presage a dreadful nihilistic destruction of all law’ (ibid.: 187).
When the enemy is not accorded a procedural justice and formal equality, the notion that peace can be made with him is unacceptable, as Schmitt detailed through his study of the League of
Nations, which had declared the abolition of war, but in rescinding the concept of neutrality only succeeded in the ‘dissolution of “peace”’ (ibid.: 246). It
is with the dissolution of
peace that total wars of annihilation become possible, where ‘the other’ cannot be assimilated, or accommodated, let alone tolerated: the
friend/enemy distinction is not longer taking place with a justus hostis but rather between good and evil, human and inhuman, where ‘the
negative pole of the distinction is to be fully and finally consumed without remainder’ (Rasch 2003: 137).
American universal liberalism justifies total war and imperialistic ventures- far worse than conflict under
proper enmity
Scheuerman 6 Chapter Three Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond, William E. Scheuerman, Associate professor
of political science at the University of Minnesota, 2006, https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/804/Chapter+3++Scheuerman,+William+-++Morgenthau+and+Schmitt.pdf;jsessionid=C0CC972402D0115F592F1226B3788162?sequence=1
The universalistic aspirations of American liberalism engender a remoralization of international relations that paves the way for the ills
of total war . Although neither Schmitt nor Morgenthau neglects the technological sources of total war, both underline the importance of the revival of the
traditionalistic garb of “just war,” now dressed in the fashionable form of American liberalism and the messianic Wilsonian fantasy of a
war “to end all wars.” American liberalism generates a self-righteous brand of pseudo- humanitarianism blind to the terrible dangers of
state violence waged under the banner of a (fictional) singular humanity. Waged in the name of humanity, ‘liberal wars, far from fulfilling the
liberal hopes [to end war], even brought about the very evils which they were supposed to destroy. Far from being the “last wars,” they were only
the forerunners and pioneers of wars more destructive and extensive” than pre-liberal ones.’23 Those who oppose the Americandominated liberal international system constitute pariahs and criminals deserving of harsh punishment.24 Blurring any meaningful distinction
between legality and morality, those who dare to oppose the American-dominated vision of an international legal community are demonized and
accordingly subjected to terrible brutalities . Warfare reverts to the horrors of the pre-Westphalian era, when foreign foes were more than
mere dueling partners: they were deemed morally inferior and potentially subhuman in character. Even worse: modern technology heightens the ¶
9¶ destructive capacity of modern warfare and makes unprecedented acts of violence relatively commonplace . The apex of liberal selfrighteousness is the view that liberal wars no longer even deserve to be described as “wars.” Although their technological prowess permits liberal states to kill
innocent civilians in any corner of the globe, they purportedly undertake “police action” (or, in more recent parlance, humanitarian intervention) for the sake of enforcing
international law, whereas only outcast (non- liberal) states who dare to challenge liberal hegemony continue to engage in the barbarism of war. The
exclusionary character of liberal universalism is thereby taken to its logical conclusion: liberal international law requires what Schmitt
describes as a discriminatory concept of war .25 In stark contrast to the Hobbesian traits of the early Westphalian system, sovereign states no longer possess equal or
“neutral” rights to wage war. As Morgenthau observes, liberals criticize autocratic and totalitarian wars, yet ‘on the other hand, [when] the use of arms is intended to bring the blessings
of liberalism to peoples not yet enjoying them or to protect them against despotic aggression, the just end may justify means otherwise condemned.’26¶ This vision of liberal
international law rests on a false universalism because self- interested liberal great powers (e.g., the United States and Great Britain) skillfully exploit
it in order to pursue their specific power interests . Liberal international law is not, in fact, representative of a mythical “world public
opinion”: it reflects specifically Anglo-American political and economic ideals . Following Schmitt, Morgenthau believes that one can still detect an instinctual
sense for “the political” (or, in Morgenthau’s terminology, sound pursuit of “power politics” and the “national interest”) behind the moralistic and legalistic rhetoric of American foreign policy.27
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American global influence rests, Schmitt similarly argues, on an uncritical acceptance by the world community of a set of inherently
imperialistic liberal categories that dutifully reflect U.S. (and sometimes Anglo-American) political and economic interests.28
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Ontology First
Prefer contextual evidence- the political ontology of liberalism conditions policies
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
For our purposes in this article, liberalism
is understood as a historical constellation of discursive practices , irreducible to, though intertwined with,
various trends within liberal political philosophy.5 While it is certainly possible to demonstrate the relevance of Schmitt’s critique with respect to classical liberal
philosophy, the liberal internationalism of Schmitt’s lifetime and even the contemporary strands of the liberal discourse,6 this article is not concerned with confirming, in a critical exegesis of the
we are interested in illuminating the conditions of possibility of the contemporary
politics of enmity, which ironically appears to follow Schmitt’s ominous prophecy about the ‘globalisation’ of liberalism almost to the
letter. In other words, we shall focus on liberal thought as it renders itself practical, illuminating the conceptual presuppositions of political
ontology that condition the possibility of concrete practices of liberal government.7 We therefore approach liberalism neither as a cohesive
political philosophy nor as a historical succession of diverse yet internally monolithic doctrines but as a discourse in the Foucauldian sense, a ‘system of dispersion’ of
statements on government and freedom, whose conditions of possibility are similarly dispersed and frequently aporetic.8
infinite corpus of liberal thought, the validity of Schmitt’s critique. Instead,
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Policy Failure
Their claims are false- factoids politically constructed to make the plan appear to be a good- causes serial
policy failure
Dillon and Reid 00 Michael, Professor of Politics – University of Lancaster, and Julian, Lecturer in International Relations – King’s
College, “Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, January / March, 25(1)
More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in
terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy
domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and
orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions
of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client
populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault
politically contestable
indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of
Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy
problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy , for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for
policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the
institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable
ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological
assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the
level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to
respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is
precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure --the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for
the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy failure is no
simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and
epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through
population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable.
fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and
unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global
liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process
committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A
nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth,
opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized
by it.
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Solves Liberalism
Our politics deconstructs liberalism
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
In this focus on aporias, we necessarily approach liberalism from the perspective of its critics as a discourse that is already problematised.11 Yet, although critical in the Kantian sense, our approach
should not be read as a reduction of diverse strands of liberalism to any single ‘straw figure’, let alone an endorsement of any version of ‘anti-liberalism’ as a remedy to the liberal politics of enmity.
Rather than being mere defects of inconsistency, the ontological aporias of liberalism account for its internal heterogeneity and auto-critical potential as well as for its permanent return to its
The critical perspective must therefore always be inherent in liberalism
itself, insofar as its foundations are never stabilised. Thus, the Schmittian approach of this article does not constitute a positive term in the
binary opposition of liberalism and realism but rather functions as a deconstructive supplement of liberalism that disrupts the operation
of this opposition through an immanent problematisation of the aporetic ontology of liberalism. ¶ This article will concentrate on two foundational aporias
relating to liberal ideals of pluralism and freedom, whose actualisation in liberal governmental practices remains dependent on the recourse to
their opposites, i.e. monistic universalism and governmental intervention. As we shall argue below, this entails that the ‘illiberal’ excess of
liberalism, whose contemporary manifestation is evident in the present politics of the ‘war on terror’ , is in no way a deviation from
whatever we may consider a liberal ‘standard’. Consequently, nothing is gained by banishing what we shall term the ‘ultra-politics of the foe’
from liberalism as a wholly alien element, conveniently ascribed to Schmitt as the paradigmatic ‘enemy of liberalism’. Rather than attempt to ‘ purify’ liberalism
and thereby reinforce the opposition between realism and liberal internationalism, a critical engagement with this extreme form of enmity
must engage with the ontological foundations of liberalism itself. While today’s IR realism increasingly resembles a wearily defensive orthodoxy,13 a Schmittian
deconstruction of liberalism arguably exemplifies the possibility of another, rather more heterodox kind of realism that would attain the critical
force of classical realism in disturbing the self-evidences of contemporary world politics.
