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Inside Out

Political Violence in the Age of Globalization


Paul Dumouchel
Ritsumeikan University, Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Japan

ne characteristic of globalization that often goes unnoticed, perhaps because it is so evident, is that it has no outside. There is nowhere beyond, no place that can be viewed as an outer space, as a location that globalization has not reached. Globalization has no border that indicates that this is where it ends; rather it closes upon itself like the globe whose shape it adopts. It is a house that you cannot leave. There is no other world that is further than, that is past, globalization. There is no area where you can go that escapes its closure. Outside of globalization, there is no outside, no land that can be inhabited or even discovered and explored. This is not a problem of imagination. The difculty to which I wish to point is not that we cannot imagine a life that would be different from life in the globalized world; in fact, that is relatively easy to do. What I want to argue is that the process we call globalization changes the shape and structure of our relations to each other, because it has no outside. Globalization (whatever else it may be) is a totalizing process in the sense that there is nowhere that is not part of the globalized world. If it is not possible to go outside of globalization or to go beyond it, it is indeed possible to fall from globalization or to be left behind and overlooked by it. This fall from grace, so to speak, corresponds to a form of internal exile
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol. 15/16, 20082009, pp. 173184. issn 1075-7201. Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

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rather than to a departure for another country. This exile may be self-imposed, as was (and is) the case with cloistered monks. Men and women abandon the world for the service of God within monasteries, islands of peace that are both inside and outside the world. However, historically this voluntary internal exile was a departure in which those who left did not entirely vanish from the society where they had previously lived. As history has shown, monasteries were important economic actors during the Middle Ages, and they played a fundamental role in the evolution of the social and political structure in Europe, as well as in the transformation of Europes natural environment. Similarly, those who choose internal exile in todays globalized society also remain important actors in the process they denounce. This internal exile can also be externally imposed; individuals and entire populations even, can be dropped out of globalization. Nonetheless, in no case does this falling out give access to a place that is not inside the global world. It does not lead anywhere that is not surrounded by the global world. To use a somewhat different image, globalization contains holes into which one can tumble and out of which it may be difcult to climb, but it has no outside. There is no outer space. That is precisely why it is called globalization! It encompasses the whole world. Why is the outside important? Essentially, because outside of where we live is where others live. It is a place that is inhabited by those who are not us. Who are they? It could be that the answer to this question is not very important, as long as they are not us. The word outside suggests rst of all a separation in physical space. It is opposed to inside, and those who are not us do not live inside, or if they happen to live there, it is only by accident, temporarily, and with our permission. This is what globalization has transformed. Others are now among us. Through globalization, the coincidence between political, social, and cultural separation on the one hand and distance in space on the other has come to an end. It is not true anymore that those who are not us, those who are different, inhabit a different place, that they live somewhere else. We now share with them the same global world and integrated space. That which we call globalization corresponds, among other things, to the fact that difference in spatial location does not anymore coincide with important social, cultural, and political differences. This aspect of globalization is usually understood to refer to the presence of foreigners among us. With migrants, foreign workers, refugees, the globalized world is a cosmopolitan world. Large cities of the Western world are inhabited by people of all origins and nationalities.1 This demographic difference from what existed, let us say, 50 years ago, this diversity of origins that

