Continuity
Alfred has just woken up. It is perhaps 6am, the rocks broken yesterday for sale on the street lie in a pile at his feet, the small shack from which he sells weed it located just to the left of the picture. He has no customers yet.
This is an image of war.
We are not used to associating wars with such images: with moments of trade, with faces in the morning.
The civil war in Sierra Leone, in which Alfred was a combatant, is more easily associated with images of astonishing violence.
These images accompany texts that talk of new wars, where once states waged wars, it is claimed, now people do, and these wars cannot be understood on the same terms as wars between states. On the contrary, by considering one of the axioms of Clausewitz’ On War[1], this essay will demonstrate that the uncertain relationship between politics and war we find in Sierra Leone[2], is a relationship already present in the thought of Clausewitz.
Contemporary conflict is not “new” – there are not, despite Mary Kaldor’s[3] insistence, new wars and old wars. Far from being at a disjuncture with wars of state, the logic of war[4] we find in Clausewitz finds its completion in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is not a “failed state”, nor the civil war a “non-political war”; civil war was the culmination of a political process, as the Sierra Leonean state was the culmination of a process of state formation.
Let us stop holding innocent ideal against distorted realisation.
I. The image of violence.
Violence separates itself out from everyday life – it demands an explanation on its own terms, far away from where we are now. The words that normally pass for an explanation include “barbaric”, and “horrible.” So it is that our war photographers[5] take images of dying troops, maimed victims, cities lit up by tracer fire. In these photographs, the time of war is a time of violence, of frenetic action; it is impossible to think of stillness, of moments of waiting, of moments of everyday life hidden among the explosions.
These images make clear the extent to which 19th century notions of warfare still grip our imagination: the idea of war as a proper time, fought between two armies, on behalf of two kings, disengaged from the civilian world, finds its 21st century parallel in these photos of unimaginable violence separated out from the world of waiting to sell weed.
This continuity would be unsurprising if it were not for the fact that the journalism that accompanies these photographs so insistently denies any continuity between contemporary conflict and the wars of the past. Contemporary conflict is indeterminate: at what point, after how many years, do we say that what happens in Somalia is no longer an exceptional war, but the norm? It is based on religion, or tribalism, apparently[6], rather than being aligned with the political wars of the 20th century. The latter are created by states acting on the basis of rational political goals: today we have irrational civilians, acting erratically, often not at the behest of a state.
The question of continuity is crucial here. The combined effect of such journalism, and such photographs, is to make violence appear as an absolute disjuncture from social life – irrational, barbaric, and, in any event, unthinkable. Yet, at the same time, this discourse makes it continuous with tribal or religious practice: it denies it a status as a war, as politics pursued by other means. This play of disjuncture and continuity ensures a double removal. When we pick up the New York Times or the Guardian, we see violence represented as something irrational – separated out from our lives – and at the same time, continuous with their lives. In any event, it should be clear, it is not our concern.
II. The logic of complementarity
One of the principle reasons that journalists are able to evoke an absolute disjuncture between contemporary conflicts such as Sierra Leone and previous patterns of warfare is the apparent absence of state actors. Sierra Leone saw an indeterminable conflict between proliferating groups of actors that had relationships to, but were not identical with, state actors. It is these state actors that form our understanding of what war is.
In an inheritance from Roman law, throughout the breadth of political theory, from Hobbes to Schmitt, there is still a great emphasis on sovereign states being considered moral persons, and as such, relationships between them should be conducted with comitas (courtesy) and with jus (probity)[7].
On the basis of these relationships of complementarity, a temporality of war is established. Benjamin notes the importance of this relationship in the Critique of Violence:
Yet it is striking that even – or, rather, precisely – in primitive conditions that scarcely know the beginnings of constitutional relations, and even in cases where the victor has established himself in invulnerable possession, a peace ceremony is entirely necessary[8].
At the end of the war: the peace ceremony. What has changed through violence (me acquiring your land by force), is now sanctified by a new law. This law makes the foundational violence of the law separate from the legal situation (to take back the land would be illegal), and yet continuity is assured; the grammar of war accomplished, we pass over into the logic of politics.
Violence, and its state representative, war, have always had this law-making power. What makes war between states as moral people different is that the rhythm of the war has been assured from the start. As much as the end of the war is followed by the peace ceremony, the beginning of war, for the modern state, is preceded by the declaration of war. As Schmitt details in The Nomos of the Earth[9], it is remarkable how utterly condemned the surprise attack is in the 19th century. As much as war has a law making power then, this power is constrained in the theory of the state by a set of pre-established laws that seek to legally limit the way in which war is carried out.