foundational problematics that simultaneously function as its problematic foundations.12
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Solves War
Bracketing of conflict is empirically validated
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
In contrast to Zizek’s diagnosis, Schmitt’s
work on international relations has persistently articulated both a possibility and the actual historical existence of such a ‘common
most famous example is of course the Westphalian states’ system and the juridical arrangemen t of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, which
established a structure of managing antagonism that Schmitt termed the ‘bracketing’ (Hegung) of war: its limitation through
rationalisation and humanisation.27 The Westphalian system delegitimised the recourse to the theological discourse of ‘just war’,
responsible for the intense violence of the ‘wars¶ of religion’, and instead relegitimised interstate war, as long as both sides in such a
conflict approached each other as a ‘just enemy’ (justus hostis), existentially equal to the Self. The mutual recognition of the principle of
sovereignty among European powers created the possibility of limiting the violence and intensity of military conflicts by virtue of the
absence of any possibility that either party could appropriate the title of ‘just war’ for its own actions and thereby stigmatise, demonise
or criminalise the enemy, depriving it of equal status and permitting its indiscriminate treatment . War was therefore by definition treated
as ‘just on both sides’ and whatever was permitted to one party was also permitted to the other: ‘ The essence of such wars was a regulated contest of forces
gauged by witnesses in a bracketed space . Such wars are the opposite of disorder.’28
ground’. The
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Solves Alterity
Maintenance of distinctions creates the most ethical relationship with otherness
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
What interests us in this modality of the
friend–enemy distinction is the explicit requirement of equality between opponents in the common space
of the ‘regulated contest of forces’. Indeed, the ontological equality of the self and the enemy is a fundamental characteristic of Schmitt’s
thought that strongly contrasts with the asymmetric constellation of the self–other interaction in the ‘poststructuralist ethics’ of Levinas
and Derrida.29 While for the latter the asymmetrical relation, whereby the Other calls the Self in question, is a prerequisite for the assumption of a genuinely ethical ‘responsibility’, for
Schmitt any asymmetry, privileging either the Self or the Other, paves the way for absolute enmity and the actualisation of the ‘most
extreme possibility’ of existential negation . For Schmitt, being called in question by the Other is not in itself an ethical but simply a horrifying experience of the possibility of
violent death. What makes the encounter with the Other contingently ethical is precisely the possibility of the resolution of this asymmetry in
the establishment of an empirical equality that actualises the equality that is always already inscribed in the transcendental function of the friend–enemy distinction: after all, in
Schmitt’s ontology of radical alterity any two subjects are equal simply by virtue of being wholly different from each other.30 Schmitt’s normative
preference for the Westphalian modality of enmity is therefore conditioned both by its correspondence to the ontological condition of
equality-in-alterity and the desire to avoid the absolutisation of hostility that is inherent in any asymmetrical self–other interaction.¶
What made possible the actualisation of ontological equality in the Westphalian period was the exclusion of all substantive (moral, economic or aesthetic) criteria, on the basis of which the
properties or actions of any party could be deemed ‘unjust’, thus permitting the appropriation of the justa causa by the other party. In contrast, the ultra- political constellation,
discussed by Zizek, is marked precisely by the presence of positive normative content in the positions of the opponents, whose incommensurability precludes the existence of a common ground
between them. In this constellation, the
Self inevitably perceives the Other not as a legitimate existential equal, but as a pure negation of the
normative principles of the Self, the otherness of the Other reduced to a mere denial of the Self. Insofar as these normative principles are treated by the Self as unproblematic and
unchallengeable, the enemy, viewed in solely negative terms of their refusal, becomes not merely the adversary in a regulated contest but an
object of hate and revulsion , or, in Schmitt’s terms, an inimicus rather than a hostis. ¶ Schmitt makes a distinction between hostis and inimicus to stress the specificity of the
relationship of a properly political enmity. The concept of inimicus belongs to the realm of the private and concerns various forms of moral, aesthetic or economic resentment, revulsion or hate that
are connoted by the archaic English word ‘foe’, whose return into everyday circulation was taken by Schmitt as an example of the collapse of the political into the moral.31 In contrast, the concept
of hostis is limited to the public realm and concerns the existential threat posed to the form of life of the community either from the inside or from the outside. In simple terms, the enemy (hostis) is
what we confront, fight and seek to defeat in the public realm, to which it also belongs, while the foe (inimicus) is what we despise and seek either to transform into a more acceptable life-form or to
annihilate. Contrary to Zizek’s attribution of the ‘ultra-politics of the foe’ to Schmitt, he persistently emphasised that the
enemy conceptually need not and normatively
should not be reduced to the foe: ‘The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally.’32 In Schmitt’s argument, during the twentieth century
such a reduction entailed the destruction of the symbolic framework of managing enmity on the basis of equality and the consequent absolutisation of enmity, i.e. the actualisation of the ‘most
extreme possibility’: [Presently] the war is considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity. Such a war is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of
the political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. In
other words, he is an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only.33 ¶ Thus, it
appears impossible to equate Schmitt’s notion of enmity with
the friend–foe politics that was the object of his criticism. The very anti- essentialism, which Zizek’s reading recovers in Schmitt, brings into play a plurality of possible modalities of
enmity. To argue, as Schmitt certainly does, that enmity is an ontological presupposition of any meaningful political relation , is certainly not to
valorise any specific construction of the friend–enemy distinction. What is at stake is the need to distinguish clearly between what we have termed the transcendental
function of the friend–enemy distinction (and in this aspect, Zizek’s own work on politics, particularly his recent ‘Leninist’ turn,34 remains resolutely Schmittian) and the empirical plurality of
historical modalities of enmity. Schmitt’s philosophical achievement arguably consists in his affirmation of the irreducibility of the former function and the perils of its disavowal, an achievement
that is not tarnished by a plausible criticism of his historical excursus on the Jus Publicum Europaeum as marked by a conservative nostalgia for a system that, after all, combined the sovereign
equality of European powers with the manifestly asymmetric structure of colonial domination.
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A2: Enmity Bad
Enmity is inevitable- it’s a question of disposition
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
Thus, the
enemy is neither an unproblematic empirical given nor a contingent effect of a belligerent fantasy, done away with through the global
progress of cosmopolitanism. Enmity as such is a perennial feature of the human condition , being, in its transcendental function, nothing more
than a vigilant receptivity to the existence of the Other .24 However, the concrete form that relations of enmity take is historically variable and
dependent on the distinction at work at concrete historical moments. Ironically, yet another misreading of Schmitt, particularly evident in today’s
discussion, consists precisely in attributing to him a highly intense and violent construct of enmity.
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A2: Liberalism is pluralistic
Liberalism may self-identify as pluralistic but it is the opposite- it relies on universal cosmopolitanism
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
Schmitt’s deconstruction of liberal universalism focuses on the concept of humanity that is crucial in the liberal displacement of the¶ friend–enemy distinction and the
consequent foreclosure of enmity. For Schmitt, despite
its self-proclaimed appreciation of pluralism, liberalism is essentially a monistic ideology
which supplants the concrete pluralism of the sovereign states’ system by abstract individualism, which is after all reducible to the
monistic category of humanity:¶ The pluralistic theorists, for the most part, speak a highly individualistic language when it comes to the most decisive points of their
arguments. ... Ethical individualism has its correlate in the concept of humanity. But just that is quintessential universalism and monism, and
completely different from a pluralistic theory.40¶ Contrary to frequent misunderstandings, Schmitt’s seminal critique of liberal pluralism is not itself antipluralistic, but rather aims at restoring, in the conditions of the monistic universalisation of the concept of humanity, the pluralism that is the ontological
condition of the existence of international politics. As Schmitt famously argues in The Concept of the Political,41 the political world is, ontologically,
a pluriverse not a universe, i.e. its pluralism is not something to be fostered through liberal institutional designs, but something that is
always present from the outset, in the form of concrete, spatially delimited polities, and thus creates the very possibility of international
politics as we know it:¶ In a spiritual world ruled by the law of pluralism, a piece of concrete order is more valuable than any empty generalisations of a false totality.
For it is an actual order, not a constructed and imaginary abstraction. ... It would be a false pluralism, which played world- comprehending totalities off against the concrete
actuality of such plural orders.42¶ Schmitt’s concern with the liberal effacement of pluralism in the name of cosmopolitan humanit y does not merely seek
to unravel hypocrisy or ridicule inconsistency but has more serious implications in the context of the transcendental function of enmity that we have introduced above.
For Schmitt, the
‘pluriversal’ structure of international relations accords with his political ontology that affirms the ineradicability of difference , from
which, as we have discussed, Schmitt infers the ever-present ‘extreme possibility’ and the demand for the decision on the enemy. Moreover, the actual pluriversal
structure of international relations satisfies the criterion of equality between the Self and the Other by precluding the emergence of a global
hierarchy, whereby a particular ‘concrete order’ lays a claim to represent humanity at large. While this pluralism does nothing to eliminate the ‘most
extreme possibility’ of violent conflict, it may be said at least to suspend it in its potentiality by retaining the possibility that the ‘existentially different and alien’ might not
become the enemy simply by remaining outside the ‘concrete order’ of the Self and thus positing no actual existential threat. Moreover, as long as the boundary
between the Self and the Other is present, there remains a possibility that whatever conflicts may ensue from the irreducible ontological
alterity, they may be resolved on the basis of the mutually recognised sovereign equality of the Self and the Other in the domain of the international,
which by definition is effaced by any political unification of humanity.43 Thus, for Schmitt ‘ it is an intellectual historical misunderstanding of an
astonishing kind to want to dissolve these plural political entities in response to the call of universal and monistic representations, and to
designate that as pluralist’.44
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A2: Perm
Alt is a pre-requisite- perm is insolvent without a prior ontological investigation
Prozorov 6 Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International
Relations at Petrozavodsk State University, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 2006, 35: 75 DOI:
10.1177/03058298060350010801
In the interbellum of the 1990s, one
frequently encountered discussions of who the new enemy might be after the demise of the Soviet Union . As
while
the ‘who’ question may be entrusted to history and politics, what requires reflection is a question of how enmity is to be managed .
Should we maintain the present ultra-politics of the foe despite its evident boomerang effects on our societies, or should we attempt to
return to the structure of ‘legitimate enmity’ of the Westphalian era, expanding it beyond the European system to the entire international
society? Should we put our trust in and surrender our freedom to the governmental apparatuses of ‘homeland security’ or should we heed
Schmitt’s warning that no security may ever be attained as long as our sense of the world is that in which there is ‘only a homeland’? ¶
This article has demonstrated that it is impossible to evade these questions by the plethoric yet repetitive discourse on overcoming enmity in the
chimerical project of ‘world unity’ and that answers to these questions require an interrogation of many ontological assumptions that
frame the conduct of modern liberal politics. We have seen that the desire to dispense with enmity as such, arising out of liberal
epistemico- moral certitude, has not brought about a ‘universal friendship’ but rather produced a limited but universalistic community,
which permanently feels threatened due to its incomplete embrace of the globe and, for the same reason, threatens everyone outside itself. The
escape from the murderous ultra-politics of the foe is impossible unless it passes through the stage of an ontological critique of liberalism,
subsequent events have demonstrated, it is entirely redundant to attempt a theoretical deduction of the concrete enemy, which is after all always constituted in a political decision. However,
hence the present importance of Schmitt.
Imposition of the global liberal order and the friend/enemy distinction are incompatible
Moreiras 4 A God Without Sovereignty. Political Jouissance. The Passive Decision, Alberto Moreiras, Duke University, CR: The New
Centennial Review, Volume 4, Number 3, Winter 2004, pp. 71-108, Published by Michigan State University Press, DOI:
10.1353/ncr.2005.0023
The friend/enemy division is peculiar at the highest level, at the level of the order of the political. This peculiarity ultimately destroys the under- standing of the political as based on and
circumscribed by the friend/enemy division. The
idea of an order of the political presupposes that the enemies of the order as such —that is, the enemy
configuration that can overthrow a given order , or even the very idea of an order of the political—are generated from the inside: enemies of the order are
not properly external enemies. This is so because the order of the political, as a principle of division, as division itself, always already regulates, and thus
subsumes, its externality : externality is produced by the order as such, and it is a function of the order. Or rather: a principle of division can have no externality. Beyond the
order, there can be enemies, if attacked, but they are not necessarily enemies of the order: they are simply ignorant of it. ¶ At the highest level of the
political, at the highest level of the friend/ enemy division, there where the very existence of a given order of the polit- ical is at stake, the
order itself secretes its own enmity. Enmity does not pre- cede the order: it is in every case produced by the order. The friend/enemy division is therefore a division that is subordinate
to the primary ordering division, produced from itself. The friend/enemy division is therefore not supreme: a nomic antithesis generates it, and thus stands above it. The order of the
political rules over politics. The political ontology implied in the notion of an order of the political deconstructs the political ontology
ciphered in the friend/enemy division, and vice versa. They are mutually incompatible . Either the friend/enemy division is supreme, for a
determi- nation of the political, or the order of the political is supreme . Both of them cannot simultaneously be supreme. The gap between
them is strictly untheorizable . If the friend/enemy division obtains independently of all the other antitheses as politically primary, then there is no order of the political. If there is an
order of the political, the order produces its own political divisions.
