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ONE

“All the World Was America”

THE LONG HISTORY OF HOMELAND SECURITY

The dialectic of security and insecurity, like that of security and terror, is central to the philosophy and form of the modern state. For John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the insecurity—or terror—of the state of nature necessitates the ascent of the sovereign and constitution of the social contract; the state arises to delineate what is secured from what is not, civilization from savagery, inside from outside, citizen from non, the bearer of rights from the rightless. Despite the reciprocal emergence of security thinking and the modern state, the absolute saturation of social and political discourse with security rhetoric is a twentieth-century phenomenon. In the United States, Social Security acquired its rhetorical power and bureaucratic form in the 1930s. The postwar years witnessed the emergence of National Security as an organizing principle of governance. And in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Homeland Security has attained discursive prominence, giving name to a new state form. In this chapter, I argue for the efficacy of conceptualizing the above-mentioned security paradigms together—shedding light upon the ways in which, for instance, Social and Homeland Security are bound up in one another, sharing both a genealogy and a political rationality. This common genealogy and rationality, I contend, can be traced to the advent of colonial modernity, and to the settler-colonization of the New World in particular. Countering ahistorical accounts of post-9/11 political-economic order, this chapter situates the contemporary manifestation and twentieth-century evolution of security discourse and practice within the long history of modernity at large.

This expansive historical framework, I contend here, as throughout this book, is essential to any critical reckoning with the political forms and narratives of the imperial present. My objective is not to deny the transformations embodied in the Homeland Security state, but to demonstrate the ways in which those transformations are contiguous with—rather than a departure from—the long and recent histories of the modern security project. Essayed in this chapter, to borrow from Fredric Jameson (for his “capitalism” I substitute “security”), “is a dialectical view of [security] . . . in place of the latter’s breaks and discontinuities: for it is the continuity of the deeper structure that imposes the experiential differences generated as that structure convulsively enlarges with each new phase.”¹ Newness, in other words, is both a consequence and expression of continuity.

My analysis proceeds through an examination of three elemental relations: security and capital, security and race, and security and emergency. Each of these relations works with and through the others, and all are fundamental to the constitution of a specifically colonial modernity. The security state emerges to guarantee the process and outcome of capitalist accumulation, in the colony as in the metropole. The securing of private property is enabled by and in turn reinforces race thinking and practice, which also functions to structure internally, and mark the external boundaries of, the political community. The capitalist and racial logics of the security state dovetail with the politics of emergency. The enactment of emergency or exception legitimates the preemptive and punitive violence of the security state; sanctions extra-legal forms of accumulation by dispossession; and clarifies the racial distinction between the bearer of rights and the rightless, human and infrahuman.

SECURITY AND CAPITAL

Though the lexiconic proliferation of security thinking is a relatively recent phenomenon, the security project was manifold in its inception. The state was founded to secure the sovereign, “the People,” and the identity, personhood, and liberty of the individual subjects that composed the body politic. All of these principles, meanwhile, were underlain by the security of property. Here Enlightenment philosophers of government and political economy were in agreement. Security was central to the rise of the modern state and, as Mark Neocleous has observed, to the ascendance of the bourgeois property rights enshrined therein.² The meaning and object of the term “security” is always contested; the vocabulary of security animates movements of resistance as well as processes of dispossession and domination. In its ascendant form, though, the modern security project is constructed and deployed by and in the service of the state and capital—to justify discursively and provide structural mechanisms for the accumulation, uneven distribution, and maintenance of political and economic power.

“In the beginning,” Locke wrote, “all the world was America.” In the beginning, in other words, all the world—untamed and uncultivated—invited the virtuous procedures of primitive accumulation. In the opening paragraphs of “Of Property,” the fifth chapter of his Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke introduces what is often termed his “labor theory of property.” Because “every man has property in his own person,” he is rightfully entitled to whatever he extracts or derives from nature: “For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to.”³ Crucially, in claiming land and laboring upon it, thereby increasing the bounty derived from that land, man is in fact increasing, or “improving,” the “common stock” of humanity: “he that encloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres than he could have had from a hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind.” The dispossession of common lands for the purpose of industrious cultivation is, Locke insisted, in effect a gift to the dispossessed, the Yorkshire peasant and indigenous American alike. “I ask,” Locke wrote, “whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage, or husbandry, a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life as ten acres of equally fertile land in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated.”⁴ North American land, lying fallow due to the indolence of its native inhabitants, invites the intervention of the European settler, who through his labor will increase the product of the land and thus the stock of mankind in general.

In a telling passage in “Of Property,” Locke writes that “the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged . . . become my property without the assignation or consent of anybody.”⁵ The phrase “the turfs my servant has cut” intimates that the property owner is entitled to the produce of the labor of anyone he hires or forces to work upon his land. Though “every man has property in his own person,” the product of labor ultimately belongs, in Locke’s formulation, not to the laborer but to the owner of the property upon which the laborer works. “Improvement,” then, might be achieved not just through the enterprising individual whose industry animates the dormant commons, but through the institutions of wage labor and chattel slavery. It is the purpose of government to facilitate, and to secure, this process of expropriation and improvement.

Contrary to Locke, Hobbes argues that property is not intrinsic to the state of nature but is the invention of political authority, of the sovereign who can secure the possession of goods and land and oversee their improvement through industry. Property, in other words, only emerges as a concept when conjoined with security. Hobbes is close to Locke, though, when, in an oft-cited passage from Leviathan, he holds forth on the necessity of labor discipline. While the unable should receive the charity of the sovereign, he writes, “for such as have strong bodies . . . they are to be forced to work; and to avoyd the excuse of not finding employment, there ought to be such Lawes, as may encourage all manner of arts; as Navigation, Agriculture, Fishing, and all manner of Manifacture that requires labor.”⁶ The duty of the sovereign is to provide security for private property, and to compel through law the labor of those who hold no title to the means of production.