Following the end of the Second World War, however, the European powers were forced to engage in a seemingly very different type of conflict.
Here.
(c) Robert Capa. Near Namdinh.May 12, 1954.
It is 1954. We are in Indochina. In the background, a French military convoy in the background roars through to Doia Tan. It certainly has a sense of time: places to get to, missions to be accomplished. In the foreground, a man ploughs a field. He also has a sense of time: the time the rice should be planted, fertilised[10]. These two senses of time are absolutely incommensurable[11]: there is no logic of complementarity here. And with it, no clearly defined start nor finish to the war.
The time between the declaration and the peace ceremony is the time of war. For Clausewitz, the time of war is decided by politics, and ended by politics.
The war in Sierra Leone began in silence. There was no declaration before the collection of Burkinabe, Liberian and Sierra Leonean men crossed the Liberian border into Kailhoun province. There was no peace ceremony at the end.
In On War, Clausewitz tries desperately to keep politics separate from war – to make sure that the grammar of war (its demands, its structural necessities) did not overwhelm the logic of politics, and result in an absolute war which ended in complete destruction. The time of war announced by peace treaties and declarations is one way of assuring its divide from the rest of life. But if there are no treaties? And if the treaties, even in Clausewitz, were not effective?
We see precisely this absence of a specific temporality to war in Sierra Leone. Alfred, whose story began this essay, fought during the war, changed sides with abandon, gave up, became a drug dealer, a diamond miner, went back to war, and gave up again: the structures of the war were not separated out from everyday life, they were entrenched within it. There was no time of proper engagement, of two armies agreeing to do battle away from civilians, and thus, in the depiction of the international media, correspondingly no politics.
What this essay will now suggest, however, is that this not simply a question of contemporary conflict – the indetermination which makes separating war from life impossible is not a result of globalisation, or the rise of non-state actors. It is prefigured in the theory of the state of the 19th century.
III. The indetermination of a relation
War is a question of continuity. But a continuity of what, precisely? The term finds itself firmly established in Clausewitz’s most famous proposition in On War[12]: “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” This proposition actually occurs twice in On War, and in each case it refers to a different object. We must here not forget that On War is an unfinished text, that Clausewitz wanted to rewrite the book according to something that occurred to him only half way through, that throughout the text there is evidence of a constant battle between war and politics, but a battle which shifts its contours, and by the end has come to assume a completely different meaning, and that, finally, and most importantly, this proposition is merely one of what Balibar[13] calls the four axiomatics of the text, and that, for reasons of space, by taking only these one axioms, I am today being unjust to Clausewitz.
In book I, we find the proposition that war is a way to continue politics with other means. The assumption here is that politics is normally carried out by non-violent means[14], and that it is the right of the state to pursue politics through violent means when these normal means are insufficient. It is important to note, for Clausewitz, it is the state that is allowed to act, and the state is a unity between people, nation and army. These means can then be codified in proper relations.
Yet right away, Clausewitz acknowledges, the means of war – violence – and, crucially, the means of these means (patriotism, the institution of the military) change politics; what is initially set out to be a means employed by politics, becomes something which turns back on politics, makes demands of it, effects it in manifold ways. So while initially we have the formulation that the time of war is but a particular time of politics (a time of politics carried out in a particular way), already in book I, Clausewitz finds time doubling back on itself; the time of politics becoming, already, the time of war. For instance, to give a modern example of the time of politics that Clausewitz would not have been comfortable with, in an election, we already find the time of war prefigured in the need to instil a certain sense of patriotism, in the need to plan to give sufficient funds to the military.
Ultimately, the law-making power of violence (the ability to give violence a continuity that retroactively modifies the conditions of its own founding) can be seen in the constant threat that the military can take over; that the time of politics simply becomes an extension of war. History is littered with examples, but in case we think that this is so far from our situation today, the example[15] of Turkey, a modern European nation where the military has launched four coup d’états since 1960[16], should suffice. The very possibility of war, the necessity of preparing for war, reveals here the violent basis of state power, and the way in which what is initially a means to be employed by the state ends up modifying the logic of politics itself, whereby politics becomes the preparation for war.
By the end of On War, the unease about the relationship of war to politics has expressed itself in a more striking formulation of the proposition. In book VIII, the emphasis is placed on the idea that war is “nothing else but the continuation of politics by other means”. Here, war is no longer an option pursued by political actors when non-violent political means are no longer sufficient[17], instead, it is one among many options. This does not resolve the tension outlined for Clausewitz’ first formulation, but merely displaces it.
