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The Liberal War Thesis

Brad Evans

Thursday, 1 September 2011

WHEN THE HISTORIAN Sir Michael Howard delivered the prestigious Trevelyan lectures at Cambridge University in 1987, he posed one of the most pertinent questions of our times: What is the relationship between liberalism and war? For many, the fact that this question was posed at all represented a remarkable political departure. In international politics, liberalism has conventionally been associated with the Kant-inspired virtues of perpetual peace, along with the commitment to uphold human rights and justice. Preaching peaceful cohabitation among the world of peoples, liberal advocates have therefore made claim to the superiority of their enlightened praxis on the basis that they enjoy a monopoly on the terms “global security,” “peace,” and “prosperity.” While liberals take this for granted, for Howard therein lay the dilemma: despite being shrouded in universalist and pacifist discourse, liberal practice has actually been marked historically by war and violence. Howard’s concern, not unlike criticisms of Carl Schmitt’s, was clear. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid summarize:

[Howard’s] target was the way in which the liberal universalization of war in pursuit of perpetual peace impacted on the heterogeneous and adversarial character of international politics, translating war into crusades with only one of two outcomes: endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cultures.

Despite the importance of Howard’s initial provocation, he nevertheless failed to come to terms with the exact nature of liberal war-making efforts. He merely chided liberals for their naive faith in the human spirit, which, although admirable, was at best idealistic and at worst dangerous. Liberalism is not simply a set of ideals; neither is it some conscience of the political spirit. Liberalism is a regime of power that wages the destiny of the species on the success of its own political strategies. Before we map the implications of this for our understanding of war, an important point of clarification should be made. Unlike reified attempts in international relations thinking to offer definitive truths about war, what I present here as the liberal war thesis does not pretend to explain every single conflict. It does not deny the existence of geostrategic battles, and neither does it deny the fact that any single war can reveal a number of competing motivations. Like security, war can be written and strategically waged in many different ways depending on the key strategic referent. Wars can be multiple.

So, what then makes a war liberal? Here I offer ten fundamental tenets that set liberal war apart from conventional political struggles:

1. Liberal wars are fought over the modalities of life itself. Liberalism is undoubtedly a complex historical phenomenon, but if there is one defining singularity to its war-making efforts, then it is the underlying biopolitical imperative, which justifies its actions in relation to the protection and advancement of modes of existence. Liberals continuously draw reference to life to justify military force (cf. Ignatieff). War, if there is to be one, must be for the protection and improvement of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favor. More recently, for instance, it has underwritten the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation that is seen, by David Kilcullen and Rupert Smith, for instance, to offer a more humane and locally sensitive response. If liberal peace can therefore be said to imply something more than the mere absence of war, so it is the case that liberal war is immeasurably more complex than the simple presence of military hostilities. With war appearing integral to the logic of peace insofar as it conditions the very possibility of liberal rule, humanity’s most meaningful expression actually appears through the battles fought in its name. It would be incorrect, however, to think that this logic represents a recent departure. Life has always been the principal object for liberal political strategies. Hence, while the liberal way of rule is by definition biopolitical, as it revolves around the problems posed by species life, so it is the case that liberal ways of war are inherently biopolitical, as they, too, are waged over the same productive properties that life is said to possess. The reason contemporary forms of conflict are therefore seen to be emergent, complex, nonlinear, and adaptive is not incidental. Mirroring the new social morphology of life, the changing nature of conflict is preceded by the changing ontological account of species being that appears exponentially more powerful precisely because it is said to display post-Newtonian qualities.

