Читать книгу Governing from the Skies - Thomas Hippler - Страница 9

On 25 July 1909, H. G. Wells was doing gymnastics in his garden when his telephone started ringing persistently. With some annoyance, he finally decided to interrupt his exercises and picked up the handset. The message was hard to understand amid the crackling: ‘Blériot has crossed the Channel … an article … on what that means!’¹ From his fine house in Sandgate, Kent, Wells enjoyed a superb view over the Channel and could almost see Dover, some fifty kilometres to the east, where Blériot had just landed.² As Wells had just enjoyed tremendous success with his science fiction novel War in the Air, the Daily Mail editors naturally thought of him to comment on the historic event: Louis Blériot crosses the Channel by aeroplane.

Wells began to reflect. First of all, he greeted the sporting triumph as a gentleman: ‘Mr Blériot has done a good performance, and his rival Mr Latham really did not stand a chance. That is the most important thing for us.’ Wells recognized that he had underestimated the stability of aircraft, along with almost all other experts on aeronautics. But as he pursued his train of thought, certain worries arose. The consequences of these flights suddenly struck him as tremendous, fearful, and terrible:

This event – that this thing invented by a foreigner, built by a foreigner, driven by a foreigner, could cross the Channel with the ease of a bird flying over a stream – poses the problem in a dramatic fashion. Our manhood is now defective … The foreigner makes a better class of men than we others.

Foreigners were cultivated, curious, inventive, enterprising. The British were well brought up but lacked initiative, happy to play golf while the French, Americans, Germans, and even Brazilians rose up in the air. On top of the wound this inflicted on patriotic narcissism, another worry struck the writer. The Channel crossing had needed a combination of will, courage, and technical competence. Blériot was certainly a hero, but a hero of a new kind: he embodied an emerging new elite, a new ruling class ready to assume power. The ‘natural democracy’ of the English could not stand up against the technological heroes of the flying machines.³ These dark thoughts beset Wells to the point of bordering on the paranoid. If a Frenchman had flown in an aircraft, was it rational to conclude that foreigners produced a better class of man than the British? Wells may have exaggerated in seeing this flight as heralding the end of a particular political system, and of democracy in general. But, from his point of view, the British political, social, and cultural system was losing ground vis-à-vis its geostrategic rivals, and an unprecedented military danger suddenly threatened a country that had up till now believed itself invulnerable, protected by its island shores. Planes setting out from Calais would soon be able to drop explosives on London. Great Britain had to change its mode of social organization, its educational institutions, with a view to equipping itself with the means to create its own class of men capable of matching this technological heroism.

With today’s hindsight, we can discern in Wells’s delirium the anticipation of the end of a historical cycle marked by British hegemony on a global scale, a shift that would take half a century to complete. According to such a well-informed observer as Eric Hobsbawm, it was not until the Suez crisis of 1956 that Great Britain recovered from the shock inflicted in 1909 and recognized that after the loss of its colonies it was now only a second-rate power.⁴

In 1909, however, the United Kingdom remained the hegemonic centre of the world. It had long possessed the military means to control and secure the great sea routes. As a centre of commercial exchange on a global scale, the hegemon had to be in a position to defend its merchant shipping throughout the world; it had to possess what the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan called ‘command of the sea’. This required two conditions: first of all, a navy capable not only of confronting any other, but also – often more difficult – of effectively protecting its own merchant shipping against piracy. This made it necessary to possess naval bases located on the main sea routes, and ideally throughout the world, so as to be able to refuel and repair ships. The advantage of Britain’s island position was clear. Maritime supremacy enabled the dominant power both to establish its hegemony in the world system and to defend the metropolis. In other words, an island hegemonic power that enjoyed maritime supremacy could defend itself at less cost than a continental hegemonic power, forced both to maintain a strong navy in the interest of overseas expansion and a strong land army to defend its home territory. The British army was more like an expeditionary force to be deployed in the colonies in normal times and on the European continent in times of major crisis, as during the Napoleonic wars or the First World War. As long as Great Britain dominated the seas, its home territory was protected against any attack. The great battles of European wars took place across the Channel, on the plains of Flanders.