First of all, it is entirely ambiguous whether this is descriptive or a prescriptive: is the grammar of war merely the continuation of a political logic (always and in all cases), or, is it the case that it functions as a warning: the violent means of war are only legitimate insofar as they follow a political logic, and do not subvert the logic of the political. To place these doubts back inside our argument: it is not resolved whether the time of war is pursued according to the time of politics (when things should be done, in proper time, according to politics) or whether the time of war is always separate from the time of politics (if the decisions of battle never run according to the priorities of politicians) but necessarily be subordinate to it in order to be legitimate – to be accorded legitimacy afterwards, or retroactively.
IV. The time of peace is the time of war
What Clausewitz feared most was what he called absolute war – where the grammar of war triumphed over political concerns and both sides ended up destroying themselves. What he didn’t anticipate, but what his entire work seems a preparatory warning against, was total war. Instead of war continuing on its own path, and overcoming politics in the proper time of war (that initially declared by politics), what we saw during the 20th century was war becoming the total commitment of politics: war ceased to be the commitment of states when non-violent means no longer worked, it became a commitment of all people, not simply states or armies. The Schmitt who wrote State, Movement, People[18], reverses Clausewitz, and claims politics should be placed in the cause of war. However, he does so only to the extent that war emerges as a possibility to return to an autonomous political sphere.
In several respects, contemporary conflict is structurally similar to the theory of total war: it involves every element of society, the relationship between politics and war is reversed. What is missing is the state, precisely. Yet, if we were to look closely at the war in Sierra Leone, we would find it is the legacy of a particular history of state formation: Chabal and Daloz[19], in particular, have extensively documented the extent to which seemingly failed states are actually the result of conscious choices by elites to put resources into informal networks rather than Weberian bureaucratic structures, largely as a result of the states insertion into an inter-national environment in a marginal position.
The endless war we seemingly see in Africa, and that is not without parallel in the war on terror (like the war in Sierra Leone, this is a war without a proper sense of time, and, correlatively, it is a war without proper subjects), is prefigured by the inability to distinguish between war and politics in Clausewitz’ text.
What is left ambiguous in Clausewitz, is what precisely war is. It is, one notes, primarily defined negatively – as not being political (and correlatively non-violent). Yet given, as Benjamin has shown, the violent character of politics, and of the laws on which it is founded, we cannot be happy with such a definition of war (as the absence of politics, or of violent means employed by politics).
In wars between states, legal theorists tell us, we have different, contradictory conditions. “The possibility of military law rests on exactly the same objective contradiction in the legal situation as does that of strike law – namely, on the fact that legal subjects sanction violence whose ends remain for the sanctioners natural ends, and can therefore come into conflict with their own legal or natural ends.[20]”
It is precisely in this contradiction that war as a time emerges. What happens in war? Troops move from place to place, they receive instructions – what is efficient and rational for them, given the circumstances, may not be efficient or rational for political actors worried about public relations back home. This is one time of war. It is, one should already note: a time already played at, already present, in peacetime: in practices and drills, in the ritualised launching of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan. Peace here becomes the playing out of the forces that sustain it.
Even in these exercises, other senses of time emerge: the time of waiting, the traders who make their money: in World War Two it was selling cigarettes, in the Green Zone of Baghdad today, it is KFC franchises, for Alfred, in the story that began this essay, it is selling weed.
There is the boredom of the troops; the hours spent waiting in strange places – trenches in a bygone era, today; shells of mosques. War cannot be the elimination of these senses of time: they are always present – it is indeed a framing of them, occurring in an ambiguously legal space which relies on two key elements: first, a beginning and a possible ending – a condition that we have seen does not pertain to Sierra Leone, but equally, cannot be ensured by Clausewitz, for it is a condition that relies on the separation of politics from war, whereas we are here concerned with elucidating war as a zone as such, and not in relation to politics. Second, it relies on a logic of complementarity: two armies fighting each other. It does not matter if there are more than two sides, as long as the logic continues; national armies, in a legally pre-defined space, fighting a war.
We have seen this space collapses in Clausewitz, we have seen this space collapse in Sierra Leone. What is left is not simply war, but the absence of a political sphere outside of private interests. War becomes merely a framing device to justify the suspension of a legal space founded on elements which do not pertain to the contemporary situation.
Bibliography
Balibar, Etienne. On Clausewitz. Public Lecture. Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, May 8, 2006.
Benjamin, Walter. 1921. Critique of Violence. In Benjamin, Walter. 1996: Selected Writings. Volume One: 1913-1926. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Von Clausewitz, Carl. 1873 [1832]. On War. N Trübner: London.
Chabal, Patrick & Daloz, Jean-Pascal. 1999: Africa works: disorder as a political instrument. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 1988. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wreteched of the Earth. Penguin: London.
