Rd 5
1ac
Plan:
Plan: The United States should legalize nearly all marihuana in the United States.
Cartels
Contention one is cartels:
Drug violence is spiraling out of control in Mexico
Jo Tuckman Mexico City, The Guardian, Friday 9 May 2014 09.10 EDT “Violence erupts again in Mexican state where drug
wars began” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/09/violence-mexico-tamaulipas-state-drug-wars ac 8-27
A spate of extreme violence in Mexico's north-eastern Tamaulipas state has ended the relative calm in the region
where the country's drug wars began. Officials say about 80 people have been killed in almost daily street
battles. This week the state's top detective, Salvador de Haro Muñoz, was among five people killed in a shootout. Ten police
officers have been arrested for allegedly leading him into an ambush. Fourteen people were killed in one day this month in a string
of gun battles between federal forces and unidentified gunmen in the city of Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas. " It's
worse than ever ," said a local woman who saw three shootouts on three consecutive days while visiting relatives in
Tampico in early April. The woman, who asked not to be identified, said authorities did nothing to intervene beyond advising people
to stay off the streets. " This
is a failed state with no law and no authority." Tamaulipas has been a focal
point in the drug wars as one of the busiest places on the border for northbound drugs and
migrants and southbound weapons and cash. But the latest outbreak of bloodletting has
prompted fears that the region is set for a return to the worst days of 2010 , when entire
populations fled towns in the region to escape the violence.
Be skeptical of arguments that violence is decreasing—families deliberately
under-report deaths for fear of retaliation
By Karla Zabludovsky covers Latin America for Newsweek. “Murders in Mexico Down From Height of the Drug War, But
Violence Persists” Filed: 7/23/14 at 6:42 PM http://www.newsweek.com/murders-mexico-down-height-drug-war-violence-persists260990
During Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto’s first year in office, after he had promised to cut back on everyday violence, there
were 22,732 recorded homicides the National Institute of Statistics and Geography announced Wednesday.¶ The figure, which the
institute called preliminary, is slightly lower than the previous year but still higher than when Felipe Calderon, Pena Nieto’s
predecessor, took office. In 2007, shortly after Calderon declared war on drugs, the number of homicides reached 8,867. During his
six years in office, homicides peaked at 27,213, in 2011.¶ “This is lower than I expected,” said Rene Jimenez Ornelas, coordinator
of the unit for the analysis of violence at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, of the number of homicides in 2013. Jimenez
Ornelas said one of the reasons for a lower-than-expected number is that many people prefer to
have their loved ones’ death registered as a heart attack or another natural cause to avoid an
investigation. “Why? Because they make the rest of the family pay ,” said Jimenez Ornelas, implying
that criminals might seek revenge and kill family members who report a homicide.
Nation-wide legalization of marijuana is a game-changer for stopping violence in
Mexico—takes a huge chunk out of cartel profits and frees up police resources
Hesson 14 -- immigration editor, covers immigration and drug policy from Washington D.C.
[Ted, "Will Mexican Cartels Survive Marijuana Legalization?" Fusion, fusion.net/justice/story/mexican-cartels-survive-marijuanalegalization-450519, accessed 6-2-14]
1. Mexico is the top marijuana exporter to the U.S. A 2008 study by the RAND Corporation estimated that Mexican
marijuana accounted for somewhere between 40 and 67 percent of the drug in the U.S. The cartel grip on the U.S. market may not
last for long. Pot can now be grown for recreational use in Colorado and Washington, and for medical use in 20 states. For the first
time, American consumers can choose a legal product over the black market counterpart. Beau Kilmer, the co-director of
the RAND Drug Policy Research Center, says that a few states legalizing marijuana won’t eliminate
the flow of the drug from down south, but a change in policy from the federal government would
be a game changer. “Our research also suggests that legalizing commercial marijuana production at the
national level could drive out most of the marijuana imported from Mexico,” he wrote in a 2013 op-ed. 2.
Marijuana makes up more than $1 billion of cartel income Pot isn’t the main source of income for cartels. They
make most of their cash from drugs like cocaine and heroin. But marijuana accounts for 15 to 26 percent of the
cartel haul, according to RAND’s 2008 data. That translates to an estimated $1.1 billion to $2 billion of
gross income. The drop in sales certainly wouldn’t end the existence of drug traffickers — they bring in an estimated $6 billion
to $8 billion annually — but losing a fifth of one’s income would hurt any business. On top of that, Kilmer
says that marijuana likely makes up a higher percentage of the cartel take today than it did back in
2008. So
taking away pot would sting even more . 3. Authorities could focus on other drugs
Marijuana made up 94 percent of the drugs seized by Border Patrol in the 2012 fiscal year, judging by
weight. If pot becomes legal in the U.S. and cartels are pushed out of the market, that would allow
law-enforcement agencies to dedicate more resources to combat the trafficking of drugs like
heroin and cocaine.
Pot is key to cartels—blocks their ability to recruit, buy weapons, and corrupt
politicians
Laura Carlsen Director, Mexico City-based Americas Program of the Center for International Policy; columnist, Foreign Policy in
Focus “How Legalizing Marijuana Would Weaken Mexican Drug Cartels” Posted: 11/02/2010 3:55 pm EDT Updated: 05/25/ 2011
6:10 pm EDT http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-carlsen/how-legalizing-marijuana_b_777837.html ac 8-28
opponents of
legalization have issued a barrage of confused and contradictory arguments . Their aim is to somehow
debunk the common-sense fact that legal sourcing erodes the black-market profits of organized crime. The most recent
argument thrown out in the anti-Prop. 19 campaign, claims that the California marijuana market is
insignificant to Mexican drug traffickers. That argument was blown out of the water on October 18
when the Mexican Army and police seized 134 tons of marijuana, wrapped and ready to be
smuggled from Tijuana across the border. The huge cache was estimated to be worth at least
$338 million dollars on the street. Mexican authorities guessed that it was owned by the nation's most powerful drugtrafficking organization, the Sinaloa Cartel. Even if much of that is distributed to other states, the sheer size
of the potential shipment shows that the U.S. marijuana market for Mexican traffickers, calculated
at $20 billion a year, is well worth fighting for. Since before Prop. 19 came along, reports showed that Mexico's drug
cartels were concerned about how U.S. production and legalization of medical marijuana cut into their profits. Prohibition
creates the underground market that generates their economic, political and military strength.
In the months leading up to today's vote on California's Proposition 19 to legalize recreational use of marijuana,
With the drop in income from marijuana sales, cartels have less money for buying arms and
politicians, or recruiting young people into the trade. The drug cartels also consider the marijuana black market
worth killing for. Just days after the historic bust, thirteen young men were massacred at a drug rehabilitation center. An anonymous
voice came over police radio saying the act was "a taste of Juarez" and that up to 135 people could be murdered in retaliation for
the bust--one per ton. Although calculating Mexican cartel earnings from marijuana sales will always be
a guessing game, it's indisputable that as long as it's illegal every penny of those earnings goes
into the pockets of organized crime. From the peasant who converts his land from corn to pot to
feed his family, to the truckdriver who takes on a bonus cargo, to the Mexican and U.S. border
officials who open "windows" in international customs controls, to the youth gangs who sell in
U.S. cities--all are sucked into a highly organized and brutal system of contraband. Legalization in
part of the world's leading market would take a huge chunk out of this transnational business.
Most comprehensive studies prove violence will be significantly reduced in the
long-run, and short-term lashout will be limited
Beau Kilmer et al 10, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Brittany M. Bond, Peter H. Reuter (Kilmer--Codirector, RAND Drug Policy
Research Center; Senior Policy Researcher, RAND; Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School, Ph.D. in public policy, Harvard
University; M.P.P., University of California, Berkeley; B.A. in international relations, Michigan State University, Caulkins--Stever
Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Bond--research economist in the Office of the
Chief Economist of the US Department of Commerce's Economics and Statistics Administration, Reuter--Professor in the School of
Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland. “Reducing Drug Trafficking Revenues and Violence
in Mexico Would Legalizing Marijuana in California Help?” RAND occasional paper (peer reviewed),
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2010/RAND_OP325.pdf
However, there
is at least one countervailing factor that might reduce violence in the short run. Given
that the signal of market decline will be strong and unambiguous, experienced participants might
accept the fact that their earnings and the market as a whole are in decline. This could lead to a
reduced effort on their part to fight for control of routes or officials, since those areas of control
are now less valuable. Of course, that does presume strategic thinking in a population that appears to have a propensity for
expressive and instrumental violence. The natural projection
in the long run is more optimistic . Fewer young
males will enter the drug trade, and the incentives for violence will decline as the economic
returns to leader- ship of a DTO fall. 10 However, the long run is indeterminably measured: probably years, and
perhaps many years. The outcome, either in the short or long term, of a substantial decline in the U.S. market for Mexican marijuana
in 2011 is a matter of conjecture. One view is that, in the short run, there could be more violence as the DTO leadership faces a very
disturbing change in cir- cumstances. The fact that a decline in their share of the marijuana market would come after a period in
which there has been rapid turnover at the top of their organizations and much change in their relationships with corrupt police could
make it particularly difficult for the DTOs to reach a cooperative accommodation to their shrunken market. However, if the Mexi- can
government lessens pressures and signals its willingness to reach an accommodation with a more collaborative set of DTOs, the
result could be a reduction in violence. In the long run, the analysis is different. One would think that
DTO participation
would become less attractive . However, the government’s actions are again capable of reversing this. The government
might take advantage of the weakened state of its adversary to break up the larger DTOs; a configuration of many smaller
organizations could lead to greater competitive violence.
Alternative activities can’t make up for profits—post-prohibition effect on the
mafia proves
Robelo 13 -- Drug Policy Alliance research coordinator
[Daniel, "Demand Reduction or Redirection? Channeling Illicit Drug Demand towards a Regulated Supply to Diminish Violence in
Latin America," Oregon Law Review, 91 Or. L. Rev. 1227, 2013, l/n]
It is also impossible to foresee how regulation would affect levels of violence. Some analysts believe a short-term increase in
violence is possible (as competition over a smaller market could intensify), but that violence in the longer term will decline. n106
Some analysts point out that organized crime may further diversify into other activities, such as extortion and
kidnapping, though these have been shown to be considerably less profitable than drug trafficking.
As one scholar [*1249] notes, given the profitability of the drug trade, "it would take roughly 50,000 kidnappings to equal 10% of
cocaine revenues from the U.S. n107 While the American mafia certainly diversified into other criminal endeavors
after the Repeal of alcohol Prohibition, homicide rates nevertheless declined dramatically. n108
Combining marijuana regulation with medical regulatory models for heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine could strike a major blow
to the corrosive economic power of violent trafficking organizations, diminishing their ability to perpetrate murder, hire recruits,
purchase weapons, corrupt officials, operate with impunity, and terrorize societies. Moreover, these approaches promise concrete
results - potentially significant reductions in DTO revenues - unlike all other strategies that Mexico or the United States have tried to
date. n109 Criminal organizations would still rely on other activities for their income, but they would
be left weaker and less of a threat to security. Furthermore, the U nited S tates and Latin American governments
would save resources currently wasted on prohibition enforcement and generate new revenues in
taxes - resources which could be applied more effectively towards confronting violence and other
crimes that directly threaten public safety. n110
Even modest losses means cartels can’t corrupt the police and judiciary
Usborne 14
[David, "How Central Is Marijuana In The Drug War? Ctd," The Dish, quoted by Andrew Sullivan, 1-11-14,
dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/01/11/how-central-is-marijuana-in-the-drug-war-ctd/, accessed 6-9-14]
A 2012 research paper by the Mexican Competitiveness Institute in Mexico called ‘If Our Neighbours Legalise’, said that the
legalisation of marijuana in Colorado, Washington and California would depress cartel profits by as much as 30 per cent. A 2010
Rand Corp study of what would happen if just California legalised suggests a more modest fall-out. Using consumption in the US as
the most useful measure, its authors posit that marijuana accounts for perhaps 25 per cent of the cartels’
revenues. The cartels would survive losing that, but still. “ That’s enough to hurt , enough to cause massive
unemployment in the illicit drugs sector,” says [fellow at the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center
David] Shirk. Less money for cartels means weaker cartels and less capacity to corrupt the judiciary
and the police in Mexico with crumpled bills in brown envelopes. Crimes like extortion and kidnappings are
also more easily tackled.
Mexico instability undermines U.S. leadership and risks global arms races
Robert Haddick, contractor at U.S. Special Operations Command, managing editor of Small Wars Journal, "This Week at War: If
Mexico Is at War, Does America Have to Win It?" FOREIGN POLICY, 9--10--10,
www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/10/this_week_at_war_if_mexico_is_at_war_does_america_have_to_win_it, accessed 5-213.
Most significantly, a
strengthening Mexican insurgency would very likely affect America's role in the rest
of the world . An increasingly chaotic American side of the border, marked by bloody cartel wars,
corrupted government and media, and
a breakdown in security, would likely cause many in the U nited
S tates to question the importance of military and foreign policy ventures elsewhere in the world.
Should the southern border become a U.S. president's primary national security concern, nervous
allies and opportunistic adversaries elsewhere in the world would no doubt adjust to a distracted
and inward-looking America, with potentially disruptive arms races the result. Secretary Clinton has looked
south and now sees an insurgency. Let's hope that the United States can apply what it has recently learned about insurgencies to
stop this one from getting out of control.
