Bureaucracy, The Individual and Rational Decision Making?

This was originally a response to a question my lecturer posed my class, "Individual cognition and bureaucratic interests undermine rational decisions in the “War on Terror". I didn't really like the question, so i went my own way in answering it...

The post 9/11 years have been marked with a distinct loss of civil liberties and “The ‘War on Terror’ serves as the latest guise for the aggressive reassertion of the principle state sovereignty, beyond the traditional limits imposed on it by legal institutions or democratic polities” (Newman, 2008). The ‘War on Terror’ can be seen as the forefront of, as Newman put it, this “creeping conservatism’s” initiative to reaffirm its hold on power by using the 9/11 event to do so. I cannot in good conscience argue for or against the fact that individual cognition and bureaucratic interests are undermining rational decisions for this 'war', for in doing so leads me to experience a peculiar form of cognitive dissonance as it is in my opinion, that this 'war' is in essence irrational. However I can agree with the fact that rationality in decision making can be undermined by falsely perceived notions of truths, individual cognition and bureaucratic interests which actually does, in my opinion, exemplifies the 'war' in all entirety. Namely it is an irrational 'war' that was created based on falsehoods to serve bureaucratic (and private) interests using an abhorrent act of terrorism as its vehicle to push through policies that would never have taken shape otherwise.

That aside, rationality can sometimes be impaired by individual cognition (or in the case of the neocons, group cognition). Individual experiences, bias, self-interest, personality or even delusions are want to persuade decisions one way or another, an example of which could be seen in Thatcher's poll-tax in 1989. Against all advice she persisted to push through this highly unpopular system for, as some analyst put it, her "Iron Lady" persona made it impossible for her to "U-Turn" on any decision she made. This trait was an asset for her in the past, unfortunately for her it eventually led to her being toppled from government in 1990. A more curious example irrational decision making due to individual cognition would be the late Saparmurat Niyazov, or Turkmenbashi, the 1st President of Turkmenistan who amongst other things renamed the month January after himself and shut all hospitals outside his capital, Asgabat.

Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.", and no doubt he said it with the intention satirising the insanity of this monolithic organ of government. In essence, the bureaucracy of a nation officially exists to execute, maintain and perpetuate the policies of the nations political core. However, more often than not, a bureaucracy exists with the sole intention of perpetuating itself whilst expanding its budget, and it is this instinct of self-interest and self-preservation that sometimes undermines rationality. In 2008, Tom Sauer, of the International Politics University of Antwerp, presented a paper at the SOAS Conference ‘Globalisation and Disarmament’, entitled "US nuclear weapons policy under the Clinton administration: a missed opportunity due to bureaucratic inertia and a lack of political leadership" in which he outlined how the US military-industrial complex managed to prevent Clinton from revising the US' nuclear weapons policies as any change to the status quo could threaten its relevancy. This is a clear example of how bureaucratic interests can subvert both policy and clear, rational decision making. It is in the US' best interest to reduce its nuclear armaments as this would not only help reduce an already bloated defence budget but would also provide it with the moral high ground to insist other nations to follow suite and help it prevent newer upstart nations from insisting on joining the nuclear club. However, bureaucratic self-interest won over rationality.

In his paper, Sauer concluded that arms control was limited by "the power of the bureaucracy and a lack of political leadership. " and one could say the same concerning the rationality of our leaders decisions. The power of the bureaucracy can and does subvert rationality, and so does the personal limitations, in other words individual cognition, of the decision makers. An apt analogy would be when a car hits a tree. If you consider the tree as a constant, then there are only two variables left to consider in such an accident to determine why it happened, one being the inertia and mass of the car along with any mechanical problems it may have could make it impossible for the driver to correct any mistakes or miscalculations he made to cause the crash, and the other would of course be the state of mind the driver was in during the accident. If the drivers drunk and the breaks don't work, then you could say that the accident was inevitable.

Do new threats to national security justify the use of torture?

