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Infinite War
Ellen Meiksins Wood (2002)
When the US (and
Britain) failed to launch a massive attack on Afghanistan within
days of the September 11 atrocities, there was almost universal
surprise, whether tinged with disappointment or relief. People
had come to expect, as a matter of course, an immediate and
massive high-tech assault, which would spare the lives and limbs
of US forces while inflicting much 'collateral damage'. But
this time, we were told, the White House 'moderates' had won, at
least for a time, if only because the exigencies of preserving
the coalition against terrorism counselled caution, or because
winter was too near, or because the Taliban might simply implode
without a fight. Any attack --and there might be none at
all-- would be 'measured' and 'proportionate'. Optimists
hoped that Bush had learned the virtues of multilateralism.
Pessimists feared the worst was still to come. But critics
and supporters were united in their wonder at the temperance
displayed by the world's only superpower.
Then the bombing
started. The massive high-tech assault, with all the
collateral damage, proceeded as before. Still, hopes were
voiced that the strikes would be carefully targetted and
'proportionate' and that the campaign would be short. In
the meantime, the US told the UN that it reserves the right to
keep its options open for possible strikes on targets other than
Afghanistan. As the Taliban regime in Afghanistan
collapses, we can assume that, at some not too distant point, the
US will declare its mission accomplished (irrespective of what
happens on the ground). But we seem even further away from
the end of the 'war against terrorism' than we were at the start.
Yet it is not to
soon to say that the standards by which we have been judging this
new war, for or against, are now outdated. In recent years,
the US and its allies, notably Britain, have been redefining war
and the criteria by which we judge it. The new doctrine of
war that seems to be emerging is a necessary corollary to a new
form of empire.
War Without
End
Immediately after
the September 11 atrocities, President Bush announced that his
purpose was to rid the world of evil. At that moment, the
'war against terrorism' was being called 'Operation Infinite
Justice'. Some time later, Prime Minister Blair told the
Labour Party Conference that the present campaign should be part
of a larger project of 'reordering our world'. Nothing that
was said before or after did much to clarify or narrow these
grandiose ambitions. Sympathetic observers were no less at
a loss than critics to explain precisely what the objective of
the first military round would be: to capture Osama bin Laden, to
destroy al-Qaida's training camps (by then surely empty), or to
overthrow the Taliban, with or without installing a new
government, to say nothing of further objectives, such as attacks
on Iraq to complete the job left unfinished by George Bush Senior.
In the face of
these uncertainties, the tendency has been to assume either that
the White House is simply divided between hawks and doves, or
that the administration is simply confused, with no real idea
what to do; and there is a strong temptation to think that Blair
is suffering from almost pathological delusions of grandeur,
which have the advantage of deflecting scrutiny from his failures
at home. No doubt there is something to be said for all
these interpretations. But we need to take more seriously
the significance of Bush and Blair's grand design.
If we discount
the overblown self-righteous rhetoric, there remains a new
military doctrine, which, while making the most extravagant moral
claims, nonetheless departs from centuries of discourse on 'just
war'. The just war tradition has always been notoriously
elastic and infinitely capable of adjustment to the varying
interests of dominant classes, encompassing everything up to and
including the most aggressive and predatory imperial adventures.
So throughout the changing character of war and imperialism,
ideologies of justification have been able to remain within
certain conceptual limits and to operate with certain basic
principles. The new doctrine, while invoking the traditions
of just war, has for the first time in centuries found those
principles insufficiently flexible and has effectively discarded
them. Just as earlier adjustments were made to fit changing
contexts and requirements, the current rupture also has its
specific historical context and bespeaks particular class needs.
The doctrine of
'just war', throughout its permutations, enunciates a few basic
requirements for going to war: there must be a just cause; war
must be declared by a proper authority and with the right
intention, and after other means have been exhausted; there must
be a reasonable chance of achieving the desired end, and the
means must be proportionate to that end. In a moment, we
shall look at some of the ingenious ways in which those
apparently stringent requirements have been made compatible with
the most aggressive wars of commercial rivalry and imperial
expansion. But let us first note how the current doctrine
operates within those constraints and how it departs from them.
Every US war
claims a just cause, a proper authority, and right intentions,
while insisting that there is no other way. Those claims
are, of course, more than a little debatable. But the point
here is simply that justifications of US military campaigns,
however contestable they may be, up to this point remain within
the limits of just war argumentation. The rupture occurs
most clearly in the other two conditions: that there must be a
reasonable chance of achieving the goals of any military action,
and that the means must be proportionate.
There are two
senses in which the new doctrine of war, most recently enunciated
by Bush and Blair, violates the first of these two principles.