2. Liberal wars operate within a global imaginary of threat. Ever since Immanuel Kant imagined the autonomous individual at peace with the wider political surroundings, the liberal subject has always been inserted into a more expansive terrain of productive cohabitation that is potentially free of conflict. While this logic has been manifest through local systems of liberal power throughout its history, during the 1990s a global imaginary of threat appeared that directly correlated liberal forms of governance with less planetary endangerment. This ability to collapse the local into the global resulted in an unrivalled moment of liberal expansionism (see The Human Security Report 2005). Such expansion did not, however, result from some self-professed planetary commitment to embrace liberal ideals. Liberal interventionism proceeded instead on the basis that localized emergency and crises demanded response. Modes of incorporation were therefore justified on the grounds that although populations still exist beyond the liberal pale, for their own betterment they should be included. This brings us to the martial face of liberal power. While liberalism is directly fuelled by the universal belief in the righteousness of its mission, since there is no universally self-evident allegiance to the project, war is necessarily universalized in its pursuit of peace: As Dillon and Reid put it:

However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims.

3. Liberal wars take place by “other” means. Liberalism declares otherness to be the problem to be solved. The theory of race dates back to canonical figures like Kant, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose progressive account of life originally conceived of noble savagery. While this desire to subjugate “the other” is a permanent feature of liberal biopolitics, the idea of human security that emerged in the early 1990s instilled it directly into policies that sought to pacify the global borderland, as Duffield demonstrates. Directly challenging the conventional notion of state-based security, human security discourses found a remedial solution to the problem of maladjustment in sustainable development. This led to the effective “capitalization of peace,” since conflict and instability became fully aligned with the dangers of underdevelopment. Inverting Carl von Clausewitz’s formula that war represents a continuation of politics by other means, war-making efforts were increasingly tasked with providing lasting capacities for social cohesion and peace. Liberal ways of war and development thus became part of the same global strategic continuum. While it could be argued that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, concern with sovereign recovery unsettled this narrative, giving sure primacy to military force, the contemporary post-interventionary phase of liberal occupation signals its effective reawakening. The veritable displacement of the figuration of the terrorist by the body of the insurgent fully reveals this strategic reprioritization. Unlike the problem of terrorism — that is, a problem of (dis)order — insurgents are a problem of population whose violence is the product of causal resentment. Their resistance pertains from unfortunate locally regressive conditions that can be manipulated to resuscitate the vitality of local life systems. Since insurgencies, then, are open to remedy and demand engagement, like the savages of the colonial encounter, they are otherwise redeemable.

4. Liberal wars take place at a distance. The Clausewitzian inversion above does not simply incorporate every aspect of civic governance into the global war effort. Since the unity of life incorporates every political strategy into a planet-wide battle, the destiny of the species as a whole is wagered on the success (or failure) of its own political strategies. As recent liberal incursions make clear, however, global war cannot be sustained by relying on interventionary forces. Not only do such interventions lead to localized resistance, but the relationships to violence they expose are politically unsustainable. Waging war at a distance is the favored policy choice. This policy of getting savages to fight barbarians in the global borderlands involves a broad range of interconnected strategies. These include the abandonment of political neutralities; arming and training of local militias; instilling the correct political architecture to prevent credible political opposition; funding development projects that have a distinct liberal agenda; and marginalizing any community that has the temerity to support political alternatives. This distancing does not simply reveal the microphysics of liberal biopolitical rule. Creating conditions wherein the active production of all compliant life-sustaining flows (biopoliticized circulations) does not jeopardize the veritable containment of others, liberal war makes possible the global partitioning of life. This is not simply about security understood in the conventional sovereign sense of upholding territorial integrities. It is about deciding what must be made to live and what must be allowed to perish in the global space of flows.

5. Liberal wars have a distinct relationship to territory insomuch as spatiality is firmly bound to active living space. Liberal power triangulates security, populations, and territory in a way that binds geostrategic concerns to the active production of ways of life. Through the capitalization of peace, this triangulation has gone global as the management of local resources has become a planetary security concern. The development-security nexus tied the dramatic materialization of life to conditions of social cohesion. More recently, it has widened its security ambit to include protection of the environment and climate adaptation strategies. Leading to the generalization of liberal biopolitical rule, the development-environment-security nexus (DESNEX) is now part of a mobilization for war on all fronts — from human to biospheric (see Evans and Duffield). As the security apparatus of a new liberal environmentalism, DESNEX is no longer satisfied with policing and maintaining the life chances between the globally enriched and the globally denied. This is a highly politicized maneuver predicated on the geographical containment of the poor and dispossessed. It is forging a new global settlement around the control and management of the biosphere. A new speciation of global life is therefore taking place according to its ability to properly manage and care for the environment and, at the same time, maintain capitalist accumulation. For DESNEX, containment is now not enough — a locked-in global poor must be made fit for such stewardship.