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A2: Violent
Our argument is not to encourage violence but to limit this inevitable condition of human nature
Rasch 5 Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle, William Rasch, Professor of Germanic Studies, Ph.D. University of
Washington/Seattle, The South Atlantic Quarterly 104:2, Spring 2005
But as Max Weber observed firsthand, ascetic quietude leads so often, so quickly, and so effortlessly to the chiliastic violence that knows no bounds;11 and as we have lately observed anew, the
The true goal of those who say there is no war is to
eliminate the war that actually exists by eliminating those Lyons and Tygers and other Savage Beasts who say there is a war. This war is the truly
savage war . It is the war we witness today. No amount of democratization, pacification, or Americanization will mollify its effects, because
democratization, pacifica- tion, and Americanization are among the weapons used by those who say there is no war to wage their war to
end all war.¶ What is to be done? If you are one who says there is a war, and if you say it not because you glory in it but because you fear it and
hate it, then your goal is to limit it and its effects, not eliminate it, which merely intensi- fies it, but limit it by drawing clear lines within
which it can be fought, and clear lines between those who fight it and those who don’t, lines between friends, enemies, and neutrals, lines between
millennial messianism of imperial rulers and nomadic partisans alike dominates the contemporary political landscape.
combatants and noncombat- ants. There are, of course, legitimate doubts about whether those ideal lines could ever be drawn again; nevertheless, the question that we should ask is not how can we
establish perpetual peace, but rather a more modest one: Can symmetrical relationships be guaranteed only by asymmetrical ones? According to Schmitt, historically this has been the case. ‘‘The
tradi- tional Eurocentric order of international law is foundering today, as is the old nomos of the earth. This order arose from a legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world, from an
unrepeatable historical event. Only in fantastic parallels can one imagine a modern recurrence, such as men on their way to the moon discovering a new and hitherto unknown planet that could be
exploited freely and utilized effectively to relieve their struggles on earth’’ ( ). We have since gone to the moon and have found nothing on the way there to exploit. We may soon go to Mars, if
current leaders have their way, but the likelihood of finding exploitable populations seems equally slim. Salvation through spatially delimited asymmetry, even were it to be desired, is just not on the
horizon. And salvation through globalization, that is, through global unity and equality, is equally impossible, because today’s asymmetry is not so much a localization of the exception as it is an
invisible generation of the exception from within that formal ideal of unity, a generation of the exception as the difference between the human and the inhuman outlaw, the ‘‘Savage Beast, with
whom Men can have no Society nor Security.’’ We are, therefore, thrown back upon ourselves, which is to say, upon those artificial ‘‘moral persons’’ who act as our collective political
if we think to establish a differentiated unity of dis- crete political
entities that once represented for Schmitt ‘‘the highest form of order within the scope of human power,’’ then we must symmetrically manage
the necessary pairing of inclusion and exclusion without denying the ‘‘forms of power and domination’’ that inescapably accompany
human ordering. We must think the possibility of roughly equivalent power rela- tions rather than fantasize the elimination of power
from the political uni- verse. This, conceivably, was also Schmitt’s solution. Whether his idea of the plurality of Großräume could ever be carried out under
contemporary cir- cumstances is, to be sure, more than a little doubtful, given that the United States enjoys a monopoly on guns, goods, and
the Good, in the form of a supremely effective ideology of universal ‘‘democratization.’’ Still, we would do well to devise vocabularies
that do not just emphatically repeat philo- sophically more sophisticated versions of the liberal ideology of painless, effortless, universal equality.
The space of the political will never be created by a bloodless, Benjaminian divine violence. Nor is it to be confused with the space of the simply human. To dream the dreams of
universal inclusion may satisfy an irrepressible human desire, but it may also always produce recurring, asphyxiating political nightmares of absolute
exclusion.
identities.Theyusedtobecalledstates.Whattheywillbecalledinthefuture remains to be seen. But,
Liberalism is the more violent system
Thorup 6 In Defence of Enmity - Critiques of Liberal Globalism, Mikkel Thorup, Ph.D.-dissertation, Institute of Philosophy and the
History of Ideas, Department of the History of Ideas, University of Aarhus, Denmark, January 2006
This is what we’ve been trying to show, using
enmity as a central category, and taking political enmity as our point of departure. Not because political enmity is
inherently benign, far from it. It comes with problems of its own, which liberal globalism is set on this earth to emphasize and criticize. The use of
political enmity here is, so to speak, not political but scientific. Political enmity is a theoretical, not a real-historical, concept. It is implied in the logic of diplomacy, classical
international law and regularized warfare and it has some relevance in actual events on the battleground , at least before industrialized warfare. But, this
has been no exercise in nostalgia for a lost warrior ethics. Theoretically, we have to presuppose the political enmity, no matter how much it in actual practice has been contaminated by the other
forms of enmity.¶ Politically, it
serves as a critical corrective and, perhaps, as a minimal utopia (as one of my fellow PhD-students called it); the best to hope for. Instead
of the current liberal monopolization of legitimacy , we should perhaps learn to recognize “legitimate non-democratic regimes that have the
authority to contain tensions but can also respect a minimum of social and political rights” (Hirst 2002: 8). Postmodern state or chaos and war are not the exclusive options of a global
era. Most non- liberal regimes do not engage in continuous war-making; they do not sponsor terrorism or engage in constant repression .
Most people, even in non-liberal regimes, do live good lives. Iin an interview conducted by myself and Frank Beck Lassen, John Gray said: “ People can live
peaceful, productive, creative lives without a global liberal society” (Thorup & Lassen 2005: 12). This is the truth, which liberalism refuses to see .
Paul Hirst (2002: 8) insists: “It is what regimes do that matters” and in this, liberal democracies may have less reason to claim moral superiority. Just as there is no necessary
connection between liberalism and democracy, there is none between liberalism and pacifism. This is the illusion of liberalism , radicalized by
liberal globalism. And it’s the illusion we’re attempting to undermine by insisting on the political nature of post-political liberalism. Politics as conflict is not
inherently despotic or violent. That is just the liberal way of understanding and presenting it (like politics as technique is understood and described as
inauthentic in much liberalism critique). Here, politics as conflict has served us as a counter- narrative to a hegemonic politics as technique and as a way
to see the workings within politics as technique of the exact same dangers, that is being delegated to politics as conflict, that is, repression, exclusion,
creation of ‘others’, war internally and externally.¶ The liberal-humanitarian discourse becomes the language of intervention ; and
“thinking their interventions benign or neutral, they intervene more often than they otherwise might” (Kennedy 2004: 23); and often in areas
and ways, which doesn’t help the ‘victims’ intended. This is not to deny the need, often, of intervention of various kinds, and it is certainly no questioning of the humanitarian
motive. The ideology critique of this text is not to seek the real, hard reason behind the soft spoken words but to take the humanitarian language and motivation serious and then to look critically at
the implications of good intentions. It’s my thesis that a not insignificant part of the problem lies in an insufficient understanding of power. David Kennedy says that the humanitarian blindness
“often begins at the moment the humanitarian averts his eyes from his own power” (2004: 329, my italics).
Humanitarians and liberal opinion-makers wield enormous
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power, also military power, but this goes unnoticed in and through the liberal-humanist discourse, which consistently cast off any appearance of own power
and names power as evil and as the problem to be overcome. This is the understanding of self and power constitutive of liberalism, that I’ve told.
The intention is to limit conflict- the alternative is more unlimited enmities and more ferocious wars
Thorup 6 In Defence of Enmity - Critiques of Liberal Globalism, Mikkel Thorup, Ph.D.-dissertation, Institute of Philosophy and the
History of Ideas, Department of the History of Ideas, University of Aarhus, Denmark, January 2006
Gary Ulmen (1987: 188) says that “so long as the state retained the monopoly on politics – the enemy was clearly the public enemy”. The decline in enmities is connected to loss of the state’s
monopoly on deciding and naming the enemy. Contrary
to presentations of Schmitt as celebrating ¶ 113¶ enmity and war, as the hidden architect behind the wars of the
was Schmitt’s intention to limit both enmity and war to its most contained forms. War is only justified in
“the situation of a real fight against a real enemy, not through any ideals, programmes or normativities” (1996a: 49). Implicit is the conviction
that both enmity and war is ineradicable , which may be true or wrong, but once you accept the thesis of the permanence of the political (as
conflict), you’re obligated to find ways to live with enmity and war . His thesis is that the decline of the nation state will not mean less enmity or
fewer wars but rather more unlimited enmities and more ferocious wars. The three enmities above are the ones usually discussed in connection with Schmitt. But
present American administration,33 it
there are more concepts of enmity implicit in his work:
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A2: Nazi
Indicts of Schmitt serve to uphold the liberal system
Piccone and Ulmen 2 Uses and Abuses of Carl Schmitt, Paul Piccone, founder and long-time editor of the journal TELOS, doctorate
in philosophy at SUNY, Gary Ulmen, telos Winter 2002 vol. 2002 no. 122 3-32
Within such a dogmatic scientistic context pretending to be ideologi- cally neutral, history
becomes straightjacketed as an ontogenetic recon- struction of the
triumphal march of managerial-liberal thought. Particular categories developed within particular contexts to explain particular phe- nomena are automatically
integrated within the predominant universalist framework to apply anywhere, anytime. The same happens with particular political
ideologies. Thus, competing systems such as Nazism, fascism and communism — and now even Islamic integralism — are not only system- atically
misinterpreted, but, like liberalism, also universalized as perma- nent threats to a managerial liberalism hypostatized as the natural outcome of evolution and,
therefore, as normal and natural. This is why such politi- cal thinkers as Schmitt, whose work was always inextricably rooted in problematic
historical contexts,6 can still be perceived as an ideological threat, long after those concrete historical situations have faded into the past .
Because for a time he was opportunistically embroiled in Nazi poli- tics, and the new American anti-Schmittians see Nazism and fascism not
as closed chapters of 20th century history, but rather as permanent threats to liberalism, Schmitt’s ideas are interpreted as something that
must be eliminated , rather than as challenges to be confronted . In fact, the demoni- zation of Schmitt is instrumentalized to defend the
status quo and predom- inant relations of domination. Assumed to be the best of all possible systems, the existing managerial framework,
run by a New Class elite, legitimates itself as the only bulwark of Western values by opposing all competing alternatives — equally rooted in the Western tradition — as
lethal threats to its own interpretation of progress and emancipation. Dur- ing the Cold War, the de facto permanent state of emergency contributed to the academic institutionalization of this state of
affairs, which persists long after both Nazism and fascism (and, after 1989, even communism) have been vanquished. Worse yet, it perpetuates a Jacobin historiography predicated on the primacy of
economic, rather than of political parame- ters, primarily as a struggle between capitalism and the poor, rather than as one between intellectuals and politicians versus ordinary people.
