The brutalization of the world by Plinio Cabrera

JosephaÂ Laroche

The Brutalization of the World From the Retreat of States to Decivilization

The Brutalization of the World

Josepha Laroche

The Brutalization of the World From the Retreat of States to Decivilization

Translated by Daniel Rayburn

Josepha Laroche Sorbonne University Paris, France Translated from the French by Daniel Rayburn

Translated from the French language edition: La brutalisation du monde - Du retrait des Etats a` la de´civilisation, 2e e´d. revue et augmente´e, L’Harmattan, Coll. Chaos International, 2016 ISBN 978-3-319-50792-7 ISBN 978-3-319-50793-4 DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50793-4

(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963826 © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To JJA

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part I

The Repression of the Death Drive

The Stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hold of the Psychic Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Risk of Anomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 The Deadly Reign of the Unconscious . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 The War, a State Prerogative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.3 The Respect for Prohibitions in Laws of War . . . . . . . . . 2.2 The Emergence of the Civilizing Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 The Self-Control of the Drives and Emotions . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 The Alterity from the Law of Nations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.3 The Sublimation of International Relations . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

11 11 12 14 19 21 22 25 27

A Diplomatic Framing of Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Civilizing Contribution of Diplomacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 The Conquest of a State Monopoly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 The Professionalization of a Permanent Dialogue . . . . . . 3.1.3 The Naturalization of a Peaceful Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Super-ego as a Triumphant Peacemaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 The Denial of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 The Stigmatization as Imperial Peace-Making . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 The Games of Coercive Diplomacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

33 34 34 36 39 46 48 49 52

. . . .

59 60 61 66

Part II 4

The Return of the Repressed

The Sacralization of Interstate Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 To Kill and Die for Oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.1 The Recognition of Virility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.2 The Trivialization of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

viii

Contents

4.2

Commemorating Carnage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 The Cult of Death on the Field of Honor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 The Invention of the Unknown Soldier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

70 71 75

The Globalization of Non-state Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 The Reaffirmation of a Community Between Itself . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.1 The Communities of Narration and Emotions . . . . . . . . . 5.1.2 The Spiral of Identity Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Regulation of Drives by Sacrifice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.1 The Imaginary Construction of Scapegoats . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 The Rationalization of Persecution and Massacres . . . . . .

79 79 81 83 91 92 98

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Selected Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Chapter 1

Introduction

A synergy of psychoanalysis, history and sociology is required to develop the tools for a better understanding of the international. But to adopt such a heuristic epistemological approach carries significant risk and may prove a daunting task. However, the time has come to meet this challenge in order to construct a more appropriate framework for understanding the mixing of micro and macro that characterizes the global situation today. This approach is all the more unusual because, for a long time, political science, the science of history and psychoanalysis have been distrustful of each other. The concept of resistance forged by Freud is particularly suitable for this task.1 In this case, the rejection of psychology has marked political science, and notably the development of political sociology in France. However, we currently observe a connection between these areas, including some influence of psychoanalysis on all the social sciences. The self-analysis carried out by Pierre Bourdieu towards the end of his life appears closer to this approach.2 In the second place, let us start from the hypothesis that political analysis should give its symbolic dimension greater prominence than it currently holds. In this regard, we should consider the analytical tool to be a valuable instrument for understanding what is being played out on the international stage. In particular, it can help us both to take into account and to restore the representations that social actors develop in their own practices, such as those that create conflicts between groups. Matters of violence, aggression or even simple competition could then be Terms marked with an asterisk in the text refer to the definitions in the glossary. 1 Recall that this designates an attitude of opposition to analytical work, the latter being an object revealing unconscious desires and the effect of inflicting on man the crime of narcissism, cf., Sigmund Freud, ‘Re´sistances a la psychanalyse’ a text written in French, [1925], in: Sigmund Freud (Ed.), Re´sultats, ide´es, proble`mes, vol. II, 1921–1938, Paris, PUF, 1992, pp. 125–139; Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Nineteenth Lecture: Resistance and Suppression, [1916], United States, Horace Liveright, 1920, place 4037 sq. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, Paris, Raisons d’agir, 2004.

1 Introduction

approached with superior depth. To commit to a psychoanalytic approach to politics is finally to choose to build upon a science that has already proven itself, as an analysis on another level—that of the individual—in applying it to the field of social formation.3 From the outset, such an approach assumes that political science is not, itself, uniquely able to restore the complexity of politics on a global level. The focus of this book is therefore to enlighten sociopolitical productions with the help of Freudian concepts. Let us to underline how psychoanalysts are reluctant to leave the field of clinical analysis and attempt this type of research.4 Essentially, it is because they refuse to distance themselves from their first goal, which is therapy. In fact, it is rather political scientists who have initiated the reconciliation, mobilizing psychoanalysis to account for some aspects of politics that have been ignored or undervalued by their discipline.5 To our knowledge, no French political scientist has yet risked dealing with the international for this explicit purpose.6 Our project will therefore be legitimately surprising, as the mainstream approach considers international politics, par excellence, to fall under macropolitics; more precisely, High Politics.7 Thus, our thesis is the opposite of this macropolitical frame of analysis, which conceives of the State as distant from social actors and, a fortiori, individuals and their psyche, in which they are concealed more intimately.8 However, this approach should not limit international relations to interstate relations. Indeed, such an approach now seems far too restrictive, given the rise of non-State actors who have burst on to the world stage in the past decades.

3 Freud invites us to do so as he writes in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [1921], New York, First Rate Publishers, 2016, p. 1: ‘The contrast between Individual Psychology and Social or Group Psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. [. . .] In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent, and so from the very first Individual Psychology is at the same time Social Psychology as well—in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words’. 4 Referring foremost to the celebrated work of Sigmund Freud, William Bullitt, Woodrow Wilson: a Psychological Study, New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction, 1999; cf., equally, Euge`ne Enriquez, La Horde et l’E´tat, Paris, Gallimard, 1983. 5 For example, the AFSP (Association franc¸aise de Science Politique) organised a colloquium on 27th November 1971, entitled The Importance of Psychoanalysis to Political Science, cf., equally, a special edition of the journal, Pouvoirs, (11), 1979. 6 Alexander Wendt (Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999) writes nonetheless that: ‘the role that unconscious processes play in international politics is something that needs to be considered more systematically, not dismissed out of hand’, p. 278. 7 This phrase belongs to the lexicon of Realist theorists. It refers to the diplomatic-strategic sphere, the only one that is decisive in their eyes for analyzing international relations. 8 We could even go as far as the unconscious on this point, cf., Josepha Laroche, ‘La conscience malheureuse comme mode d’action internationale: le pacifisme de Romain Rolland’, in : CURRAP (E´d.), Le For inte´rieur, Paris, PUF, 1995, pp. 137–149.

1 Introduction

Moreover, we cannot be content with just a positivist and descriptive approach, which remains well short of a comprehensive sociology.9 On the contrary, we will consider the international—and not international politics—as a heterogeneous and chaotic space in which we will examine the interventions of State/non-State actors, the private/public, holders of proven political authority and/or holders of symbolic and/or economic resources, all of whom engage in complex interactions.10 We will also see that they are constantly involved and tied up together in multiple configurations. By establishing a relationship between the contributions of the sociology of international relations and those of historical science and psychoanalysis, we should constantly keep in mind that ‘all scientific knowledge acquired must be regarded as fallible and partially contested’11; the ultimate objective being then to achieve a better understanding of the world. From a transnationalist perspective*, we will address the intertwined dynamics of the national and international levels to confront the dialectic of war and peace, so dear to realist theory*. It will be appropriate to return notably to the work of Norbert Elias; in particular, his thesis of the civilizing process following which societies evolve within the framework of a movement of regression of individual violence.12 We will treat the repression of the death drive by analyzing the different devices that have facilitated and allowed such a change to be historically consubstantial to the emergence of the State. This pacification is in effect founded on the emergence and the routinization of a number of social practices and the creation of institutions without which it could not have developed over the centuries. Many such arrangements have ensured a regulation of international relations and so fit with the Eliasian analysis. From here, we will examine the return of the repressed, to highlight the erosion of this civilizational movement at the profit of a process of brutalization. We will see how the mass killings of the two world wars have reactivated a dynamic of interpersonal brutality, which has constituted a decisive break and marked a historical rupture; the most destructive individual drives being from then on authorized and encouraged by States. Finally, we will try to show that the current globalization of non-State violence now invalidates Elias’ problematic. From the

On the idea of understanding as an overall approach to action and taking into account the meaning given by the actor, cf., the idea of the signifying set, Max Weber, Economy and Society, [1922], trans., Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013; cf., equally, Philippe Raynaud, Max Weber et les dilemmes de la raison moderne, ‘Les origines de la sociologie compre´hensive’, Paris, PUF, 1987, pp. 71–81. 10 On this concept, cf., Robert O. Keohane, Joseph S. Nye (Eds.), Transnational Relations and World Politics, Harvard, Harvard University Press 1972; Robert O. Keohane, Joseph S. Nye Power and Interdependence, [1977], 3rd ed., New York, Longman, 2001. 11 Georges Balandier, Anthropologie politique, Paris, PUF, 1967, p. 1. 12 The writings on sociology of Norbert Elias also abolish the borders between the internal and external, putting the emphasis on the relationships of interdependence that determine social configurations.

1 Introduction

outset, it is clear that our approach is more disenchanted than that of Elias and so closer to Freud’s tragic vision of the world.13 There remains a major point to clarify. The question rests entirely on knowing why we are moving from a civilizing process to a process of brutalization. In fact, this passage is today structurally linked to the weakening of States; the latter has been placed in correlation with the irruption and the rise in power of non-State actors—the famous “sovereignty-free actors” of Rosenau14—and the absence of any principle of regulation, a fortiori to all governance. This is because the international has now become at once heterogeneous and anomic entailing that the peace process, so well conceptualized by Elias, is now less effective and has given way to the return of the repressed to which we have just referred. In this case, we should draw attention to a fundamental question: our thesis of the substitution of a process of brutalization for a process of civilization differs from the critique that has been traditionally directed at Elias. Several analysts have often confronted him with the barbarism of Nazism, ipso facto contradicting his approach.15 However, this involves a misunderstanding because the process of historical discontinuity implies regressions as much as advancement, sequences where centrifugal and centripetal forces alternate. At the end of his life, Elias also desired to confront this important moment by engaging in the biography of a statist society.16 Can his theory hold in the face of the Nazi regime, in which he sees a decline and a collapse (Zuzammenbruch)? Despite the outburst of paroxystic violence, he reaffirms more than ever the need for a psycho-sociological ‘long history’ to approach politics. Finally, as Florence Delmotte has underlined that Nazism ‘certainly represents the apocalyptic culmination of the decivilizing 13 Norbert Elias, Au-del a de Freud, sociologie, psychologie, psychanalyse, [1939], trans., Paris, La Dećouverte, 2010; Quentin Deluermoz (Ed.), Norbert Elias et le XXe sie`cle, Vingtie`me Sie`cle, Apr–Jun 2010. 14 James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990; James N., Rosenau, Ernst Otto Czempiel (Eds.), Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 15 In fact, these were often his disciples, cf., Edmund Leach ‘Violence’, London Review of Books, 23 Oct. 1986; Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, New York, Polity Press, 1991; Abram de Swaan, ‘La dećivilisation, l’extermination et l’E´tat’, in : Yves Bonny, Jean-Manuel de Quieroz, Erik Neveu (Eds.), Norbert Elias et la theórie de la civilisation, Rennes, PUR, 2003, pp. 63–73 ; Jonathan Fletcher, ‘The Theory of Decivilizing Processes and the Case of Nazi Mass Murder’, ‘Towards a Theory of Decivilizing Processes’, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdskrift, 22 (3), 1995, pp. 283–296. 16 This concerns the last work of Elias first published in 1990 and composed of five essays of which ‘The Breakdown of Civilization’, cf., Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Cambridge, Cambridge Polity Press, 1996. On this point, we could also consult Françoise Lartillot (Ed.), Norbert Elias : e´tude sur les Allemands, Lecture d’une œuvre, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2009. But we must not forget that already in 1929, Elias wrote a text entitled “The Sociology of German anti-Semitism”, in: Norbert Elias, Early Writings. The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, vol. 1, Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2006, pp. 77–83.

1 Introduction

process, this period is in fact only the actualization of the historical evolution that rendered possible (and certainly not ineluctably, the German development in its entirety’.17 On the other hand, we should remember that the Nazi State was stigmatized, condemned and finally defeated by an international coalition of States for having broken the current international order and violating its values.18 What more striking example could finally be provided to us in support of the Eliasian thesis? We can see from this emblematic example that we cannot comment on the state of the civilizing process and conclude that it has failed, simply because it has relied upon the existence of a very high intensity of violence. In other words, it is not enough to invoke a historical sequence of extreme gravity solely to refute Elias’ analysis. Let us agree all the same that our study maintains a certain kinship with the concept of decivilization insofar as it also deals with ‘the other side of the coin’, to recall the expression of Stephen Mennell.19 For our part, we have simply opted for the term brutalization coined by George Mosse. In effect, we have taken up this historian’s thesis that the Great War would represent the matrix of all the extreme violence to come and so represent, as such, a historical turning point. What also seems to us to be theoretically decisive, which indeed serves as a discriminating factor, is precisely this famous ‘retreat of the State’,20 which now takes the form of a loss of State authority on a global level. Indeed, long held to be exclusively inter-statist in nature, the international scene has ceased to be as such. It has lost its uniformity because the State actor is no longer decisive. Countless transnational actors have largely escaped its sovereign control and may even have prevented the State from fulfilling its main regulatory functions.21 We so look to traditional diplomacy that has undergone profound changes today. Having for its object to represent and to guarantee sovereignty and to safeguard the interests of public power, this public policy has been entrusted for centuries to a professional body responsible for conducting negotiations in accordance with

Florence Delmotte, ‘Une theórie de la civilisation face a l’effondrement de la civilisation’, Norbert Elias et le 20e sie`cle, Le Processus de civilisation a l’e´preuve, Vingtie`me sie`cle, (106), Apr–Jun 2010, pp. 58–59. 18 We return here to Elias’ thesis that German decivilization is consubstantial to the weakness of the German State, the fragility and incompleteness of its monopoly of violence. These elements should be correlated with the German habitus, see Sonderweg, cf. Elias, The Germans. . . op. cit., p. 7 sq. 19 Stephen Mennell, ‘L’envers de la me´daille: les processus de dećivilisation’, in: Alain Garrigou, Bernard Lacroix (Eds.), Norbert Elias, la politique et l’histoire, Paris, La Dećouverte, 1997, pp. 213–236. 20 Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State. The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. 21 Daniel Drache, Defiant Publics, The Unprecedented Reach of the Global Citizen, Cambridge, Polity, 2009; Daniel Drache, ‘L’autorite´ morale en temps de crise’, in: Josepha Laroche (Ed.), Un Monde en sursis, De´rives financie`res, re´gulations politiques et exigences e´thiques, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2010. Coll. Chaos International, pp. 185–196. Saskia Sassen, ‘Le retour de l’accumulation primitive’, in: ibid., pp. 169–183. 17

1 Introduction

carefully developed procedures. Nowadays, this monopoly finds itself initiated by the action and activism of new protagonists able to develop new forms of diplomacy.22 Certainly, they still remain fragmentary and intermittent, but they already produce effects that force States to develop strategies of distancing, bypassing or even reappropriating these forms. Similarly, States no longer have the capacity for the economic response deployed at the time of the Welfare State. Stakeholders in the globalization process now show a high degree of autonomy, as the various financial crises—1994, 1997 and 2008–2011—have reflected. In economic and financial matters, the flows of globalization have hardly allowed State actors to master the fundamental balances. They have largely lost their hand because of the growing autonomy of multiple stakeholders, mortgaging their capacity for action as well as their credibility.23 At last, and unexpectedly so, the involvement of State power has also been in reaction to the possibilities of the direct intervention of individuals previously considered to be excluded from the international scene. More mobile, less willing than before to recognize any bond of allegiance, they have succeeded in certain situations to weigh decisively on the international level and to erode the various state monopolies, in regard to which Elias developed his socio-genesis of the State.24 It is therefore necessary to restore the emotional, affective and cognitive dimensions of such an upheaval, particularly those of them at the origin of communitarian violence and participate in the transnationalization of terrorist actions. But first, let us return to the famous Eliasian thesis of the pacification of behaviors. Published in Basel in 1939,25 this work is devoted to the civilizing process. The first part traces and analyzes the evolution of social practices in Western civilization since the Renaissance. The second offers an anthropological study of the emergence of the West as a pole of world domination. Finally, we should also include Die h€ ofische Gesellschaft, which underlines the role of etiquette in the curialization* of the nobility. We are thus in the presence of an overall frame of analysis—a sociohistorical phenomenon that has evolved over the past five centuries. In taking the books of etiquette of the Renaissance and those that followed them as civilizational markers, Elias emphasized a significant evolution of standards

22 On the innovative diplomacy of the international fellowship of the Nobel, Josepha Laroche, Les Prix Nobel. Sociologie d’une e´lite transnationale, Montre´al, Liber, 2012, p. 131 sq. 23 Bertrand Badie, Le Diplomate et l’intrus, L’entre´e des socie´te´s dans l’are`ne internationale, Paris, Fayard, 2008, p. 45 sq., p. 187 sq. 24 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, [1939], London, Wiley-Blackwell, 2000. Equally, Joseph R. Strayer, Charles Tilly, William Chester Jordan, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2016. 25 Since 1930, Elias had been the assistant of Karl Mannheim at the University of Frankfurt. But the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933 forced him to interrupt his studies; he was not allowed to support his empowerment thesis on court society and its defense was forbidden. He then fled Germany and went into exile in Switzerland before reaching France and the UK, and after the war, the Netherlands, see ‘Biographical Interview with Norbert Elias’ in: Norbert Elias, Reflections on a Life, Cambridge (MA), Polity Press, 2007, p. 2 sq. and 49 sq.

1 Introduction

throughout the seventeenth century which, for him, were due to the repression of drives and bodily functions. This historical movement was based on the respect and the internalization of prohibitions as all the forms of control experienced by individuals over the course of time. In regard to such a process, we should refer to an emotional and instinctual self. It was realized in such a way that men were not aware of what they were doing because “people, in the course of the civilizing process, have sought to suppress in themselves everything that they feed to be of an ‘animal character’” as Elias wrote on this subject.26 At the same time, a feeling of disgust and rejection towards these developments was formed in these individuals. In their eyes, these manifestations were increasingly devalued and often associated with displeasure. The feelings of shame, humility and embarrassment were redoubled in intensity; feelings that have been progressively codified and institutionalized by the State. Hence, individual behavior in society was slowly formatted and framed, to the point of being constituted by the rules of etiquette. Therefore, it is this set of norms that progressively became dominant and gradually built a social consensus. The power of the Eliasian thesis is that it combines, in the same movement of thought, a psychogenesis and a socio-genesis. Knowing that one cannot proceed without the other, Elias claims that, instead, they are proving to be structurally indivisible. This concerns a very slow change that develops on an individual scale, but is also observed in a socio-historical trajectory unfolding over several centuries. What then has caused such a development? As we know, the explanatory power of this model is based on the link between the State-building process and economy of drives organized at the same time on an individual level. It is by tracing the socio-genesis of the State—from the eleventh to the seventeenth century—that Elias reconstructs this civilizing process.27 This has the consequence of reducing violence and the animal nature of men or, more precisely, in monopolizing the exercise of legitimacy—through the figure of the king—for the sole benefit of the State. We should note here that Elias made the Weberian approach his own. However, he enriched this thesis by adding the Freudian contribution which, lest we forget, permeates all his work. In fact, he placed the Weberian sociology of the State in correlation with the management of emotions and affects, as Freud had analyzed it. He also emphasized the interdependence of the formation of the State and the psychic economy on both the macro and micro scales. Moreover, he showed the links between the monopoly of legitimate physical violence monopolized by the State and self-control; that is to say, the strict control

Elias, The Civilizing Process. . . op. cit., p. 102. Bernard Lahire writes here that ‘In French sociology and doubtlessly beyond, we regard Norbert Elias a little too often as a simple successor of Max Weber and largely underestimate the importance of Freud’s work in the genesis, the formulation and the realization of his intellectual project’, cf., Bernard Lahire, ‘Postface, Freud, Elias et la science de l’homme’, in : Norbert Elias, Au-del a de Freud, op. cit., p. 187; Elias himself clearly claimed: ‘I was always of the opinion that the theory of Freud left behind needed to be developed further’, cf., Elias, Reflections on a Life. . . op. cit., p. 70. 26 27

1 Introduction

operated by individuals over their own drives. Only this interweaving has allowed a pacification of social space to occur. In other words, both the construction of the State and the civilizing process go hand in hand. In such a configuration, the emergence and deployment of a State diplomacy played a substantial role. For several centuries, insofar as States were indeed the authors and sole recipients of international standards that were more and more coercive, professionalized and routinized, they remained at the very foundation of this civilizing process. But the explosion of norms which we are witnessing internationally today, and the powerful instability of exchanges that has resulted, tells us that this process has come to an end. In order that the emergence of the State figure might apparently be realized, a set of mechanisms for controlling drives had to be put in place. Above all, it needed the repression of the death drive.28 It is towards this repression that we will now turn.

This concept of the death drive was forged by Freud as part of his general theory of the psychic apparatus. He introduced it in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, United Kingdom, Read Books, 2013.

Part I

The Repression of the Death Drive

Turned towards all the forms of destruction and self-destruction, Thanatos displays itself in aggressive predispositions, the acts of appropriation and will to power. This death drive includes the tendencies towards the destruction of others as well as selfdestruction and present a highly regressive character. In other words, this is the drive par excellence. It is one that draws humans towards the underneath, the pre-cultural, if not the subhuman. One that keeps men in an anterior state, pre-cultural and barbaric or, the case being, leads them to it.1 In the work of the founder of psychoanalysis, this appears closely linked with the reality principle and the pleasure principle. The two great psychic operators that appear fundamentally antagonistic and structures each of us. This coupling constitutes a kind of axis against which we build our predispositions and so develop our actions and reactions. The first represents that by which individuals learn about the real, an apprenticeship that takes them through the necessary detours and delays—even indispensable—to achieve the satisfaction of some of their desires. According to the second reference that governs our mental organization, it returns to all the human activities that aim to avoid displeasure and systematically seek pleasure. However, it is not reduced in any way to the satisfaction of vital needs. Indeed, it serves much more as a regulator of mental functions calling for behavior that either avoids or favors the evacuation of unpleasant tensions. It further encourages the satisfaction of all the drives, whatever they are. But it is precisely in seeking to fulfil them by the quickest means that it is partly bound up with the death drive. To repress the pleasure principle is, ultimately, to repress the death drive.2 To state that it is gradually brought under control, is to choose to emphasize the lessening of the pleasure principle by the self-control of the emotions and affects. This is the same

Andre´ Green, Pourquoi les pulsions de destruction ou de mort?, Paris, Ithaque, 2010, p. 17 sq. Sigmund Freud concludes his text in writing that: “The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts”, cf., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, op. cit., p. 87.

Part I The Repression of the Death Drive

as highlighting the process of internalization and the naturalization of prohibitions that reflects the historical triumph of the super-ego*.3 Therefore, we intend to show how this victory of the super-ego has participated historically in the repression of the death drive and has played a central role in the civilizing process. But first, let us return to the Eliasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; sociogenesis of the State and the historicizing of the psychic economy of individuals.

Sigmund Freud wrote: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Super-Ego is the self-criticizing part of the mind out of which the conscience developsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, cf., Moses and Monotheism, [1939], Great-Britain, Aziloth Books, 2013, p. 117. 3

Chapter 2

The State’s Hold of the Psychic Economy

Although State control has been exerted on the psychic economy over the course of the last centuries, this does not allow us to infer that this will always be the case. But the game is not yet over, for we must always deal with the death drive. This concept forged by Freud has never really been accepted by his disciples nor has it been retained for posterity alongside with his other conceptual innovations. It is true that it emerges, in many ways, from a simple premise that may not be sufficient as an explanation in itself. However, it seems useful to deepen the thesis of the civilizing process developed by Elias and so articulate the dialectic of war and peace. In this regard, we will not adopt the first sense—albeit a very organicist manner—given by the founder of psychoanalysis and according to which we would principally see the fundamental aspiration of every human being to find absolute rest in the inorganic. We will focus instead on all the derivations that emanate from it. These can attach themselves to any object from the outside world to undertake their complete destruction. This process hence brings about the failure of the life instinct. In the framework of this dualism of drives, we understand that this regression tends constantly to restore disorganized forms, if not chaos itself. From this perspective, we will see how it is correlated directly with the constant risk of anomy.

2.1

The Risk of Anomy

Anomy occurs when the individual no longer knows how to limit his desires. Anomy is the result of inadequate social regulations and too little control exercised upon him, to the point where it does not know how to limit his desires. In fact, while Terms marked with an asterisk in the text refer to the definitions in the glossary. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 J. Laroche, The Brutalization of the World, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50793-4_2

2 The State’s Hold of the Psychic Economy

laws and rules do not adequately guarantee the functioning of society, an anomic condition can lead to fear and dissatisfaction. Social actors therefore suffer from the malaise of infinity: ‘Anomia, therefore, is a regular and specific factor in suicide in our modern societies; one of the springs from which the annual contingent feeds. [. . .] [-anomic suicide] differs not on the way in which individuals are attached to society, but on how it regulates them [. . .]. [Anomic suicide] results from man’s activity lacking regulation and his consequent sufferings’.1 For our part, we will use this concept to refer to the international chaos due to the absence of commonly agreed rules—implicit or explicit—of good conduct, or rules promoting isolation and predation rather than cooperation. A space may sometimes then be left to outbursts of all the deadliest individual and collective drives,2 in regard to the war of all against all, before this becomes purely a matter for the State.

2.1.1

The Deadly Reign of the Unconscious

Associated with the act of repression, the existence of the unconscious* is essentially postulated from its effects in referring anything that escapes the spontaneous consciousness in its reasoning and reflection. The Freudian invention, his “discovery”3 thus consists of the hypothesis of a psychic underneath that may be subject to thorough investigation and respond to a well-founded methodological protocol.4 By reinvesting this term—in its privative connotation—which had already existed since 1878,5 Freud was committed to giving it a new and radical direction. He had mentioned it in 1895, in ‘Sketch for a Scientific Psychology’,6 in order to characterize everything in the mind that stumbles and falters in a seemingly

Emile Durkheim, Suicide. A Study in Sociology, [1897], Snowball publishing, 2012, p. 258. The sociologist introduced the term ‘anomy’ in 1893 in The Division of Labour in Society, and he used it again in 1897 in his book, Suicide, to describe a social situation marked by a feeling of alienation and indeterminacy due to the loss of values. He then showed that the erosion of these prior values caused the weakening of the social order, which could induce an anomic suicide. 2 On the relationship between anomy and group violence, cf., Philippe Besnard, L’Anomie, Paris, PUF, 1987, p. 97 sq. 3 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI, New York, Norton, 1978, p. 25. The role of the unconscious is to overcome the simple objectivist approach to psychic facts through which traditional psychology limits itself, founding itself on a strict hypo-deductive logic. 4 This naturally concerns the protocol of the cure, cf., Jacques Lacan, ‘Variantes de la cure type’, in: E´crits 1, [1966], Paris, Seuil, 1999, pp. 322–361. 5 It was the German philosopher Theodor Lipps (1851–1914)—better known for his work on empathy—who introduced the concept of the unconscious in psychology. 6 This text was addressed to his friend Wilhelm Fliess and was not destined for publication, having been discovered in the Fliess archives after the death of the founder of psychoanalysis, cf., Sigmund Freud, Esquisse d’une psychologie scientifique, in: La Naissance de la psychanalyse, lettres a W. Fliess, (Sketch for Scientific Psychology, in: The Birth of Psychoanalysis—Letters to W. Fliess), trans., Paris, PUF, 1956.

2.1 The Risk of Anomy

incomprehensible way; that is, everything that breaks the continuity of an action or a form of behavior, or what produces a ‘causal gap’.7 In this regard, let us just recall the most blatant manifestations at the heart of daily life which can, in turn, take the form of dreams, slips of the tongue, missed or forgotten actions, or more generally, all compulsive symptoms. Therefore, it is understandable that ‘The ego is not master in its own house’,8 as Freud liked to say. With this hypothesis, Freud intends to circumscribe the existence of a psychic dimension which would remain inaccessible to the Cartesian cogito and would alone permit us to reach this psychological depth that called out to him. Moreover, in the continuation of his work, he will not cease to underline this structuration and its systematic articulations. Thus, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,9 he will show that the individual is always part of a network of social relations he incorporates psychically. To this extent he has hardly need to appeal to a supposed notion of collective unconscious that some have seen fit to advance.10 The above is completely tautological, insofar as the concept of the unconscious interlocks the individual and the social. What is more, it appears devoid of any heuristic interest and we will not bring it up again in the following discussion.11 In the same way, he will insist upon its dynamic dimension, as the psychic energy released by the drives is all the more powerful insofar as they have no other purpose than to express themselves unknown to the subject. From there, it is not surprising to see that these drives sometimes take detours, diversions and turn back via, we should say, regressions, repetitions, distortions and other compulsions. These different configurations express the fact that the unconscious appears at once as an instance of censorship, regulation and permissiveness. All these considerations explain why, when Jacques Lacan reconfigures this Freudian invention, he presents it as one of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.12

Joe¨l Dor, ‘L’inconscient’, in: Pierre Kaufmann (Ed.), L’Apport freudien, Paris, Bordas, 1993, p. 181. 8 Sigmund Freud, ‘Une difficulte´ de la psychanalyse’ [1917], in: Sigmund Freud, L’Inquie´tante e´trangete´ et autres essais, trans., Paris, Gallimard, 1985, p. 184. 9 Sigmund Freud underlined in this text such an interdependence between the social and the psychic dimensions, two faces of the same reality, that there is no way to ignore it. 10 It was Carl Gustav Jung—one of the first to collaborate with Sigmund Freud and from whom he split following theoretical divergence—who forged the concept of the collective unconscious: ‘I therefore presented the hypothesis that the unconscious is closed, meaning at its deep levels composed of collective material that is relatively alive and functioning, and it is in this way that I was brought to speak of a collective unconscious’, [1933], trans., Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 46. 11 In 1987, Norbert Elias deepened his theoretical position previously developed in 1939, cf. ‘Changes in the We-I Balance’. In this study, he clearly privileged his Freudian approach, notably when he defined the notion of social habitus, cf., Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals New York, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001, p. 137, 163. 12 However, he goes further again in considering the unconscious ‘structured like a language’, cf., Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. . . op. cit., p. 20 cf., and further again in the key text of Jacques Lacan, Position de l’inconscient, [1964], in: E´crits II, Paris, Seuil, nouvelle e´d., 1999, pp. 309–330. 7

2 The State’s Hold of the Psychic Economy

Why then would the reign of the unconscious be so deadly? Because its contents are made up of all the drives (Trieb),13 with their final stage, the death drive (Todestrieb). Therefore, a risk of structural drift can still lead to anomy; that is, to chaos, disorder and disintegration. In other words, it might resemble a government with a generalized license, to take the words of Montesquieu.14 Such a configuration would then lead to war and a social reality propitious to lawlessness and involving profound behavioral dysfunction.15

2.1.2

The War, a State Prerogative

If States are successful as guardians of behavioral norms within their national territory, this is quite different when they enter into war.16 But before imposing themselves on the international stage, conflicts—which simply result from the desire of each side to satisfy this or that drive—were made, at least in the Middle Ages, the object of very weak regulation: The ever-present threat was one which lay heavy on each individual. It affected one’s possessions and, indeed, one’s very life. [. . .] Finally violence, was an element in manners. Medieval men had little control over their immediate impulses; they were emotionally insensitive to the spectacle of pain, and they had small regard for human life, which they saw only as a transitory state before Eternity; moreover, they were very prone to make it a point of honor to display their physical strength in an almost animal way.17

In regard to this feud—this privatization of justice and of punishment, this private system of revenge between two warring families, two clans or two tribes—the question still remains controversial today. Indeed, some analysts see it as an assault, a simple disruption of the political order, while others take it, on the contrary, to be a real institution. However, all agree that feuds dominated the medieval period. When they occurred, the public authority did not consider punishment of the crimes and offenses committed against individuals and groups—who felt aggrieved—to be direct justice, beyond any authorization emanating from the

13 It would not be wrong to recall here the explanation offered by Jacques Lacan in the form of a firm warning against any risk of confusing its meaning: ‘The drive, as it is constructed by Freud, starting from the experience of the unconscious, forbids any psychologizing thought this recourse to instinct where is can hide its ignorance in the assumption of natural morality. The drive will never be brought under the obstinate control of the psychologist [. . .], the Freudian drive has nothing to do with instinct (and none of Freud’s terms allows such confusion)’ cf., Lacan, E´crits II, op. cit., p. 331. 14 In his writing, Montesquieu opposes the license to freedom, since the latter consisted in obeying the laws and conducting oneself as if these laws were understood in their strict limits. 15 During wars, there is a rise in crime, robbery, rape, looting and all forms of predation. 16 Freud, Essais. . . op. cit., p. 14 sq. 17 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, [1939], Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964, p. 432.