Regardless of how it's proponents may posit the necessity of using torture as a means of extracting information, there is no way to justify the practice. Not only does it disgrace the country that countenances it, it inevitably undermines the country's ability to protect itself. History has thought us that the costs of utilising torture have been astronomical, for the French in Algeria, for the Americans in Vietnam, and now for the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The French army may have won the Battle of Algiers but they soon lost the war for Algeria, in part because their systematic torture delegitimated the larger war effort in the eyes of most Algerians and many French. “You might say that the Battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” observed British journalist Sir Alistair Horne, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”

For the Americans, they're track record with their use of torture has shown its ineffectiveness. Official sources are nearly unanimous that the yield of the massive Phoenix program, with over forty prisons across South Vietnam who systematically tortured thousands of suspected communists, was surprisingly low. One Pentagon contract study found that, in 1970-71, only 3 percent of the Viet Cong “killed, captured, or rallied were full or probationary Party members above the district level.” Not surprisingly, such a brutal pacification effort failed either to crush the Viet Cong or win the support of Vietnamese villagers, contributing to the ultimate U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War. Even the comparatively limited torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay has done incalculable damage to America’s international prestige whereas the information. In short, the intelligence gains are soon overwhelmed by political costs as friends and enemies recoil in revulsion at such calculated savagery.

As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. With the agency's multinational gulag full of dozens, even hundreds, of detainees of dwindling utility, CIA agents, active and retired, have been vocal in their complaints about the costs and inconvenience of limitless, even lifetime, incarceration for these tortured terrorists. The ideal solution to this conundrum from an agency perspective is pump and dump, as in Vietnam, pump the terrorists for information, and then dump the bodies. After all, the systematic French torture of thousands from the Casbah of Algiers in 1957 also entailed more than 3,000 “summary executions” as “an inseparable part” of this campaign, largely, as one French general put it, to ensure that “the machine of justice” not be “clogged with cases.” For similar reasons, the CIA’s Phoenix program produced, by the agency’s own count, over 20,000 extrajudicial killings.

To reassert my answer, no, there is no way to justify the use of torture regardless of any arguments given on the security of the state. Basically torture is are always wrong, regardless of what the suspect is thought to know or to have done. It's banned absolutely under international law. Further more, the information gained is more often than not are unreliable. The practice of torture corrodes the rule of law and undermines the criminal justice system and in no way does it do not make us any safer. The use of torture to stop ticking bombs leads ultimately to a cruel choice?either legalize this brutality, à la Dershowitz and Bush, or accept that the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder, à la Vietnam.

A, B & C vs Ireland: Should Ireland Be Excluded From The EU?

The question of whether or not Ireland should be kicked out of the EU because of the entitled case cannot be answered by a simple yes or no as it brings up two questions with seemingly conflicting answers, namely; what exactly are the reproductive rights of the mothers and what rights to life does an unborn foetus have.

Reproductive Rights

In the case of A, B & C v Ireland, the mothers claim was that the laws of Oreland contravened their reproductive rights as expressed by the WHO as:

“Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.”

As which, A,B & C argue that in enforcing anti-abortion laws, Ireland has negated their right “to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children."(Proclamation of Teheran 1968). However, reproductive rights as stated by the WHO and the Teheran proclamation are non-binding agreements which and many of the articles are yet to be recognized in hard-law hard. To complicate matters more, the European Convention on Human Rights is silent on the question of reproductive rights

Right to Life

All member states of the EU have to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights to in order to maintain their membership with the EU, and this is where Reproductive Rights clash with the Article 2 in that document, The Right to Life. Many Pro-lifers argue that the act of aborting a pregnancy constitutes a negation of the foetuses right to life. However, most pro-lifers rest their argument on a religious or philosophical definition of when a human is defined as a being a human; they consider as soon as a woman’s pregnant, the collection of fertilised cells that make up the embryo is already human thus Article 2 applies at the moment of conception. The pro-abortion lobby on the other hand argue that a human can only be considered a human upon delivery.

When is a Human, Human?

