Background: What follow is a revised version of a dialogue Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn conducted at a conference on Hannah Arendt: Crises de l’Etat-nation, convened at l’Université Paris VII–Denis-Diderot, November 16-18, 2006. The original dialogue was published in French in a volume entitled Hannah Arendt: Crises de l’Etat-nation (Sens&Tonka, 2007).
A CONVERSATION ON HANNAH ARENDT’S CONCEPTION OF SOVEREIGNTY
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn
JK. A word about the backstory to the following conversation may be in order. Elisabeth and I met in 1968 in Hannah Arendt’s seminar on “Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century.” Studying under the guidance of a woman who had lived through the worst of those experiences, and probably better than anyone understood their unprecedentedness, was itself a remarkable experience – one we’ve talked and written about before. In Arendt’s seminar we also learned something no less remarkable about the art of thinking. If in its purest form thinking is a world-withdrawn activity, a swift, silent dialogue conducted by the thinking ego with itself, Arendt showed us by her own example that thinking also can be active in a conversation between people who, while not withdrawn from the world, find themselves in a space defined by a kind of decorum. The space of Arendt’s seminar was strictly bounded by the political narratives and testimonies she selected for us to read and discuss, where she, as first among equals (primus inter pares), was somehow able to establish equality as the common desideratum of everyone participating in the seminar. Which is to say that for a few hours each week we came together in a sort of public space, or at least in an ambience of political friendship, of philia politik , as Aristotle called it. There the self did not divide into the two-in-one of the thinking ego, but on the contrary, we strove to become each other’s other self, which, again according to Aristotle, is the consummation, the telos, of friendship. One could say, metaphorically, that the seminar was like the rehearsal and occasionally the performance of a concerto, in which, under Arendt’s direction, the solo parts were passed back and forth in a community of friends. Elisabeth and I so much enjoyed this manner of speaking, which by no means precluded contestation or debate, but was founded and depended on an underlying harmony or agreement, that for forty years we’ve relished every opportunity to revive it. Therefore, following Arendt as best we can, we will attempt to engage not only each other but also you in the spirit of Aristotlean friendship. Our topic is the controversial one of political sovereignty.
If Arendt had written a single essay on sovereignty rather than writing about it in a number of different places, she might have given it the title: “What Was Sovereignty?” So it seems consistent with her mode of thinking, which was also Aristotle’s, to begin by briefly looking back to the primary historical manifestation of national sovereignty in sixteenth century France. There is an Italian background to its French development, insofar as Niccolò Machiavelli at the beginning of the century, around 1513, first used the word “state” (il stato) to refer to what emerged – though in Italy not before more than three hundred years had passed – as the modern nation-state. In 1576 Jean Bodin’s Six livres de la république, which was written during the divisive religious wars in France, called for both a fully sovereign monarchy and religious toleration. The two appeals were interrelated: the need Bodin saw for sovereign political power to put an end to the chaos of civil war in France was likewise the condition under which Catholics and Protestants would come to tolerate each other. Bodin’s theory came to life, so to speak, when in 1593 Henri of Navarre, who was raised a Huguenot, on his march to sovereign power suddenly converted to Catholicism, saying “Paris vaut bien une messe” (“Paris is well worth a mass”). But then in 1598, as Henri IV, the first Bourbon king of France, he promulgated the Edict of Nantes, which granted Huguenots the freedom to worship according to the dictates of their conscience. The sovereign power of the state, a power above any other power, not excluding that of religious institutions, brought to an end, at least for a time, the devastation of France by Frenchmen. It is no wonder that Arendt always referred to France as “the nation-state par excellence,” for France was the first and foremost national state to emerge from medieval feudalism.