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is clearly visible in the streets, on buses and subways, in stores, and in the range of products we nd on the market, is certainly an important new phenomenon. The collapse of the difference between us and them, which is simultaneously a difference between the inside and the outside, is most visible in this increase on the streets of large cities of foreigners, or of those whom, in North America, we call visible minorities. However, as is often the case, that which is most visible hides an even more fundamental transformation. The coincidence of spatial difference with social, political, and cultural differences is inseparable from the modern notion of national territory and from the international division of the world into exclusive territories. Globalization brings about the end of territories, to translate the title of a book by Bertrand Badie.2 The territory is a form of political and social organization at both the domestic and international levels that has profoundly shaped the world in which we live, and that we take for granted as the normal order of things. We tend to think that territories always existed, and that they cannot not exist. Because the erosion of the territorial order is gradual and resembles more the slow ruination of a house than the sudden collapse of a building, we are mostly unaware that it is giving way to different forms of local and global political organization. At rst sight it may seem that the territory is nothing else than the physical space over which a political entity exercises its control. Given that any political organization has to exist in physical space, it seems that territories have always existed, that they are unavoidable. However what is at stake, what is particular to territories as we understand them in relation to modern nation-states, is a special type of political and social relation to physical space that did not always and everywhere exist. Moreover, even if it is true that every political organization exists in physical space, it does not follow that all need to maintain a particular or privileged relation to any part of that space. For example, a club, a corporation, a guild, or any network of allegiance exists wherever and whenever two or more of its members meet.3 Such political entities are not attached to any particular territory, to any particular region of physical space. Their operation is independent of place; it is constitutive of such political organizations, of the relations between members, not the location where they happen to be. Though the position of its members relative to each other is fundamental to the functioning of such a political entity, these relative positions are independent of any absolute location, contrary to what is conveyed by the idea of territory. It is therefore not true that all forms of political organization need to, or even de facto do, maintain a special relationship with some portion of physical space.

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Nomadic tribes usually recursively revisit the same regions or even the same specic places at regular times during the year. Often they do not claim exclusive use of these places with which they profess to maintain an important relationship. Furthermore, the intervening space that separates these places is often conceived of as free empty land that is nobodys in particular. It constitutes a distance to be traveled, an open domain that may contain some other less important places, but which belongs to none and to all.4 These repeated journeys through a limited range, this way of interacting with physical space, do not give rise to a territory in the modern sense of the term. Even though a special relationship with certain parts of physical space is involved, the way of interacting with the physical space that a group occupies is completely different from what constitutes a territory. It is structured by what may be called the logic of place. The relation to space is organized around certain places or locations that are sacred and have value. Such places in a sense are not part of normal space; they are not continuous with it. They are qualitatively different. Sacred places are openings into another world or witnesses to its irruption into this one. A space in which there are sacred places, a space that is structured by their presence, is, by denition, discontinuous and heterogeneous. Understood in this way, the course traveled by a nomadic tribe does not determine a territory so much as it describes a pilgrimage. It does not, that is, delimit a continuous space over which a group or political entity claims exclusive authority. The territory of a modern nation-state, on the contrary, is continuous and isotropic. In many ways the territory exhibits the basic characteristics of Euclidian space. Apart from some rare historical examples that have usually proven unstable, the territory of a modern nation-state is continuous in the sense that each part of the territory is contiguous with another part of the territory.5 Nothing separates one part of a states territory from the next part. All portions or divisions of the territory touch each other, and going from one to the next does not entail any qualitative difference as far as being part of the territory is concerned. Territory is also exclusive. While the same place can be sacred to more than one religion, for example, Jerusalem; Jerusalem cannot be part of the territory of both Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan. A choice must be made; a decision has to be reached. Political territories exclude each other just as the parts of Euclidian space do. Territorial space is also isotropic, in the sense that no part of the territory is more or less part of the territory than any other. Alsace-Lorraine is just as much part of France as are Touraine or Paris. There may be important qualitative differences between various regions of a countrys territory, concerning, for example, economic importance, climate, majority population, or linguistic and cultural differences; however, inasmuch