So when does Article 2 apply to an individual? When is a foetus recognised as being human? As I mentioned earlier, most pro-lifers take the religious high ground and base their arguments on 2,000-year-old religious dogma, but it seems unwise to base such an important definition on something that essentially has no factual backing. At the same time studies have shown that foetuses in towards the end of their third trimester actually experience REM sleep (Schwab & Schiller 2009), meaning they dream and is not dreaming indicative of consciousness? Descartes posited, “I think therefore I am” in his “Discourse on Method” (1637) when he was discussing the proof of self-existence so perhaps in can further be expanded to define when a human can be considered human. Meaning, that if thinking about your existence acknowledges that you do in fact exist, your existence is based on the fact that you thought about it thus thought or the act of thinking defines your humanity. So perhaps, in order for us to adequately determine when Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights applies, you would have to determine when brain activity, or thought, occurs in the foetus.

Conclusion

To conclude, since reproductive rights aren’t enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, technically, Ireland is not at fault for denying its citizen’s the right to abort unwanted pregnancies. However, it is disconcerting that reproductive rights aren’t discussed in the document, since this means that European states technically could be as draconian as China in regards to reproduction.

My opinion is that it is uncertain on whether or not A, B and C’s rights were abused as not enough information as given on each of their cases, e.g. How long were they into their pregnancies? How did they become pregnant to begin with? What were their reasons for wanting an abortion? These questions matter when discussing abortion rights for though I’m not a pro-lifer since I do believe women have the right to decide what happens in their bodies, I also believe that the right of the foetus to live also has to be taken into consideration. A common consensus has to be reached on when humanity occurs in a foetus. This consensus however must be based on provable facts and not ideological nor religious suppositions or philosophical debate.

My Thoughts on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy & The Identity of the State

Conventionally, foreign policy is a set of goals that provides the general rule of conduct determining how a state interacts with its neighbours economically, politically, socially and militarily, and to a lesser extent, how the state will interact with non-state actors. The objectives of these policies are to protect the states interests, namely its security, ideological goals, and economic prosperity. This can occur as a result of peaceful cooperation with other states, or through exploitation. Diplomacy on the other hand, is how the state communicates these policies to its neighbours. Together, they represent an instrument of statecraft necessary to identify the state in relation to its neighbours.

A state’s foreign policy represents a linkage between the state’s domestic interior and the international exterior and can be seen as a portrayal of the state’s character or ‘personality’. This ‘personality’ is determined principally by the culture practiced by either the state’s citizen’s en mass or simply by its elites and how this culture views itself to be in relation to the international. The culture of the state constructs its identity by contrasting itself against its neighbours, acknowledging primarily the differences, real, perceived or synthetic, in order to define itself a unique singularity from which it can determine its current standing and where it wishes to be.

It is through this self-examination of what it perceives its identity to be and its place in the international that defines its interactions with its neighbours. This ‘self-made identity’, or interior, exerts itself onto the exterior by determining the form of conversation between itself and its neighbours. This colours the state’s ‘personality’ by making it inherently bellicose or passive in its attempts to achieve its goals. In recent years however, with the growth of stronger inter-state and non-state players and the diffusion of cultures via mass diaspora the concept of an inherent ‘stable-state-identity’ is increasingly becoming fictitious.

In Conclusion, it is from this Manichean construct of “us against the other” that the state perceives what its interests to be. Furthermore, it also determines the methodology it will use, namely the disposition of the diplomacy it practices, in order to attain these interests. It is in the author’s opinion that this represents a form of self-inflicted division, however it is an inherent facet of the current international system and it is increasingly becoming redundant in this current era globalisation but that is the topic of another paper.

A Brief Essay on Human Rights

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

—Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

On December 10^th, 1948 The United Nations General Assembly adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. The UDHR consists of 30 Articles covering the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled. Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law; and economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to participate in culture, the right to be treated with respect and dignity, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to education.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has acted as the leading modern codification of commonly accepted rights. However, this Bill of Rights does not represent international law and all signee countries adhere to it only on a voluntary basis. Indeed internationally, there has been many debates and disagreements over which rights are human rights, and about the precise nature, content, justification and appropriate legal status of those rights. One of the biggest questions has been over at what point is a human deemed to even be human for these rights to apply? Some countries have even criticized the Universal Declaration for its perceived failure to take into the account the cultural and religious context of different countries.

