first press www.theglobalsite.ac.uk 2001
Martin Shaw
A regressive crystallization of global state power: theorising a response to the 'war against terrorism'
Martin Shaw International Relations and Politics, University of Sussex m.shaw@sussex.ac.uk
Contents: Introduction; Theoretical foundations; The third Western war of the global era; Conclusions
As the world lurches into what is called a new type of war, everyone inevitably falls back on old emotional, moral and intellectual resources for their sense of what is happening and to make their own response. Every war is new in some significant way, and in any case we have been here before: in the last decade over the Gulf and Kosovo, the two occasions on which the West made war (as opposed to intervening less decisively in pre-existing conflicts). War stirs, moreover, powerful memories of still older conflicts, such as the Second World War and Vietnam. All of us have feelings and beliefs shaped partly by all these earlier events, which come into play in this supposedly new situation. (Evans and Lunn, 1996).
For some, their beliefs dictate a simple response. American patriots will have little difficulty in supporting whatever their government does in this situation. Anti-imperialists, even as they write about a 'new' imperialism, will likewise oppose whatever America does, as they have done with its every other military venture. Consistent pacifists will oppose military action on principle. All of these responses, in their simplicity, must arouse some suspicion. If we already know how we should respond, does it really matter what actually happened? Will we know if there is really something different about the present situation, or about how we should respond to it?
For non-believers, these kinds of response are troubling. For scholars - committed to studying and understanding - they must be particularly so. And yet if scholars take their trade seriously, they must make use of their stock of old knowledge to make sense of the new. Elements of novelty must be defined precisely with reference with what we know from the past. Science must allow for the complexity of continuity and change in the same historical events. In this way we can define, in a more nuanced but also a more solid manner, whether we should respond - politically, morally - in the same or a different way to this as to earlier crises.
This paper is an attempt to define the issues of the crisis precipitated by the terror attacks on America on 11 September 2001, in the light of certain kinds of theoretical understanding. It is written in the belief that, while there are certainly principles that should define our understandings of and responses to war in general in the modern era, these include the idea that each war throws up a different constellation of the more general issues involved. In particular, I want to advance the notion that the conjuncture of the 'war against terrorism' is significantly different from that of the two comparable crises, the Gulf and Kosovo, which I have already mentioned. I want to argue, therefore, that it requires a partially different response.
In elaborating my position, I draw on several bodies of work and my own previous syntheses of them. Broadly speaking, these are drawn from historical sociology, but developed in engagement with international relations and strategic, war and peace studies, as well as informed by both democratic and peace politics. More specifically, they draw on four sets of positions that I have developed in other work (e.g. Shaw 1988, 1991, 1996, 2000, 2002):
1 Arguments about the nature of state power in the current period.These can be summarised in the following points:
4 Arguments about the foundations of progressive politics.
I lay out these arguments, since they are derived from previous work, as the principles on which the analysis that follows is based. However in order to develop this, I need to add a 5th point:
5 Polymorphous crystallization as a general law of historical sociologyThis idea was developed by Michael Mann in his theory of the state (in Sources of Social Power, 1993). Its core is the argument that the same power networks crystallize in variable ways according to different kinds of issue that arise. There are both certain kinds of general higher-order crystallizations, and also more specific crystallizations that arise in particular situations. Mann develops his concept in relation to the nation-state - thus he sees both 'imperialist' and 'welfare' (among other) crystallizations of the American state, each tending to involve particular sets of relationships between apparatuses within the state and social groups outside.
I did not systematically incorporate this idea into my theory of the global state (although I have used it in another context, as a way of understanding the shifting crystallizations of media roles in global crises: Shaw 1996). However I think it can be used to link the idea of variable regimes, as developed in international relations, with a more structural concept of power such as the global state. It helps explain how essentially the same power network can manifest itself in a variety of regimes in different issue-areas. It also helps to explain the contrasting forms in which global power structures reveal themselves in different conjunctural world crises and wars, as well as at different moments during these wars.
The third Western war of the global era
George W. Bush has called the 'war against terrorism' that he is launching the 'first war of the twentieth century'. This is not strictly true, of course, because many wars are taking place around the globe and some - like the conflict in Macedonia - are of very recent origin. Moreover this first war of the chronological century is actually the third major war of the new 'global' era that opened with the end of the Cold War in 1989-91, involving Western powers in conflict with non-Western states.