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as it is a part of national territory, every part of the national territory is as much a part of the territory as any other. These same traits, or rather the political translation of these traits, are also typical of the state that occupies a particular territory. The monopoly of legitimate violence characteristic of modern states may be viewed as a form of political continuity. It indicates that political power exercises its rule without breaks or holes, without stops and new beginnings. The power of the modern state is not only supreme, in the sense that no other power within society can challenge it, but it is also sovereign. Local powers can exist as powers only through the states authority and with its permission. The formal equality of all citizens is the political equivalent of isotropy. Every citizen, just like every part of space, has an equal worth; every member of the state has the same value. Formal equality, it is often claimed, is not enough, which is certainly true. However, this criticism of formal equality should not be understood as a form of rejection of formal equality. Rather, it only makes sense against the background of an existing formal equality, of its promises and of what it implies. There is, however a sense in which political equality can only be formal. While the parts of Euclidian space are really identical to each other, individual human beings and social agents are different from each other in many ways, along many dimensions. Formal equality is the political decision that for certain purposes, and in certain domains, some of these differences will not be taken into account. The criticism of formal equality reects disagreements over the purposes for which signicant differences between agents should be ignored and the domains in which equality will be taken for granted. That is to say, it is the expression of a debate concerning which differences are to be disregarded and in what domains. The modern state is the tool, the institution through which the ction of equality is, in a sense and to some extent, made real, but only within a certain territory and more so for those who maintain with that territory a particular relationship of belonging. This particular relationship of belonging is primarily legal, taking the form of citizenship. This is a political characteristic that is usually determined in relation to space, that is, by the place of birth. The particular relationship of belonging also has a cultural dimension that may enter into contradiction with and sometimes even overrule the spatial determination of citizenship. Those who share the same culture are often understood as belonging to the same territory. Citizenship will thus more easily be granted to foreigners who share the same language or belong to the same ethnic group as most nationals. Conversely, those who occupy the same territory are made to share the same culture, understood in a broad sense. This can be done through the expulsion

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or destruction of minority populations, as Heather Rae documented in State Identities and the Homogenisation of People.6 It can also be done, and historically was most often done, through assimilation, education, and repression of minority languages. The populations of modern nation-states were not originally homogeneous but were made homogeneous through explicit state policies. Like equality, homogeneity is a ction in the sense that there are always many dimensions along which a population is heterogeneous, and as in the case of equality there is always a choice of the dimension(s) along which people are made to be homogeneous, for example, religious, linguistic, ethnic, or shared culture in a more specic sense. As in the case of formal equality, formal homogeneity overlooks many important differences between members of the population, for example, differences in income and education, which are taken not to be politically signicant. In spite of the fact that a territory corresponds to the domain where a state exercises an exclusive jurisdiction, territory also is, and perhaps primarily is, an international institution. At the international level, the territorial order is characterized by the existence of a plurality of mutually exclusive territories. Territories determine a certain type of relationship between states based on the existence of hard borders delimiting exclusive portions of political space. States claim exclusive jurisdiction over certain areas, as if this is something that essentially proceeds from their own power and sovereignty, but borders are only real and meaningful to the extent that they are recognized by other states. One of the characteristics of the territorial order is that it implies the existence of a plurality of states that are formally equal in the sense that they recognize each others exclusive sovereignty over a certain portion of space. Each states territory, its monopoly of legitimate violence over that territory, exists only to the extent that other states recognize it and agree to it. Outside of one states territory there exist other territories, the territories of other states that have the same status and characteristics. This plurality is fundamental. Unlike the uctuating boundaries of an empire surrounded by empty land and roaming barbarians, boundaries that determine the limits of the state viewed as a sanctuary in a largely unknown and hostile world, borders separate from each other states that are formally equal and that constitute a community of spatially exclusive political entities. This community of territories corresponds to a particular institution of the friend/enemy dichotomy that Carl Schmitt posits as fundamental to politics. The central characteristic of the modern European state, according to Schmitt, is that the friend/enemy distinction coincides with the separation between the inside and the outside of the state. This allotment of enmity and