That aside, what is the necessity of having an internationally accepted doctrine of human rights? The necessity is that without doing so, all humanity would be condemned to a future of persistent barbarity where insecurity would be the norm. History has shown that societies in which the rights of the individual have been ignored have all been doomed to eventual entropy. The definition of what these rights are have of course changed over time from the Cyrus Cylinder of the ancient Persians, the Natural Laws of the Romans, the Magna Carta, the Natural Rights of the French and finally the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What this shows is that people have long understood that there is value in being human and it is this value that needs to be protected.

In conclusion there is a distinct need to identify an internationally accepted covenant that would legally bind states to protect the dignity and sanctity of the life of the common man. We need to identify the prerequisites for a "universal" minimal standard of justice and tolerance that would maintain this dignity and would be considered the internationally accepted moral norms owed by and to the individual by the mere virtue of their humanity and of course at what point does it apply. These prerequisites can exist as the shared norms of actual human moralities, as justified moral norms or moral rights supported by strong reasons, as legal rights at a national level, or as a legal right within international law.

“I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!”

Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Network (1976)

A Case Study on the 'War on Terror' : An Analysis from the Perspective of Critical International Relations Theory

In post 9/11 years there have been a number of new, serious challenges facing radical politics, there has been the new hegemony of neo-liberal projects of capitalist globalization, such as the WTO, as well as the ideological obscurantism of the so-called Third Way. Furthermore, the intense disillusionment in the wake of the collapse of Communist systems nearly two decades ago has resulted in a political and theoretical vacuum for the radical Left, which has on the whole, been futile in its attempts to counter the rise of the Far Right in Europe, as well as Newman (2008) put it, “the more insidious ‘creeping conservatism’ whose dark ideological implications we are only just beginning to see unfold”. However, most serious of all, would be the re-emergence of the aggressive, authoritarian state in its new guise of security and bio-politics all of which is a reaction to the 9/11 event. The post 9/11 years have been marked with a distinct loss of civil liberties and “The ‘War on Terror’ serves as the latest guise for the aggressive reassertion of the principle state sovereignty, beyond the traditional limits imposed on it by legal institutions or democratic polities” (Newman, 2008). The ‘War on Terror’ can be seen as the forefront of this “creeping conservatism’s” initiative to reaffirm its hold on power by using the 9/11 event to do so.

(a) On Critical International Relations Theory

This case study will analyse the ‘War on Terror’ from the perspective of Critical International Relations Theory. It is in this papers opinion that the more traditional perspectives of Liberalism and Realism are myopic and far to narrow in its understanding of the interactions of state and the individuals that constitute it to adequately analyse such a complex issue the “War on Terror”. It is in this papers opinion that the continued use of such perspectives contributes to “a civil society… that thinks, reflects and analyzes complex international events through a very narrow set of theoretical lenses" (Smith, 2002). Whereas with Critical Theory, it allows greater flexibility in analysing the information at hand and would provide a more realistic critique by drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities.

(b) On criticism

Both postmodern and post-Marxist approaches to international relations can be said to be critical of the prevailing rationalist orthodoxy as well as that they both approaches share a commitment to human freedom, though differently understood. Freedom for postmodernists is negatively constituted, as resistance to determination. Where as with Post- Marxists, however, freedom is looked at in positive terms, it is the literal institution of human emancipation. From there on the approaches diverge even further as they echo the fundamental philosophical schism that divides the rational school they criticise.

Realist and postmodern approaches are sceptical about the prospective for human progress whereas idealist and post-Marxist approaches rest on the assertion of a rigid criterion of judgement (Hutchings, 2001). In so far as possible the analysis of the ‘War on Terror’ here under presented will attempt to decouple from the remainder of the critical school and codify post-Marxist analyses. Within this post-Marxist mainstream of critical theory, there are two branches that will be considered. The initial segment of this essay will consider the shared theoretical framework that structures both bodies of criticism. From here the treatment of the two branches under consideration will diverge thus sections two and three of the essay will then treat these in turn.

i. The first branch is primarily associated with the writings of Andrew Linklater as it is based on notions of cosmopolitan idealism and traces its philosophical lineage through the work of Habermas to Kant.

ii. The second branch, that can be said to be the most closely associated with the work of Robert Cox, is more eclectic as it builds most notably through the work of Gramsci on the historical materialism of Marx.