Securing the Social

One lineage of Social Security can be traced to 1834, when the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed in England and Wales. Systems of localized poor relief had existed since at least the mid-sixteenth century in England, but not until the 1834 Act was the administration of poor law centralized and codified at the level of the state. The 1834 Act created a network of workhouses, which absorbed the unemployed into institutions of disciplined and disciplinary labor. The Act sought a solution to the problem of the general insecurity and “superfluous” populations created by early industrial capitalism. Dispossessed of the means of their own subsistence, the proletariat is forced to enter the market to sell their labor for a wage. But there is of course never a guarantee of employment and thus the state must intervene, in a biopolitical manner, to ensure the reproduction of the working classes. In one sense, the poor law provided a measure of security—miserable, horrid security, in the case of the workhouses: “houses of terror,” Marx called them in Capital—to a population defined by its insecure existence, its naked subjection to the basically inhuman laws of the market.⁷ In another sense, though, poor laws protected the bourgeoisie from the threat of large-scale social unrest and helped ensure the maintenance of capitalist property relations.⁸ This dual purpose—securing the individual (and the hetero-familial unit to which he belongs) and securing the larger capitalist order—characterized the Social Security provisions inaugurated a century later on the other side of the Atlantic.

Contemporary social insurance programs, though, differ from earlier “poor laws” in important ways. If in eighteenth-century England the poor laws provided a “charity” to the unemployed, Social Security is allocated only to those who contribute to its funding. The Poor Law Act of 1834 demanded labor from its beneficiaries, while Social Security limits its benefits—with few exceptions—to those who labor. The insurance component of Social Security, Jennifer Klein has argued, inspired the rapid proliferation of non-state, for-profit insurance providers⁹—a moment of entrepreneurial ingenuity in which a capitalist industry arose to protect people against the ravages of capitalism. The market is the solution to the market: a refrain that would echo loudly in the latter part of the century, and indeed one that continues to reverberate in the neoliberal moment, in the context of recurring economic crises.

The securitization of the social went hand in hand with its capitalization. Security became not simply something provided by the government, but something purchased on the market. The biocapitalist industries of life and health insurance emerged in concert with the biopolitical functions of the Social Security state. One object of security for both state and business, in other words, became life itself—an evolution that enabled the broadening and deepening of security governance, the intensification of its effect upon the individual and social body.¹⁰ The tripartite pact between state, business, and labor—consolidated to an even greater degree following the Second World War—blunted the class contradictions at the heart of the security/insecurity binary and contributed to the hegemonic reach of the security project. The ultimate effect was the continuation of capitalist social relations, the reproduction of a social order based on the security of private property and accumulation in perpetuity.

Security in the Shadow of War

From its inception, but with a particular intensity following the Second World War, the Social Security project dovetailed with the rhetoric and policy of National Security. During both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, arguments made for the expansion of Social Security deployed the vocabulary of National Security. Major public infrastructure projects such as the Interstate Highway System—inaugurated by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956—and Saint Lawrence Seaway reconstruction—a project undertaken jointly with Canada, which enabled the development of massive hydroelectric power works, and which significantly expanded commercial shipping routes from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes—were likewise justified on National Security terms. Sputnik and the Soviet threat it embodied, meanwhile, occasioned sharp increases in math and science funding, initially allocated for in the National Defense Education Act of 1957—another instance of a major federal investment in domestic public infrastructure made in the name of National Security.¹¹ Generally speaking, the welfare state and the warfare state emerged from the war closely entwined, and would remain conjoined for the next two decades.

Expanding and deepening its social infrastructure at home, during the early stages of the Cold War the United States worked to construct a “Keynesian empire” abroad. This National Security paradigm was founded on a developmentalist logic that cohered with domestic policy, specifically Social Security. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States asserted itself as a world power intent on creating and dictating a new international political and economic order—the initial manifestations of which were the European Economic Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) and the financial framework conceived at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. The intellectual rationale for the Bretton Woods system was capitalist security—the belief that peace amongst nations depended upon a liberal system of international trade, one that would be regulated by select governments and supported by international financial institutions (created at Bretton Woods) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (known in 1945 as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or IBRD). Though a departure from the explicitly territorialized logic of the modern colonial system, the international economic order devised at Bretton Woods and instituted in the decades to come maintained the stark divide between the overdeveloped global North and underdeveloped global South. It maintained, moreover, a commitment to the ethos of “free enterprise.” The architects and authors of U.S. policy during the Cold War imagined the freedom of enterprise as that freedom which conditions the possibility of all others. Here we find a more modern version of the Enlightenment axiom that there can be no liberty and security prior to the liberty and security of private property.

Neoliberal Security

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the particular economic expression of U.S. foreign policy underwent a dramatic change. Before the close of the 1960s, “embedded liberalism”—the economic order, based on a market sphere subject to extensive social constraints, that facilitated high levels of economic growth in the advanced capitalist world throughout the 1950s and 1960s—had begun to show signs of distress. In the early 1970s, a conjunction of factors—notably energy crises, high unemployment, and inflation—resulted in fiscal crises across the global North, and the Bretton Woods system of international financial regulation broke down. Embedded liberalism no longer seemed capable of guaranteeing the conditions for capital accumulation. The alternative that established itself in the early 1970s, and that has remade the capitalist world in the years and decades since, is neoliberalism.

