Empire Within

International Hierarchy and its Imperial Laboratories of Governance

Alexander D Barder, Alexander Barder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317590071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the reverberating impacts between historical and contemporary imperial laboratories and their metropoles through three case studies concerning violence, surveillance and political economy.

The invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 forced the United States to experiment and innovate in considerable ways. Faced with growing insurgencies that called into question its entire mission, the occupation authorities engaged in a series of tactical and technological innovations that changed the way it combated insurgents and managed local populations. The book presents new material to develop the argument that imperial and colonial contexts function as a laboratory in which techniques of violence, population control and economic principles are developed which are subsequently introduced into the domestic society of the imperial state. The text challenges the widely taken for granted notion that the diffusion of norms and techniques is a one-way street from the imperial metropole to the dependent or weak periphery.

This work will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, critical security studies and international relations theory.

1 International relations theory

Hierarchy and the problem of empire

Introduction

Historical patterns of international hierarchy reveal a multi-directional diffusion of norms, practices and technologies of governance. However, this multi-directional diffusion remains largely unexamined by international theorists because of two main reasons that I explore throughout this chapter: first, the fact that canonical international theory is largely predicated upon an assumption of international anarchy. International anarchy is construed as a timeless feature of international politics, which also implies an ahistorical representation of the state. Second, this multi-directional diffusion of norms remains unexamined because of a continuing Eurocentrism that sees the West as a privileged historical actor. This implies that Western norms travel outbound rather than being the product of interactions with the non-West. It also implies that the reverse flow of norms and practices from imperial and/or hegemonic relations remain hidden. Socialization, when it is theorized in international theory, is conceived as the socialization of the non-West into an already constituted European society of states. What these perspectives imply is in general a lack of importance attached to historical global patterns of imperialism. International theorists have largely ignored histories of domination that have resulted in a set of imperial know-how, practices, cultures and norms – what some have called a “colonial archive” – that has left significant traces upon the historical trajectory of Western state-formation up to the present.¹

The ultimate goal of this chapter is then to set the theoretical background for the subsequent empirical chapters that detail how the materialization of the camp, surveillance and neoliberalism are fundamentally imbricated in transnational imperial or hegemonic circuits. My concern is first to show why international theory currently lacks the conceptual tools to examine these transnational (as opposed to inter-national, between nations) hierarchical relations that result in novel institutions and apparatuses in the West. Second, I will discuss why and how we can see the imperial domain as a central “space of experience” or a laboratory of political, social, cultural, and economic experimentation that then becomes adapted for implementation within metropolitan domains. Rather than seeing the state as an ahistorical maximizer of security because of the requirements of international anarchy, imperial zones of exploitation and experimentation have left important traces upon metropolitan state development. It is here that I believe that Bruno Latour provides us with an intriguing way of thinking about the role of the laboratory more generally. Though Latour had in mind the scientific laboratory, I believe his sociology of the laboratory holds just as well for the imperial laboratory. For Latour, the translation of scientific facts or discoveries from the laboratory occurs because of the establishment of networks or relays outside the laboratory that make such facts visible and intelligible. In other words, of primary importance is the building of institutions and norms that essentially extends the laboratory into the social world. In an analogous way, the “tools of empire” become legitimated over time as the way of managing subject populations and become extended in response to problems in the metropole.

International hierarchy revisited

The concept of international anarchy has long been the foundational concept for the discipline of international relations. Often understood as the lack of a global mechanism to adjudicate international disputes between nation-states, anarchy implies systemic properties that are distinct from the domestic “hierarchical” level. Whereas the domestic level is governed by a state apparatus that is functionally differentiated (i.e. institutions such as the executive, legislative or judiciary serve different functions) at the international level, according to neorealists in particular, all states must maintain certain capacities of defense and security, making them “like-units’.² Anarchy implies a system of self-help; it implies the predominance of the pursuit of national interests and, for political realists at least, signifies the realm of a Hobbesian state of nature that demands constant vigilance. Whereas the domestic level implies relations of authority and legitimacy, anarchy implies a lack of those two attributes, rendering international difference a matter of material capability. More importantly, for Kenneth Waltz, investigating the system in which international relations takes place necessitates a level of abstraction removed from the historical specificities of how such units themselves came into being:

Definitions of structure must leave aside, or abstract from, the characteristics of units, their behavior, and their interactions. Why must those obviously important matters be omitted? They must be omitted so that we can distinguish between variables at the level of the units and variables at the level of the system.³

As many have shown, Waltz’s theory of international political is itself unable to explain changes in either the structure or system of the international itself, and that it operates by assuming that states are in essence black boxes.⁴ Waltz’s theory of international politics works by establishing “scientific” generalizations that rest upon unproblematized historical continuities papered over through deductive rationalizations.⁵ It is not surprising then that Waltz confidently asserts that “The enduring anarchic character of international politics accounts for the striking sameness in the quality of international life through the millennia, a statement that will meet with wide assent.”⁶ Indeed not much happens in Waltz’s structural realism: there is no norm diffusion, no changes in the constitution of the units, no changes in the system of international relations (only through a switch to global hierarchy would the system change). Only the continuous billiard-ball-like balancing coalitions of great powers, the structural changes in polarity and the occasional great power war appear to mark the flow of its immanent cyclical time.