(c) On terrorism

This case study understands terrorism as a political technique that relies on the systematic use of violence to instil fear in civilian populations (Devetak, 2005a) in order push forward an agenda. It thus attempts to avoid any simplistic recourse to political labelling on the basis of the actors responsible for acts of violence; that is to say that according to the above definition, terror can equally be brandished by state and non-state groups and determination should be based on substantive analysis of the method rather than the actor that wields it.

A. The framework of criticism

The two branches of critical theory to be considered both share certain core criticisms of traditional rationalist approaches to international relations and the specific application of these criticisms to the US war on terror will be explored in the succeeding sections of this case study. In the first instance, a criticism of the bracketed ontological assumptions of the rationalist schools is shared. That this ontology is 'prior' or 'given' is vehemently disputed as the objects of analysis chosen by traditional approaches structure the questions asked and the answers received. Secondly, each branch challenges the epistemology of more orthodox approaches. In his essay entitled “Political Realism and Human Interests“, Ashley argued that positivist methodologies constitute knowledge of practical and technical interests, in other words positivists are interested in knowledge as a means of understanding and controlling the world. This understanding of what knowledge is ignores and inhibits emancipatory constitutive knowledge interests. Thus it ignores forms of knowledge that seek to reveal the relations of domination and the conditions of “distorted communication and understanding that deny humans the ability to make their future through full will and consciousness” (Ashley, 1981). This, it is argued, results in a mode of knowing that proliferates the paradigms of the past into the future.

B. Cosmopolitan Universalism

In “Men and Citizens” (1990), Linklater sets out his criticism of the morally particularistic ontology of mainstream international relations theory. He argues that the foundational enforcement of the state as the key source of subjectivity in international relations causes rigid boundaries between the self and the other. This exclusionary notion of what community is and how the individual relates to it creates a discourse that privileges the ethical rights of the citizen above those of the rest of humanity. The US “War on Terror” relies precisely on such particularism in order to privilege the perceived interests of the US above those of the rest of humanity.

The analysis that Linklater (2002) gives on the “War on Terror” is guided by the progressive notion that it is possible to universally eliminate unnecessary human suffering. In his book, he lines out both the extent to which the war on terror devalues normative progress made towards reducing unnecessary human suffering and the extent to which it creates even more unnecessary suffering. Firstly, the continued “War on Terror” has eroded the protection offered by established legal norms thus it has caused various contraventions of the well established and widely observed human rights and humanitarian legal conventions. Examples of which can be seen in conditions of detention and the legal process extended by the US to enemy prisoners at its facilities in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and also in the regime of clandestine extradition and interrogation euphemistically termed rendition. In addition to that, the various unauthorised, extra-national military operations instigated by the US in pursuit of its war aims, such as the US air strikes of January 2007 in Southern Somalia, breach the international legal principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. The US may hold the outcomes to be absolute goods, in other words the ends justify the means, however this ignores the universally agreed limits on state action as it privileges a narrowly defined US military interest above the universal rights of mankind.

Secondly, as Linklater pointed out, the pursuit by the US of its “War on Terror” has been responsible for instituting human suffering afresh. Marc Herold estimated that there were more civilian casualties that resulted from the first two months of US military action in Afghanistan than from the attacks of September 11th (Herold, 2002). This differential value placed on US and 'enemy' civilian lives is further emphasised by the United States’ willingness to use cluster munitions in areas of high civilian population density (Oliver, 2003). Arguably, US military planners consider the risks presented to US ground personnel intrinsic in mounting more targeted operations to outweigh the risks presented to the lives of Iraqi civilians by using cluster munitions. As Devetak pointed out, “[u]nchecked particularism” is used to deprive outsiders of their rights (Devetak, 2005b).

Chomsky's criticism however (2002), is based more upon the closely related principle of reciprocity; the idea that one should be subject to the same norms of behaviour that one seeks to impose on others. He is of the opinion, that according to the definition of terrorism used by the US army, the actions of US and British forces in Afghanistan also constitute international terrorism; i.e. 'a calculated use of violence to attain goals that are political ... in nature' (US Army manual quoted in Chomsky, 2002).