2.1 The Risk of Anomy

sovereign power. In taking up such a power to make war (belli gerendi potestas), they so rectified their own twisted grievances. These private warsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as they were designated by clericsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;were characterized by ceaseless conflicts and a total lack of discipline; every aggrieved man sought to enforce his personal rights of ownership or inheritance by force and with impunity. With regard to this logic of escalation at the origin of several centuries of uninterrupted violence, Bloch wrote that: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Middle Ages, from beginning to end, and particularly the feudal era, lived under the sign of private vengeance [. . .] blood thus called for blood, and interminable quarrels arising from often futile causes, set the hostile houses at each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s throatsâ&#x20AC;?.18 For their part, the jurists of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries determined the limits that the central power should establish in distinguishing itself from the wars conducted by Perfect States, those led by these private powers in the course of being marginalized. Their conflicts, as redefined private duelsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or assimilated even to the level of banditryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;became not only illegitimate, but illegal, and were punished as such. They were then subject to criminalization, as illustrated by Richelieuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s banning of duels. Similarly, any non-professional exercise of arms was linked to mercenaries, devalued and stigmatized, or qualified as a criminal act and outlawed.19 However, as Michael Howard has pointed out, the distinction between a private war of individuals and a public war embodied by the action of a sovereign power, only grew very slowly. Finally, it reached the time when the prohibitions took hold in the form of systems of law, then establishing themselves as social behavior. After Weber, Norbert Elias will then show in The Civilizing Process that a movement of monopolization allowed state actors to realize at this time a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;process of dispossessing the autonomous â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;private agents of administrative powerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;20 by stripping them of all the means of reaching an outcome via combat. Thus, it was such mercenaries who plundered the people of the countries conquered, carving out booty amongst themselves, while demanding large sums as the price of their services21; these military entrepreneurs were eventually decommissioned and ultimately criminalized. 18

Bloch, op. cit., pp. 132, 134â&#x20AC;&#x201C;135. In this regard, Michael Howard (War in European History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 18) points out that in France in the fifteenth century, the Hundred Years War produced companies of mercenaries, the scorchers who pillaged, raped and burned individually or in groups. In Italy and Germany, adventurersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;condottieriâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;recruited men, commanded them and offered their services to the highest bidder. We could cite, for example, the archetypal figure of Bartolomeo Colleoni, the famous condottiere immortalized by the sculptor Verrocchio, who served from 1454 in the Venetian Republic with the title of commander-in-chief (capitano generale). See also Lucien Bely, Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Art de la paix en Europe: Naissance de la diplomatie moderne XVIeâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;XVIIIe sie`cle, Paris, PUF, 2007, p. 14. 20 Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, Science as a Vocation, Politics as a Vocation, [1919], Cambridge (Mass), Hackett Publishing 2004. Electronic version, place n 2193. 21 As Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, one of the last and most illustrious condottiere (1583â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1634). A warrior of the Czech nobility, he placed himself at the service of the Empire 19

2 The State’s Hold of the Psychic Economy

Thus, in becoming holders of the ‘monopoly of legitimate physical violence’,22 State actors gradually transformed and redefined what was too often an anarchic violence into ‘reasonable employment of force, under the control of authorities recognized as legitimate’.23 This expropriation was accompanied by a profound rationalization of the military tool to the point where the evolution and consolidation of a central power—constituted itself as an invention of the State—put an end to these famous private wars. From the opposite perspective, the professionalization of soldiers, founded on harsh discipline, finished by substantially changing the course of wars. This finally made possible a mastery of movement, a mastery of the offensive and, even more significantly, a mastery of the self. The latter resulted from abnegation and, above all, submission to authority. It proved to be an essential counterpart to the proper functioning of armies and guaranteed their victories. In every phase of war, the pleasure principle—susceptible to being satisfied by each—thus found itself well and truly confiscated, brought under the control of and manipulated by a State which ‘demanded the utmost obedience and sacrifice of its citizens, but at the same time it treats them as children through an excess of secrecy and censorship of news of opinion’.24 In this Hobbesian configuration, the body of the State indeed emerged as the bulwark of the ‘war of every man against every man’.25 This was the only political space where regulations and exchanges were able to engage societies in this civilizing process so well emphasized by Elias. However, the whole question remained of knowing whether or not the State had the right to wage war. Although this was condemned in principle, the exception of a just war26 was immediately admitted. Although often attributed to St. Augustine, it was only formalized in the doctrinal corpus between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, thanks to Thomas Aquinas. Certainly, if it was explicitly stated that ‘war is always a sin’, he was also quick to justify it as follows:

during the Thirty Years War, becoming the generalissimo of imperial armies, under the Dukes of Friedland and Mecklenburg. 22 Weber, The Vocation Lectures, Science as a Vocation, Politics as a Vocation. . . op. cit., place 2110. 23 Howard, op. cit., 1988, p. 69. 24 Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death, [1915], New Orleans, Cornerstone Book Publishers, 2016, p. 14. 25 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme & Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, [1651], London, Andrew Crooke, at the Green Dragon in St. Pauls Church-yard, 2016, p. 79. The philosopher—who had studied Aristotle’s Politics carefully—is here opposed to the Aristotelian tradition. For him, man is sociable not by nature, but by accident and obligation. The state of nature is a Bellum omnium contra omnes. Of course, we should not see a description of any historical reality here, but a theoretical proposal. 26 Of Christian origin, this theory dates in fact from the Middle Ages, but it was already outlined in ancient times when Cicero—in the fashion of the Greek thinkers—questioned, for example, the legitimacy of the war and considered it just, that which was intended to restore the rule of law or to rectify an injustice.

2.1 The Risk of Anomy

In order for a war to be just, three things are required. First: the authority of the prince by whose command the war is to be waged. For it is not the business of a private individual to declare war, because he can seek for redress of his rights from the tribunal of his superior. [. . .] The care of the common weal is committed to those who are in authority, it is their business to watch over the common weal [. . .] the power to declare and counsel war should be in the hands of those who hold the supreme authority. Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault. [. . .] Thirdly, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil. [. . .] it may happen that the war is declared by the legitimate authority, and for a just cause, and yet be rendered unlawful through a wicked intention [. . .] The passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power, and such like things, all these are rightly condemned in war.27

Theologians, such as Francisco de Vitoria (1485–1546) or Francisco Sua´rez (1548–1617), also helped to establish this doctrine legitimizing the State’s use of force. By virtue of these prescriptions, any act of defense undertaken by a State in response to a war of aggression was recognized as legitimate once all peaceful options had been examined (ultima ratio regum). Thus, the war of just cause or Jus ad Bellum took shape. However, it is Grotius who carries this theory further in his De Jure belli ac pacis.28 He strives to limit the coercion existing between States.29 He also defines war as ‘a contending by force’,30 admitting that its constant potentiality, even to the extent of being a virtual necessity. He therefore searches for the justifications to legitimate its exercise. His ambition is actually to express the imperative of recta intentio ( just cause) in a set of legal principles. After setting aside the wars of conquest, naturally not covered by this logic, he takes stock of the rights—both public and private—that would authorize the use of arms.31 Like St. Thomas, he retains the concept of legitimate defense; it can be perpetuated as long as ‘injures’ have been made to the aggressed State and as long as it has not sought full recovery of ‘what belongs rightfully to it’. Ultimately, the Dutch jurist considers the legitimacy of coercive actions that should be taken against those responsible for the initial violence and within the limit of a ‘lawful devastation’.32 This is why Peter 27

Thomas of Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 40, Of War, Benziger Bros. edition, 1947. Electronic edition, cf.: http://urlz.fr/4chi 28 The book was published in 1625 in Paris where the author—compromised by the political and religious struggles of his country—had fled. It is dedicated to the King of France, Louis XIII, who granted him a pension, and whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau would not fail to denounce a century later in The Social Contract, cf. Rousseau, The Social Contract and other Later Political Writings, trans., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010. 29 Charles Edwards, ‘The Law of Nature in the Thought of Hugo Grotius’, The Journal of Politics, 32, 1970, pp. 784–807. 30 Hugo Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace [1625], Jazzybee Verlag, 2016, p. 23. 31 Steven Forde, ‘Hugo Grotius on Ethics and War’, American Political Science Review, 92 (3), Sept 1998, pp. 639–648. 32 Grotius, op. cit., Part III, chapter XII, entitled ‘Moderation in laying waste and similar things’, p. 394.

2 The State’s Hold of the Psychic Economy

Haggenmacher believes that ‘Grotius wanted to reaffirm the concept of jus belli in 1625 and nothing more’.33 In other words, we should see in this work ‘a general and exhaustive theory of legitimate violence’,34 establishing purely and simply the laws of war. Taking the maxim of St. Augustine, does not Grotius indeed conclude his treatise by expressing the hope that ‘peace should be accepted even at a loss [. . .] peace, whatever the terms on which it is made, ought to be preserved absolutely, on account of the sacredness of good faith’?35 It is precisely this logic that has been invoked again in recent years, allowing the doctrine of just war to undergo an important renewal.36 Indeed, it was fiercely debated during the invasion of Panama—named Operation Just Cause—in 1989 and again during the Gulf War.37 The latter was in response to the aggression of Kuwait in August 1990 by Iraqi troops, with the annexation of that country causing the occupier to declare it to be the ‘19th Iraqi province’.38 Here, the United Nations Security Council passed a first resolution condemning the occupation, then a new text organizing the military, commercial and financial boycott of Iraq. Finally, the Council adopted resolution 665 authorizing the use of military action to enforce the embargo*. It was thus under the auspices of the United Nations that the United States initiated Operation Desert Shield on January 16, 1991—a military intervention that involved 34 states until the cease-fire of March 3, 1991—before the conditions for peace were dictated to Iraq by the Western coalition.39 In summary, this international organization authorized the use of all necessary means—including force—to restore the sovereignty of an aggressed State. It put in place a coercive apparatus (dispositif) of enforcing a set of prohibitions forged and made sacred over the course of previous centuries.40

Peter Haggenmacher, Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste, Geneva, Institut Universitaire des Hautes E´tudes Internationales, Paris, PUF, 1983, p. 620. 34 Ibid., p. 626. 35 Grotius, op. cit., p. 465, p. 475. 36 This return of the strength of the concept of the just war has inspired the work of Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, New York, Basic Books, [1977], 3rd edition, 2000. 37 For a critical analysis of their media coverage, see Jonathan Mermin, ‘Conflict in the Sphere of Consensus? Critical Reporting on the Panama invasion and the Gulf War’, Political Communication, 13 (2), 1996, pp. 181–194. 38 Sebastiano Maffettone, ‘Guerre juste et intervention arme´e en Irak’, Raisons politiques, (30), May 2008, pp. 149–173. 39 Lavina Rajendram Lee, US Hegemony and International Legitimacy: Norms, Power and Followership in the Wars on Iraq, London, New York, Routledge, 2010; Alexander Thompson, Channels of Power: the UN Security Council and US Statecraft in Iraq, Ithaca, (N.Y.); London, Cornell University Press, 2009. 40 ‘Agora: The Gulf Crisis in International and Foreign Relations Law’, American Journal of International Law, 85 (1–3), Jan–Jul 1991, pp. 63–109; pp. 506–535.

2.1 The Risk of Anomy

2.1.3

The Respect for Prohibitions in Laws of War

With this concept of just war, war was therefore judged to be licit because its motives were declared legitimate and legal in intent. Over time, murderous wars— led by lawless mercenaries capable of perpetrating massacres or capturing men for the sole purpose of extracting a ransom—have given way to warriors’ wars obeying strict rules to regulate them.41 In this historical phase opening the modern era, the State actor pretends to be producer, guarantor and guardian of standards that will gradually codify inter-state conflicts, strengthen social cohesion and help society to escape from anomy. Indeed, the laws of war that are gradually put in place can be analyzed as an outcome, the consecration of a set of prohibitions and of rules.42 Thus, these principles were aimed at channeling violent conduct and, once again, stemming the death drive. Connected to the process of construction and the autonomization of the State, the first prescriptions—which consecrated certain taboos*—were enacted in religious form. For example, areas where the provision of salvation or the peace of God was sought, where institutions incontestably advanced to offer immunity to non-combatants, such as peasants or churchmen. Similarly, the truce of God appeared in the eleventh century, prohibiting any widespread and indiscriminate violence.43 These provisions were codified in the sixteenth century by Grotius. This lawyer was the first to provide a secularized version of the law.44 The means of initiating a conflict were then gradually regulated by institutionalizing the principle of war and thus conferring upon it a real status.45 The first founding rule concerned casus belli: hostilities must be declared and carried out by a legitimate prince, the warrior arm of God and instrument of the divine will. This principle permitted professional soldiers to be exempted from any responsibility. Military obligations were then established towards civilians and vice versa. The means of combat were specified, while qualifying some of them as

To understand this evolution well, John Rigby Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450–1620, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1985; cf., equally, Fernand Braudel, La Me´dite´rrane´e et le monde me´diterrane´en a l’e´poque de Philippe II, vol. 3, Paris, Armand Colin, 1990 (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Reign of Philip II). 42 Olivier Corten, Le Droit contre la guerre: l’interdiction du recours a la force en droit international contemporain, (The Law against War: Prevention of Recourse to Force in Modern International Law), Paris, Pe´done, 2008. 43 Violence is prohibited from Saturday evening to Monday morning and during certain Christian holidays, such as Christmas Day, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, or the day of the virgin and certain saints’ days. 44 In the keynote speech of his book, he asserts that the rights of the people can be constructed, even if God were not to exist. Indeed, for the coroner, the law of war is not God’s business, but only that of States. 45 On all these points, cf., Adam Watson, Hegemony & History, London, Routledge, 2007, particularly the chapter Justice between States, pp. 38–43.

2 The State’s Hold of the Psychic Economy

dishonorable—such as treacherous ambushes—with the aim of using codes of good practice to settle belligerent conduct. Certainly, if the means of waging war effectively incorporated tricks and surprise attacks, they still differed from treachery and the false use of truce signals. As for espionage, it was simply condemned. Similarly, the rights of the hostages, ambassadors, officials, fighters and prisoners were outlined. Finally, the conditions of truce were specified along with the purpose of the treaties, such as how to stop the war or make peace. These measures notably included establishing how better to protect the occupied territories and their population. Thus, treaties of contribution made provisions, for example, for supplying occupying troops with what they needed to complete their mission, where it was strictly forbidden to loot. With regard to the defeated, they had to be respected and the confiscation of their property had to be limited, as ‘no more harm should be inflicted than what was permitted’. This imperative would later be found elsewhere, in the notion of just proportionality presented in the Hague Convention, adopted in 1907.46 It also figured in the document prohibiting the killing of civilians, the rape of women, the use of poisoned weapons and poisoned gas, as well as the burning of crops. Thus, what was clearly targeted in these provisions would later be called crimes against humanity*. In the nineteenth century, these efforts to humanize wars were multiplied and every means was sought to manage and soften, if not curb, warlike practices. Hostilities were thus formed part of an increasingly strict and binding ritual. In fact, rather than launch themselves into the heat of battle, so invalidating all rational forecasts and evaluations, States would recall their ambassadors in a fit of belligerency, even in defiance of the logic of the situation. After, they would embark on a partial, then more general mobilization, addressing an ultimatum to their enemy within a specific time limit. All these measures sought to do their utmost to prevent war. We should note here that facing Nazi Germany in 1939, France and the United Kingdom stayed faithful to this modus operandi.47 It was the same for the reconstruction of peace: parties to the conflict laid down the conditions for the cessation of combat. Military leaders and diplomats then entered into negotiation. Once the armistice was established, they convened a conference to prepare the peace treaty, which was then signed and ratified, leaving only the restoration of diplomatic relations between the former enemies. The enactment of prohibitions was equally accompanied by a work of requalification. So it appeared to be just a matter of rational, reasoned and reasonable commitments working for the reduction of conflict or even placing it 46 Article 22 stipulates that: ‘The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited’, cf., The Hague Convention (II) of 1907 Respecting the Limitation of the Employment of Force for the Recovery of Contract Debts/International Peace Conference, Washington, DC: The Endowment, 1915, 1 vol. (IV–7 p.); Collection Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Division of International Law. Pamphlet Series (11). 47 Maurice Beaumont, La Faillite de la paix, de l’affaire e´thiopienne a la guerre (1936–1939), Paris, PUF, 1968, pp. 845–847.

2.2 The Emergence of the Civilizing Process

out of law as was the case in 1929 with the Kellogg-Briand Pact.48 Over time, social actors have come to respect these measures on penalty of being sanctioned. Better again, they had to learn to live in worship of these sanctified prohibitions in order to incorporate them into their own psychic economy. As a set of mandatory norms, Jus cogens, which had the objective of limiting the absolute power of the State,49 if not exceeding it in the name of values considered universal, fits into this logic of sacralization. Described by Georges Scelle as international common law, it lies in the field of superlegality.50 Certainly, the recent establishment of an ICC (International Criminal Court) with supranational power symbolizes, in some ways, this international institutionalization. Yet if it concerns both individual liberties, the right to life, personal liberty, freedom of movement and all human rights, it remains to this day vaguely defined by Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.51 The normative and State straitjacket that has progressively bound societies, has allowed them to channel their violence and escape the risk of anomy. For all that, the emergence of a civilizing process has gone much further than only applying the instruments perceived to be exclusively binding.

2.2

The Emergence of the Civilizing Process

In studying the sociopolitical evolution of the Renaissance, Elias demonstrated that it took place less through a transformation of the economic infrastructure than through a process of rationalization affecting general social attitudes and the entire social system.52 To this end, he was immediately concerned with the different national representations of the term civilization, returning in particular to the opposition between the French conception and the German tradition. The first, he says, erases the specific characteristics among people, emphasizing what is common to them and finally inducing in them ‘something which is constantly in motion, constantly moving “forward”’.53 In contrast, the second appears more limited

48 On the intellectual origins of this pacte cf., Josepha Laroche, ‘Une repre´sentation ame´ricaine de la paix: l’actualite´ de Nicholas Murray Butler’, Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique, (1), 1993, pp. 5–24. 49 Ulf Linderfalk, ‘The Effect of Jus Cogens Norms: Whoever Opened Pandora’s Box, did you ever Think about the Consequences?’, European Journal of International Law, 8 (5), Nov. 2007, pp. 853–871. 50 Georges Scelle, Pre´cis de droit des gens: Principes et syste´matique, 2, Droit constitutionnel international, [1934], Paris, Dalloz-Sirey, 2008. 51 To consult the text of the Vienna Convention and for a critical analysis, cf., Paul Reuter, La Convention de Vienne du 29 mai 1969 sur le droit des traite´s, Paris, Armand Colin, 1970. 52 Catherine Colliot-The´le`ne, ‘Le concept de rationalisation de Max Weber a Norbert Elias’, in: Garrigou, Lacroix, op. cit., pp. 52–74. 53 Elias, The Civilizing Process. . . op. cit., p. 6.

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because it systematically favors the particularity of groups and their isolation. Nevertheless, how should we explain the genesis of two meanings so antithetical, if not by a differentiated relationship through which societies would maintain their politics? Consequently, in order to check that this hypothesis was well-founded, Elias built a framework of analysis that narrowly associated the socio-genesis of the State with the psychogenesis of the individual. He then showed that the centralization of the State has resulted in the domestication of drives and the euphemization of individual violence based on self-constraint at every moment.54 The slow substitution of rational behavior for a disposition of the drives testifies to the placing of the pleasure principle under effective control, a prerequisite for being able to engage in a civilizing process; the development of the latter involving a regression to the state of nature*. In this regard, the above will decline even more, better to emerge even stronger during the course of the subsequent centuries in the form of the law of nations ( jus gentium)*,55 based on the principle of otherness. Finally, a number of drives which were, initially, unacceptable aspirations will find themselves converted into pacifying measures, socially recognized and highly valued, contributing to a sublimation* of international relations. Thus, we may notice in these different paths that the political sociology of emotions and affects returns to the observations advanced by Freud when he € wrote that ‘The super-ego of any given epoch of civilization (Kultur-Uberich) 56 originates in the same way as that of an individual’.

2.2.1

The Self-Control of the Drives and Emotions

Civilization—defined as the government of conducts and refined behaviors—has managed to triumph over barbarism, Elias tells us, because it has been imposed in every form of State control over the psychic economy of individuals. More precisely, the political control of drives has taken the form of self-control. Indeed, the German sociologist demonstrates that, over the centuries, this mastery has forced each of us to repress drives once they were no longer seen as socially acceptable. In spite of this process of socialization, any individual decision to express these drives would come at an exorbitant cost in terms of social integration, image and reputation. This historic move may be synthesized in the following motto, notes Elias: ‘“Thing is somtyme allowed is now repreuid”. Erasmus and his contemporaries were still permitted to speak about things, functions, and ways of behaving that one

Elias, Ibid., p. 379 sq. Slim Laghmani, Histoire du droit des gens: du jus gentium impe´rial au jus publicum europaeum, Paris, Pedone, 2004. 56 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, [1932], trans., Mansfield Centre, Conn., Martino Publishing, 2010, p. 136. 55

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or two centuries later were overlaid with feelings of shame and embarrassment, and whose public exposure or mention were proscribed in society’.57 From the sixteenth century, these behavioral treatises and manuals of etiquette dealing with the concept of civilite´, bore witness to the whole of this conditioning, by prescribing changes of habit, defining new rules of behavior and imposing a number of social taboos. In this regard, the little treatise of civilitate morum puerilium (‘On Civility in Boys’) of Erasmus—which has enjoyed an exceptional circulation attested to by the existence of numerous editions—remains the point of reference par excellence. As stated vehemently and in great detail by the Dutch humanist, it becomes, for instance, forbidden to anyone who lives in society to urinate or defecate in public, spitting,58 blowing his nose on the napkin, plunging his fingers into his food,59 or exhibiting his secretions, moods and emotions. Nonetheless, in the previous century so many of these social practices had been quite tolerated and, for some, accepted or even valued. But all the animality that remained in the human was systematically repressed, reprimanded and relegated to specific places and hidden, as well as body odor, nudity or even secretions and excretions of every variety.60 From this moment on, all these forms of expression would now be stigmatized or prohibited, with those contravening them doing so at the risk of being socially excluded and sometimes even put to death. On this last point, the prohibition of the duel remains one of the most edifying symbols of this pacification of mores that goes from State coercion to self-constraint. Indeed, until then this type of combat had symbolized personal freedom and the exclusive domain of the aristocracy before becoming, by extension, that of other social strata. As Elias notes, ‘dueling at this time and long after had the character of an enclave that nobles and, later, other classes reserved for themselves within the State—often in defiance of the king or other authorities—as a symbol of individual freedom as understood in the framework of the warrior tradition, that is the freedom to wound or kill each other if they were so inclined’,61 each being left to master his drives and emotions whatsoever they may be and irrespective of the violence, often extreme, that resulted. However, the strengthening of State control would gradually prevent Elias, The Civilizing Process. . ., op. cit., p. 71. ‘Spit after turning the head, so as not to defile or sprinkle anyone. If any dirt falls to the ground, you must crush it with the foot, so that it does not disgust anyone. If this is not possible, use a tissue [. . .] do not dig into the dish but take the first piece in front of you’ cf. Ibid., pp. 94, 96. 59 This was the case a fortiori, in the eighteenth century. For the French historian, Jean-Marc Albert: ‘The table requires restraint in gestures and conversation’, this century was characterized by a dominating movement ‘to train the body by codified gestures in order to curb the animal within man and force him to carry himself correctly [. . .] the aim of table manners is to teach civilized habits as much as it is to erase the trivial reality of the act of eating’, cf., Aux Tables du pouvoir, des banquets grecs a l’Elyse´e, Paris, Armand Colin, 2009, p. 130. 60 In France, it was the edict of November 1539 that established the rules of cleanliness, forbidding dirtiness ‘to vacate or throw away in streets and squares [. . .] waste, tailings, infections, or water of any kind [. . .] urine, stagnant or corrupted water’ cited by Dominique Laporte, Histoire de la merde, [1978], Paris, La De´couverte, 2003, p. 11. 61 Norbert Elias, The Court Society, Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2006, p. 257. 57 58

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any further toleration of such behavior. For example, Richelieu did not hesitate to order the execution of two duelists, both members of the nobility, in order to stop the wave of duels and to mark with blood the State’s monopoly. Elias concludes that ‘restraint had to be practised. Anger and hostility could no longer be given free rein’.62 Social control therefore became narrower and the pressure stronger on every individual; that is the reason why it never went as far as to express the individual’s feelings. This logic could go as far as the negation of the self, as Pascal showed when he wrote the famous aphorism ‘le moi est haı¨ssable’ (the ego is hateful).63 Such a civilizing process then went through a deep restructuring of personalities which led to extreme self-control, particularly in its more aggressive manifestations. This self-control caused a distancing faced with the most emotionally charged situations. On this theme, many publications indicated the art of not expressing any emotion outwardly, or indeed to feign or to conceal the true self. We think here, of course, particularly of the writings of Machiavelli and later those of Balthazar Gracian or the Memoirs of Saint-Simon.64 Better still, indifference became the paragon of this new social code, removing individuals from everything natural while nature was assimilated to savagery. Suffice to say that such techniques suppressed emotions and affects which no longer had a place in society assigned to them. Elias showed that everything in this historical turning point was due to the process of courtisation of warriors.65 Indeed, the nobility was forced to adapt to a new ethos based on refinement, the control of drives and the euphemization of violence. This domestication resulted in the renunciation of the independence of one’s military power and arts before giving way to public speaking, verbal jousting, rhetoric or even persuasion. This obligation actually dispossessed and even politically annihilated the nobles, forcing them to depend solely on the king and condemning them to live at his court where constraints weighed so heavily that ‘even if the cage were open it would be impossible to escape; for the ties holding the courtier prisoner in the great world are a part of himself’.66 From then on, to maintain his position in the pecking order, ‘to keep one’s place in the intense competition for importance at court, to avoid being exposed to scorn, contempt, and loss of prestige’,67 the noble courtier did not cease to adjust to the role assigned to him or to which he aspired. He must constantly meet—until the point of exhaustion—the royal requirements because ‘this il faut that increasingly embraced 62

Ibid. Pascal, Pense´es, [1670], in: Œuvres comple`tes, Paris, Gallimard, 1954, p. 1126. 64 Machiavelli notably wrote: ‘Everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are; and these few dare not oppose the opinion of many’, cf., The Prince, [1513], Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 71; Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, [1647], trans., Danvers, (MA), Crown Business, 1991; and also, Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon on the Times of Louis XIV, and the Regency, vol. 1, 2, 3, 4, [1691–1723], Palala Press, 2016. 65 Elias, The Court Society. . . op. cit., p. 230 sq. 66 Ibid., p. 245. 67 Ibid., p. 248. 63

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the whole life of people at court reveals very vividly both the mechanism and the intensity of the constraint to which the people congregating at the court were subjected’.68 This State policy, aiming principally to discipline behavior, also took the form of a work of language standardization. In the France of the sixteenth century, the Pleiades Group, for example, took upon itself the task of purifying expressions; the language of the court becoming refined and distinguished or valuable even to the point of caricature. This courtly society thus fostered a reflexive approach.69 Impulses were, in effect, given free rein, although self-control gradually gained ground in terms of engendering more and more decency amongst individuals, expressed in the great ‘dryness of words’70 and sometimes even going as far as to install silence. Completing this slow process of self-control and the transformation of sensitivities, a release under control of the emotions was permitted, thanks to sport.71 Certainly, sport releases many affects and aggressive drives, but in a narrow context where violence remains contained and limited in a well-defined space-time. This is why Elias locates this activity in a sphere where the emotional economy has been submitted to what he calls sportification, forming as such a constitutive part of this civilizing process in progress. But if the latter performs well on a micro scale, it also makes itself apparent on the macro level with the emergence of the law by which States confirmed the principle of otherness in the political order.

2.2.2

The Alterity from the Law of Nations

Often referred to as the Constitutional Charter of Europe, the treaties of Westphalia were certainly consecrated in 1648 with the double defeat of the Emperor and the Pope.72 Yet, their fundamental role was to establish legal relations between State entities who agreed to recognize an alterity that their violence had hitherto denied.

Ibid., p. 249. Self-reflection (beginning long before Montaigne, for whom the ego had become the privileged object, as he declared in his essays: ‘I dare not only to speak of the ego but will speak only of the ego’, Michel de Montaigne, Essays, (II, VIII, the Art of Giving) and the examination of conscience, the inner portrait, resulted, over time, in writing a private forum. Memoirs, journals or books accounted for privileged spaces where intimacy was finally given up. These narrative forms are nonetheless very different, cf., Madeleine Foisil, ‘L’E´criture du for prive´’, in: Philippe Arie`s, Georges Duby (Eds.), Histoire de la vie prive´e, de la Renaissance aux Lumie`res, Paris, Seuil, 1986, pp. 331–369. 70 Ibid., p. 367. 71 Norbert Elias, Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process, 2nd Revised ed., Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2008. 72 Two treaties—Münster and Osnabrück—were signed bilaterally because, at the time, the technique of multilateral treaties was unknown. 69

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For the first time, States posed the question of the same and the other in the history of international relations, both psychologically and socially.73 Indeed, by formalizing a new political map of Europe, these agreements institutionalized the emergence of sovereign States. At the same time, they laid the first foundations of European public law, as a harbinger of international public law.74 The customary rules, hitherto piecemeal and scattered, were now the basis of the law of nations that gradually took the form of a set of standards whose consistency helped to support inter-statism. In such a case, sovereignty was defined as one: indivisible, perpetual and therefore recognized as a component of State power. In the future, these political actors would no longer accept in their mutual relations any limits other than those arising from their sole sovereign decision. Nevertheless, in relying on the rule of pacta sunt servanda—keeping one’s word— they intended to honor the agreements they had previously established and which bound one to another.75 Thus, it appears that the objective of power they pursued could equally be attained by peaceful means, such as negotiation.76 In this case, it was not a process of instinctual repression, but rather a rational letting-go, after which the death drive was, for a while, confined and under control. It was a beam of prohibitions and rules which were more stringent. From then on, it formed the law of nations and conferred its strength and legitimacy. Such a movement showed that governments sought to free themselves from violent eruptions which sometimes threatened the very existence of States. This chaotic situation left room for ‘a curious mix of ignorance and recognition of alterity’.77 Recognized and institutionalized through a body of standards, it then opened the way for a form of interstate solidarity. Finally, from the outset, this linking of commitment and interdependence was certainly based on rational calculation but, for the rulers concerned, just as much on accounting on the appearance of external dangers. In effect, this logic of the situation led to the policing and pacifying of their conduct, civilizing once again the politics with which State powers persisted. In other words, the reality principle eventually ended up prevailing over the pleasure principle, with this potentially death-dealing power, serving to govern men over a time. In this civilizing process involving the concerted denial of States of the most destructive drives, it is clear that the doctrine has played a quite decisive role.78 What the psychoanalyst Marie Moscovici called in a very suggestive way, the ‘sameness’, cf., Le Meurtre et la langue Paris, Me´tailie´, 2002, p. 189. 74 Hedley Bull, Adam Watson (Eds.), The Expansion of International Society, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984. 75 In international law, it was then Article 26 of the Vienna Convention of 1969 and dedicated to the Pacta sunt servanda principle which stated: ‘Every treaty in force is binding upon the parties to it and must be performed by them in good faith’. 76 William Zartman (Ed.), Peacemaking in International Conflict: Methods and Techniques, Rev. ed., Washington (DC): United States Institute of Peace, 2007. 77 Jacques Are`nes, Souci de soi, oubli de soi, Paris, Bayard, 2002, p. 130. 78 Michel Villey, La Formation de la pense´e juridique moderne, Paris, PUF, 2003, p. 338 sq. 73

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Chief among the latter, it should be mentioned that with De jure belli ac pacis (1625), Grotius established more acutely than his predecessors—mainly Vitoria and Suarez—that States should now avoid confrontation and even avoid ignoring each other. On the contrary, he showed that it was the case of accepting a common need for a normative construction limiting their power. Therefore, the jurist acknowledged the existence of sovereign entities. But he considered them as inextricably linked to each other by a Law of Nations, derived from natural law and consequently imposing itself as such. For him, such a device should be governed by the force of law as a higher entity that transcending them. However, the juridification of such innovation actually amounted to the creation of a specific mechanism for the development of binding rules.79 The time during which State actors agreed to limit their power and to frame their fighting spirit, corresponds to that in which the foundations of the law of nations were laid ( jus gentium). Far from being a fortuitous coincidence this shows, in the future, that States would construct interactions in otherness. This instinctual repression of micro-macro measures was, at the same time, accompanied by a homogenizing rhetoric that has continued to emphasize what brought communities together then finishing by uniting them. We should not be surprised that, from then on, the sublimated idea of an international society—or a community—might take shape in the imaginary with such an impact. Little wonder that this notion became a naturalized representation—a real unthought—whose incessant evocation today demonstrates its success.