It is, needless to say, clear that no military action could
possibly rid the world of Bush's 'evil-doers'. For that
matter, the 'war against terrorism' can hardly be said to have a
reasonable chance of ending terrorism. If anything, it
stands a better chance of aggravating terrorist violence. Nor
can military action, with or without humanitarian admixtures,
reorder the world in the way outlined by Blair.
But it is just as
clear that the new doctrine departs from the principle of
achievable goals in ways inconceivable to any earlier proponents
of the just war doctrine. This particular principle was
directed against futile and self-destructive adventures by forces
lacking the means to achieve their ends and more likely to make
their own conditions worse. The present case has to do with
the world's most powerful military force, the most powerful the
world has ever known, which could confidently expect to achieve
any reasonable military goal. So a new principle is being
established here: it could simply mean that military action can
after all be justified without any hope of achieving its aim, but
it would probably be more accurate to say that military action
now requires no specific aim at all.
Such a principle
naturally affects the means-ends calculus too. We are
accustomed to criticizing the US and its allies for undertaking
actions which in their massively destructive means are unsuited
to their professed ends. But we may now be compelled to
discard the principle of proportionality altogether --not simply
because we are being asked to accept 'disproportionate' means but
because, in the absence of specific ends, no such calculus is
relevant at all. There is a new principle of war without
end, either in purpose or in time.
The 'war against
terrorism' is not the first instance of the new doctrine. It
certainly has roots in the Cold War. Even the 'war on
drugs', insofar as it undoubtedly has a military component (whether
directly conducted by the US or, with its assistance, by, say,
Colombian forces), has had something of this flavour. The
campaign against Iraq too has been going on without apparent end.
But the most important step in establishing the new doctrine has
been the notion of 'humanitarian war'. And it is certainly
in this connection that the constraints of old just war
principles were first most explicitly discarded.
It is by now a
well-known story that, in their conflict over war in the Balkans,
the former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, then
Ambassador to the UN, challenged the current Secretary of State,
Colin Powell, then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, over his
objection to military intervention in Bosnia. Underlying
his objection was the so-called 'Powell Doctrine', a military
doctrine in the old just war tradition, requiring that military
action have clear and finite ends, adequate means, and exit
strategies. 'What's the point of having this superb
military that you've always been talking about,' Albright angrily
protested, 'if we can't use it?' What Albright was
challenging was certainly not a doctrine opposed to any military
action ever. Powell, as a military man, was hardly
advocating pacifism. Where they parted company was
precisely at the point that traditional doctrines of just war
require specific and finite achievable ends and commensurate
means.
But if Madeleine
Albright represents a milestone in the development of this new
docrtine, it has long been a pattern in the US for political
figures to depart from the old one. When Henry Kissinger
advocated the unpredictable use of military force, he, like
Albright, had in mind the use of force for political purposes far
more diffuse and inchoate than the achievement of some specific
military goal, as did others throughout the Cold War. To be
sure, he was not particularly given to just war arguments and was
generally quite open about his adherence to the opposing
principles of amoral raison d'etat. But other
political leaders, in support of the same policies, have had no
difficulty invoking the justice of war. Today, when Colin
Powell himself is Secretary of State, he is being challenged by
non-military politicians such as Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and
probably Cheney, together with Bush advisers such as Richard
Perle, whose views are even more clearly antithetical to the old
just war principles of ends and means. They have, according
to reports, devised a plan called 'Operation Infinite War', which
calls for an open-ended war with no limits of time or geography.1
Just War and
Empire
To situate this
new doctrine in its specific historical context requires some
consideration of what went before. In particular, we are
interested in how theorists have negotiated the constraints of
just war theory to make it compatible with aggressive and
expansionist wars, especially in the early years of European
colonialism, when the foundations for future imperialist
ideologies were laid down. Considering the current
innovations in military doctrine against that background will
help to illuminate the ways in which they correspond to the
latest phase of Western imperialism, just as earlier phases
called forth their own specific ideological adjustments.
Arguments about
the legitimacy of war no doubt have a much longer history than
the just war tradition. The Romans, for instance, raised
questions about the legitimacy of war, and some, like Cicero,
appeared to demand fairly strict conditions --for instance, that
only a war in self-defence can be legitimate. Yet, at the
same time, these apparently stringent limitations were from the
start made compatible with war in pursuit of imperial power and
glory --no less by a republican like Cicero than by later
defenders of the Empire. And from the start, the Romans
were inclined to invoke a kind of global, human society on whose
behalf they were engaging in their wars of expansion, to civilize
the world by imposing the Pax Romana. That notion of a
global society required little modification to serve the purposes
of later Christians bent on their own brand of civilizing
mission, as the Roman Empire gave way to the Universal Church.