U.S. leadership is key to global stability and preventing nuclear great power wars
Brooks et al 13 Stephen, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank
Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School
of Public and International Affairs, William C. Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor in the Department of Government at
Dartmouth College “Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Winter
2012/13), pp. 7–51
A core premise of deep engagement is that it prevents the emergence
of a far more dangerous global security
environment. For one thing, as noted above, the United States’ overseas presence gives it the leverage to
restrain partners from taking provocative action . Perhaps more important, its core alliance commitments also
deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony from contemplating expansion and make its partners more
secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to their security problems that threaten others and thus stoke security
dilemmas. The contention that engaged U.S. power dampens the baleful effects of anarchy is consistent with influential variants of
realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would emerge absent the “American
Pacifier” is provided in the works of John Mearsheimer, who forecasts dangerous multipolar regions replete with
security competition , arms races, nuclear proliferation and associated preventive war temptations , regional
rivalries, and even runs
at regional hegemony and full-scale great power war . 72 How do retrenchment
advocates, the bulk of whom are realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are complicated, but two capture most of the
variation: (1) U.S. security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of
rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S. interest. Each response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes
sense given that the whole debate hinges on a complex future counterfactual (what would happen to Eurasia’s security setting if the
United States truly disengaged?). Although a certain answer is impossible, each of these responses is nonetheless a weaker
argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other
international relations theories that discount the conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73
Defensive realists maintain that the high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense dominance, and an array of policies and
practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that Eurasia’s major states could manage regional multipolarity
peacefully without the American pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on this scholarship, particularly in regions where the kinds of
stabilizers that nonrealist theories point to—such as democratic governance or dense institutional linkages—are either absent or
weakly present. There are three other major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before making
this bet. First is regional expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding
each region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few experts expect a return of intense great power competition in a post-American
Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of increased EU defense cooperation and the budgetary
costs of increasing military outlays. 74 The result might be a Europe that
threats
is incapable of securing itself from various
that could be destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars),
lacks capacity for global security missions in which U.S. leaders might want European participation, and is vulnerable to the
influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of Eurasia where the United States has a substantial military
presence? Regarding the Middle East, the balance begins to swing toward pessimists concerned that states currently backed by
Washington— notably Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—might take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that
would intensify security dilemmas. And concerning East Asia, pessimism regarding the region’s prospects without the American
pacifier is pronounced. Arguably the principal concern expressed by area experts is that Japan and South Korea are likely to
obtain a nuclear capacity and increase their military commitments, which could stoke a
destabilizing reaction from China . It is notable that during the Cold War, both South Korea and Taiwan
moved to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity and were only constrained from doing so by a still-engaged
U nited S tates. 75 The second body of scholarship casting doubt on the bet on defensive realism’s sanguine portrayal is all of the
research that undermines its conception of state preferences. Defensive realism’s optimism about what would happen if
the United States retrenched is very much dependent on its particular—and highly restrictive—assumption about
state preferences; once we relax this assumption, then much of its basis for optimism vanishes. Specifically, the
prediction of post-American tranquility throughout Eurasia rests on the assumption that security is the only relevant state preference,
with security defined narrowly in terms of protection from violent external attacks on the homeland. Under that assumption, the
security problem is largely solved as soon as offense and defense are clearly distinguishable, and offense is extremely expensive
relative to defense. Burgeoning research across the social and other sciences, however, undermines that core
assumption: states have preferences not only for security but also for prestige , status, and other aims, and
they engage in trade-offs among the various objectives. 76 In addition, they define security not just in terms of territorial protection
but in view of many and varied milieu goals. It follows that even states that are relatively secure may nevertheless
engage in highly competitive behavior. Empirical studies show that this is indeed sometimes the case. 77
In sum, a bet on a benign postretrenchment Eurasia is a bet that leaders of major countries will never allow these nonsecurity
preferences to influence their strategic choices. To the degree that these bodies of scholarly knowledge have predictive leverage,
U.S. retrenchment would result in a significant deterioration in the security environment in at least some of the world’s key regions.
We have already mentioned the third, even more alarming body of scholarship. Offensive realism predicts that the withdrawal of the
American pacifier will yield either a competitive regional multipolarity complete with associated insecurity, arms racing, crisis
instability, nuclear proliferation, and the like, or bids for regional hegemony, which may be beyond the capacity of local great powers
to contain (and which in any case would generate intensely competitive behavior, possibly including regional great power war).
Hence it is unsurprising that retrenchment advocates are prone to focus on the second argument noted above: that avoiding wars
and security dilemmas in the world’s core regions is not a U.S. national interest. Few doubt that the United States could survive the
return of insecurity and conflict among Eurasian powers, but at what cost? Much of the work in this area has focused on the
economic externalities of a renewed threat of insecurity and war, which we discuss below. Focusing on the pure security
ramifications, there are two main reasons why decisionmakers may be rationally reluctant to run the retrenchment experiment. First,
overall higher levels of conflict make the world a more dangerous place. Were Eurasia to return to higher levels of
interstate military competition, one
would see overall higher levels of military spending and innovation and a
proxy wars and arming of client states—all of which would be concerning, in part
because it would promote a faster diffusion of military power away from the U nited S tates. Greater
higher likelihood of competitive regional
regional insecurity could well feed proliferation cascades, as states such as Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia
all might choose to create nuclear forces. 78 It is unlikely that proliferation decisions by any of these actors would be the end of the
game: they would likely generate pressure locally for more proliferation. Following Kenneth Waltz, many retrenchment advocates
are proliferation optimists, assuming that nuclear deterrence solves the security problem. 79 Usually carried out in dyadic terms, the
debate over the stability of proliferation changes as the numbers go up. Proliferation optimism rests on assumptions of
rationality and narrow security preferences. In social science, however, such assumptions are inevitably
probabilistic. Optimists assume that most states are led by rational leaders, most will overcome
organizational problems and resist the temptation to preempt before feared neighbors nuclearize , and most
pursue only security and are risk averse. Confidence in such probabilistic assumptions declines if the world were
to move from nine to twenty, thirty, or forty nuclear states. In addition, many of the other dangers noted by analysts who
are concerned about the destabilizing effects of nuclear proliferation—including the risk of accidents and the prospects that some
new nuclear powers will not have truly survivable forces—seem prone to go up as the number of nuclear powers grows. 80
Moreover, the risk of “unforeseen
crisis dynamics” that could spin out of control is also higher as the number of
nuclear powers increases. Finally, add to these concerns the enhanced danger of nuclear leakage, and a world with overall higher
levels of security competition becomes yet more worrisome. The argument that maintaining Eurasian peace is not a U.S. interest
faces a second problem. On widely accepted realist assumptions, acknowledging that
U.S. engagement preserves
peace dramatically narrows the difference between retrenchment and deep engagement. For many supporters of retrenchment,
the optimal strategy for a power such as the United States, which has attained regional hegemony and is separated from other great
powers by oceans, is offshore balancing: stay over the horizon and “pass the buck” to local powers to do the dangerous work of
counterbalancing any local rising power. The United States should commit to onshore balancing only when local balancing is likely
to fail and a great power appears to be a credible contender for regional hegemony, as in the cases of Germany, Japan, and the
Soviet Union in the midtwentieth century. The problem is that China’s rise puts the possibility of its attaining regional hegemony on
the table, at least in the medium to long term. As Mearsheimer notes, “The
U nited S tates will have to play a key role in
countering China, because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.” 81 Therefore, unless China’s
rise stalls, “the United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold
War.” 82 It follows that the United States should take no action that would compromise its capacity to move to onshore balancing in
the future. It will need to maintain key alliance relationships in Asia as well as the formidably expensive military capacity to intervene
there. The implication is to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce the presence in Europe, and pivot to Asia— just what the United
States is doing. 83 In sum, the argument that U.S. security commitments are unnecessary for peace is
countered by a lot of scholarship , including highly influential realist scholarship. In addition, the argument that Eurasian
peace is unnecessary for U.S. security is weakened by the potential for a large number of nasty security consequences as well as
the need to retain a latent onshore balancing capacity that dramatically reduces the savings retrenchment might bring. Moreover,
switching between offshore and onshore balancing could well be difªcult. Bringing together the thrust of many of the arguments
discussed so far underlines the degree to which the case for retrenchment misses the underlying logic of the deep engagement
strategy. By supplying reassurance, deterrence, and active management, the United States lowers security competition in the
world’s key regions, thereby preventing the emergence of a hothouse atmosphere for growing new military capabilities. Alliance ties
dissuade partners from ramping up and also provide leverage to prevent military transfers to potential rivals. On top of all this, the
United States’ formidable military machine may deter entry by potential rivals. Current great power
military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are at historical lows, and thus far other major powers have shied away from seeking
to match top-end U.S. military capabilities. In addition, they have so far been careful to avoid attracting the “focused enmity” of the
United States. 84 All of the world’s most modern militaries are U.S. allies (America’s alliance system of more than sixty countries
now accounts for some 80 percent of global military spending), and the gap between the U.S. military capability and that of potential
rivals is by many measures growing rather than shrinking. 85
Statistically proven that heg prevents war
Owen ‘11
John M. Owen Professor of Politics at University of Virginia PhD from Harvard "DON’T DISCOUNT HEGEMONY" Feb 11 www.catounbound.org/2011/02/11/john-owen/dont-discount-hegemony/
Andrew Mack
and his colleagues at the Human Security Report Project are to be congratulated. Not only do they present
a study with a striking conclusion, driven by data, free of theoretical or ideological bias, but they also
do something quite unfashionable: they bear good news. Social scientists really are not supposed to do that. Our job is, if not
to be Malthusians, then at least to point out disturbing trends, looming catastrophes, and the imbecility
and mendacity of policy makers. And then it is to say why, if people listen to us, things will get better. We do this as if our
careers depended upon it, and perhas they do; for if all is going to be well, what need then for us? Our colleagues at Simon Fraser
University are brave indeed. That may sound like a setup, but it is not. I shall challenge neither the data nor the
general conclusion that violent conflict around the world has been decreasing in fits and starts
since the Second World War. When it comes to violent conflict among and within countries, things
have been getting better. (The trends have not been linear—Figure 1.1 actually shows that the frequency of interstate wars
peaked in the 1980s—but the 65-year movement is clear.) Instead I shall accept that Mack et al. are correct on the macro-trends,
and focus on their explanations they advance for these remarkable trends. With apologies to any readers of this forum who recoil
from academic debates, this might get mildly theoretical and even more mildly methodological. Concerning international
wars, one version of the “nuclear-peace” theory is not in fact laid to rest by the dat a. It is certainly true
that nuclear-armed states have been involved in many wars. They have even been attacked (think of Israel), which falsifies the
simple claim of “assured destruction”—that any nuclear country A will deter any kind of attack by any country B because B fears a
retaliatory nuclear strike from A. But the most important “nuclear-peace” claim has been about mutually
assured destruction, which obtains between two robustly nuclear-armed states. The claim is that
(1) rational states having second-strike capabilities—enough deliverable nuclear weaponry to survive a nuclear
first strike by an enemy—will have an overwhelming incentive not to attack one another; and (2) we can safely assume
that nuclear-armed states are rational. It follows that states with a second-strike capability will not fight one another.
Their colossal atomic arsenals neither kept the United States at peace with North Vietnam during the Cold War nor the Soviet Union
at peace with Afghanistan. But the argument remains strong that those arsenals did help keep the United States and Soviet Union at
peace with each other. Why non-nuclear states are not deterred from fighting nuclear states is an important and
open question. But in a time when calls to ban the Bomb are being heard from more and more quarters, we must be clear about
precisely what the broad trends toward peace can and cannot tell us. They may tell us nothing about why we have had no World
War III, and little about the wisdom of banning the Bomb now. Regarding the downward trend in international war,
Professor Mack is friendlier to more palatable theories such as the “democratic peace” (democracies
do not fight one another, and the proportion of democracies has increased, hence less war); the interdependence or
“commercial peace” (states with extensive economic ties find it irrational to fight one another, and interdependence
has increased, hence less war); and the notion that people around the world are more anti-war than
their forebears were. Concerning the downward trend in civil wars, he favors theories of economic
growth (where commerce is enriching enough people, violence is less appealing—a logic similar to that of the “commercial
peace” thesis that applies among nations) and the end of the Cold War (which end reduced superpower support for rival rebel
factions in so many Third-World countries). These are all plausible mechanisms for peace. What is more,
none of them excludes any other; all could be working toward the same end. That would be somewhat
puzzling, however. Is the world just lucky these days? How is it that an array of peace-inducing factors
happens to be working coincidentally in our time, when such a magical array was absent in the past? The
answer may be that one or more of these mechanisms reinforces some of the others, or perhaps
some of them are mutually reinforcing. Some scholars, for example, have been focusing on whether economic growth
might support democracy and vice versa, and whether both might support international cooperation, including to end civil wars. We
would still need to explain how this charmed circle of causes got started, however. And here let
me raise another factor, perhaps even less appealing than the “nuclear peace” thesis, at least
outside of the United States. That factor is what international relations scholars call hegemony—
specifically American hegemony. A theory that many regard as discredited, but that refuses to go away, is called
hegemonic stability theory. The theory emerged in the 1970s in the realm of international political
economy. It asserts that for the global economy to remain open—for countries to keep barriers to
trade and investment low—one powerful country must take the lead. Depending on the theorist we consult,
“taking the lead” entails paying for global public goods (keeping the sea lanes open, providing
liquidity to the international economy), coercion (threatening to raise trade barriers or withdraw military
protection from countries that cheat on the rules), or both . The theory is skeptical that
international cooperation in economic matters can emerge or endure absent a hegemon. The
distastefulness of such claims is self-evident: they imply that it is good for everyone the world over if one country has more wealth
and power than others. More precisely, they imply that it has been good for the world that the United States has been so
predominant. There is no obvious reason why hegemonic stability theory could not apply to other
areas of international cooperation, including in security affairs, human rights, international law,
peacekeeping (UN or otherwise), and so on. What I want to suggest here—suggest, not test—is that
American hegemony might just be a deep cause of the steady decline of political deaths in the
world.How could that be? After all, the report states that United States is the third most war-prone country since 1945. Many of the
deaths depicted in Figure 10.4 were in wars that involved the United States (the Vietnam War being the leading one).