Of course, there have been many other important local conflicts that have become what I have called 'global crises', through mediation by TV, NGOs and the legitimate global institutions of the UN (Shaw 1996). Western military power has been involved in some of these, to varying extents. However these three large-scale mobilizations of Western and especially American military power to defeat organized enemies stand out from other more limited actions.
I want to look at the issues posed by the three conflicts in the light of the model indicated in the analytical principles outline above.
1 The Iraqi wars of 1990-91
I prefer this label to the more common '(Persian) Gulf War' because it recognizes the greater complexity of the conflicts (plural) that occurred, centred on the Iraqi state under the regime of Saddam Hussein. That state fought four wars in 1990-91: the conquest of Kuwait; the war with the US-led coalition; the wars against the Shi'ites in the south and the Kurds in the north. (Shaw 1996) These were continuations of earlier wars: the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, and the 'Anfal campaign', the genocidal war against the Kurds in the late 1980s that had taken perhaps 100,000 lives. (Makiya 1993) They led in turn to the limited conflicts with the UN, and especially the US and UK, continuing to this day.
These complex wars thus involved a variety of forces: parties, guerrillas and social groups within Iraq as well as regional and Western states. The legitimacy of the US-led Western action depended on this complex power network - as well as a larger global context. The following key points seem to be relevant in examining how the general processes, outlined above, crystallized around the 1990-91 wars:
It can be seen, from these key points, that the Gulf War posed two different kinds of questions of legitimacy
The initial mobilization - forged in the light of the US's humiliation in failing to prevent the invasion of Kuwait - raised one set of questions. But another was raised with the uprisings at the end of the coalition's campaign, and yet others with the refugee exodus and the deepening of sanctions in the mid-1990s. These different conjunctural crystallizations expressed the shifting patterns of the ongoing conflictual network of local, regional and global power actors.
2 The Kosovo wars, 1998-99As with the Iraqi wars, there were two more or less distinct conflicts in and over Kosovo. The war between the Serbian state and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), in which Serbian forces carried out genocidal expulsions and massacres of Albanian civilians, erupted fully in early 1998. The war between NATO and Serbia was launched a year later and lasted for 3 months until Slobodan Milosevic agreed to the entry of NATO troops into the province. Also, as with Iraq, there was a history of extensive wars in former Yugoslavia (but unlike Iraq, with a developing history of Western involvement from their beginnings in 1991), including acute political conflict in Kosovo.
The wars involved a similar broad range of actors to Iraq: the repressive Serbian state; Kosovan parties, guerrillas and civilian society; and the West in various forms. However they represented a significantly different general crystallization, reflected in conjunctural crystallizations that posed partly different kinds of issues from Iraq:
Summarising the comparisons of Iraq and Kosovo: the general crystallization of Western power in the latter case was far more closely linked to the pressure of the global-democratic revolution, and to humanitarian concerns. It reflected the pressure of political forces representing the majority population of Kosovo, and concern about the threatened civilian population mediated by international media and NGOs, in a way that happened only at one stage of the Iraqi wars (the Kurdish refugee crisis).
At the same time, the form of Western military action, although certainly open to criticism for not being directly protective of civilians and for causing civilian casualties, was nowhere near as destructive of life as Western policies towards Iraq. Serbian military and civilian casualties were probably each in the hundreds, compared to the ten thousand or so civilians massacred, and hundreds of thousands expelled, by Serbian forces; and Western military action eventually stopped the killing and restored the population to their homes.
In Iraq, in contrast, tens of thousands of largely conscript troops and several thousand civilians were killed by the US-led coalition. The longer-term results were even bleaker: the destruction of infrastructure and sanctions - and the regime's neglect - caused living standards to deteriorate drastically and many lives were lost as a result. The Gulf War did achieve the restoration of Kuwaiti civilians to their homes, and the Kurdish intervention provided a modicum of protection to expelled civilians, but these were secondary to the overall thrust of Western policy. Political outcomes in Kuwait and Kurdistan, let alone in Iraq, were considerably further from democracy than those in Kosovo and Serbia.
