AWOT Essay: Where does the fear come from?

While the ‘politics of fear’ is fast becoming a standard media sound-bite, there is little agreement about what actually constitutes such politics. First and foremost amongst the under-investigated aspects of this phenomenon is the origin of the fear, with a number of diverse hypotheses offered on the topic. Michael Moore, for instance, inserts a rather crude segment into ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’, in which he suggests that society’s fears are being manipulated by corporations in order to sell them ridiculous safety gadgetry. Stronger accounts of the phenomenon, such as Barry Glassner’s ‘Culture of Fear’, have put media hype in the spotlight. Meanwhile another documentary, this time the highly sophisticated BBC production by Adam Curtis, ‘The Power of Nightmares’, seems to point the finger at politicians (“now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to deliver us from nightmares…”), accusing them of deliberately stoking up fear to legitimize their rule.

On this blog we have been somewhat critical of the latter account (and, indeed, Adam Curtis has made an effort to present a more nuanced interpretation of his account elsewhere), stressing the fact that politicians are picking up on a wider social anxiety that is firmly rooted in society. So it is with interest that we turn to Jeffrey Rosen’s ‘The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Freedom and Security in an Anxious Age’, a book which addresses the politics of fear almost entirely from the perspective of society, or, in Rosen’s terms, the crowd.

A wide-ranging investigation into the consensus on intrusive surveillance, Rosen’s book is an excellent and thought-provoking read. Despite his legal background, Rosen does not restrict himself to the dry, technocratic, and oft-rehearsed arguments of ‘balancing between liberty and security’, instead drawing together a large array of social issues to describe the problem. The material is diverse, from 19th Century sociology to reportage and interviews with contemporary law-makers and surveillance entrepreneurs. This is a book in the best traditions of Richard Sennett or Christopher Lasch, as Rosen tries to understand the mutually impacting relationship between the individual American psyche and wider social phenomena. At the same time, Rosen produces logical and pithy arguments against many of the innovations which are designed to make us safer (we have previously posted on his cutting analysis of Britain’s CCTV revolution).

Rosen’s central theme relates the public’s broad acquiescence to security measures within a narrative of increasing social isolation and uncertainty. In this he borrows from Anthony Giddens’ account of ‘risk culture’ whereby, as society dictates less and less about a given individual’s future, the resulting uncertainty leads to a heightened preoccupation with risk. That is to say that, as our futures become less clearly determined, we devote a greater degree of energy to thinking about (or worrying about) that future, including above all the attempt to understand the potential risks in any course of action. In a highly creative move, Rosen goes on to use this framework to explain the increasingly ‘confessional’ nature of our culture, looking at the rise in blogs and exhibitionist writing amongst other things. This, he claims, stems from a need to constantly prove ourselves to, and attempt to connect with, a society with whom we have little or no real connection. It is an attempt to overcome the lack of common understanding we described in Monday’s post. This constant desire to lay ourselves bare to the world, to allow and even encourage others to pry into every tiny detail of our personal lives, leaves society very open to government intrusion for the sake of security.

But while it generates a fascinating and substantial critique of contemporary cultural norms, Rosen’s account may show the limits of focusing too hard upon society as the locus for the politics of fear, without taking into account the possible role of political leadership. His descriptions of the crowd can often seem somewhat clichéd stripped as they are of any political context that could make sense of contemporary developments. Thus statements like, “citizens in a modern democracy are not very good at absorbing complicated information from the media” (p.15) or “the crowd, left to its own devices, reacts to threats emotionally rather then analytically,” (p.30) take on a quality of prejudice rather than of reasoned argument.

We should make clear that Rosen has tried to clarify his approach somewhat when discussing his work. In his words, “[t]he goal is not to be contemptuous, but just hard- headed about the rigors of the challenges we face.” And of course, it is always impossible to introduce as much nuance as we would like into any account of human activities. Yet when Rosen ignores the role of politicians in creating a climate of fear, he loses part of the picture. In a situation where no politician challenges the politics of fear, as propagated by governments or other institutions, why would we expect the public to be anything other than fearful? That is to say, if there is no voice in society suggesting an alternative vision, it is inevitable that people will start to accept the accounts of imminent danger that are presented to them. Yes, politicians are partly responding to an anxious public mood, but they are also giving up on the chance to challenge that mood, not to simply reflect the emotional state of society, but to try and shape it.

But, if we take a further step back, perhaps we can start to see a broader problem that embraces both the politicians and the people, alleviating the need to situate the problem in one particular camp. While Giddens’ and Rosen’s descriptions of the crowd in the modern world—atomized, incoherent and emotional—may ring true to us today, they are not the timeless accounts they would have us believe. In fact, since the dawning of modernity, societies have rapidly developed numerous novel ways of understanding both our individual position in society and the nature and direction of that society as a whole. To take one example, class quickly became the dominant mode (in America as well as Europe) of distinguishing between our peers, marking out those who we could trust and those we could not. While there may be forces that push us in that direction, atomization is not the inevitable condition of modernity. Historically it has been assuaged through the development of ideological frameworks that helped us make sense of the world. Thus it is this loss of common narrative that determines the condition of society, its leaders, and their relationship. The only language in which politicians can talk to the people is one that appeals to the basic fact of their alienation. The gap between people, and between people and their leaders, grows.

When we talk about ‘frameworks’ or ‘narratives’ it perhaps suggests something intangible; an identity that might be reestablished in a strictly abstract manner. Yet underlying this conception is a more concrete issue—that such frameworks are ways of explaining and facilitating our control over the direction of society. Without a clear and shared understanding of our world, it is impossible to imagine ourselves directing its progress, and uncertainty dominates. A diminished sense of agency gives rise to social anxiety. Rosen points to this phenomenon at work on an individual level, when he records some statistics as to who in society who feel most at risk from various threats. (p.71-72) Essentially, those who have less control over their lives (impoverished minority groups, women), fear a terrorist attack more than well-off white men. Our fear of terrorism is very directly influenced by our sense of certainty or otherwise about our own lives.

The politics or culture of fear may be the defining characteristic of our era. And anyone who aims to understand that phenomenon would do well to read Rosen’s book. We are still at a very early stage in categorizing this aspect of modern life, yet the ‘Naked Crowd’ will no doubt be an essential tool in enabling us to do so.

AWOT Essay: Liberty and the Need to Assert Interests, Part I

As we've discussed before, an underreported aspect of the war on terror is the way in which the federal government has transformed terrorism into a catch-all criminal category. From animal rights activists destroying property to individuals violating immigration laws, aggressive prosecution and harsh penalties have been justified in the name of national security. The USA Today reports that since 2001 the number of terrorism convictions by the FBI has quadrupled from 84 to 336. However, this does not mean that 4 times as many Al Qaeda operatives have been captured by the agency. According to the same article, most of these convictions have had nothing at all to do with terrorism, with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reporting in 2003 that three-fourths of the cases were "mislabeled" -- most being low-level immigration violations. Among such mislabeled convictions include 60 Middle Eastern students who cheated on English language proficiency tests.