It is certainly
true that Christian theology also produced trenchant critiques of
imperial expansion and raised far-reaching questions about the
legitimacy of war. But it is testimony to the remarkable
flexibility of this moral discourse that, for instance, in the
most expansionist early European imperial power, Spain, a
theology critical of the Spanish empire in the Americas
could be mobilized no less in its defence.2
Early justifications of the empire, especially at a time when the
Spanish sovereign was also Holy Roman Emperor, presented it as
something like a mission on behalf of the Christian world order,
based on donation from the pope in the form of papal Bulls.
But the difficult relationship between the Spanish monarchy and
the papacy made this an awkward defence. To make matters
worse, the available theological arguments against the claims of
the papacy, which worked in favour of the monarchy, tended also
to argue against the Spanish conquest. Theologians of the
Salamanca School argued that the pope, though he was the
spiritual leader of Christendom, had no temporal authority over
the world, nor did the pope have authority of any kind over non-Christians.
This meant not only that there was no such thing as a universal
temporal empire but also that Spain could not rely on a papal
donation and claim legitimacy for its conquest on the grounds
that it was bringing Christianity to infidels, or even that it
was punishing the savages for violations of natural law.
These arguments,
whether they were motivated by humanitarian revulsion at imperial
atrocities or simply defending the monarchy against the papacy,
challenged the right to impose Spanish domination on the Americas.
Yet a justification of empire emerged from the very same
theological tradition. Having accepted that the old
arguments based on the universal temporal authority of the church
and the papacy would not serve, the new justification relied
instead on the 'just war'. Colonialism might not be
justified on the grounds of papal authority, but there were
various legitimate reasons for waging war --to defend the
'innocent' or, much more broadly, to promote the values of
'civilized' (i.e. European) life. Just as a republic could
go to war in self-defence, war could be waged on behalf of a
universal 'human republic' threatened by behaviour that violated
its particular standards of peace and good order. Any conquest
resulting from a just war could establish legitimate domination.
The principle of war in self-defence could thus embrace anything
including universal conquest, not to mention slavery.
The Spanish,
unlike other European empires, were unambiguously explicit that
what they were justifying was indeed conquest. They
were obliged to do so, given the nature and object of their
empire. By far their main interest was the extraction of
silver and gold from South American mines. Their conquest
was certainly genocidal; but faced with a dense, well organized,
and technologically fairly advanced indigenous population, they
seem to have had more to gain from conquering and ruling than
completely exterminating that population, requiring a labour
force more than they needed empty territory. Even their
agricultural plantations, in the encomienda system, made
use of servile indigenous labour.
Other European
empires, without access to massive wealth from mines, had
different ambitions and hence different ideological needs. The
French and the English made much of the differences between their
empires and the Spanish, denying (with scant respect for
historical truth) their role as conquerors and emphasizing (with
somewhat greater veracity) the agricultural and commercial nature
of their colonies. We shall return to the English case in a
moment, to explore some significant ideological innovations
associated with it. But the most striking example of
theoretical opportunism in response to specific imperial needs is
provided by the Dutch, in the person of Hugo Grotius.
The Dutch more
than any other Europeans constructed a commercial empire, in
which colonial conquest and settlement were a secondary, or
auxiliary, concern. Yet in the pursuit of commercial
supremacy, the Dutch were no less given to aggressive military
violence than their rivals. In the early years of the Dutch
Republic, as it was coming into its golden age, military
expenditures accounted for a greater proportion of the Republic's
exceptionally high tax revenues than did any other activity, and
the Dutch engaged in some notorious acts of aggression.3 Nor
did they abandon military means of gaining commercial advantage
as the economy continued to rise and then fall --up to and
including the Dutch role in England's Glorious Revolution. Whatever
the English may have thought about their 'bloodless' revolution,
the Dutch conceived it as an invasion, carried out with support
not only by the state but by the Amsterdam stock exchange, for
purely commercial reasons in an effort to counter the commercial
rivalry of France.
The Dutch
produced an ideology to match their 'extra-economic' means of
establishing commercial supremacy. The case of Grotius is
particularly important and revealing because he is commonly
credited with founding international law, and his work is
generally presented as a theory of limitations on war.
Yet that work is striking for its ideological opportunism,
transparently constructed to defend the very particular practices
of the Dutch in their quest for commercial domination in the
early seventeenth century. To build his case, he not only
produced a theory of war and peace but laid a foundation for
transforming theories of politics and property in general.4
If Grotius is indeed the founder of international law, we may
have to admit that international law in its inception had as much
to do with advocating as limiting war, and as much to do with
profit as with justice.
Without formally
violating the limits of the just war tradition, Grotius was able,
as Richard Tuck has persuasively shown, to justify not only wars
of self-defence, however broadly conceived, but even the most
aggressive wars pursued for no other reason than commercial
profit. Without departing from the requirement that a war
can be just only if conducted by a proper authority, he was also
able to defend aggressive action not just by sovereign states but
by private trading companies.