2.2.3

The Sublimation of International Relations

From the sixteenth century, authors like Sully (E´conomies royales, 1572–1595) or Cruce´ (Le Nouveau Cyne´e, 1623) laid down plans for organizing international relations, which assumed a limitation of the sovereignty of States and aimed to build an international society.80 This term was not an anodyne one insofar as it supposed, from the outset, that it might be created as a homogeneous entity, in solidarity, united by the same interests and the same values while deploying the same practices. Historically, this inclusive notion arose primarily in relation to armed conflict and based on the dialectic of peace/war. It reflected at once a desire for peace and the need for States to recognize an increasingly strong interdependence. Furthermore, they intended to frame and manage this interdependence in law. It also For him, States should consent liberally to them because ‘certain laws thus originating had in view the advantage, not of particular states, but of the great society of states. And this is what is called the volitional law of nations, whenever we distinguish that term from the law of nature’, Grotius, op. cit., pp. 5–6. 80 Christian Lange, Histoire de l’internationalisme, Volume 1, Kristiana, Aschebourg, 1919, pp. 406 sq. Available on the Internet: http://urlz.fr/4hAK 79

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showed a will to erect mankind into a political category. At first glance, it would seem nevertheless to be just a question of a fiction, a ‘veritable moral entelechy’81 advanced by philosophers like Erasmus, the Abbot Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, Kant, or even later in its political translation, the American President, Woodrow Wilson. In their time, each expressed the hope that such an organization would raise to a global level the idea of peaceful communities. In the mind of these clerics, it was hence a matter of putting in place the peaceful ordering of the world. Thus, the humanist Erasmus—who was one of the first to develop an irenic and cosmopolitan position—writes in the Querela Pacis (Treatise on War, 1517). Accordingly to his view, war is simply, ‘sweet to those that know it not’.82 War, what other thing else is it than a common manslaughter of many men together, and a robbery, the which, the farther is sprawleth abroad, the more mischievous it is?83

He refuses to resign himself to this ‘wicked thing’ that sounds like a challenge to reason and an affront to Christianity.84 From his perspective, ‘war suddenly and at once overthroweth, destroyeth, and utterly for-doeth everything that is pleasant and fair, and bringeth in among men a monster of all mischievous things’. On the contrary, only ‘peace is the mother and nurse of all good things’85 and that is the reason why it can lead to prosperity. He so exclaims that: What evil spirit, what pestilence, what mischief, and what madness put first in man’s mind a thing so beyond measure beastly, that the most pleasant and reasonable creature Man, the which Nature hath brought forth to peace and benevolence, which one alone she hath brought forth to the help and succour of all other, should with so wild wilfulness, with so mad rages, run headlong one to destroy another?86

For him, the warrior’s violence will never respond to any “necessity” but will only be the result of passions like anger and the search for glory, ambition or even greed. Furthermore, he imagined that it would appear as a good deal for some. But, in his view this constituted a major error in understanding to the extent that the winner would suffer ultimately as much as the vanquished.87 Considering that ‘if the love of one singular person with one another be so sweet and delectable, how great should the felicity be if realm with realm, and nation with nation, were

81 Francis Chateauraynaud, ‘Une ente´lećhie d’apre`s la guerre froide Note sur les modes d’existence de la communaute´ internationale’, EHESS, Jul 2002, p. 4. 82 Erasmus, Against War, [1517], Boston, Aeterna Press, 2014, p. 14. 83 Ibid., p. 24. 84 Ibid.; León-Ernest Halkin, E´rasme et l’humanisme chre´tien, Paris, Ed., universitaires, 1969, pp. 90–91; León-Ernest Halkin, E´rasme, Paris, Fayard, 1987, pp. 147–151. 85 Erasmus, Against War, op. cit., p. 25. 86 Erasmus, op. cit., p. 15. 87 In other words, we are at odds here with the theory of zero-sum game that was developed nowadays in strategic matters, notably by Schelling (cf. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1990), following which the loss suffered by a player is equivalent to the gain of his opponent.

2.2 The Emergence of the Civilizing Process

coupled together, with the band of amity and love?’,88 Erasmus then suggested ways to build this international society that he had called for. He therefore recommended the use of arbitration and the more definitive fixing of State borders because ‘war should be by all means and ways fled and eschewed’.89 In the eighteenth century, peace projects multiplied considerably, sometimes placed in competition one with each other by the academies of the day. With A Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe (Projet pour rendre la paix perpe´ tuelle en Europe), which was published in 1713, Abbe´ de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743) departed from the terrain of simple moral exhortation and religious concern on which Erasmus still stood. On the contrary, he intended to develop a highly political model based on the principle of collective security and the sovereignty of law. He planned accordingly to create a European League provided with an intervention force destined to enforce a peaceful alliance in Europe so that to ‘give birth to an effective Power, capable of forcing any ambitious ruler to observe the terms of the general League which he has joined with others to set up’.90 Following this, he was convinced with ‘absolute certainty that all disputes, present and future will always be settled without war’.91 Naturally, we would rightly emphasize, that this thesis was still narrowly restricted to European countries that renounced war.92 It thus lacked a global dimension which would, nonetheless, be present with his successors. In 1761, when he returns to this work to comment upon it, Rousseau sees ‘a work of solid judgment’, but also, in some ways, ‘an empty dream’93 in which the author ‘fairly supposed that nothing was needed but to convoke a Congress and lay the Articles before it; that they would be signed directly and all be over on the spot’.94 He adds: Let us not say, then, that if his system has not been adopted, that is because it was not good. Let us rather say that it was too good to be adopted. Evils and abuses, by which so many men profit, come in of themselves. Things of public utility, on the other hand, are seldom brought in but by force, for the simple reason that private interests are almost always range against them. [. . .] while we admire so fair a project, let us console ourselves for its failure.95

Erasmus, op. cit., p. 25. Erasmus, Ibid., p. 40. 90 Abbe´ de Saint-Pierre, A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe; and The State of War, London, Constable, 1917, p. 58. 91 Ibid., p. 88. 92 This corresponds to the historical reality of the era that Watson qualifies as the ‘Collective European hegemony’, Hegemony & History, op. cit. p. 107. 93 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe; and The State of War, Primary Source, [1761], London, 1917, Nabu Public Domain Reprint, p. 93. 94 Rousseau, op. cit., p. 102. 95 Ibid., p. 111. 89

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As a result, in considering this project idealistic, Rousseau refuses to distinguish international from national dimensions of politics and considers it a process that leads to wars, stems from the same logic as that of despotism. In other words, whatever the forms adopted, it is the dark passions and the destructiveness that men carry in them which cause extreme violence. Therefore, can we reasonably consider building an international society that would institutionalize a movement of pacification throughout the world? It is doubtful whether sovereign States would renounce a priori the use of force in defense of their rights. From this gloomy and disenchanted vision, he shows that the micro and macro dimensions are inseparable. He concludes that only a coercive force might lead States to pacify their interactions because ‘it could only have been carried out by violent means from which humanity must needs shrink’.96 With less skepticism and more conceptual systematization, Kant then notes that the devastation caused by wars nonetheless leads States to seek ways to end this situation of extreme violence. He recalls how they are already engaged in a civilizing process by agreeing on common laws that regulate their relations. However, to go beyond this first step, it is appropriate that the law of nations ( jus gentium) from then on became the foundation of a League of Nations (V€ olkerbund). Consequently, the German philosopher advocated the globalization of the best political constitution in order to create a universal cosmopolitan State that would then ensure the necessary end of a state of international violence and so establish world peace. At first glance, such a view seems merely to be utopian. Nevertheless, anxious to counter such a reproach, Kant presents several very concrete proposals from the first lines of his essay on Perpetual Peace (1795).97 He hence raises six categorical imperatives, as six of his own principles to prohibit certain practices: (1) the prohibition of any peace treaty that would include a secret clause. This transparency requirement is considered, in itself, a guarantee of peace. (2) Defense of any private appropriation of the public sphere because the latter represents a common good. (3) Limitation of the arms race. (4) Refusal of any national debt to increase the potential for war because it would lead to a de facto economic and financial threat to international stability. (5) Respect for non-interference in the internal affairs of States and the self-determination of nations. (6) Condemnation of any recourse to perfidious means that would engender war crimes.98 Present through the course of these ‘preliminary Articles’ is a condemnation of all forms of war: the war of conquest or annexation, the war of aggression, preventive wars, the punitive war, the war of extermination and the just war to 96 Ibid., p. 112. To put into perspective these considerations, cf., Alexis Philonenko, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la pense´e du malheur, Paris, Vrin, 1984. cf., equally Victor Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique, Les principes du syste`me Rousseau, Paris, Vrin, 1983, pp. 567–632. 97 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace. A World State Philosophical Essay, [1795], London, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016. 98 This is reminiscence of the Plan for Universal Peace published in 1789 by Jeremy Bentham, based on the simultaneous disarmament and the establishment of an arbitration tribunal with an international police force.

2.2 The Emergence of the Civilizing Process

which Kant finally finds no possible justification. Hence, it is the very idea of war that he comes to proscribe.99 To escape this state of nature par excellence, it is necessary to enter into a legal state. In other words, it is necessary to replace power interactions with legal and contractual relations worldwide. According to this logic, the people must unite in a “World State” (Weltstaat, Weltrepublik), as a kind of a voluntary federation of free, sovereign and equal States.100 In this case, there is no question of a world super-State, or more, of a universal empire that would erase the uniqueness and diversity of its components. Finally, according to his work, ‘the law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free States’,101 which would necessarily realize a perpetual peace (Friedens-und V€ olkerbund). One might protest that Kant has little concern for the conditions of the effective realization of such a society, insofar as he hardly considers the integration process between States that are very attached to their sovereignty. It is true that peace through law singularly lacked historical roots and remains based on a belief in the finality of history. However, it was a sufficiently strong source of inspiration that the academic and Democratic Governor Woodrow Wilson did not cease—once elected president of the United States—to carry to the baptismal font the League of Nations (V€ olkerbund), that the philosopher from K€onigsberg had called for.102 As it so happens, we must identify in these different projects for an international society, the desire to see a well-tempered triumph of inter-statism where each actor’s behavior would necessarily be taken into account with the calculation of the other actors involved. Such a construction then entails that States will strive to establish a concerted regime of common rules and institutions; a system of recognition that they had an interest in maintaining, with the idea of international order mingled with that of international society and even international community. Nowadays, depending on the context and the actors, the above designation refers to different entities. Suffice to say that this usage is of a certain interest—especially in diplomatic negotiations—because its vagueness allows one to reconcile divergent views and reach more easily compromised positions. The very conceptual inconsistency even plays like an instrument of pacification. Indeed, this vague term has entered common language because the political leaders, international

Alexis Philonenko, Essai sur la philosophie de la guerre, Paris, Vrin, 1988, pp. 29–50. Simone Goyard-Fabre ‘Kant et l’ide´e de ‘Socie´te´ des Nations’’, Revue canadienne de philosophie, (21), 1982, pp. 693–712. 101 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace. . . op cit., p. 37. Institut international de philosophie politique Eric Weil, Theodore Ruyssen, Michel Villey (Eds.), La Philosophie politique de Kant, Paris, PUF, 1962. 102 Theodore Ruyssen, ‘Les origines kantiennes de la Socie´te´ des Nations’, Revue de me´taphysique et de morale, 31 (2), 1924, pp. 355–371. Freud and Bullitt wrote on this matter: ‘On February 14, 1919 [. . .], just before his departure for America he read to a plenary session of the Peace Conference the Covenant of the League of Nations. He was a very happy man. He was sure that the Covenant meant lasting peace for the whole world. [. . .] He believed that the mere existence of the piece of paper he held in his hands established the Brotherhood of Man. He had given peace to the world’. Freud, Bullitt, Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study. . . op. cit., p. 212. 100

2 The State’s Hold of the Psychic Economy

organizations leaders and the media constantly resort to it in describing the actors on the international scene. In loose terms, it refers equally—despite their heterogeneity—to all member States of the United Nations or to public and private actors. In other contexts, it is simply labelled the G8 or G20, or—and this is equally vague—a grouping of developed countries. At other times, it may evoke, more narrowly still, the UN Security Council or just its permanent members. Nonetheless, international politics is now characterized by several cleavages (North/South, South/South, legal/authoritarian States, etc.). They are determined by major socio-economic disparities and large dissimilarities between actors on the international stage (undeveloped/developed countries).103 Yet the violence caused by this state of the world remains so unequal and divided, so devoid of redistributive justice in its overall content. In fact, this is due in large part to the ongoing dialogue that continues to be maintained by diplomats. This diplomatic framing of violence they inaugurated several centuries ago has undoubtedly been a major historical turning point, one that we must now deal with.

Patrick Artus, Marie-Paule Virard, Globalisation, le pire est a venir: ine´galite´s croissantes, gaspillage des ressources, spe´culation financie`re, course absurde aux profits et implosion de l’Europe, Paris, La De´couverte, 2008.

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Chapter 3

A Diplomatic Framing of Violence

Throughout the Middle Ages, Europe was the theatre of constant wars. However, from the sixteenth century, States adopted diplomatic rules which were gradually imposed and codified in their relationships. We will now look at this framing to show how it has contributed to prescribing and pacifying the international order. At the individual level, as Erving Goffman has shown, this has resulted in significant behavioral constraints; the objective being to avoid at all costs the ‘breaking frame’.1 Thus, violence was reduced and channelled before being progressively regulated by a set of technical codes and reiterations that founded diplomacy. Afterwards, it was gradually transformed into simple diplomatic jousting to prevent many bloody conflicts between State powers. It is sufficient to say that it appears right to analyze how this diplomatic-strategic architecture enabled conflicts to be resolved between international actors, while euphemizing them and sometimes passing over them. At the same time, we should notice that these provisions favored the affirmation or the reaffirmation, by various degrees, of collective affiliations to States, organizations or more-or-less established groups. But before examining them, we will put into perspective the art of diplomacy and return to the conditions of its emergence. Then, we will evaluate the historical triumph of the super-ego which represents this work of pacification as being inherently fragile.

Terms marked with an asterisk in the text refer to the definitions in the glossary. 1 These can take the form of incongruities, sidesteps, changes of register, curses, lexical flaw or even cognitive dissonances, cf., Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, [1974], Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1986, p. 345.

3.1

3 A Diplomatic Framing of Violence

The Civilizing Contribution of Diplomacy

The expressions diplomacy, diplomat and diplomatic only date from the late eighteenth century,2 which historically corresponds to the completion of the State-building process in Europe. For several centuries, no other type of diplomacy was considered to exist. For the theorists of realism, this is still the case.3 Nonetheless, it should be said that the diplomatic art has undergone a long movement of centralization and monopolization through its body of specialized agents. But what particularly holds our attention here is the revelation of a framing of violence gradually operating through the consent of a partial, yet concerted abandonment of sovereignty. In this regard, we recall Freud’s position on the social bind and its connection to the individual. Considering this position may provide insight into the mechanisms by which a general repression of drives and emotions has been set up in favor of diplomacy. This conceptual contribution will therefore facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the apparatuses by which some wars were circumscribed or even avoided.

3.1.1

The Conquest of a State Monopoly

Strictly speaking, diplomacy is one of the main instruments of State power as, historically, the oldest, the most institutionalized and the most professionalized discipline.4 However, over time, it has stopped concerning itself only with matters of politics and strategy to become global and integrate other jurisdictions; such as,

In France, Linguet was the first to use the word diplomacy and Robespierre that of diplomat in 1792 in the De´fenseur de la Constitution, (1), 1792, p. 181, cf., Ame´deé Outrey, ‘Histoire et principes de l’administration française des Affaires e´trange`res’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 3 (2), 1953, pp. 298–318. 3 The founding father of the Realist school, Hans G. Morgenthau, theorised this diplomatic approach in his canonic work, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, [1949], 6e ed., New York, Alfred Knopf, 1985. cf., equally, Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1994; Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1979; For France, cf., Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations, [1962], Paris, Calmann-Le´vy, 8e e´d., 1984 and Pierre Hassner, La Terreur et l’empire. La violence et la paix II, Paris, Le Seuil, 2003. Diplomacy and foreign policy were therefore confused, cf., Stefano Guzzini, Sten Rynning, ‘Reálisme et analyse de la politique e´trange`re’, in Fre´de´ric Charillon (Ed.), Politique e´trange`re, Nouveaux regards, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2002, pp. 33–63. 4 In this strict logic, Article 3 of the Vienna Convention (1961) details the normal functions that it must accomplish: (1) Represent the accrediting State; (2) Protect the interests of the accrediting State and those of its citizens, in the limits admitted by international law; (3) Negotiate with the accrediting State; (4) Inform by all licit means the conditions and the evolution of events in the accrediting State (diplomatic pouch); (5) Develop friendly relations.

3.1 The Civilizing Contribution of Diplomacy

trade, finance, culture, or even the environment. Thus, in many areas the framings were also implemented and deployed for the same purpose of facilitating and pacifying interstate relations. Faced with the city-States and imperial constructions, States demonstrated their pre-eminence in terms of territorial and social cohesion. At the end of a long historical movement, they would have a specialized administration and slowly have gained a monopoly on foreign policy. In a logic of centralization, this process emerged in this sector as in many others, such as those of taxation, justice or defense. Gradually, State actors were able to expropriate many private stakeholders5—the Church, pirates, etc.—who in previous centuries had known how to contest, design and conduct a foreign policy. For example, no private person or commercial company would, in the future, claim this right or practise it a fortiori. In other words, State power has been built on a principle of exclusion.6 Let us not forget that this process of monopolization was implemented by individuals. Indeed, this empirical reality—blatantly denied by holistic approaches—invites us not to neglect the links between the macro and the micro or, if you prefer, between the social and the psychic. It is therefore important not to overstate the rational dimension of the State organization no more than that of diplomacy, despite its obviously technical nature. Keeping in mind that, for any organizational structure, actors always have a freedom of action and their strategic capabilities are carried out in areas of uncertainty that never cease to subsist there.7 Hence their desires and impulses may sometimes be expressed uncontrollably. Secondly and consequently, beyond its civilized and coherent area, the administration of foreign affairs—like any other social structure—retains an irreducible part that may resurface at any time, ‘unwelcome, repressed, psychic material, which, though pushed away from consciousness, is nevertheless not robbed of all capacity to express itself’.8 Within these limits, a body of skilled and specialized professionals was trained to constitute a foreign department through the contemporary period. It somehow became gatekeeper (guard) to the relationship that the State had with the outside, in an area where its supremacy was no longer in any doubt. This is why the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century will remain the golden age of this State diplomacy in the history of international relations. This era has indeed marked the culmination of a historical process in which pacified relations between sovereign

Weber, The Vocation Lectures, Science as a Vocation, Politics as a Vocation, op. cit., place 2209. Be´ly, L’Art de la paix en Europe. . .op. cit., p. 44. This was applied to certain laws, for example the Logan Act, adopted by the United States in 1799 and which is still in force. Today, this document ordains that American citizens should not maintain a relationship with foreign powers, without having obtained the prior authorization of the American government. 7 For this concept of zone of uncertainty, cf., Michel Crozier, Le Phe´nome`ne bureaucratique, Paris, Seuil, 1964; Michel Crozier, Erhard Friedberg, L’Acteur et le syste`me, Paris, Seuil, 1977. 8 Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, [1901], trans., United States, Pacific Publishing Studio, p. 113. 6

3 A Diplomatic Framing of Violence

States were implemented through the technique of negotiation. Similarly, various forms of cooperation were slowly institutionalized and routinized. Here we find a thesis dear to functionalism* such as that developed by David Mitrany.9 In this case, the British political scientist considered that political institutions should no longer be based on a territorial logic if we wanted to build world peace. To achieve this goal, he claimed that State actors have had to engage in a succession of functional and cooperative actions to resolve socio-economic problems and prevent disputes. Far from High Politics, by pooling their resources more and increasingly coordinating their efforts, Mitrany stated that the implementation of a logic of Spill Over—or streaming—follows necessarily as a sort of virtuous cycle strengthening their close entanglements. It entailed that their interests might become so inextricably intertwined that any prospect of conflict would disappear. The academic studies of Ernst Haas,10 and those of the founding fathers of Europe—such as Schuman and Monnet—or that of the Regime theorists*—John G. Ruggie,11 Joseph Nye and Stephen Krasner—were also inspired by this theoretical framework in order to avoid thinking in terms of power and power relations. Hence, as much as a number of methods and institutions with formalized practices have become part of a process of naturalization, diplomatic expertise has gradually been strengthened.

3.1.2

The Professionalization of a Permanent Dialogue

Meetings between princes, like their numerous one-to-one discussions, became rarer in the sixteenth century, a period in which they had given way to negotiations conducted by their ministers and advisers. Of course, personal relationships between sovereigns survived.12 However, for truces or peace treaties, for example, the princes increasingly appealed to men of concord who were accustomed to negotiation. The presence of resident diplomats was eventually established as it responded to the need to construct a permanent dialogue between States. Moreover, many actors

David Mitrany, A Working Peace System, London, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1943. Ernst B Haas, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization, Stanford, Cal., Stanford University Press, 1964; Philippe C. Schmitter, ‘Ernst B. Haas and the Legacy of Neo-Functionalism’, Journal of European Public Policy, 12 (2), 2005, pp. 255–272. 11 John G. Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organization, 36 (2), print. 1982, pp. 379–415. 12 The Thirty Years War still favored few direct negotiations, especially between German princes and Prince Johann Georg of Saxony and George William of Brandenburg in 1630 to Annaburg then Zabeltitz. Similarly, Louis XIII and Charles Emmanuel of Savoy met in Avignon in 1622 or Christian IV of Denmark and Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1629 at Ulfsba¨ck. Lastly, but not excluding the famous meeting of Louis XIV with his future father-in-law, Philip IV, at the Island of Pheasants on the occasion of his marriage with the Infante Maria Theresa to end the great Franco-Spanish conflict born of the Thirty Years War. 10

3.1 The Civilizing Contribution of Diplomacy

with poorly differentiated roles and fragile political lineages continued to maintain a climate of conflict, disorder and destruction. But the idea had yet to emerge that, under certain conditions, dialogue might bring about peace. Thus, in the Christian West, diplomats gradually imposed themselves as artisans of peace, or true peacemakers. Foremost among them was the ambassador.13 He did not appear institutionally until the seventeenth century; that is, at a time when relations between sovereign States began to be organized in a stable and sustainable manner. Indeed, embassies previously existed but only very rarely, with the exception of a few cases that involved permanent legates, pontifates or espicopals.14 However, long before the time when permanent representatives multiplied, messagiers and ambaxiators were charged with minor missions. These representatives of sovereigns were sent abroad only occasionally or only for a few months, serving as messengers to deliver a missive, simply to issue a verbal message or even hear and report a response, ‘to spy but never to negotiate’.15 More rarely, they received orders to remain in the designated place for several years.16 But such decisions were exceptional and always interpreted one by one. It was the case that a lot of time passed, for example, before the Duke of Savoy did the same, then the authorities of the Italian peninsula and finally the European governments. The ambassador was generally selected from the high nobility, the clergy or even the royal entourage.17 He was protected by immunity and a ceremonial decree that accompanied all his missions upon his arrival. Through political mimicry, he used the same gestures and attitudes as the lord he represented, showing such a keen sense of precedence and hierarchies. He was notably supported by the same apparatus as the one he embodied: State power. In fact, his person expressed the sacred. This is the reason why his role implied a legal arrangement securing over time his status and his persona.18

The term designates the origin of a civil servant charged with commissions. The charge is costly. It also supposes a postal service and charges for informing then, the case being, corruption. Otherwise, for a long time, princes did not want to see foreigners present in their court because they feared that they could easily be spies. 15 Françoise Autrand, Philippe Contamines, ‘Naissance de la France, naissance de sa diplomatie’, in : Histoire de la diplomatie française, Du Moyen-Aˆge a l’Empire, vol. 1, Paris, Perrin, 2005, p. 113. 16 As in 1455, Nicodemo Tranchedini was sent by the Duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, in permanent post to Florence until 1460, cf., Jacques Chazelle, La Diplomatie, Paris, PUF, 1968, p. 15 sq. 17 The prelates, bishops and abbots: the last Valois employed, for example, 26 of them as ambassadors. 18 At the crossroads of oral tradition and the written fixation, it was decided that it should be a scholar having naturally mastered Latin. A loyal servant ( fides) of the State, he must observe and learn and then write dispatches before and supporting the negotiation. Finally, if necessary, he may also be a lawyer. Thus, the famous diplomat of Louis XIV, François de Callie`res (1645–1717), mentioned that any negotiation ‘worrying about his reputation, the preparation of his mandate, to listen, to learn about the interests, culture and passions of its partners, to adjust interests and to use their wits to build commitments and favorable alliances’ cf., François de Callie`res, De La Manie`re de Ne´gocier Avec les Souverains, [1716], Paris, nouveau monde e´dition, 2006. 14

3 A Diplomatic Framing of Violence

Nonetheless, the significance of backstage manoeuvres should not be overlooked in the diplomatic process because diplomatic dialogue could not flourish without the existence of an unofficial, shared secret.19 Does not diplomacy hide as much as it shows? Thus, the correspondence was concealed through State officials and the instructions of the sovereign. Furthermore, single letters or more confidential missives were systematically encrypted with very elaborate codes, while States did not cease to compete in the same quest to discover a perfect Code.20 In this case, the secret must be regarded as a technique and a form of political action attributing value to information it would not necessarily have if it had remained simply accessible. In doing so, it gives the holder a privilege and a distinction in place of possessing an exceptional position because—Georg Simmel has shown that ‘secrecy is a sociological ordination [. . .], the sociological meaning of the secrecy is external; as a relationship between a man who has the secret and another who does not have it’.21 In other words, it is primarily because information was forbidden that it constituted valuable secret data. To put it in another way, it was therefore an essential attribute of power, while promoting a movement of individualization. Thus, in diplomatic relations, respecting the secrecy of one’s counterpart means behaving with tact, reserve and discretion, qualities that are specifically part of the civilizing process with which we are dealing. This approach to diplomacy also requires a sufficiently professionalised relationship for a clear and effective separation to exist between the actors involved and the roles they hold. The requirement was for concealment to force anyone suffering from it to endorse his own exclusion. Indeed, the principle of secret diplomacy is based on a partial or complete exclusion of one or several parties, which does not abolish the provision of any reciprocity. This implies that each one is able to hold himself mentally at a distance. Thus, the diplomat must remain at the same time professionally inside and personally outside the interaction.22 In such a complex configuration of bipolar dissociation, professionalization certainly represents the only possibility to overcome, without affective and emotional damage, this logic of the double bind* (dual link)—a paradoxical or double constraint. In this case, it involves integrating the other with oneself, while excluding him in the same

The term secret appears in the fifteenth century and comes from the Latin secretus and the verb secerno which signifies separate, to place apart, cf. Pierre Nora, ‘Secrets de l’histoire et histoire du secret’, in: Philippe Arie`s, Pierre Nora (E´ds.), Histoire de la vie prive´e, vol. 5, Paris, Seuil, 1987, p. 179 sq. 20 Be´ly, op. cit., p. 58. 21 Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies, [1908], CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015, p. 51. 22 With regard to this doubling, cf., Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual. Essays on Face-To-Face Behavior, New York, Pantheon, 1982, p. 110: ‘Because of possessing multiple selves the individual may find he is required both to be present and to not be present on certain occasions. Embarrassment ensues: the individual finds himself being torn apart, however gently. Corresponding to the oscillation of his conduct is the oscillation of his self’.

3.1 The Civilizing Contribution of Diplomacy

moment.23 Naturally, this structure of interactions in which diplomats are implicated, favors the irruption of cognitive dissonance and may, if necessary, jeopardize the diplomatic framing of violence. As Lucien Be´ly notes, from the seventeenth century, ‘the mechanics of diplomacy are so well oiled that nothing can undermine them’.24 Gradually, the conflicts between sovereigns changed registers, once territorial and settled mostly in ferocity and blood, they became more and more frequent quarrels of precedence in simple and symbolic battles25; all these changes showed ‘a profound transformation of drives’.26 Day after day, diplomacy was therefore required as a set of technical and symbolic instruments, appropriate for safeguarding a reasonable balance between rationalized States. The art of persuasion, interpretation, negotiation and diplomatic rhetoric sought, above all, consistency, compliance with rules and regulations, concord and even, on occasions, perpetual peace. Certainly, during this modern age, there were many religious wars that bloodied Europe, but they were eventually stopped by diplomatic activity, so offering the opportunity for diplomacy to expand, diversify and strengthen. Thus, the principle of otherness took on a political form, even though its refusal was previously constitutive of all excesses. Without any doubt, this was a historic turning point. Indeed, the spiral of violence became, from that moment, a relentless succession of international negotiations based on a continuous dialogue established between professionals of the diplomatic art. In other words, every time the diplomat prevailed over the soldier,27 the civilizing process would overcome the death drive. But this is not necessarily cause for rejoicing because we must always keep in mind the disenchanted warning of Freud that ‘civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another’.28

3.1.3

The Naturalization of a Peaceful Order

In a distant echo of Augustine’s voice, the words peace and concord still remain very present throughout the sixteenth century. But from this time, diplomats worked in favour of earthly peace, without waiting for a hypothetical final

For more developments of this concept, cf., Centre culturel international (Ed.), Bateson, premier e´tat d’un he´ritage, Colloque du Centre culturel international de Cerisy, June 1984, dir. Yves Winkin, Paris, Seuil, 1988. 24 Be´ly, op. cit., p. 42. 25 For example, the rivalry that opposes the kingdom of France to Spain in the sixteenth century. 26 Elias, The Civilizing Process. . .op. cit., p. 390. 27 Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations. . .op. cit., p. 17. 28 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents. . .op. cit., p. 86.

3 A Diplomatic Framing of Violence

beatitude. Hence, they were in permanent negotiation towards this aim because everyone agreed to recognize that war is only conducted in the aim of peace. The idea gained widespread acceptance that to enjoy a peaceful order, States should be free of all ethical concerns, which should be strictly separated from any affect and a fortiori, any drive and emotion. In this logic, excessive privileges might be granted to the res publica thus sacrificing, if necessary, special interests.29 Similarly, discussions of religious faith now had to be regarded as domestic affairs—despite certain solemn declarations—or were removed completely from negotiations. In fact, these more-or-less dispersed considerations proceeded from a slow political process of autonomization and secularization of international relations. They formed part of a coherent discourse, or even a comprehensive doctrine: that of the raison d’E´tat. The latter gradually spread throughout Europe, thanks to so-called Machiavellian30 literature, to the point of inspiring and legitimizing the implementation of many diplomatic arrangements. This approach, which links Machiavelli to the raison d’E´tat we owe to the book Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and its Place in Modern History that Friedrich Meinecke published in 1925.31 Although, we know perfectly well today that the Florentine diplomat cannot be considered as the inventor and promoter of this concept,32 the fact remains that his work lends itself to such a comparison since it is based on a strict determinism of politics and its necessary secularization. Indeed, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, the philosopher did not want to concern himself with good and evil in dealing with State affairs. On the contrary, he believed that to gain or to retain power; one should stray from moral judgment and consider only one worthwhile end: efficiency. He therefore thought it ‘to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination’,33 unlike those who preferred the fruits of the imagination. He added: ‘many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation’.34 In Machiavelli wrote on this point: ‘It is the well-being not of individuals, but of the community which makes a State great’, cf., Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, book 2, chapter 2, p. 162. 30 Initially, reason of State produced a work written by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) and published in Venice in 1589, Le Della ragion di Stato. Literature on Raison d’E´tat—also described as Machiavellian—is tackled by Giuseppe Ferrari (1811–1876), in his Histoire de la raison d’E´tat, [1860], Paris, Kime´, 1992. 31 However, Friedrich Meinecke recognized that the same term, Raison d’E´tat, was not part of Machiavellian terminology, cf. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison D’Etat and Its Place in Modern History [1925], Piscataway (N.J) Transaction Publishers, 1997. 32 Cesare Vasoli, ‘Machiavel inventeur de la raison d’E´tat?’, in: Yves-Charles Zarka (E´d.), Raison et de´raison d’E´tat, The´oriciens et the´ories de la raison d’E´tat aux XVIe et XVIIe sie`cles, Paris, PUF, 1994, pp. 43–66. 33 Machiavelli, The Prince, [1513], op. cit., p. 61; Ioana Petre, Machiavelli and the Legitimization of Realism in International Relations, Iasi (Romania), Editura Lumen, 2013. 34 Machiavelli, Ibid. 29

3.1 The Civilizing Contribution of Diplomacy

other words, the aim is to analyze reality as it is and not to represent it as it should be. In operating a real epistemological revolution, this thesis makes him a theorist of means, a technician of power and a forerunner of the Realist School. The first author to separate ethics and politics, or if you prefer, the ends and means, ‘this fanatic of rationality’35 breaks with centuries of predictive and prescriptive approaches. Certainly, according to him, politics—which he dealt with as a real clinician—requires with the force of a ‘very fierce lion’, although he would prefer whenever possible, the cunning of ‘a very astute fox’.36 In other words, the goal was to avoid as much as possible, all forms of violence—including and especially wars—because nothing is equivalent in value to the tactical expertise demonstrated by the princes of diplomacy. This eminently pragmatic conception translates Machiavelli’s enduring concern to reduce the world’s disorder by employing a rational system of constraints. Such a system could then limit drives and emotions to instruments domesticated in the service of the State. Indeed, in its Machiavellian definition of politics, the state of nature must constantly be curbed because it is primarily due to the desires of men and their insatiability, ‘because men will always turn out bad for you unless they have been made good by necessity’.37 It appears from this disenchanted vision that States cannot get on with one another and form durable alliances on the basis of what we might call simple elective affinities; that is to say, religious or political similarities, today qualified as ideological. For Machiavelli—faithful in this to classical thought—no political foundation can be rationally built on emotions and human passions. Because the

35 Raymond Aron, ‘Le machiave´lisme de Machiavel’, [1938–1940], in: Raymond Aron, Machiavel et les tyrannies modernes, Paris, Editions de Fallois, Paris, 1993, p. 68. On that point, Anthony Parel, writes: ‘He does not reject the fact of religion and morality, since he knew very well that the life of politics was an incessant involvement with moral and religious (ideological) issues. What he wanted to formulate, and did formulate, was a rule of conduct precisely for dealing with that situation, independently of theology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. In doing so he unearthed the scientific basis of the conflict between politics and morality’, cf. ‘Machiavelli’s Method and his Interpreters’, in: Anthony Parel (Ed.), The Political Calculus. Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1972, p. 13. 36 Machiavelli, The Prince, op. cit., p. 79. On a ruse that is characteristic of High Politics as well as military, cf., Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, op. cit., p. 192 sq.; Machiavelli, The Art of War, book four [1513–1520], CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; Felix Gilbert, ‘Machiavelli: the Renaissance of the Art of War’, Peter Paret (Ed.), Makers Of Modern Strategy, from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, pp. 11–31. Anthony Parel (Ed.), The Political Calculus. Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1972. 37 Machiavelli, The Prince, op. cit., p. 95. For a deconstruction of the cliche´s which accumulate too frequently about his work and for putting the notion of virtue into perspective cf., Armelle Le BrasChopard, ‘Machiavel et le respect de la promesse donne´e. Contre le contresens’, in: Josepha Laroche (E´d.) La Loyaute´ dans les relations internationales, 2e e´d., Paris, L’Harmattan, 2011, pp. 41–58.