The convictions underscore a real crisis facing the national security apparatus. At stake in transforming marginal offenders and Arab ESL students into terrorists is the need to prove that government is actually capable of accomplishing its tasks. Despite the immense coercive powers of the bureaucratic state, most citizens experience the state as irrelevant, ineffectual, or utterly arbitrary. In a sense, when the FBI pads the numbers, it's attempting to convince the public of government's ability to fulfill basic social commitments. This need to reassure a skeptical citizenry is thus about justifying the institutions themselves and proving that government can truly eliminate all potential threats.

Yet, the public's need for such reassurance raises a prior question. Why must the state justify itself this way in the first place? Is creating a condition of complete security practically feasible? In fact, as we argued recently, the very idea of security loses meaning without a grounding sense of liberty. Unless individuals develop and collectively entrench an account of freedom, figuring out what would make such freedom secure becomes a futile task. Today, the Administration employs words like liberty and freedom ritualistically, usually as a cant to link the war on terror to the Cold War and to clothe current misadventures with the ideological heft of a previous era. But, the terms themselves are empty, and real public discourse hardly ever addresses what actually constitutes the substance of freedom and liberty.

In fact, both the public's need for absolute physical safety and the hollowness of liberty-speak are part of a more general problem: the breakdown of social trust. The reason why animal rights activists and illegal immigrants can plausibly be presented by the FBI as "terrorists" is because the language of terrorism captures a prevailing sense of alienation. Individuals find themselves isolated, no longer enjoying attachments to community members or to fellow employees. Under these circumstances, everyone appears as an outsider -- a potential threat to safety and a source of danger. Ordinary crime and acts of terrorism merge, as both underscore a feeling of uncertainty and social disconnect. Thus, the quest for reassurance is a reciprocal one between government and isolated individual. With citizens coming to see neighbors as strangers, they seek inoculation for all potentially dangerous and hostile interactions. At the same time, no longer rooted in a collective project of liberty or material progress, government finds its legitimacy dependent on the ability to limit precisely such interactions.

Scholars of civil society like Robert Putnam describe the breakdown of trust as a collapse of "social capital." Putnam imagines that we can restore trust by strengthening community organizations such as the PTA, and by developing local institutions to address public problems. Yet, these arguments almost entirely ignore the central problem with isolation and the loss of trust, not to mention the primary basis by which people actually develop bonds of political attachment. In particular, civil society scholars ignore how the very ability of individuals to develop accounts of freedom is undermined by the experience of alienation. The more isolated individuals feel, the more willing they are to cede power to government and to transform security into a principle that legitimates even the most coercive forms of state violence.

One can only understand the president's claim to a unitary and unchecked emergency power against this backdrop. The breakdown of social trust promotes a collective sense of permanent threat that the government simply appropriates. It also helps explain why the language of security continues to be so powerful even five years after 9/11. Of all the objective threats facing individuals, a terrorist attack is far, far down on the list. Yet, it taps into an experience of isolation and social unease, and reinforces this willingness to reimagine government as principally concerned with keeping bodies safe and secure.

Yet, such atomization also undermines liberty by deforming the very nature of politics. In particular, the lack of social trust undermines the central basis for solidarity and collective agency. As the recent immigration protests remind us, all the great social movements in American history were built on common interests. Marginalized communities, be they poor farmers, industrial wage earners, or disenfranchised blacks, understood themselves as united by shared experiences of economic and political oppression. These experiences could only be addressed by imagining the specific union member, woman, or black citizen as part of a larger group. By liberating this larger group, all individual members would necessarily be freed as well.

Today, a common complaint is that citizens are apathetic and uninterested in politics. But, such apathy is an understandable if not appropriate response when public debate ignores the practical conditions facing individuals -- focusing instead on the symbolics of racial epithets or national languages. Politics only becomes meaningful when it is grounded in shared experience and allows individuals to recognize and develop those interests that unite them. Without social trust the very basis for such a politics disappears, since individuals are unable to appreciate the ways in which they're collectively tied. Instead neighbors and co-workers morph into strangers, potential terrorists or criminals, and the only commonality binding the political community is that of mutual suspicion and threat. In other words, we become equal only to the extent that we are all potentially subject to violence, and thus equally require the state's protection.

In the second part of this post, we'll discuss the kind of politics which has risen to fill the void left by interest. Political life today transforms all assertions of group interest into acts of selfishness. Without a sense of the common ties binding citizens, interest arguments strikes us as competing and arbitrary power claims -- attempts to get special benefits from the state. By contrast, the only worthy forms of political engagement are those that do away entirely with issues of interest and solidarity and focus instead of promoting universal, moral goals (for instance, global human rights). The further removed from the tangible experiences of citizens, the purer the political objective seems. The consequence, of course, is that we lose the capacity to develop and assert substantive accounts of freedom -- those actually responsive to the everyday concerns of neighbors and co-workers. Moreover, we perpetuate a cultural climate in which the language of security and, thus, the rhetoric of the war on terror appears not only a political necessity, but as the only tie that connects us as citizens. Rather than being bound by commitments to liberty or social progress, what unites us is fear and the need for all threats to be eliminated.

East Timor - Back to Square One

It is commonly said that the debacle in Iraq has suddenly called into question the great white hope of state-building. Where prior efforts at humanitarian intervention and restoring states, in places like Somalia, Haiti, East Timor and Kosovo, are supposed to have fared better, it is Iraq that has given a black-eye to an otherwise noble commitment. And the main failure in Iraq, according to the administration’s critics, is the lack of planning, not the idea of building states itself.

The return of foreign ‘peace-keeping’ troops to East Timor, including 120 military police from Portugal, East Timor’s former colonial occupier, Thursday reminds us that the problem in Iraq was not just a matter of hubris and lack of foresight, but something more profound in the nature of state-building. East Timor was one of the flagship state-building projects of the 1990s, in which, under the auspices of the United Nations Transitional Administration In East Timor (UNTAET), the UN was given an unlimited mandate to reconstruct the newly independent country, and to prevent full-scale civil war. The UN describes its mission in the following way:

‘On 30 August 1999, the people of East Timor voted by means of a direct, secret and universal ballot to begin a process leading towards independence. UNTAET was established on 25 October 1999 to administer the Territory, exercise legislative and executive authority during the transition period and support capacity-building for self-government. East Timor became an independent country on 20 May 2002. Also that day, UNTAET was succeeded by the United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET) established by Security Council resolution 1410 of 17 May 2002 to provide assistance to core administrative structures critical to the viability and political stability of East Timor.’

One immediate fact springs out, even from the UN’s own description: if the UN created a state, why was it necessary to replace one horrible acronym with another? Why should the ‘viability and political stability of East Timor’ have been a question once UNTAET gave back control to the East Timor government? The echoes of the 'hand over of sovereignty to Iraq' are unmistakable.