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Humans Good
Humans are not inherently violent- the world has grown more peaceful
Pinker 11 Steven Pinker is Professor of psychology at Harvard University "Violence Vanquished" Sept 24
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180.html
On the day this article appears, you will read about a shocking act of violence. Somewhere in the world there will be a terrorist bombing, a
senseless murder, a bloody insurrection. It's impossible to learn about these catastrophes without thinking, "What is the world coming
to?"¶ But a better question may be, "How bad was the world in the past?"¶ Believe it or not, the world of the past was much worse . Violence has been in decline
for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species.¶ The decline, to be sure, has not been
smooth. It has not brought violence down to zero, and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is a persistent historical development,
visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children .¶ This claim, I know, invites skepticism, incredulity, and sometimes
anger. We tend to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which we can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.
There will always be enough violent deaths to fill the evening news, so people's impressions of violence will be disconnected from its
actual likelihood.¶ Evidence of our bloody history is not hard to find. Consider the genocides in the Old Testament and the crucifixions in the New, the gory mutilations in Shakespeare's tragedies and Grimm's fairy tales, the British
monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled with their rivals.¶ Today the decline in these brutal practices can be quantified . A look at the numbers shows that
over the course of our history, humankind has been blessed with six major declines of violence.¶ The first was a process of
pacification: the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural
civilizations, with cities and governments, starting about 5,000 years ago.¶ For centuries, social theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau speculated from their armchairs about what life was like in a "state of nature." Nowadays we can do
better. Forensic archeology—a kind of "CSI: Paleolithic"—can estimate rates of violence from the proportion of skeletons in ancient sites
with bashed-in skulls, decapitations or arrowheads embedded in bones. And ethnographers can tally the causes of death in tribal peoples that have recently
lived outside of state control.¶ These investigations show that, on average, about 15% of people in prestate eras died violently,
compared to about 3% of the citizens of the earliest states. Tribal violence commonly subsides when a state or empire imposes control
over a territory, leading to the various "paxes" (Romana, Islamica, Brittanica and so on) that are familiar to readers of history. ¶ It's not
that the first kings had a benevolent interest in the welfare of their citizens. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his livestock from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding. From his point of view,
The second decline of violence was a civilizing process that is best
documented in Europe. Historical records show that between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a 10to 50-fold decline in their rates of homicide.¶ The numbers are consistent with narrative histories of the brutality of life in the Middle Ages, when highwaymen made travel a risk to life and limb and
dinners were commonly enlivened by dagger attacks. So many people had their noses cut off that medieval medical textbooks speculated about techniques for growing them back.¶ Historians attribute this decline to
the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories into large kingdoms with centralized authority and an infrastructure of
commerce. Criminal justice was nationalized, and zero-sum plunder gave way to positive-sum trade. People increasingly controlled
their impulses and sought to cooperate with their neighbors.¶ The third transition, sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, took off with the Enlightenment. Governments
and churches had long maintained order by punishing nonconformists with mutilation, torture and gruesome forms of execution, such as burning, breaking, disembowelment, impalement and sawing in half. The 18th century
saw the widespread abolition of judicial torture, including the famous prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment" in the eighth
amendment of the U.S. Constitution.¶ At the same time, many nations began to whittle down their list of capital crimes from the
hundreds (including poaching, sodomy, witchcraft and counterfeiting) to just murder and treason . And a growing wave of countries abolished blood sports, dueling,
witchhunts, religious persecution, absolute despotism and slavery.¶ The fourth major transition is the respite from major interstate war that we have seen since the
end of World War II. Historians sometimes refer to it as the Long Peace .¶ Today we take it for granted that Italy and Austria will not
come to blows, nor will Britain and Russia. But centuries ago, the great powers were almost always at war, and until quite recently, Western European
countries tended to initiate two or three new wars every year. The cliché that the 20th century was "the most violent in history" ignores the second half of the
century (and may not even be true of the first half, if one calculates violent deaths as a proportion of the world's population). ¶
Though it's tempting to attribute the Long Peace to nuclear deterrence, non-nuclear developed states have stopped fighting each other
as well. Political scientists point instead to the growth of democracy , trade and international organizations—all of which, the
statistical evidence shows, reduce the likelihood of conflict . They also credit the rising valuation of human life over national grandeur—a hard-won lesson of two world wars.¶ The fifth trend,
such squabbling is a dead loss—forgone opportunities to extract taxes, tributes, soldiers and slaves.¶
which I call the New Peace, involves war in the world as a whole, including developing nations. Since 1946, several organizations have tracked the number of armed conflicts and their human toll world-wide. The bad news is that for several
decades, the decline of interstate wars was accompanied by a bulge of civil wars, as newly independent countries were led by inept governments, challenged by insurgencies and armed by the cold war superpowers.¶ The less bad news is that civil
since the peak of the cold war in the 1970s and '80s, organized conflicts of all kinds—
civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, terrorist attacks—have declined throughout the world, and their death
tolls have declined even more precipitously. ¶ The rate of documented direct deaths from political violence (war, terrorism, genocide
and warlord militias) in the past decade is an unprecedented few hundredths of a percentage point . Even if we multiplied that rate to account for
unrecorded deaths and the victims of war-caused disease and famine, it would not exceed 1%.¶ The most immediate cause of this New Peace was the demise of communism,
which ended the proxy wars in the developing world stoked by the superpowers and also discredited genocidal ideologies that had justified the sacrifice of vast numbers of eggs to make a utopian omelet.
Another contributor was the expansion of international peacekeeping forces, which really do keep the peace—not always, but far more often than when
adversaries are left to fight to the bitter end.¶ Finally, the postwar era has seen a cascade of "rights revolutions"—a growing revulsion against aggression on
smaller scales. In the developed world, the civil rights movement obliterated lynchings and lethal pogroms, and the women's-rights movement has
helped to shrink the incidence of rape and the beating and killing of wives and girlfriends.¶ In recent decades, the movement for children's rights has
significantly reduced rates of spanking, bullying, paddling in schools, and physical and sexual abuse . And the campaign for gay rights has
forced governments in the developed world to repeal laws criminalizing homosexuality and has had some success in reducing hate
crimes against gay people.¶ Why has violence declined so dramatically for so long? Is it because violence has literally been bred out of
us, leaving us more peaceful by nature? ¶ This seems unlikely. Evolution has a speed limit measured in generations, and many of these
declines have unfolded over decades or even years. Toddlers continue to kick, bite and hit ; little boys continue to play-fight; people of all ages continue to snipe and bicker,
wars tend to kill far fewer people than wars between states. And the best news is that,
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It's more likely that human nature has always comprised inclinations toward
violence and inclinations that counteract them—such as self-control, empathy, fairness and reason—what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." Violence has declined
because historical circumstances have increasingly favored our better angels .¶ The most obvious of these pacifying forces has been
the state , with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force . A disinterested judiciary and police can defuse the temptation of
exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge and circumvent the self-serving biases that make all parties to a dispute believe that they are on the side of the angels.¶ We see evidence of the
pacifying effects of government in the way that rates of killing declined following the expansion and consolidation of states in tribal
societies and in medieval Europe. And we can watch the movie in reverse when violence erupts in zones of anarchy, such as the Wild West, failed states and neighborhoods controlled by mafias and street gangs, who
can't call 911 or file a lawsuit to resolve their disputes but have to administer their own rough justice.¶ Another pacifying force has been commerce , a game in which everybody
can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become
more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in
reciprocal altruism.¶ For example, though the relationship today between America and China is far from warm, we are unlikely to
declare war on them or vice versa. Morality aside, they make too much of our stuff, and we owe them too much money. ¶ A third peacemaker has been
and most of them continue to harbor violent fantasies and to enjoy violent entertainment.¶
cosmopolitanism—the expansion of people's parochial little worlds through literacy, mobility, education, science, history, journalism and mass media. These forms of virtual reality can prompt people to take the perspective of people unlike
These technologies have also powered an expansion of rationality and objectivity in human
affairs. People are now less likely to privilege their own interests over those of others. They reflect more on the way they live and
consider how they could be better off. Violence is often reframed as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won. We
themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.¶
devote ever more of our brainpower to guiding our better angels. It is probably no coincidence that the Humanitarian Revolution came on the heels of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, that the Long Peace and rights revolutions
coincided with the electronic global village.
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No root cause
Reject the infinite number of root causes to conflict that debilitate action
Moore 4 John Moore 4 chaired law prof, UVA. Frm first Chairman of the Board of the US Institute of Peace and as the Counselor on
Int Law to the Dept. of State, Beyond the Democratic Peace, 44 Va. J. Int'l L. 341, Lexis
If major interstate war is predominantly a product of a synergy between a potential nondemocratic aggressor and an absence of effective
deterrence, what is the role of the many traditional "causes" of war? Past, and many contemporary, theories of war have focused on the role of
specific disputes between nations, ethnic and religious differences, arms races, poverty and social injustice , competition for resources, incidents and
accidents, greed, fear, perceptions of "honor," and many other factors. Such factors may well play a role in motivating aggression or generating fear and manipulating public
opinion. The reality, however, is that while some of these factors may have more potential to contribute to war than others, there may well be an
infinite set of motivating factors, or human wants, motivating aggression. It is not the independent existence of such motivating factors
for war but rather the circumstances permitting or encouraging high-risk decisions leading to war that is the key to more effectively controlling
armed conflict . And the same may also be true of democide. The early focus in the Rwanda slaughter on "ethnic conflict," as though Hutus and Tutsis had begun to slaughter each other
through spontaneous combustion, distracted our attention from the reality that a nondemocratic Hutu regime had carefully planned and orchestrated a genocide against Rwandan Tutsis as well as its
Hutu opponents. 158 Certainly if we were able to press a button and end poverty, racism, religious intolerance, injustice, and endless disputes, we would want to do so. Indeed, democratic
governments must remain committed to policies that will produce a better world by all measures of human progress. The broader
achievement of democracy and the rule of law will itself assist in this progress . No one, however, has yet been able to demonstrate the
kind of robust correlation with any of these "traditional" causes of war that is reflected in the "democratic peace." Further, given the difficulties
in overcoming many of these social problems, an approach to war exclusively dependent on their solution may doom us to war for
generations to come. [*394] A useful framework for thinking about the war puzzle is provided in the Kenneth Waltz classic Man, the State and War, 159 first published in 1954 for the
Institute of War and Peace Studies, in which he notes that previous thinkers about the causes of war have tended to assign responsibility at one of the three levels of individual psychology, the nature
of the state, or the nature of the international system. This tripartite level of analysis has subsequently been widely copied in the study of international relations. We might summarize my analysis in
this classical construct by suggesting that the most critical variables are the second and third levels, or "images," of analysis. Government structures, at the second level, seem to play a central role in
levels of aggressiveness in high-risk behavior leading to major war. In this, the "democratic peace" is an essential insight. The third level of analysis, the international system, or totality of external
incentives influencing the decision to go to war, is also critical when government structures do not restrain such high-risk behavior on their own. Indeed, nondemocratic systems may not only fail to
constrain inappropriate aggressive behavior, they may even massively enable it by placing the resources of the state at the disposal of a ruthless regime elite. It is not that the first level of analysis,
the individual, is unimportant - I have already argued that it is important in elite perceptions about the permissibility and feasibility of force and resultant necessary levels of deterrence. It is, instead,
that the second level of analysis, government structures, may be a powerful proxy for settings bringing to power those who are disposed to aggressive military adventures and in creating incentive
structures predisposed to high-risk behavior. We might also want to keep open the possibility that a war/peace model focused on democracy and deterrence might be further usefully refined by
adding psychological profiles of particular leaders as we assess the likelihood of aggression and levels of necessary deterrence. Nondemocracies' leaders can have different perceptions of the
necessity or usefulness of force and, as Marcus Aurelius should remind us, not all absolute leaders are Caligulas or Neros. Further, the history of ancient Egypt reminds us that not all Pharaohs were
disposed to make war on their neighbors. Despite the importance of individual leaders, however , the
key to war avoidance is understanding that major international war
is critically an interaction, or synergy, of certain characteristics at levels two and three - specifically an absence of [*395] democracy and
an absence of effective deterrence. Yet another way to conceptualize the importance of democracy and deterrence in war avoidance is to
note that each in its own way internalizes the costs to decision elites of engaging in high-risk aggressive behavior. Democracy internalizes
these costs in a variety of ways including displeasure of the electorate at having war imposed upon it by its own government. And
deterrence either prevents achievement of the objective altogether or imposes punishing costs making the gamble not worth the risk . 160 III.
