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Article Excerpt
This article explores why it is so difficult to imagine a state without an army. It considers Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, conventional accounts of the sovereign state and the right to legitimate violence, Gandhi's concept of satyagraha, Gandhi's Constitution for a Free India, and Gandhi's understanding of the art of the possible. It concludes with a reading of Gandhi and the sacrificial politics of founding in India. KEYWORDS: nonviolence, state violence, Japanese Peace Constitution, Gandhi, satyagraha.
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In 1931, on his way to the London Round Table Conference, Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a Reuters correspondent what his program was. He responded by writing out a brief, vivid sketch of "the India of my dreams." Such an India, he said, would be free, would belong to all its people, would have no high and low classes, no discrimination against women, no intoxicants, and, "the smallest army imaginable." (1)
The last phrase presents a puzzle: What is the smallest military imaginable? But the fact that it presents a puzzle is also puzzling. For what is so unimaginable about no military at all? The question is not rhetorical, for most people do find the no-military option unimaginable. It is easy enough to pray for peace, to petition and demonstrate for peace, or to imagine oneself as a perfectly pacifist non-killer. It is harder to imagine a state with no military.
One of the few places where this option is clearly and forcefully stated is in Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. People who first hear about this article often respond by insisting that the words can't mean what they say. It is, after all, an axiom of politics that states have militaries. This axiom is presumed to hold despite the fact that there exist today 13 countries with no military forces and no military alliances. (2)
"Zero" is easy enough to imagine; what is it that makes it so hard for us to imagine "zero military"? Perhaps one reason is that the things the military are trained to do, and does, are so awful that it is essential to us to believe that they are absolutely necessary, and to allow any hint of a doubt about that to enter our consciousness is unsettling. Moreover, if you start talking about the possibility of zero military you are treated as one who has stepped out of the realm of reality. You risk being called a crank, a dreamer, a peacenik, a wimp, or (God help us!) a "Gandhian."
One might counter that it is natural not to imagine zero military, because what constrains our imagination is the force of reality itself. The idea is simply irrational and unrealistic, and not worth thinking about. But I am convinced that just the opposite is true: this failure of our imagination prevents us from seeing reality; it conceals from us the truth of our situation. It is only when we accept Gandhi's implicit challenge and carry his "smallest military imaginable" to its extreme conclusion that we can begin truly to think about what the military means in our lives.
The Peace Constitution of Japan
Japan's postwar constitution does carry the challenge to its extreme conclusion; its Article 9 imagines the military altogether out of existence.
Article 9: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as any other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
Taken by itself, Article 9 is a fascinating, bold, lucidly written statement of a new principle of international politics, and a new concept of "the state" itself. Note that this is not an "appeal" for peace, such appeals being a dime a dozen. It does not say that the government should avoid war insofar as possible, or that it should try as hard as it can to seek peaceful solutions. Rather, the Japanese Constitution is written on the principle of sovereignty of the people, which means that it takes the form of a command by the people to the government. It sets out the powers that the government has, and the powers it does not have. Article 9 says the government does not have the power to make war, threaten war, or make preparations for war. Therefore, the government does not have those powers. As a legal instrument, it is clear and absolute. The problem is that, as a practical matter, it is enveloped in layers of hypocrisy. Its formulators, or some of them--members of the postwar US occupation and of the then Japanese government--may have believed in Article 9 sincerely enough to get it written down, but never enough to have it carried out.
Yet how is it possible that they could have been sincere at all? Article 9 utterly violates the common sense of politics and political science. How could a group of practical politicians and military people have offered this as a serious proposal? There are several possible answers to this question.
First, one might, at least tentatively, try taking the authors at their word. It is important to recall the historical moment, and the geographical place, where this constitution was written. This was immediately after the end of World War II, in Tokyo, a city that had been flattened and burned by what can rightly be termed US terror bombings. It is said that you could stand in the center of Tokyo and see the horizon in every direction. It is probably only partly metaphorical to say that the smell of burning flesh had still not vanished from the city. It seems possible that the most hard-nosed realists (as the two persons alleged as the forces behind the peace clause, Baron Kijuro Shidehara and General Douglas MacArthur, surely were) could read directly off the face of the land that the international system was not operating properly, and that given the technology of modern warfare, the state was no longer able to protect its citizens from violent death. This is also the historical moment when, and the country where, the world entered the age of nuclear warfare. Confronted with these things, unprecedented in history, one would not need to be a pacifist dreamer to see that something was deeply wrong and that a new principle was needed.
