The history of the war from the past one hundred years is a history of bombing Ever since its invention, aviation has embodied the dream of perpetual peace between nations, yet the other side of this is the nightmare of an unprecedented deadly power. A power initially deployed on populations that the colonizers deemed too restive, it was then used to strike the cities of Europe and Japan during World War II. With air war it is now the people who are directly taken as target, the people as support for the war effort, and the sovereign people identified with the state. This amounts to a democratisation of war, and so blurs the distinction between war and peace. This is the political shift that has led us today to a world governance under United States hegemony defined as ‘perpetual low-intensity war’, which is presently striking regions such as Yemen and Pakistan, but which tomorrow could spread to the whole world population. Air war thus brings together the major themes of the past century: the nationalization of societies and war, democracy and totalitarianism, colonialism and decolonization, Third World-ism and globalization, and the welfare state and its decline in the face of neoliberalism. The history of aerial bombing offers a privileged perspective for writing a global history of the twentieth century.
Оглавление
Thomas Hippler. Governing from the Skies
Governing From the Skies. A Global Historyof Aerial Bombing
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
CHAPTER 1. Land, Sea, and Air
CHAPTER 2. Towards Perpetual Peace
CHAPTER 3. The Knights of the Sky
CHAPTER 4. The Colonial Matrix
CHAPTER 5. Civilization, Cosmopolitism, and Democracy
CHAPTER 6. People and Populace
CHAPTER 7. Philosophy of the Bomb
CHAPTER 8. Making and Unmaking a People
CHAPTER 9 ‘Revolutionary War’ beneath the Nuclear Shield
CHAPTER 10. World Governance and Perpetual War
Notes
Index
Отрывок из книги
THOMAS HIPPLER
Translated by David Fernbach
.....
In any case, cosmopolitism, as represented at the institutional level by the United Nations, leads us back to our point of departure: Libya. As distinct from the air strikes of 1911, those of 2011 were motivated not by a ‘civilizing mission’ but by humanitarian reasons, precisely spelled out by a Security Council resolution. They pertain therefore to what the theorist of ‘new wars’, Mary Kaldor, has called ‘cosmopolitical law enforcement’, designed to tackle forces of fragmentation, the erosion of state power, ‘identity politics’, and ‘asymmetrical wars’.8 And it is precisely these elements that connect the Libyan experience of 1911 with that of 2011: all the factors that the ‘new wars’ theorists present as bound up with globalization were in fact already at work in colonial ‘police bombing’.
In this way, the history of aerial bombing converges with the major themes of twentieth-century history: the nationalization of societies and war; democracy and totalitarianism; colonialism and decolonization; Third Worldism and globalization; the social state and its decline in the face of neoliberalism. From this point of view, the history of aerial bombing offers a point of entry, an ‘Ansatzpunkt’ such as Erich Auerbach demanded for a philological approach to world literature, into writing a global history of the twentieth century: ‘a particular phenomenon, the best delimited, the most concrete possible’,9 yet one that makes it possible, in the manner of a transverse section, to draw together some of the salient characteristics of this century. In short, bombing functions as the starting point of a global history. Its ambition is not encyclopaedic, and the history presented here does not claim to be in any way exhaustive. Yet it presents a series of examples that seem particularly instructive for our understanding of the developments in the world system over the course of the past century.