Testing the Hypothesis Hypotheses, or paradigms, are useful if they reflect the real world better than previously held paradigms. In the complex world of foreign affairs and the war puzzle,
No general construct will fit all cases even in the restricted category of "major interstate war;" there are simply too
many variables. We should insist, however, on testing against the real world and on results that suggest enhanced usefulness over other
constructs. In testing the hypothesis, we can test it for consistency with major wars. That is, in looking, for example, at the principal interstate wars in the twentieth century, did they present
perfection is unlikely.
both a nondemocratic aggressor and an absence of effective deterrence? 161 And although it, by itself, does not prove causation, we might also want to test the hypothesis against settings of
potential wars that did not occur. That is, in non-war settings, was there an absence of at least one element of the synergy? We might also ask questions about the effect of changes on the
international system in either element of the synergy. That is, what, in general, happens when a totalitarian state makes a transition to stable democracy or vice versa? And what, in general, happens
when levels of deterrence are dramatically increased or decreased?
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Imperialism Good
Take your ideological blinders off- only critiquing liberal power ignores the violence of non-liberal regimes
Shaw 2 Martin Shaw, professor of international relations at University of Sussex, April 7, Uses and Abuses of Anti-Imperialism in the
Global Era, http://www.martinshaw.org/empire.htm
It is fashionable
in some circles, among which we must clearly include the organizers of this conference, to argue that the global era is seeing 'a new imperialism' that can be blamed for the problem of 'failed states' (probably among many others). Different contributors to this strand of thought name this imperialism in different ways, but novelty is clearly a
critical issue. The logic of using the term imperialism is actually to establish continuity between contemporary forms of Western world power and older forms first so named by Marxist and other
theorists a century ago. The
last thing that critics of a new imperialism wish to allow is that Western power has changed sufficiently to
invalidate the very application of this critical concept. Nor have many considered the possibility that if the concept of imperialism has a
relevance today, it applies to certain aggressive, authoritarian regimes of the non-Western world rather than to the contemporary West. In
this paper I fully accept that there is a concentration of much world power - economic, cultural, political and military - in the hands of Western elites. In my recent
book, Theory of the Global State, I discuss the development of a 'global-Western state conglomerate' (Shaw 2000). I argue that 'global' ideas and institutions, whose significance characterizes the
new political era that has opened with the end of the Cold War, depend largely - but not solely - on Western power. I hold no brief and intend no apology for official Western ideas and behaviour.
yet I propose that the idea of a new imperialism is a profoundly misleading , indeed ideological concept that obscures the realities of
power and especially of empire in the twenty-first century. This notion is an obstacle to understanding the significance, extent and limits
of contemporary Western power. It simultaneously serves to obscure many real causes of oppression, suffering and struggle for
transformation against the quasi-imperial power of many regional states. In order to explore the intellectual and political problem that 'a new imperialism' poses it is
And
necessary to do several things. Obviously, we must explore the old imperialism, but before we can do that we must look at the roots of the concept in the idea of empire itself. Indeed, my argument
is that the coherence of the concept of 'imperialism' lay partly in its connection with the idea of empire. In analysing imperialism, classic Marxist writers (see Table 1) linked the new economic
modern Western
power has almost entirely abandoned formal empire. Hence the idea of neo-imperialism, rooted in economic exploitation buttressed only by indirect political dominance,
relations of late nineteenth-century world capitalism to the phenomenon of political empire. Late twentieth-century anti-imperialists have struggled with the problem that
has already a history of half a century. The problem that these critics have faced is that their chosen concept has become more and more abstracted from the real politics of empire. I argue that in
the global era, this
separation has finally become critical. This is for two related reasons. On the one hand, Western power has moved into new territory, largely uncharted -- and I
politics of empire remain all too real, in classic forms that recall both modern imperialism and
earlier empires, in many non-Western states, and they are revived in many political struggles today. Thus the concept of a 'new imperialism' fails to deal with both
key post-imperial features of Western power and the quasi-imperial character of many non-Western states. The concept overstates Western power and understates the
dangers posed by other, more authoritarian and imperial centres of power. Politically it identifies the West as the principal enemy of the
world's people, when for many of them there are far more real and dangerous enemies closer to home. I shall return to these political issues at the end of
argue unchartable -- with the critical tools of anti-imperialism. On the other hand, the
this paper.
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Liberalism Good
Collapse of western cultural institutions results in mass violence
Michael J. Thompson 3 is the founder and editor of Logos and teaches political theory at Hunter College, CUNY. His new book, Islam
and the West: Critical Perspectives on Modernity has just been released from Rowman and Littlefield Press. “Iraq, Hegemony and the
Question of American Empire,” http://www.logosjournal.com/thompson_iraq.htm, Accessed date: 1-14-13 y2k
It is rare that political debates typically confined to the left will burst into the mainstream with any degree of interest, let alone profundity. But this has not been the case with the question of
For many on the left, this was a political question with a cut and dried answer: the
American-led military campaign was a clear expression of its imperial policies and motives, the object of which is economic global
dominance. But in some ways, such assumptions voiced by much of the American and European left, specifically among its more dogmatic and
sectarian strains, mischaracterize and even misunderstand the reality of American global power and the possible contributions of the western
political tradition more broadly. With each passing day the events in Iraq deliberately evoke the question of American empire, and not without good reason. The neoconservative position on
American empire and the recent military campaigns in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
this has been to see American policies and its position in the world as that of a hegemon: a nation which seeks to lead the constellation of world nations into the end of history itself where the fusion
of "free" markets and liberal democracy is seen to be the institutional panacea for the world's ills and with this the enlargement of capital's dominion. But the deepening morass of the occupation of
Iraq belies such intentions. Paul Bremer's statement that "we dominate the scene [in Iraq] and we will continue to impose our will on this country," is a concise statement betraying not America's
imperial motives, but, rather, the way that its hegemonic motives have ineluctably been pushed into a logic of imperial control. America has, in other words, become an empire by default, not by
intention, and the crucial question now is: how are we to respond? But the charge of America-as-empire is not as obvious as many have assumed even though many superficial elements of its history
point to that conclusion. Students of American political history know of the dual policies of American empire from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "Gunboat Diplomacy" was the imperial
policy of backing up all foreign territorial policies with direct military force. From the Philippines to Cuba, Grenada and Haiti, this was an effective policy, copied from the British and their acts in
the Opium War, which allowed the United States to extend itself as a colonial power. "Dollar Diplomacy" was America's effort, particularly under President William Howard Taft, to further its
foreign policy aims in Latin America and the Far East through the use of economic power. Theodore Roosevelt laid the groundwork for this approach in 1905 with his Roosevelt Corollary to the
Monroe Doctrine, maintaining that if any nation in the Western Hemisphere appeared politically or fiscally so unstable as to be vulnerable to European control, the United States had the right and
obligation to intervene. Taft continued and expanded this policy, starting in Central America, where he justified it as a means of protecting the Panama Canal. In 1909 he attempted unsuccessfully to
establish control over Honduras by buying up its debt to British bankers. In Nicaragua, American intervention included funding the country's debts to European bankers. In addition, the State
Department persuaded four American banks to refinance Haiti's national debt, setting the stage for further intervention in the future. Both policies were imperial to the extent that they wanted to
manipulate and use other countries as geographical means for domestic economic and political ends. To expand markets were meant, during the late 19th century and early 20th, as a means for
displacing excess domestic industrial productivity, the cause of most cyclical recessions during that period. Goods produced in excess could be unloaded in more local foreign markets and there was
also the return of agricultural goods and natural resources, too. We
could probably say that America is once again becoming an empire of sorts, but this is something
that is more recent than some may in fact think. The Cold War was a battle of hegemons, between the U.S. and the Soviets, and this has, since the latter's
collapse and the ascendancy of neoconservatives to positions of influence and power in Washington, turned into a political situation where American interests are
pursued unilaterally without the intervening countervailing tendencies of international institutions such as the UN. And it is here that the moment of empire begins to eclipse that of
hegemony: when a single nation begins to hold direct control over foreign territory for its own interests. The Iraqi oil fields were up and running not long after the fall of Baghdad where, even now,
electricity and clean water are in short supply if even existent. (An Iraqi friend in Baghdad tells me that they have power for about one hour a day.) When I visited Baghdad in January of 2003,
several of my colleagues and I were fortunate enough to be able to have a private conversation with several members of the faculty from the College of Political Science at Baghdad University. For
them, the consensus for political change in Iraq was clear: the ousting of Saddam Hussein was necessary for the Iraqi people and any semblance of political freedom, but it was his regime that was
the problem and it was the regime, they felt, that should be the focus of UN sanctions and pressure, not the total annihilation of state institutions that the Ba'athists had inhabited and, in part, created.