Notwithstanding politicians’ claims to the contrary, a candid look at U.S. foreign policy reveals that the
country
is as ruthlessly self-interested as any other great power in history. The answer is that U.S.
hegemony might just be a deeper cause of the proximate causes outlined by Professor Mack. Consider
economic growth and openness to foreign trade and investment, which (so say some theories) render
violence irrational. American power and policies may be responsible for these in two related ways.
First, at least since the 1940s Washington has prodded other countries to embrace the market
capitalism that entails economic openness and produces sustainable economic growth. The
United States promotes capitalism for selfish reasons, of course : its own domestic system depends upon
growth, which in turn depends upon the efficiency gains from economic interaction with foreign countries, and the more the better.
During the Cold War most of its allies accepted some degree of market-driven growth. Second, the U.S.-led western
victory in the Cold War damaged the credibility of alternative paths to development —communism and
import-substituting industrialization being the two leading ones—and left market capitalism the best model. The end of
the Cold War also involved an end to the billions of rubles in Soviet material support for regimes that tried to make these alternative
models work. (It also, as Professor Mack notes, eliminated the superpowers’ incentives to feed civil violence
in the Third World.) What we call globalization is caused in part by the emergence of the United
States as the global hegemon. The same case can be made, with somewhat more difficulty, concerning the
spread of democracy. Washington has supported democracy only under certain conditions—the
chief one being the absence of a popular anti-American movement in the target state—but those
conditions have become much more widespread following the collapse of communism. Thus in the
1980s the Reagan administration—the most anti-communist government America ever had—began to dump America’s old dictator
friends, starting in the Philippines. Today Islamists tend to be anti-American, and so the Obama
administration is skittish about democracy in Egypt and other authoritarian Muslim countries. But
general U.S. material and moral support for liberal democracy remains strong.
Global violence decreasing – civilization has become more moral
Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor at Harvard University, ‘7 (Steven, March 19, “A History of Violence” The New Republic,
lexis)
In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and
slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with
laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable
in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated
trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are
probably living
in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth. In the decade of Darfur and Iraq,
the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem
somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of
violence point to exactly that conclusion. Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history
has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment,
human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of
government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine
punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of
political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of
conflict resolution--all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they
are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when
they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light. At one time, these facts were widely
and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao,
appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently,
however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people
in
other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own
societies. The doctrine of the noble savage--the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions-pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like Jose Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen
Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic
of universal brotherhood"). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have
discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in
modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. To be sure, any attempt to document changes in
violence must be soaked in uncertainty. In much of the world, the distant past was a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it,
and, even for events in the historical record, statistics are spotty until recent periods. Long-term trends can be discerned only by
smoothing out zigzags and spikes of horrific bloodletting. And the choice to focus on relative rather than absolute numbers brings up
the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of 100 to be killed or 1 percent in a population of one
billion. Yet, despite these caveats, a picture is taking shape. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at
the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of
violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And
it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially
England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth
century. At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state
ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts--such as the
proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in
a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men--suggest that pre-state societies were far more
violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But ,
in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who
fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley,
Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare
that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the
wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million. Political correctness from the other end of
the ideological spectrum has also distorted many people's conception of violence in early civilizations--namely, those featured in the
Bible. This supposed source of moral values contains many celebrations of genocide, in which the Hebrews, egged on by God,
slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. The Bible also prescribes death by stoning as the penalty for a
long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery,
disrespecting one's parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more
murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians,
Muslims, and Chinese. At the century scale, it is hard to find quantitative studies of deaths in warfare spanning medieval and
modern times. Several historians have suggested that there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars across the
centuries to the present, but, as political scientist James Payne has noted, this may show only that "the Associated Press is a more
comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks." Social histories of
the West provide evidence of numerous barbaric practices that became obsolete in the last five
centuries, such as slavery, amputation, blinding, branding, flaying, disembowelment, burning at
the stake, breaking on the wheel, and so on. Meanwhile, for another kind of violence--homicide--the data are
abundant and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European
localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates
declined steeply--for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the
early 1960s. On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has
fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the
number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to
less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a
steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots . Zooming in by a further
power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in
state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements
rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the
number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent. The decline of killing and cruelty poses several
challenges to our ability to make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so wrong about
something so important? Partly, it's because of a cognitive illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to
recall examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of
people dying of old age. Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be
anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it's the incentive structure of
the activism and opinion markets: No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things
keep getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has
been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the
lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in
Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history. But, from a contemporary vantage
point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have
risen. The other major challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain it. A force that pushes in the same direction
across many epochs, continents, and scales of social organization mocks our standard tools of causal explanation. The usual
suspects--guns, drugs, the press, American culture--aren't nearly up to the job. Nor could it possibly be explained by evolution in the
biologist's sense: Even if the meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favor the genes for meekness quickly enough.
In any case, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for violence. Social psychologists find
that at least 80 percent of people have fantasized about killing someone they don't like. And modern humans still take pleasure in
viewing violence, if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas, Mel Gibson movies, video
games, and hockey. What has changed, of course, is people's willingness to act on these fantasies. The sociologist Norbert Elias
suggested that European modernity accelerated a "civilizing process" marked by increases in self-
control, long-term planning, and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. These are precisely
the functions that today's cognitive neuroscientists attribute to the prefrontal cortex. But this only raises the question of why humans
have increasingly exercised that part of their brains. No one knows why our behavior has come under the control of the better
angels of our nature, but there are four plausible suggestions. The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty,
brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a
modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the
neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so
on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence--don't strike first, retaliate if struck--but, to guarantee its credibility, parties
must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be averted by a
state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the
incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the
need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in
European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And, today,
violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and
territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband. Payne suggests another possibility: that the critical variable
in the indulgence of violence is an overarching sense that life is cheap. When pain and early death are everyday features of one's
own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. As technology and economic efficiency lengthen and improve
our lives, we place a higher value on life in general. A third theory, championed by Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-
sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as
trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people
acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and
ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more
valuable alive than dead. Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed
people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia,
people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other
races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, a la Wright, but it might
also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the golden rule: The more one knows and thinks about other living
things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be
powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the
contingent nature of one's own station, more palpable--the feeling that "there but for fortune go I." Whatever its causes, the
decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency : We enjoy the peace
we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should
work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world
has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons. But the phenomenon
does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for
moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and
effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" From the
likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been
doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.
Pursuit of hegemony’s locked-in – the only question is effectiveness
Dorfman 12, Assistant editor of Ethics and International Affairs
(Zach What We Talk About When We Talk About Isolationism, http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=605)
The rise of China notwithstanding, the United States remains the world’s sole superpower. Its military
(and, to a considerable extent, political) hegemony extends not just over North America or even the Western hemisphere, but also
Europe, large swaths of Asia, and Africa. Its interests are global; nothing is outside its potential sphere of
influence. There are an estimated 660 to 900 American military bases in roughly forty countries worldwide,
although figures on the matter are notoriously difficult to ascertain, largely because of subterfuge on the part of the military.
According to official data there are active-duty U.S. military personnel in 148 countries, or over 75
percent of the world’s states. The
United States checks Russian power in Europe and Chinese power in
South Korea and Japan and Iranian power in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Turkey. In order to maintain a frigid
peace between Israel and Egypt, the American government hands the former $2.7 billion in military aid every year, and the latter
$1.3 billion. It also gives Pakistan more than $400 million dollars in military aid annually (not including counterinsurgency operations,
which would drive the total far higher), Jordan roughly $200 million, and Colombia over $55 million. U.S. long-term military
commitments are also manifold. It is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the only institution legally
permitted to sanction the use of force to combat “threats to international peace and security.” In 1949 the United States helped
found NATO, the first peacetime military alliance extending beyond North and South America in U.S. history, which now has twentyeight member states. The United States also has a trilateral defense treaty with Australia and New Zealand, and bilateral mutual
defense treaties with Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea. It is this sort of reach that led Madeleine Albright to call the
United States the sole “indispensible power” on the world stage. The idea that global military dominance and
political hegemony is in the U.S. national interest—and the world’s interest—is generally taken for
granted domestically. Opposition to it is limited to the libertarian Right and anti-imperialist Left, both groups on
the margins of mainstream political discourse. Today, American supremacy is assumed rather
than argued for: in an age of tremendous political division, it is a bipartisan first principle of foreign policy, a
presupposition. In this area at least, one wishes for a little less agreement. In Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a
Global Age, Christopher McKnight Nichols provides an erudite account of a period before such a consensus existed, when ideas
about America’s role on the world stage were fundamentally contested. As this year’s presidential election
approaches, each side will portray the difference between the candidates’ positions on foreign
policy as immense. Revisiting Promise and Peril shows us just how narrow the American worldview
has become, and how our public discourse has become narrower still. Nichols focuses on the years
between 1890 and 1940, during America’s initial ascent as a global power. He gives special attention to the formative debates
surrounding the Spanish-American War, U.S. entry into the First World War, and potential U.S. membership in the League of
Nations—debates that were constitutive of larger battles over the nature of American society and its fragile political institutions and
freedoms. During this period, foreign and domestic policy were often linked as part of a cohesive political vision for the country.
Nichols illustrates this through intellectual profiles of some of the period’s most influential figures, including senators Henry Cabot
Lodge and William Borah, socialist leader Eugene Debs, philosopher and psychologist William James, journalist Randolph Bourne,
and the peace activist Emily Balch. Each of them interpreted isolationism and internationalism in distinct ways, sometimes deploying
the concepts more for rhetorical purposes than as cornerstones of a particular worldview. Today, isolationism is often
portrayed as intellectually bankrupt, a redoubt for idealists, nationalists, xenophobes, and fools .
Yet the term now used as a political epithet has deep roots in American political culture. Isolationist principles can be traced back to
George Washington’s farewell address, during which he urged his countrymen to steer clear of “foreign entanglements” while
actively seeking nonbinding commercial ties. (Whether economic commitments do in fact entail political commitments is another
matter.) Thomas Jefferson echoed this sentiment when he urged for “commerce with all nations, [and] alliance with none.” Even the
Monroe Doctrine, in which the United States declared itself the regional hegemon and demanded noninterference from European
states in the Western hemisphere, was often viewed as a means of isolating the United States from Europe and its messy alliance
system. In Nichols’s telling, however, modern isolationism was born from the debates surrounding the Spanish-American War and
the U.S. annexation of the Philippines. Here isolationism began to take on a much more explicitly anti-imperialist bent. Progressive
isolationists such as William James found U.S. policy in the Philippines—which it had “liberated” from Spanish rule just to fight a
bloody counterinsurgency against Philippine nationalists—anathema to American democratic traditions and ideas about national
self-determination. As Promise and Peril shows, however, “cosmopolitan isolationists” like James never called for “cultural,
economic, or complete political separation from the rest of the world.” Rather, they wanted the United States to engage with other
nations peacefully and without pretensions of domination. They saw the United States as a potential force for good in the world, but
they also placed great value on neutrality and non-entanglement, and wanted America to focus on creating a more just domestic
order. James’s anti-imperialism was directly related to his fear of the effects of “bigness.” He argued forcefully against all
concentrations of power, especially those between business, political, and military interests. He knew that such vested interests
would grow larger and more difficult to control if America became an overseas empire. Others, such as “isolationist imperialist”
Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful senator from Massachusetts, argued that fighting the Spanish-American War and annexing the
Philippines were isolationist actions to their core. First, banishing the Spanish from the Caribbean comported with the Monroe
Doctrine; second, adding colonies such as the Philippines would lead to greater economic growth without exposing the United
States to the vicissitudes of outside trade. Prior to the Spanish-American War, many feared that the American economy’s rapid
growth would lead to a surplus of domestic goods and cause an economic disaster. New markets needed to be opened, and the
best way to do so was to dominate a given market—that is, a country—politically. Lodge’s defense of this “large policy” was public
and, by today’s standards, quite bald. Other proponents of this policy included Teddy Roosevelt (who also believed that war was
good for the national character) and a significant portion of the business class. For Lodge and Roosevelt, “isolationism” meant what
is commonly referred to today as “unilateralism”: the ability for the United States to do what it wants, when it wants. Other
“isolationists” espoused principles that we would today call internationalist. Randolph Bourne, a precocious journalist working for the
New Republic, passionately opposed American entry into the First World War, much to the detriment of his writing career. He
argued that hypernationalism would cause lasting damage to the American social fabric. He was especially repulsed by wartime
campaigns to Americanize immigrants. Bourne instead envisioned a “transnational America”: a place that, because of its distinct
cultural and political traditions and ethnic diversity, could become an example to the rest of the world. Its respect for plurality at
home could influence other countries by example, but also by allowing it to mediate international disputes without becoming a party
to them. Bourne wanted an America fully engaged with the world, but not embroiled in military conflicts or alliances. This was also
the case for William Borah, the progressive Republican senator from Idaho. Borah was an agrarian populist and something of a
Jeffersonian: he believed axiomatically in local democracy and rejected many forms of federal encroachment. He was opposed to
extensive immigration, but not “anti-immigrant.” Borah thought that America was strengthened by its complex ethnic makeup and
that an imbalance tilted toward one group or another would have deleterious effects. But it is his famously isolationist foreign policy
views for which Borah is best known. As Nichols writes: He was consistent in an anti-imperialist stance against U.S. domination
abroad; yet he was ambivalent in cases involving what he saw as involving obvious national interest….He also without fail argued
that any open-ended military alliances were to be avoided at all costs, while arguing that to minimize war abroad as well as conflict
at home should always be a top priority for American politicians. Borah thus cautiously supported entry into the First World War on
national interest grounds, but also led a group of senators known as “the irreconcilables” in their successful effort to prevent U.S.
entry into the League of Nations. His paramount concern was the collective security agreement in the organization’s charter: he
would not assent to a treaty that stipulated that the United States would be obligated to intervene in wars between distant powers
where the country had no serious interest at stake. Borah possessed an alternative vision for a more just and pacific international
order. Less than a decade after he helped scuttle American accession to the League, he helped pass the Kellogg-Briand Pact
(1928) in a nearly unanimous Senate vote. More than sixty states eventually became party to the pact, which outlawed war between
its signatories and required them to settle their disputes through peaceful means. Today, realists sneer at the idealism of
Kellogg-Briand, but the Senate was aware of the pact’s limitations and carved out clear exceptions for cases of national defense.