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friendship is realized through the equality and homogeneity of citizens on the one hand and the exclusive and continuous dimension of territory on the other. Outside of the territorial state live not only others but also enemies. Not that all others are enemies, or that all those who live outside are enemies; rather, it is that those who live inside are friends, that among them resorting to violence is illegitimate. Conicts should be resolved by appealing to and by submitting to the arbitration of a third party. Enemies, says Schmitt, are others with whom it is possible to have conicts that cannot be resolved by appealing to either shared rules or the decision of an agreed-upon arbitrator.7 Schmitt has been mainly interested in the relationship a state maintains with its enemies and in what this entails concerning the nature of sovereign power. However, the coincidence of the friend/enemy distinction with the spatial limits of the state also implies a certain type of relationship between friends, that is to say, between those who live together. The states monopoly of legitimate violence and the imposition of the rule of law constitute only one aspect of the situation resulting from the expulsion of enemies outside the borders of the state. Social justice adds another dimension to the requirement of equality, one that is based on the solidarity of those who belong together. Since the end of World War II, the development of the welfare state has been the central means of preventing the reappearance of enemies within the state. It has been both the way in which citizens have been made friends and the symbol of the fact that they are friends. Social justice has been the custodian of a central aspect of the territorial order, the absence of enemies within the space over which the state exercises its jurisdiction. This has been fundamental to the states capacity to maintain its monopoly of legitimate violence. Social justice as it has been implemented through the welfare state rests on indirect reciprocity. This reciprocity is indirect rst of all because it is not realized directly in the relationship of agents to each other, but arises through the operation of a center that redistributes resources. It is also indirect because it is deferred. Reciprocity, properly named, that is to say the other half of the reciprocal relation, is pushed back in time, either until it is needed, in the case of those who give, or until it can be done, in the case of those who receive. Indirect and deferred reciprocity is a kind of promise, and the modern state has been the guardian of that promise in the name of all its citizens.

Others and enemies are now among us. That is to say, we cannot anymore take it for granted that the space we inhabit together is free from individuals or groups who feel they can legitimately resort to violence. We call them terrorists.

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The war against terrorism is a sign of the disappearance of the territorial order, of the disappearance of the states monopoly of legitimate violence, and of the disappearance of wars as we used to know them. War as we have come to understand it is something that takes place between nations, sovereign states; alternatively, in the form of civil war, it is a conict within a state that pitches against each other factions that vie for the monopoly of legitimate violence. War in either sense has a beginning and an end. There are winners and losers, and when the war is over, peace returns. There are many signs that such wars are disappearing, that this type of violent confrontation is being replaced by what Frdric Gros calls tats de violence, that is to say, states of violence, where the word state is to be understood in the same way as it is in state of affairs.8 Ann Hironaka, in Neverending Wars, shows that since 1944 both the number and the duration of civil wars have grown dramatically. What has grown even more dramatically is the number of ongoing civil conicts, indicating that hostilities tend to last longer and longer. In fact, these extremely long civil wars are not exactly civil wars anymore; they are not simply conicts whose goal is the seizure of the states power, conicts that come to an end when that is done. Take, for example, the case of Afghanistan. The civil war started in 1978, and in the following year the country was invaded by the Soviet Union. The Soviet occupation lasted 10 years, during which ghting never stopped, and after the Sovietss departure, the civil war continued. Even once the Taliban captured Kabul and gained recognition as the Afghan regime by the international community, ghting did not end, and in some parts of the country war raged on until 2001. Then once again Afghanistan was invaded, this time by the Americans in the hope of capturing Bin Laden and destroying al Qaeda. Today, Germany, France, Canada, England, Italy, Poland, and the United States all have soldiers there and NATO is asking its member states to make a long-term commitment of troops. Since 1978, 30 years have gone by: that is, long enough to be born, become an adult, have children, and die, all within the duration of a war. There is a sense in which this is not war anymore but a state of violence. That is to say, violence in such situations is not a means to a certain end, a means that will be discarded once that end is reached. It does not correspond to a moment of decision but constitutes a permanent state of affairs. There are many places in the world today that seem to have fallen into such states of violence, for example, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Colombia, to name but a few. These states of violence are not wars, civil or otherwise; they are not war as we used to know it but violence as a way of life, as a mode of existence, not only for certain individuals, like mercenaries or soldiers, but for entire regions. In fact, these states