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latter implies unrest and unpredictability which are dangerous. To theorize the raison d’E´tat must consequently oppose the risk of madness and pulsional drift.38 It is for this reason that this approach was effectively implemented by Richelieu, for example, then by Mazarin,39 when the cardinal of a very Catholic France decided to ally with the Protestant States—particularly with the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus—to counterbalance the power of imperial and Catholic Austria. Unfortunately, the contradiction of this policy was only too apparent. If France assisted outside the heretics while fighting them within her borders, it was for the sole purpose of preserving the independence, unity and stability of the State. It was still the same case when it came to forging close ties with the Sublime Porte. Certainly, this power was seen as the common enemy of Christianity, but more often as an objective ally of the King of France against the Habsburgs. Afterwards, it was the primary responsibility of diplomacy to justify and rationalize such unjustifiable alliances for a Christian prince in terms of values,40 but necessary and essential in terms of a peaceful order. Do not imagine that this politics of the raison d’Etat was limited to the modern era, far from it. On the contrary, it inspires even today the political approach of many States.41 This is because its theory and its implementation have historically allowed a disconnection between politics and ethics. It also operates a split, particularly between reason and affect, and between rational calculation and irrepressible urges. Now this radical change of method, ‘philosophical reversal’42 placed a great emphasis on diplomacy. Indeed, its codes and disciplinary techniques were incorporated in this logic and encouraged the shift necessary for the emergence of a dehumanization of politics. This is why, in relation to the commonplace arguments regularly held both on the thought of Machiavelli and the doctrine of the raison d’Etat, we prefer, for our part, to emphasize how much the repression of the death drive paid tribute to this diplomatic framing of violence. In fact, diplomacy was always manifested in a constant desire to erase the irrational, better to contain and repress it. Therefore, resulting from this logic was a drive to curb the risk of international disorder and every instinctual upsurge that It is in this sense that we may also understand the very famous quip of Henry Kissinger: ‘A little less emotion and a little more diplomacy’. 39 In doing so, these great servants of the State confined themselves to extending the line of the pro-Lutheran diplomacy which Francis the First had opened brilliantly in 1534, when he signed a secret treaty with the Protestant Landgrave of Hesse. Since the time of Charles V, King of France has always been to break the encirclement of the kingdom by the Habsburg Empire. However, one possible strategy was to ally with the German princes who had chosen Protestantism, even if such an alliance seemed against nature for a Catholic sovereign. In the same logic, since Francis the First, the French power also turned east towards the Ottoman Empire to weaken the Emperor. 40 On the distinction to establish between final rationality and rationality in value, cf., Max Weber, Economy and Society, [1922], trans., Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013. 41 It resulted in a ‘thermonuclear duopoly’, existing during the Cold War and the politics of rival blocs, which Raymond Aron has qualified as ‘the American-Soviet condominium’ founded on ‘the balance of terror’, cf., Aron, Paix et guerre. . .op. cit., p. 436 sq. 42 Aron, Le Machiave´lisme. . .op. cit., p. 63. 38

3.1 The Civilizing Contribution of Diplomacy

could lead to explicit violence. In this regard, rites of international meetings and summits operate as ‘symbolic operators’43 seeking to produce a peaceful order. More specifically, in a spreading of pomp, a spectacular display of power at rest and in balance, they worked for the construction, cohesion and reconstruction of a regulating order. Above all, they functioned in particular as compensatory vectors between political units as well as between men. They contributed to mitigating offenses, whether territorial or symbolic, in order to save face and often to preserve peace.44 Then, specific standards were produced, enacted in certain conditions of time and place, those that can be set up as any careful dramaturgy, including certain actors and excluding others, while applying scrupulous respect for all forms. Repetition and even routinization of these severe constraints in fact represents the best evidence of their perfect fulfilment because the rite proves able to reduce disorder. Indeed, as Balandier has noted, ‘the process of conflict and disorganization was sorely and temporarily transmuted’.45 Certain international meetings, proving particularly emblematic, can better help us understand the weight of this ritualized power and discern all the inherent violence it has concealed. A rigid system of extremely precise requirements, the protocol has the effect of pacifying and building a social space where—in strict compliance with established standards—the roles are defined and magnified. In this way, an image of peace is built, that of a neat and simple world or, more precisely, the successful image of establishing a ritualized order. Beyond the pomp and splendor, evidence is administered showing that conflicts are overcome for a time and therefore that the death drive is kept at a distance and repressed. A powerful instrument for defining and dividing roles according to their spatial arrangement, the protocol allows etiquette to be given its full potential. Consisting of a mass of prohibitions, recommendations, prescriptions and other advice commands, it can then define the rules of the diplomatic game to classify, order and prioritize space, time and people, the holders of the institutions who agree to submit to them. Finally, what for Norbert Elias portrays the courtly society effectively is equally appropriate today to characterize the organization of the symbolic at the international level: [thanks to Etiquette], court society represents itself, each individual being distinguished from every other, all together distinguishing themselves from non-members, so that each individual and the group as a whole confirm their existence as a value in.46

Whether at bilateral meetings or at the annual General Assembly of the United Nations, at meetings of the G7/G8 or during the G20, the situation remains the same: the format of the summits is very tightly controlled. It is the object of a

Georges Balandier, Le De´sordre, E´loge du mouvement, Paris, Fayard, 1988, p. 29. Goffman, Interaction Ritual, op. cit., cf., particularly the chapter ‘On Face-Work. An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction’, p. 5 sq.; Thomas Lindemann, Sauver la face, sauver la paix, sociologie constructiviste des crises internationales, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2010. Coll. Chaos International. 45 Balandier, Le De´sordre, op. cit., p. 34. 46 Elias, The Cour Society. . .op. cit., p. 112–113. 43 44

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meticulous stage design, so much so that it frequently requires rehearsals—as with the Nobel Prize ceremony47—in order that nothing will be left to chance or improvisation. In other words, the form appears in-itself to be highly political.48 We must understand that the rules of protocol and etiquette set a strictly codified order of the power relationships between the participants and the respective powers they represent.49 They have euphemized and pacified their relations in curbing the violence that existed between them. The latter is obscured in favor of a policy of propriety and politeness at every moment.50 Thus, during the time of an international meeting, no room is ever left for explicit violence or any excess which might come from nowhere. Direct, spontaneous expression is equally prohibited. In this respect, the remarks that Theodor W. Adorno makes on the dialectic of tact corresponds exactly to this kind of situation when he writes: ‘beneath the demand that the individual be confronted as such, without preamble, absolutely as befits him, lies a covetous eagerness to ‘place’ him and his chances, through the tacit admissions contained in each word, in the ever more rigid hierarchy that encompasses everyone’.51 In fact, the search for total control of these sequences aim to prevent the slightest disorder, a fortiori extreme brutality, to avoid all instinctive outbursts. The Heads of State and Government, just like their representatives, must therefore comply with established rules, exchange greetings and expected phrases, build and frame an image of an unchanging world stage, one indivisible and harmonious despite the implacable reign of inequalities and rivalries. The art of dodging and euphemism that consists in saying nothing, but saying it well, here takes on its full meaning and effectiveness. It thus assumes an honorary and sumptuary framework, multiplying the agreed delivery of speeches as an almost incantatory form of message distant from all reality, carrying decisions deprived of any materialization. On this point, cliche´s, grandiloquent discourse, redundancy and other ludicrous matters are as much about procrastination techniques organizing a rhetoric of emptiness. Nevertheless, we would be very wrong to conclude that they are completely useless. Indeed, protocol and etiquette perform an important symbolic work, with true professional expertise combining to produce inertia and appeasement and thereby fulfilling a regulatory function of the international.52 Let us note that it is the same, often soothing ambiguity that acts as a facilitator to negotiations.53 Laroche, Les Prix Nobel. . .op. cit., p. 57 sq. Claude Rivie`re, Les Liturgies politiques, Paris, PUF, 1988. 49 Yves De´loye, Claudine Haroche, Olivier Ihl, ‘Protocole et politique: formes, rituels et pre´se´ance’, in: Yves Deloye, Claudine Haroche, Olivier Ihl, (Eds.), Le Protocole ou la mise en forme de l’ordre politique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996, pp. 11–31. 50 Dominique Picard, Politesse, savoir-vivre et relations sociales, Paris, PUF, 1998, p. 48 sq. 51 Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, [1944], trans., New York, Verso, 2006, p. 37. 52 Josepha Laroche, ‘Figures du diplomate dans l’œuvre d’Albert Cohen’, in: Yves Poirmeur, Pierre Mazet (Eds.), Le Me´tier politique en repre´sentations, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999, pp. 369–370 sq. 53 Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations, New York, Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 123 sq. 47 48

3.1 The Civilizing Contribution of Diplomacy

Curiously, in the reverse of the shackles of protocol and the tyranny of propriety, we can nonetheless observe that diplomatic meetings and world summits also combine deep institutional distance with a proximity that is conspicuously displayed by the participants in their interactions. Admittedly, distancing and ritualised codification are always applied to them.54 However, they endeavor to script and to naturalize a great familiarity between these stakeholders. This gives rise constantly to many transparent indicators such as Body language or Body gloss, bodily hexis,55 linguistic familiarity, jokes or even a cleverly professional knowhow to project a cool and relaxed atmosphere.56 Rounding off these highly political semiotics, correspondence—even confusion—is regularly maintained between some exhibition of privacy and the treatment of world affairs. They may involve international summits organized in their homes, from dinners in their villas or a mixture of entertainment and business meetings. It is always through the same logic that pacification operates, occurring through an apparent depoliticization of the issues at stake. By associating systematically international summits and their individual dimension, a subliminal message is indeed sent that has the power to domesticate an image that is now harmless and benign, if not reassuring. This image is thus reduced to interpersonal relationships, seemingly affectionate and friendly as part of a scenario where a personification of politics is anecdotized to the extreme. This deliberate psychologizing is also accompanied today by a strong media presence.57 In this type of storyboard, it is implicitly said that world affairs and diplomatic relations are simply settled exclusively among peers. It also may be suggested that international complexity can be easily and conveniently be tackled by men of good will, friends meeting by the fire-side, so conducive to intimate moments. Here we can make reference to the conception of the Greeks for whom the essence of friendship was foremost in speech. For them, only dialogue, talkingtogether could enable the emergence of a philanthropia, the foundation of the

Dominique Picard, ‘La ritualisation des communications sociales’, Communication et langages, (108), Apr–Jun 1996, pp. 102–115. 55 On bodily expression as a driver of communication, see the part V entitled Body Gloss, cf., Erving Goffman, Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Order, New York, Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1971, pp. 122–137. 56 We recall in this regard the summit between Presidents Giscard d’Estaing and Gerald Ford where they were photographed in swimming costumes beside a swimming pool, or again the meetings of the Heads of State at the ranch of President George W. Bush or the summits organized by the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in his private property in Sardinia. Each time the attire and familiarity were rigorously staged: absence of a tie, suits, picturesque locations, a relaxed atmosphere etc. 57 On the confusion characterizing certain television programs which practise a permanent auto zapping and participate in this phenomenon. cf., the virulent critique of Daniel Schneidermann, Du Journalisme apre`s Bourdieu, Paris, Fayard, 1999; Dominique Marchetti, ‘Le de´clin de l’information politique internationale a la te´le´vision franc¸aise’, in: E´velyne Pinto, (Ed.), Pour une analyse critique des me´dias, Paris, Ed. du Croquant, 2007, pp. 111–128. 54

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polis58; only speech would humanize the world, or civilize it, to return to Eliasian terminology. But it is still necessary that State actors follow a set of rules and principles allowing them to prohibit any recourse to the use of violence. It is also necessary that the super-ego triumphs historically as the key socio-political determinant.

3.2

The Super-ego as a Triumphant Peacemaker

Over the centuries, the repression of the death drive has taken the form of a pacifying triumph of super-ego, even if it takes the form of a fragile triumph. The place of mechanisms for renouncing the drives, this psychic component contains the images of the different binding forces through which the ego might determine itself. As such, it often produces a feeling of guilt and appears as an internalized figure of the prosecutor and a particularly ruthless attorney because ‘nothing is hidden from super-ego, not even thoughts’.59 At first glance, this prohibiting authority would be closer to what is usually taken as the figure of moral conscience. However, it differs in two fundamental respects. First, censorship—insofar as it is effective—is not consciously carried out by individuals. Second, its injunctions do not necessarily fall within the moral register. They are simply established in the order of imperatives and psychic tyranny, but also social in nature through the strengthening of chains of interdependence.60 Therefore, lacking a specific purpose, this mental tyrant can attach itself to things that are totally unknown to the ethical sphere. The super-ego thus embodies an internalized authority, symbolizing the law and prohibiting its violation. In this case, it has historically taken the form of a set of standards prohibiting any transgression of the social order at the risk of sanction. Consequently, its victory may be read as the internalization of each enacted prohibition; an internalization guaranteed, institutionalized and controlled by the State. More than being repressed, the death drive was actually ‘introjected’; that is to say, ‘internalized, in fact it is send back where it came from and directed against the ego’,61 allowing the civilizing process to be accomplished. All the aggressive Hannah Arendt, ‘philanthropia, “love of man”, since it manifests itself in a readiness to share the world with other men’, Men in Dark Times, London, J. Cape, 1970, p. 25. 59 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, op. cit., p. 108.e 60 For Norbert Elias, the rhythm of time that makes the link between interior pressure and social injunctions is ‘a manifestation of the multitude of intertwining chains of interdependence which run through every single social function that people have to perform’, Elias, The Civilizing Process. . .op. cit., p. 379; Norbert Elias, Time: an Essay, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, p. 121: ‘[the individual] has to attune his own conduct to the established “time” of any group of which he forms part and, as one shall see, the longer, the more differentiated become the chains of functional interdependencies which bind people to each other, the stricter becomes the regimen of the clocks.’ 61 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, op. cit., p. 105. 58

3.2 The Super-ego as a Triumphant Peacemaker

and destructive orientations are then taken over by a part of the ego, which as superego, has become an authority of severity and guilt emerging as a ‘need for punishment’.62 In other words, one part of the ego stands against another one, as Freud has pointed out: Civilization therefore obtains the mastery over the dangerous love of aggression in individuals by enfeebling and disarming it and setting up an institution within their minds to keep watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered.63

But, this psychosocial configuration, intended to pacify interactions, remains unstable. To ensure its longevity, social mechanisms are set up to keep the pleasure principle always under control. Certainly, the State normally provides an oversight that protects against any sudden eruption of emotions or violence, the latter being most often the subject of private concealment. More generally, it guarantees against any major transgression of norms. Indeed, the self-imposed discipline embedded in the social constraints—or if you prefer, the prohibitive aspect of civilization— allows homo sociabilis to be fully inserted into the civilizing process, to play an active part and even to be fond of it. Nevertheless, it is still likely to give way under the pressure of pulsional tensions that have not been sufficiently inhibited socially. This is because the true renunciation of the drives, as well as their repression, entails neither their demise nor even their overcoming. Finally, we must also reckon with the permanent risk of ‘this perpetual recurrence of the same thing [. . .] the compulsion to repeat’64 inherent to the destructive drive, so that ‘the natural instinct of aggressiveness in man, the hostility of each one against all and of all against each one, opposes this programme of civilization’.65 Ultimately, nothing is ever historically acquired because ‘we must defend civilization from the ruin that always threatens it’.66 Nothing is less sure than the pacifying triumph of the super-ego remains far from being directly transferable and applicable to relations between States. This is why, over time, States have forged a series of measures designed to curb the violence of the world stage and to prevent or punish any violation of their own rules and obligations. Thus, their rulers have developed a wide repertoire of actions—such as stigmatization or even coercive diplomacy—with the ultimate goal of preserving peace. Amongst this repressive arsenal, one sanction relates to the very identity of players: the denial of recognition.

Freud, Ibid. Ibid. 64 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, op. cit., p. 24, 25. 65 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents. . .op. cit., p. 102. 66 Enriquez, De la Horde. . .op. cit., pp. 124–125. 63

3.2.1

3 A Diplomatic Framing of Violence

The Denial of Recognition

Of course, recognition is not a condition for the existence of States. But when a nation-State entity is created, it will not occupy a full place in the community of States if it is not recognized—that is to say, accepted and co-opted—by its peers. The more that State actors are established within the framework of international law, the more that the imperative of non-recognition is applied to sanction the use of illegal force. This ability allows them, if necessary, to rationalize and legitimize hostility, to deploy a foreclosure strategy on the world stage and thus reinforce a politics of ostracization*. Therefore, the a priori exclusion of a political actor is so justified, easing any possible recourse to war. In this case, such a provision must also be analyzed as a symbolic violence that stands above and supports the physical violence that may be accomplished later. But it will be exercised legitimately in the name of a peace to be created or restored. Recall that, in this regard, the Tobar Doctrine proclaimed in 1907 which—even if it had had no general effect and had been applied only to Central America—was centred upon the refusal to recognize any State power or illegitimate government that would be derived from a coup.67 In the same logic, we may also include the Stimson doctrine of the interwar period,68 by which the United States asserted that, in the future, they would not recognize any de facto situation nor any violent arrangement infringing the integrity of a State. We should also mention NagornoKarabakh which is recognized nowadays exclusively by Armenia, but is ignored by all the other UN members. Finally, we should not forget to report the case of the Moldovan Republic of Transnistria, which exists for none of the UN member States, not even Russia.69 In other words, any refusal of recognition amounts to a discretionary act by which no legal nor legitimate existence is granted to a new political entity, since it was formed by way of a coup. This provision is enshrined in the civilizing scope of combating violence and may increase substantially ‘the vulnerability of identity’70 of the actor concerned. It represents the implementation of an institutionalized exclusion of the legal, political, and economic and, naturally, the symbolic dimensions involved. It concerns a sort of mark of non-existence decided by the most 67

Formulated in 1907 by Dr. Tobar, then Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Republic of Equator. In the name of the American Secretary of State, Henry Stimson. Formulated on 7th January 1932, when the Chinese province of Manchuria was invaded by Japan. According to this declaration of non-recognition, the United States came to block the Japanese expansion in Manchuria and denied all legitimacy to the Puppet State of Manchukuo created by Japan. 69 The self-proclaimed State had a majority population of Russian origin and caused the secession of the Republic of Moldavia in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. cf., Stefan Troebst, “The “Trandsniestrian Moldovan Republic”: From Conflict-Driven State-Building to State-Driven Nation-Building”, European Yearbook of Minority Issues, vol. 2, 2002–2003, pp. 5–30. 70 Thomas Lindemann, La Guerre, Paris, Armand Colin, 2010, p. 128. cf., in this work the chapter devoted to recognition, pp. 123–135. 68

3.2 The Super-ego as a Triumphant Peacemaker

powerful States and on which most of them agree in the strictest logic of altercasting*. In fine, this ostracism also serves as an unifying cement. Indeed, in deciding to establish the rules in regard to which all State actors must reach a consensus, they end up fused around common values. By refusing to co-opt one or another applicant, they so strengthen the bonds between them and reaffirm their common destiny. Denying a political entity the ability to constitute any international existence and refusing to integrate it into the community of States naturally affects its very identity and strikes at its constitutive elements. This utmost form of discrimination comes under the logic of stigmatization. But, there are many other forms that also involve diplomatic framing. Nonetheless, we should keep in mind that this work of pacification is primarily defined and implemented by the most powerful international actors.

3.2.2

The Stigmatization as Imperial Peace-Making

Stigma—which implies to profoundly discredit the actor to which it is attached— does not exist in itself. It is determined relationally insofar as the stigmatizer constructs the stigmatised.71 On the other hand, it allows hostility, as well as an eviction strategy, to be rationalized and legitimized, both off-stage and then possibly through an appeal to violence. Its development comes at the source and in support of a physical and/or ulterior material violence. It goes through the manipulation of social information and all the signs that transmit it. In other words, it transforms the interactions between the actors who will, in return, change direction on their own. Internationally, the policies of stigmatization contribute to marginalizing or even excluding any participant who violates the dominant order and who, moreover, does not have enough resources to legitimize his transgressions. Above all, this intervention leads to the reaffirmation of the values of the most powerful political actors. At the same time, they impose on the world stage as the only international standards of value. These dominant norms are then somehow naturalized. A review of several historical sequences seems particularly enlightening in this regard. First recall the situation in Germany in the aftermath of the Great War. After the armistice was signed, the victors considered that this country was entirely responsible for the global conflict and qualified for appropriate sanctions. In so stigmatizing the defeated State, they openly introduce the War Guilt Clause on the agenda (Schuldfrage) that is to say the question of the responsibility of Germany for the

71 ‘The term stigma, then will be used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed’, cf., Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, New York, Touchstone, 1986, p. 3.

3 A Diplomatic Framing of Violence

outbreak of the war.72 It was directly incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles, which proclaimed in its Article 231: The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.

This text was legally founded on the same principle of the payment of reparations by Germany for the damage and losses suffered by the Allies. It was therefore established that the country would have to pay 20 billion gold marks. Germany’s economic potential was also substantially weakened, given that the raw materials— iron ore, coal, steel and agricultural products—would be condemned to be delivered in bulk to its former enemies. At that time, the phrase Germany will pay became in France the triumphant national leitmotiv which followed the famous formula ‘What you always think, never talk of it’?73 The German delegation to the Peace Conference, then the political class and public opinion, saw in the toughness of these provisions a condemnation of all the politics pursued by the Reich before 1914. It was indeed, for them, a questioning of its power politics and more specifically a delegitimization of Wilhelmine imperialism. This was why the Weimar Assembly would only accept this treaty belatedly on June 22, 1919. It is therefore not surprising that many Germans described the treaty as the Diktat of Versailles. Above all, it was not surprising that the Nazis or, in the first place, Hitler74 in the Twenties, had seen in Germany’s hurtful situation a political resource to enable significant resentment and hatred to stir up. In short, it happened to be a means of facilitating their accession to power. Let us now analyze more recent historical episodes and see if they reflect the logic of diplomatic framing. Under President Ronald Reagan, the US and the UK were the first to have recourse to the expression Rogue State to stigmatize Libya and Iraq. Thus, they designated States which did not comply with the basic rules—pacta sunt servanda—of international law. In this case, they considered that these countries explicitly violated the common rules by fomenting attacks, supporting terrorist organizations or even seeking to illegally acquire weapons of mass destruction. Denouncing their policies as detrimental to collective security, they then imposed their economic sanctions and financial retaliation before finally attacking them

According to social and historiographical debates on this subject cf., Jacques Droz, Les Causes de la Premie`re Guerre mondiale, essai d’historiographie, Paris, Seuil, 1973. 73 Declaration of the French politician Gambetta in 1872 with regard to Alsace and Lorraine, which had just been conquered by the Bismarckian Reich in the course of a triumphal war. 74 Even if, as Ian Kershaw has perfectly well underlined: ‘In the early 1920s, we are still far from the point where Hitler, as yet no more than a provincial beerhall rabble-rouser, could himself be associated with the ‘heroic’ leadership image, and be seen by the mass of the people as just that great leader sent by providence to unite Germany and restore its greatness’, cf., The “Hitler Myth”. Image and Reality in the Third Reich, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 21; and also cf., Ian Kershaw, Hitler. [1], 1889–1936: Hubris, London, Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1998; Hitler. [2], 1936–1945: Nemesis, London, Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 2000.

3.2 The Super-ego as a Triumphant Peacemaker

militarily.75 Several amongst them—Afghanistan, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan—were also placed in this category.76 But, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the US authorities instead resorted to a vaguer notion of an Axis of Evil. Implicitly, this expression referred to two older qualifications. First, the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, which during the Second World War designated the allies of Nazi Germany, and the second—the Evil Empire— used in the Eighties by President Reagan to characterize the Soviet Union. In the case of Iraq, this country was accused by George W. Bush’s administration to possess WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and of having links with Al-Qaeda. However, after the Anglo-American invasion triggered in 2003, no such weapons were found, not by UN inspectors nor by the Americans themselves. As for the links with the terrorist group, the American Senate then recognized that they were proven unfounded. With regard to North Korea and Libya, these countries originally agreed to negotiate with the United States and to operate, for a while, a diplomatic turning point, before ripping up the rulebook. The regime of Colonel Gaddafi was then confronted with new attacks before its leader was finally assassinated in the course of military operations.77 As for Pakistan, it officially provided support to Washington in its fight against terrorism. With the exception of Iran, these States are no longer on that list. Nevertheless, this fluctuating and highly prescriptive terminology has been criticized because it is part of a rhetoric of demonization in the service of US foreign policy. In this respect, the pacification of the world stage has been reduced to merely imperial pacification. Indeed, this policy of stigmatization was primarily mobilized against powers hostile to Washington, but these were not the only ones to be exempted from the common law and free of international law.78

Elizabeth N. Saunders, ‘Setting Boundaries: Can International Society Exclude “Rogue States”?’, International Studies Review, 8 (1), March 2006, pp. 23–53. 76 Colin Dueck, “Strategies for Managing Rogue States”, Orbis, 50 (2) Spring 2006, pp. 223–241. 77 The riots that exploded in the city of Benghazi on February 15–16 2011 formed part of what was called the Arab Spring. On February 17, protests multiplied in all of Libya, but from February 21, the colonel appealed to the army to reprimand his opponents who demanded his departure. On February 26, 2011, the UN Security Council resolution 1970 was unanimously adopted. This text organized an arms embargo on the destination of Libya, seized the assets of Chief Jamahiriya’s family and recommended the seizin of CPI. Then resolution 1973 decided on March 17: ‘to forbid all flights in the aerial space of the Jamahiriya Libyan Arabs to help protect civilians’. It authorized UN Member States to ‘take all measures necessary [. . .] to protect civilian zones and populations [. . .] while excluding the deployment of a forces of foreign occupation under whatever form it might take’. However, on Monday June 27, 2011 the CPI charged the Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi with crimes against humanity. But, the libyan leader was finally killed in Sirte, on October 20, 2011. The judges delivered charges of crimes against humanity to his son Saı¨f Al-Islam and the Head of Security Services, Abdallah Al-Senoussi. 78 Meghan L. O’Sullivan, ‘Les dilemmes de la politique ame´ricaine vis- a-vis des “Rogue States”’, Politique e´trange`re, (1), print. 2000, pp. 67–80. 75

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Therefore, we see through this analysis of such historical cases that the construction and strengthening of international legitimacy by stigmatizing policy remains an effective procedure. The above approach allows standards to be internationalized that underpin the diplomatic management imposed by the most powerful players. Qualifying an opponent in a derogatory and accusatory way is hence the first symbolic step in this long progression2. Essentially, it determines and legitimates all possible future sanctions, shaping the perceptions and representations of all stakeholders on the world stage.

3.2.3

The Games of Coercive Diplomacy

As we have just seen, diplomacy involves conducting a negotiation and a policy of conflict prevention through pressure, threats or even gradual and limited use of force. It is also better not only to deter but to compel to act or not to act. Taking various forms—diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions and gunboat diplomacy*—coercive diplomacy seems a more indefinite approach than conventional strategy. It cannot therefore be confused with conventional strategy because its aim is not to occupy a territory, pursue an enemy or inflict the greatest possible loss or even destruction. On the contrary, the invocation of a possible coercion aims simply to stimulate the negotiations and bargaining needed to accelerate the achievement of a peaceful solution: ‘The power to hurt is a bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy’.79 A conflict with its human and material costs would thus be limited—if not avoided—which fits well into the logic of the civilizing process. As a framing of international violence, coercive diplomacy had particular resonance with the advent of nuclear weapons. Theorized more systematically in the Sixties, it has been implemented on numerous occasions since the end of the Cold War. The Gulf War then marked its accession, mainly because of the flexibility of air power. It is clear that this form of diplomacy is based on complex sets of strategic interactions and remains a very delicate operation. Indeed, under the assumption that all the actors are rational, this means that ‘violence is believed to be impossible because no-one wants it’.80 We should consider that a loss of control over the exchanges that could provoke hostilities falls within the realm of the improbable. This concern for rationally transforming force into an abstract yet fully controllable algebra may conclude in an outright negation of violence. However, the rationality of irrationality and the risks of escalation involved should be taken into account because ‘what makes irrational threats rational is the new irrationality of rational threats’.81

Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1966, p. 2. Pierre Hassner, ‘Violence, rationalite´, incertitude: tendances apocalyptiques et ire´niques dans l’e´tude des conflits internationaux’, RFSP, 14 (6), de´c. 1964, p. 1167. 81 Pierre Hassner, ‘On ne badine pas avec la force’, RFSP, 21 (6) 1971, p. 1227. 80

3.2 The Super-ego as a Triumphant Peacemaker

Nonetheless, the theory of strategic interaction shows that it still remains an area of uncertainty; something left to chance between several rational decisions, both calculated and coordinated. In other words, the potential for misunderstanding persists and endures all the more, being that the interests of rulers are not necessarily aligned and overlap with those of their countries, as too narrow a reading of rational choice would lead us to believe.82 Leaders may exploit such external interventions for electoral purposes and manipulate certain data from this perspective when citizens do not have sufficient and reliable information.83 In addition, to conduct an appropriate analysis of decision-making, Graham Allison has highlighted—in its bureaucratic model—the routine mechanics of all the administrations concerned and the existing struggles within the inner circle of the senior civil service and political leadership.84 The actor at the origin of government policy is, indeed, not a single, solitary decision-maker evaluating each of his moves rationally. Instead, he should be viewed as being embedded in large organizations with political stakeholders who often show different orientations to those of the government. They are thus held in constant competition in order to influence decisions as well as government actions. Finally, in a game of intense negotiations, perceptions of what is at stake and preferences determine the orientations of each decision-maker. These are dominated by the place that each occupies in the decision-making apparatus; hence, they are determined by the operational framework and common values. In other words, ‘the position you defend depends on the position you occupy’ as Allison has so aptly noted.85 Therefore, we must understand that under such a complex configuration, there is always a risk of resorting to violence, even in spite of genuine cooperation—or bargaining—between opponents.86 Consequently, from competition to coordination, from conflict to cooperation, it is appropriate to take into account the determination of the stakeholders in the whole of their interdependence. Likewise, is it necessary to understand their expectations as to the losses and gains anticipated without overestimating the 82 Jack Levy, ‘Prospect Theory, Rational Choice and International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 41 (1), 1997, pp. 87–112. 83 George W. Downs, David M. Rocke, ‘Conflict, Agency, and Gambling for Resurrection: The Principal-Agent Problem Goes to War’, American Journal of Political Science, 38 (2), May 1994, pp. 362–380. 84 For an analysis and studies of synthesis on this theory of rational choice applied to international relations, cf., Jean-Yves Haine (Ed.), Rationalite´s et relations internationales: de´bats, la crise des missiles de Cuba, Cultures et conflits, Special Edition (36), Winter 1999, print. 2000, pp. 5–167. 85 ‘Where you stand depends on where you sit’, Graham T. Allison, The Essence of Decision, Boston, Little Brown, 1971, p. 176 ; Graham T. Allison, Morton H. Halperin, ‘Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications’, in: Raymond Tanter, Richard H. Ullman (Eds.), Theory and Policy in International Relations, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1972, pp. 40–79; Nelson Michaud, ‘Graham Allison et le paradigme bureaucratique: vingt-cinq ans plus tard est-il encore utile?’, E´tudes internationales, 27 (4), 1996, pp. 769–794. 86 Edward J. Lawler, ‘Power Processes in Bargaining’, Sociological Quarterly, 33 (1), print. 92, pp. 17–34.