In fact, the very
principles commonly cited as central to his restrictions
on war can have, and were intended to have, the opposite effect.
Grotius, like other theorists of the seventeenth century, is
credited with something like a conception of the state of nature,
according to which individuals possess natural rights prior to,
and independent of, civil society. At the same time,
states, which can have no powers that individuals do not already
have in nature, must, he argued, like individuals be governed by
the same moral principles. Although this is generally taken
to place strict conditions on the rightful pursuit of war, this
conception, with all its wide-ranging implications for political
theory in general, was first elaborated by Grotius, at a time
when the Dutch were embarking on commercial expansion in the
Indies, in order to defend aggressive military action, not just
by states but by private traders --action such as the seizure of
Portuguese ships-- on the grounds that individuals, like and even
before states, have the right to punish those who wrong them.
Grotius, as Tuck puts it, 'made this remarkable claim, that there
is no significant moral difference between individuals and
states, and that both may use violence in the same way and for
the same ends.'5
But violence in pursuit of commercial advantage, whether by
states or private traders, does not, on the face of it, look like
self-defence. So Grotius went further, effectively
constructing a whole political theory on the principle that self-preservation
is the first and most fundamental law of nature, and then
defining self-preservation in the most capacious way. First,
it means that individuals and states are permitted, perhaps even
obliged, to acquire for themselves 'those things which are useful
for life'. Although they may not, in the process, injure
others who have not injured them, their own self-preservation
comes first.
Grotius's notion
of injury turns out to be very broadly permissive, while the
moral principles to which individuals and states are both subject
are minimal. The notion of some kind of international
society bound together by certain common rules is regarded as one
of Grotius's major contributions to international law and a
peaceful world order. But his argument had far less to do
with what individuals or states owe one another than the right
they have to punish each other in pursuit of self-interest, not
only in defending themselves against attack but 'proactively', as
it were, in purely commercial rivalries. 'Grotius,'
concludes Tuck, 'endorsed for a state the most far-reaching set
of rights to make war which were available in the contemporary
repertoire.'6
This included not only a very wide-ranging international right of
punishment but also, as Grotius adjusted his theories to the
changing needs of the Dutch commercial empire, a right to
appropriate territory. To buttress that right, Grotius was
obliged to develop a theory of property --and here, his
ideological opportunism is particularly striking.
In the first
instance, his main concern in constructing his theory of property
was to argue for the freedom of the seas, to challenge the right
of commercial rivals like the Portuguese to claim ownership of
the seas and monopolize trade routes. We can only have a
proprietary right, he maintained, to things we can individually
consume or transform. The sea cannot be property, because,
like air, it cannot be occupied or used in this way and is
therefore a common possession. Furthermore, what could not
become private property, he argued (contrary to traditional
conceptions of political jurisdiction), could not, by the same
token, be the public property of the state either, since both
private and public ownership come about in the same way. No
state jurisdiction was possible where the kind of control implied
by property was even in principle impossible.
It is not
difficult to see how military intervention might be justified on
these grounds against those whose only wrong had been to assert a
hitherto accepted right of state jurisdiction over neighbouring
waters or the right to regulate certain fishing grounds and trade
routes. Nor, of course, did this principle preclude the de
facto monopolization of trade that the Dutch were aiming for
in certain places, where they simply coerced local
populations into trade, while aggressively repelling their
European rivals.
At this point,
Grotius was, in a sense, more concerned with what is not
property than what is. For the purposes of defending Dutch
commercial practices, and in particular, the actions of the East
India Company, it was enough to insist on the freedom of the seas
and the right to pursue commercial interests aggressively. But,
as Tuck points out, a shift in Dutch commercial policy,
especially in the face of competition from the English and the
French, meant that Dutch trading companies became more interested
in colonial settlement than they had been before, if only to
facilitate trade. Grotius duly mobilized his earlier theory
of property to encompass this requirement too.
Having argued
that something could become property only if it could be
individually consumed or transformed, which might be true of land
but not the sea, he now elaborated the other side of that
argument: if usable things were left unused, there was no
property in them, and hence people could appropriate land left
unused by others. Land left waste or barren --i.e.
uncultivated-- was not property and could be claimed by those
able and willing to cultivate it. Grotius's argument had
clear affinities with the Roman law principle of res nullius,
which decreed that any 'empty thing' such as unoccupied land was
common property until it was put to use --in the case of land,
especially agricultural use. This would become a common
justification for European colonization.7
Grotius argued that no local authority could legitimately prevent
free passage or the occupation of unused land, and any attempt to
do so could legitimately be challenged by military means. Nevertheless,
since land, unlike the sea, was in principle capable of
transformation into property, it was also susceptible to
political jurisdiction. Grotius never denied that
indigenous authorities retained their general jurisdiction over
the land --something that Dutch trading companies effectively
accepted by seeking the approval of these local authorities and
even paying them for taking land out of their jurisdiction.
