Governing from the Skies

A Global History of Aerial Bombing

Thomas Hippler, David Fernbach

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784785956
• eBook ISBN: 9781784785970
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Ever since its invention, aviation has embodied the dream of perpetual peace between nations, yet the other side of this is the nightmare of an unprecedented deadly power. A power initially deployed on populations that the colonizers deemed too restive, it was then used to strike the cities of Europe and Japan during World War II.

With air war it is now the people who are directly taken as target, the people as support for the war effort, and the sovereign people identified with the state. This amounts to a democratisation of war, and so blurs the distinction between war and peace.

This is the political shift that has led us today to a world governance under United States hegemony defined as 'perpetual low-intensity war', which is presently striking regions such as Yemen and Pakistan, but which tomorrow could spread to the whole world population.

Air war thus brings together the major themes of the past century: the nationalization of societies and war, democracy and totalitarianism, colonialism and decolonization, Third World-ism and globalization, and the welfare state and its decline in the face of neoliberalism. The history of aerial bombing offers a privileged perspective for writing a global history of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 1

Land, Sea, and Air

On 25 July 1909, H. G. Wells was doing gymnastics in his garden when his telephone started ringing persistently. With some annoyance, he finally decided to interrupt his exercises and picked up the handset. The message was hard to understand amid the crackling: ‘Blériot has crossed the Channel … an article … on what that means!’¹ From his fine house in Sandgate, Kent, Wells enjoyed a superb view over the Channel and could almost see Dover, some fifty kilometres to the east, where Blériot had just landed.² As Wells had just enjoyed tremendous success with his science fiction novel War in the Air, the Daily Mail editors naturally thought of him to comment on the historic event: Louis Blériot crosses the Channel by aeroplane.

Wells began to reflect. First of all, he greeted the sporting triumph as a gentleman: ‘Mr Blériot has done a good performance, and his rival Mr Latham really did not stand a chance. That is the most important thing for us.’ Wells recognized that he had underestimated the stability of aircraft, along with almost all other experts on aeronautics. But as he pursued his train of thought, certain worries arose. The consequences of these flights suddenly struck him as tremendous, fearful, and terrible:

This event – that this thing invented by a foreigner, built by a foreigner, driven by a foreigner, could cross the Channel with the ease of a bird flying over a stream – poses the problem in a dramatic fashion. Our manhood is now defective … The foreigner makes a better class of men than we others.

Foreigners were cultivated, curious, inventive, enterprising. The British were well brought up but lacked initiative, happy to play golf while the French, Americans, Germans, and even Brazilians rose up in the air. On top of the wound this inflicted on patriotic narcissism, another worry struck the writer. The Channel crossing had needed a combination of will, courage, and technical competence. Blériot was certainly a hero, but a hero of a new kind: he embodied an emerging new elite, a new ruling class ready to assume power. The ‘natural democracy’ of the English could not stand up against the technological heroes of the flying machines.³ These dark thoughts beset Wells to the point of bordering on the paranoid. If a Frenchman had flown in an aircraft, was it rational to conclude that foreigners produced a better class of man than the British? Wells may have exaggerated in seeing this flight as heralding the end of a particular political system, and of democracy in general. But, from his point of view, the British political, social, and cultural system was losing ground vis-à-vis its geostrategic rivals, and an unprecedented military danger suddenly threatened a country that had up till now believed itself invulnerable, protected by its island shores. Planes setting out from Calais would soon be able to drop explosives on London. Great Britain had to change its mode of social organization, its educational institutions, with a view to equipping itself with the means to create its own class of men capable of matching this technological heroism.

With today’s hindsight, we can discern in Wells’s delirium the anticipation of the end of a historical cycle marked by British hegemony on a global scale, a shift that would take half a century to complete. According to such a well-informed observer as Eric Hobsbawm, it was not until the Suez crisis of 1956 that Great Britain recovered from the shock inflicted in 1909 and recognized that after the loss of its colonies it was now only a second-rate power.⁴

In 1909, however, the United Kingdom remained the hegemonic centre of the world. It had long possessed the military means to control and secure the great sea routes. As a centre of commercial exchange on a global scale, the hegemon had to be in a position to defend its merchant shipping throughout the world; it had to possess what the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan called ‘command of the sea’. This required two conditions: first of all, a navy capable not only of confronting any other, but also – often more difficult – of effectively protecting its own merchant shipping against piracy. This made it necessary to possess naval bases located on the main sea routes, and ideally throughout the world, so as to be able to refuel and repair ships. The advantage of Britain’s island position was clear. Maritime supremacy enabled the dominant power both to establish its hegemony in the world system and to defend the metropolis. In other words, an island hegemonic power that enjoyed maritime supremacy could defend itself at less cost than a continental hegemonic power, forced both to maintain a strong navy in the interest of overseas expansion and a strong land army to defend its home territory. The British army was more like an expeditionary force to be deployed in the colonies in normal times and on the European continent in times of major crisis, as during the Napoleonic wars or the First World War. As long as Great Britain dominated the seas, its home territory was protected against any attack. The great battles of European wars took place across the Channel, on the plains of Flanders.