There is much more, of course, to be said about the history of the concept of sovereignty than can be gone into here. Already in the next century the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius set forth a body of laws between single nations – laws of nature, as he called them – whose scope, being international, set limits to sovereign power. His laws of war, for example, respected the lives and protected the property of private persons whose lands were invaded by foreign armies. His theory of international law would be examined in later centuries and today, after the twentieth century’s two disastrous World Wars, is the subject of renewed interest; but in the seventeenth century neither actual sovereigns or Thomas Hobbes, Grotius’s near contemporary, paid it much heed. Hobbes was the first modern political philosopher and the staunchest, subtlest, and perhaps most prescient of all exponents of political sovereignty. His basic insight is that the equality of men lies in the ability of the weakest to kill the strongest, “either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.” Since they live in “continual fear, and danger of violent death,” men in their natural or pre-political state “have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company.” In Hobbes’s well known words, their lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, 13), even if the word “short” might seem to someone less fearful than Hobbes perhaps misplaced. Be that as it may, it is their political organization into sovereign states that alone removes men from their natural state and relieves or prevents them from behaving like wolves to their fellow men (homo homini lupus). But in a world that has witnessed political crimes exceeding anything Hobbes imagined in the state of nature, some contemporary Hobbesians think he would admit the right of an international body to intercede in the internal affairs of a sovereign state that fosters genocide or the so-called “ethnic cleansing” of a minority within its borders. Perhaps, but it is also possible that these Hobbesians, in their effort to adapt the past to the future, have forgotten the structure and even the delimited purpose of the commonwealth Hobbes constructs.
The fear of violent death is the ground from which Hobbes’s’ commonwealth arises. His commonwealth, which he calls Leviathan, is an “artificial man,” a “mortal God,” that “overawes” its subjects, who willingly forfeit what we call political rights, retaining only the “natural” right to preserve their lives by any means available to them in cases of prosecution and war. What Hobbes calls “mixed government” or “diversity of opinions” – which Aristotle mentions favorably – can only weaken the “absolute power” of Leviathan (Ibid., 29), an artifact forged from distinct individuals who want and need its protection so they themselves can flourish and further their private, chiefly economic, interests. It is in exchange for security that they willingly forego the public expression of their opinions and forfeit their ability to join in concerted action. The “absolute” or “sovereign” power of Hobbes’s commonwealth means that justice and law are what it decrees them to be – and not what any international body deems them to be. With his relentless logic, Hobbes does not shy away from the fact that Leviathan is a tyranny, for “tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor less, than the name of sovereignty.” It follows that “the toleration of a professed hatred of tyranny” is identical to “a toleration of hatred to commonwealth in general” (Ibid., “A Review and Conclusion”). In the end, Leviathan does not pretend to permanence or anything like the “earthly immortality” that Arendt, for one, finds potential in the polities that in this and other repects she sharply distinguishes from tyrannies. Without the freedom to act on their own behalf, “the obligation of subjects,” according to Hobbes, lasts only as long as the sovereign power “is able to protect them.” If Leviathan’s subjects have given up their right to initiate action, other sovereign states – France, for example, with which Hobbes was well acquainted – have not, and hence all such powers “live in the condition of perpetual war, and upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed, and cannons planted against their neighbors round about” (Ibid., 21). If in war “the enemies get a final victory” then “there is no further protection of subjects in their loyalty” to Leviathan; thus, when Leviathan ceases to provide security, “then is the commonwealth dissolved” (Ibid., 29). Hobbes knew that the security and stability of a sovereign state are provisional, but today, in the numbing light of events such as those of September 11, 2001, his insight that the weak are equal to the strong in their ability to inflict violent death has taken on a whole new meaning. One result of that has been that Hobbes’s understanding of sovereignty, which is a philosophically elaborated version of the divine right of kings and a theory of state-sovereignty independent of the institution of monarchy, has shown its resiliency and persistance. How many of today’s developing nations aspire to anything higher than achieving the status of a sovereign state, and how many of today’s established powers, most of which consider themselves democracies, are willing, when it comes down to questions of power, to compromise their sovereignty?