Broadly defined, neoliberalism signifies an economic order wherein markets are deregulated, trade is liberalized, industries and services are privatized, and market rationality is imposed upon all facets of social life. Whereas in classical liberalism the state is thought to confer legitimacy upon the market, in the neoliberal order this relationship is reversed: the market legitimates the state. And whereas in classical liberalism the social and the economic are imagined as separate spheres, each conforming to its own rationality, under neoliberal governance the distinction between the social and the economic, society and the market, is blurred or dissolved completely. American neoliberalism in particular, Foucault observed, “involves . . . the generalization of the economic form of the market . . . throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system.”¹²

Friedrich Hayek, one of neoliberalism’s intellectual founders, argued—in Foucault’s paraphrasing—that “the general form taken by the institutional framework in a renewed capitalism should be a game of enterprises regulated internally by a juridical-institutional framework guaranteed by the state.”¹³ The mechanism of competition between individuals or between (personified) enterprises, which founds the state and is guaranteed by it, and which is “regulated internally” by the formal dictums of the rule of law, is the economic rationality formulated by the original neoliberals, and their argument for the possibility of capitalist renewal. The juridical foundation that allows for and secures free enterprise was affectionately described, by Hayek, as the “science of liberty.”¹⁴ This is not a condition of laissez-faire, but of a pure market space deliberately created through government intervention (though as Karl Polanyi noted, laissez-faire itself was planned). Free enterprise, in other words, is imagined in neoliberal thinking as the one true purpose of government. Any curtailment of the free exercise of market competition is a violation of the most essential and highest human liberty. The introduction of this fundamentalist ideology into the Cold War milieu, at a time of economic crisis—when the discovery of new sources of surplus value was an urgent imperative of both class and state—provided the intellectual impetus for new assertations of U.S. imperialist power. It also provided a policy prescription and structural framework for the re-catalyzing of capitalist accumulation. The forcing open of markets; the privatization of everything, including social services and public welfare programs; the deliberate devaluation of assets and labor (so as to enable their later seizure by currently idle, over-accumulated capital)—these latter-day methods of dispossession are sanctioned by the institutional mechanisms of the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO), and enforced by both national militaries and private security forces.¹⁵

If starkly opposed in certain respects, New Deal liberalism and neoliberalism both belong to the modern security project. “Securitization,” as the term is used herein, signifies the transformation of an issue, concept, asset, or geography into a security concern. Though the New Deal names the largest expansion of public assistance programs in the nation’s history, one of its consequences was the securitization of the social, the implication of social welfare within the process and logic of capitalist accumulation. Paradoxically, then, the New Deal moment—the private insurance industries that emerged therein, and the appropriation by corporate entities of Social Security rhetoric—prefigured one defining aspect of neoliberal order: the subjection of the social sphere to market rationality, market calculation. In the late twentieth century, new mechanisms of securitization arose, most notably within private financial institutions in New York and London, and in the context of a dramatic increase in the importance of financial speculation to the engine of accumulation. In the latter instance, the now more explicit invocation of “securitization” refers to the amalgamation and packaging of financial assets, shares of which are then sold as securities. The avowed intention is to distribute risk amongst a wider pool of investors. In practice, though, the engineering and proliferation of ever more opaque securities—particularly those backed with sub-prime mortgages—contributed to the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.

But the larger point is this: “securitization” is a euphemism for the occupation—or fabrication, in the most recent case—of previously non-capitalized space. It is a euphemism, that is, for the continuance of primitive accumulation—the same processes of capital generation the modern security project was conceived to protect.

Securitizing the Homeland

In the nascent stages of the War on Terror, the Bush administration set out to accelerate the privatization of government. Beginning with the onset of neoliberal policy prescriptions in the 1970s and with increasing intensity in the decades since, governmental bodies in the United States—at the federal, state, and municipal levels—have sought to outsource many of their traditional responsibilities. The partial or complete privatization of prisons, airports, hospitals, waste removal, public utilities, war, etc., has proceeded apace under the guise of “public-private partnerships,” a term that names a new culture of governance wherein corporations exert an ever-greater influence over policy decisions. The Bush administration’s commitment to extending these transformations was symbolized most readily by the advent in 2002 of the Depart­ment of Homeland Security (DHS), a major reorganization of the federal government—one enabled most immediately by the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the heightened culture of counterterrorism they provoked, but one that brought into relief already existing currents of public retrenchment.

“Homeland security state,” Naomi Klein observes, quickly became synonymous with “homeland security industry”—today a booming $200 billion (per annum) global economic sector.¹⁶ Though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has occasioned the expansion of government bureaucracy, the tax dollars allocated to DHS are just as likely to end up in the coffers of private entities. Between September 11, 2001, and 2006, Klein notes, DHS spent $130 billion on private contractors.¹⁷ The outsourcing of government operations has been undertaken with diligence abroad as well, as private companies have received untold billions in public money to construct, secure, and carry out the war apparatus in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ever-more privatized military, meanwhile, is fighting not merely for “democracy,” but for neoliberal revolution. Upon the U.S. takeover of Iraq in 2003, Klein details, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), L. Paul Bremer, declared the privatization of over 200 state-owned companies, fired over 500,000 state employees, and lowered the corporate tax rate from 40 to 15 percent.¹⁸

Managing the Crisis?