The lack of concern with historical change, by neorealists in particular, translates into a lack of theorization and historical understanding of state-formation more generally. The state is typically spatially conceived through its Weberian capacity to wield ultimate authority in a designated territory – its intrinsically hierarchical constitution. This representation of two distinct spaces, the orderly/hierarchical inside versus the disorderly/anarchic and hence insecure outside, is often assumed to be the immanent product of a specifically Westphalian (European) narrative (more on this below).⁷ This ontological starting point, however, gives primary importance to international theory’s methodological need to delineate various “levels of analysis” for coherent theorization to occur.⁸ However, defining these levels of analysis often presupposes a certain ability to compartmentalize interactions between levels and implies, for international theory, an essential need to temporally bracket changes in the state apparatus.⁹ As R. B. J. Walker argues, the “discourse of eternity” that characterizes much of political realism’s vision of the unitary state is rooted in a set of specifically modern questions of particularity versus universality and self versus other, along with specifically modern understandings of space and time. By removing the question of temporality and historicity from theorizing international politics, political realism narrates the:

conventional story [of the state] as a formal and almost lifeless category, when in fact states are constantly maintained, defended, attacked, reproduced, undermined, and relegitimized on a daily basis … Again, appeals to state sovereignty serve to maintain the high ground of timelessness (epistème, eternity) against the flux (doxa) of time, and to confirm the existence of the state as something “out there” separate from the ordinary experience of people’s lives.¹⁰

The strict differentiation between anarchy and hierarchy and the timeless representation of the state coexists uneasily with the historical instances of empire-building and the practice of imperialism. Waltz, for example, spends the entirety of Chapter 2 of his magnum opus, Theory of International Politics, arguing that theories of imperialism cannot explain the prevalence of war between states – what he sees as the main justification for the discipline of international relations to begin with. In particular, theories of imperialism espoused by early twentieth-century writers such as John Hobson and Vladimir Lenin, along with more recent neocolonial/neomarxist variants, such as Johann Galtung’s, are mistaken in that they confuse specific unit-level attributes over structural conditions for the reasons why states engage in unequal exchange and dominion.¹¹ “Imperialism,” for Waltz, “is at least as old as recorded history … Historically, imperialism is a common phenomenon.”¹² It cannot be reduced to a particular domestic configuration such as capitalistic overproduction as it appears to be a transhistorical condition. Nonetheless, Waltz assumes that the genesis of imperialism is also a function of unit-level organization: “Where one finds empires, one notices that they are built by those who have organized themselves and exploited their resources most effectively.”¹³ Thus Waltz sees imperialism as a combination between unit-level factors and a structural setting, where a lack of balance between states prompts imperial domination of those that are materially weak.¹⁴ However, the point here is that in order to understand the supposedly timeless phenomena of imperialism we need to understand the historical background of how states that came to engage in imperialism organized themselves over time. In other words, we need a theory of the state which Waltz argues is unnecessary for understanding international political outcomes – much as in economic theory we do not need to have a theory of the firm if we are to understand the market. By contrast, for Jane Burbank and Fredrick Cooper, “To the extent that states became more powerful in England and France [for example] in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these transformations were a consequence of empire rather than the other way around.”¹⁵ Missing in Waltz’s paradigm is any sense of how the practice of imperialism feeds back into the very constitution and evolution of the imperial state. To put it differently, the crucial tension in Waltz’s discussion of imperialism is the manner in which the domestic space becomes imbricated with the international space in such a way that it calls into question Waltz’s attempt at creating a systemic theory of international politics abstracted from unit-level characteristics.¹⁶

International theory’s canonical representation of the inherent precariousness of international life, the timelessness of anarchy, the relegation of state-formation to domestic factors and the general lack of a conceptualization of the social malleability and complexity of the international system has been contested from a variety of different perspectives. Liberal international theorists have for some time now argued for the importance of complex economic interdependence.¹⁷ Social constructivists of a variety of ontological and epistemological perspectives have argued for a much deeper and richer ontological view of the social relations between states. Questions surrounding the role of institutions, cultures, norms, knowledge, rules or practices have guided theorists towards an image of the international system as more than the undoubtedly misleading Hobbesian representation of the fictional state of nature. Such schools of thought also open up a need to reinvestigate the historical moments of state-formation as a function of evolving international conditions and the practices of states.¹⁸ In other words, the question of how the modern state came into being cannot be reduced to just internal developments, but must be situated within international historical narratives that illuminate the heterogeneous “systems [that] have been the norm in western civilization.”¹⁹ And, indeed, such heterogeneous systems were largely characterized by transnational hierarchical relations of authority and rule that do not fit into this ontological conceptualization of international anarchy as being ubiquitous over time.

Rationalist scholars have recently turned to the question of hierarchy as a way of rethinking issues of authority and legitimacy in a world do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. International relations theory: hierarchy and the problem of empire
• 2. Imperial laboratories of violence: a genealogy of the camp
• 3. Imperial subjects at home and the rise of the modern surveillance state
• 4. American hegemony and the neoliberal laboratory in the Americas
• Conclusion: global war comes “home”
• Bibliography
• Index