If we turn to more independent assessments of the UN in East Timor we discover that this sensible, liberal alternative to the Bush-style, shoot-first-build-states-later, was in fact nothing of the sort. When the UN entered, it gave its representative there, Sergio Vieira de Mello, ‘near-dictatorial powers’ to rebuild the country from scratch. (This pattern has been repeated elsewhere, with the UN High Representative in Bosnia earning the title ‘European Raj’). Francis Fukuyama, writing about state-building projects in various Third World polities, notes
‘In these countries, sovereignty had ceased to exist, and governance functions were displaced to the United Nations or other aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) - in the case of East Timor, located on a ship floating in the harbor outside of the capital of Dili.’*

As one former district administrator for UNTAET, Jarat Chopra, observed, they did not hesitate to use their powers undemocratically, with UNTAET actively opposing elections in the country during its stint there.

‘The real barrier to elected bodies turned out not to be their achievability, but rather stinging opposition from UN bureaucrats within a centralized organizational hierarchy. They stated openly that since UNTAET was not a representative government, it could not tolerate other bodies in the country being more representative…Ultimately, the UN refused to accept local elections. An accommodation was eventually reached in which the World Bank would in fact conduct local elections, and present them to the population as such, but UNTAET Regulation 2000/13 passed for the purpose would use the words ‘democratic selection’.’**

Bush, it appears, does not have a monopoly on the Orwellian use of language. If anything, it was operations with missions like ‘peace-building’, ‘peace-maintenance’, ‘state-building’ and ‘democratic selection’ that introduced into international affairs a vocabulary so phenomenally disconnected from reality that only figures entirely removed from the chain of democratic accountability could invoke them with any seriousness.

The end result of the UNTAET mission in East Timor was not a pristine, independent state, but a disaster. Chopra, again, notes what really happened:

‘Indeed, on 20 May 2002, East Timor achieved its full independence and became the newest state of the twenty-first century. The UN Development Programme published its human development index for ‘the poorest country in Asia’, with indicators comparable to the most severely collapsed places in the world. In statistical terms, UNTAET had given birth to a failed state’***

The major failure, as Chopra notes, was the way UNTAET ‘undermine[d] indigenous forms of political legitimacy without establishing a reliable alternative and functioning administrative structure.’**** In other words, it isn’t just a technical matter of planning, or whether state-building takes place under unilateral or multilateral auspices. Whether liberals or neoconservatives, the United States or the United Nations, runs the show, the fundamental problem is the same. Internationally directed state-building strips institutions of any basis in the needs, demands, and (most importantly) will of local populations. There is no substitute for local control – you cannot hand a community its self-determination.


* Francis Fukuyama (2004) State-Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century (London: Profile Books), pp.131-132
** Jarat Chopra (2003) ‘Building State Failure in East Timor’ in Jennifer Milliken (ed) (2003) State Failure, Collapse & Reconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing), p.236.
*** Chopra p.242
**** Chopra p. 239

A Manifesto for Moralization and Militarization

Since its initial publication in April, the Euston Manifesto has instigated endless internet debate. Written by a collection of pro-war leftists, the manifesto calls for "Democracy", "Human rights for all" and "No apology for tyranny" amongst other things. While the manifesto makes a claim to a grand historical vision ("We propose here a fresh political alignment"), the document never transcends a very contemporary set of political debates. For instance, it takes positions for a two state-solution and against anti-Americanism (and bizarrely, as one commentator points out, for open source software). This is simply humanitarian intevention couched as a revolutionary project (any similarities to the neo-cons strictly coincidental of course).

Among the strongest critiques of the manifesto is this provocative account by Brendan O'Neill from the Guardian's 'comment is free' blog. In it he attempts to establish the centrality of the Bosnia War in the thinking of both the Euston group and Al-Qaeda. His observations are intriguing; both leftists and Islamists were marginalized at home, and attempted to use Bosnia to define an international landscape of good and evil (of course, they were both on the same side back then) against which they could reestablish some political legitimacy. But both groups also found refuge in this new landscape; it enabled them to escape from the pressures of providing for a domestic constituency, and eventually led to a deeper separation than ever.

No doubt, parts of O'Neill's historical account is exaggerated for the sake of the polemic. But he introduces some entirely valid arguments about the role the international sphere came to play in the politics of the post-Cold War era. The Euston Manifesto might sound like a high-minded defense of democracy but their singular focus on the international immediately undermines such a claim.

The Battle of No-Ideas

With so much discussion of how the Democrats have no ideas, and of their recent attempts to come up with some, it has been easy to ignore the ideological black-hole that is the Republican party. The most serious ideological discussion amongst the Republicans recently has been over the meaning of the word ‘amnesty,’ which resembled not so much an informed and reasoned debate as it did a Jerry Springer special about lovers arguing over the meaning of the word ‘cheating’. There was a lot of pomp and circumstance, and it was clearly made for television.

Bruce Reed’s recent piece in the Democratic Leadership Council’s Blueprint Magazine serves as a pointed, and somewhat humorous, reminder of the Republican’s active retreat from the vision thing. Riffing off the Republicans’ decision to pursue a mid-term electoral strategy of emphasizing local politics and trying to prevent them from being about national issues, Reed sardonically observes, ‘Republicans are rushing to claim the idea-free mantle for themselves.’ In fact, as Reed goes on to point out, Republicans have been washed up for a while:

‘when it comes to tired ideas, Democrats can't possibly compete with a Republican Party whose sole remaining bedrock principle is a tax-cut theory that didn't work a quarter-century ago, either.’

Reed exaggerates for emphasis, but the point is valid. The tax cut is not so much an idea as it is a redistribution of income, and it’s certainly unrelated to any broader economic program or social project. The only thing really holding the Republicans together is a shared antipathy for the Democrats and a general desire for power.

If Reed’s analysis of the Republicans is solid, he is somewhat more evasive about the Democrats. He does believe they stand for something ‘Many Democrats actually have ideas, so it has become a real burden for the party to pretend otherwise.’ But he ends his scalding critique of the Republicans with tepid fare: ‘Democrats have a good answer to the Republican charge that Democratic ideas will run the country into the ground: You ran the country into the ground first.’ This is not a good answer, and it’s certainly not a ringing call to arms. It does not even present the Democrats as a good choice, so much as the only other option besides complete and empty failure. Political competition between failures is not the same thing as partisan conflict or a battle of ideas.

In fact, the ‘ideas’ that Reed thinks the Democrats have are not really the same thing as Ideas. Reed really means the Democrats have a series of policy proposals that might win enough votes to carry an election, not that they have a coherent project for social change. In fact, it is symptomatic of limited the horizons of mainstream political imagination is, that Reed can’t think of ideas as anything more than policy proposals. It is no wonder that both parties fall back on a politics of fear. They have no other way of animating their policies, and enchanting their rule. One thing is for sure, inspiration won’t be coming from Washington.

The End of EUtopia

“In the past politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this but their power came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies...But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to deliver us from nightmares…”

So says Adam Curtis in the introduction to his film, 'The Power of Nightmares', which we screened to much acclaim this month in Manhattan. His words could have been written in response to the following story from eupolitix.com which describes the cynical harnessing of public fears, not by the neo-cons, but by the bureaucrats of the European Union.

The dream that failed in this case is that of European integration, as signaled by the widespread rejection (where politicians dared to put the question to the public) of the European Constitution. So to get their project back on track, the politicians are resorting to a series of initiatives aimed at scaring European citizens into a closer relationship. These stress the need for centralization to offset the dangers of crime, terrorism, and environmental degradation.