This makes it easier to understand Wells’s shock. From 25 July 1909, Great Britain was no longer an island, as it had become vulnerable.⁵ A hegemonic centre, however, had to be immune from any attack. If ‘all roads led to Rome’, and if all world trade passed through the City of London, the whole world order seemed to emanate from this centre. The hegemon functioned as a quasi-transcendent instance of the world system. If it represented a haven of peace, a promise of happiness and freedom, it also constituted, more prosaically, a political–social system that Kees van der Pijl calls ‘Lockean’,⁶ after the author of the Treatise on Civil Government. Following the ‘Glorious Revolution’, Great Britain replaced the Netherlands as hegemonic centre of the world system.⁷ An original complex of state and civil society was born, with the precocious development of a capitalist civil society, framed by the ‘rule of law’ and constitutional monarchy.⁸ British liberalism rested on a state that was strong, but limited its sphere of intervention so as to allow a margin of self-regulation for the capitalist economy and society.⁹ There thus appeared a genuine bourgeois/civil society, ‘from which the state has withdrawn after having imposed itself actively and constructively, shaping the institutions needed to permit the “liberal withdrawal from the sphere of value creation”’.¹⁰

Around the hegemonic centre was a ‘semi-periphery’, a zone made up of a series of contender states that generally presented ‘Hobbesean’ features, in the sense that the state played a directly dominant role, with interventions in society that were far more frequent and direct than in the Lockean model. This meant that the ruling class maintained a closer link with the state, functioning as a genuine ‘state class’ with all the risks of authoritarianism this involved. Finally, around the Lockean hegemonic centre and the Hobbesean semi-periphery lay the actual periphery, colonial or post-colonial.

The spatial distribution of violence on the world scale was arranged according to this tripartite pattern. If violence could be total on the margins of the system, it took a statized form in the Hobbesean semi-periphery. As for the Lockean centre, this passed for a haven of peace, a country open to refugees, the promised land of liberty. But it could only appear as such inasmuch as it externalized violence, unleashing this in wars between different rival states or on the periphery of the world system. At all events, the centre was constitutionally invulnerable, and had to be so. The mere possibility of an attack could thus shatter a whole system of representations of the world order. If, to cite Gilles Deleuze, ‘delirium is geographico-political’, geopolitics is also a matter of perceptions and affects. The division of the world into centre, semi-periphery, and periphery is not simply the invention of world-system theorists, but is actually rooted in our mental structures, sensations, and deliriums. To attack the centre is thus equivalent to shaking a whole world, in a sense both geopolitical and mental.¹¹ If Wells was driven mad by the idea that London could be taken as a target, what can we say about the consequences of a real attack on the hegemonic centre, such as the United States experienced on 11 September 2001?

Wells’s delirium becomes more understandable still if we consider the implications of this arrangement of the world in terms of foreign policy, defence policy, and the conduct of war in general. British foreign policy was conducted on two levels, in conformity with a tripartite division of the world: a policy of aggressive colonial expansion outside of Europe had been paired since the eighteenth century with a policy of balance of powers, collective security, and indirect intervention on the European continent. Contrary to the continental powers, the United Kingdom did not aim at territorial conquest in Europe, with the exception of certain naval bases that enabled it to control sea routes. The British custom was to base themselves on one or more ‘contender states’ in order to contain others, and those European states that were weakest militarily could count on British aid to finance their war effort. The success of such a strategy is evident: out of the seven wars fought with France between 1689 and 1815, Great Britain only lost one, the war of American independence – which was also the only time that it did not succeed in creating a continental alliance against France.¹² In the same way, the First and Second World Wars, which put a stop to the German claim to world hegemony, were won above all thanks to the alliance with the Russian and then Soviet contender.

The conduct of war in general, moreover, depends on the geopolitical distribution of violence within the world system. Since the seventeenth century, European war has been conducted between states.¹³ The state first of all puts an end to the ‘state of nature’ by establishing on its territory a power capable of containing civil war. Internal armed conflicts steadily came to an end. The corollary of this statization was a limitation of warfare: once this was defined as a relation between states, it ceased to denote a relationship between individuals. It followed from this that the latter had the right to be protected from warlike violence. Rousseau only repeated a common opinion when he wrote that, even in war, states were bound to respect the persons and goods of citizens:

The purpose of war being to destroy the enemy state, its defenders may rightfully be killed so long as they are carrying arms; but as soon as they lay them down and surrender, ceasing to be enemies or agents of the enemy, they become simply men again, and there is no longer any right over their lives.¹⁴

If Europe perceived itself as being de facto united, first of all in a Res publica christiana, then in a common ‘civilization’ or ‘society’, outside Europe things were very different. In colonial wars, the civilian population was never seen as having the right to a particular protection. Military theorists explained this in the clearest possible terms. Colonel Callwell, for example, a British colonial officer, summed up in the late nineteenth century the principles of ‘small’ colonial wars:

The main points of difference between small wars and regular campaigns … are that, in the former, the beating of the hostile armies is not necessarily the main object even if they exist, that effect on morale is often far more important than material success, and that the operations are sometimes limited to committing havoc which the laws of regular warfare do not sanction.

Since colonial wars did not oppose two states monopolizing legitimate violence, as embodied in an army, the distinction between ‘defenders of the state’ and ‘ordinary men’ was not applicable. Thus, a regular war ‘may be terminated by the surrender or capitulation of the hostile sovereign or chief, who answers for his people; but in the suppression of a rebellion the refractory subjects of the ruling power must all be chastised and subdued.’¹⁵ In Europe, the enemy was considered as ‘just’ (justus hostis) inasmuch as it was sovereign states and their regular armies that confronted one another.¹⁶ The attribute of justice distinguishes an enemy from a rebel or a criminal. Outside of Europe, on the other hand, the attribute of justice was not applied, and neither combatants nor civilians had this right to protection.

It was thus in regions outside of Europe that most bombings took place. In 1855, the Americans bombed the town of San Juan in Nicaragua, provoking the indignation of the British, who condemned an action ‘without precedent among civilized nations’. But this did not stop their own armed forces from bombing Canton the following year. The Chinese had arrested the crew of a British ship. After intervention by the consul, the authorities agreed to release the prisoners, but refused to make a public apology and give guarantees that such an incident would not happen again. The British then decided to open fire. In London, the Liberal MP Ralph Bernal Osborne justified the action in these terms: ‘Talk of applying the pedantic rules of international law to the Chinese!’¹⁷

In the nineteenth century, however, the first cracks already appeared in this binary arrangement, divided between a European sphere, with limited state wars, and a ‘peripheral’ sphere that was the theatre of unlimited war. Quite logically these cracks appeared on the border between the European centre and the colonized periphery, in the US during the ‘second war of independence’ and in Russia during the Crimean War. North America, traditionally external to the space of European international law, was gradually assimilated into the sphere of civilized Christianity.¹⁸ As for Russia, it was always situated on the margins of Europe: without being as ‘civilized’ as other European nations, it was nonetheless geographically close and of Christian religion.¹⁹ During the war that Great Britain fought with the United States in 1812–15, British naval forces bombarded Baltimore, Washington, and other US cities²⁰ – with the aim, according to the strategist Alfred Mahan – of giving the American people²¹ concrete experience of war so as to force their government to make peace.²² The people became a factor in war but, according to an old point of view that considered them as a passive element, only capable of explosions of sporadic violence.²³ As we shall see, this mode of thinking would structure a good part of air strategy in the twentieth century.

Another approach to a war of peoples was also sketched out during the ‘second war of independence’. The future president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, observed in 1882 that the British, who customarily abstained from personally mistreating civilians, had particularly targeted places where the population organized into a militia were putting up resistance to the former colonial power.²⁴ The association between militia organization and bombardment of cities was certainly not accidental: once the population are armed for national defence, they almost logically become a target in war. According to this more modern view, the people are no longer a passive factor but the seat of sovereignty and capable of self-organization. Where they were previously an object of politics, they become its primordial subject. And it was not accidental that these incidents should have taken place at a time when revolutionary wars in Europe had placed on the agenda a new conception of sovereignty, concerning the relation between state and citizens.