Toward an
Ideology of Capitalist Imperialism
Although such
principles of colonial appropriation sufficed for the Dutch,
whose main interest was in commercial supremacy, it would not
suffice for other imperial powers, or one in particular. A
much less equivocal right of appropriation by colonial settlers
would be required by the English as they developed their own very
specific pattern of colonization. The English, late
starters in the competition for overseas hegemony, began to rely
more on white settler colonies than its rivals ever did. This
pattern began in Ireland, and the Irish model was soon adapted to
new colonies elsewhere.
What is
significant about this model from our point of view is that it
was accompanied by a very distinctive ideological strategy,
which, while it shared certain assumptions with England's
European rivals, introduced innovations that reflected a very
specifically English experience. It is significant that
this ideological strategy did not take the form of a theory of
international relations or a doctrine of war and peace. The
first major theoretical contribution of the English to the
justification of modern imperialism was a theory of private
property.
In the late
sixteenth century, the English adopted a policy of colonization
in Ireland more aggressive than ever before. The object was
not simply to impose the state's hegemony but also, and more
particularly, to resettle Irish lands with English and Scottish
colonists. This meant not only a coercive process of
expropriation but also an attempt to transform Irish property
relations, on the model of English commercial agriculture.
This was, in a
sense, an instant transition from feudal to capitalist modes of
imperialism. Old strategies for dominating the Irish --by
means, for instance, of English lordship-- were being replaced by
attempts (successful or not) to absorb Ireland into the English
economy, even when, or because, direct political domination had
failed. Not only would English and Scots settlers import
the principles of English commercial agriculture but even Irish
chieftains would --and did-- emulate them, often taking English
and Scots tenants. What direct coercion had failed to do,
economic imperatives might accomplish --even if this strategy
revealed a contradiction which would always plague capitalist
imperialism: having sought to impose these new imperatives on
Ireland, the imperial power was then obliged to thwart the
development of Ireland when it threatened to become a commercial
rival, as it did in the seventeenth century.
But this new
imperial strategy required its own ideological defences. Since
Irish land could hardly be said to be unoccupied, or even
uncultivated, this project clearly required something more than
the ideological supports provided by the doctrine of res
nullius, even in the aggressively colonialist form advocated
by Grotius.
We can see the
beginnings of a new argument for colonization in the words of Sir
John Davies, one of the architects of English imperialism in
Ireland. In a letter to the Earl of Salisbury in 1610 about
the Ulster plantation, he explains the legal arguments in favour
of expropriating the Irish and transferring their property to
English and Scots settlers. The argument that stands out for our
purposes here is that 'half their land doth now lie waste, by
reason whereof that which is habited is not improved to half the
value; but when the undertakers [the settlers] are planted among
them..., and that land shall be fully stocked and manured, 500
acres will be of better value than 5000 are now.' It is
already clear in this passage that occupancy is no longer the
relevant issue. Nor, for that matter, is waste alone.
Occupied land, even cultivated land, can be appropriated if the
occupants are failing to use it productively enough. The
criterion is no longer waste or usage in the traditional sense
but relative value.
The argument
outlined by Sir John Davies in rudimentary form was clearly
rooted in the domestic experience of English agriculture, in
which considerations of 'improvement' and relative value belonged
to the everyday consciousness of commercial landlords, as did
arguments in favour of enclosure at home strikingly similar to
the case for colonial expropriation. Similarly, when
William Petty, often called the father of classical political
economy, later elaborated a labour theory of value for the very
practical imperialist purpose of surveying the value of land in
Ireland for redistribution to Cromwell's army, in his capacity as
Cromwell's Surveyor General, he brought to bear the experience of
English agrarian capitalism.
But the argument
already hinted at by John Davies in Ireland found its most
systematic development later in the century, in the work of John
Locke --though there is no need to assume any direct influence,
since such arguments were in the air of England's developing
agrarian capitalism. Locke's theory of property justifies
at one and the same time the practices of colonialists in the
Americas and capitalist landlords at home, interests combined
perfectly in the person of Locke's mentor, the first Earl of
Shaftesbury.
Commentators have
pointed out that Locke introduced an important innovation into
the res nullius principle by justifying colonial
appropriation of unused land without the consent of any local
sovereign, and that he provided settlers with an argument that
justified their actions on the basis of natural law, without any
reference to civil authority.8 In that respect, he went
even further than Grotius, with his equivocal recognition of
local authority. Locke did have a precursor in Thomas More
(a critic of enclosure who was himself an encloser), who in his Utopia
suggested a similar principle about the colonial occupation of
unused land without the permission of local inhabitants. But
there is something even more distinctive in Locke's argument,
which owes less to pan-European legal and philosophical
traditions than to the specific experience of England, and to its
domestic property relations even before its colonial ventures.