3 A Diplomatic Framing of Violence

clarity of the objectives and the coherence of their actions. In his book Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling has analyzed all aspects of this policy of coercive persuasion. This ‘diplomacy of violence’87 intends to change the status quo by ‘manipulating the risk’88 and forcing the other party to change its policy because ‘when violence is involved, the interests even of adversaries overlap. Without the overlap there would be no bargaining, just a tug-of-war’.89 In strategic terms, this approach largely neglects the mental and emotional dynamics that constantly govern decision-makers. To characterize the decisionmaking process as an accountable process it favors too utilitarian a calculation, a ‘modern version of the Benthamite calculation of well-being’90 and therefore never includes the desire for recognition or even the search for glory. It does not even give further consideration to the will to domination and influence that comes with the death drive. Finally, in this strategic paradigm, no place is left for passions, such as hatred, even if they inform so well the identity of the social actors involved.91 The games of this coercive diplomacy are finally intended to influence those who may attempt to violate their international obligations. So it is the case with the ultimatum, this comminatory warning—similar to a threat—and formulated by a State actor, a coalition or an international organization against a potential or known perpetrator. Indeed, in peremptory terms, the latter is ordered to take or not take, a particular action within a specified time. Otherwise, this organization will resort to force or any other type of sanction. Note in this regard that Resolution 678 of the UN Security Council, adopted on 29 November 1990 and in relation to Iraq, made an injunction to which this country had to comply, within strict deadlines, adopting previous texts, otherwise having to use ‘all necessary means to enforce them’. In the expiry of the time granted, military operations were in fact launched against Baghdad.92 Surely, we should see here not only the implementation of coercive diplomacy, but also an expression of imperial policy.93

Schelling, Arms and Influence. . .op. cit., p. VI. Ibid., p. 92, sq. 89 Ibid., p. VI. 90 Hassner, ‘On ne badine pas. . .’, op. cit., p. 1230. 91 A French general and theorist of strategy, Andre´ Beaufre recognizes himself that: ‘A good overall strategy can only be based on psychological principles is a lot more significant in action than in deterrence [. . .]. It is entirely based on a fair assessment of psychological profiles and the correct application of large emotional currents capable of making one act and the others capitulate’, Andre´ Beaufre, La Strate´gie de l’action, La Tour d’Aigues, L’Aube, 1997, p. 147. 92 Philippe Bretton, ‘Remarques sur le jus in bello dans la guerre du Golfe (1991)’, Annuaire français de droit international, 37, 1991, pp. 139–164. 93 Catherine Denis, ‘La re´solution 678 (1990) peut-elle le´gitimer les actions armeés meneés contre l’Irak poste´rieurement a l’adoption de la re´solution 687 (1991)?’ Revue belge de droit international, 31 (2), 1998, pp. 485–537; Michel-Cyr Djiena Wembou, ‘Re´flexion sur la validite´ et la porteé de la re´solution 678 du Conseil de sećurite´’, Revue juridique et politique, inde´pendance et coope´ration, 46 (4), oct–deć 1992, pp. 438–457. 87 88

3.2 The Super-ego as a Triumphant Peacemaker

Another example of coercive diplomacy has been given to us in the form of Operation Allied Force. In this case, an air campaign was launched against the FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) on March 24, 1999, by the forces of NATO member countries (the North Atlantic Treaty) and primarily, by those of the United States. On June 10, 1999, after suffering 79 days of intensive bombing, the Serb leadership eventually accepted the demands of the political leaders of the Organization’s member countries. Thus, to persuade the FRY to end its intervention in Kosovo and return to the status quo ante, the UN allies went ahead with their threat through a gradual and limited use of military power. In other words, their aim was not to win a war in the conventional sense, but to use their air forces, in the service of coercive diplomacy to condemn the RFY to repentance.94 In the same logic, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 on March 18, 2011, which authorized member States to ‘take all necessary measures [. . .] to protect civilians and civilian populated areas’ in Libya against the troops of Colonel Gaddafi. With the leader having failed to comply with the injunctions in this text—a cease-fire and an immediate stop to all attacks against civilians— compliance with these requirements was finally obtained through the use of force. The United Nations also present in their charter a non-exhaustive list of countermeasures that may be adopted by their executive body and all of which tend to protect the common interest.95 These are intended to make reparations for the damage caused by the offending State, as long as it respects future international obligations. Thus, the embargo encompasses all the measures involving the banning of imports and/or exports to one or several countries, which is a powerful instrument in terms of coercion. For example, the Cuban State has been placed under embargo by the United States since 1962. This sanction has been strengthened by the Helms-Burton Act (1996), which aimed to prevent any investment in the country. Similarly, after the repression of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the United States and the Council of the European Union have placed the PRC under an embargo for arms sales. More recently, as we have already indicated, sanctions have been taken against Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi and the Syria of Bashar al-Assad. We see in these cases that coercive diplomacy has mobilized a repertoire of very large and diverse sanctions. If necessary, it may indeed lead to the establishment of Pascal Vennesson, ‘Bombarder pour convaincre? Puissance ae´rienne, rationalite´ limite´e et diplomatie coercitive au Kosovo’, in: Rationalite´ et Relations Internationales Cultures & Conflits, 2 (37), 2000, pp. 23–59; cf., e´galement le nume´ro spe´cial, ‘The War over Kosovo: Ten Years on’, International Affairs, 85 (3), May 2009, pp. 447–608. 95 In the course of recent years, the United States, their allies and the United Nations have taken such measures in regard to Afghanistan, Angola, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia, Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Somalia. For more details, cf., Daniel Byman, Matthew Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion, American Foreign Policy and the Limits of Military Might, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 106 sq.; Stephanie Lenway, ‘Between War and Commerce: Economic Sanctions as a Tool of Statecraft’, International Organization, 42 (2), Spring 1988, pp. 397–426; Zachary A. Selden, Economic Sanctions as Instruments of American Foreign Policy, Westport, Praeger, 1999. 94

3 A Diplomatic Framing of Violence

an international police force—Jus in Bello96—likely to condemn any State that transgresses the established rules.97 However, besides the consideration of political power relations that govern the development of these conventions and their strategic uses, one easily discerns the limits of such a policy. Indeed, we must understand that it only takes its rationale and relevance from the Westphalian framework in which it operates. We should understand that the homogeneity of sovereign States and that of collectively agreed standards guarantees the effectiveness of this recourse. But the rise of transnational flows and stakeholders—trafficking, terrorism, communitarianism—today underlines the vulnerability of State actors and their loss of authority.98 It participates in the return of the repressed that we will now deal with in the form of a flood of interpersonal and cross-community violence. Consequently, the implication will be that States are no longer able to regulate or even curb violence and therefore induce a brutalization of the world. But before coming to this analysis, we will see first of all how mass killings—including those in the two World Wars—have questioned the paradigm of the civilizing process.

The notion of jus in bello remains no less fluid, cf., Carsten Stahn, ‘“Jus ad bellum”, “Jus in bello”. . . “Jus post bellum?”: Rethinking the Conception of the Law of Armed Force’, European Journal of International Law, Nov. 2006, 17 (5), pp. 921–943. 97 Michel Lie´geois, Maintien de la paix et diplomatie coercitive: l’Organisation des Nations Unies a l’e´preuve des conflits de l’apre`s-guerre froide, Bruxelles, Bruylant, 2003. 98 Joseph Lepgold, ‘Hypotheses on Vulnerability: Are Terrorists and Drug Traffickers Coerceable?’, in: Lawrence Freedman (Ed.), Strategic Coercion, Concepts and Cases, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 131–150. 96

Part II

The Return of the Repressed

By renouncing their drives, Freud observed that human beings thought that they would escape violence and, what is more, barbarism.1 As integral parts of the civilizing process, wars have become total, bounded only by the technological limits of the weapons of destruction and annihilation. By a curious reversal of history, with these mass wars, States tolerate or even encourage the individual action that they had previously forbidden. Thus, from the moment that their nationals kill and die for their country, they are allowed to unleash their drives freely again. In this regard, Freud notes that warlike activity rejects all the taboos to which men submit in peacetime or during conventional conflicts. He underlines that State actors then permit every type of injustice and form of possible violence as extreme abuses that are usually prohibited. In other words, the draconian control that exists in peacetime, acting on the drives of individuals, disappears during these periods of hostility. The prohibitions instituted to stem the violenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;stigmatization or other sanctionsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;are therefore no longer observed in the course of these global explosions of violence. These interdictions are even less numerous today on an international stage that has become very heterogeneous, unstable and therefore unpredictable. States are no longer able to impose their standards as easily as in the past, let alone exercise their control a fortiori over other international actors. On the occasion of crosscommunity conflict when mass crimes are committed, we then notice that the death drive returns brutally to the world stage. Therefore, the conditions are met for a destructiveness (destructiviteÂ´) to unfold ad libitum, with the premise of a war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes).

1 In 1915, when The Great War raged, Freud published an essay entitled Reflections on War and Death, a text in which he found that this conflict had dramatically changed the attitude of men facing death.

Chapter 4

The Sacralization of Interstate Violence

The two World Wars caused 10 and 50 million deaths respectively. These figures bear no comparison to any previous war. But contrary to what one might first think, their specificity has less to do with this unusual accounting balance sheet than the new dimension they have conferred upon death. Indeed, as George Mosse has brilliantly shown, what in fact proves to be decisive for the understanding of contemporary societies is how these two periods of mass killings permanently transformed the psychic economy of men. It is also crucial to observe how they made men enduringly brutal and how they permanently placed disregard for human life at the heart of society. However, this historical movement of dehumanization could not be performed without the decisive importance assumed by the ‘myth of war’.1 The latter refers in this case to the sacralization of interstate violence that began in 1914 and has continued to grow thereafter. First, he transformed the image of war while both legitimizing and trivializing it. In this regard, G. Mosse recalls the emergence of a true ‘civic faith’.2 Based on a militant and openly aggressive nationalism, it has maintained over time a ‘transcendence of the war experience and death in war’3 thanks to war memorials and commemorations. Finally, against all odds, it encouraged a continuation of the positive representation of military conflict between the two global explosions. This acceptance of mass killing has proved so effective that it has never been seriously challenged by the pacifism of never again.4

Terms marked with an asterisk in the text refer to the definitions in the glossary. 1 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, electronic version, place 119. 2 Ibid., place 160. 3 Ibid., place 170. 4 George L. Mosse, (The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, 1997, op. cit., p. 107 sq.) indicating that the masculine ideal closely linked to the war ended up even among those who expressed their hate. The bellicose nationalism remained dominant despite some pacifist positions

4 The Sacralization of Interstate Violence

According to this logic, the fact of killing and dying for one’s country, which was previously correlated only to State violence, has also become a personal and intimate affair as much as the country was seen as a person, a fortiori a mother. During the two World Wars, the States that had hitherto repressed and forced the most violent individual urges, then released, solicited and encouraged them. This occurred to the point when these urges were no longer separable from interstate violence, making the micro return to the macro and get mixed up both in the same dynamic. Objects of an emotional and affective recapture, the aims of war have been internalized, embodied and lived by every soldier as his own, to the extent that these objectives appeared necessarily inseparable from his individual self-realization.5 The participation in war therefore took the form of personal fulfilment. Consequently, hatred of the enemy became socially acceptable as love of country.6 Breaking with the thesis of a civilizing process—this brutalization of societies has in fact heralded the brutalization of the world of which today we are the witnesses and stakeholders.

4.1

To Kill and Die for One’s Country

At the time of a dominant and triumphant Christianity, the notion of nationhood clearly referred to another world, the world of the beyond, that of God; we see in this the idea of the heavenly city par excellence.7 Politically, it merged throughout the medieval period with the loyalty that the vassal owed his lord and master. It

taken during and after the Great War, see the pacifist novel written by Henri Barbusse, The Fire, and published by Flammarion in November 1916. We should also mention the articles of Romain Rolland that brought him under violent attacks, but also help him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1915), cf., L’esprit libre Au-dessus de la meˆleé, Les prećurseurs, Paris, Albin Michel, 1953; cf., equally Josepha Laroche ‘La conscience malheureuse comme mode d’action internationale: le pacifisme de Romain Rolland’, in: CURRAPP (Ed.), Le For inte´rieur, Paris, PUF, 1995, pp. 137–149. We note in the interwar period new pacifist positions, for instance Erich Maria Remarque with his famous novel, All Quiet on the Western Front appeared in 1929. On the pacifism of veterans cf., Antoine Prost, Les Anciens Combattants et la socie´te´ française (1914–1939), Paris, Presses de la FNSP, 3 vol., 1977, particularly volume 3, Mentalite´s et ideólogies. On nationalist versus pacifist schools of thought and on the acceptance of the War in France, cf., Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914, Comment les Français sont entre´s dans la guerre, contribution a l’e´tude de l’opinion publique printemps-e´te´ 1914, Paris, Presses de la Fondation des sciences politiques, Paris, 1977. 5 Mark R. Leary, ‘The Self We Know and the Self We Show: Self-Esteem, Self-presentation and the Maintenance of Interpersonal Relationships’, in: Garth J.O. Fletcher, Margaret S. Clark (Eds.), Interpersonal Processes, Malden, Blackwell, 2001, pp. 457–477. 6 Euge`ne Enriquez, ‘Tuer sans culpabilite´’, Inactuel, (2), new series 1999, pp. 15–36. 7 On the contrary, for the Greeks and Romans, the patria essentially designated the political community, that concerned the polis or even the republica.

4.1 To Kill and Die for One’s Country

therefore took on primarily a personal dimension; the warrior sacrified himself, if necessary, in order to respect these ties and to honor his commitments.8 The sense of nation that we know today did not appear before the sixteenth century.9 A secularization process led to the association of the idea of homeland (a national kingdom), with the crown symbolizing a territorial community. Therefore, to kill and die for one’s country is experienced as a sacred duty—an absolute, sacred duty which must be worshipped. In other words, the corpus mysticum of the Christian Church was gradually substituted in the heart of men for the corpus mysticum of the State. The object of love and all the other affects, the latter led those to exclaim, much like in the time of Cicero, that: ‘Patria mihi vita mea carior is; the homeland is dearer to me than my life’.10 According to this logic, war will now be constantly glorified, while remaining sufficiently commonplace to be maintained over time in the everyday emotional state of each individual. The great, virile camaraderie of soldiers will finally bloom in the most extreme violence and be revealed as even more sacred.

4.1.1

The Recognition of Virility

Naturally, as George Mosse has shown in his socio-genesis of virility, the invention of latter does not date merely from the Great War. Indeed, the notion emerged from the end of the nineteenth century, crystallizing older features that certainly existed already in the Middle-Ages. It is therefore clear that this stereotype inscribed itself over a long period, although it indeed reached its culmination in the First World War and then continued to the present. In fact, the socio-historical turning point of 1914 was due to the association that took place at the time between an aggressive militarism and a masculinity perceived as indispensable. In this case, bellicose nationalism and this element of masculinity evolved in convergence; as things stand, it has become impossible to separate them. Therefore, if the individual is today still able to kill the enemy or be killed pro patria,11 then the opportunity remains for each soldier to realize the highest force of patriotic virility inculcated within him.

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Mourir pour la patrie et autres textes, trans., Paris, PUF, 1984, p. 111 sq. Philippe Contamine, ‘Mourir pour la patrie, Xe–XXe sie`cle’, in: Pierre Nora (Ed.), Les Lieux de me´moire, II, La Nation, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, pp. 11–43. 10 Kantorowicz, op. cit., p. 133. 11 At the ceremony in commemoration of the soldiers killed in Afghanistan, the President of France underlined in his speech: ‘You do not die for nothing. Because you sacrificed yourself for a great cause. [. . .]. Soldiers who have died for France, to accomplish the mission that was entrusted to you, soldiers who have joined beyond death the long cohort of all those who fell one day on the field of honor.’ Paris, Hoˆtel des Invalides, Tuesday July 19, 2011. 9

4 The Sacralization of Interstate Violence

War is the school of masculinity unlike any other,12 as it constantly invites its participants to surpass themselves. If needs be, it also exhorts the giving of one’s life. It is authorized to take life because it alone is able to impart a value and the meaning of such. It indeed shapes and deploys an ideal of masculinity that embraces moral values as well as physical properties. Certainly, courage and strength form the main emblems of masculine heroism,13 but a self-control counts because while the warrior is encouraged to release all his drives, he must always remain master of his conduct. Finally, against all odds, the sequence of war is often experienced as an exciting adventure. Even more, this triumphant hygienism is cleansed with blood and thunder. It presents itself as a real therapy, a valuable opportunity for physical and moral regeneration.14 Meanwhile, the brutality of war is also seen as eminently festive as it provides an escape from everyday life. It even transcends the lives of the soldiers themselves, each of whom can capitalize enough on his gratification as a warrior to strengthen his self-esteem by working in the service of a noble cause: the defense of his country. All of these traits take on a paradigmatic dimension in the work of Ernst Jünger. The reason why his work should be addressed to understand better how, from 1914, the consecration of manhood and the glorification of war could merge into a single reality that was then perpetuated historically. Is it legitimate here to turn to literature as a material? This question usually raises many reservations. A first challenge is the special quality of this type of data in ‘this manner of saying that is said in the very manner’.15 Indeed, unlike purely instrumental language, literature performs a leap into becoming total experience and ‘shakes meaning’.16 Its ambition is to ‘write the real and not to describe it’,17 to transpose it in order to make it more intelligible. A second pitfall refers to positivist inclinations that too often mark the social sciences and taint with suspicion any recourse to a literary space. Yet opposing learned discourse to that which would, after all, be only literature appears highly reductive and detrimental to the research itself. On the contrary, this confrontation promises to be fruitful for those who want to recognize at what point anthropology has made use of writers. This is because they were able to say the politically unsayable in explaining the micro-phenomena that would have remained unnoticed or opaque, so enabling a subtle social logic to emerge. In fact, through their formal inventions, they have opened new

Mosse, The Image of Man. . .op. cit., p. 50 sq. Ibid., p. 100. 14 Mosse, The Image of Man. . .op. cit., p. 112–113. 15 Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre a venir, Paris, Gallimard, 1959, p. 71. 16 Roland Barthes’ expression to which he often had recourse. In: Re´ponses (Paris, Seuil, 1992, p. 180), Pierre Bourdieu replies to Loı¨c J. D. Wacquant that sociologists should cease upon ‘the wealth of fundamental problems’ offered by literature to submit it to examination. 17 Pierre Bourdieu, Les Re`gles de l’art: gene`se et structure du champ litte´raire, Paris, Seuil, 1992, p. 143. 12 13

4.1 To Kill and Die for One’s Country

opportunities for researchers that should not be ignored. For example, the restitution of historical moments—in regard to which a purely scholarly analysis would have difficulties in grasping the full meaning—owes much to the power of literary expression. So how could we fail to pay attention to the detailed analysis that Roger Martin du Gard in Les Thibault brings to the interweaving of sectorial interests ultimately leading to the 1914 War? How then could the political scientist ultimately do without the fictional world of a Joseph Roth when in his works—The Radetzky March, The Emperor’s Tomb—he both demonstrates and revives the formalism of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, its meddlesome authority and the dysfunctional relationships between the center (Hofburg/Sch€onbrunn) and the peripheries (ethnic minorities). Finally, does it not address the reality of an empire necessarily condemned to implosion? The power of a highly elaborate fiction (e´criture travaille´e) is also applied to the construction of the characters who escape their initial universe to gain in explanatory power and achieve the status of a true Weberian ideal type18: The well-known figure of Eugene de Rastignac is essential, for instance, to the political scientist who examines the social trajectories or the process of mobilizing the social resources necessary for a career. In this case, we better understand through this fictional creation that political success does not always proceed from a simple mechanism of social reproduction. Furthermore, the adventures and misadventures of Ubu should also be contemplated, since Jarry was able to analyze with accuracy and an extraordinary acuity, the emergence, irrationality and improvisation of a dictatorship, thereby demonstrating even the personal appropriation of a system of State terror. The methodological commitment that selects the literary document as, amongst other things a research resource, does not present the simple interest of giving a subjective view to reality or bringing inaccessible materials together. Owing to its strangeness—in the Freudian sense of the term—literature can offer a powerful tool of understanding to the social sciences. Of course, under certain agreed conditions of relevance, the opportunity to enrich the methods of investigation presents itself, even escaping scholarly representations that prove too narrow.19 Certainly, the scientific construction of the object is still a necessary requirement. However, it carries a logic of imprisoning the gaze that observes and analyzes. On the other hand, the literary text, in being subject to various constraints, may present strong conceptual potential, particularly if the author wants to render direct experience in his writing,20 as was precisely the case with Ernst Jünger.

On the power of fiction, cf., Bourdieu, Les Re`gles de l’art. . .op. cit., p. 50. For an equivalent approach, notably inquiry by anamnesis, cf., Philippe Braud, L’E´motion en politique, Paris, Presses de Sc. Po, 1996, pp. 238–241. 20 Cf., Our study dealing with the work of the diplomat and writer Albert Cohen, Josepha Laroche, ‘Figures du diplomate dans l’œuvre d’Albert Cohen’, in: Yves Poirmeur, Pierre Mazet (Eds.), Le Me´tier politique en repre´sentations, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999, pp. 369–370. 18 19

4 The Sacralization of Interstate Violence

When Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered military mobilization in August 1914, Jünger volunteered in the Free Corps and fought with the shock troops. Promoted non-commissioned sergeant then officer, he was wounded fourteen times and he received, a few weeks before the end of the conflict, the highest honor and most prestigious of the German army, the Cross of Merit. In particular, in the books (In Stahlgewittern) Storm of Steel and Battle as Inner Experience published in 1920 and 1922, he delivered his first recollections of the war. But he was not satisfied with writing an autobiographical account by recording it into the sixteen notebooks that he had taken to the Front. Beyond this traditional exercise, he was mostly given to observing the emergence of a new type of soldiers, individuals straight out of the trenches, both horrified and fascinated by war. These were men of steel always ready to fight ‘not so much for a higher ideal as for discovery of their true nature as warriors’21 whose psychic economy was forever disrupted by the matrix of total war. Indeed, for Jünger, who primarily characterized them, it was the intimate and physical relationship they now had with death; whether to give death or receive it. But although it aroused fear amongst the fighters, it also allowed them to show ‘virile courage’,22 making them euphoric, and giving them the pleasure of the game. A game in which the men became beasts in a radical and definitive break with the civilizing process which had hitherto held them. Jünger wrote: Certainly, savagery, brutality, the raw color of instincts were smoothed, polished, dimmed [. . .] society bridled the drive appetites and desires. Certainly, a growing sophistication was decanted and ennobled, but the bestial still slept at the bottom of his being [. . .] when the masks fall: naked as he has always been, here he emerges, the first man, caveman, totally caught up in the unleashing of instincts.23

Painting a disillusioned observation that largely echoes the theories developed by Freud at the same time, the novelist sought to render ‘the unknown kingdom where the limits of our sensibility dissolve’ and which seized the fighter before the assault. He continued: That’s where one feels how little one is at ease in oneself. Things that laid dormant in the depths, drowned in the incessant din of working days, rise up then and dissipate [. . .] It is no use, it doesn’t seem to make a difference because, all of a sudden, once men of intellect we become again emotional, toys of phantasms against whom the weapon of the sharpest reason is powerless.24

Thus, the soldiers also knew the emotion of the hunter as much as the anxiety of the game, sometimes even both simultaneously, as when undertaking night surveillance mission beyond enemy lines. The writer also described the excitement of combat and the pleasure in the pain. It was characterized by a wild cheerfulness Mosse, The Image of Man. . .op. cit., p. 110. Ernst Jünger Krieg als inneres Erlebnis: Schriften zum Ersten Weltkrieg, La Guerre comme expe´rience inte´rieure, [1922], trans., Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1997, p. 86. 23 Ibid., pp. 37–38. 24 Ibid., p. 119. This consideration is naturally to reproach the reflections formulated by Freud. 21 22

4.1 To Kill and Die for One’s Country

mingled with ardor that seized them during the assault followed by the fevered fury of the melee and finally, orgasmic enjoyment of ‘destroying the enemy’.25 By doing so, it underlined the deeply sexual dimension—remaining hidden—of this unprecedented explosion, the one that will become the paragon and the mother of all subsequent wars. Eros and Thanatos are at once present in the act of war, bringing Jünger to say that ‘war is not only destruction, it is also procreation issuing from a virile species’.26 He recognized that, for example, the ‘blood lust’ that lives in them and through which they experience ‘the drunkenness of their own fearlessness’,27 the inebriation of destruction: As strange as it is to hear for those who have never fought to stay alive: the vision of the opponent provides, in addition to a horror of horrors, the issuance of a heavy and unbearable pressure. It is the delight of the blood, floating above the war as the red veil of storms over the mast of the black galley, whose unlimited momentum is comparable to love.28

Here Jünger highlights particularly well these destructive drives that the State has provoked, encouraged and channeled before the war releases these urges. So much so that his work has often been a source of misunderstanding and caused it to be taken for bellicosity molded in chauvinism. Instead, he actually takes a clinical approach to war. When he writes in Storm of Steel, about enemy fire ‘As we advanced, we were in the grip of a berserk rage. The overwhelming desire to kill lent wings to my stride.’29 He does not approve this psychic disposition, but brings to our understanding a reality that is almost always ignored, even denied. Indeed, it remains socially and politically shameful that ‘all shaking of the foundations of civilization triggers sudden eruptions of sensuality’.30 In other words, the pleasure lies in the heart of destructiveness as the death drive lies at the heart of the pleasure principle. Similarly, when he declares: ‘Baptism of Fire! The air was so saturated to the point of such overflowing virility that each breath was intoxicated, that we wanted to cry without knowing why. O manly hearts, capable of feeling such things!’,31 it would be wrong to reduce this exclamation to an incidence of personal exaltation. On the contrary, it only confirms after all how the worship of a triumphant masculinity has played a leading role for nations in arms and armies in war and it has finally become the fundamental symbolic resort for States: ‘On war contemplated in this way from its center, there is only one possible point of view, which is the most manly perspective.’32

Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 89. 27 Ibid., p. 91. 28 Ibid., p. 40. 29 Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, London, Penguin books, 2016, p. 211. 30 Jünger, La Guerre. . .op. cit., p. 68. 31 Ibid., p. 44. 32 Ibid., p. 94. 26

4 The Sacralization of Interstate Violence

In the same logic, Jünger has often been criticized for adopting an aesthetic bias towards the subject. Setting out not to write like Apollinaire, ‘My God, war is so beautiful’,33 he is fond of extravagant cosmic images in his text; sometimes earthly, but still beautiful in their unbearable horror. However, if his writing effectively pushed the line of the Expressionists who were his contemporaries, then the aim, like them, was to achieve a greater universality and try to convey an experience of the incommunicable, that of the soldier plunged into the heart of a conflict ‘which was not the end of the violence, [but] only the beginning’34 as he adds presciently. Paradoxically, this dimension of such manly glorification was accompanied at the same time by its trivialization. For if the war could settle affectively and emotionally so easily in the heart of men, if it could legitimately take possession of their minds, then it is because the killings were quickly de-realized. Quickly, the reality of war was introduced insidiously into the day-to-day life of people and settled there permanently.

4.1.2

The Trivialization of War

A vast project dedicated to trivializing war was therefore set up at the beginning of World War I—a process that has not stopped since. Certainly, the sacralization of interstate violence assumes that mass death is glorified, sublimated and transcended. Consequently, it implies at this moment that an exceptional aura be conferred on soldiers and those who have led them. Nevertheless, it also involves collective acceptance by which the horror is sustainably tamed, if it is not simply and efficiently obscured.35 The rapid cleaning of battlefields and war zones by the end of the conflict falls precisely under this logic. In this case, the objective is to erase the war and all its traces as fast as possible. Here, the objective of the highest State authorities is to frame the collective memory and construct a partly unreal memory; in any case, one that is intellectually acceptable and above all emotionally bearable. In this case, reproductions on postcards have played a role in this trivialization process. Having emerged around 1870, these missives then became a very popular means of communication and were a powerful emotional link between the Front and those behind the lines. As such, they have mainly contributed to reflections that sweeten the conflict, including it in a framed narrative of picaresque dimension. Death rarely figured in these cartoon papers, but was simply suggested in a reassuring or heroic form. As for the dead, wounded or maimed soldiers, they were never represented as such and gave way to characters transposed into romantic

33 Guillaume Apollinaire, “L’Adieu du cavalier”, in: Calligrammes, [1918], Paris, Gallimard, 1984, p. 117. 34 Jünger, La Guerre. . .op. cit., p. 122. 35 Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. . .op. cit., place 1938 sq.

4.1 To Kill and Die for One’s Country

landscapes. Suffice to say that no factual reality was ever reproduced in its crudeness, either by drawings or photos. It was, on the contrary, subject to aesthetic stylization that left a depiction of the fighting sequences that was carefully rewritten and directed for the sole purpose of attracting the adherence of readers to a just cause, or even the desire to join the fighters. Hence, presiding over the development of these images was the desire not to offend the eye and sensitivity of the recipients.36 Finally, it is a story, full of sound and fury that was purely and simply expelled in favor of an epic narrative and imagery as soothing as it was free of guilt. Indeed, these illustrations trivialized war in presenting it both as an ordinary activity and even, if necessary, conferring on the authors of war a badge of honor as status. Would it not offer an opportunity for soldiers to showcase their camaraderie and solidarity? Would not the self-denial and heroic courage that they showed in the service of the motherland not reveal itself precisely thanks to the war? Released in millions of copies, these postcards then become a part of daily life during each conflict. Obscuring the violence and glorifying the fighters, they make war familiar and prepare populations for the resulting deaths. Even more, they are a necessary tool because—whatever the scene depicted—the message reiterated constantly is to convince the people that they should know their duty to kill and die for their country. But this industrial imagery is part of a scheme to trivialize war on a much bigger scale because, over time, nature takes its course and gradually erases all traces of the mutilated landscape of bombed cities and ravaged buildings. There only remains the destruction that governments have decided to leave. Clean and orderly cemeteries are then erected as worth visiting, just as trenches and shelters are restored and maintained or combat zones appointed as historical sites, such as the beaches of the Normandy landings. Many war relics are preserved for the sole purpose of being converted into places of memorial and memorial objects.37 Thus, the battlefield may become a tourist attraction that, initially, many veterans visit on a pilgrimage before they give way to simple tourists. In this respect, G. Mosse has shown how ‘battlefield tourism’38 had contributed to managing and trivializing the destruction of the Great War. In fact, this activity is part of the broader framework

Ibid., p. 156 sq. Mireille Gueissaz, Sophie Wahnich, (Eds.), Les Muse´es des guerres du 20e sie`cle: lieux du politique? Tumultes, Special edition, (16), Apr. 2001, pp. 7–183. In 1917, a couple of French industrialists—Louise and Henri Leblanc—donated a library and museum both for the study of the Great War to the French State from the foundation they created at the beginning of the First World War. It was a unique library in Europe of a new type entirely dedicated to contemporary history. Furthermore, it was the first to collect all the primary sources comprehensively. This institution would later become the BDIC (Bibliothe`que de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine). 38 Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. . .op. cit., place 129. Recall in this regard that the French manufacturer, Franc¸ois Michelin published in 1920 the first Michelin guide to the battlefield of the Marne. 37

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of a ‘thriving battlefield industry’,39 which also involves marketing soldiers’ equipment, such as headsets or even the uniforms, or what Mosse called ‘mass-produced bric-a-brac’.40 Indeed, this production of images and memorabilia that accompanied and followed the two World Wars—and lasts even today—has largely allowed people to get used to horror, to learn about or to be socialized to it, and finally to accept the unacceptable. In other words, this ‘trivialization process’41 was to make the destruction of war anodyne and adopt a surreptitious manner in daily life to the point of naturalizing it. The slightest essential accessory of each soldier—a belt, for example—has been reproduced in series before being converted into tourist trinkets serving as an anecdote of war (anecdotisant la guerre). Against all odds, these ambassadors of the Front were as trivial as they were familiar in also adding very odd objects to signify the soldiers’ reality, such as cushions, doilies, pen-holders, clipboards etc. Hence, a stamp, colors, shape or even a drawing or logo all indicated a symbolic recapture of the conflict to domesticate and to play down these mass killings. In this regard, what is more emblematic of this process of trivialization than the panoply of toys directly inspired by the war? Thus, tanks, appearing for the first time on the battlefield in 1916, burst on to the market in 1917 with children adding them to their toy soldiers, shortly before armored vehicles, mines and camouflage uniforms, were all scrupulously miniaturized in the most realistic manner. Naturally, as Mosse notes, ‘There were obviously different degrees of realism in games as in the children’s war, but all accomplished the same trivialization. [. . .] war was woven into the fabric of daily life’.42 This realism laid in wait in every detail accustoming children to war, a perceived and understood playful war, a war presented as a simple sporting adventure calling as much upon prowess as team spirit and camaraderie. This realism even led the designers of games to be inspired directly by the functioning of armies and their regulations, incorporating not only the conflict in the entertainment and making it familiar, but getting the players more accustomed to discipline and obedience. Above all, the play was based on a ternary construction which induced complete transitivity between violence, destruction and pleasure. Eventually, during the Great War, ‘The trench becomes a replica, a sort of foretaste of the grave and the soldier would feel it as such’.43 The soldiers quickly showing an addiction to war and emotional hardening due to being in a state of bewilderment because ‘By dint of seeing death, through daily contact with it in a confined space, you see almost nothing but’.44 As a World War I French soldier

Ernst Glaeser cited by Mosse, op. cit., place 2347. Ibid. 41 Ibid., place 2378. 42 Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. . .op. cit., place 2158. 43 Thierry Hardier and Jean-Franc¸ois Jagieleski, Combattre et mourir pendant la Grande Guerre, 1914–1925, Paris, Imago, 2001, p. 128. 44 Ibid., p. 129. 40

4.1 To Kill and Die for One’s Country

noted, from 1914 in an almost clinical fashion: ‘Walking amongst them [the dead], you get used to it because the war brings it very quickly’.45 It is precisely against this process of dehumanization and trivialization of the carnage that Dada rose up*. This artistic movement had indeed not ceased to denounce the dominant axiom of killing and dying for one’s country. All over the world, Dada managed to sublimate a huge protest against the war and its instigators, especially the military and all those generally responsible for the carnage.46 This sublimated violence has found its historical path in futility and laughter, both acid and explosive in turn. That is why the Dada movement might have been considered as: ‘A wind of rebellion and revolt [. . .] a cascade of laughter that had fallen on the cemeteries of the Great War.’47 Dada sought to indict the ballyhoo48 that was raging at the time on both the Front and behind the lines. It both understood and deconstructed the cliche´s and stereotypes. If during the Great War, the Dadaists attacked the language with such a fury, it is because, they said, that the words had proved misleading and deceptive.49 The disgust and anger that had so inspired them, caused them not to offer nothing else than their complete destruction?50 The Dada movement was built on the idea of destruction, the return of the repressed and its sublimation*.51 In respect to art, literature, morals and conventions,

Note written on September 20 1914, cf., E´mile Clermont, Le Passage de l’Aisne, Paris, Grasset, 1921, p. 125. 46 Picabia wrote after the armistice: ‘Cosily installed in castles where they gave orders without taking account, through a field visit, of the difficulties of their implementation, the military staff did not admit that their orders might have been debatable. They ordered the attack and thousands of men died in vain’, cited by Henri Be´har, Michel Carassou, DADA, Histoire d’une subversion, Paris, Fayard, 2005, p. 28. Because of such pronouncements, they were hatred by veterans’ leagues. 47 Be´har, Carassou, op. cit., 25. 48 Ballyhoo is a phrase coined by soldiers in 1914 for criticizing military propaganda. It was popularized during the First World War by the journalist Albert Londres, who denounced in his reports the lies of governments. 49 With their automatic writing process, they undermined phrases and disjointed grammatical logic; the goal residing in the annihilation of syntactic constructions. It was necessary for them to torpedo language to reduce it to neologisms, or even simple utterances and sounds devoid of all meaning or sense. 50 As Tristan Tzara stated: ‘So every man cries: there is a large destructive work, negative to accomplish. Sweeping, cleaning. The cleanliness of the individual presents itself after the state of madness, aggressive madness, full of a world left in the hands of bandits that tears through and destroys the centuries.’ cited by Be´har, Carassou, op. cit., p. 30. 51 On the concept of sublimation, cf., Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Fifth Lecture, p. 67 sq.; Jean Laplanche, Proble´matiques, tome 3, La Sublimation, Paris, PUF, 2008. 45

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its members wanted to destroy everything.52 Of course, we must see in this selfdestructive attitude, an allegory and a tribute to the disappearance of millions of men who came to kill each other. What ultimately resulted from all these productions53 was a great global flow of anger and symbolic struggle against the war. For many years, Dada has chosen to make war on war and denounce the carnage rather than commemorate it.

