The Value of Resilience

Securing life in the twenty-first century

Chris Zebrowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415735186
• eBook ISBN: 9781317401629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Value of Resilience represents one of the first systematic studies of resilience in the field of security studies. At the turn of the twenty-first century, resilience has become a 'buzz-word' within fields as diverse as network engineering, ecosystems management, child psychology and military training programmes. Resilience has emerged as a solution to the common problematic of radical contingency experienced across these fields. At its most general level resilience is understood as the capacity to absorb, withstand and 'bounce-back' quickly and efficiently from a perturbation. It is considered to be both a natural property and a quality which can be improved within a broad array of complex systems.

Rather than treating resilience as either a unified concept or technique of governance, this book analyses resilience as an emergent security value. Utilizing a biopolitical analytic, it demonstrates that the value of resilience has appreciated alongside transformations in the order of power/knowledge enacted by political economies of security. Zebrowski argues that resilience was not lying in wait for the march of science to provide the conditions for its recognition. Nor was it concealed by the distortions of ideology which lifted with the culmination of the Cold War. There is nothing natural about resilience.

By drawing attention to the complex historical processes and significant governmental efforts required to make resilience possible, this book aims to open up a space through which the value of resilience may be more critically interrogated. It will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, security studies and conflict resolution.

1 State of emergency

DOI: 10.4324/9781315681924-2

At what point do the emergency powers invoked by liberal governance risk slipping into authoritarianism? This problematic has concerned British legislators and emergency planners over the course of the twentieth century in the context of the drafting and execution of emergency powers. From its initial drafting in 1920 to when it was eclipsed by the Civil Contingencies Act in 2004 the British Emergency Powers Act has been evoked twelve times – almost exclusively in the context of labour unrest. The requirement to set legislative limits on the ability of the government to arbitrarily declare a state of emergency was a precaution taken to preserve the legitimacy and authority of the British state in responding to such an event. Setting limits on the exercise of sovereign power ensured that the emergency powers afforded to liberal governance in the context of a ‘state of emergency’ did not risk a slippery slope into authoritarianism. This was, however, only the (not uncontroversial) public face of UK emergency management. Preceding the drafting of the British Emergency Powers Act, and existing alongside it over the entirety of the legislation’s history, was a machinery of emergency governance mandated to secure essential supplies and services when threatened with industrial stoppages. The secrecy surrounding this machinery for the greater part of its history attests to the difficulty of reconciling the liberal guarantee of the right to strike with the biopolitical imperative to secure ‘the essentials of life to the community’ in the event of emergency.

For Carl Schmitt (2005) it was precisely this concern with legitimacy and, in particular, the setting of legislative limits on emergency powers, which dangerously weakened the capacity of liberal governments to respond to ‘exceptional’ events. Schmitt famously commences Political Theology with a definition of political sovereignty: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (2005: 5). Schmitt’s emphasis on who decides rather than how to decide on what constitutes an exceptional event corresponds to his critique of normative liberal approaches to declaring a state of emergency. For Schmitt, no legislative trigger can define in advance the conditions under which a body of legal norms could be suspended. Under these conditions, only the sovereign – that political force existing prior to the law – may decide on the exception and institute a state of emergency under which the essence of the legal form could be secured. For Schmitt, the sovereign’s capacity to decide on the exception, and thus invoke a state of emergency, displays the primacy of the figure of the sovereign over and above the constitution from which their power is said to derive. By subordinating the power of the sovereign to law, Schmitt suggested that liberal states were considerably weakened in their capacity to respond to exceptional events which existentially threaten the legal order of the state.

Schmitt’s work has received renewed attention in recent years. Following Agamben’s engagement with Schmitt in his Homo Sacer series (Agamben, 1998, 2005), the state of exception (or, often, emergency) has been utilized as a paradigm for analysing the exceptional measures resorted to by liberal regimes in the context of the war on terror (Aradau, 2007; Doty, 2007; Huysmans, 2008; Neal, 2006, 2008, 2010). As important as this work has been, considerably less attention has been paid to the concrete mechanisms with which ‘the emergency’ has been historically governed within liberal states.¹ The risk is that in studying the ‘state of exception’ as a condition of possibility for political sovereignty, one can easily overlook the considerable variation in the ways in which ‘the emergency’ is imagined and responded to when actual ‘states of emergency’ have been historically invoked. The focus of this chapter is therefore on the social and political conditions under which UK emergency legislation and a machinery of emergency governance emerged in the twentieth century. Such an analysis demonstrates that the advent of a British machinery of emergency governance, and the particular forms it has taken, has been profoundly shaped by the wider network of power relations animating liberal governance.