Much of the language is shockingly explicit. States one official, "Security is increasingly becoming a concern of people in Europe. But it is a concern that is accompanied by a feeling of certainty that… the most effective response in the field of security is the European response." But this and other quotes also make clear that politicians believe they are responding to a public desire for greater securitization. As we have written here before, it is not that our representatives invent the fears and then manipulate us into believing them. It is that they respond to wider social insecurities, adapting their programs and language to take advantage of this phenomenon.

Once upon a time Europe might have been united by the democratic fervor ignited by the French revolution. This was a Europe that promised liberty, equality and fraternity; a Europe that promised its citizens a greater degree of control over their lives than was believed possible a dozen years before. A sad indictment of our age then, that the Eurocrats now believe the best way to appeal to those same citizens is to paint a picture of the dark possibilities likely without their further intervention.

Protest USA

As Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post writes, this was the week that Bush decided to change the subject. Faced with dismal poll numbers and the endless violence in Iraq, he took to the airwaves to discuss immigration and shore up Republican support for his reform initiative. While clearly a political ploy, the Bush offensive does take place against the backdrop of a remarkable effort at popular mobilizing. Over the past month, millions of immigrants and their supporters have taken to the streets to call for amnesty and social equality and to protest Republican legislation that would felonize status as an illegal.

In a show of political strength that surprised politicians and Washington insiders, immigrant groups organized demonstrations in 102 cities on April 10, with over half a million people taking to the streets in Dallas and Los Angeles. Such mobilizing was followed by further protests on May 1, which included strikes and boycotts that substantially impacted many southwestern businesses. Republican strategists, who have been courting the Hispanic vote for the last decade, took notice. Wary of turning off potential voters with nativist policies, Grover Norquist reportedly commented that, unlike with its 19th century treatment of Catholic immigrants, the GOP should not send Latinos the message that they're unwelcome and then lose their vote for a hundred years.

Yet, perhaps the most interesting thing about the immigration protests was that in terms of sheer numbers it did not significantly outdraw those that took place over the Iraq war. On February 15, 2003, over 3 million people worldwide participated in anti-war demostrations, with protests occurring in 225 American cities. Since the invasion, dozens of large-scale demonstrations have been organized, including one last September in Washington which drew anywhere from 150,000 to 300,000 people. But, by contrast with the immigration rallies, Iraq organizing has had a minimal impact on Administration behavior or elite foreign policy discussions. If anything, popular mobilizing around the war has been notable for how disconnected it remains from actual sites of political power. No matter how many people take to the streets, government rolls on practically unaffected.

At one level, this speaks to how contemporary politics in U.S. tends to neutralize public assertiveness and to insulate political elites from those they ostensibly represent. However, a quick comparison of the protests around immigration rights and around the war highlights something else. What makes immigration mobilizing so potentially powerful is that the individuals involved share basic interests. They are united by a common goal of claiming their rights as equals in America and of improving their economic standing. Such ties mean that those organized are part of a relatively unified collective, seeking to impose group aspirations on politics. Moreover, participants cut across the stale partisan divide between Republican and Democrat, and include voters not safely captured by either party.

In other words, what we've witnessed over the last month is the nascent emergence of something more like a political movement, which understands itself as acting collectively to assert common objectives. This is precisely why May Day strikes and boycotts were once considered so dangerous. The power of immigrant, -- especially Hispanic -- workers to shut down business by truly enacting a "day without a Mexican" suggests real collective power. Those protesting represent a larger community that, when necessary, can be called upon to behave coherently and to great effect.

As for the anti-war protests, while ethnically and economically diverse, participants are essentially constituents of the Democratic party or independents, and can safely be ignored by GOP leaders. Moreover, their very diversity underscores the inability to articulate shared interests. Unlike with immigrant mobilizing, such activism does not express concrete experiences of economic hardship or political exclusion nor does it articulate any common viewpoint besides a general antipathy for Bush. Of course, part of this problem is due to the nature of foreign policy and to the real complexity of conditions in Iraq. Yet, it also speaks to the fact that protesting the war is by and large an act of individual conscience rather than of collectively asserting shared aspirations.

In a sense, the protest call "not in my name" speaks volumes about what happens when no group interests unite those mobilized in politics. The value of such a call is that it withdraws consent from political elites -- a potentially powerful move in any society. Yet, the very problem with the Iraq war protests is that Bush and others are utterly indifferent to whether protestors consent to the policies or not. As a result, the phrase simply dissolves into an act of private absolution and a way for citizens to divest responsibility for political choices made. By contrast, embedded in immigrant activism is an assertion of political responsibility. Such protestors make clear demands on politics on behalf of an identifiable group, and thus implicitly hold out that group as accountable for both those demands and their consequences.

Comparing these two protest experience underscores that one can't explain why popular power has become so neutralized in the U.S. without looking at the internal characteristics of those efforts at mobilization. It's not simply that political institutions seek to insulate their own authority and to limit avenues for popular invention. It's also that the very idea of shared interest as the basis for politics seems to have disappeared. Perhaps the greatest benefit of immigrant activism is that it reminds us of the need to root mobilization in concrete experiences. In other words, for protest to be successful it must be part of a movement, one that articulates the grievances of unified groups and that provides an account of social possibility. Without such a basis in interest and tangible reform, regardless of the size protests simply become another outlet for private conscience.

The US, International Law, and Anti-Politics

It is common wisdom that Bush represents a radical break with prior presidents when it comes to international law. In a review essay on the US and international law, Brian Urquhart writes about America’s ‘unwarranted assault on international law.’ In a book on War and the American Presidency, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recently argued that Bush marks a ‘fatal change in the foreign policy of the United States’ when it comes to international law. British critic Martin Jacques has also written that the ‘prime author of the huge growth in international law since 1945 has, in effect, suddenly chosen to opt out.’ It’s not hard to find evidence. Bush has rejected, withdrawn from, or undermined such landmark treaties and organizations as: United Nations Security Council, International Criminal Court, Geneva Convention, Kyoto Protocol, Land Mine Ban, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Something is clearly going on, but to say Bush is a radical change is considerably over-stating the case. Clinton was no great friend to international law. On the one hand, he instrumentalized international law for his own purposes. The invasion of Haiti in 1994 received UNSC sanction. But it did so only by the US forcing the Security Council to stretch the legal concept of ‘threat to international peace and security’ to the point where it permitted overthrowing the undemocratic government of an impotent third world country. Everyone understood this to be the US deforming international law by using its own political purposes. On the other hand, Clinton bypassed international law when it was an unwelcome constraint on his own agenda. In 1998, Clinton bombed Iraq, claiming he had authority from past Security Council resolutions, because he knew he would not receive separate Security Council authorization for the bombing, and over the objection of the other members. This was stretching law to the breaking point, and setting the precedent for military relations with Iraq that Bush was to exploit in 2003: invoke liberal interpretations of past resolutions to cover up for the lack of legal sanction in the present. And of course, the decision to bomb Kosovo the next year, was explicitly illegal, as the Security Council refused to sanction the use of force. Clinton claimed the higher moral legitimacy of humanitarian necessity, declaring a kind of moral emergency, in which diplomacy and law were dangerous time-wasters. It was in 1999 that two prominent international lawyers asked the question ‘Has US Power Destroyed the UN?’

