I wrote this over a year ago for the last political theory class I took. I am currently working on a project that traverses some of the same space, so to speak, so it's worth my digging through the archives. Reminds me how much I enjoy this sort of thing.
"Acheronta movere" (1)
Kant's discussion of war in "Perpetual Peace" emphasizes what we might call the spatial character of war. He argues that, when a state of war exists between two individuals, two solutions exist: "I can either require him to enter with me into a state of civil law or to remove himself from my surroundings." (2) In other words, Kant theorizes the state of war as a territorial problem: It can only exist when individuals must live on the same land.
Kant, therefore, looks at war as a means of dispersing human populations over the globe. When possible, he implies, humans want to avoid living in a state of war, as it "denies [them] security and injures [them] merely by being in this state." (Kant 112) And, similarly, they will seek to avoid entering a social contract (or "civil law"), as it will be a constraint upon their actions. As a result, he concludes, humans have spread themselves into every inhabitable space.
By this point in history, he concludes, an individual cannot escape the state of war by "remov[ing] himself from my surroundings." (Kant 112) The space available to humans is limited: "for since the earth is a globe, they cannot scatter themselves infinitely, but must, finally, tolerate living in close proximity." (Kant 118) When all available open spaces have filled up, the remaining choice is between living in war and accommodating oneself to the law.
Kant, drawing upon Hobbes, begins from the premise that individuals have already accepted sovereign power rather than choosing "the war of every man against every man." (3) But the Leviathans under which they live are spatially limited ones; each one holds sway over a fraction of the earth's surface. And, as sovereignty is a "multitude so united in one person," the state of war arises once again between sovereign bodies. (4) (Hobbes 129)
As each warring Leviathan controls, and excludes others from, a given space, they violate what Kant calls cosmopolitan right, or "the right to visit, to associate." (Kant 118) The right to hospitality throughout the world, which "belongs to all men by virtue of their common ownership of the earth's surface," can only be guaranteed by perpetual peace. (Kant 118) As a result, Kant argues for a "federation of nations," or a "league of peace," to establish a state of peace. (Kant 115, 117) In other words, the Hobbesian dilemma of a permanent state of war between nations is "solved" by the establishment of a social contract (or international law) between those nations. (5)
We will step back from Kant's concern with perpetual peace to note a few important features of his theorizing. First of all, he depicts the state of war as a spatial problem - it arises only between individuals or sovereignties living in "close proximity". Proximity is, of course, a historically mutable concept: transportation times and communication costs have shrunk dramatically since Kant's day, thereby bringing distant parts of the globe into closer and closer contact. (6) Nevertheless, we might look at two individuals or states as proximate if they share an interest in the same piece of land.
Second, note that Kant repeatedly describes this space - the commonly owned earth - as a surface. Commerce, and other forms of intercourse between humans, is carried out on the surface, by way of "ships and camels (the ship of the desert)." (Kant 118) Kant emphasizes the fact that cosmopolitan right applies on the earth's surface. The goal of his league of peace is to eliminate restrictions to access of the surface, to give free play to the flotillas and caravans that make commerce possible. By establishing peace and the right to visit, Kant hopes to formalize the "right to the earth's surface that [...] makes commerce possible." (Kant 118) In other words, the establishment of universal commerce, which for Kant would require perpetual peace, would eliminate all divisions and enclaves on the surface.
However, Kant fails to consider the possibility of chthonic space, of unexpected depths lying below the earth's surface. He introduces space into his discussion of war, peace and commerce, but fails to think of it as anything more than a one-dimensional surface. In doing so, Kant leaves us with more questions than he answers. First, if space is not simply a surface, what does it look like? What is the nature of its depths? Second, how does the existence of this "dimension of the abyss" alter the relationship between civil law and the state of war? (Schmitt 69) To invoke Carl Schmitt, how does partisan warfare depend upon irregular space? Finally, we might end this (theoretical) discussion by asking who the contemporary occupants of the depths are.
Kant uses the ship, which skims across the surface of the ocean, as his model for commerce. But, by our time, the submarine has "opened up an unexpected deep dimension beneath the surface on which sea war in the old style was fought." (Schmitt 70) The existence of the submarine, therefore, challenges Kant's one-dimensional view of space. While law can prevail on the surface, submarines can fight a war, protected from the traditional methods of sea war (i.e. ship-mounted artillery), from beneath. Their introduction during World War I undermined the existing regime of legality and commerce.
Partisan warfare, Schmitt argues, is similar to submarine warfare in that it opens "an unexpected space unknown to the former space" of commerce and warfare. (Schmitt 71) This space is, from the existing perspective, an irregular one, as it challenges the existing conception of space as a surface. It is a counter-space to the surface that Kant describes. He argues that when two individuals exist in proximity, they must resolve the state of war by establishing civil law or leaving - and as the earth's surface is more or less totally populated, they must choose the former option. However, the existence of irregular spaces beneath the surface enables a third option: waging war from a relatively protected zone that lies within the same territory as the opponent but outside of the legal norms prevailing on the surface.
