Mary Kaldor Part 2

Is new war still war? Because if it isn’t, then responding to it by military means might not be the right answer.

I think that’s a very good question and a very difficult one to answer. In my book on old wars and new wars, I said that new wars are essentially a mixture between war (by which I mean political conflict, conflict between two politically organized groups, for a political cause), crime (with which I mean using violence for private motives) and human rights violations (which means aggression against individuals). New wars are thus a kind of mixture of spheres previously separated analytically, but, importantly, there is always a political dimension in the sense that the parties to the conflict very often frame what they do in political terms. And insofar as they do that, they see themselves primarily as fighting a war, which in turn legitimizes what they do (because, remember, war is really ‘legitimized killing’). So if you’re saying ‘I’m doing this for national liberation’ rather than ‘I’m doing this because I want money or power’ it somehow sounds a little bit better. You can observe this with the suicide bombers in Britain: when they gave their explanations on video, that they define themselves as soldiers. They describe the situation in which their agency should be understood as war, they frame things in a political way, because politics is a commonly accepted motive for violence.

Different ways of framing different types of violence imply different solutions or different ways of addressing the problem. If we frame violence as war, it has to be addressed in terms of international relations and military answers. Another option would be to frame terrorism and other new wars as a crime or as banditry. The implication of the latter option is that these phenomena should be dealt with through law enforcement and policing.

Now that ‘small’ difference in framing changes everything: it’s the difference between high and low politics, between what is commonly defined as a threat to the national state or rather a threat to public safety, and, ultimately, a difference between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the state. If we decide to call terrorism or ethnic conflicts war, then it actually legitimized the terrorist or the ethnic cleanser as an enemy or a warring party and can lead to the destructive, and often counter-productive, use of force. That is why it is better to emphasize the rule of law and law enforcement and treat such people as criminals.

At the same time, framing something as non-political and thus as a matter of law enforcement sometimes does create problems as well: in Northern Ireland the British said ‘we’re doing law enforcement’, so they treated the IRA prisoners just like ordinary criminals. That led to problems like the hunger strike in the H-block, and in the end the British had to give in and allow the IRA prisoners to be treated as political prisoners, and in the end they then had to deal with the conflict through talks as though they were serious political issues to be debated.

I do however think that politics is going to be part of the solution: politics means negotiation and contestation, but also developing an alternative political framework based on inclusive ideas instead of exclusive labels.

A question about the Cold War. In your book The Imaginary War you argue that security elites in the East and West framed the other as a threat, not because they were convinced of the danger of the other, but rather to manage internal conflict in their own spheres. Can you explain that?

To start with your last question: absolutely. David Keen’s new book Endless War: Hidden Functions of the War on Terror (2006, read a related piece by Keen external pageherecall_made) illustrates this very well. My argument was that the Cold War was an imaginary war. In other words, it wasn’t peace, it was as though the Second World War hadn’t ended, and in our imagination we fought something like the Second World War over and again, with imaginary attacks across the German plains, and with all the elements of war yet without the actual fighting.

Somehow, during the Second World War, both the West and the Soviet Union figured out and resolved the problems that they faced in the preceding period. The West discovered the advantages of big government and how to solve the problems of unemployment, and the Soviet Union discovered how to be efficient, because central planning had been very inefficient. And in fact the socialist system, I argue, wasn’t a socialist system but rather a war-economy system. And the military-industrial complex that constituted the core of post-war economic growth in the US, is a micro-cosmos of a war economy. And so basically these two systems benefited in their own way from this re-alignment, which permitted the particular restructuring of the societies, polities and economies internal to their spheres of influence. The Cold War was essentially a mutual enterprise in which both sides kept each other going. And that worked out quite well, considering the phase of economic development we had then reached, with a system based on Fordist mass production that allowed for mass consumption in the West and mass armament in the East.

That all worked well until the Vietnam war – that war began to challenge the imaginary war story, but it was also kind of the moment when the Cold War stopped producing economic growth as it had done in the 50s and 60s. So the Cold War started to falter and you had détente and that didn’t work because nobody believed any longer in the reasons for the continuing arms race when they saw their leaders kissing each other. And so then you had the new Cold War, and gradually the whole thing began to disintegrate. So my view on the Cold War, as I tried to present it in that book, incorporates very much a sort of constructivist argument about the link between what was until then primarily seen as a political division leading to a territorial division of the world into two militarily guarded zones and the internal social, political and economic organization linked to that military division.