Historically, however, there was one great exception. In Arendt’s words, “perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics…was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the Republic, the insight [shared with Hobbes] that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.” The word sovereignty nowhere appears in the Constitution of the United States of America, which moreover contradicts the concept of sovereignty in its Sixth Article, an article that had never before been included in any comparable document. The Sixth Article states that “all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” How ironic it is that the American Republic, with its potential to point the way to an increased measure of peace and freedom among the nations of the world, by breaking that “supreme Law” has become a virtual breeding ground of violence at home and abroad. In its so-called “war against terror” the sovereignty of the United States has become grossly apparent. For example, as a signatory to the Treaty of Rome, the United States would be subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court established in The Hague in 2002; but because specifiable acts of its own forces in its war on terror, including but not limited to torture, might be prosecuted there, by presidential fiat the United States has withdrawn itself from that jurisdiction. This and other international treaties were treated not as “the supreme Law of the Land,” but as if they were mere “covenants” or agreements between persons, which, according to Hobbes, are “but empty words” unless enforced by “coercive power” (Ibid., 15).
Reading news reports from all over the world, it sometimes almost seems as if what Hobbes most dreaded, a “war of all against all,” could be realized, though not as he conceived it. Would it not be an even deeper irony if America’s abnegation, her sovereign self-denial of her own example in forging a comity of the world’s nations, were to result in a post-political rather than a pre-political state of nature? In that eventuality, America’s international isolation and domestic exhaustion would be assured. In other words, the concept of sovereignty, originally intended to stave off war and promote tolerance and prosperity, by increasing the number of wars and refining the means of violence to wage them, will have come full circle. Even if, now that they have been exposed, the excesses and abuses of the war on terror are curtailed in the future, and even if the United States should submit, which seems less likely, to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, the expression of America’s sovereignty rings clear as a bell in the words of America’s outgoing president: “We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation.” Elisabeth, let me put a question to you: Is the new-found absolute sovereignty of our Republic an emblem of its power, or on the contrary, a primary factor in the waste and diminution of what was its power?
#2
( needs to be reduced)
.2. EYB
You have started us off in the Arendtian manner: taking up a concept , sovereignty, you have explored it’s history, emphasizing the experiences in the world out of which it –as the sovereign state–arose as the best answer offered at the time to the chaos of civil discord and religious war. And you have noted how the American Constitution, in effect, questioned that best existing answer, the nation-state. In Arendt’s work, this kind of conceptual analysis was always followed by an analysis of contemporary political conditions in which she focused on novel elements, unprecedented situations, and then queried what the concept –sovereignty, in this case—meant in the contemporary conditions and how it contributed to them. She was always acutely attuned to how concepts, generated in one context, can blind people to the realities they face in quite another context, and how they can also, more ominously, be prime contributors to the realties people are having trouble facing. The pursuit of sovereignty, which meant making security into the goal of politics, is, in our world a key contribution to the elimination of politics from our world –as Arendt saw clearly more than fifty years ago.
I want to respond by considering what is new in our contemporary conditions, trying to show why the concept of sovereignty is so problematic now, as it contributes to insecuriy and lack of freedom. So let me first go back to the post-War period in which Arendt was writing The Origins of Totalitarianism, after having presaged many of its themes in a series of wartime articles for Aufbau, chiefly on Jewish issues. After the War, she was intensely involved –intellectually and practically—with the emergence of the state of Israel, which was, of course, declared a sovereign state in the wake of its War of Independence in 1948. Arendt, who wanted a homeland for stateless Jews as strongly as anyone, always felt that it was tragic that Israel was set up on the European (originally the French) nation-state model: that is, it was a multinational state in which one nation –the Jews—was the ruling nation while the Arabs living in the sate became second class citizens and while the displaced Palestinians were left stateless. The Jewish religion was instituted as the state religion. The goal that the Jewish founding fathers were trying to achieve was maximum security for the Jews living on the land of Palestine and for all those who had flooded in and were continuing to flood in after the Holocaust. Arendt herself had worked with Judah Magnes and his group to argue for a binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be equal and in which there would be no state religion or even religious parties in a multiparty system. She did not think first and foremost in terms of protecting the state, but of assuring that states would not diminish plurality or political life or render any people second class citizens or stateless.