These incidents aroused debate on the legitimacy of such actions, and on the laws of warfare in general. Since the mid-nineteenth century was a time of peace in Europe, it was the American Civil War that provided the occasion for the first modern codification of the laws of war. The famous ‘General Orders number 100’ issued by Francis Lieber on behalf of President Lincoln, and generally known as the Lieber Code, is rich in instructive ambiguities in this respect. Continuing the line of ‘national wars’ begun in 1792, Lieber laid down that ‘the citizen or native of a hostile country is thus an enemy, as one of the constituents of the hostile state or nation, and as such is subjected to the hardships of the war’ (Art. 21). Thus, the classic distinction between soldier and civilian no longer applies, once the civilian is a citizen (which in Rousseau’s formulation means a member of the sovereign against whom war is waged) and the citizen is a soldier.²⁵

Lieber immediately goes on to add (Art. 22),

Nevertheless, as civilization has advanced during the last centuries, so has likewise steadily advanced, especially in war on land, the distinction between the private individual belonging to a hostile country and the hostile country itself, with its men in arms. The principle has been more and more acknowledged that the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honour as much as the exigencies of war will admit.

Articles 21 and 22 are based on very different modes of reasoning, ‘logical’ in the first case and ‘historical’ in the second. As part of the sovereign, the citizen may be the target of military actions, yet the ‘advance of civilization’ has imposed the norm that unarmed citizens should be spared. These two developments are mutually contradictory. On the one hand, the political individual becomes a citizen, a quality that implies, among other things, the duty of taking part in defence of the country in case of war – modern citizenship, particularly in the institutional forms of conscript army or militia, thus tends to merge into the armed force of a state. On the other hand, nascent international law sought to separate citizen from soldier, to make soldiers the only legitimate target and grant a principled immunity to civilian citizens.

Another and still more important aspect is that Lieber’s ‘General Orders number 100’ distinguished between land war and naval war, determining that the ‘advance of civilization’ applied especially to the former. In other words, naval war is less civilized than war on land, quite simply because the theatres of naval warfare generally lay outside of Europe. Naval warfare had its codes and practices, largely in phase with those of colonial war. The Crimean War, however, marked a break with this point of view. In terms of strategic doctrine, it confirmed a technological development dating from the 1840s, steam shipping, which challenged the distinction between a European sphere of limited war and a peripheral sphere of unlimited war. The French strategic thought of the ‘Jeune École’ played a key role in the elaboration of the corresponding doctrine.²⁶

In 1844, the French naval strategist François d’Orléans, Prince de Joinville, saw steam shipping as a way of reestablishing the glory of the French navy.²⁷ He had the idea of reviving the old French naval strategy of a systematic attack on British trade by corsairs.²⁸ While set battle had always been fatal to the French, in the face of the superior forces of the British navy, war against commerce, a ‘vital principle for England’, had always been crowned with success.²⁹ Technological progress now made it possible to refine this strategy: steamships differed from sail in being largely independent of meteorological conditions, and so could be used to wage lightning attacks on the ports and coastal cities of the enemy nation.

A real strategic revolution was thus heralded, which took shape in two phases, first of all at the time of the Crimean War, then that of the Paris Commune and the advent of the Third Republic. Traditionally, navies had two objectives: in peacetime they served as a ‘maritime police’, and thus for protection of trade routes against pirates and corsairs: in time of war, they intervened against rival navies. In both cases, the element of the navy was the sea. This is what changed with the Crimean War of 1853–56, in which Russia was opposed by a coalition formed by Great Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire, and the navy now intervened also against coastlines.³⁰ Odessa was bombarded in 1854, and Taganrog the following year.³¹ In other words, the Crimean War brought an end to the strategic separation between land and sea.³² The Third Republic saw the second phase of this break. In 1886, admiral Théophile Aube was appointed minister of the navy, and in his person the Jeune École made its entry into French naval strategy. Its protagonists were fervent republicans, ardent defenders of colonialism, and the minister himself had spent the greater part of his career in the colonies.³³ The Jeune École, strongly influenced by the Paris Commune, drew two conclusions from this experience of social revolution: on the political level, imperialism had to open up new markets for France and thereby raise the living standard of the metropolitan proletariat;³⁴ on the military level, the Jeune École strategists were persuaded that the revolutionary threat could be actively used as a weapon in war. Revolts happened when there was economic misery that state apparatuses were incapable of repressing. As a consequence, their political and military strategy consisted in eliminating misery in the metropolis as far as possible, thanks to colonial expansion, and attacking the trade and social cohesion of the enemy. In a word, the aim of their military strategy was to avoid revolution in France and trigger this in the enemy country.