Our first objective in this chapter is thus to investigate the biopolitical enframing of emergency governance from its formal institutionalization. From the Emergency Powers Act (1920) until the drafting of the Civil Contingencies Act (2004) a request by the British government to the sovereign to declare a state of emergency has been legislatively conditioned on the presence of a threat to ‘the essentials of life’ to the community. This immediately raises important political questions: What is essential to life? How are these essentials of life determined? What is understood by ‘life’ and how has this understanding changed over time? To pose such questions is to inquire into the forms of life that are being protected and promoted by specific political programmes and security technologies. Drawing on archival research, this chapter traces the conditions under which the ‘essentials of life’ emerge and evolve as the historical referent of British emergency governance.

Our second objective in this chapter is to analyse how the ‘essentials of life’ have been historically secured. Our analysis begins by examining the historical conditions under which a British machinery of emergency governance was institutionalized to protect the ‘essentials of life’ in the final years of the First World War. The particular form taken by this machinery is demonstrated to correspond to a particular rationality of governance committed to the protection of a precarious social order. Our analysis proceeds by demonstrating how the evolution of this machinery up to the 1970s corresponded with subtle changes in the rationality of governance driving its operations. By employing a biopolitical analytic, focused on analysing changes in the ways in which life, order and contingency are problematized, this chapter traces the emergence of a rival rationality of emergency governance and discusses its implications for ways in which life was understood, evaluated, protected and promoted.

War becomes vital: securing the essentials of life in the First World War

By mid-war the mounting success of German submarines in disrupting the circulation of Allied mercantile ships was becoming a major concern. Italy was facing an acute shortage of food, coal scarcity was jeopardizing French and Italian munitions production, while imports of steel from the United States were becoming increasingly precarious. In January 1917, an Allied Naval Conference was organized to coordinate naval defences. In the opening speech to conference delegates, British Prime Minister Lloyd George emphasized that Allied victory was conditional upon control of the seas and the security of essential imports, understood as ‘raw material and other supplies essential to the prosecution of the war and to the existence of the population’.² The consequences were clear: ‘[t]‌he Germans, without inflicting a military defeat upon us, could win the war by destroying our mercantile marine.’³

The Italian delegation, in obvious accord with Lloyd George’s outlook, insisted that the British and French Cabinets be made aware that ‘prolongation of this state of things is bound, within a brief period of time, to result in curtailing the powers of resistance of such Allies in relation to the war.’⁴ Lloyd George made clear in his conclusion that Allied cooperation to secure these vital flows was critical to the war effort:

Our interest is common, and we ought not to allow comparatively little things to interfere with what, after all, is essential to the life of each country-essential to the life of Italy, essential to the life of France, essential to the life of Great Britain, and essential to something which is more important than any nation, and that is the future of the whole of the human race, which, I think, is dependant (sic) upon the success of the Allies in this great war.⁵

If, as Lloyd George insisted, the future of life itself rested on Allied success in war, so was an Allied victory taken to be dependent upon the vitality of the nation. If ‘massacres ha[d]‌ become vital’ (Foucault, 1998: 137), it was not simply because the lives of individual soldiers were at stake, nor even that war’s lethality had swelled to target the lives of civilian populations. War had become vital insofar as total war mobilized the life-energy, or biopower, of whole societies as the animating force of a war machine tasked with defending the ‘life of the nation’ (Foucault, 1998, 2007). Life was taken as a positive force whose productive capacities could be harnessed within burgeoning war industries integral to modern total war in its industrialized form.