Even while the conflict between the new state of Israel and the stateless Palestinians was shaping up as the crucial –the paradigmatic– conflict that it is has become, the United States and the Soviet Union were facing off in the pattern that came to be known as the Cold War. We are very familiar with this as a War in which both sides came to possess weapons of mass destruction which they threatened to use, asserting their sovereignty. But, of course, behind this story of a terrorism of mutual threat, was the further story of how the United States and the Soviet Union set up client states to become part of their Cold War. For both states, their security seemed to depend upon both assertion of sovereignty and control over a system of client states. That is, having client states became part of the sense of what sovereignty permits and requires. What might be called state sovereignty imperialism was legitimated.
There were basically three kinds of client states. As the European overseas empires in Africa and south Asia broke up during and after the Second World War, new states emerged The borders for these states were often set by the colonizers, so that groups with traditional animosities were cast together in an artificial territory to battle it out for dominance and sovereignty. The United States and the Soviet Union both stepped in to try to align the new states with themselves, that is, in effect, to compromise the sovereignty of these new states. The means for intervention varied, but each and every means used had totalitarian features, so state sovereignty imperialism perpetuated totalitarian elements in various forms in the post-totalitarian world.
The second type of client state existed in Eastern Europe: the Warsaw Pact states had been sovereign states before the War, and then they were drawn into the Soviet orbit, retaining their pre-War names and sometimes their boundaries, but ruled de facto by the Soviet Union and constituting its security buffer to the west. To the east and south, the Soviet Union was not so successful, even though its ideology, Communism, was embraced in many variant forms –in China, by an independent Communist Party leadership, in India by a Party that supported the Indian national policy of non-alignment, for two examples particularly important in the current world.
The third type of state existed in South and Central America, where it explicitly had the name “the national security state.” In these states, military rulers focused the military and police resources of the state on those of their citizens they judged to be communists or social reformers. They practiced state terrorism through so-called “death squads.” As early as 1946, the United States established a school in Panama for training “national security state” terrorists who became state leaders in Panama, Nicaragua, Argentina, Guatemala, Bolivia, and El Salvador . It is no secret that the school functions to this day. The U.S. also used its own security unit, the CIA, and its military in order to support the military dictatorships of the national security states and to protect American corporate interests. The region was the United States’ buffer against the Communist world as Eastern Europe was the Soviet Union’s buffer against the non-Communist world. During the same post-War years when the world was filled with struggles in which sovereignty was the ideal, the mark of freedom, for peoples in national liberation fronts who had never known it or who had achieved it and then lost it, the Soviet Union and the United States were organized to compromise their clients’ sovereignty for the sake of protecting their own sovereignty, each perpetuating totalitarian tactics .
For the two superpowers, sovereignty came to mean unchecked, unlimited, control in foreign affairs, and in America this control was fatefully equated with independence from foreign rule, that is, equated with the sovereignty that Cold Warrior Americans assumed had been won in the American Revolution (although, as you noted Jerry, the American Constitution makes no claim of sovereignty and assumes that treaties with other states will be the law of the land). In the Cold War climate, the dedication of our Founding Fathers to a Constitution supporting alliances with other states, making mutual pledges in foreign affairs, was as lost from popular opinion as was the checks and balances system of republican governance in internal affairs because all three branches of government became dedicated to the perpetual Cold War. Americans became accustomed to assume that freedom from foreign rule depended upon the strength of the Executive branch of the government and the leadership of the President as Commander-in-Chief over an ever-growing military. The checks and balances system of government that the Founding Fathers had learned from Montesquieu was as frightening to Joseph McCarthy and later nationalists and imperialists as it had been to the French revolutionists who believed in undivided centralized power.