4.2

Commemorating Carnage

Before even at the end of the Great War, the highest political authorities of all the belligerent countries paid tribute to the citizens who died for their country. A way to say that the sacrifice of these men had been legitimate; they were right to do their duty and give a higher meaning to their life. Therefore, up until the present day, States have been committed to a policy of commemorative ceremonies in very specific places, conferring upon them the sacred dimension that befits this kind of exercise. Elsewhere, governments set the precise rhythm of rituals, deciding the movement of the celebrants as well as their immobility, sometimes requiring silence and contemplation or, on the contrary, recommending public speaking and official speeches. From the outset, they also expressed the desire to reconcile private grief and national mourning, intimate sorrows and mass commotion; a policy which culminated with the creation of the Unknown Soldier. This cult of the dead on the field of honor, this tribute given to those who obeyed to the death remains primarily to give the public authority the opportunity to justify all the carnage and destruction. It offers them the chance to sublimate the dead while many question this necessity and underline the absurdity of all these losses. As noted by Ernst Kantorowicz: We are about to ask the soldier to die without proposing any emotional equivalent of reconciliation in exchange for the life lost. If the death of the soldier in combat—not to mention that of the civilian in the bombed cities—is stripped of any notion embracing humanitas, even God, a King or patria, it will also be devoid of any ennobling idea of sacrifice itself. It becomes a murder in cold blood.54

52 Paul Derme´e: ‘Dada tue-Dieu, Dada tue-tout. Dada anti-tabou!’, in: Georges Sebbag (Ed.), Manifestes DADA surre´alistes, Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 2005, p. 31. Citing again Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes: ‘The essential of Dada’s force is a principle of destruction and complete negation’, cited by Be´har, Carassou, op. cit., p. 41. In their traditional artistic productions, they opposed at random, trivial materials, rejection and contempt of all seduction. In this logic, they often opted for the creation of ephemeral objects many of which have been destroyed without a trace. 53 Thousands of works created in different registers: manuscripts, drawings, paintings, posters, movies, cartoons, sculptures, photograms, etc. 54 Kantorowiz, Mourir pour la patrie, op. cit., p. 141.

4.2 Commemorating Carnage

The reiteration of these commemorations would allow everyone to convince themselves every year that these wars had not merely been carnage.55 Rather, their liturgy presents them as necessary proofs of the defense of the country, making appeal to the overcoming of the individual for a higher cause; so goes the myth of war, understood both as “fiction, an explanatory system and mobilizing message”.56 We must recognize in these ceremonies the opportunity to express the necrophilia drive that sleeps within each of us. Could we imagine a grander social justification than that of honoring the dead on the field of honor? Could we imagine a more legitimate practice? Not only can we visit military cemeteries and funeral chapels or collect ourselves before the memorials to the dead—ossuaries, cemeteries and other cenotaphs—but civic duty requires a duty of memory of each individual. Indeed, these symbolic markers are involved in the rewriting of history and reconstruction of the past.57 They contribute, as such, to forging our collective memory and national identity. At the same time, they also constitute objects of a necrophiliac fascination. This is why States encourage and institutionalize our fascination before death: ‘Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive’.58 The sacredness of interstate violence holds and continues at this price; it passes through the State framework of a collective necrophilia strictly codified and ritualized.

4.2.1

The Cult of Death on the Field of Honor

From the end of World War I, the soldiers fallen in battle were deindividualized and exalted as national emblems. It was their duty to carry on forever the ideal of the armed hero; they even became symbols of love of country (caritas patriae). Suffice to say that their loss was nothing more than of a private matter hoisted into the de facto rank of State affair. During the two World Wars, governments therefore took direct responsibility for monitoring such carnage, adopting the role previously held

55 In France, for example, it is the law of October 25 1919 on ‘the commemoration and glorification of the dead for France during the Great War’ which set up the memorial matrix that has not ceased to be reproduced and perfected. 56 Cf., Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques, Paris, Seuil, 1986, p. 98. 57 For Maurice Halbwachs, ‘Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess’, cf., On Collective Memory, edited, translated and with an Introduction of Lewis Coser, [1925], Chicago, London, The University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 51. 58 Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, New York, Holt McDougal, 1992, p. 369.

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by families in managing grief. G. Mosse has rightly described this as a process of the “nationalization of death.”59 It was all the more imperative for the public powers to take seriously the grief and trauma of citizens before these mass deaths. As the work of Philippe Aries has shown,60 men’s attitudes before death have changed over the past centuries, even more so in the wake of an explosion of war. Indeed, States must now incorporate into their public policies a considerable change of mentality. Let us recall that during the Middle Ages, death was accepted with resignation and passivity, even with serenity; it undertakes a last inevitable journey to an unknown land. Our ancestors accepted and prepared for it in their families when the time came. However, a clear break appears from the end of the eighteenth century. In contemporary societies, a death is then experienced as an unbearable tearing apart, an unjust cruelty and an inconsolable loss. So much so that there is reason to question with Thierry and Jean-Franc¸ois Jagieleski whether the First World War went as far as to ‘revive this perception’,61 the feeling of ‘complete absurdity, that [they] should die for nothing’62 which has since assumed an unprecedented scale. In this context, only the organization of national mourning could guarantee the equality of all soldiers in death, as the law had previously guaranteed their equality as citizens. In 1914, France passed such a law creating military cemeteries in order to distinguish the civilian from soldiers fallen under stray bullets or bombs. As for the other warring countries, they were quick to do the same. These public places of worship—in charge of maintaining the sacrificial link between the living and the dead—were then dedicated to today’s pilgrimages and the various celebrations always carefully prepared as liturgical ceremonies.63 Above all, these altars of the Fatherland were strictly aligned in rigorously identical graves. Sometimes laid out in their thousands, the last say in their development is the prevalence of the principle of equity that lies between them.64 Whether it concerns French or German cemeteries or British and American graveyards this organization shows, in particular, how the State continues to impose strict discipline and absolute obedience beyond the grave.

Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. . .op. cit., place 525. Philippe Arie`s, L’homme devant la mort, Paris, Seuil, 1977; Philippe Arie`s, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident: Du Moyen Aˆge a nos jours, Paris, Seuil, 1977; Michel Vovelle, Mourir autrefois, Attitudes collectives devant la mort aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sie`cles, Paris, Gallimard, Julliard, 1974. 61 Hardier, Jagieleski, Combattre. . .op. cit., p. 122. In his famous novel, The Fire, Henri Barbusse recounts the example of the painful experience of the famous battles of Hill 132, also known under the name of the Crouy tooth that killed more than 25,000 soldiers within days. But the operation finally ended in a position of the status quo; that is, a complete failure, hence the term forged by the French soldiers of World War I so often pronounced: die for nothing. 62 Ibid., p. 126. 63 William Kidd, Brian Murdoch (Eds.), Memory and Memorials: The Commemorative Century, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004. 64 Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. . .op. cit., place 1193 sq. 59 60

4.2 Commemorating Carnage

The sacred dimension conferred on these graves, so conducive to meditation, explains the virulent controversies that have arising with regard to the mass production of memorials. Indeed, for the people, accepting a mode of industrial production trivialized the soldiers’ deaths and therefore destroyed the sacralization of this operation. Reproduced in series, these tombstones gave rise to a casualness, if not an indifference towards the dead or a lack of respect for the true war heroes. More seriously, this technical facility was seen as a rejection of their glorification or worse, a defilement. Merely, it amounted to a reification. In other words, to their physical destruction was then added a symbolic degradation. In the collective imagination, it was as if craftsmanship alone could hold the power to preserve the graves from the ravages of time, as if the stone masonry alone could sustain, hic et nunc, the recognition of the sacrifice made. In fact, these controversies did nothing more than to reveal the emergence of a new iron law, that of a brutalization of the world. Particular tribute was now to be paid to the dead on the field of honor, while war continue to be trivialized. After the Great War, it was the same logic that presided over the creation and generalization of memorials. In 1918, for example, 38,000 commemorative constructions were rapidly built in France at the behest of local councils.65 It was then necessary for the bereaved to project any love and affection onto these objects that inspired the fallen soldiers. Certainly, for citizens, these buildings remained the means to fulfil their civic duty, but they were equally a bulwark against the guilt of simply still being alive. In addition, they reinforced the cohesion of the celebrants, consolidating the sense of belonging to a community and participating as one in terms of expressing feelings; in other words, enabling them to be in communion with a common grief. These major sites of collective memory actually offer everyone the opportunity to forge a positive image of simultaneously celebrating and being celebrated. Valuing both the living and the dead, they contribute to the positive structuring of the Self and Other. Proof then that one was to be careful that if ‘the dead seize the living, but the living can also take hold of the dead’.66 These funerary steles fulfil a double requirement. First, to respect the individuality of each death by retaining the soldier’s etched name, sometimes accompanied by his photo. Moreover, it should also present the majesty of the great cause, one that may even require the ultimate sacrifice at any moment for the Fatherland and the common good. But it is still necessary to meet the challenge of reconciling the irreconcilable; that is, to honor the memory of veterans, recognizing the legitimacy of the carnage in regard to which they were the victims. 65 Antoine Prost, ‘Les Monuments aux morts, culte re´publicain? Culte civique? Culte patriotique?’ in: Pierre Nora (Ed.), Les Lieux de me´moire, I La Re´publique, Paris, Gallimard, 1984, pp. 195–225; Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France, Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1999. 66 Euge`ne Enriquez, ‘Perspectives psychanalytiques et rituels politiques’, in: Yves Deloye, Claudine Haroche, Olivier Ihl (Eds.), Le Protocole ou la mise en forme de l’ordre politique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008, p. 39.

4 The Sacralization of Interstate Violence

The cult of the dead pro patria follows a well-regulated ritual, frozen in time and space. Thus, the commemoration ceremonies meet a rigid protocol and a highly formalized political-institutional order of precedence which is accompanied by agreed and routinized discourse. This liturgical commemoration remains immutable year upon year, which gives it consistency. The commemorative march appears predictable, expected and ultimately so reassuring. It is soothing and allows, as such, the celebrants to erase death in order to exorcise it. In this regard, how can we fail to acknowledge here what Freud’s qualified as the ‘compulsion to repeat’67 and so return to the fort-da in order to emphasize its efficacy as a tool of psychic preservation. Let us recall briefly in Beyond the Pleasure Principle the moment when Freud analyzes the strange game of a very young child who keeps launching a coil attached to the end of a string to make it disappear, then pulls it to him when he wants to see it reappear. It was a form of behavior that his parents found incomprehensible and worried them. Freud then underlined that the toddler felt delighted to repeat this maneuver tirelessly. He observed that whenever the little boy threw the object, he exclaimed loudly fort (leave) and da (here) when he decided to retrieve it. Freud interprets this fun game and correlate with the frequent absences of the mother. In fact, in what might pass for simple entertainment, Freud instead discerns a way of metabolizing the suffering experienced by the son upon each departure from his mother. Freud views this as the means by which the boy ‘compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach’.68 In other words, through this symbolic operation the child managed to connect the real (absence of the mother) to the imagination (‘I would like her to be there and I will be able to make this my subterfuge’). Finally, Freud stresses, in particular, the role of comforter and the comforting nature of this repetitive activity. Eminently restorative, it preserves the child from sorrow and even gives him pleasure. We reference this case here because of its paradigmatic dimension. Indeed, from a simple game, Freud identified a psychic economy allowing a trauma to be overcome through a sense of loss and subsequent extirpation of loss. This is precisely the same logic at work in all the commemorative ceremonies that maintain the cult of the dead in the field of honor. A fortiori, when it comes to the Unknown Soldier—as we will now see—the immutable ceremony that accompanies the remembrance of the dead soldiers, assigns each official a place and a well-defined role. It routinizes gestures and speech in a liturgy repeated ad libitum. These incessant reiterations, which facilitate the framing of emotions, prevent any possible emotional excess and preserve all disorder.

67 68

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, [1920], . . . op. cit., p. 19. Freud, Ibid., p. 14.

4.2 Commemorating Carnage

4.2.2

The Invention of the Unknown Soldier

Since the Great War, interstate violence has been characterized by new forms of destructiveness more massive, more extreme and more intensive than ever. This historic turning point—due to the industrialization of the production of weapons— caused material devastation and loss of life without equivalence. But the record of the famous Storm of Steel, the result of bombing and artillery shelling cannot be limited to the State recording tens of millions of deaths. It is still necessary to take into account the considerable proportion of the dead because it raises very specific problems. Indeed, the sophistication of weapons today entails that they grind up the bodies of combatants,69 literally making them disappear.70 Insofar as such wars have become highly technological, hundreds of thousands of soldiers are reported disappeared. At best, their sometimes unidentifiable remains are deposited in mass graves.71 After each World War, States have nonetheless introduced considerable resources to try to find some of the hundreds of thousands of bodies claimed by families.72 They organized a real management of the post mortem; they established the recognition of a right to compensation and indemnization which was not enough to satisfy requests from the public. Thus, the military authorities have exhumed and retrieved corpses and human remains formerly or summarily buried in temporary graves, mass graves, or simple shell holes. At the same time, they increased their number of surveys to gather enough clues through which they could return a lost identity to their soldiers. Despite genuine efforts and some results, hundreds of thousands of fighters remained definitively without graves, abandoned or decomposed between the lines. Needless to say, the research conducted by public authorities was not successful. Finally, not only did the State take the lives of these men, but it was not able to return their remains, which aroused a keen sense of dispossession amongst their relatives. In addition, to prevent these soldiers being frozen in the anonymity of their disappearance and to enable families to do their Cf., Jünger, Storm of Steel . . .op. cit., p. 139: ‘[. . .] the other three were torn apart by the shell [. . .] We seized hold of the limbs sticking out from the wreckage, and pulled out the corpses. One man had lost his head, and the end of the torso was like a great sponge of blood. Splintered bones stuck out of the arm stump of the second, and his uniform was drenched with blood from a great wound in his chest. The intestines of the third were spilling out of his opened belly’. 70 More than 300,000 soldiers on France’s side during the Great War alone. 71 Even in France, the principle of individual burials had not yet been established until the Law of December 29, 1915 which entitled soldiers to burial at the expense of the State, being the military who died for France during the war. 72 Mentioning in this regard the first novel by Ismail Kadare, The General of the Dead Army which describes both the State policy and emotional upheaval caused within the military charged with finding the remains of combatants. In the early Sixties, almost 20 years after the end of World War II, an Italian general, accompanied by a priest, who is also an Italian army colonel, is sent by the Italian government to Albania to locate, collect and report the bones of their dead countrymen during the war and bury them with dignity. On this theme, see also the very fine film by French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, La vie et rien d’autre (Life and Nothing But). 69

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mourning, the highest political and military authorities gradually came to the invention of the Unknown Soldier. The idea may have been conceived in France in 1916 to exhume and re-bury an anonymous soldier who symbolized all the victims who fell during the conflict.73 Afterwards, many countries also adopted the principle of such an institution. For those thousands missing, these are the ‘dead who have not finished dying’,74 we would now substitute an iconic character who was lost in death without his name. In order, that this mission was fulfilled and that the collective imagination can work, it was still necessary to strictly observe the utmost secrecy around this “Ambassador of the Dead”.75 That is why on November 10, 1920, the French Minister of Pensions, Andre´ Maginot, saw fit to justify this provision as follows: Our main concern is to ensure, in the most completely anonymous way, that families with the pain of having lost one of their members to war, without having been identified, can still believe and be entitled to assume that the being who is dear to them is the subject of this supreme tribute.76

In the book he devoted to November 11, General Weygand also presented this argument, stating: ‘And all the families who have not found one of their own may believe that the dear Being for whom they weep is the Unknown Soldier’.77 From the outset, they bestowed upon it a transcendent power to represent all the dead of the Great War, and then to become, over time, the emissary of the dead of all wars. The symbolic power of this State subterfuge was to enable all citizens to engage in genuine group therapy. Thanks to him, they passed collectively into the national family, from the private to the public, before finally being hoisted as the particular into the universal and were thereby comforted. In fact, through this glorification, homage to pro patria was rendered onto this huge mass of dead soldiers. Ultimately, just as the kings were formerly in charge of curing scrofula, the Unknown Soldier— a true miracle worker78—would henceforth be responsible for healing the

He who would become the Unknown Soldier was exhumed—on the order of the Leygues government—by the French military authorities in the greatest secrecy in November 1920, one of eight major battlefields stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss border. He was selected at random from eight bodies of anonymous fighters in an underground bunker in the citadel of Verdun, by a simple soldier veteran of the Great War himself hurriedly appointed. cf., JeanFranc¸ois Jagielski, Le Soldat inconnu, Invention et poste´rite´ d’un symbole, Paris, Imago, 2005, p. 7. 74 Ibid., p. 34. 75 Ibid., p. 63. 76 Cited by Jagielski, op. cit., p. 215. 77 Ge´ne´ral Maxime Weygand, Le 11 Novembre, Paris, Flammarion, 1958, pp. 132–133. 78 We draw an analogy here with the miraculous powers assigned to the kings of France and England, the most famous of which was the king’s scrofula. This thaumaturgical attribute was analyzed in the book of historical anthropology and history of mentalities of the historian of the Annales, cf., Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, [1924], trans, London, Routledge, 2015.

4.2 Commemorating Carnage

brutalization of the world by taking the place of all the missing. But as the French veteran and novelist, Jean Gue´henno writes, he became, in particular, the: Great organizer of social ceremony, as they [the rulers] wish it to be ordained, the idol who always says yes, responsible for justifying the world as it is, as they want it to be so. The tomb of the most destitute of men, of one who lost his life and his name in the war, became the place where the established powers congregate, a place of pilgrimage with the order of the altar.79

In other words, this glorification of the ‘Son of all the mothers who have not found their son’80 should also be analyzed as the tree that hides the forest of millions of dead and endorses those to come. Indeed, glorifying everyday life, the State not only honors the missing of all wars, but it makes them speak. Worse, it speaks on their behalf, they who no longer possess an identity. This appropriation process—or even usurpation—was strongly criticized each time by some veterans who saw it as an outright sham. Hence the pacifist novelist and veteran Henri Barbusse tirelessly denounced the abusive practice of misappropriating the words of the dead because it was used in the service of a trigger-happy nationalism or hawkish foreign policy.81 Though the sacralization of interstate violence was dominant it would not be any less the object of serious grievances.

Jean Gue´henno, Journal d’un homme de quarante ans, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1934, p. 221. Jagielski, op. cit., p. 227. 81 Henri Barbusse, Paroles d’un combattant, articles et Discours (1917–1920), Paris, Flammarion, 1920, p. 106. 80

Chapter 5

The Globalization of Non-state Violence

The repressed has now returned, historically speaking, despite the civilizing apparatus that we discussed in the first part of this book, in spite of the socio-political and socio-legal techniques which have been and continue to be implemented to sanctify the prohibition of the use of violence. Finally, despite the stigma and sanctions against all forms of transgression of international standards. In other words, even if this instinctual threatâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;inherently socialâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;remains broadly contained and repressed, it does not disappear. This historical turning point occurred when States largely lost their monopoly of legitimate physical violence, which they had still managed to preserve for centuries. In addition, their ability to maintain and control the value of national wealth has been almost completely eroded. Let us underline that they have yielded ever more ground to the radicalism of the new social actors that make up the contemporary international context. This constitutes a break with the civilizing process described by Elias. Among them, we will now mention the sub-State communities able to transnationalize interventions and whose mode of affirming identity often takes the form of extreme violence.

5.1

The Reaffirmation of a Community Between Itself

The Western model of a bureaucratized State, holder of a legal-rational legitimacy, reducing differences and dispensing modernity has not been generalized in every cultural area. This political organization appears in trouble both in its historical territories as well as the traditional societies to which it has been imported; this process of political importation having provoked rejections and continuing to do

Terms marked with an asterisk in the text refer to the definitions in the glossary. ÂŠ Springer International Publishing AG 2017 J. Laroche, The Brutalization of the World, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50793-4_5

5 The Globalization of Non-state Violence

so.1 This failure, as the existence of an increasingly significant split between the imported States* and their societies, is manifested in multiple identity crises.2 These protests are aimed at the imposition of the Western model under the proclaimed form of a Westernization of the political order. This is first denied then rejected as the standardizing vocation of the figure of the State, with its claim to transcend particular interests, integrating different cultural, ethnic and religious communities over which it seeks to have authority. Its legitimacy is disputed, including in societies where it had not previously been challenged and still enjoyed a strong level of authority.3 In fact, behind the loss of control of the governed by the governors, it is a certain construction of politics—combined with the movement of secularization at work— which now seems to be refused. For decades, we have been witnessing the breaking up of political entities such as for instance Central Europe, the Caucasus, Ethiopia, Somalia, Congo, Thailand and Indonesia. These fragmentations reflect the lack of regulation and confirm the likelihood of territorial implosion. They also indicate a fundamental challenge to State logic. Faced with local societies, if States have failed to overcome this identity resistance, it is also because of a delegitimization of the customary system, where the political actors prove to be dependent on an exogenous culture. Thus, in such a context of acculturation, the legal and institutional mimicry that it highlights then leads to the establishment of a rule of effective and legitimate law. Strong expansion of micro-community allegiances thus follows. This process concerns “imagined communities” to quote the felicitous phrase of Benedict Anderson.4 What is in question is the presence of symbolic substitutes that enable men to overcome the eventual disintegration of traditional entities bound until that moment to a powerful sense of collective belonging. The political game therefore appears to be increasingly meaningless to social actors, to the point of being the object of a profound subversion resulting in a crisis of citizenship. At the same time, we have seen the strengthening of sub-national identifications and the compulsive reaffirmation of the community between-itself, already envisioned by Freud. Identities that face, oppose each other and impose themselves, most often through violence, have become the instruments of an extrainstitutional protest that intends to offer a legitimate alternative.

Bertrand Badie, L’E´tat importe´, l’occidentalisation de l’ordre politique, Paris, Fayard, 1992, p. 69 sq. 2 Ibid., p. 227 sq. 3 Cf., notably regional pride and the ‘neoregionalism which has returned in its own right: destined to protect States, this time it has only served to threaten them’, cf., Bertrand Badie, Un Monde sans souverainete´, les E´tats entre ruse et responsabilite´, Paris, Fayard, 1999, p. 177 sq. 4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2e ed., Londres, Verso, 1991. 1

5.1 The Reaffirmation of a Community Between Itself

5.1.1

The Communities of Narration and Emotions

Cultures are revitalized and are only truly themselves when they are transformed into communities of narration and emotions. Today, regardless of the specificity of these elements, they all share a desire to indulge in an exaltation of a mythical tradition. Consequently, everything is rebuilt under their particularistic causes. This culturalist strategy, which rebels against a universalist conception of modernity, is also found in other struggles for identity. In addition, these mobilizations are not limited to demanding a popular dimension, they claimed to be culture or, more precisely, they pretend to embody it and, as such, reshape it according to their own vision.5 They manufacture authenticity as an authenticity dear to culturalists. Posing as custodians of a legacy, they demand to preserve it, sometimes while exhuming it. They set themselves up as pose as the guardians of a ‘sort of sleeping identity’6 whose original purity would have been corrupted or even lost. This unambiguous reading of a mythical past—which is part of a cultural logic of closing—takes the form of a transmission of backward-looking values, obscuring the syncretism still at work. It is as if there were an irreducible base, specific to each of them, which automatically confers their immanent properties. Their discourse invents a phantasmatic past that would be projected into the future, which shows that ‘collective memory is systematically unfaithfully to the past in satisfying the needs of the present’.7 But such a symbolic operation involves the implicit assumption of the existence of ‘primordial identities’8 which are immutable ones. But these do not exist independently of the speakers because they fit socially through their enunciation. Unlike the interpretative schema of the culturalists who substantiate them and turn them into timeless realities, identities like cultures are proving to be always in perpetual change. In short, they are not reduced to civilizational monads that could be reified to fit the needs of the identity cause. This narrative endeavor overshadows the practical operations by which actors are defined in a specific historical moment. Therefore, the expression of community appears questionable insofar as it seems to refer to an aggregate identity that remains immutable over time. It thus gives the illusion that cultural homogeneities and consistencies exist, where ‘indetermination, unrealization, multiplicity and polyvalence’9 would instead be expressed. Indeed, individuals identify less with the positive dimension of the community to which they belong than one with regard to which they are defined in relation to the entities with which they are related. Finally, societies are characterized by heterogeneity and do not form cultural wholes. In other words, primordial identities do not correspond to any structural 5

On the formation of these primordial identities (identite´s primordiales), cf., Jean-Franc¸ois Bayart, L’Illusion identitaire, Paris, Fayard, 1996, p. 92 sq. 6 Ibid., p. 95. 7 Bayart, op. cit., p. 90. 8 Ibid., p. 92, sq. 9 Bayart, op. cit., p. 113.

5 The Globalization of Non-state Violence

reality. However, they are indeed perceived as such. In this respect, they represent facts of consciousness and schemes of subjectivity which constitute social facts that need to be deciphered. As Jean-Franc¸ois Bayart has summarized well, ‘they are not explicit facts demanding to be made explicit’.10 Consequently, if these identity groups can seize powerfully the social imaginary and present a populist program (programme tribunitien), it is thanks to the permanent invocation of a mythology of origins. They appropriate the history and, by resorting to tradition, distort the need to reinterpret it; they may even reinvent it in order to give meaning to their future. In such a way, as Gellner says, ‘dead languages can be revived, traditions invented, quite fictitious pristine purities restored’,11 such as the Hindu nationalists who largely reinterpreted the Vedic golden age upon which they then bestowed value, or even Jewish nationalism that—in founding Israel—resurrected the Hebrew idiom that had not been practiced for centuries. Everywhere, there is the same concern to demonstrate the strength of a community between itself, facing up to the power in place and to other collective identities or even, if necessary, to the occupier. This was the case with the Islamist resistance that began in Afghanistan from 1974 and developed in 1979 against the Soviet occupation, before it was taken over by the Taliban who intensified the fight in the following decades.12 A fortiori, the same logic was at work in the 1978–1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, or even among different groups working in Congo, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Pakistan, Sudan or again in Malaysia. If these movements are embraced by populations, it is also because these groups know how to retranslate socio-economic frustrations and manipulate them effectively. Ultimately, their success is that they manage to merge in the same discourse the issue of social inequalities and cultural identity. In this case, the audience encountered by revivalism* must be naturally correlated with the failures registered by imported States in their development policies, as well as in their attempts at secularization.13 The current rise in power of Islamism owes a lot, in this respect, to this double failure.14 It allows the current of fundamentalist Islam to unite a number of identity groups that promote their community between itself as a panacea, as well as presenting it as the ultimate spiritual and political project. On this point, let us note that in recent years all these communitarian organizations have radicalized their doctrines and projects towards States, to the point of presenting religion as the

Ibid., p. 101. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1983, p. 56. 12 Geraint Hughes, ‘The Soviet-Afghan War, 1978–1989: An Overview’, Defence Studies, 8 (3), Sept. 2008, pp. 326–350. 13 Jeffrey Haynes, ‘Religion, Secularisation and Politics: A Postmodern Conspectus’, Third World Quarterly, 18 (4), Sept. 1997, pp. 709–728. 14 To understand these very different political approaches and examine the plurality of these political developments, cf., Bertrand Badie, Les Deux E´tats, Pouvoir et socie´te´ en Occident et en terre d’Islam, Paris, Fayard, 1986. 11

5.1 The Reaffirmation of a Community Between Itself

foundation of their identity, the unique source of authority and the only true loyalty.15 This multiplicity of membership groups, their die-hard character and especially their recent arrival on the global scene has been a challenge for the States experiencing great difficulty imposing their law as an exclusive and sovereign Law. Therefore, it becomes less constraining and costly for the individual to break free of long established prohibitions. In fact, it turns out to be easy to transgress more-or-less openly. On the basis of the above, the State actors of today sometimes fail to mobilize or control these communities. Thus, at the heart of these communities, substitute authorities have developed capable of taking advantage of a number of allegiances. This is why it is necessary to analyze more closely this strong expansion of communitarianism now manifest in the entire world. Certainly, they thrive mainly in the form of ethnolinguistic or faith-based crystallization in imported States, but their rise to power is observed everywhere, including in Weberian States, such as France, Spain or the UK. For centuries, political pluralism has comforted the cohesion of the Nation-State by sometimes offering different social classes of multi-categorical partisan division. Hence, the community between itself is now present in stronger echoes and with a growing sense. We might instead see attempts to institutionalize it, as in Italy with the project of the Padania16 defended by Umberto Bossi, also in Hungary or in the States of the former Yugoslavia.17 As a result, they face an imported legalinstitutional realm or one lacking credibility. Yet, the communities between themselves thrive in a social world representing only an inspiring set of political technologies. Consequently, a homogeneous public space no longer exists. On the other hand, it multiplies juxtapositions and even confrontations of identity spaces which are increasingly segmented, self-reliant and chaotic. What does this new situation then mean? Each group—in constructing a narrative and emotional community—reconciles its own members while targeting their violence towards an outside object, or at one that has been externalized, which then facilitates a symbiotic movement of reconciliation.

5.1.2

The Spiral of Identity Conflicts

In Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud already addresses what he will later name in Civilization and Its Discontents as, ‘narcissism in respect of minor

Bernard Lewis, ‘Islamic Revolution’, The New York Review of Books, June 30, 1983. Martina Avanza, ‘Une histoire de la Padanie: la Ligue du Nord et l’usage politique du passe´’, Annales, (1), Jan–Mar 2003, pp. 85–107. 17 On the decomposition of countries and the identity paradox, cf., Bertrand Badie, La Fin des territoires, Essai sur le de´sordre international et sur l’utilite´ sociale du respect, Paris, Fayard, 1995, pp. 101–179. 15 16

5 The Globalization of Non-state Violence

differences’.18 With this study, he clearly states that this provision—both psychic and social—inevitably leads to many conflicts: Closely related races keep one another at arm’s length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scotchman, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the colored.19

But this hatred and these aversions are all resources which actually reinforce the cohesion of identity groups. The result is a latent climate of potential war against any foreigner perceived as an enemy because their members are just like those patients who ‘love their delirious ideas as they love themselves. That is the secret.’20 In other words, what unites them, makes them stronger and helps them to preserve their relationship may in no case be reduced to a system of shared values, a shared past and a common sense of sharing: ‘love is not enough, it is necessary that hatred be present as a part of the death drive’.21 It is possible that the community may exist without a particular leader if it proves able to ‘invent a transcendent object’, one that will be able to guide its hateful orientations.22 In other way, its members gather around a collective project marked with the seal of the destruction of the other. Such was the mass murder committed in Rwanda by the Hutu Power from April 6 to July 4, 1994.23 Indeed, this genocide* of mostly the Tutsi people, one that would have claimed—according to UN assessment—about 800,000 victims, had the people as its acting head, responsible for the mobilization, and not some charismatic leader. But behind this very convenient expression of the people24 hides, in this case, a heterogeneous configuration of very diverse stakeholders: local authorities, regional leaders of different political parties, business leaders, religious leaders, the military, policemen, militia or simple farmers. For all that they found themselves united by one radio station RTLM (Radio Television

Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, chap. V, [1929], trans., New York, Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 2010, p. 90. 19 Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [1921], op. cit., p. 20. 20 Sigmund Freud, The Birth of Psychoanalysis—Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, trans., Paris, PUF, 2006, p. 20. 21 Euge`ne Enriquez, De la Horde a l’E´tat, essai de psychanalyse du lien social, Paris Gallimard, 1983, p. 72. 22 Ibid., p. 83. 23 For reconstitution and analysis of the socio-political trajectory of the country from the advent in 1973 of the single party of Rwanda, cf., Andre´ Guichaoua, Rwanda, de la guerre au ge´nocide: les politiques criminelles au Rwanda (1990–1994), Paris, La De´couverte, 2010. 24 This term takes on positive and rewarding connotations in returning, in fact, to the ground on which Hannah Arendt defined the masses, cf., Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, [1948], New York, (NY), Schocken Books, 2004, the chapter entitled: A Classless Society, pp. 407–449.