Like Grotius,
Locke associates property with use and transformation. But
his argument is not simply that things can become property when,
and only when, they are used and transformed. The point is
rather that the right of property derives from the creation of value.
His famous labour theory of property in Chapter Five of his Second
Treatise of Government, according to which we acquire
property in something when we 'mix' our labour with it, is full
of complexities (including the question of whose labour,
since the master is entitled to property derived from his
servant's labour), which there is no space to explore here.
But one thing that is emphatically clear is that the creation of
value is the basis of property. Labour establishes a right
of property because it is labour that 'puts the difference of
value on every thing.' (#40) And the value in question
is not 'intrinsic' but exchange value.
This implies not
only that mere occupancy is not enough to establish property
rights, or even that hunting-gathering cannot establish the right
of property while agriculture can, but also that insufficiently
productive and profitable agriculture, by the standards of
English agrarian capitalism, effectively constitutes waste.
Land in America is open to colonization because an acre of land
in 'unimproved' America, Locke argues (in a manner reminiscent of
Davies in Ireland) which may be as naturally fertile as an acre
in England, and have the same 'intrinsick' (sic) value, is not
worth 1/1000 of the English acre, if we calculate 'all the Profit
an Indian received from it were it valued and sold here.'
(#43)
Locke thus goes
beyond even Grotius in asserting the primacy of private property
over political jurisdiction in the colonies. In fact,
political jurisdiction at either end of the colonial relationship
is conspicuously absent. For Grotius, writing on behalf of
the Dutch commercial empire, in which the principal issue was
commercial rivalry among trading nations vying for supremacy in
international commerce, it really was a question of
'international relations', including the issue of war and peace
among states. Although the Dutch certainly introduced
innovations in their own domestic production, the kind of
commercial supremacy they enjoyed depended in large part on
'extra-economic' advantages, superior shipping and sophisticated
commercial practices, the command of sea routes, de facto
if not always de jure trading monopolies, and far-flung
trading posts.9 All of these advantages were, in one way or
another, bound up with questions of war, peace, military might
and diplomacy. Even when, as the Dutch supplemented their
earlier policies of imposing trade on local powers, in the Indies
and elsewhere, with outright colonial settlement, so that Grotius
was obliged to extend his argument to encompass colonial
appropriation, he never gave up his original conceptual
framework, just as the Dutch never gave up their primary concern
with trade and commercial supremacy.
Early modern
England, no less than other commercial powers, engaged in the
same international rivalries. English theorists could also
draw on older theories of just war, for example, to justify
slavery --as Locke did himself-- by arguing that captives taken
in a just war could legitimately be enslaved. But there was
already something new going on, and we find its best early
expression in Locke. Here, we find the beginnings of a
conception of empire rooted in capitalist principles, in pursuit
of profit derived not simply from exchange but from the creation
of value in competitive production. This is a conception of
empire that is not simply about establishing imperial rule or
even commercial supremacy but about extending the logic and the
imperatives of the domestic economy and drawing others into its
orbit. Although capitalist imperialism would never dispense
with more traditional means of justifying imperial expansion, it
had now added wholly new weapons to the ideological arsenal.
Globalization
and War
The 'second', and
more properly 'British', Empire, whose crown jewel was India,
produced its own ideological requirements. To justify
imperial domination of a strong commercial power like India with
complex political institutions, where the land was very much and
insurmountably occupied, and where the issue was neither simply
trade nor colonial settlement but domination of one major power
by another, demanded arguments other than those deployed in
colonizing the New World. Much of the old ideological
repertoire could be adapted to suit this new conquest, but some
adjustments had to be made. In particular, a modernization,
so to speak, of the old universal society argument was called
upon to bear the ideological weight of the new empire. Where
the old version invoked certain universal principles of civilized
order to justify imperial wars, that theme was now modified by
more recent conceptions of progress. India could then be
depicted as enjoying benign British tutelage, at least until its
political and economic development had caught up with the
imperial guardian.
But if the new
empire had different ideological requirements than the old, the
theoretical innovations that had buttressed the first British
empire, in Ireland and America, remained in some respects more
prescient about the future shape of capitalist imperialism.
This is true not, of course, in the sense that colonial
settlement was to be the dominant form of capitalist imperialism.
But in other ways, the ideological weapons forged to defend the
Irish and American models were more specifically capitalist than
other available theories. It is here that we begin to find
a conception of empire not as conquest or even military
domination and political jurisdiction, but as purely economic
hegemony.