Interesting, so there was a territorial governance ‘fit’ between the organization of both capital and military coercion during the Cold War. It seems that that fit existed, too, during the 19th century: war used to be predominantly a national territorial issue, concerning national security, and the economy was also being consolidated and organized in national terms. Then, during the Cold War, the world got organized in a bipolar way, both economically and militarily as you argue. After the Cold War, emphasis shifted towards human security, non-territorial threats and interventions using expeditionary forces. Is there now also a fit between capital and coercion?

Not yet. As I argue in a recent piece, Old Wars, Cold Wars, New Wars and the War on Terror, Bush has tried very desperately to have a Cold War again – and the War on Terror was a way to kind of re-invent the Cold War. And Bush needed that, because the story the US has invented about itself was that the US uses its superior technology to bring democracy to the rest of the world and to fight against enemies, which not only maintains the military-industrial complex but also works as a story people can believe in and can support, which creates legitimacy for the government and its policies. So somehow they had to renew that story and the War on Terror gave them a wonderful opportunity to attempt to recreate a world that worked. In a sense, it has become politics as usual to find a common enemy for the US.

And I think that what you point at here is the central point of the global crisis which we now have to come to terms with: there is currently no fit between the organization of capital and coercion outside of the imagination of the former US administration, or rather, there is a fit but it just isn’t the one that has been sold to us in the whole War on Terror-discourse. To understand what the fit does look like, I think it is crucial to understand that money is actually a construction, and it’s an expression of power relations. The fact that the dollar was the most important international currency was very much linked to American military power and American power in organizing the bipolar system. The US in a way was using its military and monetary power to obstruct rather than to facilitate the functioning of the world economy. The US basically had a huge debt and was sucking in money from the rest of the world. So I think that this is what this crisis is all about, and I think solving the crisis really involves changes in the organization of security as well as a change in international finance and the use of currencies. China is making the same point when they called for transfers of money to the IMF and creating a real international currency rather than using the dollar or any other national currency, which empowers too much one single political entity, and thus also distorts political and military relations. But indeed, since the organization of capital and violence are linked, the creation of an international currency would mean a significant decrease in the capacity of the US to project military power abroad.

I’d like to ask you something more about the ‘military-industrial complex’ you mentioned earlier. In 1959, Samuel Huntington wrote about how the military industry came into being after the Second World War; in 1961, Eisenhower warned us about it, and one could say that it was some kind of ‘infant industry’ protected until about the 70s when the world economy got restructured and the market became increasingly the forum for exchange of (American) military technology.

Often, military technology is labeled as a source of innovation for society – things like mobile phones and internet are said to be military technologies that have spilled over to society. During wartime, military technology can also have innovative effects for warring parties, because in war the technology gets tested. It’s what the market is in peacetime. However, military technology has another aspect to it as well: in peacetime, you have no way of testing what kind of technology is efficient. In war, you get defeated if your technology isn’t effective; in peace, and particularly in the Cold War, all that mattered was that you had to imagine that you were fighting a war, but actual fighting hardly took place, so innovations didn’t get tested. Yet both parties to the conflict kept emphasizing innovation and felt the urge to match the perceived innovative threat often in a very involuted way. I argue that if you trace the innovation on both sides it is as though both were arming not against each other but against a phantom German army. So military technology became more and more complicated, and more and more divorced from civilian technology. That’s one of the reasons why, although American productivity did grow because of the stimulus of military spending, it didn’t become increasingly productive, and this is essentially why many American products are (still) uncompetitive. New military technology, based on innovations that are not actually tested in war situations, created a drag on the American and British economies, absorbing important skills and pulling technology along what one might call a degenerate evolution. I have labeled these technologies as baroque, more and more expensive and elaborate and less and less useful, in the Baroque Arsenal, a book I published in 1981.

But that doesn’t mean that the military-industrial-complex hasn’t been hugely powerful politically. Take the Israel lobby, it’s much better to understand it in terms of a military-industrial complex, which is increasingly very much internationalized and both Israel and Britain are deeply integrated into the American military-industrial complex. But an even more worrying aspect is you now have the added dimension of private security companies. The old military-industrial complex was interested in making weapons and wasn’t essentially interested in war but rather in a permanent arms-race to create a permanent and stable market; in fact war was rather bad for it, because in war their clients would discover – and that’s exactly what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan – that the technology is baroque: too expensive and too complicated to actually use. Actually now there’s a huge restructuring going on in the US military, and many of these complex systems that kept the military-industrial complex alive are being canceled, which has a huge impact on the big, traditional American defense contractors. But now you get this other dimension of the newly emerging network that also consists of private security service providers, who benefit from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the one hand, you have traditional companies of the military-industrial complex with their over-complex weapon systems that are interested in producing useless weapons systems but not in war. On the other hand, you have new companies whose income essentially depends on the ongoing war. That’s terribly worrying to me. (Continue with part three)