6. Liberal wars are wars of law. One of liberal power’s foundational myths is its commitment to law. Constitutional law is presented as being the natural foundation for any civilized society. Without this arrangement, the concept of “a people” — understood to be a legally binding community of political beings — appears to hold no meaning. A people, however, is never made by laws. Neither are laws politically neutral. Whatever the jurisdiction, laws are enacted in a highly tactical way largely in response to crises that are never value free. This brings us to the problem of the norm. Advocates of liberal war reconcile their commitment to law by relating juridical safeguards to agreed normative standards. Norms as such appear to be the logical outcome of reasoned political settlement. Our discourse of battle, however, appreciates that power defines the norm such that those who deviate from it pose a threat to the biological heritage of life. The norm is another way of suppressing political differences. There are then no universal, all-embracing, value-neutral, timeless, or eternal a priori norms that inhibit some purified and objective existential space where they await access by the learned justices of the peace. There is no absolute convergence point to human reason. Every norm is simply the outcome of a particular power struggle. Its inscription always follows the contingency of the crisis event. That is why no universalizing system of law can ever account for or suppress the particular calls for justice that directly challenge moral authority. When Philip Bobbitt advocates for a more tactical and strategic approach to law, he is not calling for some neorealist revival. He is simply asking for liberal market states to be more efficient and effective in response to those problems than they now are.

7. Liberal wars move beyond states of exception to take place within a condition of unending emergency. Walter Benjamin warned that while exceptional moments of crisis were politically dangerous, the effective normalization of rule could be far more sinister. With order finally restored, what previously shattered the boundaries of acceptability now begins to reside in the undetected fabric of the everyday. Ours is no longer a time of exception. What marks the contemporary period is terrifyingly normal. While there is no law without enforcement, no enforceability exists without intimate relation to crisis, as Derrida points out. Every law and every decision respond to an exceptional moment. It brings force to bear on what breaks from the norm to rework the basis of normality anew. There is therefore no pure theory of the exception, no absolute break from law. Law reserves the right to transgress its own foundations, where it encounters continuously emerging crises — untimely moments that require varying degrees of intensity in the subsequent deployment of force. It is no surprise, then, to find that states of exception are all too frequent once the broad sweep of liberal history is considered. Not only do crises permit the reworking of the boundaries of existence, but the fluctuating shift from (dis)ordered sovereign recovery (external modes of capture) to progressive security governance (internal modes of interventionism) defines the liberal encounter.

8. Liberal wars depoliticize within the remit of humanitarian discourses and practices. Even when some epiphenomenal tension exists, the inclusive image of thought invoked by liberals immediately internalizes the order of battle. This is no mere sovereign affair. Liberal war has always been immeasurably greater than the juridical problem of order. It has always pertained to the life and death of the species. Since what is at stake in contemporary theaters of war is the “West’s ability to contain and manage international poverty while maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume beyond its means,” as Duffield writes, each crisis of global circulation marks out a terrain of “global civil war, or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the modalities of life itself.” With depoliticization therefore occurring when life is primed for its own betterment — that is, within humanitarian discourses and practices — it is possible to offer an alternative reflection on Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life.” Agamben’s notion of bare life draws on sovereign terms of engagement. Life becomes exposed on account of its abandonment from law. The biopolitical encounter, in contrast, denies political quality as the “bare essentials” for species survival take precedence. No longer reduced bare in a juridical sense of the term, life is stripped bare since its maladjusted qualities impede productive salvation. Hence, while this life is equally assumed to be without meaningful political quality — though in this instance because of some dangerous lack of fulfilment — allowing the body’s restitution displaces exceptional politics by the no less imperial and no less politically charged bare activity of species survival.