Some supporters believed that, if nothing else, the law would help strengthen an emerging international norm against war. (Given
what followed, this seems like a sad exercise in wish-fulfillment.) Unlike the League of Nations charter, the treaty faced almost no
opposition from the isolationist bloc in the Senate, since it did not require the United States to enter into a collective security
agreement or abrogate its sovereignty. This was a kind of internationalism Borah and his irreconcilables could proudly support. The
United States today looks very different from the country in which Borah, let alone William James, lived, both domestically
(where political and civil freedoms have been extended to women, African Americans, and gays and lesbians) and internationally
(with its leading role in many global institutions). But different strains of isolationism persist. Newt Gingrich has
argued for a policy of total “energy independence” (in other words, domestic drilling) while fulminating against President Obama for
“bowing” to the Saudi king. While recently driving through an agricultural region of rural Colorado, I saw a giant roadside billboard
calling for American withdrawal from the UN. Yet in the last decade, the Republican Party, with the partial exception of
its Ron Paul/libertarian faction, has veered into such a belligerent unilateralism that its graybeards—one of
whom, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, just lost a primary to a far-right challenger partly because of his reasonableness on foreign
affairs—were barely able to ensure Senate ratification of a key nuclear arms reduction treaty with
Russia. Many of these same people desire a unilateral war with Iran. And it isn’t just Republicans.
Drone attacks have intensified in Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere under the Obama administration.
Massive troop deployments continue unabated. We spend over $600 billion dollars a year on our
military budget; the next largest is China’s, at “only” around $100 billion. Administrations come
and go, but the national security state appears here to stay.
Heg decreases structural violence---any alt dooms humanity to deprivation
Thomas P.M. Barnett 11, Former Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research
Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College American military geostrategist and Chief Analyst at
Wikistrat, worked as the Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation in the Department of Defense,
September 12, 2011, “The New Rules: The Rise of the Rest Spells U.S. Strategic Victory,” World Politics Review, online:
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/9973/the-new-rules-the-rise-of-the-rest-spells-u-s-strategic-victory
First the absurdity: A few of the most over-the-top Bush-Cheney neocons did indeed promote a vision of U.S. primacy by which America
shouldn't be afraid to wage war to keep other rising powers at bay. It was a nutty concept then, and it remains a nutty
concept today. But since it feeds a lot of major military weapons system purchases, especially for the China-centric Air Force and Navy, don't expect it to disappear
so long as the Pentagon's internal budget fights are growing in intensity. ¶ Meanwhile, the Chinese do their stupid best to fuel this outdated logic by building a force
designed to keep America out of East Asia just as their nation's dependency on resources flowing from unstable developing regions skyrockets. With America's
fiscal constraints now abundantly clear, the world's primary policing force is pulling back , while that force's implied successor is
nowhere close to being able to field a similar power-projection capacity -- and never will be. So with NATO clearly stretched to its limits by the
combination of Afghanistan and Libya, a lot of future fires in developing regions will likely be left to burn on their own . We'll just have to wait and
see how much foreign commentators delight in that G-Zero dynamic in the years ahead. ¶ That gets us to the original "insult": the U.S. did not lord it over the
world in the 1990s. Yes, it did argue for and promote the most rapid spread of globalization possible. But the "evil" of the
Washington Consensus only yielded the most rapid growth of a truly global middle class that the world has ever seen.
Yes, we can, in our current economic funk, somehow cast that development as the "loss of U.S. hegemony," in that the American consumer is no longer the demandcenter of globalization's universe. But this is without a doubt the most amazing achievement of U.S. foreign policy, surpassing even our role in World War II. ¶
Numerous world powers served as global or regional hegemons before we came along, and their record on economic
development was painfully transparent: Elites got richer, and the masses got poorer. Then America showed up after
World War II and engineered an international liberal trade order, one that was at first admittedly limited to the West. But within four decades it
went virally global, and now for the first time in history, more than half of our planet's population lives in conditions of modest-tomounting abundance -- after millennia of mere sustenance. ¶ You may choose to interpret this as some sort of cosmic coincidence, but the
historical sequence is undeniable: With its unrivaled power, America made the world a far better place. ¶ That spreading wave of
global abundance has reformatted all sorts of traditional societies that lay in its path. Some, like the Chinese, have adapted to it magnificently in an economic and social
sense, with the political adaptation sure to follow eventually. Others, being already democracies, have done far better across the board, like Turkey, Indonesia and India.
But there are also numerous traditional societies where that reformatting impulse from below has been met by both harsh repression from above and violent attempts by
religious extremists to effect a "counterreformation" that firewalls the "faithful" from an "evil" outside world.¶ Does this violent blowback constitute the great threat of our
age? Not really. As I've long argued, this "friction" from globalization's tectonic advance is merely what's left over now that great-power war has gone dormant for 66 years
and counting, with interstate wars now so infrequent and so less lethal as to be dwarfed by the civil strife that plagues those developing regions still suffering weak
Let's remember what the U.S. actually did across the 1990s after the Soviet threat disappeared. It went out
of its way to police the world's poorly governed spaces, battling rogue regimes and answering the 9-1-1 call repeatedly when
disaster and/or civil strife struck vulnerable societies. Yes, playing globalization's bodyguard made America public enemy
No. 1 in the eyes of its most violent rejectionist movements, including al-Qaida, but we made the effort because, in our heart of hearts,
we knew that this is what blessed powers are supposed to do. ¶ Some, like the Bush-Cheney neocons, were driven by more than that sense of moral
connectivity to the global economy. ¶
responsibility. They saw a chance to remake the world so as to assure U.S. primacy deep into the future. The timing of their dream was cruelly ironic, for it blossomed just
as America's decades-in-the-making grand strategy reached its apogee in the peaceful rise of so many great powers at once. Had Sept. 11 not intervened, the neocons
would likely have eventually targeted rising China for strategic demonization. Instead, they locked in on Osama bin Laden. The rest, as they say, is history. ¶ The follow-on
irony of the
War on Terror is that its operational requirements actually revolutionized a major portion of the U.S. military -- specifically the
Army, Marines and Special Forces -- in such a way as to redirect their strategic ethos from big wars to small ones . It also forged a
new operational bond between the military's irregular elements and that portion of the Central Intelligence Agency that pursues direct action against transnational bad
actors. The up-front costs of this transformation were far too high, largely because the Bush White House stubbornly refused to embrace counterinsurgency tactics until
after the popular repudiation signaled by the 2006 midterm election. But the
end result is clear: We now have the force we actually need to
manage this global era.¶ But, of course, that can all be tossed into the dumpster if we convince ourselves that our "loss" of
hegemony was somehow the result of our own misdeed, instead of being our most profound gift to world history. Again, we
grabbed the reins of global leadership and patiently engineered not only the greatest redistribution -- and expansion -- of
global wealth ever seen, but also the greatest consolidation of global peace ever seen. ¶ Now, if we can sensibly realign our
strategic relationship with the one rising great power, China, whose growing strength upsets us so much, then in combination with the rest
of the world's rising great powers we can collectively wield enough global policing power to manage what's yet to come. ¶ As
always, the choice is ours.
Representations of apocalypse cause social transcendence—it’s the only way to
prevent extinction
Wink, 2001 [Walter, nqa, “Apocalypse Now?” Christian Century, Oct 17, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79514992 //]
If that were the whole story about apocalyptic, many of us would want nothing to do with it. That is not the
whole story, however. There is a positive role for apocalyptic as well as its better-known negative. The
positive power of apocalyptic lies in its capacity to force humanity to face threats of
unimaginable proportions in order to galvanize efforts at self and social
transcendence. Only such Herculean responses can actually rescue people from the
threat and make possible the continuation of humanity on the other side. Paradoxically,
the apocalyptic warning is intended to remove the apocalyptic threat by acts of
apocalyptic transcendence.
Imagining potential nuclear wars serves as a collective warning against its
possibility and opens up space for interrogating national values
Seed, Professor of English literature at the University of Liverpool, 2K
(David, “Imagining the Worst: Science Fiction and Nuclear War,” Journal of American Studies of Turkey, Vol. 11, pp. 3949, http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~jast/Number11/Seed.htm)
A number of recurring features emerge from these narratives. In virtually every case the USA plays a
reactive role, never attacking first. Secondly, the nation’s capacity to cope with such an attack
becomes a test of its morale and for that reason the nuclear aftermath, in the short and
long term, occasions an interrogation of cherished national values. Thirdly, because
nuclear attack can only be mounted with the latest technology, these novels explore anxieties about
problems of control. Finally this fiction expresses a collective horror of ultimate endings. Some human
presence persists however tenuous or displaced. Cherished human values like reason might be transposed
on to extraterrestrial beings; or reader might play out the role of a survivor through the very act of reading a
narrative whose deliverer has died. Ultimately there is an unusual circularity to such narratives. By
deploying a whole range of strategies to imagine a dreaded future, they function as
warnings against such imminent developments. The more the future fails to develop
along these imagined lines, the more necessary is the reconfirmation of these
narratives as mere imaginary extrapolations.
Empiricism is the only practical and accurate method—prefer it
Walt 05 annu rev polit sci 8 23-48 (“the relationship between theory and policy in international relations”)
Policy decisions can be influenced by several types of knowledge. First, policy makers invariably rely on purely factual
knowledge (e.g., how large are the opponent's forces? What is the current balance of payments?). Second, decision
makers sometimes employ “rules of thumb”: simple decision rules acquired through experience rather than via
systematic study (Mearsheimer 1989).3A third type of knowledge consists of typologies, which classify phenomena
based on sets of specific traits. Policy makers can also rely on empirical laws. An empirical law is an observed
correspondence between two or more phenomena that systematic inquiry has shown to be reliable.
Such laws (e.g., “democracies do not fight each other” or “human beings are more risk averse with respect to losses
than to gains”) can be useful guides even if we do not know why they occur, or if our
explanations for them are incorrect. Finally, policy makers can also use theories. A theory is a causal
explanation—it identifies recurring relations between two or more phenomena and explains why that relationship
obtains. By providing us with a picture of the central forces that determine real-world behavior,
theories invariably simplify reality in order to render it comprehensible. At the most general level,
theoretical IR work consists of “efforts by social scientists…to account for interstate and trans-state processes, issues,
and outcomes in general causal terms” (Lepgold & Nincic 2001, p. 5; Viotti & Kauppi 1993). IR theories offer
explanations for the level of security competition between states (including both the likelihood of war among particular
states and the war-proneness of specific countries); the level and forms of international cooperation (e.g., alliances,
regimes, openness to trade and investment); the spread of ideas, norms, and institutions; and the transformation of
particular international systems, among other topics. In constructing these theories, IR scholars employ an equally
diverse set of explanatory variables. Some of these theories operate at the level of the international system, using
variables such as the distribution of power among states (Waltz 1979, Copeland 2000, Mearsheimer 2001), the volume
of trade, financial flows, and interstate communications (Deutsch 1969, Ruggie 1983, Rosecrance 1986); or the degree
of institutionalization among states (Keohane 1984, Keohane & Martin 2003). Other theories emphasize different
national characteristics, such as regime type (Andreski 1980, Doyle 1986, Fearon 1994, Russett 1995), bureaucratic
and organizational politics (Allison & Halperin 1972, Halperin 1972), or domestic cohesion (Levy 1989); or the content of
particular ideas or doctrines (Van Evera 1984, Hall 1989, Goldstein & Keohane 1993, Snyder 1993). Yet another family
of theories operates at the individual level, focusing on individual or group psychology, gender differences, and other
human traits (De Rivera 1968, Jervis 1976, Mercer 1996, Byman & Pollock 2001, Goldgeier & Tetlock 2001, Tickner
2001, Goldstein 2003), while a fourth body of theory focuses on collective ideas, identities, and social discourse (e.g.,
Finnemore 1996, Ruggie 1998, Wendt 1999). To develop these ideas, IR theorists employ the full
range of social science methods: comparative case studies, formal theory, large-N
statistical analysis, and hermeneutical or interpretivist approaches.