Insofar as life was vital to the conduct of total war, the measure of the nation’s vitality became an important consideration for the state. In this context, the military concept of morale became increasingly applied as a rough indicator of the belligerence of civilian populations. This link between ‘essentials of life’ and national morale is made explicit in the notes of a speech Lloyd George delivered in Scotland in 1917. In announcing a government commitment to ‘cheapening the essentials of life’ Lloyd George was encouraged to ‘announce that the Government recognize that, in order to keep up the moral of the nation, it was necessary, not only to have sufficient food, but ample food at reasonable prices’.⁶ Like the associated terms ‘essential imports’, ‘essential services’ and ‘essential industries’ (which routinely appear alongside references to ‘the essentials of life’ in the government documents of this period) what is ‘essential’ is defined in relation to its indispensability to the war effort.⁷ The essentials of life are not synonymous with the minimum requirements for biological life. They are the raw materials underpinning national biopower; the quantifiable counterpart to the immaterial, and therefore more elusive, notion of morale. The essentials of life thus provided an explicit referent for security practices committed to the augmentation of morale in the context of total war.

The category of the ‘essentials of life’ corresponds to a very specific enframing of life. Associated with the concept of morale, which was extended from military circles to the civilian populations given the imperatives of total war, the ‘essentials of life’ corresponded to an understanding of life as potential martial force. Yet, as rhetorically provocative as this conclusion may be, it does not, in itself, provide much insight into the particular form of life which was to be protected and promoted through the securitization of the ‘essentials of life’. To obtain a more detailed understanding of this form of life we shall now turn to a brief examination of the birth of the concept of morale within military discourses at the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, we shall focus on the critical correspondence between ideas of life, order and contingency which provided the conditions under which the concept of morale emerged. In doing so, we will look to render explicit the rationality of governance which would be extended to the government of civilian populations through the growing concern with national morale during the First World War.

Harnessing uncertainty: esprit de corps and moral forces

The concept of morale emerged out of the Romantic military discourses of late eighteenth-century France which consolidated in strict opposition to what some military theorists considered to be the excessive scientification of their occupation by strategists such as Bülow and Jomini. From the middle of the eighteenth century an influential strand of Enlightenment military theory sought to significantly reduce, if not eradicate, the contingency of war through the application of scientific method to the battlefield (Gat, 1989). A pervading sense that universal laws, such as those recently discovered by Newton, could be uncovered for the conduct of battle prompted efforts to discover these laws so they could be drawn upon to systematically order the components of one’s own war efforts (Gat, 2001: 30). Military formations became increasingly rigidified and subject to hierarchical control as geometrical principles which had been applied to bombardment and fortification were increasingly extended to the field of tactics (Bousquet, 2009: 53–5; DeLanda, 1991: 40–1). In an associated effort, military training and drilling took on special significance in the production of highly disciplined, orderly and predictable troop regiments, perhaps best exemplified by the so-called ‘clockwork armies’ of Prussian monarch Frederick II. The clockwork mechanism, as a key metaphor operating within various discourses including those of the military during this period (Bousquet, 2009; DeLanda, 1991; Landes, 2000), provided an ideal for military order based on precision, regularity and ultimately, predictability (Foucault, 1977: 135–41).

The organization of the Napoleonic armies departed in significant ways from the rigidly mechanistic armies of Fredrick the Great which had begun to display faults over the course of the Seven Years War (Bousquet, 2009: 76). The French armies were highly informed by the French military theorist Guibert who, while still very much committed to a scientific approach to war, developed manoeuvres and formations which permitted increased flexibility and autonomy for troops in battle (Gat, 1989: 43–53). Military historian Martin Van Creveld explains ‘whereas Napoleon’s opponents sought to maintain control and minimise uncertainty by keeping their forces closely concentrated, Napoleon chose the opposite way, reorganising and decentralising his army in such a way as to enable its parts to operate independently for a limited period of time and consequently tolerate a higher degree of uncertainty’ (as quoted in B...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the value of resilience
• 1 State of emergency
• 2 Protect and survive
• 3 The nature of resilience
• 4 Securing emergence
• 5 The technological subject of resilience
• Conclusion: evaluating resilience
• Index