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Article Excerpt
Recent claims about humanitarian intervention express forms of domination that are both geopolitical and increasingly constructed around a biopolitical duty to relieve the suffering of brutalized peoples. This paper examines this presumed duty in the context of tensions between juridical-institutional accounts of sovereignty and practices of suzerainty in which intervention "outside" is accompanied by intervention "inside." KEYWORDS: intervention, sovereignty, suzerainty, biopolitics, imperialism.
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Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral. --Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1895
The propinquity of modern nation-states to war underwent a new turn after the end of the Cold War, which was for some analysts also the end of "the long twentieth century." The institutional-juridical model of sovereignty is said to be less and less the base of the relations between states. Only the most "spectacular" feature of sovereignty is well maintained: Territorial integrity persists. The geopolitics of territories now articulates with a biopolitics, producing sovereign power over "naked life." A system of sovereign states is giving way to a suzerain order of traditional and new political entities, and war (and its legitimation) reflects these changes. The recent invasion of Iraq is widely seen to be exemplary in this respect.
According to the president of the United States, George W. Bush, as well as the official communications of the White House and the US Departments of Defense and State, the so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom undertaken by an "international coalition" of states (the definition of this coalition being suspect from the beginning because of the unwillingness of many relevant states to participate in it) (1) in order to achieve two main objectives: to eliminate the "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs) that the Iraqi regime supposedly had, and to end the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein: "My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." (2)
Each of the objectives is linked alternately to the weapons or the change of regime narratives, and the promoters of the action switched from one to the other, according to the situation. It seemed that the mass demonstrations of opposition to the war carried out all over the world encouraged more frequent use of the latter argument. It does not mean that this one is more relevant than the former; it only makes the action more intelligible in a specific context.
This ambivalent use of narratives in the Bush administration is well captured in a comic strip by Tom Tomorrow. (3) The author uses the film Matrix Reloaded, a continuation of the original Matrix (which develops the theme of the permanent un-firmness of virtual reality where you cannot be sure of the "reality" of what is "really" happening), to show the ambiguity of the discourse of Bush's administration. Tomorrow pretends to answer the general question of "What Is the Republican Matrix?" "It is an illusion which engulfs us all ... where reality itself is a malleable thing ... subject to constant revision." One of the characters in a vignette illustrates this: "It doesn't matter if we find W.M.D.'s, because we really went to war to free the Iraqi people!" But it is also a story about the performativity of discourse and the intelligibility of actions. It does not matter if the given reasons are accurate or not (as it was possible to confirm a few years later when the UN Secretary General announced that WMDs had not been found); what is important is to offer a convincing rationale for the action. Nobody would understand the war on Iraq today in terms of the "desire of the Emperor," and only a few in terms of "the will of God." But "defense of the world" or "freedom of Iraqi people" are perfectly intelligible narratives. Therefore we should ask why we are talking again of just wars and humanitarian interventions.
The narrative of intervention in the name of moral values, concerned with the destiny of the Iraqi people, was developed to its full implications by British prime minister Tony Blair, the main partner in the "international coalition":
Here in Iraq, if a dictator like Saddam is able to develop these weapons, is able to continue brutalising his country and threatening his neighbourhood in the way that he has, then the conflict, even if we postponed it now, the conflict when it came would be infinitely worse, and I think what happens nowadays is that we have to act in these circumstances in order to prevent the world destabilising, and it is also important to realise that when we are acting, whether it is in Kosovo or Afghanistan, or Sierra Leone, or here in Iraq, the first beneficiaries of the action are the people that we are liberating, usually from brutal and dictatorial rule, and I hope people get some sense of that. (4)
Here is nakedly exposed a well-known argument of the advocates of empire and colonization: Our mission there (wherever it was) is to Christianize, to civilize, to develop or--now--to democratize. Moreover, it is important to correctly transmit that idea to individuals: to the voters in the United Kingdom, in the case of Prime Minister Blair, or in other Western states by his equivalents; but it is also important to send the message to the individuals who inhabit the territories to be bombed, who may not understand that their slaughter is for their own benefit.
In these narratives, "the facts are structured in such a way that they become components in a particular story," which creates an order of meaning in the narrated events. (5) In the "micronarratives" of the political actors, (6) geopolitical explanations were important in the past, and they are important now in order to make intelligible the so-called "foreign policy." (7) Western leaders have used the argument about the "danger to neighbor countries" from Iraq and other "rogue states" extensively since the First Gulf War. Even a new "domino theory" has been formally formulated:
Historians may argue about whether the domino theory really applied to Communism, but I have no doubt that it does apply to the chaos of failed states. In the 1990s the collapse of the Democratic Republic of Congo sucked in countries throughout the Great Lakes region of Africa. One of the biggest obstacles to peace in Sierra Leone was continuing violence in neighbouring Liberia. Even now any slide back into ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia could affect the whole region. An Afghanistan in chaos remains a threat to its neighbours in Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia, whose stability is already undermined by the drugs trade and the refugee crisis. (8)
The formulation of these simplistic statements about the metaphysical consequences of territorial position is amplified by the mass media. Their reception is facilitated by the way they reaffirm the certainties of the Cold War.
However from a critical perspective the relation between spatial structures and discourse cannot be interpreted in a teleological way. As Henri Lefebvre points out: "Space was produced before being read; nor was it produced in order to be read and grasped, but rather in order to be lived by people with bodies and lives.... In short, 'reading' follows production." (9) That is to say, spatial structures are produced historically with the aim of providing people with a guide to orient their bodies in their dwelling space. It is therefore irrelevant whether this guide responds to an objective necessity in the economic or political field. What is important is to understand that the spatial structure is a structure of domination--in Anthony Giddens's sense (10)--both economic and political. In the process of production of these structures it is necessary to establish their legitimization, and then they become meaningful in the system of communication. They are not produced with the system of communication in mind, although the symbolic element is an integral and essential part that we cannot forget if we intend to explain the whole system.
In order to better understand the problem, it is useful to take into account the distinction that Michel Foucault establishes between "discursive" and "nondiscursive" "practical formations": (11)
The discursive formations ... [exist in relation to] the masses and populations, which are dependent from another kind of formation, and imply non-discursive milieus, "institutions, political events, economical practices and processes." It is true, the milieus produce enunciations, and the enunciations determine also the milieus. Therefore the two formations are heterogeneous, although they are inserted one in the other: there is not correspondence, not isomorphism, there is not either straight causality or symbolization. (12)
Representations of space, (13) like that implicit in the new domino theory formulated by Jack Straw above, more than being the result of economic or political pressures to dominate places that are described as black holes, are instrumental for arranging new uses for institutions, like the huge armies built during the Cold War, or to regulate the economics of the military-industrial complex.
Biopolitical considerations are also a driving force of current interventions, and biopolitical accounts are also easily understandable: after all, people, bodies and their conduct, are the immediate object of action. Following one after another, the armed and violent Western interventions are legitimized in function by the necessity to eliminate some dangerous bodies, which would allow the reform of the conduct of the population through its rebuilding into a "civilized," "developed," or "democratic" polity. The model was well constructed in World War II: Hitler and the SS or the militarist officials of the Japanese army were the main obstacles to be overthrown, but the re-education of population was the main objective of the postwar policy. For example, a US Army propaganda documentary entitled Our Job in Japan illustrates the character of the Japanese re-education program: From time to time in the documentary there are shots of a brain and a voiceover claiming that Japanese brains had been "washed" thereby making difficulties for the US forces of occupation. The job of re-education dealt not exclusively with the brain, but as well other parts of the body: The students at the schools had to ink out by hand...
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