Mexican collapse causes total U.S. withdrawal from the international system
Westhawk 08
private investor. Formerly, the global research director and portfolio manager for a large, private, U.S.-based
investment firm. Former U.S. Marine Corps officer: infantry company commander, artillery battalion staff officer December 21, 2008,
"Now that would change everything," http://westhawk.blogspot.com/2008/12/now-that-would-change-everything.html)
The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial
infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal
conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by the
Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for
homeland security alone. Yes, the “rapid collapse” of Mexico would change everything with respect
to the global security environment. Such a collapse would have enormous humanitarian,
constitutional, economic, cultural, and security implications for the U.S. It would seem the U.S. federal
government, indeed American society at large, would have little ability to focus serious attention on much
else in the world . The hypothetical collapse of Pakistan is a scenario that has already been well discussed. In the worst case,
would be able to isolate itself from most effects emanating from south Asia. However,
there would be no running from a Mexican collapse.
the U.S.
No regional cooperation
Brzenzinski (Former Sect. Of State) 04 [Zbigniew, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, Perseus, New
York // wyo-tjc]
In any case, the
eventual end of American hegemony will not involve a restoration of multipolarity
among the familiar major powers that dominated world affairs for the last two centuries. Nor will it
yield to another dominant hegemon that would displace the United State s by assuming a similar political,
military, economic, technological, and sociocultural worldwide preeminence. The familiar powers of the last century
are too fatigued or too weak to assume the role the United States now plays. It is noteworthy that since
1880, in a comparative ranking of world powers (cumulatively based on their economic strength, military budgets and assets,
populations, etc.), the top five slots at sequential twenty-year intervals have been shared by just seven states: the United States, the
United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, and China. Only the United States, however, unambiguously earned inclusion
among the top five in every one of the twenty- year intervals, and the gap in the year 2000 between the top-ranked United States
and the rest was vastly wider than ever before, The former major European powers—Great Britain, Germany, and
France—are
too weak to step into the breach. In the next two decades, it is quite unlikely that the
European Union will become sufficiently united politically to muster the popular will to compete
with the United States in the politico-military arena, Russia is no longer an imperial power, and its
central challenge is to recover socioeconomically lest it lose its far eastern territories to China. Japan’s population is aging
and its economy has slowed; the conventional wisdom of the 1980s that Japan is destined to be the next “superstate” now
has the ring of historical irony. China, even if it succeeds in maintaining high rates of economic growth
and retains its internal political stability both are far from certain), will at best be a regional power
still constrained by an impoverished population, antiquated infrastructure, and limited appeal
worldwide. The same is true of India, which additionally faces uncertainties regarding its long-term national unity. [P. 23]
Transition from IR structures prevents a new liberal order and causes violence
Martin Shaw, Professor of International Relations and Politics, University of Sussex “The unfinished global revolution: intellectuals
and the new politics of international relations,” REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, v 27, 2001, p. 627-647,
http://nationalism.org/library/science/ir/shaw/shaw-ris-2001-27-04.pdf
The new politics of international relations require us, therefore, to go beyond the anti-imperialism of
the intellectual left as well as of the semi-anarchist traditions of the academic discipline. We need to recognize three fundamental
truths. First, in the twenty-first century people struggling for democratic liberties across the non- Western world are likely to make
constant demands on our solidarity. Courageous academics, students and other intellectuals will be in the forefront of these
movements. They deserve the unstinting support of intellectuals in the West. Second, the old international thinking in which
democratic movements are seen as purely internal to states no longer carries conviction—despite the lingering nostalgia for it on
both the American right and the anti-American left. The idea that global principles can and should be enforced worldwide is firmly
established in the minds of hundreds of millions of people. This consciousness will become a powerful force in the coming decades.
Third, global state-formation is a fact. International institutions are being extended, and (like it or not)
they have a symbiotic relation with the major centre of state power, the increasingly internationalized Western
conglomerate. The success of the global-democratic revolutionary wave depends first on how well it is
consolidated in each national context—but second, on how thoroughly it is embedded in international networks
of power, at the centre of which, inescapably, is the West. From these political fundamentals, strategic propositions can be
derived. First, democratic movements cannot regard non-governmental organizations and civil society as ends in themselves. They
must aim to civilize local states, rendering them open, accountable and pluralistic, and curtail the arbitrary and violent exercise of
power. Second, democratizing local states is not a separate task from integrating them into global and often Western-centred
networks. Reproducing isolated local centres of power carries with it classic dangers of states as centres of war.84 Embedding
global norms and integrating new state centres with global institutional frameworks are essential to the
control of violence. (To put this another way: the proliferation of purely national democracies is not a recipe for peace.) Third,
while the global revolution cannot do without the West and the UN, neither can it rely on them unconditionally. We need these power
networks, but we need to tame them too, to make their messy bureaucracies enormously more accountable and sensitive to the
needs of society worldwide. This will involve the kind of ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ argued for by David Held.85 It will also require us
to advance a global social-democratic agenda, to address the literally catastrophic scale of world social inequalities. This is not a
separate problem: social and economic reform is an essential ingredient of alternatives to warlike and genocidal power; these feed
off and reinforce corrupt and criminal political economies. Fourth, if we need the global-Western state, if we want to democratize it
and make its institutions friendlier to global peace and justice, we cannot be indifferent to its strategic debates. It
matters to develop international political interventions, legal institutions and robust peacekeeping as strategic alternatives to
bombing our way through zones of crisis. It matters that international intervention supports pluralist structures, rather than ratifying
Bosnia-style apartheid.86 As political intellectuals in the West, we need to have our eyes on the ball at our feet, but we also need to
raise them to the horizon. We need to grasp the historic drama that is transforming worldwide relationships between people and
state, as well as between state and state. We need to think about how the turbulence of the global revolution
can be consolidated in democratic, pluralist, international networks of both social relations and
state authority. We cannot be simply optimistic about this prospect. Sadly, it will require repeated violent political
crises to push Western and other governments towards the required restructuring of world
institutions.87 What I have outlined is a huge challenge; but the alternative is to see the global revolution
splutter into partial defeat, or degenerate into new genocidal wars—perhaps even nuclear conflicts.
The practical challenge for all concerned citizens, and the theoretical and analytical challenges for students of international relations
and politics, are intertwined.
Framing – existential risk means you can still prefer “OK” outcomes
Bostrom ’12 – faculty of philosophy at Oxford
(Nick, “Existential Risk Prevention as the Most Important Task for Humanity”, Forthcoming in
Global Policy (2012), http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.html)
These considerations suggest that the
loss in expected value resulting from an existential catastrophe is so
enormous that the objective of reducing existential risks should be a dominant consideration
whenever we act out of an impersonal concern for humankind as a whole. It may be useful to adopt
the following rule of thumb for such impersonal moral action: Maxipok Maximize the probability of
an “OK outcome,” where an OK outcome is any outcome that avoids existential catastrophe .
Mark
At best, maxipok is a rule of thumb or a prima facie suggestion. It is not a principle of absolute validity,
since there clearly are moral ends other than the prevention of existential catastrophe. The
principle’s usefulness is as an aid to prioritization. Unrestricted altruism is not so common that we can
afford to fritter it away on a plethora of feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy. If benefiting
humanity by increasing existential safety achieves expected good on a scale many orders of
magnitude greater than that of alternative contributions, we would do well to focus on this most
efficient philanthropy. Note that maxipok differs from the popular maximin principle (“Choose the action that
has the best worst-case outcome”).[11] Since we cannot completely eliminate existential risk—at any moment, we
might be tossed into the dustbin of cosmic history by the advancing front of a vacuum phase transition triggered in some remote galaxy
a billion years ago—the use of maximin in the present context would entail choosing the action that has
the greatest benefit under the assumption of impending extinction. Maximin thus implies that we
ought all to start partying as if there were no tomorrow. That implication, while perhaps tempting,
is implausible.
2ac
2. Counter-interpretation: Legalize includes the possibility of taxes and
regulations
O’Hear 04 (Michael, Assistant Professor, Marquette University Law School. J.D., Yale Law School, 1996; B.A., Yale College,
1991, April 2004, “Federalism and Drug Control” Vanderbilt Law Review, 57 Vand. L. Rev. 783, Lexis)
Legalization refers to legalization of the use, possession manufacture, and distribution of drugs;
note, however, that a legalization policy may include significant taxation and regulation of drugs, much
as alcohol and tobacco, though legalized, are subject to taxation and regulation.
Without political solutions and ways to lessen human suffering in the short term,
the alt is radically incomplete—only the perm solves
Robert Sinnerbrink, Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, 05, Critical Horizons, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 258-259
Foucault and Agamben leave us with a stark alternative: either to take the ethical turn towards
practices of freedom compatible with neo-liberalist governmentality, or accelerate biopolitical
nihilism in the hope that a messianic overcoming of the breach between bare life and sovereign
power will institute a redeemed human community. In short, affirm pragmatic practices of ethical self-formation, or
prepare for the messianic overcoming of biopolitical domination. These alternatives, however, seem partial and
inadequate. Foucault’s turn to ethics and liberalism underplays the political urgency of confronting societies of biopolitical
control; this is a point not lost on Deleuze and taken up by Hardt and Negri in their neo-Marxist version of biopolitical production.70
Agamben’s despairing account of biopolitical nihilism, on the other hand, overemphasises the
ontological ‘sameness’ of biopower regimes, and retreats from concrete politics into a
metaphysical messianism prophetically gesturing towards a utopian community to come. What my brief genealogy of
biopower and biopolitics suggests, then, is the need to find a path between these alternatives. We
should retain the Foucaultian emphasis on a critical analysis of biopower without acquiescing to
an ethical accommodation with neo-liberalism. And we ought to affirm Agamben’s profound
questioning of the biopolitical foundations of modernity without succumbing to a utopian
metaphysical messianism. We also need to question the Heideggerian metaphysical critique of modernity that has
profoundly marked both Foucaultian and Agambenian conceptions of biopower and biopolitics. Finally, this genealogy
suggests the need to restore the experience of injustice, the suffering of human beings, to any
philosophical account of biopolitics, and to articulate political responses to biopower that go
beyond ethical acquiescence and metaphysical longing.
Framework—allow the aff to weigh impacts—other frameworks kill education by mooting the 1AC and preventing us from
learning about the topic
Sovereignty not inherently violent—the plan’s manipulation of sovereignty avoids
the worst forms of violence
Connolly chair of political science @ Johns Hopkins, 07 p. 29-30
(William, Sovereignty and Life Ed. By Calarco and DeCaroli)
Agamben contends that biopolitics has become intensified today. This intensification translates
the paradox of sovereignty into a potential disaster. The analysis that he offers at this point seems not so much
wrong to me as overly formal. It reflects a classical liberal and Arendtian assumption that there was a time when politics was
restricted to public life and biocultural life was kept in the private realm. What a joke. Every way of life involves the
infusion of norms, judgments, and standards into the affective life of participants at both private
and public levels. Every way of life is bioculrural and biopolitical. Aristode, Epicurus, Lucretius, Augustine,
Spinoza, Rousseau, and Hegel, writing during different periods, all appreciate the layering of culture into different layers of biological
life and the concomitant mixing of biology into culture. They treat the biological not as merely the genetic or fixed, bur as zones of
corporeality infused with cultural habits, dispositions, sentiments, and norms. Bioculturallife has beell intensified today with the
emergence of new technologies of infusion. Bur the shift is not as radical as Agamben makes it out to be. In latemodern life, new technologies enable physicians, biologists, geneticists, prison systems, advertisers, media talking heads, and
psychiatrists to sink deeply into human biology. They help to shape the cultural being of biology, although not always as they intend
to do. Agamben's review of new medical technologies to keep people breathing after their brains have stopped functioning captures
something of this change, showing why a sovereign authority now has to decide when death has arrived rather than lerting that
outcome express the slow play of biocultural tradition. Numerous such judgments, previously left to religious tradition in
predominantly Christian cultures, have now become explicit issues of technology and sovereignty in religiously diverse states.
Agamben tends to describe the state as the "nation-state." He does not ask whether disturbing developments in the logic of
sovereignty are bound, not merely to a conjunction between biopolitics and sovereignty, but to a conjunction between them and
renewed attempts to consolidate the spirituality of the nation during a time when it is ever more difficult to do so. As the
reactive drive to restore the fictive unity of a nation is relaxed, it becomes more possible to
negotiate a generous ethos of pluralism that copes in more inclusive ways with the nexus
between biology, politics, and sovereignty. More than anything else, the dubious drive to translate deep plurality into
nationhood translates sovereignty into a punitive, corrective, exclusionary, and marginalizing practice4 The shape of the ethos
infusing the practice of sovereignty is therefore critical, and not a mere conjugation of
sovereignty and biopolitics.