This makes it easier to understand Wells’s shock. From 25 July 1909, Great Britain was no longer an island, as it had become vulnerable.⁵ A hegemonic centre, however, had to be immune from any attack. If ‘all roads led to Rome’, and if all world trade passed through the City of London, the whole world order seemed to emanate from this centre. The hegemon functioned as a quasi-transcendent instance of the world system. If it represented a haven of peace, a promise of happiness and freedom, it also constituted, more prosaically, a political–social system that Kees van der Pijl calls ‘Lockean’,⁶ after the author of the Treatise on Civil Government. Following the ‘Glorious Revolution’, Great Britain replaced the Netherlands as hegemonic centre of the world system.⁷ An original complex of state and civil society was born, with the precocious development of a capitalist civil society, framed by the ‘rule of law’ and constitutional monarchy.⁸ British liberalism rested on a state that was strong, but limited its sphere of intervention so as to allow a margin of self-regulation for the capitalist economy and society.⁹ There thus appeared a genuine bourgeois/civil society, ‘from which the state has withdrawn after having imposed itself actively and constructively, shaping the institutions needed to permit the “liberal withdrawal from the sphere of value creation”’.¹⁰

Around the hegemonic centre was a ‘semi-periphery’, a zone made up of a series of contender states that generally presented ‘Hobbesean’ features, in the sense that the state played a directly dominant role, with interventions in society that were far more frequent and direct than in the Lockean model. This meant that the ruling class maintained a closer link with the state, functioning as a genuine ‘state class’ with all the risks of authoritarianism this involved. Finally, around the Lockean hegemonic centre and the Hobbesean semi-periphery lay the actual periphery, colonial or post-colonial.

The spatial distribution of violence on the world scale was arranged according to this tripartite pattern. If violence could be total on the margins of the system, it took a statized form in the Hobbesean semi-periphery. As for the Lockean centre, this passed for a haven of peace, a country open to refugees, the promised land of liberty. But it could only appear as such inasmuch as it externalized violence, unleashing this in wars between different rival states or on the periphery of the world system. At all events, the centre was constitutionally invulnerable, and had to be so. The mere possibility of an attack could thus shatter a whole system of representations of the world order. If, to cite Gilles Deleuze, ‘delirium is geographico-political’, geopolitics is also a matter of perceptions and affects. The division of the world into centre, semi-periphery, and periphery is not simply the invention of world-system theorists, but is actually rooted in our mental structures, sensations, and deliriums. To attack the centre is thus equivalent to shaking a whole world, in a sense both geopolitical and mental.¹¹ If Wells was driven mad by the idea that London could be taken as a target, what can we say about the consequences of a real attack on the hegemonic centre, such as the United States experienced on 11 September 2001?

Wells’s delirium becomes more understandable still if we consider the implications of this arrangement of the world in terms of foreign policy, defence policy, and the conduct of war in general. British foreign policy was conducted on two levels, in conformity with a tripartite division of the world: a policy of aggressive colonial expansion outside of Europe had been paired since the eighteenth century with a policy of balance of powers, collective security, and indirect intervention on the European continent. Contrary to the continental powers, the United Kingdom did not aim at territorial conquest in Europe, with the exception of certain naval bases that enabled it to control sea routes. The British custom was to base themselves on one or more ‘contender states’ in order to contain others, and those European states that were weakest militarily could count on British aid to finance their war effort. The success of such a strategy is evident: out of the seven wars fought with France between 1689 and 1815, Great Britain only lost one, the war of American independence – which was also the only time that it did not succeed in creating a continental alliance against France.¹² In the same way, the First and Second World Wars, which put a stop to the German claim to world hegemony, were won above all thanks to the alliance with the Russian and then Soviet contender.