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of violence often do not concern whole states or countries but are limited to particular areas, conned to particular parts of a states territory. Around them, life continues more or less as usual. These enclaves of violence sometimes have an important economic role or strategic value, and many different types of agents may participate in the hostile relations that characterize them: government troops (and more or less ofcial paramilitary units), rebel forces, private security companies, local warlords, tribal combatants, troops from neighboring countries, and members of international peacekeeping forces. This incomplete list brings out two important features of states of violence. First, there is their internationalization: very rarely are the participants, the parties in the conict, limited to citizens of one state only. Most of the time it is foreigners who play an important role in the evolution and lengthening of the struggle.9 Second, there is the presence of nonstate actors, rebel troops of course, but also private security companies, the corporations that hire them, and organized crime. In fact, it is often difcult to distinguish between political conict and large-scale criminal activities, as insurgents turn to various illegal activities to fund their operations. When that happens, winning often stops being the goal. The struggle itself becomes a form of economic enterprise. Violence is a means of monopolizing, for example, the prots of drug production, or the trade in or smuggling of diamonds. The conict thus gets integrated into the world economy. Simultaneously, this localized ghting, as long as it does not get out of hand, can serve the purposes of certain groups within the state and help them maintain their hold on power. When such is the case, the continuation of the conict is in the interest of both parties involved. States of violence are holes of lawlessness and violence in the tissue of international relations and in the territory of each state involved. These holes in the national territory and in the international territorial order may, however, be perfectly well integrated into the world economy. What this means is that there is a sense in which these conicts are not accidents and anomalies. Rather, they represent the new face of the world order. The expression war against terrorism indicates that major powers have now accepted this transformation of the international scene. Declaring war against terrorism is not an ofcial, legal, international act. It does not create any particular legal liabilities or responsibilities. The Americans do not recognize terrorists as enemy combatants and do not extend to them the protection of the Geneva Conventions. The Americans refuse to be bound by the rules of international law with regard to terrorists. They kidnap people in various countries, either friendly or hostile, and deliver them to other countries where torture is practiced. That is to say they use, to their advantage, the existence of different sets of rules, somewhat in the same way that

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multinational corporations take advantage of legal and economic opportunities in different countries. The Americans violate the air space of independent states and bomb terrorist installations (or what they think are such) anywhere in the world. Yet, it would be false to think that only Americans do this. France, England, Israel, Russia, and any country that has the power to intervene outside its borders and has reasons to believe it should, also do it. The war against terrorism does not recognize the structure of the international community as made up of independent nations separated by hard borders. The space in which this war takes place is not that of territories. It is not made up of parts that are exclusive of each other, and it is neither homogeneous nor isotropic. Rather, it is structured by something that more closely resembles the logic of place. The world is divided into hot spots of violence and cool spots of relative peace and order. The primary goal is not to bring peace to the hot spots but to maintain certain areas as sanctuaries that are protected from violence. This organization of space into sanctuaries and areas exterior to them has a fractal quality. That is to say, the space in which we live now has the same type of structure or shape at different levels or scales that can be understood either in terms of physical distance or in terms of social and cultural proximity. For example, at a lower level or on a smaller scale of resolution we nd the green zone in Baghdad, where relative security is maintained in comparison to the rest of the city. At a much more overarching level, the American fortress is defended by biometric methods of identication, strict rules concerning immigration and entrance, and an ever-growing quantity of personal data on foreign nationals coming to the United States or even simply ying over it.10 At an intermediary level between these two extremes, we have the wall that Israel has built to defend itself from suicide bombers, and the thousands of kilometers of fence that run along the border between the United States and Mexico in the hope of keeping out illegal immigrants. At the micro level we nd walled-in housing complexes defended by private guards in the middle of supposedly policed cities, protected neighborhoods that people can enter only if they live there or can state their business. This is not the territorial order anymore; this is not a space that is continuous, isotropic, and containing parts that are exclusive of each other. Sanctuaries can be embedded in each other. The edges of these zones of relative peace and security are not marked by borders in the classical sense, imaginary lines that exist because and inasmuch as they are recognized by the community of nations. It is not an international agreement that determines where the boundaries of these safe spaces will be, but the relative strength of the adversaries. In fact, these protections, fortied walls, and security checks are there because borders do not function anymore. Enemies cannot be identied