5.1 The Reaffirmation of a Community Between Itself

Libre des Mille Collines) that would, in time, create, cultivate and orchestrate the hatred.25 We therefore observed an extension of inter-communitarian clashes during the 1990s, mostly of great violence. While centuries of history had led to a complete and irreversible entanglement of populations at the heart of Europe, considerably intensifying tensions between Serbia and Croatia, the latter declaring its independence in 1991. However, this was presented within the context of the history of a multi-ethnic and multi-community Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1945, with both countries formed after the Cold War and so proving phantasmatic in terms of ethnically homogeneous territorial units. Croatia had about 60,000 Serbs living in Slavonia and Krajina entailing that Serbia was then prepared to defend its minority, possibly by force. The crisis was ended in March 1991 by a secret Serbo-Croatian division of Bosnia and Herzegovina—which also declared independence on April 5, 1992—where many Serbs and Croats also lived. But the political project of ‘ethnic purification’,26 was applied once more ad absurdum to this objective conception of the nation*, and led, as we know to war,27 ethnic cleansing,28 and finally the massacre of 8000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995.29 In the end, whatever the historical case considered, this ‘inflexible passion’30 and the horror of the Other devours those who experience hatred that never ceases, so

This Rwandan radio station broadcast on July 8, 1993 to July 31, 1994 and played a significant role in the genocide, cf., Jean-Pierre Chre´tien (Ed.), Rwanda, les me´dias du ge´nocide, Paris, Karthala, 1995; Jacques Se´melin, Purifier et de´truire, usages politiques des massacres et ge´nocides, Paris, Seuil, 2005, p. 158. 26 Alice Krieg-Planque, ‘Purification ethnique’. Une formule et son histoire, Paris, CNRS, 2003; Ivana Macek, ‘Sarajevan Soldier Story, Perceptions of War & Morality in Bosnia’, in: Paul Richards (Ed.), No Peace, No War, An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, Oxford, James Currey, 2005, pp. 57–76. 27 A consequence of the breakup of Yugoslavia, itself linked to the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989, this war was brought to the Serbian people and took hold of Croatian and Bosnian. It began on April 6, 1992 when the JNA attacked Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had declared its independence on March 1. It ended with the Dayton Agreement on December 14, 1995. 28 The fall of Vukovar constituted one of the most serious episodes, cf., Muhamedin Kullashi, Effacer l’autre, identite´s culturelles et identite´s politiques dans les Balkans, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005, p. 120 sq. 29 The massacre of Srebrenica is considered as the ‘worst massacre committed in Europe since the end of the Second World War’ and was judged to be a genocide by the TPIY (The International Criminal Court for Former Yugoslavia) and the ICJ (International Court of Justice) on several occasions. In February 2006, the ICJ rejected the liability of Serbia for the genocide but stressed that the Serbian State did not take ‘all measures within its power’ to prevent these events. In March 2010, the Serbian parliament recognized the Srebrenica massacre, a gesture perceived by the bodies of the European Union as a first signal for reconciliation throughout the region. cf., James Gow (Ed.), Dark Histories, Brighter Futures? The Balkans and Black Sea Region: European Union frontiers. War Crimes and Confronting the Past, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 7 (3), Sept 2007, pp. 345–515. 30 Jacques Hassoun, Les Passions intraitables, Paris, Aubier, 1989.

5 The Globalization of Non-state Violence

much so, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun has shown, that it is bent on destroying his cause which ‘is not the cause of desire, but the supposed cause of his indignity [. . .] and hence he should destroy the cause’.31 Therefore, the whole effort of the persecutor, he says, is tirelessly to ‘hunt down the obscure object of his hatred’.32 To grasp better the dilemma or mental trap faced by identity movements causing the conflicts and in order to understand the spiral in which they find themselves hopelessly involved, let us take the famous parable of Schopenhauer: A company of porcupines crowded themselves very close together one cold winter’s day so as to profit by one another’s warmth and so save themselves from being frozen to death. But soon they felt one another’s quills, which induced them to separate again. And now, when the need for warmth brought them nearer together again, the second evil arose once more. So that they were driven backwards and forwards from one trouble to the other, until they had discovered a mean distance at which they could most tolerably exist.33

This figure of speech indeed appears enlightening because it emphasizes the ambivalence of affects and emotions that run through all groups whatever they are. It also recalls the need for their members to find a way out of a crisis that may, if necessary, preserve them from their own violence—which may go as far as collective annihilation—so enabling them to introduce themselves into the duration of this process. Lastly, this parable points out that everything comes down to a question of distance. The other, perceived as a foreigner to be stigmatized, animalized, persecuted and sometimes even exterminated, remains in effect always the neighbor, one’s fellow human being: the foreign neighbor. As Jacques Hassoun has shown so subtly, in this process of hatred and rejection of the other, it is not, ‘Foreigners that trouble us. We recognize foreigners. It is those who are almost different. Those who are not entirely different’.34 But today, every mobilization and ethnocultural and/or faith-based form of solidarity excludes other identity groups. These formations are built against each other, because they are constructed against the foreigner: ‘The foreigner is the enemy; most often the way of getting rid of the foreigner is to put him to death’.35 There is no need to differentiate these communities because their logic of exclusion continues to be the same. It is in the social vacuum that religious or ethnocultural organizations invest profitably or prosper accordingly. They implement a differentiation strategy based on an exacerbated reactivation of the dominated cultures, involving sacred 31 Jacques Hassoun, ‘Rien n’est plus re´aliste que la haine’, in: Bertrand Piret (Ed.), La Haine, l’e´tranger et la pulsion de mort, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008, p. 46. 32 Ibid. 33 Joseph Schopenhauer, Parerga et Paralipomena, Part II, XXXI, trans., quoted by Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, op. cit., p. 49. 34 The analyst then develops his remarks by referring to the Jewish caftan, to the beards and curls to conclude that this is not the one who horrified the Nazis, but rather ‘a German Jew of Mosaic confession, who spoke perfect German and was bristling with decorations’, cf., Hassoun, op. cit., p. 46. 35 Marie Moscovici, Le Meurtre et la langue, Paris, Me´tailie´, 2002, p. 27.

5.1 The Reaffirmation of a Community Between Itself

vernacular idioms and, more generally, sub-national particularities. These ‘interstitial actors’36 circumvent the State by deploying community solidarity, such as networks of mosques in India, Buddhists in Burma or the associations of the Christian Churches in Kenya and Burundi. In sub-Saharan Africa, Christian, Muslim or syncretic movements mobilize much more than political parties do. As for the marabout or fetishist practices, they retain all of their authority. In other words, the religious field remains—or returns—largely autonomous to the extent that State actors have less success in exercising control over it. It may be observed that in Sudan or Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon, and outside the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, or even India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the activism of religious groups is also acute. Whether it concerns Maronites in Lebanon,37 Copts in Egypt, Kurds in Turkey and Hindus or Muslims in India, all contribute to perpetuating the spiral of identity conflicts that State actors are mostly incapable of stemming. It is the same instinctual logic at work when the movement is not religious but simply ethnocultural. The same extremism is found in clashes in Indonesia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Somalia and the Ivory Coast, the latter in which the invention of xenophobic ‘Ivorian identity’ (ivoirite´) occurred. But these ‘interstitial investments’38 may also have produced a confrontation between the rural and urban areas. On this point, Badie evokes the capacity of village authorities to organize their own policies on the entire base of self-administration.39 In such a historical configuration, we understand that it has become difficult for States to guarantee their security. Indeed, they now understand that their prerogatives of public power are seriously challenged and questioned by stakeholders, who show great qualifications to overcome the State prohibitions and ignore or even overstep their sovereign power. In other words, if the principle of territoriality had been universalized centuries ago, it now provides a framework for allegiances and exchanges to bloom. These are as much denied as exceeded because radicalism appears as the privileged mode of integration for almost all of these identity entrepreneurs (entrepreneurs identitaires) who derive their vitality precisely in the communities between themselves. This applies internally and a fortiori internationally, without any necessity to differentiate between the two dimensions. Indeed, as these opponent networks are usually organized in transnational forces, they frequently succeed in transferring the violence of their local action on to the world stage, so globalizing their particularist cause. We are therefore in the presence of a transnationalization of so-called terrorist actions.

Badie, L’E´tat importe´. . .op. cit., p. 264. Bernard Lewis, ‘Les Arabes devant l’Occident: les sources du ressentiment’, De´bat, (68), Jan– Feb 1992, pp. 102–116. 38 Badie, L’E´tat importe´. . .op. cit., p. 263. 39 Ibid., pp. 263–264. 36 37

5 The Globalization of Non-state Violence

Certainly, terrorism is not new.40 Nonetheless, this sociopolitical reality has developed undeniably specific traits. These relate firstly to the overall process of the transnationalization of flows constitutive of globalization, and secondly to the disappearance of bipolarity—two structuring elements which mark the third age of terrorism.41 Indeed, far from announcing a less antagonistic era, the end of the Cold War has instead led to an increased dissemination of violence. State reconfigurations—combined with a deterioration of citizen allegiances—have now transformed terrorism into a singular way of using violence.42 Having established this assessment it is not easy to determine the specificity of this term so often mobilized by public powers and the media. Alex Schmid and Albert Jongman have recorded no fewer than 109 definitions from academic or official publications.43 However, several common criteria spring up from this extensive review of an original ideological or nationalistic inspiration, implying a set of rules for terrorism: (1) the use or threat of using violence, (2) establishment of a climate of uncertainty with surprise effects, (3) the choice of symbolic targets, (4) seeking media coverage, and (5) pursuit of political objectives. It also draws strength from the mutual assistance of many transnational networks often proceeding through the exchange of services.44 Terrorist action is a social construction that cannot be studied without being contextualized and connected to local configurations of stakeholders and their representations.45 It therefore requires scrutiny of their complex interactions. This is why one cannot ignore the role and professional interest of journalists in the

40 Pamala L. Griset, Sue Mahan (Eds.), Terrorism in Perspective, Thousand Oaks, Sage publications, 2008. 41 Unlike many cliche´s conveyed by common sense, terrorism is not a new phenomenon, far from it. Indeed, recall that Russia experienced in the nineteenth century a major terrorist wave of a socialist and anarchist character. Such propaganda of the deed developed in France with many anarchist bombings between 1892 and 1894, expressed the same logic and marked the first age of terrorism. Then came the second age, inaugurated by the Congress of Berlin. It operated in 1878 a territorial division between the three empires—Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian—thus determining a balkanization of Central and Eastern Europe that exacerbated separatist aspirations of dependent peoples and ultimately lead to the Balkan wars 1912–1913. As such, this international summit was the source of an era of terrorist violence in this time with a nationalist character which will continue until independence of the colonies, cf., Marc Hecker, ‘Les trois ^ages du terrorisme’, Commentaire, 31 (121), print. 2008, pp. 283–286. 42 Philippe Braud, Violences politiques, Paris, Seuil, 2004, p. 71 sq.; Robert O. Keohane, ‘The Globalization of Informal Violence, Theories of World Politics, and the “Liberalism of fear”’, in: Robert O. Keohane, (Ed.), Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World, London, Routledge, 2002, pp. 272–287. 43 Alex P. Schmid, Albert J. Jongman, Political Terrorism, Amsterdam, North Holland Publishing Company, 1988. 44 In this case, remember the pragmatic collusion that could sometimes develop between the IRA, the FLNC, ETA and some Palestinian groups. The interchangeability of terrorists that resulted has given them a greater ability to remain elusive, which has helped to strengthen all their actions. 45 Peter Berger, Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, [1967], New York, Penguin, 1996.

5.1 The Reaffirmation of a Community Between Itself

media construction of this violence, specifically in terms of telling and showing. Indeed, this reality should not be underestimated, nor should their individual desires or career strategies to further their competitive struggles within their organizations.46 Put differently, it remains essential to determine the different social uses of this type of violence, especially as the term terrorism is emotionally charged. The magic power of these words is formidable in their occurrence as a symbolic weapon, likely to qualify/disqualify and distinguish/stigmatize this or that actor by presenting him as either freedom-fighter/revolutionary or rather as terrorist. This raises a problem of qualification. For example, the Israelis have long regarded the PLO as a terrorist group, while Palestinians have viewed their organization as a national liberation movement engaged in legitimate combat. Indeed, no group or individual identifies with the term terrorist without reducing it, as it idealizes the cause and invests in it a total legitimacy. Nevertheless, these wars of terminology should be taken into account if we want to properly address the transnational expansion of violence and the specific challenges it represents. While the reality of terrorism naturally causes anxiety and fear, it also calls upon moral condemnation. This sometimes creates fascination and a certain appeal that can serve to encourage further vocations. Thus, let us be wary of all preconceptions and take care to study these kinds of affects and remote representations in order to consider this social fact in all its complexity. However, the individual dimension of this political form of expression cannot be neglected in the analysis because the terrorist act reflects very specific psychological dispositions based upon frustration, resentment, humiliation, despair, and finally hatred, the best defense against contempt.47 Feelings will be more-or-less politically instrumentalized when the moment comes. For some, this represents the preferred way of expressing their identity and securing it in the group to which these individuals belong, their in group (groupe d’appartenance). In short, an identity that marks with blood a clearcut boundary between the out-group and the in-group.48 By offering the latter an acting out* with strong emotional resonances, they express solidarity with their cause often to their own death. Suffice to say, a dramatized form of self-assertion

On this point, we will refer to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’emprise du journalisme’, ARSS, (101–102), 1994, pp. 3–9 ; Patrick Champagne, ‘La vision me´diatique’, in: Pierre Bourdieu (Ed.), La Mise`re du monde, Paris, Seuil, 1993; pp. 61–79. 47 Axel Honneth notes that, ‘For the victims of disrespect [. . .] engaging in political action also has the direct function of tearing them out of the crippling situation of passively endured humiliation and helping them, in turn, on their way to a new, positive relation-to-self’, cf., The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996, p. 164). 48 Concepts closer to what Norbert Elias called the established and outsider groups, cf., Norbert Elias Reflections on a Life. . .op. cit., p. 122; for more developments, cf., Norbert Elias, John L. Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders: a Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems, Londres, Frank Cass, 1965. 46

5 The Globalization of Non-state Violence

must also be recognized here, ‘which is again and above all, a display. A physical power and a political powerlessness at the same time’.49 The intended objective of folding the State or any other community, means radically reversing the balance of the strong/weak relationship. The criterion of effectiveness responding to a calculation of the utility of cost/benefit plays out in full on the micro as well as the macro political level. This concerns sending a message to the designated enemy to signify that his opponent is taking control of the agenda. This message is accompanied by a signature taking the form of a ritualized scenography where everything becomes meaningful to compose the terrorist syntax: the choice of the date, place,50 target,51 type of weapon and possible redundancies.52 This concern for extreme planning, even sophistication, is also reflected in the meticulousness with which terrorists have begun to master advanced technology. Now, with the development and worldwide dissemination of a form of mass destruction both miniaturized and banalized, this type of transnational terrorism is now at a serious advantage, practiced by networks in large part deterritorialized and including every type of community. This development undoubtedly marks a historical turning point. Given this new situation, it is clear that States have come out weakened from this confrontation when these constituent elements are realized. Not only do terrorist groups challenge their monopoly that has, on the whole, been preserved so far, but by internationalizing their use of violence while deterritorializing it, often even exporting it, they make every principle of territoriality more and more obsolete. They demonstrate that public authorities are no longer able to control their borders nor their territory. By their violent and spectacular actions, terrorist groups show that they hold the power to convert simple individual micropolitical acts into macropolitical results. Considering that these movements of forcing through and acting out might be politically rewarding, they force governments to negotiate and compel them to borrow non-institutional and clandestine channels in order to delegitimize States. Donna Schlagheck has shown that rule of law risks being particularly vulnerable to this type of action. To this end, she stresses the four criteria of their vulnerability: (1) they are open societies based on freedom of movement and free association, 49 Philippe Braud, ‘La violence politique : repe`res et proble`mes’, in: Philippe Braud, (Ed.), La Violence politique dans les de´mocraties europe´ennes occidentales, Paris L’Harmattan, 1993, p. 22. 50 Two examples among many others: (1) in 1973, an attack was committed by Armenians in Lausanne. Why this city? Because 50 years earlier, the victors of the First World War signed the eponymous treaty that came on the promise of the Treaty of Sevres (1919) which they undertook in favor of an independent Armenia. (2) The Madrid bombing in 2004 claimed by al Qaeda. Why Spain? Because every year the country loudly celebrates the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492, which is a humiliation for the Islamists and a permanent source of resentment. Cf., Marc Ferro, Le Ressentiment dans l’histoire, comprendre notre temps, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2007, pp. 7–8. 51 With the attacks of September 11, 2001, striking simultaneously, the US world power, the West, New York the center of the world economy and Manhattan, the center of global finance and globalization, Washington and the Pentagon, but also 91 States through their resulting victims. 52 Paul Wilkinson, ‘Terrorist Tactics and Targets: New Risks to World Order’, Conflict Studies, (236), Dec. 1990, pp. 1–21.

5.2 The Regulation of Drives by Sacrifice

(2) they depend on new technologies, being naked, prime targets for terrorists, (3) and they have free media and (4) they must reckon with the pressure of public opinion.53 Given these characteristics, according to the author, when democracies face a terrorist crisis they risk ‘over-reacting’.54 Indeed, to try to eradicate terrorism, they may suppress civil liberties, to confer excessive powers to force coercion and ultimately jeopardize their own institutional identity.55 But these democracies may, on the contrary, be ‘under-reacting’ when negotiating with terrorists. They will hence accept their demands and ultimatums at the risk of losing their credibility. In doing so, terrorists undermine the legitimacy of States by refuting the persistence of a diplomatic monopoly. Political leaders are then reduced to simply denying this reality and refuse ostensibly to negotiate with terrorists. Although they announce this refusal, they do not have the means to go through with it.

5.2

The Regulation of Drives by Sacrifice

To sacrifice, it is first and foremost to kill. Beyond the diversity of its forms, the sacrifice, as Marcel Mauss said, has, ‘to establish communication between the sacred and the profane world through the intermediary of a victim; that is, an object destroyed in the course of a ceremony’.56 This social fact reflects a mechanism of victimhood—a mimetic crisis, to borrow the expression of Rene´ Girard—which would, according to him, settle rivalries of desires.57 In this case, the essential lies not in the circumstances that will determine this life-saving device, or more, in the specific character of the victim who triggers the hateful and destructive fascination of a group. Indeed, these elements come more under the category of epiphenomenon than any explanatory factor. On the other hand, it should be highlighted that, at the end of an outburst of a drive, any community engaged in a violent act of this nature will finally experience unanimity as a symbiotic reconciliation of all its members: the war of all against all, then turning 53

Donna Schlagheck, International Terrorism: An Introduction to the Concepts and Actors, Lexington, Lexington Books, 1988, p. 91 sq. 54 Tobias Kelly, Alpa Shah (Eds.), ‘A Double-Edged Sword: Protection and State Violence’, Critique of Anthropology, Special Issue, 26 (3), Sept. 2006, pp. 251–348. 55 Paul Wilkinson, ‘The Role of the Military in Combatting Terrorism’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 8 (3), Aut. 1996, pp. 1–11. During the 1970s—the famous dark years (Die Bleierne Zeit) - at the time of the Red Army Faction, this was an important social debate in the Federal Republic of Germany. In regard to the Italian Red Brigades, cf., Luigi Bonanate, ‘Les anneés de plomb: une histoire de´passeé? Anatomie du terrorisme italien’, Confluences en Me´diterraneé, (20), 1996–1997 pp. 51–60. 56 Marcel Mauss, Œuvres, Les Fonctions sociales du sacre´, “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice” [1899], Paris, Minuit, 1968, p. 302. (Collected Writings—The Social Function of the Sacred, ‘Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice’). 57 For the developments of this thesis cf., the two works of Rene´ Girard, Le Bouc e´missaire, Paris, Grasset, 1982 ; La Violence et le sacre´, Paris, Grasset, 1972.

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into a war of all against one. The scapegoat therefore becomes the holder of the power to unleash the crisis, one that then restores peace as a peace rediscovered, even if it is only a temporary peace.

5.2.1

The Imaginary Construction of Scapegoats

In reference to some etymological comparisons, Rene´ Girard not only establishes a lexical relationship between several signifiers, but he shows more similarities between a number of different social postures, those that are found in an adversary and have become a persecutory mechanism and a long-time archetype. Crisis, crime, criteria, critique: these terms share the same root in the Greek verb Krino which not only means to judge, condemn, distinguish and differentiate, but also to accuse and condemn a victim.58

In this context, let us recall that in the ritual of the Old Testament, during The Day of Atonement, the high priest must take two goats and draw them by lots. While it becomes directly a sacrifice to God, he puts his hands on the head of the second—the scapegoat*—and confesses to him the sins of Israel before sending him into the desert to the demon Azazel. Thus, the goat is supposed to carry with him all the sins transmitted by the imposition of hands. It should be emphasized in this case how this purification rite is similar to the ancient Greek institution of pharmakos. Indeed, to combat a calamity, the Greeks chose a person they expelled from the community of citizens, before putting him to death. To the extent that this sacrificial victim was responsible for all evils, his expulsion was then considered to purge the city of the evil that had struck it.59 Finally, let us return for a moment to the very instructive case of Bouphonies practiced in Ancient Greece.60 Many celebrants were led every year in a procession of oxen near the Acropolis where cakes were deposited as offerings all around the altar. Initially, this ritual took the form of an outright oblation, but it quickly gave way to an act of great violence because as soon as an animal began to devour the food, it was immediately killed with an axe. It was then cut up because it was considered to have contaminated the offerings and to have committed an act of sacrilege. It was then roasted and eaten immediately by all group members. In other words, everyone was involved in this sacrifice as a means of distributing and 58

Girard, Le Bouc e´missaire, op. cit., p. 35. Hence the ambiguity of the neutral term (φάρμακoν, pharmakon) could mean either cure or drugs that poison or venom. Jacques Derrida analyzed in Plato’s Pharmacy opposite meanings of the term pharmakos in ancient Greece, from a reflection on the Phaedrus of Plato. Indeed, in this dialogue, Plato compares writing to a drug cf., La Pharmacie de Platon, texte repris dans La Disse´mination, Paris, Seuil, 1972. 60 This was a ceremony performed at the time of Aristophanes (fifth century BC.) And it was still held every summer in the lifetime of Pausanias (second century). We are aware of this sacrifice through the Greek philosopher Theophrastus (fourth century BC.). Although his work is now lost, we know many extracts with the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry (234–305). 59

5.2 The Regulation of Drives by Sacrifice

disseminating responsibility for the bloodshed committed by every participant. They all found themselves to be stakeholders, whatever their role as oxen conductor, simple water porters, servants, axe sharpeners, priests, etc. As it happens, although this simple object was just an animal, we are dealing with a murder, as shown by the anthropologist Lucien Scubla whose thesis we quote here. After the meal, there begins an ‘authentic criminal trial which give rise to the transfer of the accused’.61 A succession of accusations and denials is set up between all the stakeholders of the Bouphonies. Each one accuses the other, with each imputing responsibility to his neighbor for the killing. Ultimately, they all attribute it to a single person, the cutthroat. Yet, this man denies his guilt and in turn discharges it on the knife. Judged as the only culprit, this object is thrown into the sea as ‘the killer is spared because no-one claims to recognize him’.62 In other words, after what amounts to a trial, no-one is believed to have intended to commit this act of blood. All share this common cause and so invoke the fault of the sacrificed animal. His sacrilege—daring to lash out at the offering dedicated to the gods—forces them to commit murder. In this process of imputation, ‘the social actors behave as if they both recognize and refuse to admit that the sacrifice is a murder’ and Lucien Scubla concludes that: Everything happens as if, to fulfil its function, the sacrifice demands both that it looks like a murder and cannot be recognized as one. This is the double bind or the sacrificial paradox which we escape, like certain logical paradoxes, by a sort of putting it in quotation marks or making the statement intrinsic to the ritual that: ‘This is not a murder’.63

By now, it is obvious that this thesis consists in saying that sacrifice and murder are intertwined. However, an objection could be made that, after all, this is only a matter of an animal, as in the first myth of the scapegoat. But what is forgotten is that if it is only an animal, it is one that is always more or less humanized before being killed,64 even when such a substitution seems very unlikely. Thus, the people

Lucien Scubla, ‘Ceci n’est pas un meurtre ou comment le sacrifice contient la violence’, in: Franc¸oise He´ritier (Ed.), De la Violence, vol. 2, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1999, p. 153 sq. The reference to the celebrated work of the painter Henri Magritte, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, being a manner of emphasizing the eminent constituent power of representations. 62 Ibid., p. 154. 63 Ibid. 64 In this regard, in The Golden Bough, James George Frazer presents us with the feast of the bear among the Aino (Japanese people who lived in the Japanese island of Yezo), as certainly the most paradigmatic case of all: you capture a bear that is then raised as a child, a woman making it suckle the breast and continues to cajole him. The wild beast lives with his master in his family, playing with his children and is treated exactly like them with great affection. It is the sacred bear, equivalent to a divinity. Then, after a certain stage of development, he is shut up in a wooden cage before killing him during a great collective ceremony. The killing in his honor is characterized by the deployment of abuse of all kinds of exceptional cruelty (impalement, crushing him between two poles, etc.). The animal is thus thrown to all members of the community, each to persecute the beast before obligation to finally eat. Frazer notes: ‘Not to partake of the feast would be equivalent to excommunication’, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, [1911–1915], London, Macmillan, 1950, p. 507. 61

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who sacrifice aquatic animals prefer those whose blood flows in abundance and are therefore as similar as possible to humans in this way. We might object again that these cases involve myths or concern ritual practices very distant from our civilization and our time; they are, quite simply, completely unfamiliar. Is it therefore worth mentioning them? What meaning would they carry? In fact, if we wanted to expose them it would be because they highlight the ideal-type, in the Weberian sense of the term. It denotes a matrix of designated victims and a legitimization of the abuses committed against them, usually until death ensues. Besides, they allow to return to the border between human being and animal that has been established by our societies. Claude Levi-Strauss develops in this case an irrevocable analysis of this dichotomy sanctified by Western civilization which, as he writes, has always ultimately served to ‘separate men from other men’.65 He considers that this division between humanity and animality, constitutive of Western humanism, is at the origin of the domination of people by other people. But, this search for a mighty power appears all the more relentless insofar as it is not perceived as such by the actors who are mobilized to perform it. It is important to point out here the deadly logic in which a return to the animal constitutes, against all odds, the shortest path to hitting sooner or later man as an object of massacres66 and extermination. In fact, as Florence Burgat has shown with relevance, when humans are animalized—and qualified as vermin, rat, lice, dog, jackal, pigs, etc.—this dehumanizes them and constitutes a process whereby their rights are erased.67 Therefore, whenever such and such community uses this animal rhetoric to describe a group of enemies, perceived and represented as doing evil, then it proceeds by reification, understood as ‘a forgetting of recognition’ of the Other.68 Finally, this community sets the stage for an identification of all subsequent violence inflicted upon the enemy with the illusion of being within his rights—that of legitimate defense. In this way, anyone who is excluded or condemned for having supposedly accomplished such and such an act, may suddenly and unknowingly fulfil the function of expiatory victim, having to suffer the consequences in terms of extreme violence. In fact, this person—or group—is the scapegoat chosen in further correlation to the operation of the persecuting group for reason of its own

Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, vol. 2, Paris, Plon, 1973, p. 53. Darquier de Pellepoix declared in 1978 in L’Express: ‘Antisemitism has not for us been a question of a certain conception of the world but a question of cleansing which will soon be resolved. We will soon have no more kikes. We have no more than 20,000 of them and Germany will be free of them’. Commenting on this declaration, the psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun writes: ‘Death does not lie in hatred, only destruction. What is destructive in hatred is not human; everyone knows since Darquier de Pellepoix that we only saw kikes [. . .] and it’s true: we cannot think of the death of another human being, because there is no other human being [in hatred]’, Hassoun, op. cit., p. 53. 67 Florence Burgat, ‘La logique de la le´gitimation de la violence: animalite´ vs humanite´’, in: He´ritier (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 45–62. 68 Axel Honneth, La Re´ification, trans., Paris, Gallimard, 2005, p. 71 sq. 66

5.2 The Regulation of Drives by Sacrifice

characteristics.69 The choice of this target may even seem random or arbitrary. As for the sacrificial fact, it is not necessarily enacted by the occurrence of a particular event. Finally, the charges are usually proven to be stereotyped because the process serves to name the guilty party in order to assign responsibility for this or that evilfortune, then accusing and punishing him. In other words, an alternative principle is at the base of this imaginary construction of this negative charge, one generating practical effects. This mechanism, based on an ignorance of the real issues, protects the entire community in the application of its own violence. It diverts and reroutes this ferocity towards an element—whether internal or external—that will eventually be sacrificed. In this way, harmony and social unity are restored to the whole but only at this price.70 When examining a large number of historical cases, what is striking is ultimately the homogeneity of the charges levelled, whatever the period and cultural area. For example, during the Great Plague,71 Doctor Konrad Megenberg reports—similar to a number of chroniclers of the moment72—that people accuse the Jews of having organized a vast plot to poison wells and fountains. But before this scourge occurs, a long time after its disappearance the Jews continue to embody absolute evil in the West.73 Similarly, the Turks between 1914 and 1915, led by Enver Pasha, accused the Armenians living in the territory of the Sublime Porte to collude with the Russian enemy and enriching themselves unduly. Without seeking countless other examples, we could still include the expulsion of the Beninese people decided by the Gabonese authorities in 1978 and that of the Cameroonians in 1981. This primordialist logic of ethnicisation is exacerbated when each ethnic group creates a scapegoat of the other, found for example equally in Burma where the Muslim minority is regularly expelled to Bangladesh. Finally, it should not be forgotten that

Girard, Le Bouc. . .op. cit., p. 37 sq. How not to recall Kafka’s short story here, The Metamorphosis, in which the author portrays a man who wakes up one morning in his family as a large insect. Therefore, his family puts him away, neglects and ultimately tortures him to death before throwing him in the garbage. After relegation and this killing, family life makes a fresh start: ‘They decided to pass that day resting and going for a stroll. Not only had they earned this break from work, but there was no question that they really needed it’, cf., Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, [1915], trans., Great Britain, Amazon, 2016, p. 104. 71 The Great Plague or Black Death was an outbreak of bubonic pandemic, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which struck Europe’s population between 1348 and 1352. It was neither the first nor the last outbreak of this type, but it’s the only one wearing that name. This is the first in history to have been well described by contemporary chroniclers. It is estimated that it has decimated between 30 and 50% of the European population in 5 years, making about twenty-five million victims. It led lasting impact on European civilization, especially after the first wave, the disease reappeared regularly in different countries already contaminated, such as in France (1353–1355) and the UK (in 1360 and 1369). 72 We should also mention the writer and poet Guillaume de Machaut who Rene´ Girard evokes at length in the first chapter of Le Bouc e´missaire, op. cit. 73 Cf., Pierre Sorlin, L’Antise´mitisme allemand, Paris, Flammarion, 1969, p. 27 sq.; Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident, Paris, Fayard, 1978, p. 132 sq. et p. 356 sq. 69 70

5 The Globalization of Non-state Violence

similar practices have also taken place in recent years at the heart of Europe, such as in the territories of the former Yugoslavia, Romania (Roma) or in Hungary. Conspiracy,74 treason, bribery, detention of an evil power, capturing and hoarding wealth constitute the main representations of persecution, or the ‘charges’; in other words, the accusations most frequently present in the accusers’ discourse. Naturally, for each operation, there is a specific selection criteria of victimhood.75 However, note that this construction is transcultural in its operating principle. Indeed, everywhere, States seek more-or-less to subdue their minorities, which often results in discrimination, if not persecution. It is in this context that common sense always highlights the difference of the other, a difference that would be unbearable for any community constituted and so lead to sacrificing it. Ultimately, we might succeed in obtaining the explanatory factor for the torments inflicted on the victims, a torment which seems at first sight so irrational or incomprehensible. However, Rene´ Girard shows that, despite appearances, this is not the case. He emphasizes that the oppression resulting from this fear is due primarily to the fear of lack of differentiation, ‘its inexpressible opposite’.76 Contrary to expectations, it is actually the terror of undergoing an experience of lack of differentiation that leads members of a group to use extreme forms of violence and to project them upon the other. In the end, it would be this fear of the same and the standardization of conduct that would incite the group members to break, all of a sudden, their civilizational straitjacket which they had, hitherto, more or less accommodated. In other words, the origin of destructive drives is not—as it is said too frequently— the difference of the Other perceived as threatening, but rather an overvalued and fantasized alleged difference that the persecutor takes it upon himself to convey as a threatened purity: In each individual there exists a tendency to feel ‘more different’ than others and equally, in each culture, a tendency to think not only as different from others but as the most different of all because each culture is maintained by individuals who accord to it this feeling of ‘difference’.77

In this logic, the idea that each foreigner in the community may pollute the latter and thereby offend its order, consequently leads its members to seek to protect themselves by operations of purification. Indeed, in a society where men and objects stay in their place, they are recognized as pure by its members, according

Girard, op. cit., pp. 41–62. We find all these elements in certain literary works. For example, in Animal Farm—George Orwell’s political fable—Snowball, a pig with an inventive spirit and opposed to the ideas of Napoleon—the dictator pig, inspired by Stalin—will be expelled from the farm by the latter. Considered a traitor by the enemy farmers, he will therefore be the scapegoat for all the misfortunes that hit soon after animal life (destruction of the mill and looting of all kinds, loss of keys, etc.). 76 Girard, Le Bouc. . .op. cit. p. 53. 77 Ibid. p. 34. 75

5.2 The Regulation of Drives by Sacrifice

to the anthropologist Mary Douglas.78 On the contrary, once an element—an object, a person or a group—appears unclassifiable, then a social anomaly is immediately established. To put it in another way, if he were to enter into any classification constitutive of the social structure, or if his assignment to a specific space remains ambiguous because it corresponds to many of them, then it would represent a danger to the social and cultural coherence of the whole society. Moreover, it actually symbolizes a danger insofar as it is perceived as dirty and defined as a defilement.79 Sacrificial operations aiming to purify contaminated order most often take violent forms. When they are part of a communitarian framework, they can even go as far as to perform cathartic lynchings. They then fall within various categories of fanatics—fanaticus—all governed by the death drive.80 To put it in other words, the construction of the scapegoat, as a ruthlessly efficient socio-political technique, is likely to remove or evacuate a potential source of conflict; that is, a problem that the group was unable to resolve by other means. It is a sort of a crisis based on the death drive: one can or one cannot know how to deal with the problem and that is the reason why one externalizes it in destroying a third party (tenant lieu). At the very time when this cathartic function is fulfilled, there is also exchange and sharing between the group members who succeed in constricting and thus intensifying their links. Let us recall in this regard that Durkheim had already shown in The Division of Labour in Society that this was necessarily viewed as a punishment imposed by a society. That is both a kind of expiation and a sort of a social weapon of defense.81 According to this logic, it is clear that what is defined as a common danger is also a valuable lever to be activated in line with the needs of the time. The threat of what is perceived as a collective defilement is also equivalent to an indirect instrument of mutual coercion, ‘no such thing to remind the community members to meet their obligations [. . .] how to resist the temptation to be rid of