Vague alts are bad and a voter—kills fairness because they can shift out of our offense
Alt causes totalitarianism—utopian faith in justice without the law is the
foundation of fascism
Kohn 06 [Margaret, Asst. Prof. Poli Sci @ Florida, “Bare Life and the Limits of the Law,”.Theory and Event, 9:2,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.2kohn.html, Retrieved 9-26-06//uwyo-ajl]
**this card edited for ableist language**
Is there an alternative to this nexus of anomie and nomos produced by the state of exception? Agamben invokes genealogy and
politics as two interrelated avenues of struggle. According to Agamben, "To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its
nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of 'politics'." (88)
In a move reminiscent of Foucault, Agamben suggests that breaking the discursive lock on dominant ways of seeing, or more
precisely not seeing, sovereign power is the only way to disrupt its hegemonic effects. Agamben clearly hopes that his
theoretical analysis could contribute to the political struggle against authoritarianism, yet he only
offers tantalizingly abstract hints about how this might work. Beyond the typical academic conceit that
theoretical work is a decisive element of political struggle, Agamben seems to embrace a utopianism that
provides little guidance for political action. He imagines, "One day humanity will play with law just as children play
with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good." (64) More troubling
is his messianic suggestion that "this studious play" will usher in a form of justice that cannot be
made juridical. Agamben might do well to consider Hannah Arendt's warning that the belief in
justice unmediated by law was one of the characteristics of totalitarianism . It might seem unfair to focus
too much attention on Agamben's fairly brief discussion of alternatives to the sovereignty-exception-law nexus, but it is precisely
those sections that reveal the flaws in his analysis. It also brings us back to our original question about how to resist the
authoritarian implications of the state of exception without falling into the liberal trap of calling for more law. For Agamben, the
problem with the "rule of law" response to the war on terrorism is that it ignores the way that the
law is fundamentally implicated in the project of sovereignty with its corollary logic of exception. Yet the
solution that he endorses reflects a similar blindness [failure]. Writing in his utopian-mystical mode, he insists,
"the only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law."(88) Thus Agamben, in spite of
all of his theoretical sophistication, ultimately falls into the trap of hoping that politics can be liberated from
law, at least the law tied to violence and the demarcating project of sovereignty.
Agamben’s rejection of all law as inherently violent is based on misreadings of
political theory and false generalizations – not all law is violent, and we shouldn’t
assume that it is
Jean-Philippe Deranty, Professor of French and German Philosophy at Macquarie University, 04, online:
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, accessed September 11, 2005
Agamben chooses to focus on the decisionistic tradition (Hobbes, Heidegger,
Schmitt). With it, he wants to isolate the pure essences of all juridical orders and thus highlight the essential violence structuring
28. All this explains why
traditional politics. Since the law essentially appears as a production and capture of bare life, the political order that enunciates and
maintains the law is essentially violent, always threatening the bare life it has produced with total annihilation. Auschwitz is the real
outcome of all normative orders. 29. The problem with this strategic use of the decisionistic tradition is that it does not
do justice to the complex relationship that these authors establish between violence and normativity, that
is, in the end the very normative nature of their theories. In brief, they are not saying that all law is violent, in essence
or in its core, rather that law is dependent upon a form of violence for its foundation. Violence can
found the law, without the law itself being violent . In Hobbes, the social contract, despite the absolute nature of the
sovereign it creates, also enables individual rights to flourish on the basis of the inalienable right to life (see Barret-Kriegel 2003: 86).
30. In Schmitt, the decision over the exception is indeed "more interesting than the regular case", but only because it makes the
regular case possible. The "normal situation" matters more than the power to create it since it is its end (Schmitt 1985: 13). What
Schmitt has in mind is not the indistinction between fact and law, or their intimate cohesion, to wit, their secrete indistinguishability,
but the origin of the law, in the name of the law. This explains why the primacy given by Schmitt to the decision is accompanied by
the recognition of popular sovereignty, since the decision is only the expression of an organic community. Decisionism for Schmitt is
only a way of asserting the political value of the community as homogeneous whole, against liberal parliamentarianism. Also, the
evolution of Schmitt’s thought is marked by the retreat of the decisionistic element, in favour of a strong form of institutionalism. This
is because, if indeed the juridical order is totally dependent on the sovereign decision, then the latter can revoke it at any moment.
Decisionism, as a theory about the origin of the law, leads to its own contradiction unless it is reintegrated in a theory of institutions
(Kervégan 1992). 31. In other words, Agamben sees these authors as establishing a circularity of law and
violence, when they want to emphasise the extra-juridical origin of the law, for the law’s sake.
Equally, Savigny’s polemic against rationalism in legal theory, against Thibaut and his philosophical ally Hegel, does not amount to
a recognition of the capture of life by the law, but aims at grounding the legal order in the very life of a people (Agamben 1998: 27).
For Agamben, it seems, the origin and the essence of the law are synonymous, whereas the authors he relies on thought rather that
the two were fundamentally different.
Whatever being is impossible to realize—we can only empty out the concept of
rights if there is a concrete alternative
Daly 04 (http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm,
The non-citizen and the concept of 'human rights', Frances Daly, Australian National University
2004).
What it is that we might want a human potentiality to mean is, of course, a complex, difficult and open-ended issue. But it
is
important for us to ask whether a human potentiality must start from emptiness. Agamben
repeatedly refers to the need to begin from a place of 'amorphousness' and 'inactuality', assuming
that there is something that will necessarily follow from the simple fact of human existence – but
why should we assume this? What might constitute or form this potentiality is surely concerned with what is latent but as
yet unrealized. For Agamben, there is nothing latent that is not already tainted by a sense of a task that must be done (Agamben,
1993: 43). There is no ability to achieve any displacement with what is present within values of
community and justice, there is only an immobilizing nothingness that assumes a false essence,
vocation or destiny. If the 'whatever' being that he contends is indeed emerging, and it possesses,
as he argues, "an original relation to desire", it is worthwhile asking what this desire is for
(Agamben, 1993: 10). If it is simply life itself, then it is not clear why this should be devoid of any content. Any process of
emptying out, of erasing and abolishing, such as that which Agamben attempts, is done for a
reason - it involves critique and rejection, on the basis, necessarily, that something else is
preferable. But Agamben provides us with very little of what is needed to understand how we
might engage with this option.
Agambens “camp” is disastrous political strategy—its impossible and only a
convenient rationalization to make theorists feel secure
Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2003, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The
Perverse Core of Christianity, p. 152-56
So let us return to the scene of a small child violently tearing apart and discarding the chocolate ball in order to get at the plastic
toy— is he not the emblem of so-called “totalitarianism,” which also wants to get rid of the “inessential” historical contingent coating
in order to liberate the “essence” of man? Is not the ultimate “totalitarian” vision that of a New Man arising out of the debris of the
violent annihilation of the former corrupted humanity? Paradoxically, then, liberalism and “totalitarianism” share the belief in Factor
X, the plastic toy in the midst of the human chocolate coating. The problematic point of this Factor X that makes us equal in spite of
our differences is clear: beneath the deep humanist insight that, “deep within ourselves, we are all
equal, the same vulnerable humans,” is the cynical question “why bother to fight against surface
differences when, deep down, we already are equal?”—like the proverbial millionaire who poignantly discovers that
he feels the same passions, fears, and loves as a destitute beggar. However, does the ontology of subjectivity as lack, the pathetic
assertion that we all have “a nigger’s head,” really provide the final answer? Is not Lacan’s basic materialist position that the lack
itself has to be sustained by a minimum of material leftover, by a contingent, indivisible remainder which has no positive ontological
consistency, but is simply a void embodied? Does not the subject need an irreducible pathological
supplement? This is what the formula of fantasy ($ — a, the divided subject coupled with the object-cause of
desire) indicates. Such a convoluted structure (an object emerges as the outcome of the very operation of cleansing the field of
all objects) is clearly discernible in what is the most elementary rhetorical gesture of transcendental philosophy: that of identifying
the essential dimension (Factor X) by erasing all contingent content. Perhaps the most seductive strategy with regard
to this Factor X is to be located in a favorite twentieth-century intellectual exercise: the urge to
“catastrophize” the situation: whatever the actual situation, it had to be denounced as
“catastrophic,” and the better it appeared, the more it encouraged this exercise—in this way, irrespective of our
“merely ontic” differences, we all participate in the same ontological catastrophe. Heidegger denounced
the present age as that of the highest “danger,” the epoch of accomplished nihilism; Adorno and Horkheimer saw in it the
culmination of the “dialectic of enlightenment in the “administered world”; Giorgio Agamben defines the twentieth-
century concentration camps as the “truth” of the entire Western political project . Recall the figure of
Max Horkheimer in 1950s West Germany: while denouncing the “eclipse of reason” in the modern Western consumer society, he
simultaneously defended this same society as the sole island of freedom in the sea of totalitarianisms and corrupt dictatorships all
around the globe. It was as if Winston Churchill’s old ironic quip about democracy (the worst political regime,
repeated here in a serious form: Western “administered society” is
barbarism in the guise of civilization, the highest point of alienation, the disintegration of the autonomous
individual, and so forth—however, all other sociopolitical regimes are worse, so that, in comparison, one
nonetheless has to support it. . . . I shall propose a radical reading of this syndrome: what if what these unfortunate
intellectuals cannot bear is the fact that they lead a life which is basically happy, safe, and
comfortable, so that, in order to justify their higher calling, they have to construct a scenario of
radical catastrophe? And, in fact. Adorno and Horkheimer are oddly close to Heidegger here: The most violent
but none of the others is any better) was
“catastrophes” in nature and in the cosmos are nothing in the order of Unheimlichkeit in comparison with that Unheimlichkeit which
man is in himself and which, insofar as man is placed in the midst of beings as such and stands for beings, consists in forgetting
being, so that for him das Heimische becomes empty erring, which he fills up with his dealings. The Unheimlichkeit of the Unheimlichkeit lies in that man, in his very essence, is a katastrophe—a reversal that turns him away from the genuine essence. Man
is the only catastrophe in the midst of beings.2 The first thing that cannot fail to strike a philosopher here is the implicit reference to
the Kantian Sublime: just as, for Kant, the most violent eruptions in nature are nothing in comparison with the power of the moral
Law, for Heidegger, the most violent catastrophes in nature and social life are nothing in comparison with the catastrophe which is
man himself—or, as Heidegger would have put it in his other main rhetorical figure, the essence of catastrophe has
nothing to do with ontic catastrophes, since the essence of catastrophe is the catastrophe of the
essence itself its withdrawal, its forgetting by man. (Does this also apply to the Holocaust? Is it possible to claim, in a
nonobscene way, that the Holocaust is nothing in comparison with the catastrophe of the forgetting of being?) The (ambiguous)
difference is that while, for Kant, natural violence expresses the sublime dimension of the moral Law in a negative way, for
Heidegger, the other term of the comparison is the catastrophe that is man himself The further ambiguous point is that Kant sees a
positive aspect of the experience of the catastrophic natural eruptions: in witnessing them, we experience in a negative way the
incomparable sublime grandeur of the moral Law; while for Heidegger. it is not clear that we need the threat (or fact) of an actual
ontic catastrophe in order to experience the true catastrophe that pertains to human essence as such in a negative way (Is this
difference linked to the fact that, in the experience of the Kantian Sublime, the subject assumes the role of an observer perceiving
the excessive natural violence from a safe distance, not being directly threatened by it, while this distance is lacking in Heidegger?)
It is easy to make fun of Heidegger here—there is, however, a “rational kernel” to his formulations. Although Adorno and Horkheimer
would dismiss these formulations with scathing laughter, are they not caught in the same predicament? When they delineate
the contours of the emerging late-capitalist “administered world [verwaltete Welt] ,“ they are presenting
it as coinciding with barbarism, as the point at which civilization itself returns to barbarism, as a
kind of negative telos of the whole progress of Enlightenment , as the Nietzschean kingdom of the Last Men:
“One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented
happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.”13 At the same time, however, they nonetheless warn against
more direct “ontic” catastrophes (different forms of terror, etc.) .The liberal-democratic society of Last
Men is thus literally the worst possible, the only problem being that all other societies are even
worse, so that the choice seems to be between Bad and Worse. The ambiguity here is irreducible: on the one
hand, the “administered world” is the final catastrophic outcome of the Enlightenment; on the other, the “normal” tenor of our
societies is continually threatened by catastrophes, from war and terror to ecological disasters, so that while we should
fight
these “ontic” catastrophes, we should simultaneously bear in mind that the ultimate catastrophe
is the very “normal” tenor of the “administered world” in the absence of any “ontic” catastrophe .’4
The aporia here is genuine: the solution of this ambiguity through some kind of pseudo-Hegelian “infinite judgment” asserting the
ultimate coincidence between the subjects of late-capitalist consumerist society and the victims of the Holocaust (“Last Men are
Muslims”) clearly does not work. The problem is that no pathetic identification with the Muslims (the living
dead of the concentration camps) is possible—one cannot say “We are all Muslims” in the same
way as, ten years ago, we often heard the phrase “We all live in Sarajevo,” things went too far in Auschwitz. (And,
in the opposite sense, it would also be ridiculous to assert one’s solidarity with 9/11 by claiming: “We are all New Yorkers!”—millions
in the Third World would say: “Yes!”..) How, then, are we to deal with actual ethical catastrophes? When, two
decades ago, Helmut Kohl, in order to sum up the predicament of those Germans born too late to be involved in the Holocaust, used
the phrase “the mercy of the late birth [die Gnade des spaten Geburt] many commentators rejected this formulation as a sign of
moral ambiguity and opportunism, implying that today’s Germans can dismiss the Holocaust as simply outside the scope of their
responsibility However, Kohl’s formulation does touch a paradoxical nerve of morality baptized by Bernard Williams “moral luck.”15
Williams evokes the case of a painter, ironically called “Gauguin,” who left his wife and children and moved to Tahiti in order to develop his artistic genius fully—was he morally justified in doing this, or not? Williams’s answer is that we can answer this
question only in retrospect, after we have learned the final outcome of his risky decision: did he
develop into an artist of genius, or not? As Jean-Pierre Dupuy has pointed out,’6 we encounter the same dilemma
apropos of the urgency to do something about today’s threat of various ecological catastrophes:
either we take this threat seriously, and decide today to do things that, if the catastrophe does not
occur, will appear ridiculous, or we do nothing and lose everything in the case of the catastrophe.