The point is not to defend international law. As we have suggested before, looking to external instruments like foreign governments or international law to restrain our undemocratic, imperial government is at best a high risk strategy and at worst an abdication of responsibility for domestic criticism and opposition. The responsibility falls primarily on us to deal with our own government, not look for divine intervention. The more challenging point is that the United States has been living in its permanent state of exception – willing to suspend the rules for all kinds of ‘moral’ and security emergencies – since well before Bush. In fact, according to the international relations scholar Chris Coker, ‘Crisis management has become the central political objective’ of post-Cold War American foreign policy. We might say, foreign policy lacks the moment of reflection about broader aims and principles, which politicians on both sides drown out by discovering emergencies – moral and security based – that demand immediate action in the present, rather than open political debate about the future. The real problem, in other words, isn’t that our presidents end up suspending international law per se. It is that their crisis politics suspends real politics. It does so not so much in the name of national security – which Bush has, of course, done – but rather through a somewhat broader invocation of crisis and emergency. During a crisis, the injunction to act overwhelms discussions about objectives and principles, and dissenters are quickly made part of the problem in the first place.

The rules, especially international rules, are often paper barriers to begin with, and in breaking them, Bush is not a lone wolf. A real critique of his relationship to international law, therefore, has to do more than make opportunistic points about how willing he has been to subvert the rules. The problem isn’t the subversion of law but the negation of politics.

Facing our Fears

The issues of fear and risk seem to be fast becoming the critical concepts of contemporary politics. In the early 1990s sociologists such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck were discussing the 'risk society,' and in the late 1990s the 'culture of fear' was the title of not one but two significant works on British and American society. The war on terror has made the problem even more immediate and pressing. This attention, however, has raised as many questions as it has answered. While our blog aims to produce a principled critique of many of the policies instigated under the rubric of the war on terror, we believe investigating the politics of fear to be an equally important dimension of our project. As Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson writes this week "Diagnosis is the first step toward treatment."

Robinson makes a number of other useful points in his subtle contribution to the discussion. He recognizes that, in part, Bush et al are simply responding to something going on in American society whereby anxiety has become a widespread condition. In his mock psychoanalysis of the American people Robinson writes:

"Patient feels vulnerable to attack; cannot remember having experienced similar feeling before. Patient accustomed to being in control; now feels buffeted by outside forces beyond grasp...Patient is by far most powerful nation in world, yet feels powerless. Patient is full of unfocused anger."

While the White House tries to take advantage of this condition, it is also a force beyond their control which can prove problematic. Robinson neatly captures this dynamic when he writes, "if the immigration issue didn't threaten to disrupt so many people's lives, it would be amusing to witness Bush's attempts to calm the irrational fears he has so often encouraged." (He could equally have cited the port security debacle as another example of the logic of fear turning back on Bush.)

Robinson promises to return to this theme again and we eagerly await his further contributions. As the politics of fear defines discussion of wider and wider aspects of society and government we must be innovative in our thinking about the subject.

Realistic Idealism--A Bush-Clinton Special

Is there a right way to support democracy in the Middle East? This seems to be a conundrum for Democrats and others opposed to Bush, but pro-democracy. Madeleine Albright undertook to answer the question in last week’s Washington Post. She urges that promoting democracy in the Middle East is not a mistake. Coining the phrase 'realistic idealism' she claims that while democracy is not a panacea for the region, not supporting reform is a betrayal of America’s duty to promote liberty.

Protecting idealism from the cynical claims of the realists forces Albright to treat Iraq as an exception:
The "realists" are right to bemoan the invasion of Iraq, but that misguided operation cannot be used to indict the promotion of democracy. The purpose of the invasion was to seize weapons that did not exist and to sever a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that had not been made. The failures were of leadership and intelligence, not a too-fervent commitment to democracy.

Iraq was wrong, because the justifications for the invasion were faulty—there never were any weapons of mass destruction, just as there never was any connection between the Iraqi regime and Bin Laden. By this reasoning, had Operation Iraqi Freedom really been intended to promote democracy, things might have been different. Apparently, for Albright, the purpose of American foreign policy governs its outcomes. This latter conclusion is affirmed by the fact that she suggests no alternatives to the course of action pursued by the Bush administration.

So were the outcomes different under Albright’s watch? It was the Albright state department that held fast and firm to the pre-invasion sanctions regime against Iraq. Albright is famously on the record as declaring that rising child mortality, for which sanctions were at least partly to blame, was “worth it.” Albright’s bluster in the face of international dissatisfaction with the sanctions regime was a precursor of the current administration’s battles with the UN over their 2003 invasion. Both administrations remained firm in the face of strong opposition, both utilized the reasoning that they could not back down in the face of such a righteous cause. As Albright herself suggests in the Washington Post, Iraq was not an obvious target for the Bush Administration’s efforts (given no weapons and no Qaeda connection). It seems likely that it was the miserable stalemate of the sanctions policy that first led Bush et al. to focus on Iraq as an arena for positive action in international affairs.

And why would Bush believe such a strategy was doomed to fail? Albright herself has received countless honorary degrees and high praise for her leadership and support for US interventionism. Although Albright provides no explanation in last week’s column for what the "right way to support democracy" would be, we may be able to surmise from her own interventionism under Clinton. The 1999 NATO campaign against Yugoslavia set a great precedent for Iraq—from the use of an ultimatum that the country either surrender sovereignty or be bombed into submission, to the institution of military action without UN approval. And the Yugoslavia action even matches Iraq in terms of its failure to meet any of its own goals.

This failure was recognized as early as September 1999, in as mainstream a publication as Foreign Affairs. Michael Mandelbaum described the NATO campaign in the September/October 1999 issue as:
“a conflict marked by military success and political failure. The alliance's air forces carried out their missions with dispatch; the assault forced the Serb military's withdrawal from the southern Yugoslav province of Kosovo. The wider political consequences of the war, however, were the opposite of what NATO's political leaders intended…The war itself was the unintended consequence of a gross error in political judgment. Having begun it, Western political leaders declared that they were fighting for the sake of the people of the Balkans, who nevertheless emerged from the war considerably worse off than they had been before.”

The description could equally be applied to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Mandelbaum continues: “The alliance also went to war, by its own account, to protect the precarious political stability of the countries of the Balkans. The result, however, was precisely the opposite: the war made all of them less stable. Albania was flooded with refugees with whom it had no means of coping. In Macedonia, the fragile political balance between Slavs and indigenous Albanians was threatened by the influx of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.” And if anyone wonders what our intervention in the Balkans did for democracy and self-determination, just take a look at the authoritarianism when Paddy Ashdown governed, or more recent developments in Kosovo.