Douglas checks his thesis examining the code of purity following Leviticus, which are unclean— and defiled—animals that do not fit in the general scheme or the story of creation, such as beasts swarming and crawling those who are neither bird nor fish nor meat animals; and those whose strange means of locomotion gives them unclassifiable or imperfect dimension in their category. The American anthropologist then shows that this text presents the rules for the human creature to continue dividing the activity—operator—initiated by Yahweh when he created the universe. In doing so, the man allows the divine blessing to be realized in the fertility of the land, and in return, he can present the pure fruit of the earth to the Temple. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, [1967], London, Routledge, 2002, p. 51 sq. 79 A danger even more pernicious—as Georges Vigarello has shown in his subtle Eliasian study— that since the eighteenth century, we associate the dirtiness with the death. cf., Le Propre et le sale, l’hygie`ne du corps depuis le Moyen-Aˆge, Paris, Seuil, 1985, p. 155 sq. 80 Of the various types of fanatics—the inspired, the possessed, the initiated, the enraged, the terrorist and the suicide bomber—cf., Bernard Chouvier, Les Fanatiques, la folie de croire, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2009; cf., equally Miche`le Ansart-Dourlen, ‘Fanatisme et re´sistance : le fanatisme comme passion politique et morale; ses ambivalences’ in : Ansart, Haroche (E´ds.), Les Sentiments et le politique, op. cit., pp. 139–150. 81 ´ Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, [1893], London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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it if one cares about the community’s survival’, as Mary Douglas notes.82 Finally, if the designated victims are exterior to the group, then the construction of a scapegoat will be even more effective because it does not risk creating ‘a cycle of internal revenge that threatens social cohesion’.83

5.2.2

The Rationalization of Persecution and Massacres

As we have just seen, the process of building a scapegoat appears eminently functional. From here on, one might be tempted to consider the existence of a deliberate manipulation, even a ploy intended to orchestrate collective movements of destructive polarization. But it is not. In fact, in this complex dynamic aggregate, a number of more or less intentional individual interactions ultimately slip from the control of participants. In this case, collective action thus proves unpredictable, particularly because the emotional and psychological reactions of every individual are part of an overall construction of social logic. It demonstrates how any group or individual actor can neither predict nor even control the temporality of this phenomenon. Strictly speaking, a collective actor does not exist because we are referring to a process without any subject. In analyzing different game models, Norbert Elias has shown that the more players, the more the configuration of their mutual interdependence is generally uncontrollable. Then, the more that the behavior of one escapes being mastered by each of the others.84 If no one can impose his views, on the contrary, all the persecutors and murderers might believe—individually and collectively—in the guilt of their victim(s). This is particularly the case if they are locked—as consenting executors—in the mental prison of their own system of representations. The one that makes sense to them, no matter if the facts are unproven and sometimes even imaginary. What matters in this case is that they produce effects of reality, at once collective and individualized. In other words, unlike St. Thomas, they see what they believe in, simply because they symbolically create what they believe in, thanks to a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.85 In this respect, Rene´ Girard recalls the existence of a ‘persecutory delusion’, a veritable ‘granitic belief’86:

Douglas, op. cit., p. 194. Braud, Violences politiques, op. cit., p. 196. 84 Norbert Elias, What is Sociology?, trans., New York, Columbia University Press, 1984, 71 sq. 85 Regarding this concept, cf., Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science, Theorical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1973, pp. 533–535. This type of self-fulfilling prophecy is also reminiscent of the constituent imagination mentioned by Paul Veyne, cf., Les Grecs ont-ils cru a leurs mythes, essai sur l’imagination constituante, Paris, Seuil, 1983. 86 Girard, Le Bouc. . .op. cit., p. 64, 65. 83

5.2 The Regulation of Drives by Sacrifice

The persecutors always finish by convincing themselves that a small number of individuals, or even one alone, can make themselves extremely damaging to society as a whole, despite their relative weakness. This is the stereotypical accusation that authorizes and facilitates this belief in clearly playing a mediating role. It serves to bridge the gap between the smallness of the individual and the enormity of the social body.87

How then should we decipher the implacable circularity of these representations in which the perpetrators remain? By what mental mechanism may they persist, against all odds, in accordance with their actions? In fact, if the death drive can be accomplished so easily at the expense of a scapegoat, it is because the process is performed simultaneously as an operation of the rationalization* of persecutions and massacres.88 In fact, Freud underlined that the perception does not correspond to a passive process of recording reality, but instead involves a whole technique of reconstruction and psychic defense.89 Hence the resort to a form of extreme violence is emotionally supported and legitimized by constantly developing a rational explanation of the system’s appearance in its own executioner’s eyes. Thus, the mass-killer or the persecutor can justify his actions, even as if the real logic of these operations escape him. It is this mental mechanism that Freud wants to highlight in his arguments relating to the ‘omnipotence of Thought’90 when he writes that ‘objects as such are over-shadowed by the ideas representing them’.91 In this case, this unconscious work is comparable to the secondary elaboration of dreams that submits images to a consistent scenario, so obscuring the latent content in order not to make present the manifest content.92 As such, it falls under the semblance that satisfies each pressing need to maintain the unity of the ego. Subsequently, no cleavage between fantasies and the super-ego will be left and there are no longer any emotional conflicts either.93 Unknown to the very same protagonist, the individual then begins to set up a protective self-esteem by

Ibid., p. 25. This term rationalization was coined for the first time in 1908 by psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, Papers on Psycho-Analysis, [1923], London, Forgotten Books, 2016. 89 Freud’s defense mechanism meant, in 1915, the whole process that characterizes a particular neurosis. It also uses this phrase to emphasize the defensive use of certain psychic processes. In his book The Ego and its Defense Mechanisms, Anna Freud continues to deal with his father’s work by presenting some of the main defensive methods: repression, regression, reaction formation, isolation, retroactive cancellation, projection, turning against itself, or rather, sublimation. 90 Sigmund Freud Totem and Taboo. Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, [1913], London, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016, p. 77. 91 Freud, Ibid. He explains this in a beautiful expression adopted from one of his patients, ‘a highly intelligent man, a former sufferer from compulsion neurosis’. ibid. 92 Freud, The Third Lesson in: Five Lectures. . .op. cit., p. 34 sq. 93 Norbert Elias, Involvement and Detachment, Oxford, Blackwell, 1987, p. 45 sq. After recalling that Man himself is a process, the author points out all the consequences and engages in a narrative analysis of Poe’s A Descent into the Maelstrom to show the management of critical processes: ‘People, in this case, still have a chance of controlling both their own strong affects and some aspect of the critical situation itself’. 88

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adopting a justification for his actions that remains consistent and acceptable on a logical and moral level. Such a technique of psychic resistance is then used to channel and organize many defensive compulsions. They finally take the shape of a plausible narrative which, for any perpetrator of violent actions, reveals all the signs of legitimacy. In sum, a variation on the theme of the true lie.94 Several researchers have drawn an analogy between this type of psychic posture and paranoia.95 Thus, in his book Purifier et de´truire, usages politiques des massacres et genocides (Purify and Destroy, the Political Uses of Massacres and Genocides), Jacques Se´melin stresses that this inherently genocidal ‘delirious rationality’ is based on an association of suspicion, psychological rigidity (psychorigidite´) and an enlarged ego, which falls within the logic of the paranoiac, an individual as foreign to doubt as self-criticism, which inhabits him as a hateful passion dominating his thinking skills. He concludes in this regard that, ‘paranoid reasoning is just based on false premises’.96 The initial motivation for persecutions and massacres often lies in the existence of grievances and claims. It resides in a common memory of emotions. It can be found in a community of aspirations feelings and resentments97; as such, it is a process of collective identification with a cause. But it is still necessary for each that the impression they share with others finds a route through which social logic and the individual come into convergence and synergy. Yet, it is mostly rumor that achieves this conjunction.98 In other words, an informal noise, persistent and without a determined source, will convey and widely disseminate stories apparently serving as carriers of truth and revelations.

94 We borrow this expression from the French novelist, Louis Aragon, author of a text—Le mentirvrai—that gave its title to the collection of some of his short stories. The narration is in this case in the transformation of facts kept in his memory, organized in a fictional composition which, although resulting from a lie and therefore, strictly speaking, a liar carries a truth that is closer to reality than a direct and immediate reproduction will facilitate. 95 Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. . .op. cit., p. 113 sq.; Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 3rd ed., Serif, London, 1996; Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945, New York, Harper Perennial, 2008. 96 Se´melin, Purifier et de´truire. . .op. cit., pp. 66–67. 97 Regarding the memory of resentments, Pierre Ansart has distinguished four attitudes that can structure individual memory as well as collective memory: (1) The temptation of oblivion. (2) Re-recollection. (3) Revisions. (4) Intensifications, cf., Pierre Ansart, ‘Histoire et me´moire des ressentiments’, in: Pierre Ansart (Ed.), Le Ressentiment, Bruxelles, Bruylant, 2002, pp. 26–30 ; Ferro, op. cit. 98 Philippe Aldrin, Sociologie politique des rumeurs, Paris, PUF, 2005. The author focuses specifically on institutional interactions and analyzes the constraints that bypass the modes weighing upon the public discourse adopted; Henri Boyer, Michel-Louis Rouquette (Eds.), Rumeurs en politique, Mots, (92), March 2010, pp. 5–66 ; Pascal Froissart (E´d.), Rumeurs, contes et faux-semblants, Me´diaMorphoses, (19), March 2007, pp. 33–115.

5.2 The Regulation of Drives by Sacrifice

101

In 1947, the psychosociologists Allport and Postman showed that this type of social fact was based on three complementary movements.99 On the one hand, there is a process of reduction under which the initial message is simplified. On the other hand, it then experiences a boost by which stakeholders will retain certain details or even add items to the narrative in order to strengthen its coherence and impact. Finally, a logic of assimilation leads them to appropriate it again, so adjusting it to their own values, beliefs and emotions. The selection-distortion then begins, so characteristic of this phenomenon. Its broadcast is sometimes facilitated by the existence of an opinion leader.100 In this case, it involves three types of implications. In the first place, by working on the premise of personal identification, it shows how this affair remains primarily the business of everyone. In the second place, what is at stake is upgraded in importance, while strengthening the capacity for collective action. Finally, thanks to the intervention of charisma-based or personal resources, such as reputation or the institutional status in the foreground, arguments of authority are produced, thus accelerating all the data released. Consequently, there is no need to have recourse to something resembling a conspiracy theory to account for this unconscious defense mechanism. Let us recall that for various reasons, both structural and temporary, an entire community can sometimes forge a story at a particular moment in its historical trajectory; they may even pluck a single word from the air, capturing, amplifying and propagating it. Why? Because at the foundation of this type of event, everyone is offered a simple and reassuring explanation as a gratuity which may be limited to the mere designation of a victim. The latter becomes the stumbling block and the crystallization point of the destructive drives expressed by everyone in the group. The same futility of any opposition between individual and society should again be noted here: ‘the individual activity of some is the social limitation of others. And it depends only on the power of the interdependence function concerned, the degree of reciprocal dependence, who is more able to limit whom by his activity’101 because ‘society with its regularity is nothing outside individuals, nor is it simply an ‘object’ ‘opposite’ the individual; it is what every individual means when he says “we”’.102 We may see better now the necessity of looking at both the social causes of the construction of scapegoats, as well as the personal motivations of their persecutors, as those motives with which they convince themselves. More than a calculation dictated by such and such an interest, they rather refer to whatever makes sense

Gordon W. Allport, Leo J. Postman, The Psychology of Rumor, New York, Holt, 1947. According to the theory of communication at two levels (two steps flow), American sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet have developed in their book The People’s Choice, How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign, New York, Columbia University Press, 1944. 101 Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals, [1939, 1987], trans., New York, Continuum International Publishing, 2001, p. 54. 102 Ibid., p. 60. 100

102

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overall for the social actors concerned.103 But this rationalization of persecution could not find its effectiveness so easily, if it did not reveal itself to be an integral part of a projection* at the end of which individual anxieties benefit from a shift towards the social.104 In other words, what is deleted inside takes shape on the outside; this process of exfiltration thereby facilitating the evacuation of emotions. Consequently, intolerable affects will further enable persecutors to keep their selfesteem. With this functional layout, an accurate perception of reality combines with a falsification of reality, thus facilitating a regulation of the drives involved in the duality of pleasure-displeasure. From then on, conditions are ripe for a brutalizing process to begin, a process whose logic may go eventually right to the end of destructiveness ad libitum. A historical space appears here, a window of opportunity favorable to the accomplishment of mass violence, genocide or crimes against humanity. Within such a framework, it appears necessary to place Freudâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s disillusioned remark: the history of the world, which is still taught to our children, is essentially a series of race murdersâ&#x20AC;?.105

103

Weber, Economy and Society, [1922], trans., Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013. Sami-Ali, De la Projection, une eÂ´tude psychanalytique, Paris, Payot, 1970, p. 17 sq. 105 Freud, Reflections on War and Death, op. cit., p. 50. 104

Chapter 6

Conclusion

Let us always keep in mind that the social is not external to the psyche. In this book, we have considered the central issue of the internalization of constraints and the individual repression of drives.1 However, the overall interest of the Eliasian problematic is to emphasize that the psychic economy and its transformations over the centuries must necessarily be correlated with the formation of the State. That is why we have sought to show that the emergence and the deployment of diplomacy, as well as an institutionalization of international relations has played a key role in the pacification of behaviors constitutive of the civilizing process. Naturally, we should not understand civilization synonym of progress, nor a fortiori linear progression, nor even understand whether or not this term may refer to a unique interpretative model: we are not situated in an evolutionary perspective here. In contrast, we have pointed out the polarities towards which societies have been oriented at certain moments in their history. We have then focused on the loss of authority of States and hence on their lesser ability to civilize societies. With the coming of globalization, they have indeed lost their touch when faced with increasing power of non-State actors, whether involving market activity, company investments, products of financial banking or even the evaluations of rating agencies. As far as the sub-State and transnational communities are concerned, we find that these networks of individuals—which sometimes resort to extreme violence—reject any allegiance to State power. Indebted, divested, disengaged and weakened, State actors are no longer able to assure the regulation and protection of the societies they have managed for centuries. In the global village, where the media reign unperturbed in their tempo, identity clashes have not ceased to multiply and impose themselves on the international agenda. Today, we can still perceive in many societies, a destruction of 1 We have taken into account here a remark of Elias: ‘That an historical social psychology, a study at once psychogenetic and sociogenetic, is needed to draw the connections between all these different manifestations of social human beings, remains unrecognized’, Elias, The Civilizing Process. . .op. cit., p. 407.

103

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6 Conclusion

social ties and solidarity that have led to the exclusion from the national community of individuals who are gradually reified before being socially nullified.2 This negation of otherness based on a process of affective de-identification, marks a strong come-back in force of the state of nature—or, to put it in another way, everyday barbarism—of which the war on the poor and foreigner only constitute a harbinger of things to come, in view of becoming the laboratory of a global ‘resavaging’ which is already a work in progress.3 Under these conditions, how could States continue to civilize, even when, on every side, their counter-actions provoke many movements of social secession4 that are increasingly violent and serve to diminish their legitimacy? How could they continue to civilize while relations of interdependence are being removed, consequence of the State retreats,5 breaking step by step with the progression of a depacification process and while many of us proceed to fall into gueuserie,6 to use a term dear to Rousseau? How could they continue to civilize at a time when brutalization and misery have joined together? Finally, how could we fail to see that the ‘inert violence’7 of the international system is now reflecting a troubling brutalization of the world?

2 The concepts advanced by Abram de Swaan of dyscivilization and compartmentalization help to explain this logic, cf. ‘La dyscivilisation, l’extermination de masse et l’E´tat’, in: Yves Bonny, JeanManuel de Queiroz, Erik Neveu (Eds.), Norbert Elias et la theórie de la civilisation: lectures et critiques, Rennes, PUR, 2003, p. 67 sq. 3 Cf. the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives, Modernity and Its Outcasts, London, Polity Press, 2003, in which the author shows in particular that immigrants are perceived and treated in the West as ‘human waste of distant parts of the globe unloaded into ‘our own backyard’ (p. 56); cf., equally, Emmanuel Renault, who evokes ‘la production de vastes populations destineés a la destruction (production d’hommes jetables)’ (the production of large mass of populations destined to destruction (the production of disposable men)’, cf., L’Expe´rience de l’injustice, Reconnaissance et clinique de l’injustice, Paris, La dećouverte, 2004, p. 406 ; Josepha Laroche, ‘La course a l’abıˆme’, in: Laroche (Ed.), Un Monde en sursis, op. cit., Paris, L’Harmattan, 2010, pp. 15–38. 4 We take this expression from the American economist, Robert Reich. Riots have already prefigured this in the Parisian suburbs in 2005 or that of Greater London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Salford, Wolverhampton, Nottingham and Leicester in August 2011. 5 Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State, the Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. 6 This is the refusal demonstrated by social movements in Spain, Greece or even Israel in their own way. The term indignant or outraged has been chosen by the Spanish in tribute to Ste´phane Hessel’s call, be outraged! Montpellier, Indige`ne, 2010. Cf., Cle´ment Paule, ‘The Sociopolitical Structuring of Indignation. The Transnational Movement of Indignants’, Passage au crible, (45), June 27 2011, available on the web at the following address: http://urlz.fr/4243. 7 Pierre Bourdieu (Ed), The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Cambridge (UK), Polity Press, 1999, Postscript, p. 629.

Glossary

Terms marked with an asterisk in the text refer to the definitions in the glossary

Acting Out Behavior of a player that comes out of an assigned register and becomes completely alien to himself and others in achieving a goal that does not match the common law. The act is committed as a transgression. The acting out of States and non-State actors takes the form of a violation of the international public law and as a deviation from the common law.

Altercasting Verbal strategy of enclosing a social actor in a role with which he will eventually tally. This symbolic violence comes within the framework of theories of persuasion. It results in modifications at the very behest of the person. Sociologists Eugene Weinstein, Paul Deutschberger and Philip Blumstein have shown how this identity projection is similar to a technique of interpersonal takeover and might induce cognitive dissonance.

Banishment This constitutes a medieval measure of proscription taken against an individual or a community (city or country) whose authority was recognized throughout the Holy Roman Empire and the German-speaking States. This penalty was imposed on the ÂŠ Springer International Publishing AG 2017 J. Laroche, The Brutalization of the World, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50793-4

105

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Glossary

decision of the Emperor. In this book, we use this expression by analogy to characterize the forms borrowed internationally by the proscription and prohibition of some State or non-State actors.

Crime Against Humanity This concept appears in 1915, following the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks. In 1945, it will be defined by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg as ‘a crime to murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious groups . . . ’. It will be declared imprescriptible. In France, it was judged in the Papon case that one could be found guilty of crimes against humanity without having participated directly, but having just authorized and organized the crimes (see the concept of bureaucratic crime developed by Hannah Arendt).

Double Bind Concept developed in 1956 by the anthropologist and psychologist Gregory Bateson as part of his theory of schizophrenia. This approach is related to scientific advances in systemic academic research. It is connected to the research from the School of Palo Alto, named after the Californian city where they developed this work. This theoretical current has included researchers in psychology and psychosociology and in communication sciences.

Embargo From the Spanish embargar meaning ‘a sequestered place’. Strictly speaking, this term refers to a set of coercive measures—diplomatic, military, and commercial— recognized by international custom. Strictly speaking, its aim is to temporarily immobilize foreign vessels to pressure the State whose flag they fly. The current usage appears more extensive and refers to all measures that a prohibition on imports and/or exports to one or more countries.

Glossary

107

Framing The term refers to the concept of framing present in the work of Gregory Bateson and further again in that of Erving Goffman. It means that every situation is built on principles that structure social events and the commitments of the actors involved. This is an interpretative schema which organizes the activities of stakeholders into a social drama.

Functionalism This term originally refers to the process by which sectors of the international system—functions—are now regulated by diverse actors and not only by States, thereby promoting greater international integration. By extension, functionalism refers to the theoretical current that studies the functional regulatory systems around which organize the various sectors in the international space. In this regard, the functionalist studies help to renew and enrich the theory of international relations, with particular emphasis on the emergence of international organizations and the regulatory functions they perform. Logically, functionalist analysis has found a privileged field of application in the contemporary mechanisms of regional integration.

Genocide Term coined in 1944 by the American jurist of Polish origin, Raphael Lemkin, with its genesis in the Greek words, “birth”, “kind”, “species” and the suffix “cide” from the Latin caedere meaning “kill”, “massacre”. It was then used to designate the crimes against humanity perpetrated during World War II by the Nazis against the Jews and Gypsies. The genocide was then legally defined in the Genocide Convention (1948, United Nations). It refers to crimes committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part national, ethnical, racial or religious groups. This definition was included in the Rome Statute (1998), followed by the founding of the ICC (International Criminal Court), which equated genocide with an intent to exterminate a population and the systematic implementation of this design. It appears from this qualification that, contrary to popular belief, mass murder does not automatically constitute genocide.

108

Glossary

Gunboat Diplomacy This initially came from the idea of shooting with cannons from the sea on to the coasts of territories who did not pay their debts. A symbol of military power of a State, the gunboat was a light warship (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries) that could intervene in shallow water, particularly during operations of colonization in Africa and Asia. This intervention was abolished in 1907. However, in 1956, the FrancoBritish expedition during the Suez crisis was undertaken according to this logic. By extension, the term is sometimes used today when a State—or coalition—manifests its military might in the form of a warning or intimidation and conducts limited action against another State actor.

Imported State Term that refers to the new States formed in the wake of decolonization. In the process of their construction, their political staff and their ruling elites were then imported as well as socio-political standards issuing from the legal and institutional technologies of the West.

Law of Nations The phrase is a translation of the Latin jus gentium, gens, gentis, signifying nation and people. It is synonymous with the right of States and represents the previous designation of international public law that has gained prominence.

Objective Conception of the Nation This is also called the ethno-cultural conception of the nation or the German conception of the nation. At the end of the nineteenth century, in order to determine the national belonging, the German jurist Heinrich von Treitschke recommended a very positivist manner to take into account the elements considered objectives, such as language, religion, geography or ethnicity. He theorized the German communitarian tradition that Johann Herder (1744–1803) and the Sturm und Drang movement had helped to institute. Under this approach, the nation was defined as a natural grouping which gave the story objectively specific traits. Under this naturalistic approach, it thus appeared that, for example, one could not just become German: one was born so or one was not. Originally concerning the blood right ( jus sanguinis), which resulted in significant restrictions on the acquisition of

Glossary

109

nationality, this ethno-cultural conception of the nation is similar to the concept of organismic Gemeinschaft—Traditional Community—elaborated this time by the German sociologist Ferdinand T€onnies (1855–1936) to be opposed, from a nostalgic perspective, to the notions of Gesellschaft, civil society, the urban and industrialized and, above all, contract. This representation of the nation at that time will be subject to serious criticism from the French philologist and historian of religion, Ernest Renan. In fact, he criticized and disqualified this account point by point in his famous lecture delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11, 1882: What is a Nation? Instead, he opposed this concept to a contractualist conception of the nation, one that is also subjective and expressing the ‘great solidarity’ of a community gathered in the same territory and sharing an equal ‘desire to live together’. This would depict the nation as a citizenry united by a common consent, anxious to forge a common future and collectively assume a heritage of historic events, suffering and reputation. Finally, he saw in it ‘a plebiscite of everyday life’.

Ostracism The prohibition of a group. In Athens, in ancient Greece, it was the banishment of a person of the city by decision of the public assembly (the Ecclesia). This procedure of temporary exclusion of 10 years that worked in the fifth century before Christ allowed the exclusion of a citizen considered dangerous to the State. Nowadays, this term refers to an exclusionary attitude, reserve or hostility towards a person, group, organization or a State.

Pacta sunt servanda Latin phrase that means that agreements concluded between States must be respected. It implies that States are now bound to the treaty they have signed and, as such, they cannot derogate from the obligations arising from this agreement and are obliged to respect them.

Process of Courtisation Neologism coined by Norbert Elias in his analysis of the court of King Louis XIV. It is the process by which the French monarchy was able to place the old nobility under complete domestic political control.

110

Glossary

Projection A system of psychic defense that protects the ego. This concept was developed by Freud in 1894 to describe the primordial activity based on ignorance to protect the ego. From the outset, it is the relation to the two fundamental axes of the analytic doctrine; namely, the hypothesis of the unconscious and of the psychic apparatus. In this context, the projection transforms painful affects into external perceptions of the world.

Rationalization The discourse of an individual seeking to ensure logical consistency and a rational point of view. It can also be an action or a behavior driven by feelings and emotions. This provision thus makes reality conform to its representation and provides psychic healing.

Realism/Neo Realism This current of political science intends to analyze international relations as they are and not as they should be. As such, realism favors the analysis of power relations between States to explain the functioning of the international system. The realist paradigm that equates international relations with a state of nature is based on three pillars: (1) the concepts of power and interest; (2) the assumption of a dialectic and necessary opposition between peace and war; (3) the exclusive consideration of the diplomatic and strategic dimension which should be organized by a policy of a balance of forces and a system of alliances. Some Realistic thinkers (Kenneth Waltz and his thesis of three images or Robert Gilpin and his theory of hegemonic stability) have founded neorealism. However, this current is no longer be limited to these three components and has now complexified the initial paradigm.

Regimes (Theory of) This focuses analysis on interstate cooperation rather than conflict, power and State interests. The international regimes are defined by Stephen Krasner as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. They are applied to organizational agreements which concern a voluntary group of States, willing to cooperate.

Glossary

111

Introduced in the Eighties, in response to the neo-realist theory of hegemonic stability, the theory of regimes has the merit of breaking with too exclusively limited approaches in terms of order/disorder, war/peace, that of overvalues made too many conflicts. By segmenting and empowering all levels of interstate relations, emphasizing particular sectors of specific activities, it focuses on cooperation between international actors. As such, this theory is interested in practical questions and permits the thinking of problems of collective action on an international level.

Revivalism This term originally refers to the religious movement of the Protestant Awakening. Appearing in Europe in the seventeenth century, its impact was first felt on Lutheran churches through pietism. With the development of Methodism, however, it proved a great success in England in the eighteenth century. Pentecostal and charismatic churches claim their spiritual parentage. In the United States, evangelists have made it one of the origins of their trans-denominational movement. By extension, this concept refers to all social and political movements in ethnic and linguistic communities occurring in countries and carrying identity claims. These can be religious, but also cultural or nationalistic.

State of Nature In the social contract theories (seventeenthâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;eighteenth centuries), this term refers to the state of violence and chaos in which human beings find themselves in the absence of civil authority. This concept refers to what humanity would be if there were no common and shared rules. One must understand the representation of the state of nature not as a historical reading of societies, but as a philosophical allegory to describe humanity as it would be without the State and society. Internationally, it is defined as one in which, chaos, barbarism, war and insecurity reigns exclusively, therefore entailing constant fear.

Sublimation Freud created this concept to characterize human activities that seem unrelated to Eros or Thanatos. However, it has been applied to show in his writings and in his life therapist that there was a fundamental and permanent link between human activities and the death drive. He distinguished two main categories which would primarily exert sublimation; firstly, work then, on the other hand, intellectual investigation and particularly artistic creation. A drive is described as sublimated

112

Glossary

when it is derived and redirected to an object that is not sexual or facing death, but instead turned to a socially valued purpose.

Super-ego € This concept—Uber-Ich—was introduced by Freud in 1923 in his study The Ego and the Id, Das Ich und das Es. Initially, the super-ego results from the resolution of the Oedipus complex. It is in effect when the child internalizes the forbidden parricide and incest by identifying with the parent of the same sex. By extension, the super-ego—which encompasses all functions of prohibition and ideal—is defined as a mental training dominating the ego.

Taboo Popularized in Europe by James Cook, returning from his first famous voyage, this term refers in the ethnological literature to a sacred Polynesian prohibition whose contravention would cause a supernatural punishment. At the base of taboo, there is a waiver. Obedience to the taboo prescription must be defined as a waiver of anything that would willingly be desired. The taboo is consequently a prohibited act. Freud will discuss ‘obsessive prohibitions’ in this context. By extension, it refers to a topic, a question and an act that would be better not to talk or do, if we want to respect the codes and norms of a given society. Taboo is a religious phenomenon that may be seen as a negative form of the sacred. It expresses both an extensive and dangerous character. Violation of the taboo does not necessarily entail a punishment, but rather a response of might. It fascinates but also creates fear, so much so that the taboo is not conducive to speaking—by fear of power—but rather to silence.

Transnationalism A School of Political Science which focuses its analysis of international relations on: (1) the intensification of flows across national borders and (2) the emergence and rise of non-State actors on the world stage. The representatives of this current intend to exceed the realist and neo-realist paradigms who dominated international relations theory until the 80s.

Glossary

113

Unconscious This concept is the masterpiece of Freudian theory and refers to repressed content in its entirety being denied access to the conscious system.

Selected Readings

Ansart, Pierre. 1997. Les Cliniciens des passions politiques. Paris: Seuil. Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Je´rusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil London. London: Penguin Classics. ———. 2014. On Violence. New York: Important Books. Aron, Raymond. 1976. Penser la guerre: Clausewitz. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard. Assoun, Paul-Laurent. 1993. Freud et les sciences sociales. Paris: Armand Colin. Assoun, Paul-Laurent, and Markos Zafiropoulos. 1994. Psychanalyse et pratiques sociales. Paris: Anthropos. ———. 1995. La Haine, la jouissance et la loi. Paris: Anthropos. Badie, Bertrand. 2002. La Diplomatie des droits de l’homme, entre e´thique et volonte´ de puissance. Paris: Fayard. Balandier, Georges. 2003. Civilise´s, dit-on. Paris: PUF. ———. 2005. Le Grand de´rangement. Paris: PUF. Bonny, Yves, Jean-Manuel de Queiroz, and Neveu Erik, eds. 2003. Norbert Elias et la theórie de la civilisation: lectures et critiques. Rennes: PUR. Bruneteau, Bernard. 2004. Le Sie`cle des geńocides. Violences, massacres, processus geńocidaires de l’Armeńie au Rwanda. Paris: Armand Colin. Burin, Philippe. 2004. Ressentiment et apocalypse, essai sur l’antise´mitisme nazi. Paris: Seuil, Coll. Points histoire. Byers, Michael, ed. 2000. The Role of Law in International Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caille´, Alain, ed. 2007. La Queˆte de la reconnaissance, regards sociologiques. Paris: La Dećouverte. Cottret, Bernard, and Henneton Lauric, eds. 2010. Du bon usage des comme´morations. Histoire, me´moire et identite´, XVIe–XXIe sie`cle. Rennes: PUR. Delmotte, Florence. 2007. Norbert Elias, la civilisation et l’E´tat, enjeux e´piste´mologiques et politiques d’une sociologie historique. Bruxelles: Editions de l’Universite´ de Bruxelles. De´loye, Yves, and Claudine Haroche, eds. 2004. Maurice Halbwachs, Espaces, Me´moires et psychologie collective. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Deluermoz, Quentin, ed. 2010. Norbert Elias et le 20e sie`cle, Le Processus de civilisation a l’e´preuve, (106), avr–juin. Fletcher, Jonathan. 1997. Violence and Civilization: An Introduction to the Work of Norbert Elias. Cambridge: Polity. Giesen, Klaus-Gerd. 1992. L’E´thique des relations internationales: les theóries anglo-ame´ricaines contemporaines. Bruxelles: Bruylant.

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Selected Readings

Goodwin, John, and Henrietta O’Connor. 2016. Norbert Elias’s Lost Research: Revisiting the Young Worker Project. Oxford: Routledge. Halkin, León-Ernest. 1969. E´rasme et l’humanisme chre´tien. Paris: E´ditions universitaires. ———. 1987. E´rasme. Paris: Fayard. Hassoun, Jacques. 1997. L’Obscur objet de la haine. Paris: Aubier. Henkin, Louis. 1979. How Nations Behave: Law and Foreign Policy, 2e ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 2012. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jervis, Robert. 1976. Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jervis, Robert, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janis Gross Stein. 1991. Psychology & Deterrence. London: The Johns Hopkins University. Kaldor, Mary. 2006. New and Old Wars. Organized Violence in a Global Era. 2e ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kidd, William, and Brian, Murdoch, eds. 2004. Memory and Memorials: The Commemorative Century. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lake, Davis A., and Donald S. Rotschild. 1998. The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion and Escalation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laroche, Josepha. 2013a. Dada ou la guerre a la guerre. In Gouverner les violences. Le processus civilisationnel en question, eds. Laroche, Josepha and Poirmeur, Yves, 199–213. Paris: L’Harmattan, Coll. Chaos International. ———. 2013b. L’E´tat civilisateur, De l’usage de la grandiosite´ en diplomatie. In Penser la science administrative dans la postmodernite´, Me´langes Chevallier, 353–363. Paris: LGDJ. ———. 2014. La Grande Guerre au cine´ma, un pacifisme sans illusions. Paris: L’Harmattan, Coll. Chaos International. ———. 2016. Les Reálistes dans la theórie des conflits internationaux. Paris: L’Harmattan, Coll. Chaos International. Mennell, Stephen, and Elias Norbert. 1989. Civilization and the Human Self-Image. Basil: Blackwell. Merton, Robert K. 1973. The Sociology of Science. Theorical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Richards, Paul, ed. 2005. No Peace, No War. An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts. Oxford: James Currey. van Krieken, Robert. 1998. Norbert Elias. London: Routledge. von Clausewitz, Karl. 2015. On War, [1832–1837]. Henty: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.