While the Cold War contradictions over the ideal of sovereignty were being played out, many visions of new federations of sovereign states –visions of a new Europe, for the most clear example– were articulated, mostly by Europeans who embraced federalism as a political ideal. The most important philosophical advocate of federations –implying relinquishment of the ideal of state sovereignty–was Arendt’s teacher Karl Jaspers, especially in his 1949 work The Origin and Goal of History.
When the United Nations was established as a successor to the failed League of Nations, many Conventions –like the 1948 Genocide Convention—were articulated that called for some limitations upon the sovereignty of signatories. Regional economic alliances and military alliances like NATO were set up and strengthened. Eventually, other supranational and international formations and institutions arose; the Human Rights Movement emerged, and the International Court was set up in The Hague. But always, in these various types of formations and conventions, where the ideal of sovereignty was crticized, it returned in some other form. Overcoming sovereignty in the United Nations is a very partial and contradictory matter on many levels, and every debate in the UN about intervening in the affairs of a sovereign state brings the contradictions to the fore.
Summarily, it is obvious, as Arendt and many other theorists of international relations have noted, that in the post-War world there have been, on the one hand, struggles in which sovereignty was the ideal, and, on the other hand, developments in which sovereignty was viewed as the obstacle to international or supranational cooperation but was embraced nonetheless. We can say simply that there is sovereignty for nationalists following the old European nation-state ideal and sovereignty for internationalists who cannot bring themselves to give up the ideal of sovereignty in practice. That contrast –very simply stated—can at least allow us to realize the missing possibility: a vision of nations in which sovereignty on the old European nation-state model is not the ideal; and a vision of international co-operation or federation in which sovereignty is not carried over in practice.
I think that the conflict of nationalist and internationalist aspirations was itself (and remains) a really novel political feature of the post-War situation, in which the contradictions in that contrast have become greater and greater. This novelty has meant that no alternative vision –like the one that Arendt herself articulated—has been able to emerge in the nearly two decades since 1989, when the Cold War in its acute form ended and our present era, which is now defined by the war on terrorism, began.
#3
So Elisabeth, I take it that what you mean is that security is not the end of politics, for Hannah Arendt. And I agree completely with that. As long as what she calls the law of human plurality governs the appearance of men on the earth, politics , which in its basic definition is simply the living together of men and women in their absolute distinction from one another, has no end, no telos– not economic and social prosperity, and not security. If politics had an end outside of itself, we would not be free. And as Arendt says, the meaning of politics is freedom. I was in a conference just two weeks ago, in Berlin, which took that quotation from Arendt as its theme: Der Sinn von Politik Ist Freiheit. Arendt explicates that thought in a variety of ways. In “The Human Condition”, for example, she writes “the life span of man running towards death would inevitably carry everything to destruction and ruin if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever present reminder that men, though they must die are not born in order to die, but in order to begin.”
In an essay written a little bit later, Arendt goes farther. She says “action in politics among all the capabilities of human life, is the only thing of which we could not even conceive without at least assuming that freedom exists. Without freedom, political life would be meaningless. The raison d’être of politics is freedom and its field of experience is action.”
It is action that Arendt retrieves from the pre philosophic experience of politics, and freedom experienced as action. The joy of appearing to others in one’s uniqueness and recognizing the others in theirs, the joy of together generating the power to interrupt the course of human affairs by initiating something new and seeing it through to completion. When I talk about action as I am doing right now I sometimes wonder (and wonder if you do, too, Elisabeth?), whether we have any idea what Arendt was talking about. Is the experience of action so far from us today that we can talk about action and we can talk about Arendt but perhaps not know what she was talking about.
This is one reason I think that Arendt goes back to ancient times, so that she can tell stories that still make sense to us today. It is not that she longed for the past and her emphasis on M….. and Initiation,[????????? It's still said sometimes that she was a nostalgic, but that is just ridiculous.