(See the interview in Logos, Winter 2003: 2.1 at www.logosjournal.com/issue_2.1.pdf) Hegemony in international terms without some kind of competing force, such as the Soviets,
can
clearly lead to the abuse of power and a unilateralist flaunting of international institutions that do not serve at the imperium's whim. But this should
not mean that hegemony itself is a negative concept. Although empire is something rightfully reviled, hegemony may not be as bad as
everyone thinks. We need to consider what is progressive and transformative in the ideas and values of the western republican and
liberal traditions . We need to advocate not an anti-hegemonic stance in form, but an anti-hegemonic and anti-imperialist stance in content, one that advocates the particular interests of
capital of the market in more broad terms rather than the universal political interests of others. Rather than choose between western hegemony on the one hand and
political and cultural relativism on the other, we need to approach this problem with an eye toward cosmopolitanism and what the
political theorist Stephen Eric Bronner has called "planetary life." Simple resistance to American "imperial" tendencies is no longer enough for a
responsible, critical and rational left . Not only does it smack of tiers-mondisme but at the same time it rejects the realities of globalization
which are inexorable and require a more sophisticated political response. The real question I am putting forth is simply this: is it the case that hegemony
is in itself inherently bad? Or, is it possible to consider that, because it can, at least in theory, consist of the diffusion of western political ideas,
values and institutions, it could be used as a progressive force in transforming those nations and regions that have been unable to
deal politically with the problems of economic development, political disintegration and ethnic strife? It is time that we begin to consider the
reality that western political thought provides us with unique answers to the political, economic and social problems of the world and this
includes reversing the perverse legacies of western imperialism itself . And it is time that the left begins to embrace the ideas of the
Enlightenment and its ethical impulse for freedom, democracy, social progress and human dignity on an international scale. This is
rhetorically embraced by neoconservatives, but it turns out to be more of a mask for narrower economic motives and international realpolitik, and hence their policies and values run counter to the
Western ideas and institutions can find affinities in the rational strains of thought in almost every
culture in the world , from 12th century rationalist Islamic philosophers like Alfarabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sinna) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) to India's King Akbar and China's Mencius. The
key is to find these intellectual affinities and push them to their concrete, political conclusions. Clearly, the left's problem with the idea of the spread of western political
ideas and institutions is not entirely wrong. There was a racist and violent precedent set by the French and English imperial projects lasting well into the 20th century. The problem
is in separating the form from the content of western hegemonic motives and intentions. And it is even more incorrect to see the
occupation of Iraq as a symptom of western ideas and Enlightenment rationalism. Nothing could be further from the case and the sooner this is
realized, the more the left will be able to carve out new paths of critique and resistance to a hegemony that is turning into empire. And it is
radical impulses of Enlightenment thought.
precisely for this reason why, in institutional terms, the UN needs to be brought back in. Although there are clearly larger political and symbolic reasons for this, such as the erosion of a unilateralist
framework for the transition from Hussein's regime, there is also the so-called "effect of empire" where Iraq is being transformed into an instrument of ideological economics. The current U.S. plan
for Iraq, one strongly supported by Bremer as well as the Bush administration, will remake its economy into one of the most open to trade, capital flows and foreign investment in the world as well
as being the lowest taxed. Iraq is being transformed into an neo-liberal utopia where American industries hooked up to the infamous "military-industrial complex" will be able to gorge themselves
on contracts for the development of everything from infrastructure to urban police forces. As time moves on, we are seeing that Iraq provides us with a stunning example of how hegemony becomes
empire. It is an example of how the naïve intention of "nation building" is unmasked and laid bare, seen for what it truly is: the forceful transformation of a sovereign state into a new form suited to
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narrow western (specifically American) interests. Attempts to build a constitution have failed not from the lack of will, but from the lack of any political discourse about what form the state should
take and about what values should be enshrined in law. Ruling bodies have become illegitimate almost immediately upon their appointment because there exists almost complete social
In the end, America has become, with its occupation of Iraq and its unilateralist and militaristic
empire in the most modern sense of the term. But we should be careful about distinguishing empire from a hegemon and the
implications of each . And since, as Hegel put it, we are defined by what we oppose, the knee-jerk and ineffectual response from the modern left has
been to produce almost no alternative at all to the imperatives that drive American empire as seen in places such as Iraq. To neglect the military,
economic and cultural aspects of American power is to ignore the extent to which it provokes violent reaction and counterreaction. But at the same time, to ignore the important contributions of western political ideas and institutions and their power and efficacy in
achieving peace and mutual cooperation , whether it be between ethnic communities or whole nations themselves, is to ignore the very source
of political solutions for places where poverty , oppression and dictatorships are the norm and remain stubbornly intact. Western
hegemony will not be seen as problematic once the values of the western political tradition and specifically those of the Enlightenment, from the liberal rule of
law, the elimination of the arbitrary exercise of power and the value of political and social equality, are set in a cosmopolitan global framework. Only then will the words of
fragmentation, and the costs of knitting it together are too great for America to assume.
posture, an
Immanuel Kant take on any kind of concrete meaning for people the world over. "To think of oneself as a member of a cosmopolitan society in compliance with state laws is the most sublime idea
that man can have about his predicament and which cannot be thought of without enthusiasm."
Liberalism solves conflict escalation
Schureman 6—William E. Scheueman is Professor of Political Science @ Indiana University, Constellations, 13(1), p. 116
Schmitt offers three reasons in support of this view. First, he implicitly relies on the stock argument that “authentic” politics necessarily elides legal regulation: when conflicts
involve “existentially” distinct collectivities faced with “the real possibility of killing,” the attempt to tame such conflicts by juridical means is destined to fail, or at least badly distort the fundamental (political) questions at hand.
Insofar as the partisan fighter represents one of the last vestiges of authentic (i.e., Schmittian) politics in an increasingly depoliticized world, he has to dub any attempt to regulate the phenomenon at hand as misguided and maybe
this argument relies on Schmitt’s controversial model of politics, as outlined eloquently but unconvincingly in his famous Concept of the Political. To be
sure, there are intense conflicts in which it is naïve to expect an easy resolution by legal or juridical means. But the argument suffers from a
troubling circularity : Schmitt occasionally wants to define “political” conflicts as those irresolvable by legal or juridical devices in order then to argue
against legal or juridical solutions to them. The claim also suffers from a certain vagueness and lack of conceptual precision . At times, it seems to be directed against
trying to resolve conflicts in the courts or juridical system narrowly understood; at other times it is directed against any legal regulation of intense conflict. The former argument is surely stronger than the latter. After all, legal
devices have undoubtedly played a positive role in taming or at least minimizing the potential dangers of harsh political antagonisms. In the Cold War, for
example, international law contributed to the peaceful resolution of conflicts which otherwise might have exploded into horrific violence ,
even dangerous. Yet
even if attempts to bring such conflicts before an international court or tribunal probably would have failed.22
Globalization is inevitable, US is key—solves every impact.
Panitchpakdi 4—Supachai Panitchpakdi is the UN Conference on Trade and Development General, “American Leadership and the
World Trade Organization: What is the Alternative?”, 26 February 2004, http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/spsp_e/spsp22_
e.htm Accessed date: 8-27-12 y2k
The U nited S tates, more than any single country, created the world trading system. The US has never had more riding on the strength of that
US leadership — especially in the current Doha trade talks — is indispensable to the system's success. It is true that as the WTO's importance to the world economy increases,
so too does the challenge of making it work: there are more countries, more issues, trade is in the spot light as never before. But the fiction that there is an alternative to the WTO — or to US
leadership — is both naïve and dangerous . Naïve because it fails to recognize that multilateralism has become more — not less — important to advancing US
interests. Dangerous because it risks undermining the very objectives the US seeks — freer trade, stronger rules, a more open and
secure world economy . The Doha Round is a crucial test. The core issues — services, agriculture, and industrial tariffs — are obviously directly relevant to the US. America is highly competitive in services — the
I can sum up my message today in three sentences:
system. And
fastest growing sector of the world economy, and where the scope for liberalization is greatest. In agriculture too the US is competitive across many commodities — but sky-high global barriers and subsidies impede and distort
agricultural trade. Industrial tariffs also offer scope for further liberalization — especially in certain markets and sectors. But what is at stake in these talks is more than the economic benefits that would flow from a successful deal.
The real issue is the relevance of the multilateral trading system. Its expanded rules, broader membership, and binding dispute mechanism means that the new WTO — created less than ten years ago — is pivotal to international
economic relations. But this means that the costs of failure are also higher — with ramifications that can be felt more widely. Advancing the Doha agenda would confirm the WTO as the focal point for global trade negotiations,
and as the key forum for international economic cooperation. The credibility of the institution would be greatly enhanced. But if the Doha negotiations stumble, doubts may grow, not just about the WTO's effectiveness, but about
the future of multilateralism in trade. This should be a major concern to the US for two reasons: First, the US is now integrated with the world economy as never before. A quarter of US GDP is tied to international trade, up from
10 per cent in 1970 — the largest such increase of any developed economy over this period. A third of US growth since 1990 has been generated by trade. And America's trade is increasingly global in scope — 37 per cent with
Canada and Mexico, 23 per cent with Europe, 27 per cent with Asia. Last year alone, exports to China rose by almost 30 per cent. The US has also grown more reliant on the rules of the multilateral system to keep world markets
open. Not only has it initiated more WTO dispute proceedings than any other country — some 75 since 1995 — according to USTR it has also won or successfully settled most of the cases it has brought. The point is this: even the
US cannot achieve prosperity on its own; it is increasingly dependent on international trade, and the rules-based economic order that underpins it. As the biggest economy, largest trader and one of the most open markets in the
world, it is axiomatic that the US has the greatest interest in widening and deepening the multilateral system. Furthermore, expanding international trade through the WTO generates increased global prosperity, in turn creating yet
strengthening the world trading system is essential to America's wider global objectives. Fighting
terrorism, reducing poverty , improving health , integrating China and other countries in the global economy — all of these issues are linked, in
one way or another, to world trade. This is not to say that trade is the answer to all America's economic concerns; only that meaningful solutions are inconceivable without it. The world trading
system is the linchpin of today's global order — underpinning its security as well as its prosperity. A successful WTO is an example of how
multilateralism can work. Conversely, if it weakens or fails, much else could fail with it. This is something which the US — at the epicentre of a more interdependent world — cannot afford to ignore.
These priorities must continue to guide US policy — as they have done since the Second World War. America has been the main driving force behind eight rounds of
multilateral trade negotiations, including the successful conclusion of the Uruguay Round and the creation of the WTO. The US — together with the EU — was instrumental in launching
more opportunities for the US economy. The second point is that
the latest Doha Round two years ago. Likewise, the recent initiative, spearheaded by Ambassador Zoellick, to re-energize the negotiations and move them towards a successful conclusion is yet another example of how essential the
signalling that the US remains committed to further liberalization, that the Round is moving, and that other countries have
a tangible reason to get on board. The reality is this: when the US leads the system can move forward; when it withdraws, the system drifts.