The “homeland security” moment is defined by myriad contradictions—between imperial expansion and imperial decline; between the willful performance of state failure (Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Maria) and spectacular performance of state power (the “shock and awe” conquest of Iraq); between the labor imperatives of business and anti-immigrant nativism; between the hyper-modern weapons of info-war and atavistic methods of (neo)colonial expropriation; between the universal aspirations of capital and territorial exigencies of the nation-state.¹⁹ Perhaps one contradiction connects all the others; property and the state, if always allied, have never been identical. Potentially, the privatization of public space and of government itself will have the effect of rendering the capitalist security project unstable, less able to withstand—or capitalize on—the crises that naturally befall it. Marx observed in the nineteenth century that capital, left to its own devices, is sometimes its own worst enemy, prone to destroy the very mechanisms that exist for its self-protection. The historical role of the state in the modern security project is not only to protect property from its outside and its other, but to protect property from itself.

Following the economic crisis inaugurated by the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble in 2008, the most powerful national and supranational entities within the advanced capitalist world—for example, the United States, Germany, the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB), the IMF—demonstrated little sign that they were capable of 1) regulating financial capital in a way that would obviate future cataclysms and 2) buttressing public infrastructure in a way that would prevent or temper widespread and recurring social protest. At the highpoint of the postwar social-democratic moment, the capitalist state provided its citizens a measure of social and economic security in exchange for mass participation in processes of expanded reproduction (production and consumption). In the neoliberal moment, the state is ever less capable of upholding its side of the social contract, and an ever-shrinking percentage of the population is able to secure its own existence through market participation. In other words, the dialectical underside of the modern security project—the insecurity it has always produced, particularly for populations in the formerly colonized world—is in the neoliberal context on uniquely stark display in both the global North and global South. The crisis today is not periodic, an anticipated trough in capital’s undulating patterns of regeneration, but perpetual.

SECURITY AND RACE

“The racial coding of the world,” to borrow a phrase from Paul Gilroy, emerged concomitant with the European conquest and settler-colonization of the Americas. Race discourse configured the state form and helped make available the subjection and exploitation of people within and beyond the boundaries of the political community. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the era in which Hobbes and Locke wrote, Europeans were waging war at home and abroad: enslaving and dominating peoples of Africa and the Americas, and prosecuting a race-inflected assault on the working poor—“the ‘savages’ of the civilized world”²⁰—domestically. Drawing the boundary between inside and outside at the same time it articulated the social body into opposed classes, race was central to the formation and securing of emergent property relations and methods of accumulation in both Old World and New.²¹

The state arises to secure the civis, the space of law and reason, from the anarchy and infrahumanity of the state of nature. The distinction is a racial one. With the foundation of the state, the crisis of the state of nature is not left behind but delimited and counterposed, remaining that against which the inside is defined, the pretext for and antithesis of the secured body politic. The security project requires the perpetual and simultaneous production and repression of difference: “Race appears in this scheme of things,” David Theo Goldberg writes, “as a mode of crisis management, as a mode . . . of managing manufactured threats, and curtailing while alienating the challenge of the unknown.”²² Race is both that against which society must be secured and the means of its securing.

From the inception of the state form, liberalist promises of progress and assimilation coexisted, uneasily but necessarily, with essentialist racial narratives that confined the other to an ahistorical emptiness from which there can be no escape. This two-fold racial imagination endures. Naturalist racisms ensure the reproduction of the imaginary of the state of nature, the outside that continues to occupy a central discursive role in Western political orders. Historicist racisms ensure the adaptability of racial thought, which must undergo perpetual transformation in response to evolutions in the mode of production and periodic crises of accumulation. The other who yesterday lacked the capacity for industry may tomorrow be required as a critical source of cheap wage labor.

Race, Gender, and Social Security

One effect of Social Security is to clearly define who counts as a properly laboring member of the citizenry, and who does not—who is a public concern and who has a marginal or subordinate place in the calculus of public good. Social Security, in other words, draws a line between the citizen and the non-citizen, and between different occupations, different forms or sectors of labor. From its inception in the United States, Social Security was highly gendered and highly racialized, reproducing the prevailing norms of the time, which confined women and racial minorities to unpaid—as in the case of household work—or lower-paid labor. Agricultural and domestic workers, of whom the vast majority were women and minorities, were not included in the original Social Security act; nearly two thirds of black workers and more than 70 percent of women workers were not covered by the 1935 legislation. And “illegal” immigrants and the non-working population were left out altogether. (This is not to paint the greatest innovation of public services in U.S. history as a reactionary development, but rather to highlight that the content of the original Act did little to challenge—and in important ways even reinforced—the gendered and racialized organization of labor in particular and society more broadly.)

In her study Pitied but Not Entitled (1994), Linda Gordon writes that the Social Security Act of 1935 “excluded the most needy groups from all its programs, even the inferior ones. These exclusions were deliberate and mainly racially motivated.”²³ The Southern Democrats who controlled Congress were determined to limit the bill’s provisions to the white industrial working class, thereby exacerbating already existing structural inequalities. The exclusion of women from the legislation, moreover, reinforced gendered power relations within and outside the home. As Gwendolyn Mink concludes, “Reflecting masculinist assumptions, gender conventions, and maternalist achievement, the New Deal reproduced social policies contingent on maternal dependence, tying women’s economic security to men’s wages.”²⁴ Social Security legislation enacted processes of exclusion through incorporation; “by routing women and men toward economic security differently, the New Deal entrenched separate, gendered citizenships.”²⁵ It also entrenched separate, racial citizenships. In addition to the marginal place of African Americans in Social Security legislation, the explicitly racialized immigration policy of the 1930s—one based on a national quota system that would prevail until 1965—ensured that white would remain the color of Social Security citizenship for some time to come.

The categorical exclusions contained within the original Social Security Act did not go uncontested, as the claims of African Americans and women to political recognition and a fuller citizenship translated into significant, if limited and limiting, changes in the form and content of Social Security policy. But the point remains: Social Security is one way of separating the citizen sphere from its outside, and one way of dividing the inside into racial and gender hierarchies both symbolic and real. Like the security project at large, Social Security is simultaneously about social inclusion and social exclusion.