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on the basis of their passports; borders are not an adequate tool with which to keep them out. This disappearance of the territory goes hand in hand with the disappearance of equality that was characteristic of the territorial order. Others are different from us. They do not belong here, and our rules and protections should not be extended to them. There is nothing particularly new about this. Foreigners have always been subjected to different regulations. The territorial order provided a rationale for this distinction and simultaneously for a procedure both simple and public to determine who would be subjected to what rule. In consequence, it was possible to maintain the equality of us, because it was clear who we were and who they were, and even, in a sense and to some extent, to maintain the equality of them. Enemies are now among us. They are hidden, anywhere and everywhere, and they can be anyone. This means that at any time, on the basis of a suspicion, the rule of law can be suspended in relation to some unknown individual, an individual who, until he was discovered, was exactly like everyone else; nothing obvious distinguished him from any one of us. Enemies, unlike criminals, are not arrested after an act or presumed innocent; they have to be stopped before they act. It is the hostile intentions they harbor that make them enemies, rather than any action they may yet have committed. With the disappearance of the territory, there is no simple, public procedure that allows us to make the distinction between friends and enemies. We are in consequence already beginning to get accustomed to the fact that we are not all treated equally, on the basis of suspicions that sometimes appear justied and at other times arbitrary. It should be remembered that suspicion is the very opposite of the rule of law, according to which you can be sentenced only for a crime you have committed, against a law that is public and provides for a penalty that is proportional to the offense. Enemies suspected of evil designs are not properly sentenced to anything or for anything they have done. They are rendered unable to harm anyone before they can act. The objective pursued is not justice, proportionality between the offense and the punishment, but expediency, at the price of some unfortunate mistakes, as revealed by the death of Jean-Charles de Menezes.11 Suspicion is to the rule of law what a preemptive strike is to a declaration of war. In consequence, the war against terrorism cannot have any clear end in time. There is no ofcial act that can restore peace, that can signify that this war is over and that we can from now on live in peace. Danger may be viewed as more or less great at different times; acts of terrorism may become more or less frequent. That is to say, the safety of the sanctuary may be maintained with greater or lesser success. There may be lulls in the struggle and long periods of calm. This,

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however, is not a war that can be won, but it is a war that can be lost. The war against terrorism constitutes a state of violence, and it is inseparable from the existence of other states of violence. It is, in other words, an expression of the way in which violent conicts have become institutionalized in the globalized world. It cannot be won, but it can disappear if we succeed in reducing the number and the extent of states of violence, in institutionalizing violent conicts in a different way. It can be lost as sanctuaries can become smaller and more unequal, and as we all spend ever more resources on defending ourselves.12

NOTES
1. Migrants tend to settle in and around large cities. 2. Bertrand Badie, La n des territoires (Paris: Fayard, 1995). 3. They do not even need to meet in physical space; communication through the Internet is often enough. 4. In Australia, the program to restore land ownership to aborigines has faced precisely this difculty. How can you translate into modern terms land ownership of such a different form of relation to the spatial environment? See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition (London: Duke University Press, 2002). 5. Among the rare and unstable examples that run counter to this rule are Pakistan before the separation from Bangladesh and Germany between World War I and World War II, during which period Prussia was divided by the Danzig corridor. 6. Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 7. Carl Schmitt, La notion de politique (Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1972). 8. Frdric Gros, tats de violence: Essai sur la n de la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). 9. On average, civil wars with interstate intervention, broadly dened, are 300 percent longer than wars without intervention. Ann Hironaka, Neverending Wars: The International Community, Weak States, and the Perpetuation of Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 51. 10. Ian Traynor, Bush Orders Clampdown on Flights to US, February 11, 2008 http://www. guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/11/usa.theairlineindustry. 11. Jean-Charles de Menezes was shot and killed by ofcers of the London Metropolitan Police who mistook him for a terrorist. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_ Menezes#Biography. 12. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIRPI), world military spending has gone up by 45 percent between 1998 and 2008. See Les depenses militaries mondiales ont progresse de 45 en dix ans, Le Monde, 06/10/2008, http://www. lemonde.fr/archives/article/2008/06/10/les-depenses-militaires-mondiales-ont-progresse-de-45-endix-ans_1056125_0.html.

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