Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans

Чтение книги онлайн.

      The Liberal War Thesis

      Brad Evans

      Thursday, 1 September 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

      However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, СКАЧАТЬ