Albright’s call for a realistic idealism is expressly aimed at the successors to the Bush Administration. Yet her defense of “idealism” (i.e.- democracy promotion) unwittingly seeks an extension of the destructive commonalities between the Clinton and Bush foreign policies. As we have said numerous times at AWOT, external intervention into the affairs of weaker states does nothing to support the democracy or liberty of their citizens. In fact, intervention by the West, with the US often at the helm, serves to distort local dynamics in ways we do not anticipate. The most powerful arbiters in determining the future of a state becomes external actors (the US, the EU, the UN, NATO), thus shifting the point of negotiation from a local, state-based one to the international stage—further undermining the ability of local citizens to effect change over their state. Suddenly, the route to power is through pandering to our interests, not local ones. Truly democratic institutions only arise through the collective efforts of those governed by them, not by imposition.

Albright concludes that at the top of the next administration’s “to-do” list “must be a reaffirmation of America's commitment to liberty and respect for the dignity of every human being. Without such a commitment, all else will be in vain.” What Albright, Clinton, Bush, and all current Democratic and Republican proposals miss is that such a commitment cannot be achieved through military adventurism abroad. It must arise from democratic activity at home.

Impeachment or Ideas

A few weeks ago, we expressed doubts about the political value of impeaching Bush. As Bush continues to plummet in the polls, and the Democrats toy with the idea of taking back the House, the drumbeat for impeachment has only gotten stronger. This editorial over at Counterpunch reminds us of some of the problems with this political strategy.

“The myriad problems we face today are not of George W. Bush's making alone. He is but the current face on a system that needs a complete overhaul. Giving the Democrats freedom to exploit Bush's unpopularity to insure that the next face is not Republican is what Stephen Colbert might call, ‘rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.’”

Impeachment is the logical conclusion of the ‘anybody but Bush’ argument. The irony is that rising calls for impeachment come at the very moment when Democrats claim to be trying to think up their own ideas. The author above is right to expect little from the Democrats, but even so there is a political moment here. Impeachment is a test of the Democrats’ self-confidence. They could go for the (in certain ways) less risky impeachment gambit, or make the effort of actually articulating a meaningful alternative. The two cannot co-exist easily. An impeachment would focus most public attention on the legal proceedings and alleged crimes, drowning out discussion of a political future.

Of course, it is conceivable that impeachment might mean something more. As the author says, “for Bush's impeachment to serve as more than a high-profile partisan lynching, it must be seen as a baby step toward justice.” But this is precisely what seems impossible. Not only is the track record of impeachments not all that promising. At present, it is the will for more substantial change that is distinctly lacking.

Conspiracy Past And Present

Readers of Againstwot with a little time on their hands could do worse than check out this highly esoteric series of podcasts by Ken Hollings, a British writer with a remarkable knowledge of US pulp culture. 'Welcome to Mars' is an investigation of the post-war (from 1948-1959) American's relationship with science, government and one another, illustrated by reference to popular films and books, social history, and technological innovation.

The episodes are somewhat inconsistent, as is to be expected given that Hollings' recordings are entirely unscripted. We found the first few episodes to be the richest and most coherent (in particularly the second "1948-49: Flying Saucers over America"). Nonetheless, what is consistent is the atmospheric character of the broadcasts. Effective, if intentionally somewhat dated, futuristic music floats over Hollings' calm narration. It suggests both 1950's ‘B’ movie science fiction and future worlds.

The narrative is not a simple argument. Rather Hollings tries to capture the essence of the period, not by attacking the question directly but through a suggestive collage of contemporary material. In so doing he presents a powerful portrait of confusion, alienation, and suspicion. This is a time in which, as it does in Hollings' dialogue, government atomic programs intertwine with the rise of psychiatry, while the denizens of the new Levittown watch the skies for the evidence of extraterrestrial visitors, and their neighbors for evidence of communist sympathies. The echoes with our own time recur frequently. People suspect the Eastern Bloc, their own government, and even one another, of manipulating them. Meanwhile governments and mainstream media (including Life Magazine) undertake serious investigations of the UFO phenomenon. Above all it is a world in which people feel powerless and without context.

That said, the series is not entirely satisfying. The open ended character of the narration is ultimately a little anti-climatic. We are left with endless suggestion, with one intriguing anecdote after another, but without any sense of what Hollings really believes about the 1950s. At one point, he cites a line from a contemporary film in which a female actress, undergoing groundbreaking psychiatric treatment, asks "Dr, when I am real?". Again, brilliantly suggestive, but we could equally throw the question back at Hollings; does he really believe in government cover-ups of extra terrestrial visitation? Finally though, this may be one of the strengths of Hollings experimental work. By refusing to pin himself down, he reproduces the shifting narratives and understandings of that period. He keeps us wondering and questioning, just like those initial residents of Levittown.

Of course, the parallel between the two period should not be taken too far. Underwriting the odd disquiet that Hollings illuminates, seems to be the sense that 'anything could happen'. And, indeed, it might. The war's end was ushering in a period of massive social change and economic expansion. Technological advance made possible both the construction of Levittown and the atomic bomb. The fantasies of Hollings' subjects are often as much about the promise of the future, as the uncertainty it brings. They reflect the anticipation of what may lie behind the many doors being opened. By contrast our contemporary age does not believe 'anything can happen', it believes 'the worst thing can happen'. The doors remain firmly shut, but we nonetheless conjure up the monsters behind them.

It’s Not The Spies’ Fault

AWOT editors have written widely on the blurring of lines between different branches of government, and the consequences this has for being able to locate and resolve problems. AWOT has also noticed the tendency for the contemporary Bush administration to respond to political crises with institutional fixes. The most recent example of this came with the recent sacking of Porter Goss, the CIA director, after only an eighteen month tenure. His sacking has raised questions about the role of intelligence in national security decision-making, and the relationship between intelligence and politics. In particular, it has led to doubts that responses to the perceived intelligence failures of the CIA post 9/11 and post-Iraq have made any headway in resolving the problem. An awareness is developing that the problem may not be institutional, but political.

Goss was appointed in September 2004, replacing George J. Tenet. His job had been made difficult from the outset by the reforms of the intelligence community brought in by Congress in its Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. This created a post of intelligence czar, the ‘director of national intelligence’ (DNI), which took over a number of functions from the CIA director, including the daily briefing of the President. In recent months, John Negroponte, the new DNI, clashed with Goss over a number of issues.

Subsequent critical commentary has focused on the counter-productive impact of the DNI job, and in particular the proliferation of bureaucracy within the intelligence community. In a recent Financial Times article, appeals court judge Richard Posner, author of Uncertain Shield: The US Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform, was quoted as saying that “the reorganization was a mistake, was misconceived, [was] not responsive to the problems in the intelligence community.”

However, the FT article makes the interesting observation that today, some voices are being heard that are saying that the problems are not to be found within the intelligence community at all. They are political problems. This has been the claim of employees within the CIA, who have defended the agency’s work, claiming that Iraq was not a failure of intelligence, but was a product of political exigencies overriding the advice provided by state servants. In other words, the White House would only listen to what it wanted to hear, rather than take into account opposing arguments.