Linklater describes in Transformation of Political Community (1998) how the processes of state-building, geopolitical rivalry, capitalist industrialisation, and moral practical learning contribute to the monopolisation by the state of sources of political identity. The result of which is a discourse that understands a necessity of correlation between the boundaries of sovereignty, nationality, citizenship and territory and it is with such a vision of the international order that allows a causal connection between the attacks of September 11th, the Taliban regime and the Afghan 'quasi-state' to be understood. Surely criminal legal proceedings should have been instituted against those individuals implicated in the 9/11 attacks rather than the machinery of war mobilised to confront a nation? It reflects interestingly on the power relations that exist between different branches of the international relations school that the threat posed by a diffuse, transnational network was confronted by the machinery of inter-state warfare (see the treatment of the work of Ashley in section A above, for a discussion of the potential for the epistemological method of the traditional branches of international relations to introduce such oversights). Linklater argues that a decentralisation of the sites of power and a diversification of human loyalties offers the potential to alter the relationship between universality and particularity away from the totalising project of the state.

Habermas (2003) on the other hand, seems to see the “War on Terror” more of a rhetorical pretext for an extant policy of unilateral domination than an epistemologically driven error. He argues that the “War on Terror” consists of the forceful imposition of a global liberal order in place of the consensual, human rights based approach grounded in international law that preceded it. This shift is held to be best animated by opposing the continental European understanding of intervention based on giving force to the legitimacy of internationalized human rights (after the cosmopolitanism of Kant), to the Anglo-American understanding based on the imposition of a liberal international order (after the liberal nationalism of Mill). It is argued that the United States’ approach is actually a setback to the trend of the domesticisation of state power through international law that has characterised international relations since World War II. In choosing to act unilaterally, the United States has devalued this universal principle and has actually undermined its normative authority.

The thoughts of Habermas also encapsulate an emancipatory potential that is best approached from a more positive perspective. Habermas' discourse ethics is a dialogic ideal, which seeks to institutionalise inclusive democratic arrangements for decision-making, characterised by procedural fairness rather than guided by notions of moral correctness. If such a process of cosmopolitan decision-making were to be instituted, it would essentially make room for the subjectivities of all affected parties on an equal basis. Aside from that, it would also broaden the political community past the boundaries of the sovereign state and deepen the political community within the state. It was because of the fact that the US attack of Iraq failed to satisfy the conditions of discourse ethics that Habermas refuses to sanction it (Devetak, 2005b).

C. Historical Materialism

Cox (2002) understands the development of world society over time using historical materialism through Marx and from this approach he uses the synchronic dimension to investigate the arrangement of material forces instituted at a given point in time. The social, economic and political processes that lead to changes in this systemic arrangement is not manifest externally, however it can be inferred by arranging synchronic slices in the diachronic dimension. In the words of Marx, "circumstances make men as much as men make circumstances" (1932) thus this approach stresses the fact that current manifestations of world society are directly a function of previous ones. It is the relations of production, which is broadly understood to include cultural institutions like the education system, church and press that produce the social conditions that enable 'behaviours consistent with ... [the] arrangement of power relations in society' (Cox, 1983), that structure transitions from the present to the future and thus hold the key to shaping alternative visions of the future.

As Cox sees it, the historically specific and mutable character of the current world system is emphasised by this perspective. I would imagine that he would look to broaden the conservative framework in which understandings of the war on terror are set. The focus of the lens the “War on Terror” brings to bear on world politics is as notable for what it excludes as for what it describes. The attacks of 9/11 can be seen to target the symbols of the projection of US military and financial power overseas. However, the political realisation of the war on terror brackets and expands the projection of this power while objectifying the reaction thereto as an externality to be managed. Cox would implore that we focus on the manner in which the social conditions and cultural institutions currently instituted have facilitated growing global poverty and inequality and the asymmetric application of legal procedures, that we understand the structural underpinnings of immanent material problems in global society.