This explains why it was far easier - in the light of the democratic and historical pacifist principles outlined above - to support the general thrust of Western policy in Kosovo than in Iraq. However it is important to note that the latter, especially, posed radically shifting issues at different points in the conflict.
3 The 'war against terrorism'
How then do the prospects for the third Western war of the global era shape up in the light of these comparisons? Obviously we do not know the precise forms of American and coalition military action, nor the way the conflict will develop, and the way in which new conjunctures will pose specific crystallizations of issues. One of the things we should learn from the earlier conflicts is the way that events can pose sharply contrasting sets of issues at different points. We need to be prepared to respond flexibly to new developments.
Nevertheless, we can characterize the general crystallization of the conflict as it appears in these, its opening stages. I shall draw on the comparisons already established between the Gulf and Kosovo to sharpen the way that I draw this characterization.
The 'war against terrorism' represents a regressive crystallization of the emergent global state. At its heart, in a sad irony, is the incineration of the innocents in New York and Washington. This is as dreadful a crime against humanity as has been committed anywhere in the world in the last decade, and cries out for international justice and the invocation of legitimate global order. But the US seems determined that what happened on 11 September was 'not a crime, but war'.
Bush has pulled America together for revenge, not justice. He has pulled together an international coalition behind a threadbare notion of 'defeating terrorism' that does little to add to this. The huge potential for legitimacy in real, concerted international action against terrorism may well be squandered in an adventure with dubious and unclear goals, and lead to more innocent victims to lay alongside those buried under the World Trade Centre.
This war seems likely to strengthen US hegemonism within the West - and reinforce the positions of Russia's and China's unsavoury rulers in an American-centred global power network. European leaders like Tony Blair have run hard to avoid being sidelined altogether, and in the end they will have no more than limited influence on what happens. The United Nations has been ignored (for worse reasons than applied over Kosovo) and international justice downgraded.
It seems likely that the war will have far more serious negative effects on world politics than previous conflicts. The Gulf War did much to stimulate the growth of the extreme political Islam that has now wreaked such violence on America. However the Gulf War had political aims that could be justified to some sectors of Muslim opinion. The Kosovo War, in addition to its general progressive justifications, also offset this tendency, because the West took military action to protect a threatened population that happened to be Muslim. This took place, moreover, at a time when the emblematic conflict of Islam and the West, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, was at a more hopeful stage. Today, Muslims have little to hope for from America in that context.
We cannot do without global power networks - in this sense 'anti-globalization' politics is a chimera. A global state framework that ties together the world's state powers, so as to prevent major interstate war, increase economic flows and facilitate population movements, has much to recommend it. Such a framework, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, can only be centred on the West, given its economic, military, political - and indeed ideological - supremacy. However the forms in which this framework develops matter crucially. There are choices between war and non-war, semi-authoritarianism and deepened democracy, the assertion of power and the development of global legitimacy.
Moments of general military crisis are the strongest expressions of these issues. We need to recognise that war, in general, is a problem for global order. The New York and Washington attacks are a graphic demonstration of terrible human consequences - and political-economic destabilization - resulting from the simplest uses of force. This was degenerate war par excellence. The positive way to develop global state frameworks is to maximise the use of non-military means - political, legal and policing measures are available in abundance to tackle terrorism. Even in Kosovo, which of the three major military interventions I have evaluated most positively, non-military measures (earlier recognition of Kosovan democratic demands, arrests of the main perpetrators in Bosnia, etc.) could have helped avoid the crisis that erupted. Likewise the NATO war had many negative consequences. Where military force is used effectively in global state building, it is generally in much more limited forms and alongside other kinds of action.
The 'war against terrorism' appears to crystallize the negative sides of global power. We must always remember that war is an unpredictable process, in which events throw up new choices, and even destruction can open roads to change. The plight of the Afghani civilians already demands a 'humanitarian response' before a single bomb has been dropped. But at the outset, there appears no good justification for large-scale military action, and every reason to fear its consequences for the safety of many innocent human beings. This new war will reinforce reactionary concepts of world order and do little or nothing to advance progressive political and social developments. It is important for democratic globalists to oppose a regressive mobilization of force.
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