The Cold War and Racial Security

During the Cold War, the security of identity existed alongside economic security and military security as an urgent National Security concern. Integral to the embryonic Cold War order was the discursive enunciation of U.S. exceptionalism, which strictly delineated what is “American” from what is “un-American,” what is to be secured—freedom, capitalism, individualism—from what is a threat to “our” security—totalitarianism, communism, collectivism. Reworking enduring colonial binaries, the National Security narrative of the Cold War imagined the communist threat to global capitalist hegemony as irrational and degenerate—a retrograde recapitulation of barbaric tendencies.²⁶ The ownership of property in common, for example, was understood as a savage trait, in opposition to the free system of private property that undergirds U.S. civilization and is the prerequisite for all human progress.²⁷ The racial content of these oppositions is apparent. The “primitive” peoples that the United States must uplift through developmentalist programs or discipline through counterinsurgency warfare are cast in an explicitly racial nomenclature. The convergence of the “red scare” with the “yellow peril” in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere, for example, represented the synthesis of various racial tropes, each with its own unique history. But it represented as well the reproduction of the foundational binary between (Western) civilization and its outside. Domestically, moreover, the McCarthyite effort to purge communist contagion from within the national political community occasioned an attack on all manner of radical or alternative social identities and formations. Just as the line separating inside from out needed to be perpetually retraced and reinforced, so too did the composition and social structure of the interior body politic require perpetual definition and control.

That said, the racial nomos of the United States—its national and international dimensions—was throughout the Cold War subject to and altered by critiques emanating from within and without. The civil rights movement at home, and a combination of Soviet and anticolonial voices abroad, highlighted the contradiction—inherent to the domestic and foreign expression of U.S. state power—between the rhetoric of democracy, freedom, and equality and the endurance of racialized forms of social exclusion and political repression. The contours of this basic contradiction were already apparent during the Second World War, when the United States’ claims of anti-imperialism and its corresponding affirmation of the right to “self-determination” clashed with its transparently expansionary geopolitical ambitions, with the realities of Jim Crow, and with the wartime policy of Japanese internment. “By framing their war propaganda as a struggle for democracy and against the Third Reich’s racist tyranny,” Thomas Borstelmann has observed, “the Western Allies opened themselves to intensive critiques of their own colonial and segregationist practices.”²⁸ In the early stages of the Cold War, this critique was taken up by the Soviet Union, which highlighted the inequality and discrimination endemic to U.S. society. If failing to radically alter the dominant racial paradigms of the war, this line of criticism did have significant consequence, pressuring administrations from Truman to Johnson into a less tepid—if still profoundly qualified, and motivated as much by diplomatic as by moral concerns—embrace of civil rights transformations.

The conjoined critique of segregation at home and militaristic meddling abroad had less impact on U.S. conduct in the world—compelling not major foreign policy changes but the addition of further euphemistic cover for the proxy wars and counterinsurgency conflicts sanctioned by the containment doctrine. Moreover, as Mary Dudziak, Carol Anderson, and others have argued, McCarthyite repression blunted the anti-capitalist, internationalist potentialities of the civil rights movement.²⁹ In other words, Cold War concerns over image nudged the U.S. government in a slightly more progressive direction on civil rights issues but de-radicalized the civil rights movement itself—marginalizing its anticolonial voice and preventing the emergence of a more comprehensive struggle for social and economic change.

Broadly speaking, the securing of racial order in the moment of the Cold War involved the careful balancing of exclusionary and inclusionary narratives and policies—the line separating “us” from “them” was rigorously defined and policed while a measured politics of inclusion reshaped the United States’ racial landscape. The dual nature of the modern security project’s racial logic—the delineation of inside and outside and differentiation of the inside—was transformed but not transcended by the struggle for civil rights nationally and independence globally.

Race and Neoliberalism

The neoliberal transformations begun in the early 1970s and intensified in the 1980s were accompanied by evolutions in the way racial difference was thought about and acted upon—not the invention of a completely new conceptualization of race, but the subtle adaptation of extant racial narratives and practices to the changing imperatives of both capital and state. The “flexible,” post-Fordist forms of accumulation heralded by neoliberal doctrine require more “flexible” racial imaginaries.

Theorists such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Fredric Jameson argue that in the late capitalist moment there is no longer an outside. The process of modernization is complete; nature has been completely assimilated into the social order. For Hardt and Negri, the movement from “modern” to “imperial” sovereignty represents the movement beyond the “fixed and eternal boundaries” of modern colonial racism toward a racism defined by “the play of differences and the management of micro-conflictualities within [imperial order’s] continually expanding domain.”³⁰ While right to note the more “fluid and amorphous”—yet still “stable and brutal”—racial ideology deployed in neoliberal governance, they go too far in pronouncing the disappearance of the outside altogether.³¹ “The central moment of modern racism . . . the global antithesis between inside and outside”³² persists, even if the precise delineation of that foundational boundary is subject to periodic redrawing. A racism that rests upon a “strategy of differential inclusion” can coexist with a racism that rests upon binary exclusion. Indeed, the modern security project has always maintained a balance between these two modes of racial practice. The newness of the neoliberal moment is evinced by the dexterity with which imperial order navigates between them—casting superfluous bodies or convenient enemies into the outside, while incorporating non-capitalized space and a multiplicity of others into its sphere of power and tribute. In the neoliberal moment, triumphalist narratives of an imminent “post-racialism” coincide with loud reassertions of absolute civilizational alterity. The premature universal and the retrograde particular stand side by side.