The worst case is here the choice of a middle ground, of taking a limited number of measures—in this case,
we will fail whatever happens (that is to say, the problem is that there is no middle ground when it comes to an ecological
catastrophe: either it will happen or it won’t).
They overessentialize—Nazi Germany and the democratic polity are distinct—you
should not reject the tools of modern rights
Deranty Philosophy Prof. @ Macquarie University, 04 p. online
(Jean-Phillipe, Borderlands Vol. 3 # 1 “Agamben’s Challenge to normative theories…”
Agamben does not restrict indistinction to the conceptual or
structural level, but extends it to empirical, historical phenomena. The archaic State is not
substantially different from the modern one. There is no essential difference between democracy
before Auschwitz, the totalitarian States themselves, and democracy after Auschwitz between
liberal democracies and dictatorships (Agamben 1998:10). In Auschwitz, there is no difference between victim and
Consistent with this foundationalist essentialism,
executioner (Agamben 1999a: 21). No distinction between the sacred priest, the criminal banned from the archaic community and
the modern citizen; no distinction between the bodies in Auschwitz and the bodies of victims of car
accidents in modern Europe (1998: 114); no distinction between the Muselmann in the extermination camp and the
immigrant locked up by police in a hotel at Charles de Gaulle Airport (1998: 174), or between the Muselmann and the overcomatose
person (1999a: 156); no distinction between the Nazi extermination camps and the camps established in the former Yugoslavia. On
a general, philosophical level, the essentialist method that leads to general indistinguishability would be questioned by other
traditions of thought. The strongest critique would probably come from the Hegelian tradition, for which the essence is to be
found nowhere but in its modes of appearance, identity in differences. The conceptual imperative
that ensues is the task of thinking precisely what appears as different, and not look for a
transcendent "thing-in-itself" in which all differences are swallowed. If indeed there are historiographical
differences between democracy and fascism (1998: 10), then perhaps it should bear more weight in the theory, and not be blurred
into indistinction. From a Hegelian perspective, Agamben’s conceptuality looks very much like a Schellingian
night where all cows are black. This in itself is obviously not a ground for rejection, as all theory starts from a theoretical
decision which is itself ungrounded and the matter of pure freedom, as Fichte demonstrated. Thought, like politics, is all about the
decision and its implications. In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena
seems particularly counter-intuitive in the case of dissimilar modes of internment. From a practical
point of view, it seems counter-productive to claim that there is no substantial difference between archaic communities and modern
communities provided with the language of rights, between the lawlessness of war times and democratic discourse. There must be
a way of problematising the ideological mantra of Western freedom, of modernity’s moral superiority, that does not simply equate it
with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie 2001). Habermas and Honneth probably have a point when they highlight the advances made by
modernity in the entrenchment of rights. If the ethical task is that of testimony, then our testimony should go also to all the individual
lives that were freed from alienation by the establishment of legal barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion. We should heed
Honneth’s reminder that struggles for social and political emancipation have often privileged the
language of rights over any other discourse (Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human
rights altogether could be a costly gesture in understanding past political struggles in their
relevance for future ones, and a serious strategic, political loss for accompanying present
struggles. We want to criticise the ideology of human rights, but not at the cost of renouncing the
resources that rights provide. Otherwise, critical theory would be in the odd position of casting
aspersions upon the very people it purports to speak for, and of depriving itself of a major
weapon in the struggle against oppression.
We can use the tools of biopower to challenge its worst manifestations—rejecting
these tools leads to horrid violence
Deranty, Philosophy Prof. @ Macquarie University, 04 p. online
(Jean-Phillipe, Borderlands Vol. 3 # 1 “Agamben’s Challenge to normative theories…”
48. One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of
politics. As Rancière remarks, Foucault’s late hypothesis is more about power than it is about politics (Rancière 2002). This is quite
clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancière
suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes
problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive. The
power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply because the
exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power
includes by excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that
Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised
only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical, exclusionary essence of social structures
demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the
basis of this recognition that politics can sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the
challenge to exclusion. 49. This proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agamben’s reduction of the overcoming of the
classical conceptualisation of potentiality and actuality to the single Heideggerian alternative. Instead of collapsing or dualistically
separating potentiality and actuality, one would find in Hegel’s modal logic a way to articulate their negative, or reflexive, unity, in the
notion of contingency. Contingency is precisely the potential as existing, a potential that exists yet does not exclude the possibility of
its opposite (Hegel 1969: 541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an ontology of contingency that recognises the place of
contingency at the core of necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real vindicates Hegel’s claim
that the impossible should not be opposed to the actual. Instead, the possible and the impossible
are only reflected images of each other and, as actual, are both simply the contingent. Auschwitz
should not be called absolute necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute contingency. The absolute
historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency, which, if true,
would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat. Its absolute necessity in
fact harbours an indelible core of contingency, the locus where political intervention could have
changed things, where politics can happen. Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of modernity and his theory about the place
and relevance of the Holocaust in modernity have given sociological and contemporary relevance to this alternative historicalpolitical logic of contingency (Bauman 1989). 50. In the social and historical fields, politics is only the name of the contingency that
strikes at the heart of systemic necessity. An ontology of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the
possibility, and the possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and the contingency of catastrophe
as logically entailing the possibility of its opposite. Modernity is ambiguous because it provides the normative
resources to combat the apparent necessity of possible systemic catastrophes . Politics is the name of
the struggle drawing on those resources. 51. This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of
modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects are able to consider themselves autonomous
subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they are recognised as full members of
the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in modernity is
precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political struggles, as
fights for rights. We can see now how this account needs to be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines
the apparent necessity of the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know that their rights are granted only contingently, that the
possibility of the impossible is always actual. This is why rights should not be taken for granted. But this does
not imply that they should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as
contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason for
constant political vigilance . 52. By questioning the rejection of modern rights, one is undoubtedly unfaithful to the letter of
Benjamin. Yet, if one accepts that one of the great weaknesses of the Marxist philosophy of revolution was its inability to
constructively engage with the question of rights and the State, then it might be the case that the politics that define
themselves as the articulation of demands born in the struggles against injustice are better able
to bear witness to the "tradition of the oppressed" than their messianic counterparts.
Humanitarianism is good—it focuses on moral agency, not bare life, and has
concrete impacts in military situations
Volker Heins, Visiting Professor of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal, and Senior
Humanitarianism is good—it focuses on moral agency, not bare life, and has
concrete impacts in military situations
Volker Heins, Visiting Professor of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Social
Research, Frankfurt, Germany, 2005, German Law Journal, Vol. 6, No. 5, p. 853-56
In relation to the modern nation state, the "moral entrepreneurs"31 who founded the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) had a simple deal in mind, one that has continued to provide the foundation for the political/humanitarian divide until today.
They argued that in the course of events, the assistance given to the wounded, sick and captured neither affects the outcome of
battles nor interferes in any other way with the pursuit of victory by warring states; taking care of those whose suffering was
senseless even from the point of view of the states themselves. The neutrality of the victims (their irrelevance for the outcome of
power struggles) was to be tightly coupled with the neutrality of those providing assistance (their nonpartisanship with respect to the
combatants).32 According to this basic Principle of Distinction, modern humanitarian action is directed towards those who are
caught up in violent conflicts without possessing any strategic value for the respective warring parties. Does this imply that
classic humanitarianism and its legal expressions reduce the lives of noncombatants to the "bare
life" of nameless individuals beyond the protection of any legal order? I would rather argue that
humanitarianism is itself an order-making activity. Its goal is not the preservation of life reduced to a bare natural fact, but conversely
the protection of civilians and thereby the protection of elementary standards of civilization which prevent the exclusion of individuals
from any legal and moral order. The same holds true for human rights, of course. Agamben fails to
appreciate the fact that human rights laws are not about some cadaveric "bare life", but about the
protection of moral agency.33 His sweeping critique also lacks any sense for essential
distinctions. It may be le-gitimate to see "bare life" as a juridical fiction nurtured by the modern state, which claims the right to
derogate from otherwise binding norms in times of war and emergency, and to kill individuals, if necessary, outside the law in a
mode of "effec-tive factuality."34 Agamben asserts that sovereignty understood in this manner con-tinues to function in the same
way since the seventeenth century and regardless of the democratic or dictatorial structure of the state in question. This claim
remains unilluminated by the wealth of evidence that shows how the humanitarian motive not only
shapes the mandate of a host state and nonstate agencies, but also serves to restrict the operational freedom of
military commanders in democracies, who can-not act with impunity and who do not wage war in a lawless state
of nature.35 Furthermore, Agamben ignores the crisis of humanitarianism that emerged as a result of the totalitarian degeneration of
modern states in the twentieth century. States cannot always be assumed to follow a rational self-interest which informs them that
there is no point in killing others indiscriminately. The Nazi episode in European history has shown that sometimes leaders do not
spare the weak and the sick, but take extra care not to let them escape, even if they are handicapped, very old or very young.
Classic humanitarianism depends on the existence of an international society whose members feel bound by a basic set of rules
regarding the use of violence—rules which the ICRC itself helped to institutionalize. Conversely, classic humanitarianism becomes
dysfunctional when states place no value at all on their international reputation and see harming the lives of defenseless individuals
not as useless and cruel, but as part of their very mission.36 The founders of the ICRC defined war as an anthropological constant
that produced a continuous stream of new victims with the predictable regularity and unavoidability of floods or volcanic eruptions.
Newer organizations, by contrast, have framed conditions of massive social suffering as a consequence of largely avoidable political
mistakes. The humanitarian movement becomes political, to paraphrase Carl Schmitt,37 in so far as it orients itself to humanitarian
states of emergency, the causes of which are located no longer in nature, but in society and politics. Consequently, the founding
generation of the new humanitarian organizations have freed themselves from the ideals of apolitical philanthropy and chosen as
their new models historical figures like the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thou-sands of Jews during the Second
World War.38 In a different fashion than Agamben imagines, the primary concern in the field of humanitarian intervention
and human
rights politics today is not the protection of bare life, but rather the rehabilitation of the
lived life of citizens who suffer, for in-stance, from conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
At the same time, there is a field of activity emerging beneath the threshold of the bare life. In the United States, in particular,
pathologists working in conjunction with human rights organizations have discovered the importance of corpses and corporal
remains now that it is possible to identify reliable evidence for war crimes from exhumed bod-ies.39 The expansion of the radius and
the reach of humanitarian organizations sensitized to human rights concerns accelerated the disintegration of the historically tight
connection between the strategic irrelevance of civilian victims and the taboo surrounding armed attacks on humanitarian aid
workers. We now see that aid work-ers used to protect civilians must themselves be protected against militant groups who do not
even shrink from killing members of the ICRC.40 In some conflicts today not even the barest attempt is made
to preserve even a semblance of respect for international humanitarian law .
Biopolitical modes of governance are no longer a threat to anyone – the crisis of
the sovereign state has caused violent biopolitics to be abandoned entirely
Jonathan Short, Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought, York University, 2005, “Life and Law: Agamben and Foucault on
Governmentality and Sovereignty,” Journal for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, Vol. 3, No. 1
Adding to the dangerousness of this logic of control, however, is that while there is a crisis of undecidability in the domain of life, it corresponds
despite the new forms of
biopolitical control in operation today, Rose believes that bio-politics has become generally
less dangerous in recent times than even in the early part of the last century. At that
time, bio- politics was linked to the project of the expanding national state in his opinion. In
disciplinary-pastoral society, bio-politics involved a process of social selection of those
characteristics thought useful to the nationalist project. Hence, according to Rose, "once each life has a
to a similar crisis at the level of law and the national state. It should be noted here that
value which may be calculated, and some lives have less value than others, such a politics has the obligation to exercise this judgement in the
name of the race or the nation" (2001: 3). Disciplinary-pastoral bio- politics sets itself the task of eliminating "differences coded as defects", and
in pursuit of this goal the most horrible programs of eugenics, forced sterilization, and outright extermination, were enacted (ibid.: 3). If Rose is
this notion of 'national fitness', in
terms of bio- political competition among nation-states, has suffered a precipitous
decline thanks in large part to a crisis of the perceived unity of the national state as a
viable political project (ibid.: 5). To quote Rose once again, "the idea of 'society' as a single, if heterogeneous, domain with a
more optimistic about bio-politics in 'advanced liberal' societies, it is because
national culture, a national population, a national destiny, co-extensive with a national territory and the powers of a national political
government" no longer serves as premises of state policy (ibid.: 5). Drawing on a sequential reading of Foucault's theory of the
the territorial state, the primary institution of
enclosure, has become subject to fragmentation along a number of lines. National
culture has given way to cultural pluralism; national identity has been
overshadowed by a diverse cluster of identifications, many of them transcending the national territory on
governmentalization of the state here, Rose claims that
which they take place, while the same pluralization has affected the once singular conception of community (ibid.: 5). Under these conditions,
Rose argues, the bio-political
programmes of the molar enclosure known as the nationstate have fallen into disrepute and have been all but abandoned.