In the analysis of Cox, the concept of historical materialism is augmented by that of hegemony, an idea he inherited from Gramsci. On the basis of a historical survey, Cox asserts that hegemonic world order can be said to exist when consensual rather than coercive power prevails, when commonly held interests are shared and relations of domination are latent (Cox, 1983). Hegemonic world orders rest on the regulation of inter-state conflict and a globalised mode of production that unites civil society in different countries. The social, economic and political structures that sustain hegemony are more consistent and complimentary at the core than in peripheral societies where the contradictions between modern economic or political modes and traditional social ones can cause reactions to spring forth.

This understanding of the functioning of hegemony reads the attacks of 9/11 as a counter-hegemonic force, an attempt to challenge the prevailing order. Cox (1983) allows for this to happen in two ways, through 'wars of movement' (physical battles) and 'wars of position' (propaganda battles), asserting that only wars of position are likely to succeed in conditions where the hegemonic order is strongly embedded. It is fair to say that the norms of multi-lateral dispute resolution through international institutions and the global application of free market economics (after Fukuyama) were relatively strongly embedded at the turn of the millennium. The US reaction to the counter-hegemonic attacks of 9/11, paradoxically, engenders greater potential for systemic change than did the attacks themselves. The attacks of 9/11 met with almost universal international condemnation, but the doctrine of unilateral war posited by the US in response has unleashed dissonance in civil society. This reaction in civil society threatens the cultural constitution of the state-society complex (i.e. the 'relations of production' in the broad sense understood above) and by implication the world order. Much of the work of Cox has focussed on possibilities immanent in history for bottom-up social change that will eventually alter forms of state and of world order (see for example Cox, 1999).

Conclusion

When compared to the voluminous output of postmodern scholars in response to the attacks of 9/11 and the associated declaration of a war on terror, the post-Marxist response has been surprisingly muted. Perhaps this reflects the current academic fad within the critical school? Or perhaps mainstream critical scholars consider the strategic and meta-theoretical debates that have traditionally animated the school more important? Either way, given the primacy of the debate on global terrorism in the rest of the academy, it seems strange that more has not been written. That which has been written, has tended to animate that classical philosophical territory between particularism and universalism. Critical theory has retreated, through the immanent critique and multi-lateral cosmopolitanism from bald assertions of universally applicable moral principles, but continues to rely on a belief that progress towards universality remains possible and desirable.

The social contract of security has been shown to constitute political communities through practices of inequality and ‘unfreedom’. The deferral of equality through the creation of the Leviathan makes the liberty granted to a selective and partial form of freedom, allowed to some in the conditions of the ‘silence of the laws’. Yet, the spectre of equality is the greatest danger to the Leviathan. In Hobbes, the multitude can challenge the right of the sovereign to judge on good and evil and manifests itself as an equal judge. The multitude gives shapes to the equal right of publicly using one’s judgement that Kant will later on see as the premise of the Enlightenment. However, if in Kant, this right is still submitted to a selection, to a division of the social positions according to the division of labour, post-Marxist interpretations of equality radicalise it by rendering equality as a maxim for action mobilised against situations of social and political wrongs. ‘Peace, security and order’ as Hobbes defined the function of the modern state attempt do away with the politicisation of debasement, enslavement and contempt. In moral terms the case presented against the war on terror is a compelling one, but the perspectives offered are not immediately striking or novel. Is it then the manner in which we conceive of and produce knowledge about the world order that produces problems therewith? Or does a Manichaean war on terror justify the application of whatever means are deemed necessary to combat it?

References

Ashley, Richard (1981), "Political Realism and Human Interests", in International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 25 6(2).

Aradau, Claudia (2007), “Forget equality? Security, liberty and the ‘war on terror’ “, SGIR Sixth Pan-European International Relations Conference, ‘Making Sense of a Pluralist World’, Turin, 12-15 September 2007

Chomsky, Noam (2002), "Who are the Global Terrorists", in Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order, Eds. Ken Booth, Tim Dunne, Palgrave Macmillan.

Cox, Michael (2002), "Meanings of Victory: American Power after the Towers", in Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order, Eds. Ken Booth, Tim Dunne, Palgrave Macmillan.

Cox, Robert (1983), "Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method", in Millennium, Vol. 12 (2).

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