The Racial State after September 11

Within the discursive frames of the War on Terror, “homeland” evokes a bounded territorial space with a definitive outside that must be resisted and policed. This boundary, moreover, is understood to define not just geography but the limits of a distinct ethno-political or ethno-cultural community. It suggests, in other words, the enduring dream of the perfect imbrication of race, space, and nation. And it implies as well that abiding imperial anxiety: the specter of difference encountered in the world returning home to corrupt the essential cultural homogeneity and social or economic integrity of the nation-state. In this way, the term “homeland” is ideally suited to the security project in its postcolonial yet still manifestly imperialist incarnation. It describes the peculiar predicament of a fading imperial power reverting to blood-soil nativism as its military marches around the world under the banner of Enlightenment universals.

The racial logic of Homeland Security governance was laid bare by Katrina floodwaters. Following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’s poorest residents, of whom the vast majority were African American, were left to fend for their own survival, or—as was the fate of nearly 2,000 people—to die. Tens of thousands crowded into stadiums, convention centers, or along elevated stretches of highway, without adequate food, water, or medical attention. Affecting images of government failure in New Orleans played across the television news, but so too did images of “out-of-control” black residents “looting” abandoned supermarkets. When the federal relief effort did arrive, its loyalties were ambivalent—divided between protecting the property of New Orleans’s wealthier residents and aiding in the survival of its most marginal and most vulnerable. The security of the former seemed to take precedence, as the incessant media invocation of “looters” and marauding “armed gangs” served to criminalize the hurricane’s victims and highlight the final sanctity of private property. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco gave soldiers authorization to “shoot to kill” in the course of their order-restoring mission: “These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle-tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets. . . . They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. . . . These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.”³³ Subsequently, those displaced by the hurricane were labeled “refugees” by the media: first criminalized, and then symbolically stripped of their citizenship.³⁴

When Governor Blanco highlighted the Iraq War experience of the soldiers called upon to enforce order in post-Katrina New Orleans, she revealed the profound connections between racialized militarism in the homeland and in the world. This connection is further evidenced by the governance of and public discourse surrounding immigration. Dispossessed of economic self-determination by free-trade agreements, the legacies of colonial expropriation, and related geographic inequities, migrants from the global South arrive in the North as living reminders of imperial brutalities present and past. Their presence in the metropole, though, does not provoke a serious reckoning with either neoliberal governance—and the state failure and social death it engenders—or the living sediment of colonial histories. Instead, in the dominant media and governmental discourses the presence of immigrants is either affirmatively cited as proof of democratic tolerance and multicultural vitality or condemned as an attack on domestic labor, drain on public services, and threat to normative national identity—as a cause, in other words, of both cultural and economic crisis. This ambivalence should not disguise the central import of each racial narrative—the universalist and the nativist—to the Homeland Security project in particular and to the modern security project in general.

SECURITY AND EMERGENCY

As elaborated above, capital and race are two keywords of the modern security project. The triad of security terms “prerogative/emergency/exception”—all of which here refer to the political movement, by an executive power, beyond the normative constraints of legislative or juridical democratic process—is another crucial entry in the security lexicon. Executive prerogative is unsurprisingly central to the pre-liberal or “absolutist” philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. But as Mark Neocleous demonstrates, prerogative and exception are also of great import to the liberalism of John Locke.³⁵ There are moments of political exigency, Locke allows, when the legislature is incapable of acting with the required expediency; the executive power must in these instances arrest democratic deliberation and enact the power of decision. The “public good” (which is, as Neocleous observes, often merely a euphemism for the protection of private property), the “safety of the people,” and the security of society more generally, periodically demand the exercise of prerogative power.³⁶ The prerogative power of decision is not in fact exceptional but rather a basic and permanent feature of the modern liberal state.

Before the procedural enactment of emergency powers, the particular threat that occasions the emergency must be identified or imagined. In the settler-colonial context, the emergency that required or sanctioned the exception was the (racialized) state of nature broadly conceived. Following September 11, 2001, the “terrorist threat” was quickly established as an emergency that demanded the invocation of emergency powers. In all cases, “security” is the reason of state that permits the invocation of emergency or enactment of prerogative within the normative body of the liberal state. When the “security” of the political community is under threat from the savage or the terrorist, exception is justified—indeed, is legally provided for. Perhaps it is more appropriate to think not of a power that moves beyond “the rule of law,” but one that is sanctioned by it, that is essential to it. The instances in which a state of emergency might be invoked in the name of security today are various, ranging from economic crisis to natural disaster to foreign or domestic war. But in each case a fundamental contradiction is at work: the suspension of the law, by the law, in the name of the law.

As with race, the concept and practice of “emergency” were developed in concert with the exercise of colonial power. Locke imagined the “state of nature” as a space of pure exception. “In the State of Nature,” he observed, “every one has the Executive Power of the Law of Nature.”³⁷ One fundamental purpose of government, Locke contended, is not to do away with this natural exception, exactly, but to centralize and codify it. Exception (or “emergency”) is both a reason for and core technology of the nascent security state, its imperial form in particular. In the British imperial imagination, the “rule of law” was upheld as a singular gift, bestowed by the colonizer upon the colonized. “The establishment of a system of law which regulates the most important parts of the daily life of the people,” the political philosopher James Fitzjames Stephen put it in the 1870s, “constitutes in itself a moral conquest more striking, more durable, and far more solid, than the physical conquest which renders it possible.”³⁸ Central to this colonial “system of law,” though, was the fact of its recurrent suspension: the fluid definition of certain “acts of state”—including, in circumstances both exigent and everyday, murder—as beyond juridical oversight, and the indefinite detention of colonized subjects without charge or trial.³⁹ The colony, Achille Mbembe has argued, is the zone of exception par excellence—a space “where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization.”⁴⁰ “That colonies might be ruled over in absolute lawlessness,” Mbembe writes, “stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native. . . . Savage life,” he continues, “is just another form of animal life.”⁴¹ Unrecognizably human, capable of neither political commonwealth nor industrious labor, the savage exists outside the moral and rational calculus of the modern state. The state of nature, the pure space of exception, is the laboratory within which colonial power synthesizes methods of dehumanization with processes of extra-juridical violence. The extra-legal violence honed there is later institutionalized in the legal apparatus of the modern state, and in the security project that is its raison d’être.⁴²