The picture that emerges is one that is familiar to AWOT readers: an administration where decision-making has been concentrated within a small number of individuals, who pursue goals without the considered deliberation and reflection that is spread across the institutions of government. Yet this inversion of the process by which democracies are supposed to operate is accompanied by another trend worth highlighting: the conduct of war in the absence of any real threat or enemy.

From this perspective, there’s no point in blaming the spies. Since the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, threat assessments and political goals have been uncoupled. Or put another way, national security has become increasingly politicized, and no longer exists as a field that is distinct and abstracted from the domestic political fray. That intelligence became a political football in the run up to the Iraq war should, on this understanding, come as no surprise.

What's The Point of Winning?

It’s going around in Democratic circles these days that the party of the people needs some ideas. Incipient attempts at political innovation have been the subject of a debate-setting essay on the ‘common good’ by American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky, a favorable op-ed in the Washington Post by liberal opinion-setter E.J. Dionne, a news item in the New York Times, as well as of a number of meetings, magazine articles, blog-threads, and dinner conversations. It has splintered into subsidiary debates, as major figures in the party, like Madeleine Albright, argue over whether philosophical rejuvenation has to happen in foreign policy first, or whether it is time to shift emphasis from security to other ideas. Looking more broadly, it seems the Democrats are playing catch-up with an already existing, trans-Atlantic project of left-wing political renaissance and manifesto-writing.

In theory, intellectual and philosophical renovation, especially of such an unimaginative party as the current Democrats, is a good thing. But there are a number of odd and uninspiring aspects of this new development within the Democratic Party. First, the main inspiration for renewal seems to have come from a series of electoral defeats: two phenomenally uninspiring presidential candidates, who lost elections they had no business losing, and an equally pathetic showing in the 2002 mid-terms. On top of which, with Bush sinking in the polls and the Republicans floundering, the Dems sense a huge electoral opportunity this fall, but don’t have a way of presenting their party as the answer to the country’s problems.

But there is something oddly instrumental about this approach to political ideas. The syllogism seems to be: a) ‘The Democrats lost the election because of their current ideas’ b) ‘The Democrats therefore need new ideas’ therefore c)….what? Logically it must be c) ‘The Democrats therefore need new ideas that will win them an election’. Needless to say, this is not how new, compelling political ideas emerge. When thinking is dictated by the electoral cycle, and the baseline injunction to win an election, the ideas will inevitably be shallow and inorganic. They will not emerge through an extended period of testing, discussion, organizing, and engagement. Rather, they will happen in a series of somewhat rushed conversations on op-ed pages, in think-tanks, party conferences, and watered down campaign speeches. The ideas that emerge will be vaguely pleasing, adequately abstract, and ultimately sound like campaign slogans rather than substantial and inspiring ideas. These ideas will be unconnected to a series of policies and programs – rather, certain policies will be pressed into service to justify ideas, even as ideas are forced into the straight-jacket of electoral thinking. Just think of how opportunistically the Dems have used port security as part of their security-first strategy.

This is not to say that political thinking should be wholly unaffected by strategic, political considerations. No doubt it is easy to work out a philosophy from the sidelines, without having to worry about convincing other people. But the point is that political renewal in these floundering times is too long-term, profound, painstaking, and gradual a process to be dictated by the electoral demands of a political party. It requires many different kinds of political engagement, and debates at all levels of society that do not make assumptions about who is worth talking to and who isn’t. The need to get elected forces one away from making overly controversial arguments that might traumatize the existing terms of the debate, and it disciplines political engagement by focusing interest mainly on ‘most likely voters.’ At some point, electioneering has inverted the means and the ends. We only seek power because we want to implement a political project; we don’t want a project that may also help us win an election. The times call for wider experimentation, and much more patience, than current political parties and their organic intellectuals are willing to accept.

The Necessity of Liberty: An AWOT Essay

The war on terror has had one positive, though unintended, impact on American politics: it has reawakened a debate about liberty. It has presented us with a seemingly stark choice. Do we want liberty or security? Of course, for the most part, this has not been much of a debate. While critics gripe about the erosion of our liberties, those who actually wield power have taken the side of security. Even the very way the debate is often posed has been counterproductive. Some libertarians believe liberty and security are opposites, and reject any loss of liberty in the name of security. The defense of liberty is almost an existential position, in the name of which any risk is acceptable. Some securitarians accept the terms and flip their value. They prize life over liberty, as liberty has little point if we are struggling just to stay alive. On this view, the discussion of liberty is besides the point – it is a luxury good we consume in better times.

Then there are those who feel that it makes little sense to present liberty and security as if they were polar opposites. On this view, if we think hard enough, there is no conflict at all between the two – the debate has been one great misunderstanding. Isn’t security a precondition for enjoying liberties, or even a right in and of itself, as some defenders of the war on terror claim? Another version of this kind of argument is that the only path to security is by defending our liberties. Perhaps the ACLU is right that we can be Safe and Free, and there is no inherent conflict between security and liberty.

Yet we recognize that this, too, is unsatisfactory – the situation is clearly more complex. A whole series of policies, some of which infringe upon civil rights, are justified in the name of security. There is a kind of political choice at stake, and we cannot wave away the conflict between liberty and security as mere conceptual confusion. Indeed, politicians and opinion-makers probably introduce some of this confusion in a deliberate attempt to justify policies, distort public debate, and exercise power. Yet while conceptual confusion might reflect cynical manipulations, there is an even more troubling possibility: that we have, as a society, simply lost any strong sense of what liberty and security means as concepts and what their value is as ideals. The fuzzy nature of the debate therefore reflects a social condition, a lack of clarity about first principles, which politicians and opinion-makers semi-consciously exploit.

Our aim here is to try to cut through the liberty-security debate by presenting it as the current form of a long-standing political and philosophical debate about the relationship between freedom and necessity. This might seem abstract and disconnected from anything immediately relevant to politics, but it is in fact surprisingly easy to show just how immediately important a discussion like this is.

What is the relationship between liberty and security, then? We are not so foolish to think we can offer a definitive answer, once and for all, but it is still necessary to think through this issue as far as possible. It makes sense to start with the seemingly evident truth that security is a precondition for liberty. This seems to be the most common way of thinking about the problem. If our life is dominated by a struggle simply to survive, or meet basic needs, then we cannot truly exercise our freedom. We might say that choices made under these conditions are dictated by necessity, not made freely. This is a major justification of the war on terror – terrorism makes our freedom meaningless because we live in a constant state of insecurity.

Some on the left have picked up on this idea and tried to use it for their own purposes. Why not criticize the administration not for emphasizing security too much, but not enough? If we are only free when we don’t have to worry about basic necessities, then surely security from terrorism is not the only, and not even the most important, security issue? What about job security, health security, social security, food security, or to tie up the bundle of goods that everyone should enjoy – ‘human security’? This last notion, human security, was very popular in the 1990s amongst liberals and progressives, especially those involved in humanitarian affairs in one way or another. It was the way most people interpreted, and continue to interpret, the list of human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which include not just those civil and political rights, like freedom of speech, assembly and religion, but also rights to employment, health care, basic education, and social security – even cultural membership. It is a classic justification of the welfare state that, by providing these goods, and by presenting them in the form of rights, people are actually made more free. That is now one argument made to defend providing these rights not just nationally but internationally.