US is to the multilateral process —
The fact that US leadership is essential, does not mean it is easy. As WTO rules have expanded, so too has as the complexity of the issues the WTO deals with — everything from agriculture and accounting, to tariffs and
telecommunication. The WTO is also exerting huge gravitational pull on countries to join — and participate actively — in the system. The WTO now has 146 Members — up from just 23 in 1947 — and this could easily rise to
170 or more within a decade. Emerging powers like China, Brazil, and India rightly demand a greater say in an institution in which they have a growing stake. So too do a rising number of voices outside the system as well. More
and more people recognize that the WTO matters. More non-state actors — businesses, unions, environmentalists, development NGOs — want the multilateral system to reflect their causes and concerns. A decade ago, few people
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had even heard of the GATT. Today the WTO is front page news. A more visible WTO has inevitably become a more politicized WTO. The sound and fury surrounding the WTO's recent Ministerial Meeting in Cancun — let
alone Seattle — underline how challenging managing the WTO can be. But these challenges can be exaggerated. They exist precisely because so many countries have embraced a common vision. Countries the world over have
turned to open trade — and a rules-based system — as the key to their growth and development. They agreed to the Doha Round because they believed their interests lay in freer trade, stronger rules, a more effective WTO. Even in
Cancun the great debate was whether the multilateral trading system was moving fast and far enough — not whether it should be rolled back. Indeed, it is critically important that we draw the right conclusions from Cancun —
which are only now becoming clearer. The disappointment was that ministers were unable to reach agreement. The achievement was that they exposed the risks of failure, highlighted the need for North-South collaboration, and —
after a period of introspection — acknowledged the inescapable logic of negotiation. Cancun showed that, if the challenges have increased, it is because the stakes are higher.
comes from inside
the U
The bigger challenge to American
S
leadership
— not outside —
nited tates. In America's current debate about trade, jobs and globalization we have heard a lot about the costs of liberalization. We need to hear more about
the opportunities. We need to be reminded of the advantages of America's openness and its trade with the world — about the economic growth tied to exports; the inflation-fighting role of imports, the innovative stimulus of global
competition. We need to explain that freer trade works precisely because it involves positive change — better products, better job opportunities, better ways of doing things, better standards of living. While it is true that change can
be threatening for people and societies, it is equally true that the vulnerable are not helped by resisting change — by putting up barriers and shutting out competition. They are helped by training, education, new and better
opportunities that — with the right support policies — can flow from a globalized economy. The fact is that for every job in the US threatened by imports there is a growing number of high-paid, high skill jobs created by exports.
Exports supported 7 million workers a decade ago; that number is approaching around 12 million today. And these new jobs — in aerospace, finance, information technology — pay 10 per cent more than the average American
wage. We especially need to inject some clarity — and facts — into the current debate over the outsourcing of services jobs. Over the next decade, the US is projected to create an average of more than 2 million new services jobs a
year — compared to roughly 200,000 services jobs that will be outsourced. I am well aware that this issue is the source of much anxiety in America today. Many Americans worry about the potential job losses that might arise from
foreign competition in services sectors. But it’s worth remembering that concerns about the impact of foreign competition are not new. Many of the reservations people are expressing today are echoes of what we heard in the 1970s
and 1980s. But people at that time didn’t fully appreciate the power of American ingenuity. Remarkable advances in technology and productivity laid the foundation for unprecedented job creation in the 1990s and there is no
reason to doubt that this country, which has shown time and again such remarkable potential for competing in the global economy, will not soon embark again on such a burst of job-creation. America's openness to service-sector
trade — combined with the high skills of its workforce — will lead to more growth, stronger industries, and a shift towards higher value-added, higher-paying employment. Conversely, closing the door to service trade is a strategy
for killing jobs, not saving them. Americans have never run from a challenge and have never been defeatist in the face of strong competition. Part of this challenge is to create the conditions for global growth and job creation here
he process of opening to global trade can be disruptive, but they recognize that the US economy
cannot grow and prosper any other way. They recognize the importance of finding global solutions to shared global problems. Besides,
and around the world. I believe Americans realize what is at stake. T
what is the alternative to the WTO Some argue that the world's only superpower need not be tied down by the constraints of the multilateral system. They claim that US sovereignty is compromised by international rules, and that
Almost none of the trade issues facing the US today are any
easier to solve unilaterally, bilaterally or regionally. The reality is probably just the opposite. What sense does it make — for example — to negotiate e-commerce rules bilaterally Who would be
multilateral institutions limit rather than expand US influence. Americans should be deeply sceptical about these claims.
interested in disciplining agricultural subsidies in a regional agreement but not globally How can bilateral deals — even dozens of them — come close to matching the economic impact of agreeing to global free trade among 146
countries Bilateral and regional deals can sometimes be a complement to the multilateral system, but they can never be a substitute. There is a bigger danger. By treating some countries preferentially, bilateral and regional deals
Instead of liberalizing trade — and widening growth — they carve it up. Worse, they have a domino
effect : bilateral deals inevitably beget more bilateral deals, as countries left outside are forced to seek their own preferential arrangements, or risk further marginalization. This is precisely what we see happening today. There
exclude others — fragmenting global trade and distorting the world economy.
are already over two hundred bilateral and regional agreements in existence, and each month we hear of a new or expanded deal. There is a basic contradiction in the assumption that bilateral approaches serve to strengthen the
America led in the creation of the
multilateral system after 1945 precisely to avoid a return to hostile blocs — blocs that had done so much to fuel interwar instability and conflict .
America's vision, in the words of Cordell Hull, was that “enduring peace and the welfare of nations was indissolubly connected with the friendliness, fairness and freedom of world trade”. Trade would bind
nations together, making another war unthinkable . Non-discriminatory rules would prevent a return to preferential deals and closed alliances. A network of multilateral
initiatives and organizations — the Marshal Plan, the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT, now the WTO — would provide the institutional bedrock for the
international rule of law, not power . Underpinning all this was the idea that freedom — free trade, free democracies, the free exchange
of ideas — was essential to peace and prosperity, a more just world. It is a vision that has emerged pre-eminent a half century later. Trade has expanded twenty-fold since 1950.
Millions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa are being lifted out of poverty , and millions more have new hope for the future. All the great powers — the US, Europe,
Japan, India, China and soon Russia — are part of a rules-based multilateral trading system, greatly increasing the chances for world prosperity and peace. There is a growing
multilateral, rules-based system. Even when intended to spur free trade, they can ultimately risk undermining it. This is in no one's interest, least of all the United States.
realization that — in our interdependent world — sovereignty is constrained, not by multilateral rules, but by the absence of rules. All of these were America’s objectives. The US needs to be both clearer about the magnitude of
what it has achieved, and more realistic about what it is trying to — and can — accomplish. Multilateralism can be slow, messy, and tortuous. But it is also indispensable to managing an increasingly integrated global economy.
Multilateralism is based on the belief that all countries — even powerful countries like the United States — are made stronger and more secure through international co-operation and rules, and by working to strengthen one another
Multilateralism's greatest ideal is the ideal of negotiation, compromise, consensus, not coercion
from within a system, not outside of it.
. As Churchill said of
democracy, it is the worst possible system except for all the others. I do not believe America's long-term economic interests have changed. Nor do I believe that America's vision for a just international order has become blurred. If
anything, the American vision has been sharpened since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington; sharpened by the realization that there is now a new struggle globally between the forces of openness and modernity, and
the forces of separatism and reaction. More than ever, America's interests lie in an open world economy resting on the foundation of a strong, rules-based multilateral system. More and more, America's growth and security are tied
to the growth and security of the world economy as a whole. American leadership today is more — not less — important to our increasingly interconnected planet. A recent successful, and much needed, example is the multilateral
agreement on intellectual property rights and access to medicines for poor countries, in which the US played a pivotal role. It would be a tragic mistake if the Doha Round, which offers the world a once-in-a-generation opportunity
What is the
alternative It is a fragmented world, with greater conflict and uncertainty . A world of the past, not the future — one that America turned away from after 1945, and that we
should reject just as decisively today. America must lead . The multilateral trading system is too important to fail. The world depends on it . So does America.
to eliminate trade distortions, to strengthen trade rules, and open markets across the world, were allowed to founder. We need courage and the collective political will to ensure a balanced and equitable outcome.
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No Prior Questions
Prior questions fail and paralyze politics
Owen 2 David Owen, Reader of Political Theory at the Univ. of Southampton, Millennium Vol 31 No 3 2002 p. 655-7
Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘[a]
frenzy for words like “epistemology” and “ontology” often signals this philosophical
turn’, although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role
in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to
reflection on the philosophical commitments of different theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the commitments that
such a philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a
has an inbuilt tendency
to prioritise issues of ontology and epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the latter two were merely a simple
function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or
epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these
philosophical commitments. Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theory to recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of problems,
such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory
cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features
in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory) and, i f this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this does not
undermine the point that, for a certain class of problems, rational choice theory may provide the best account available to us. In other words,
while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of
critical judgement, it is not the only or even necessarily the most important kind . The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because
prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather
than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible
true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the
action, event or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘theory-driven work is part of a reductionist program’ in that it
‘dictates always opting for the description that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory’.5 The justification
offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to
characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science
since ‘whether there are general explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged
before conducting that inquiry’.6 Moreover, this strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical
validity . The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might be called (only
slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated
to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology
stimulates the idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right , namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and
epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.
characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet,
confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with the philosophical turn is that it
Ontology must be secondary to the prior question of political practice
Jarvis 00 Darryl, Senior Lecturer in International Relations – University of Sydney, International Relations and the Challenge of
Postmodernism, p. 128-9
More is the pity that such irrational and obviously abstruse debate should so occupy us at a time of great global turmoil. That it does and
continues to do so reflect our lack of judicious criteria for evaluating theory and, more importantly, the lack of attachment theorists have to the real world. Certainly
it is right and proper that we ponder the depths of our theoretical imaginations, engage in epistemological and ontological debate, and analyze the sociology of our knowledge.