9. Liberal wars are intimately bound to the active production of political subjectivities. Security discourses have always had a particular affinity with political authenticity, which sets out who we are as people and defines what we are to become. It places limits around what it means to think and act politically. The liberal approach to security implies that political authenticity is not simply tied to those identity formations defined by epiphenomenal tension. It breaks free of such static demarcations. The liberal subject instead is constructed by living freely through contingent threats to insecurities around its existence. Within a broader and more positive continuum of endangerment, liberal subjectivity has never been in crises if we understand those to be the disruptions to fixed modes of being. Born of the paradoxically anxious conditions of its ongoing emergence, the liberal subject is the subject of crises. It lives and breathes through the continual disruption to its own static modes of recovery. While this subject has gone through many key changes, the disrupted subject is made real today on account of its need to be resilient. Again, this does not infer a static state of ontological affairs. Resilient life must uphold the principles of adaptation and change held true by our radically interconnected age. Since what is dangerous today is seen as integral to the very life processes that sustain liberal life, danger is directly related to the radically contingent outcomes on which the vitality of existence is said to depend. With liberal societies having to endure what Dillon has termed the “permanent emergency of its own emergence,” our predisposition to the unknowable contingency of every new encounter — the event of contemporary life itself — appears at the same time to be the source of our potential richness and the beginning of all our despairs.

10. Liberal wars are profoundly ontotheological. When Barack Obama reconciled the problem of “evil” with the “imperfections of man” in his Nobel laureate speech, he reaffirmed the Kantian belief that evil is very much part of this world — not that people are born of evil but that unnecessary suffering results from bad or dangerous political judgment. Offering then a humanistic reworking of the story of the fall — one in which life, always assumed to be perpetually guilty of its own (un)making, must continually seek its own recovery from the ashes of its own potential demise — we uncover why sovereignty is not the transcendental frame of reference for liberal power. Kant-inspired liberalism preaches universality but accepts that the universal is beyond the realms of lived experience. It preaches the international virtues of law but accepts that one’s encounter with moral law has to be contingent. It insists on life’s autonomy even though it offers an account of freedom in which humankind has fallen to the guilt of its own unmaking. It promotes human progress yet puts forward the thesis of infinite regress to highlight humankind’s imperfections. And it claims that all life has an original predisposition to good and a simultaneous propensity to evil. Liberal life is forced to endure a self-imposed temporal purgatory — life is always guilty of the moral deficiencies of the past yet incapable of exorcising them in the future. These imperfections are actually demanded so that the antiproductive body can prove its moral and political worth. While this morally deficient default setting invariably moves us beyond any metaphysical attachment to the humanitarian principle (humanity is, after all, too flawed to become the unifying principle) and while the power of law alone is insufficient to overcome the imperfections of modern people, faith is restored by something in the order of the divine economy of life itself.

One could argue here that contemporary liberalism is, in itself, facing terminal crises. Whatever one’s opinions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is clear that Western populations have no taste for new forms of military interventionism and lasting engagement in the global borderlands. And whether one considers a resurgent socialism in Latin America, the emergence of new forms of capitalization by alternative geopolitical powers, the changing nature of religious movements that have used democratic procedures to their own political advantage, or the continuation of indigenous struggles that challenge any hold over the terms “rights,” “freedom,” “democracy,” and “justice,” liberalism appears to be operating within a declining zone of political influence. As recent events in Libya illustrate, however, we must be wary of signaling its lasting demise. Throughout modern history, liberalism has proved to be resilient when faced with its own crises of legitimacy and authority. Its claims to violence in particular seem to enjoy a remarkable ability to regenerate as the memory of indigenous subjugation and depoliticization fades with time. One could be more cynical and suggest that given the only things that liberal regimes in Western zones of affluence can materially export today are war and violence, rather than write of its demise, the liberal war thesis is only beginning to enter a new retrenching chapter, which will resonate for a considerable time.

Originally published in somewhat different form as “The Liberal War Thesis: Introducing the Ten Key Principles of 21st Century Biopolitical Warfare” in The South Atlantic Quarterly.