Space is made irregular by partisans, who fight an irregular type of warfare. It comes into being not through physical or tectonic changes that fundamentally alter the geography of a region, but through the implementation of new modes of warfare. The invention of submarine warfare, for example, opened up the space beneath the sea's surface - a space that already existed but had not previously been accounted for by traders, navies, or international law. Schmitt lays out four characteristics of the partisan. First, he says, they are characterized by "irregularity, increased mobility of active combat, and increased intensity of political engagement." (Schmitt 20) By this, he means that they are out of military uniform, and are able to move rapidly and blend in with a civilian population. Furthermore, they fight with a direct political aim - which, although they are easily assimilated into global revolutionary projects such as Marxism, is primarily "a fundamentally defensive position." (Schmitt 92)
Finally, the partisan has a "telluric" character - he or she derives from and is rooted to a particular piece of land. (Schmitt 20) As stated above, the partisan's project is a defensive one: it is the struggle to hold on to a particular space. More than that: the partisan's existence depends upon the existence of that space, which is characterized by its "autochthonous population" and "geographical particularity." (Schmitt 21) Schmitt names the national liberation struggles fought by Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi-Mihn and Fidel Castro against colonial intrusion (from Japan, France and the U.S., respectively) as examples of partisan warfare. In each case, partisans relied upon "conditions of terrain, climate, and society," including their intimate knowledge of local geography and the support of local populations. (7) Mao emphasizes the partisan's close relation to the "autochthonous population," commenting that "guerrilla warfare basically derives from the masses and is supported by them." (Tse-Tung 44)
Schmitt's examples of partisan warfare all take place within underdeveloped landscapes - "mountain-ranges, forests, jungles, or deserts" - that provide easy access to irregular space for rural peoples living within those landscapes. The existence of such land, and the presence of people with an autochthonous relationship to it, was the condition of possibility for both the earliest example of partisan warfare (the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon's armies) and the latest (the Vietnam War, Che's Latin American adventures). As I have suggested above, partisan warfare in irregular spaces undermines (sometimes in a very literal sense) the civil and international laws that guarantee Kant's cosmopolitan right to commerce on the earth's surface. The irregularity of the partisan challenges international law by challenging the "clear distinctions between war and peace, military and civilian, enemy and criminal, state war and civil war" upon which it is founded. (Schmitt 32)
The partisan, who exists only insofar as irregular space (an "unexpectedly deep dimension" beneath the surface) is available to him or her, fights a defensive battle against a real enemy. He or she seeks to defend the land against those who have other designs upon it - in other words, to secure their enclave against the extension of the "new nomos of the earth." (Schmitt 95) The partisan seeks, in other words, to preserve the distinctive character of his or her territory against colonial projects - which may include commercial interests. To do so, he or she depends upon the existence of a depth into which he or she can escape from the reach of civil law without leaving the land entirely. This, for Schmitt, is the condition of possibility for the continuation of warfare in an age in which commerce and the modern-day incarnations of Kant's "federation of nations" - the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund - are attaining hegemony over the whole of the earth's surface.
At the same time, the traditional milieu of the partisan, the rural population with close ties to underdeveloped, irregular terrain, is declining in importance. Rural population growth has flattened, while urban populations in the developing world continue to skyrocket. Within a few years, most people in developing countries will live in the cities. (8) For the partisan to thrive out of Ho Chi-Mihn's jungle environs, irregular spaces must exist within urban environments. We must, therefore, discuss the nature of urbanism in the Third World.
Frantz Fanon comments, in The Wretched of the Earth, that colonialism has produced a "compartmentalized world, this world divided in two." (9) In the colonies, which have since been liberated from their European masters, two sectors - that of the colonist and that of the colonized - confront each other. Each sector has radically different physical characteristics. "The colonist's sector is sector built to last, all stone and steel. It's a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers." (Fanon 4) Fanon depicts this sector as a smooth surface, a rationalized space on the model of European cities. It absorbs the fruits of commerce, sating itself on the products of its "cosmopolitan" interaction with the colonized space.
By contrast, "[t]he colonized's sector, or at least the 'native' quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. [...] It's a world with no space, people are piled on top of one another, the shacks squeezed tightly together." (Fanon 4) This sector, which feeds on the refuse from the colonist's sector, is chronically underdeveloped. As a result, it is irregularly-formed space, populated chaotically by a chaotic mass of human beings. We might consider it to be the "underworld" of the colonist's sector. Its inhabitants, although they rely upon the land, "which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity," are displaced to the illegal margins of the urban landscape by the colonists. (Fanon 9) They must defend the land that they occupy only irregularly and tenuously.
Although colonialism has ended, Fanon's description of these two sectors has not ceased to be relevant. Cities in the Third World have been evacuated, largely, of their former colonial masters, but the same pattern of underdevelopment continues. The space into which the vast majority of new urban denizens are moving, or being born, is irregular: it consists of slums and shantytowns, constructed by residents on ground that is not theirs. Just as Fanon said, these slum-dwellers, the new milieu of the partisan, must defend the irregular space in which they live, autochthonously. As we are finding today, they will fight against the extension of the new world order - in Mogadishu, Palestine, Sadr City, Fallujah...
References
(1) A Latin citation from Otto von Bismarck; it is translated as "mobilize the netherworld." Theory of the Partisan. Carl Schmitt. New York: Telos Press, 2007. p. 40. (Further citations are in text.)
(2) Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Immanuel Kant. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983. p. 112. (Further citations are in text.)
(3) Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes. Petersborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. p. 95. (Further citations are in text.)
(4) Kant recalls this definition, writing "As nations, peoples can be regarded as single individuals who injure one another through their close proximity while living in the state of nature..." (Kant 115)
(5) Kant comments, however, that this "federation" would not be a Leviathan on an international level, as "a nation consisting of nations" would be "contradictory." (Kant 115)
(6) See David Harvey's classic map on the subject, reproduced online here.
(7) On Guerrilla Warfare. Mao Tse-Tung. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. p. 42. (Further citations are in text.)
(8) See The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements. United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Sterling, VA: Earthscan Publications, 2003. p. 24.
(9) The Wretched of the Earth. Frantz Fanon. New York: Grove Press, 2004. p. 5. (Further citations are in text.)
0 comments:
Post a Comment