But to support that this is the only task of international theory, let alone the most important one, smacks of intellectual elitism and
displays a certain contempt for those who search for guidance in their daily struggle as actors in international politics. What does Ashley’s project, his
deconstructive efforts, or valiant fight against positivism say to the truly marginalized, oppressed, and destitute? How does it help solve the
plight of the poor, the displaced refugees, the casualties of war, or the émigrés of death squads? Does it in any way speak to those whose actions and thoughts
comprise the policy and practice of international relations? On all these questions one must answer no . This is not to say, of course, that all theory should be judged by
its technical rationality and problem-solving capacity as Ashley forcefully argues. But to support that problem-solving technical theory is not necessary—or in some way
bad—is a contemptuous position that abrogates any hope of solving some of the nightmarish realities that millions confront daily. As Holsti
argues, we need ask of these theorists and their theories the ultimate question, “So what?” To what purpose do they deconstruct, problematize, destabilize, undermine,
ridicule, and belittle modernist and rationalist approaches? Does this get us any further, make the world any better, or enhance the human condition? In what sense can this “debate
toward [a] bottomless pit of epistemology and metaphysics” be judged pertinent, relevant, helpful, or cogent to anyone other than those
foolish enough to be scholastically excited by abstract and recondite debate. Contrary to Ashley’s assertions, then, a poststructural approach fails to
empower the marginalized and, in fact, abandons them. Rather than analyze the political economy of power, wealth, oppression, production, or international relations and
render and intelligible understanding of these processes, Ashley succeeds in ostracizing those he portends to represent by delivering an obscure and highly convoluted discourse. If Ashley wishes to
chastise structural realism for its abstractness and detachment, he must be prepared also to face similar criticism, especially when he so adamantly intends his work to address the real life plight of
those who struggle at marginal places.
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Extinction First
Nuclear war is a prerequisite to ontological investigations
Santoni 85 Maria Theresa Barney Chair Emeritus of Philosophy at Denison University, Ronald, “Nuclear War: Philosophical
Perspectives” p 156-157
Zimmerman calls for a “paradigm shift” in our
thinking about ourselves, other, and the Earth. But it is not clear that what either offers as suggestions for what we can, must, or should do in the face of a
runaway arms race are sufficient to “wind down” the arms race before it leads to omnicide . In spite of the importance of Fox’s analysis and reminders it is not clear
To be sure, Fox sees the need for our undergoing “certain fundamental changes” in our “thinking, beliefs, attitudes, values” and
that “admitting our (nuclear) fear and anxiety” to ourselves and “identifying the mechanisms that dull or mask our emotional and other responses” represent much more than examples of basic,
often. stated principles of psychotherapy. Being aware of the psychological maneuvers that keep us numb to nuclear reality may well be the road to transcending them but it must only be a “first
step” (as Fox acknowledges), during which we Simultaneously act to eliminate nuclear threats, break our complicity with the ams race, get rid of arsenals of genocidal weaponry, and create
conditions for international goodwill, mutual trust, and creative interdependence. Similarly, in
respect to Zimmerman: in spite of the challenging Heideggerian
insights he brings out regarding what motivates the arms race, many questions may be raised about his prescribed “solutions.” Given our need for a
paradigm shift in our (distorted) understanding of ourselves and the rest of being, are we merely left “to prepare for a possible shift in our
self-understanding? (italics mine)? Is this all we can do? Is it necessarily the case that such a shift “cannot come as a result of our own will?”
– and work – but only from “a destiny outside our control?” Does this mean we leave to God the matter of bringing about a paradigm
shift? Granted our fears and the importance of not being controlled by fears, as well as our “anthropocentric leanings,” should we be as cautious as Zimmerman suggests about out disposition “to
want to do something” or “to act decisively in the face of the current threat?” In spite of the importance of our taking on the anxiety of our finitude and our
present limitation, does it follow that “we should be willing for the worst (i.e. an all-out nuclear war) to occur”? Zimmerman wrongly, I contend,
equates “resistance” with “denial” when he says that “as long as we resist and deny the possibility of nuclear war, that possibility will
persist and grow stronger.” He also wrongly perceives “resistance” as presupposing a clinging to the “order of things that now prevails.”
Resistance connotes opposing, and striving to defeat a prevailing state of affairs that would allow or encourage the “worst to occur.” I
submit, against Zimmerman, that we should not, in any sense, be willing for nuclear war or omnicide to occur . (This is not to suggest that we should be numb to the
possibility of its occurrence.) Despite Zimmerman’s elaborations and refinements his Heideggerian notion of “letting beings be” continues to be too permissive in
this regard. In my judgment, an individual’s decision not to act against and resist his or her government’s preparations for nuclear holocaust is , as I
have argued elsewhere, to be an early accomplice to the most horrendous crime against life imaginable – its annihilation . The Nuremburg tradition calls not
only for a new way of thinking, a “new internationalism” in which we all become co-nurturers of the whole planet, but for resolute actions that will sever our complicity with nuclear criminality and
the genocidal arms race, and work to achieve a future which we can no longer assume.
We must not only “come face to face with the unthinkable in image and thought” (Fox) but must act now
Only when that is achieved will ultimate violence be
- with a “new consciousness” and conscience - to prevent the unthinkable, by cleansing the earth of nuclear weaponry.
removed as the final arbiter of our planet’s fate.
You can’t examine ontology knowing you are going to die
Elshtain 3 Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School (Jean
Bethke, “Just War Against Terrorism”, pg. 47
That said, the civic peace that violence disrupts does offer intimations of the peaceable kingdom. If
we live from day to day in fear of deadly attack, the goods we
cherish become elusive. Human beings are fragile creatures. We cannot reveal the fullness of our being, including our deep sociality, if airplanes are flying
into buildings or snipers are shooting at us randomly or deadly spores are being sent through the mail . As we have learned so shockingly, we can
neither take this civic peace for granted nor shake off our responsibility to respect and promote the norms and rules that sustain civic peace.
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Alt fails
Alt fails- rejected by the international community
Scheppele 4 Law in a Time of Emergency: States of Exception and the Temptations of 9/11, Kim Lane Scheppele, Public Law and
Legal Theory Research Paper Series Research Paper No. 60, University of Pennsylvania Law School, May 2004
In this Article, I have tried to explain why the
logic of Schmitt’s analy- ses no longer work as a practical matter to justify states of exception, even when
it is clear to the international community that something fundamental has changed in the world system since 9/11. The institutional
elaboration of a new international system that has occurred since Schmitt’s time make his ideas seem all the more dangerous, and yet all
the more dated . There are simply fewer states in the world willing to tolerate either Schmitt’s conception of politic s or his conception of the
defining qualities of sover- eignty. Schmitt’s philosophy has, in short, been met with a different soci- ology. For his ideas to be either persuasive or effective, they must be more than internally
coherent or even plausible; they must be loosed in a context in which they can win against other competing ideas. Precisely because of the horrors of the twentieth century, much
of the
international community that has entrenched both democracy and the rule of law has turned away from these extra-legal justifications for
states of exception. Instead, such states have attempted to embed exceptionality as an instance of the normal, and not as a repudiation of the possibility of
normality. . Only the United States, with its eighteenth-century constitution and Cold War legacy of ex- ceptionalism, seems to be soldiering on in this new legal space of conflict unaware that the
defining aspect of the new sovereignty is that even the new sovereign is bound by rules.
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Causes War
Schmitt’s politics cause war
Specter 4 Perpetual War or Perpetual Peace? Schmitt, Habermas and Theories of American Empire, Matthew Specter, PhD candidate in
modern European intellectual history at Duke University, was delivered as a lecture at the Internationales Forschungszentrum
Kulkturwissenschaften in Vienna, 26 April 2004, http://www.politicaltheory.info/essays/specter.htm
The Bush administration was born under a Schmittian star. The Supreme Court's judgment in Bush v Gore (2000) delivered the presidency to Bush through one of the
most indefensible readings of constitutional law in American history. So bald was this political instrumentalisation of constitutional law, that it would have
made Carl Schmitt blush. Aside from the circumstances of its birth, three features of Bush Administration policy make the label Schmittian seem a good fit. First, their decision to
define the attacks of September 11 as acts of war reflects an understanding of Schmitt´s belief that politics requires an enemy, preferably a
state. Second is their strategy towards international law: formally reject it, or find a way to interpret it in your favor. Third is their use of what Schmitt called
the state of exception, or state of emergency to suspend normal constitutional protections. In this category one can put the attacks on civil liberties represented by the
so-called Patriot Act, and the illegal detention of terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay.¶ Critics of US foreign policy since WWII have long understood the mobilising function of the Communist
threat. With the collapse of the USSR, the global military presence of the US required a new justification. Popular culture and intellectuals alike struggled to fill the void that had been filled by the
"evil empire." Political scientist Francis Fukuyama eulogised this condition in his 1989 work, arguing that the apparent triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism marked the "end of history." The
next major intellectual effort to orient the U.S. in the post-Cold War world was political scientist Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), which
has obtained a renewed audience after 9-11. Huntington and Fukuyama's works both contain a Schmittian accent: Fukuyama's is in the characterisation of the triumphant liberal bourgeois order as a
world without meaningful politics, political causes for which one would be prepared to die. This pathos of conflict is Schmittian. The same pathos of conflict can be found in Huntington's vision of
an inevitable clash between regional power-blocs aligned on cultural lines. Before 9-11, the Bush administration had been casting about for an enemy, and seemed to have settled on China. The
advantage of formulating the enemy as "terrorists and the states that support them," was that it gave the administration more discretion to
choose whom to attack.¶ Schmitt's treatise on The Concept of the Political was a deep and unsparing critique of liberalism. Schmitt believed that liberalism was not a political theory
because it had no "positive" theory of the state. In constitutionalism, he saw only "negative" mechanisms for controlling or separating power. As he writes, liberalism "in a very systematic fashion
negates or evades the political…there exists no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics." (CP, 70) According to Schmitt, all states have internal and external enemies. Being political means
being able to recognise threats to the existence of the state. Since in the extreme case, the
defense of the state involves physical killing, Schmitt makes of this
extremity the defining criterion of "the" political. As he has famously written: "The specific…distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between
friend and enemy… The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing." (CP, 33) The problem with liberalism,
argues Schmitt, is that liberalism denies the existence of true, mortal enemies. "Liberalism…has attempted to transform the enemy into a competitor from the viewpoint of economics into a
competitor and from the intellectual point of view into a debating adversary." (CP, 28) Schmitt emphasizes the concreteness of political judgment, repudiating the idea that neutral or disinterested
parties can or should make political decisions. "Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand and judge…whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and
therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence." (CP, 27) In
formulating its propaganda selling the wars on Iraq and
Afghanistan, the Administration picked up on the essentially Schmittian insight that an enemy is not someone you negotiate with; an
enemy must be totally annihilated . Al Qaeda was said to want to "destroy our whole way of life". Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of
mass destruction were represented as a "grave and gathering threat." In his book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (2003), Richard Perle, one of the
neoconservatives making policy in the White House, alleges that the US faces "intolerable threats" from the states who "sponsor"
terrorism, and/or are seeking nuclear weapons: Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. The Bush Administration's most notorious tag-lines also have a
Schmittian flavor: the "axis of evil," and the "you're either with us or against us" speeches.