US motives were mixed from the beginning. Destroying Japan's military power was of course a war aim from the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and writing that into the constitution can be seen simply as a way of nailing down the victory. This was backed by a deep mistrust of Japan on the part not only of the United States but the other allied powers (especially those which, like Korea, China, and the Philippines, had been invaded and colonized); from this standpoint the Peace Constitution did not necessarily mean that military force in itself was bad, but that Japan could not be trusted with it. Moreover, MacArthur, it turns out, never really believed that a demilitarized Japan would be safe from attack, but rather saw the string of US military bases then under construction, some in Japan but most on tiny Okinawa (which had been seized from Japan and was then under US military governance) as the thing that would make the Japanese Peace Constitution possible. (3) McArthur was able to imagine zero military in a particular space, so long as that space was protected by an impenetrable chain of fortresses.
The Japanese government, for its part, while legally obliged to obey the constitution under which it was empowered, could not imagine doing so, and began lobbying the Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP) for a small army almost from the time the constitution was promulgated on November 3, 1946. In 1950, with the beginning of the Korean War, SCAP ordered the Japanese government to form a paramilitary "Police Reserve," which was the seed out of which the present Self-Defense Forces eventually grew. In 1952, when the Peace Treaty was signed and Japan again became an independent country, the Japan-US Security Treaty was stipulated as a condition (you want independence, you accept the US bases), and has remained in effect to this day. So the experiment proposed in the constitution, that Japan abandon the method of protecting national security with military force and instead seek to protect itself with peace diplomacy, has never been attempted.
There is a third major actor in the story: the Japanese public. At the time the constitution was proposed, opinion polls showed that it was supported by 85 percent of the people. Huge rallies were held to celebrate it, and the newspapers were filled with favorable letters. No one could have predicted this in, say, 1944. Everything written about Japan up to the end of the war saw Japanese society as militaristic to the core. Some observers could find hardly anything in it besides Bushido, the alleged samurai spirit. Partly this was a failure of these observers to look closely enough, and demonstrated their inability to distinguish culture from government-sponsored ideology. Nevetheless, I think this counts as one of the great acts of collective will in history, where a people makes a decision to turn about 180 degrees and strike out in a new direction.
The Japanese government never liked the Peace Constitution, and the US government very soon changed its mind about it. As the Cold War began and the United States decided it would prefer to have Japan not as a weakened ex-enemy but as a rearmed anti-Soviet ally, US occupation policy flip-flopped and there began what is known in Japan as the "Reverse Course," one element of which was to put pressure on Japan to ignore its constitution and rearm. With all this opposition, why is Article 9 still there? The answer is, public support. The government has long wanted to amend it, but so far has not been able to muster the public opinion to do so. Failing this, they have resorted to the technique called "amendment by interpretation." Thus they interpret Article 9 as not ruling out self-defense, and so the Self-Defense Forces have grown up to become the third largest military force in the world (measured not by number of troops but by military expenditures and equipment).
So viewed objectively, the Peace Constitution seems perfectly hypocritical. Article 9 rules out war, threat of war, and preparation for war, but the Self-Defense Forces are fully equipped with artillery, tanks, warships, attack aircraft, missiles, and so on. Moreover, under the Japan-US Security Treaty, the United States has made Japan, and especially Okinawa, into a fortress from which it has carried out wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and "special operations" in many other countries.
Furthermore, in the case of many of the supporters of Article 9, their support can also be said to be hypocritical. That is, public opinion polls that ask, "Do you support (1) Article 9, (2) the Self-Defense Forces, (3) The Japan-US Security Treaty, or (4) US bases in Japan and Okinawa?" find that many people answer "yes" to all four. This is by no means a position supporting Article 9. The best to be said for it is that it may be clever pragmatism: If you believe military protection is necessary, get it done by someone else (the United States) or, if you believe a domestic military force is necessary, keep it in a limbo of unconstitutionality so that it won't become arrogant and domineering as the Imperial Army did before 1945.
Thus it may be asked whether it would be best to dismiss Article 9 as a peace proposal altogether. There remain strong reasons not to do so, for the remarkable thing is that, even enveloped in these layers of hypocrisy, Article 9 has had powerful effects. Consider:
Despite all the contradictions surrounding Article 9, it remains a fact that in the more than half-century since it was adopted, no human being has been killed under the authority of the right of belligerency of the Japanese state. This is an extraordinary record, which no one could have predicted before 1945. And this is of course the principal intention of Article 9: no more killing. As long as this record continues, Article 9 is still in effect. Within Japanese society there has been formed a body of Article 9 believers, people who, insofar as they oppose both the Self Defense Forces (as unconstitutional) and the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (as providing for the continuation of the U.S. occupation), can be said to be sincere in their belief in Article 9. This may be the largest collection of people in the world...
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