[Marxism] Etienne Balibar: Politics As War, War As Politics

["Gilles d'Aymery" <aymery@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Etienne Balibar: Politics As War, War As Politics

Etienne Balibar is professor in Paris X Nanterre and University of
California, Irvine. He was invited to participate in the first edition of
the Dictionary of War but unfortunately could not make it to Frankfurt.
Instead he has sent us as his contribution an essay entitled: "Politics
As War, War As Politics - Post-Clausewitzian Variations". It is the text
of a public lecture he gave at the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the
Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, on May 8, 2006.

We seem to be really living in a post-clausewitzian era, in a double
sense of this expression. First, there is a lively ongoing debate, which
is not restricted to the narrow range of "polemologists", concerning the
clausewitzian or non-clausewitzian character of contemporary wars. This
debate started about 25 years ago, when the typical Cold-War era
obsession with mutual destruction of the Great Powers gave place to a
keen interest among military experts and political theorists for "low
intensity conflicts", mainly located in the Third World (a category still
very much in use after the Second World as such had collapsed), involving
interventions from technologically sophisticated armies from the North
against guerrilla-type adversaries, therefore highly dissymmetrical.

Martin van Creveld from Israel and Samuel Huntington from the US seem to
have been among the first to launch the slogan of "non-clausewitzian"
warfare in a post-clausewitzian political environment. Then came the
"ethnic wars" in former Yugoslavia and other parts of the world, which
prompted the British peace theorist and politologist Mary Kaldor and
others to launch the idea of New Wars versus Old Wars, involving
historical "subjects" which are not Nation-States with their regular
armies, again suggesting that the explanatory value of ideas deriving
from Clausewitz´s celebrated work On War - even generalized and adapted
to new circumstances, new strategic interests and new technologies, which
had been a major preoccupation of War theorists for 150 years - had
reached its limit, and was henceforth unable to account for the kind of
interaction now arising between war and politics, but also religion,
race, economy. Just as, at a certain point, after a glorious career,
Euclidian Geometry had to give way to Non-Euclidian Geometry to describe
the real physical world, Clausewitzian strategy and polemology should
give way to a new non-Clausewitzian understanding of the historical
world, allowing another type of "calculations". This did not prevent some
analysts of contemporary wars to advocate a continuous use of
Clausewitzian schemes and concepts, both analytical and normative, I am
particularly thinking of Alain Joxe in his remarkable L´Empire du Chaos
(translated as Empire of Disorder), who by the same token reinstalled
Clausewitz in a series of theorists of War as a social and political
phenomenon, and as the correlate of State sovereignty, which did not only
include Thucydides, Machiavelli and Schmitt, but also Hobbes, Marx and
Weber. But the situation has now changed again, which to a large extent
is the result of the launching of the US War in the Middle East, and the
way it has evolved in its first three years.

[Full: http://www.dictionaryofwar.org/en-dict/node/164 ]

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