Biopower does not result in bare-life – increase in biopower increases the
potentialities of life
Mika Ojakangas (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Finland) 2005 “Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power,” Foucault Studies,
No. 2, p. 5-28, May
Moreover, life as the object and the subject of biopower – given that life is everywhere, it becomes everywhere – is in no way bare,
but is as the synthetic notion of life implies, the multiplicity of the forms of life, from the nutritive life to the intellectual life, from the
biological levels of life to the political existence of man. Instead of bare life, the life of biopower is a plenitude of life, as Foucault puts
it. Agamben is certainly right in saying that the production of bare life is, and has been since Aristotle, a main strategy of the sovereign power to
establish itself – to the same degree that sovereignty has been the main fiction of juridico‐institutional thinking from Jean Bodin to Carl Schmitt.
The sovereign power is, indeed, based on bare life because it is capable of confronting life merely when stripped off and isolated from all forms
of life, when the entire existence of a man is reduced to a bare life and exposed to an unconditional threat of death. Life is undoubtedly sacred for
the sovereign power in the sense that Agamben defines it. It can be taken away without a homicide being committed. In the case of bio‐power,
however, this does not hold true. In order to function properly, biopower cannot reduce life to the level of bare
life, because bare life is life that can only be taken away or allowed to persist – which also makes
understandable the vast critique of sovereignty in the era of biopower. Biopower needs a notion of life that corresponds to its aims.
What then is the aim of biopower? Its aim is not to produce bare life but, as Foucault emphasizes, to “multiply life”,to
produce “extra life.” Biopower
needs, in other words, a notion of life which enables it to accomplish this
task. The modern synthetic notion of life endows it with such a notion. It enables bio power to “invest life
through and through”, to “optimize forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to
govern.” It could be argued, of course, that instead of bare life (zoe) the form of life (bios) functions as the foundation of biopower. However,
there is no room either for a bios in the modern biopolitical order because every bios has always been, as Agamben emphasizes, the result of the
exclusion of zoe from the political realm. The modern biopolitical order does not exclude anything – not even in the form of “inclusive
exclusion”. As a matter of fact, in the era of bio‐politics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe. It has already moved into the site
that Agamben suggests as the remedy of the political pathologies of modernity, that is to say, into the site where politics is freed from
every ban and “a form of life is wholly exhausted in bare life.”At the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben gives this life the name “form of life”,
signifying “always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power”, understood as potentiality (potenza).49 According to
Agamben, there would be no power that could have any hold over men’s existence if life were understood as a “form‐of‐life”. However, it is
precisely this life, life as untamed power and potentiality, that bio‐power invests and optimizes. If bio‐power multiplies and optimizes
life, it does so, above all, by multiplying and optimizing potentialities of life, by fostering and generating “forms of life”.
Alt cedes the political—turns the K
Boggs ‘97 (Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, “The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late
twentieth-century America”, December, Volume 26, Number 6,
http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/m7254768m63h16r0/fulltext.pdf)
In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of antipolitics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to
decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means
that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow
disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people’s lives. Far
from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many
levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites – an already familiar dynamic in many
lesser-developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant
individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude
to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics
might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise – or it might help further rationalize the existing power
structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective
interests that had vanished from civil society. 75
Alt can’t solve—biopolitics comes from social relations that are beyond the plan
Lazzarato no date [Maurizio, “From Biopower to Biopolitics,” Trans. Ivan A. Ramirez,
www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/lazzarato_biopolitics.pdf, acc 1-7-05]
Foucault needs a new political theory and a new ontology to describe the new power relations expressed in the political economy of
forces. In effect, biopolitics are “grafted” and “anchored” upon a multiplicity of disciplinary [de commandemant et d'obéissance]
relations between forces, those which power “coordinates, institutionalizes, stratifies and targets,” but that are not purely and simply
projected upon individuals. The fundamental political problem of modernity is not that of a single source
of sovereign power, but that of a multitude of forces that act and react amongst each other according
to relations of command and obedience. The relations between man and woman, master and student, doctor and patient, employer
and worker, that Foucault uses to illustrate the dynamics of the social body are relations between forces that always involve a power
relation. If power, in keeping with this description, is constituted from below, then we need an
ascending analysis of the constitution of power dispositifs, one that begins with infinitesimal mechanisms that
are subsequently “invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed and institutionalized by ever more general mechanisms, and
by forms of global domination.” Consequently, biopolitics is the strategic coordination of these power
relations in order to extract a surplus of power from living beings. Biopolitics is a strategic relation; it is not the
pure and simple capacity to legislate or legitimize sovereignty. According to Foucault the biopolitical functions
of “coordination and determination” concede that biopower, from the moment it begins to operate in this particular manner, is
not the true source of power. Biopower coordinates and targets a power that does not properly
belong to it, that comes from the “outside.” Biopower is always born of something other than
itself.
Biopolitics is key to modern science and medicine
Nikolas Rose (Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College – University of London) 01 “The Politics of Life Itself” Theory, Culture &
Society Vol. 18(6): 1–30
THE BIOLOGICAL existence of human beings has become political in novel ways. The object, target and stake of this new ‘vital’
politics are human life itself. How might we analyse it?1 I would like to start from a well known remark by Michel Foucault, in the first
volume of The History of Sexuality: ‘For millennia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living being with the additional capacity
for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question’ (Foucault, 1979:
188). Foucault’s thesis, as is well known, was that, in Western societies at least, we lived in a ‘biopolitical’ age. Since the 18th
century, political power has no longer been exercised through the stark choice of allowing life or giving death. Political authorities, in
alliance with many others, have taken on the task of the management of life in the name of the well-being of the population as a vital
order and of each of its living subjects. Politics now addresses the vital processes of human existence: the size and quality of the
population; reproduction and human sexuality; conjugal, parental and familial relations; health and disease; birth and death.
Biopolitics was inextricably bound up with the rise of the life sciences, the human sciences, clinical
medicine. It has given birth to techniques, technologies, experts and apparatuses for the care and
administration of the life of each and all, from town planning to health services. And it has given a kind of ‘vitalist’
character to the existence of individuals as political subjects.
That’s key to human survival and solves the impact to the K
Edwin A Locke (Professor of Management – University of Maryland-College Park and Senior Writer – Ayn Rand Institute) 97 “The
Greatness of Western Civilization”
www.aynrand.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr001=7xcem0b1i1.app7a&page=NewsArticle&id=6164&news_iv_ctrl=1077
The triumph of reason and rights made possible the
full development and application of science and technology and
ultimately modern industrial society. Reason and rights freed man's mind from the tyranny of religious dogma and freed man's
productive capacity from the tyranny of state control. Scientific and technological progress followed in several
interdependent steps. Men began to understand the laws of nature. They invented an endless succession of new products. And they
engaged in large-scale production, that is, the creation of wealth, which in turn financed and motivated further
invention and production. As a result, horse-and-buggies were replaced by automobiles, wagon tracks by steel rails, candles by
electricity. At last, after millennia of struggle, man became the master of his environment. The result of the core achievements of
Western civilization has been an increase in freedom, wealth, health, comfort, and life expectancy
unprecedented in the history of the world. The achievements were greatest in the country where the principles of reason and rights were implemented most
consistently--the United States of America. In contrast, it was precisely in those Eastern and African countries which did not embrace reason, rights, and technology where
people suffered (and still suffer) most from both natural and man-made disasters (famine, poverty, illness, dictatorship) and where life-expectancy was (and is) lowest. It is said
that primitives live "in harmony with nature," but in reality they are simply victims of the vicissitudes of nature--if some dictator does not kill them first.
West is not an "ethnocentric" prejudice;
The greatness of the
it is an objective fact. This assessment is based on the only proper standard for judging a government or
a society: the degree to which its core values are pro- or anti-life. Pro-life cultures acknowledge and respect man's nature as a rational being who must discover and create the
conditions which his survival and happiness require--which means that they advocate reason, rights, freedom, and technological progress. Despite its undeniable triumphs,
Western civilization is by no means secure. Its core principles are under attack from every direction--by religious fanatics, by
dictators and, most disgracefully, by Western intellectuals, who are denouncing reason in the name of skepticism, rights in the name
of special entitlements, and progress in the name of environmentalism. We are heading rapidly toward the dead end of nihilism. The
core values and achievements of the West and America must be asserted proudly and defended to the death. Our lives
depend on them.
Preventing extinction preserves the potentiality of humanity – that independently
outweighs
Bostrom ’12 – faculty of philosophy at Oxford
(Nick, “Existential Risk Prevention as the Most Important Task for Humanity”,
Forthcoming in Global Policy (2012), http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.html)
To calculate the loss associated with an existential catastrophe, we must consider how much value
would come to exist in its absence. It turns out that the ultimate potential for Earth-originating
intelligent life is literally astronomical . One gets a large number even if one confines one’s
consideration to the potential for biological human beings living on Earth. If we suppose with Parfit
that our planet will remain habitable for at least another billion years, and we assume that at least
one billion people could live on it sustainably, then the potential exist for at least 10^16 human lives.
These lives could also be considerably better than the average contemporary human life, which is
so often marred by disease, poverty, injustice, and various biological limitations that could be partly
overcome through continuing technological and moral progress. However, the relevant figure is not
how many people could live on Earth but how many descendants we could have in total. One lower
bound of the number of biological human life-years in the future accessible universe (based on current
cosmological estimates) is 1034 years.[7] Another estimate, which assumes that future minds will be mainly implemented in
computational hardware instead of biological neuronal wetware, produces a lower bound of 1054 human-brain-emulation subjective
life-years (or 1071 basic computational operations).(4)[8] If we make the less conservative assumption that future
civilizations could eventually press close to the absolute bounds of known physics (using some as yet
unimagined technology), we get radically higher estimates of the amount of computation and memory
storage that is achievable and thus of the number of years of subjective experience that could be
realized.[9] Even if we use the most conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores the
possibility of space colonization and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential
catastrophe is greater than the value of 10^16 human lives. This implies that the expected value of
reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred
times the value of a million human lives . The more technologically comprehensive estimate of 1054 human-brainEven if we give this
allegedly lower bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically mature civilization a
mere 1% chance of being correct, we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a
mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much
as a billion human lives. One might consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an
expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any “ordinary” good , such as the direct
benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute value of the indirect effect of saving 1
billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential risk—positive or negative—is almost
certainly larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action. [10]
emulation subjective life-years (or 1052 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly.
Life has intrinsic and objective value achieved through subjective pleasures---its
preservation should be an a priori goal
Kacou 8
(Amien WHY EVEN MIND? On The A Priori Value Of “Life”, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol
4, No 1-2 (2008) cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/92/184)
Furthermore, that manner of finding things good that is in pleasure can certainly not exist in any world without consciousness (i.e.,
without “life,” as we now understand the word)—slight analogies put aside. In fact, we can begin to develop a more sophisticated
definition of the concept of “pleasure,” in the broadest possible sense of the word, as follows: it is the common psychological
element in all psychological experience of goodness (be it in joy, admiration, or whatever else). In this sense, pleasure can always
be pictured to “mediate” all awareness or perception or judgment of goodness: there is pleasure in all consciousness of things
good; pleasure is the common element of all conscious satisfaction. In short, it is simply the very experience of liking things, or
the liking of experience, in general. In this sense, pleasure is, not only uniquely characteristic of life but also, the core expression of
goodness in life—the most general sign or phenomenon for favorable conscious valuation, in other words. This does not mean that
“good” is absolutely synonymous with “pleasant”—what we value may well go beyond pleasure. (The fact that we value things
needs not be reduced to the experience of liking things.) However, what we value beyond pleasure remains a matter of speculation
or theory. Moreover, we note that a variety of things that may seem otherwise unrelated are correlated with pleasure—some more
strongly than others. In other words, there are many things the experience of which we like. For example: the admiration of
others; sex; or rock-paper-scissors. But, again, what they are is irrelevant in an inquiry on a priori value—what gives us pleasure is
a matter for empirical investigation. Thus, we can see now that, in general, something primitively valuable is attainable in living —
that is, pleasure itself. And it seems equally clear that we have a priori logical reason to pay attention to the world in any world
where pleasure exists. Moreover, we can now also articulate a foundation for a security interest in our life: since the good of
pleasure can be found in living (to the extent pleasure remains attainable),[17] and only in living, therefore, a priori, life ought to be
continuously (and indefinitely) pursued at least for the sake of preserving the possibility of finding that good. However, this platitude
about the value that can be found in life turns out to be, at this point, insufficient for our purposes. It seems to amount to very little
more than recognizing that our subjective desire for life in and of itself shows that life has some objective value. For what difference
is there between saying, “living is unique in benefiting something I value (namely, my pleasure); therefore, I should desire to go on
living,” and saying, “I have a unique desire to go on living; therefore I should have a desire to go on living,” whereas the latter
proposition immediately seems senseless? In other words, “life gives me pleasure,” says little more than, “I like life.” Thus, we seem
to have arrived at the conclusion that the fact that we already have some (subjective) desire for life shows life to have some
(objective) value. But, if that is the most we can say, then it seems our enterprise of justification was quite superficial, and the
subjective/objective distinction was useless—for all we have really done is highlight the correspondence between value and desire.
Perhaps, our inquiry should be a bit more complex.