Kaldor, Mary. 1999. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity
Kaplan, Robert. 1994. The Coming Anarchy. The Atlantic Monthly. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/anarchy.htm. Accessed 6/2/2004.
Manela, Erez. 2008.The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Salt, Justin. 1999: Turkey’s military ‘democracy’. Current History. Vol. 98, pp.72-78
Schmitt, Carl. 2003 [1974]. The Nomos of the Earth: in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. London: Telos Pres
Schmitt, Carl. 2001 [1933]. State, Movement, People. Washington: Plutarch Press.
[1] Von Clausewitz, Carl. 1873 [1832]. On War. N Trübner: London. Henceforth OW.
[2] The case of Sierra Leone is taken as exemplary. The results would surely differ if we took Iraq, Lebanon or Somalia. However, despite these cases being heterogeneous, there is sufficient structural similarity – in the constitution of non-state bodies as military actors, for example – to think that the conclusions drawn from reading Clausewitz in Sierra Leone have a wider pertinence. Regardless, given a lack of space, I am unable to draw on a more comparativist perspective.
[3] Kaldor, Mary. 1999. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity.
[4] Two notes should be made here. Clausewitz does not, purposefully speak of the logic of war, but a grammar of war. Logic is reserved for politics, which occasionally employs the grammar of war. The failure of Clausewitz’ project would be for war to acquire a logic of its own. The use of the term “logic of war” here implies precisely that. This point will be developed at length in the rest of the paper. Further, as there is a danger in using Sierra Leone to stand in for contemporary conflict, there is an equal danger in asking a reading of one axiom from Clausewitz to stand in for European political theory of war. Neither name is appropriate to the object. This paper employs a reading of Clausewitz to illuminate certain continuities between his concerns with 19th century warfare between states and civil war in Sierra Leone. If there are broader conclusions to be drawn about the world we live in today is left for the reader to decide.
[5] An excellent example of this type of image (excellent in both its exemplary nature and its photographic quality) is Battlespace, an exhibition of photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan made by the November Eleven collective. It is available at http://www.battlespaceonline.org/. Accessed 17/4/2008.
[6] Such depictions are a journalistic commonplace. Exemplary in this regard is the neo-Malthusian enthusiasm of Kaplan, Robert. 1994. The Coming Anarchy. The Atlantic Monthly. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/anarchy.htm. Accessed 6/2/2004.
[7] See Schmitt, Carl. 2003 [1974]. The Nomos of the Earth: in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. London: Telos Press. p.143. Henceforth NE.
[8] Walter Benjamin. 1921. Critique of Violence. In Benjamin, Walter. 1996: Selected Writings. Volume One: 1913-1926. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p.240. Henceforth CV.
[9]NE.
[10] Perhaps, years earlier, in 1919, his time was also that of Ho Chi Minh, who, convinced that now was “their time”, pressed the case for Vietnamese self-determination to Woodrow Wilson, who had arrived in Paris with a plan to make the world “safe for democracy.” Self-determination, for Wilson, always took place in a framework of imperialism, and Minh’s pleas fell on deaf ears. The time announced by the end of colonialism was not that of equal parties (who would then also fight equal wars), but of an unending war, where the logic of politics and the grammar of war could no longer be disentangled. See, Manela, Erez. 2008.The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[11] In Fanon’s words: “The Zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed. But not in the services of a higher unity.” This absolutely un-dialectical schema would see the impossibility of a proper combat between the two sides. See Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wreteched of the Earth. Penguin: London. p.38.
[12] OW:15
[13] Etienne Balibar. On Clausewitz. Public Lecture. Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, May 8, 2006.
[14] Though this is unremarked on in the scholarship, the extent to which Benjamin relies on a reading of On War in the Critique of Violence becomes clear through the particular way he uses the word means, and his surprisingly identical identification of diplomacy as a non-violent means, in the critique of violence.
[15] The exemplary analysis of the relationship between war and state power is 1227: Treatise on Nomadology:-The War Machine, in Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 1988. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum Press. pp.351-424.
[16] See, for instance. Salt, Justin. 1999: Turkey’s military ‘democracy’. Current History. Vol. 98, pp.72-78.
[17] In this formulation, one could call war the “after-life of politics”; the politics pursued at the end of politics. Such a name would indicate the dangerous, contradictory character of such a formulation.
[18] Schmitt, Carl. 2001 [1933]. State, Movement, People. Washington: Plutarch press. This Schmitt should be distinguished from the Carl Schmitt of later works, who works through the contradictions of the position he takes here.
[19] Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz. 1999: Africa works: disorder as a political instrument. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
[20] CV:240.
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