So what is wrong with this? Why not attack the war on terror for failing to attend to those whose lives are really insecure, like the 60 million Americans without health insurance, or the approximately 35 million Americans who live in poverty, or the more than 10 million who die annually from preventable disease worldwide? Are any of these people really free given how insecure their lives are? This kind of argument suggests the real problem is not the way our civil liberties are infringed in the name of security, but the way real security threats are ignored in the name of false ones. Our society is unfree because it does not make people truly secure.

Yet as intuitive as much of this seems, it is wrong on a number of levels. The first is that, even if in principle we accept that some degree of security is necessary to be free, it is a political question as to which security needs matter most. Needs can’t be a merely technical question for political elites to interpret all on their own. Freedom means determining our own needs. What counts as enough security to live freely is, our should be, a matter of debate and discussion. This is a question of freedom itself, for freedom is not just about having one’s needs met, but to meet them as much as possible through one’s own efforts. It is conceivable that a wealthy society could have a large bureaucracy administering to each and everyone’s wants, providing health care, social security, education, and generally high standard of living, yet everyone could be unfree if they were merely passive recipients of state assistance. That is to say, the citizens of the richest nation in the world would not be free if they lacked basic democratic oversight of the bureaucracy which ‘served’ them. The sheer existence of material security, alone, does not make one free. It matters that these goods be provided because they are demanded politically by society, and not just because they are deemed the ‘right needs’ by bureaucrats. If it’s true that many of the needs we have can only be satisfied by our cooperation with others, this only means that we collectively must decide how to allocate our resources, rather than passively allow others to interpret what our needs are. So one problem with the argument that security is a means to liberty, is that what security means is not self-evident, and once it is viewed as a precondition for liberty, it can lead to bureaucracy without democracy.

There is another problem with expanding the use of the term security to take in the whole range of needs that people have. This further problem is that security has gone from a means to an end in itself. There is a way in which, now, all the talk of social security, health security, food security, and so on reflects a kind of numbing of the political imagination. Politicians see that it is rhetorically effective and so they use it. This is not so much an explicitly cynical move, but simply that it is a kind of lowest common denominator. Everyone can agree that security is good, so it absolves politicians of having to make more profound or inspiring appeals. Focusing on the most basic needs becomes a way of avoiding any discussion of more utopian possibilities. It is a way of accommodating political life to the lack of demand for liberty.

This lack of demand for freedom is the most troubling feature of our own society. Unlike food security, health security, social security, and job security, freedom is the one thing that cannot be provided by any external agency. It must be desired, needed, in the sense that the individual possesses the will to be free. Freedom must be experienced as a necessity, as a fundamental need without which the individual is not really alive in a full human sense. This is the way freedom and necessity, or liberty and security, meet in a surprising way. If what distinguishes human beings from all other entities is that we have the capacity for self-development, for being a determining factor in our own lives, then to be alive in more than just a physical sense, requires being free. Security is not, in this sense, a precondition for liberty but the other way around. Freedom is a condition for being secure because it defines what security, in the sense of knowing what needs securing, means. But it also means that there are limits on what the state or any external agent can do in keeping us ‘safe’. In fact, this suggests that the emphasis on security, especially when it comes to be about ‘making sure people are alive’, can turn into an ideological project of trying to define what a human life entails. Once security is reduced to a long (human rights) or short (freedom from fear) list of human needs that the state can provide us, then security has lost its connection to liberty and become an ideological concept. If anything, security becomes a way in which the lack of demand for freedom is reproduced, or existing demands for freedom and self-determination are transformed into their opposite – needs that the state actively protects or provides for.

If this is true, then the greatest threat to liberty may not be what it commonly is thought to be. Most are concerned about the formal erosion of our civil liberties, but there is something much more fundamental. It is that we don’t think of freedom as a necessity. It is something extra or external to our lives, something to be traded off for a bit of security, or something we only get after we are secure. This is a dangerous misunderstanding of the actual situation.

In other words, security is not a precondition for liberty, liberty is a precondition for security. That is so for at least two reasons. The first reason is that we are not alive if we are not free – any threat to our freedom is in this sense a source of insecurity. It’s not that liberty is functional to security, in the sense that protecting civil liberties is the best way to combat terrorism or realize a prosperous society, but that any threat to liberty is in and of itself a threat to our security as free beings. The second, perhaps more important, reason that liberty is a precondition for security is that we cannot even interpret what security means without first having a sense of what living a free life is. Security, in the sense of being free from fear, or being free from want, or even having a prosperous standard of living, is a means to being free. Liberty is the external standard by which we measure what security we want and how we want to achieve those kinds of security. It is only when we realize that security is a means for being free that we can judge when certain policies are no longer rationally connected to their purpose – otherwise, security just ends up becoming an end in itself, and the mere perception of threat can become a justification for action, regardless of any higher ends a policy is supposed to serve.

As we have discussed before, one of the problems with the war on terror is precisely the way fear and security have been entirely separated from rational assessment, and linked instead to unverifiable feelings, perceptions, and suspicions. ‘Unknown unknowns’, in Rumsfeld’s immortal words, become the legitimate basis for invading a country. And the measure of an act’s success becomes not necessarily its real effect on some object or enemy, but its effect on the public’s feelings – the reassurance of public fear becomes the objective, rather than a rational assessment of different risks. Indeed, the political game becomes a symbolic contest over who most successfully manages public fear, rather than who formulates policy in a rational way. So the administration cooks up orange alerts, terrorist warning systems, and periodic announcements about ‘terrorism-related convictions’, while its immediate opponents cynically trump up port security and the various other ways in which we have been left unsafe. This is not a question of mere manipulation, but related to a broader climate in which the relationship between security and liberty is completely scrambled, leaving us with woefully inadequate terms by which to scrutinize and criticize political action.

This abstract discussion has political consequences. If the greatest threat to our liberties is not their formal erosion but that we no longer think of liberty as a necessity, then that suggests we have to widen and deepen our criticism from what it is now. The Bush administration alone is not the only problem. We have to take aim not just at formal erosions of liberty – they may not even be the most central issue. We have, instead, to criticize all attempts to ‘securitize’ politics, or turn life into a question of mere survival. The greatest threat to liberty is a kind of political culture in which various aspects of our life are organized around the suppression or displacement of demands for liberty. We hope to discuss more, in subsequent posts, why people are more willing to see themselves as passive, vulnerable beings, and therefore susceptible to a culture of fear. The issue here, however, is simply to suggest that there are serious ideological stakes in the liberty and security debate. It is not clear to us how to expand the desire for self-determination, the desire to be more than merely alive, but to be the agent in shaping one’s own life. But creating a need for liberty is what we see as one of the most important functions of social criticism today. This cannot be done by shying away from first principles or abstract argumentation and simply demanding immediate action. Nor is it a question that can be addressed at the level of individual attitudes or preferences; it requires social and cultural change. Uncompromising, public criticism of all policies and arguments that undermine the demand for liberty is a more promising place to start.