John Locke,
again, best reflects this new conception of empire, in the sense
that his theory of colonial appropriation by-passes altogether
the question of political jurisdiction or the right of one
political power to dominate another. In his theory of
property, we can observe imperialism becoming a directly economic
relationship, even if that relationship required brutal force to
implant it. That kind of relationship could be justified
not by the right to rule but by the right, indeed the obligation,
to produce exchange value.
Capitalist
imperialism eventually became almost entirely a matter of
economic domination, in which market imperatives, manipulated by
the dominant capitalist powers, were made to do the work no
longer done by imperial states or colonial settlers. It is
a distinctive and essential characteristic of capitalist
imperialism that its economic reach far exceeds its direct
political and military grasp. It can rely on the economic
imperatives of 'the market' to do much of its imperial work.
This sharply differentiates it from earlier forms of imperialism,
which depended directly on such extra-economic powers, whether
territorial empires which could reach only as far as the capacity
of their direct coercive powers to impose their rule, or
commercial empires whose advantages depended, for example, on
domination of the seas.
Once subordinate
powers are made vulnerable to economic imperatives and the 'laws'
of the market, direct rule by imperial states is no longer
required to impose the will of capital. But here we
encounter a paradox, or, better still, a fundamental
contradiction of capitalism. Market imperatives may reach
far beyond the power of any single state, but these imperatives
themselves must be enforced by coercive extra-economic power.
Neither the imposition of economic imperatives, nor the everyday
social order demanded by capital accumulation and the operations
of the market, can be achieved without the help of coercive
powers much more local and territorially limited than the
economic reach of capital.
That is why,
paradoxically, the more purely economic empire has become,
the more the nation state has proliferated. Not only
imperial powers but subordinate states have proved necessary to
the rule of global capital. It has, in fact, been a major
strategy of capitalist imperialism even to create local
states to act as conduits for capitalist imperatives.
Globalization has
not transcended this need. The 'globalized' world is more
than ever a world of nation states. In fact, the new
imperialism we call globalization, precisely because it depends
on a wide-ranging economic hegemony that reaches far beyond any
state's territorial boundaries or political dominion, is a form
of imperialism more dependent than any other on a system of
multiple states.
Subordinate
states that act at the behest of global capital may be more
effective than the old colonial settlers who once carried
capitalist imperatives throughout the world, but they also pose
great risks. In particular, they are subject to their own
internal pressures and oppositional forces, and their own
coercive powers can fall into the wrong hands, which may oppose
the will of imperial capital. In this globalized world,
where the nation state is supposed to be dying, the irony is
that, because the new imperialism depends more than ever on a
system of multiple states, it matters to capital more than ever
who commands those local states and how. For instance,
popular struggles for truly democratic states, for a
transformation in the balance of class forces in the state, with
international solidarity among such democratic national
struggles, might present a greater challenge to imperial power
than ever before.
At any rate, the
imperial power has acted to ensure against any risk of losing its
hold on the global state system. However unlikely or
distant that prospect may seem, the US has been ready to
anticipate it by using its one most unambiguous advantage, its
overwhelming military power --if only because it can do so more
or less with impunity.
But if military
force remains an indispensable tool of the new imperialism, its
nature and objectives must be different from its application in
old colonial empires. The old forms of colonial imperialism
required outright conquest, together with theories of war and
peace to justify it. Early capitalist imperialism, while no
less dependent on coercive force to take control of colonial
territory, seemed able to dispense with a political defence of
colonization and to incorporate the justification of colonial
settlement into a theory of property. Globalization, the
economic imperialism of capital taken to its logical conclusion,
has, paradoxically, required a new doctrine of extra-economic,
and especially military, coercion.
The practical and
doctrinal difficulties posed by this new situation are obvious.
If local states will guard the economy, who will guard the
guardians? It is impossible for any single state power,
even the massive military force of the US, to impose itself every
day, everywhere, throughout the global system. Nor can any
conceivable collective force impose the will of global capital
all the time on a multitude of subordinate states, or maintain
the predictable order required by capital's daily transactions.
It is not easy to identify the role of military force in
defending a borderless empire and establishing imperial control
over a global economy, instead of sovereignty over a clearly
bounded territory.
Since even US
military power cannot be everywhere at once (it has never even
aspired to more than two local wars at a time), the only option
is to demonstrate, by frequent displays of military force, that
it can go anywhere at any time, and do great damage. This
is not to say that war will be constant. 'Operation
Infinite War' is apparently intended to produce something more
like Hobbes's 'state of war': 'the nature of war,' he writes in
the Leviathan, 'consisteth not in actual fighting, but in
the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no
assurance to the contrary.' It is this endless possibility
of war that imperial capital needs to sustain its hegemony over
the global system of multiple states.