Economic Emergency, Capitalist Security

In the United States, the invocation of emergency powers—usually expressed in the enactment of martial law—was until the late nineteenth century limited to moments of imminent physical threat or danger, due to invasion from without or rebellion or civil war within.⁴³ In the decades surrounding the turn of the century, however, martial law was in multiple instances imposed to suppress labor unrest.⁴⁴ Further, during the First World War but most profoundly in its aftermath, exceptional executive power was enacted in the economic realm, as a response not to violent disorder but to capitalist crisis. In continuance of this trend, the purview of emergency powers expanded throughout the twentieth century.

The economic recovery legislation that gave initial form to the New Deal was enacted by President Roosevelt under a legally declared state of emergency and was conditioned by the recurring invocation of “emergency” in public discourse—a rhetorical proliferation that coincided with the heightened discursive power of “security.” The emergency of the Great Depression, Roosevelt held, required a countervailing exercise of emergency executive power. Roosevelt was responding to mass unemployment and a dramatic fall in national income, and to a wave of labor protest and intensifying culture of class struggle more broadly. Immediate and decisive intervention was an imperative if people were to be put back to work and economic growth were to resume; but intervention was also required to alleviate class fracture and obviate the possibility of socialist revolution. The emergency, that is, referred not only to the welfare—or security—of the citizenry but to the security of capitalist social relations.⁴⁵

Cold War Emergency

The emergency declared by Roosevelt in 1933 marked the beginning of a continuous line of emergency governance that remains unbroken today.⁴⁶ The normalization of emergency has had profound political and social effects, occasioning the dramatic expansion of executive powers and contributing to the militarization of society.⁴⁷ President Truman’s declaration of emergency in 1950, in response to China’s invasion of Korea, represents one particularly important moment in this twentieth-century genealogy. Truman’s proclamation consolidated the emergent but already hegemonic National Security state—a new political order founded on the specter of total and permanent war, which blurred the spatial and temporal distinctions between war and peace and incorporated all of society into the military sphere.⁴⁸

Truman’s declaration of emergency in 1950 concretized and escalated an extant policy program, one the president had famously articulated to a joint session of Congress in his 1947 “Truman Doctrine” speech. In that address, Truman outlined a new, more anticipatory and interventionist foreign policy based on “containment” rather than détente. The emergency declared by Truman in 1950—in the name of the nation’s economic and military security, and in the defense of capitalist freedom against “communist imperialism”—was premised not just on the actuality of military conflict but on the “looming peril” of an existential threat to the nation. The infamous internal policy document NSC-68, drafted by the National Security Council and approved by President Truman just two days before his declaration of emergency in 1950, outlined the culture and rationale of Cold War emergency governance. The intellectual and spiritual antecedent of the Bush Doctrine, NSC-68—which warned of “the ever-present possibility of annihilation,” and which argued that at stake was the survival “not only of this republic but of civilization itself”—argued for constant military and security mobilization in the face of the communist threat.⁴⁹ It argued, moreover, that the struggle against communism would necessarily be waged internal to the United States as well as in the world. NSC-68, that is, defined the ways in which National Security is more than a mode of U.S. global power—it is also a technique for policing individual citizens and structuring the national body politic.⁵⁰ In the Cold War emergency order, military buildup and McCarthyite repression went hand in hand, just as the War on Terror and Patriot Act exist in tandem today.

Neoliberal Emergency

In the neoliberal moment, the expanding scope of emergency powers—an expansion that has coincided with security’s ever-greater purchase on human social life—is on full display. In the case of the New Deal, emergency was enacted to mitigate class contradiction and ensure the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Today, emergency powers have a different intent and effect: not the mollification of class contradiction but its intensification; not the preemptive management of economic insecurity and crisis, but the deliberate cultivation of a general culture of insecurity and crisis. If the security of capital has always been prior to and above the security of the person or the public—the latter only privileged when it acts as a conduit to the former—this enduring hierarchy is in neoliberalism utterly transparent. The neoliberal state of emergency demands the constant and militarized securing of capital, and the constant and militarized policing of the insecure spaces inhabited by the multitudes that fall through the chasms of the “ownership society.” Capital, in neoliberal order, is always embattled, always in danger—because only the feeblest of attempts is made to assimilate its other into the realm of achieved security. In place of the social contract are the gated community and the private security force on the one side and the proliferating slum on the other.

