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CHAPTER 3 Europe’s Weapon is the Law

The bland features of Hans Blix became an unlikely fixture on our television screens and in our newspapers in early 2003. With his weapons inspections, this softly spoken balding former diplomat became the personification of hope and peace. The other familiar figure in those tense few months was Donald Rumsfeld, the ebullient American Secretary of Defense. The former wrestling champion also promised to destroy the Iraqi will to fight: not by relying on inspections, but using ‘shock and awe’ to scare Iraqis into submission.

The conflict went beyond the situation in Iraq. The two men became archetypes for different worldviews: the pyrotechnic might of the United States military was the perfect foil to the United Nation’s preference for inspections. One offered to contain the Iraqis by spectacular displays of power, the other by keeping them under constant surveillance.

Unfortunately, spectacle and surveillance were just two sides of the same impotence, because both attempted to control Iraq from the outside. Unlike Europe’s transformative power, which changes countries permanently, this kind of power lasts only as long as there is a crisis and huge amounts of international pressure and resources. As soon as the media and the political circus move on, the problems return.

The Bush Administration has used the crisis in Iraq to show that Europe’s obsession with international law is a sign of its terminal weakness. It depicts it as a modern-day Prometheus bound up in red tape, at the mercy of devouring predators. But what was it that transformed Europe from being an incubator for world wars into a transmission belt for peace and democracy? The simple answer is: international law. The law is Europe’s weapon of choice in its campaign to re-shape the world.

Power as Spectacle

Machiavelli famously said that it is better to be feared than to be loved. But he also warned that it is vital not to be hated. Donald Rumsfeld ignored the second part of this injunction when he ordered the Pentagon to implement the principle of ‘Shock and Awe’. The report by the National Defense University, which coined the term, called for displays of firepower so dramatic that they would sap America’s enemies’ will to fight in the same way that the nuclear bomb had worked on Japanese fighters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War.¹ In an age of terror, Rumsfeld and his colleagues were looking to turn the tables on their enemies. They would use violence not to achieve specific objectives such as conquering a town or destroying a weapons factory, but as an end in itself: an instrument to enforce discipline on ‘tyrants and terrorists’ around the world.

This was part of a broader strategy to respond to a post-9/11 world in which terrorists could procure weapons of mass destruction from ‘rogue states’. Pre-emptive strikes were intended to help restore the viability of deterrence – by making it clear that the USA would severely punish any state that considered sharing destructive technologies with terrorists. By making an example of Iraq, Rumsfeld hoped to be able to send a message to Iran, Syria, North Korea, and any other country thinking of equipping itself with weapons of mass destruction.

Using brute force to convey a message is not new. But now this idea of ‘power as spectacle’ can be perfected with the technology of the twenty-first century: ‘daisy cutters’, ‘bunker-busting’ nuclear bombs, squadrons of F16s, and the like. The problem with expressive violence is that its effects soon wear off. Rulers in the past found that they needed to up the ante with ever more gruesome executions and other displays of might, such as the gut-wrenching execution of Robert-François Damiens, who was ripped apart by four galloping horses for attempting to kill Louis XV of France in 1757. And even if fear can be maintained, it becomes increasingly expensive and ultimately counter-productive as it creates resentment among the very people it is seeking to control.

That is what has happened with Iraq. There were almost monthly displays of firepower between 1991 and 2003 to keep the regime on its toes. When this was felt to be failing, the logic of the allies’ position compelled them to invade in 2003. The initial effect was successful. Saddam was removed, and Iran, Syria and Libya were initially cowed by the brute force of the invasion. But soon the effects wore off. Already the regimes in Tehran and Damascus feel emboldened by the fact that 130,000 US troops are bogged down in Iraq. And as the continued presence of foreign forces acts as a magnet for insurgency, the Syrian and Iranian regimes look on with relief at the transformation of a potentially popular war of liberation into an unpopular and bloody occupation.

However, the fatal flaw of ‘power as spectacle’ is that it is essentially destructive. It can stop people doing bad things, but it is not a good way to build and govern a complex society. In Afghanistan the allied invasion had no trouble removing the Taliban regime, but the allies failed to rebuild Afghanistan from the roots up. In spite of a veneer of democracy, the underlying realities of rule by warlords, corruption, and nepotism remain the same. As one American soldier wryly put it: ‘We thought we had bought the Northern Alliance, but it turns out that we had rented them.’ Once the superpower’s attention had been diverted by the war in Iraq, its power to transform the Afghan Republic began to wane.

This kind of power is inefficient because it is always imposed on unwilling subjects from outside, rather than changing the wiring of society from the inside. This is what led modern societies to move from ‘power as spectacle’ towards ‘power as surveillance’.

Power as Surveillance

The French philosopher Michel Foucault showed how, from the nineteenth century, advanced societies moved from relying largely on the deterrence of visible expressions of might to discipline enforced by making potential subjects of power visible, through regulation, official papers, CCTV and prisons. Foucault argues that the shift from spectacle to surveillance allowed modern societies to be policed at a fraction of the cost of the ‘Ancien Régime’. The key was finding ways to record and monitor the behaviour of citizens in a systematic way through the development of timetables, identity cards, photographs, medical records, and laws.

The United Nation’s weapons inspections were developed because military power is expensive and short-lived in its effects. By getting the international community to insist that Iraq complied with treaties that Saddam himself had signed, the UN felt that it would have the legitimacy to change Iraq. And by sending Hans Blix and Mohammed Al Baradei to triple-check every single Iraqi claim, they knew they would not have to take Saddam at his word. Weapons inspections are the direct opposite of power as spectacle: it is not the strength of Blix and his team that needs to be on show, but the behaviour of the Iraq regime and sites they are inspecting. This was power as surveillance.