The conduct of war in general, moreover, depends on the geopolitical distribution of violence within the world system. Since the seventeenth century, European war has been conducted between states.¹³ The state first of all puts an end to the ‘state of nature’ by establishing on its territory a power capable of containing civil war. Internal armed conflicts steadily came to an end. The corollary of this statization was a limitation of warfare: once this was defined as a relation between states, it ceased to denote a relationship between individuals. It followed from this that the latter had the right to be protected from warlike violence. Rousseau only repeated a common opinion when he wrote that, even in war, states were bound to respect the persons and goods of citizens:

The purpose of war being to destroy the enemy state, its defenders may rightfully be killed so long as they are carrying arms; but as soon as they lay them down and surrender, ceasing to be enemies or agents of the enemy, they become simply men again, and there is no longer any right over their lives.¹⁴

If Europe perceived itself as being de facto united, first of all in a Res publica christiana, then in a common ‘civilization’ or ‘society’, outside Europe things were very different. In colonial wars, the civilian population was never seen as having the right to a particular protection. Military theorists explained this in the clearest possible terms. Colonel Callwell, for example, a British colonial officer, summed up in the late nineteenth century the principles of ‘small’ colonial wars:

The main points of difference between small wars and regular campaigns … are that, in the former, the beating of the hostile armies is not necessarily the main object even if they exist, that effect on morale is often far more important than material success, and that the operations are sometimes limited to committing havoc which the laws of regular warfare do not sanction.

Since colonial wars did not oppose two states monopolizing legitimate violence, as embodied in an army, the distinction between ‘defenders of the state’ and ‘ordinary men’ was not applicable. Thus, a regular war ‘may be terminated by the surrender or capitulation of the hostile sovereign or chief, who answers for his people; but in the suppression of a rebellion the refractory subjects of the ruling power must all be chastised and subdued.’¹⁵ In Europe, the enemy was considered as ‘just’ (justus hostis) inasmuch as it was sovereign states and their regular armies that confronted one another.¹⁶ The attribute of justice distinguishes an enemy from a rebel or a criminal. Outside of Europe, on the other hand, the attribute of justice was not applied, and neither combatants nor civilians had this right to protection.

It was thus in regions outside of Europe that most bombings took place. In 1855, the Americans bombed the town of San Juan in Nicaragua, provoking the indignation of the British, who condemned an action ‘without precedent among civilized nations’. But this did not stop their own armed forces from bombing Canton the following year. The Chinese had arrested the crew of a British ship. After intervention by the consul, the authorities agreed to release the prisoners, but refused to make a public apology and give guarantees that such an incident would not happen again. The British then decided to open fire. In London, the Liberal MP Ralph Bernal Osborne justified the action in these terms: ‘Talk of applying the pedantic rules of international law to the Chinese!’¹⁷

In the nineteenth century, however, the first cracks already appeared in this binary arrangement, divided between a European sphere, with limited state wars, and a ‘peripheral’ sphere that was the theatre of unlimited war. Quite logically these cracks appeared on the border between the European centre and the colonized periphery, in the US during the ‘second war of independence’ and in Russia during the Crimean War. North America, traditionally external to the space of European international law, was gradually assimilated into the sphere of civilized Christianity.¹⁸ As for Russia, it was always situated on the margins of Europe: without being as ‘civilized’ as other European nations, it was nonetheless geographically close and of Christian religion.¹⁹ During the war that Great Britain fought with the United States in 1812–15, British naval forces bombarded Baltimore, Washington, and other US cities²⁰ – with the aim, according to the strategist Alfred Mahan – of giving the American people²¹ concrete experience of war so as to force their government to make peace.²² The people became a factor in war but, according to an old point of view that considered them as a passive element, only capable of explosions of sporadic violence.²³ As we shall see, this mode of thinking would structure a good part of air strategy in the twentieth century.

Another approach to a war of peoples was also sketched out during the ‘second war of independence’. The future president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, observed in 1882 that the British, who customarily abstained from personally mistreating civilians, had particularly targeted places where the population organized into a militia were putting up resistance to the former colonial power.²⁴ The association between militia organization and bombardment of cities was certainly not accidental: once the population are armed for national defence, they almost logically become a target in war. According to this more modern view, the people are no longer a passive factor but the seat of sovereignty and capable of self-organization. Where they were previously an object of poli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Land, Sea, and Air
• Chapter 2: Towards Perpetual Peace
• Chapter 3: The Knights of the Sky
• Chapter 4: The Colonial Matrix
• Chapter 5: Civilization, Cosmopolitism, and Democracy
• Chapter 6: People and Populace
• Chapter 7: Philosophy of the Bomb
• Chapter 8: Making and Unmaking a People
• Chapter 9: ‘Revolutionary War’ beneath the Nuclear Shield
• Chapter 10: World Governance and Perpetual War
• Notes
• Index