The New Deal and the “embedded liberalism” it helped entrench is one example of the second phase of what Karl Polanyi called capitalism’s “double movement”: first, the movement toward the liberation of markets and universalization of the commodity form; and second, the countermovement—encouraged by labor primarily but at moments in the twentieth century by capital as well—toward the amelioration of capitalism’s most alienating and destructive effects. Without the second movement, Polanyi contends, capital would completely destroy the “fictitious commodities” that are its foundation—land and human labor most of all—and thus destroy itself. The actual complete disembedding of the market—the dream of the market fundamentalists—is, Polanyi insists, an impossibility, as it would mean turning nature and people into pure commodities, and thus ultimately destroying nature and people.⁵¹

In embedded liberalism, the state recognizes this danger and responds by instituting various protective measures to guard against the violence and reach of the market. Neoliberalism, though, disregards the imperative of the second movement. According to neoliberal doctrine, the brutalities of the market are not to be counteracted. Indeed, neoliberal policy proceeds through the annihilation/privatization of the public institutions and services historically created in the moment of countermovement. In neoliberal order, emergency powers regulate not the stability of society at large—“there is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher intoned—but the security of private property, and the security of the ongoing processes of commoditization and privatization that make up the first movement described by Polanyi. Whether the economic crisis that began in 2008 will provoke a new and sustained countermovement remains unclear. In the immediate context of the crisis, the U.S. executive used its powers of emergency intervention—outsourced, in large part, to the Federal Reserve—to bail out precarious financial institutions and to stimulate dormant credit markets. But tellingly, it did not—with the tentative exception of 2010’s healthcare reform legislation—“exploit the crisis” to buttress beleaguered social safety nets or establish new ones. And at the state level, the invocation and enactment of “emergency” enabled the imposition of anti-union legislation and other austerity measures. In Michigan, to cite just one example, Governor Rick Snyder oversaw in the spring of 2011 the passage of a law that gave him the power to remove elected officials, abrogate union contracts, and eliminate services in any municipality or school district declared by the state to be in a condition of “financial emergency.”⁵²

New and Old States of Exception

The War on Terror was imagined by its neoconservative authors as a “forever war.” The interminable temporality of the conflict is implicit in the very idea of a struggle against terror, which is not a material entity that can be eradicated but an animating idea, a mode of representing a particular—if fluid in definition—form of violence or difference. The declaration of a War on Terror, in other words, explicitly posits the emergency as permanent. But as I discuss above, the emergency—and the war that it compels—has been a structural component of modern political order since its inception. And as Julian Reid and Michael Dillon put it, “when emergency becomes the generative principle of formation of community and rule” the political sphere is determined by the urgency, “the compelling political economy,” of war.⁵³ This inherency is most visibly evidenced in the space of the colony and by colonial histories.⁵⁴ The colonial rationality of the War on Terror thus betrays—even as it strives to obscure—the other, deeper, permanent war with which it is continuous.

The principal policy documents and laws of the War on Terror—the USA PATRIOT Act (2001), National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), and National Strategy for Homeland Security (2002)—introduced a series of terms and categories into the political lexicon, many of which are cited by critics as evidence of the “state of exception” within which we now live: “enemy combatant,” “battlefield detainee,” “extraordinary rendition.”⁵⁵ These categories name the novel forms of liminal, rightless subjectivity produced by the extra-juridical mechanisms of the U.S.-led War on Terror and experienced in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and untold secret prisons located throughout the world. The word extraordinary nicely captures the simultaneous newness and mundanity of the War on Terror’s emergency formations—extraordinary as exceptional, and extraordinary as extra ordinary (really ordinary). In the latter meaning, the vocabulary of “enemy combatant” and “extraordinary rendition,” the violence it names, represents an exceptionally acute manifestation of long-established norms, Manichean frames—civilization and barbarism, human and infrahuman—basic to colonial modernity.

It bears emphasizing here that my intention in this section is not to suggest any perfect congruence between this and that emergency formation; an emergency declared in response to a national disaster of course differs profoundly, in its political intention and effect, from an emergency declared in wartime or in the face of economic crisis. Rather, my purpose is to locate the contemporary proliferation of emergency—as a narrative and as a governmental form—within the longer history of emergency as a technique of state power. This argument about the politics of emergency mirrors the overall argument of this chapter, which sheds light upon the ways in which ostensibly discrete instances of security thinking and governance—Social Security and Homeland Security, for example—share a political genealogy and rationality, which can be traced to the advent of colonial modernity.

CONCLUSION

Summoning Walter Benjamin, and invoking as well the work of Giorgio Agamben, a common critical refrain insists that in the moment of the War on Terror the state of exception has become the rule.⁵⁶ The ongoing state of emergency declared by President Bush in the immediate aftermath of September 11 stands as compelling evidence in support of this thesis. As I have argued here, though, the contemporary iteration of emergency governance is not in fact exceptional but proves or evinces the rule. The exemplary sites or subjects of the “post-9/11” state of exception, such as Guantánamo Bay or “battlefield detainee,” are contiguous with the longer history of modernity’s exceptional violence—a violence perfected in the space of the colony. The racial logics of the contemporary moment—the synthesis of outright exclusion and “differential inclusion”—can likewise be traced to the early modern moment, and in particular to the settler-colonization of the New World. And contemporary modes of neoliberal depredation—the production and subsequent seizure of devalued or non-commoditized spaces and entities—are genealogically related to originary forms of primitive accumulation.

The security project arose concurrently with and in support of the settler-conquest of the New World, the establishment of the modern state form, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. Centuries later, new and old technologies of dispossession continue to propel capitalism into new worlds both fictitious and real; new and old racisms continue to shape human social life, delimiting and structuring the space of political belonging; and new and old narratives of crisis and emergency—of nature, of war, of economy, of culture—continue to inspire the innovation and intensification of state and market power. Intrinsic to each of these processes, security—as a political ideal and governmental technique—is also one binding thread between them. So too is terror. From its inception, the imperial security project has labored to elide the terror of its foundation and extant form. The history and contemporary expression of that terror is taken up in the chapter that follows.