The Prince de Joinville had already pinpointed two strategic targets in a naval war against England: British trade, and the ‘confidence’ of the British people.³⁵ This programme took a more radical turn under the Jeune École. One of the collaborators of minister Aube, Gabriel Charmes, spelled out that ‘it is clear that the bombardment of fortresses will in future be only an accessory operation … It will be undefended coastlines and open cities that are attacked above all.’³⁶ If the first phase of the nineteenth-century naval revolution had abolished the classic separation between land and sea, the second and political phase was to abolish the distinction between military and civilian objectives. This put an end to the firm precept expressed first by the French strategist Antoine-Henri Jomini and then reaffirmed by the American Alfred Thayer Mahan: ‘The organized forces of the enemy are always the principal objective.’³⁷ For the republican strategists of the Jeune École, the armed forces were precisely no longer the principal objective. Since the nation was one, the army being the nation in arms and the citizen being the soldier, it was the whole enemy nation that found itself in the firing line.

These strategists naturally feared that the adversary would employ the same means, and had no illusions as to the possibilities of defence: it was impossible to foresee where the enemy would strike, thus impossible to defend coastlines effectively, unless naval forces were deployed entirely for this purpose, rather than in defence of the colonies and trade routes. Clausewitz’s fundamental principle, that defence is more economical than attack, thus underwent a complete reversal.³⁸ First naval and then air, bombardment was thus more akin to techniques generally described as ‘terrorist’: whereas classic war involved a dialectic of attack and defence, we could say that a terrorist strategy consists in completely abandoning defence in favour of pure attack. The relationship between the terms is reversed, and attack becomes both easy and economical, while defence against terrorism is expensive and immensely complicated.³⁹ It was also for this reason that it was often in the interest of the weaker side to opt for a terrorist tactic, as France prepared to do in the eventuality of a naval war against the United Kingdom. From now on, the side that struck first acquired a considerable advantage over its adversary. With steamships and the possibilities of coastal bombardment, speed became a still more determining factor in war. In all these characteristics, French naval strategy in the late nineteenth century prefigured the air strategy to come: it was necessary to strike quickly, to strike strongly, and to strike a nation and no longer just an army. The adversary had other means of defence than to deploy the same strategy.

Was this the subject of Wells’s meditations in July 1909? It is certain, in any case, that at the start of the twentieth century British public opinion began to perceive that the country’s island position was in danger. As early as 1903, Erskine Childers’s spy novel The Riddle of the Sands, depicting secret preparations for a German landing on the English shore, enjoyed great success. The Royal Navy remained more powerful by far than other naval forces, and as long as the threat came only from the sea, all that was needed was a certain vigilance. But Blériot’s flight shattered this certainty. From 25 July 1909, the situation had definitely changed. Maritime supremacy, however useful it remained, no longer had any great value in protecting the metropolis. British exceptionality had had its day. What was to be done?

To confront this new geopolitical configuration, the British Empire decided to take the initiative. Since 1887, representatives of the colonies and ‘dominions’ had met at regular intervals in ‘colonial conferences’, renamed ‘imperial conferences’ in 1907. But from 1911, a common foreign policy under British tutelage was established: the Empire was transformed into a Commonwealth. The same year, the United States signed treaties of arbitration with both Great Britain and France. Great Britain, a centre now on the decline, and the United States, en route to becoming the new hegemon, renounced war as a means of resolving conflicts. The two great ‘Lockean’ powers thus removed themselves from the ‘anarchy’ of international relations.⁴⁰ We could say that the centre of the world was globalized.

At the same time, this hegemonic centre expanded in Europe, since France, formerly the main contender on the Continent but singularly weakened by the lost war with the new German contender in 1870–71, was now assimilated into the Lockean centre. In 1912, a Franco-British naval agreement, bearing initially on a colonial dispute in Syria but rapidly extended to North Africa, sealed the new alliance between the British hegemon and its ancient rival. A new world configuration thus saw the light. In Europe, Germany acceded to the rank of principal Hobbesian contender, and the lines of the Great War were mapped out. On the world level, the globalization of the hegemonic power paved the way for the most striking development in the twentieth century’s history of violence: the collapse of the separation between the European centre and the colonized periphery. The coming conflict would not be simply a European Great War, but the First World War.