Hobbes understood
what the new imperialists know: that power rests to a great
extent on psychology and especially fear. As the
right-wing commentator, Charles Krauthammer has recently said in
the Washington Post, 'The elementary truth that seems to
elude the experts again and again --Gulf war, Afghan war, next
war-- is that power is its own reward. Victory changes
everything, psychology above all. The psychology in the
region is now one of fear and deep respect for American power.
Now is the time to use it to deter, defeat or destroy the other
regimes....', above all, Iraq. So, while power produces
fear, fear produces more power; and the purpose of a war like the
one in Afghanistan is to create a psychological climate, as much
as anything else, a purpose more easily served by attacking
adversaries who can be defeated with relative ease (and where,
perhaps, the outcome matters relatively little to the imperial
power), and then moving on to bigger game, fortified by universal
fear.
This does not
necessarily mean that the US, as global capital's ultimate
coercive power, will wage war for no reason at all, just for the
purpose of display. There are likely to be more finite
goals, as in Afghanistan, though even here, the objectives
probably have more to do with trying out new modes of war and,
above all, creating a political climate for the open-ended 'war
against terrorism' --even more than, say, ensuring access to the
huge oil and gas reserves of Central Asia, which many
commentators have suggested is the purpose of the war.
But whatever
specific objectives such wars may have, there is always something
more. The larger purpose is to shape the political
environment in a complex system of multiple states. In some
cases, particularly in subordinate states, the object is
exemplary terror, pour encourager les autres. In
advanced capitalist states, the political environment is shaped
in other ways, by their implication in imperial alliances.10
But in all cases, the overriding objective is to demonstrate US
hegemony.
Such purposes
help to explain why there has developed a pattern of resort to
military action by the US in situations ill-suited to military
solutions, why massive military action is anything but a last
resort, and why the connection between means and ends in these
military ventures is typically so tenuous. An endless
empire which has no boundaries, even no territory, requires war
without end. An invisible empire requires infinite war, and
a new doctrine of war to justify it.
Notes
1. On 30
September, The Observer in London carried a special report
by Ed Vulliamy, 'Inside the Pentagon'. Here are the
highlights of the piece:
'As war begins in Afghanistan, so does the assault on the White House - to win the ear and signed orders of the military's Commander in Chief, President George W. Bush, for what Pentagon hawks call "Operation Infinite War"....'
The Observer has
learnt that two detailed proposals for warfare without limit were
presented to the President this week by his Defence Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, both of which were temporarily put aside but
remain on hold.
'They were drawn
up by his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz....
the plans argue
for open-ended war without constraint either of time or geography....
'...the Pentagon
militants prefer to speak of "revolving alliances",
which look like a Venn diagram, with an overlapping centre and
only certain countries coming within the US orbit for different
sectors and periods of an unending war. The only countries in the
middle of the diagrammatic rose, where all the circles overlap,
are the US, Britain and Turkey.
'Officials say
that in a war without precedent, the rules have to be made up as
it develops, and that the so-called "Powell Doctrine"
arguing that there should be no military intervention without
"clear and achievable" political goals is "irrelevant"....'
2. For an
illuminating discussion of Spanish imperialist ideology, in
contrast to that of Britain and France, see Anthony Pagden, Lords
of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and
France c. 1500-1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1995.
3. On Dutch
military expenditures during this period, see Jan de Vries and A.
van der Woude, The First Modern Economic: Success, Failure,
and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 100-102.
4. For a
provocative, and persuasive, interpretation of Grotius, see
Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought
and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
5. Tuck p.. 85.
6. Tuck p. 108.
7. Pagden has a
useful discussion of this principle and its use particularly by
the English and, to a lesser degree, the French, and the reasons
for its absence in Spanish imperial ideology. See pp. 77 passim.
The principle was obviously more useful in cases where
imperialism took the form of settler colonies which displaced
local populations and was of little use to the Spanish, with
their empire of explicit conquest.
8. It is
striking that histories of early modern European political
thought, such as those by Pagden and Tuck, as well as James Tully
whose work has revealed much about the imperial implications of
Locke's theory of property, seem to have a blind spot when it
comes to theoretical innovations related to the specific
experience of English capitalism. It will be argued in what
follows that Locke differentiates himself from his European
predecessors and Continental contemporaries more than any of
these histories allow, in ways that are directly related to the
distinctive historical experience of England and English
imperialism.
9. This
argument about the Dutch Republic's reliance on 'extra-economic'
advantages is elaborated in my 'The Question of Market
Dependence, Journal of Agrarian Change Vol. 2 No. 1,
January 2002.
10. See Peter
Gowan (The Global Gamble - Verso) on US efforts to shape the political environment in
allied capitalist powers.