Let me tell briefly one of her own favorite stories. just as the victorious Achaeans returning from Troy, the first war of annihilation founded the polis of Athens whose laws and walls (arose) incorporated the freedom to act and speak within them, just as the Romans descendants of the defeated Trojans founded an eternal city, an everlasting common thing, a Res Publica. Arendt derives the founding of Rome not from Romulus, but from Aene in Virgil's Aeneid. To me, it is apparent that security, though not the end of politics, is indeed among its goals. As much as actions in speaking, the preservation or the security of the ability to act and speak is a goal of the political goal of founding. The modern problem of sovereignty did not arise in the short lived polis of Athens nor did it either in the extremely long lived Republic and the Empire of Rome. The reason for Rome's extraordinary longevity was that the act of founding was repeated in every Roman political act. That is as Hanna Arendt read Roman history, at least, it was the tradition that bound back every act to the original founding of Rome. At least that was the case until it wasn't, which can be dated to the loss of Varus legions East of the Rhine in 9 AD. One could say Rome's turning to the defence of her territorial borders was the beginning of her decline. So securely were her foundations laid however, it took more than 400 years to shatter them. And with their shattering, the Pax Romana, we should not forget, was followed by what we know as the Dark Ages, long ages lacking public light and therefore, Elizabeth, as you said, remembrance of men's words and deeds. Public light was restored in the Middle Ages, specially in the High Middle Ages, but then it emanated from a single source, which was again Rome but this time the Church of Rome in so many respects the ere of Imperial Rome. The question of sovereignty did not arise then but was subsumed under the recognized spiritual authority of the One Catholic Church. The question of sovereignty as the means of security arose in territorially bounded nation-states. Following the Renaissance, a rebirth of politics with action and acts of founding understood in a secular sense not unlike the ancient pagan sense. We saw how that happened as the result of civil war motivated by various religious beliefs. And as you Elizabeth have now shown, in detail, the career of the concept of sovereignty in the modern world which for Arendt is the world than began with the explosions of the first atomic bombs, at the close of WWII, you have shown the twists and turns of the career of sovereignty in the post-war formation of the state of Israel, the Cold War, and the subsequent visions of new federations of sovereign states including such organizations as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and above all I feel you are right in suggesting that in the course of this dialogue Arendt's alternative to the sovereign nation-state will come up but before turning to it, I want not so much to question as to examine what you said about Arendt's focus on novel elements and unprecedented situations. I take it you mean more than the original insights we more or less expect from sophisticated political commentators. And I certainly agree that Arendt's political commentaries are sui generis and often difficult which are among the reasons that real politicians that is to say practitioners of real politic pay so little attention to them. At least in America. I am less convinced that the depth of her analysis of the relation, say, between truth and politics or of the complex role of lying in politics or of the relation between poetry and politics or of her dismissal of politics as problem solving is due to her ability to discern unprecedented elements in specific situations. I'm most convinced of that. The depth of her analysis and of judgement of particular events such as the war in Indochina Vietnam, the deception revealed in the Pentagon papers about that war, and perhaps most crucially her judgment of the man Adolf Eichmann does indeed have it source in the one event, the advent of totalitarianism as a form of rule in the 20th century which she viewed as wholly unprecedented in the entire history of mankind. The point I think is not that the elements of totalitarianism – anti-Semitism and imperialism to mention the two most prominent – were unprecedented but that their crystallization as she calls it, was. The crystallization of elements in totalitarianism was certainly contingent, certainly not necessary, but it also provided an answer, a horrifying answer to what Arendt saw as the burden of our times, the presence in the world of masses of world alienated or worldless human beings which make the condition sine qua non of totalitarian movements. In the sight of totalitarianisms, totalitarians, as Arendt I think alone was able to imagine it, all individual human beings who felt secure in the world, were superfluous regarding the superhuman laws of the motion of nature into history. We've already heard about that in this conference. The aim of those laws was on the one hand the creation of a master race an on the other of a classless society in the future. These laws of motion were inexorable, sweeping away all positive laws and all concepts of human justice before them. The project of totalitarianism was to accelerate those laws by removing all impediments from their paths, that is, anyone who felt secure in the world as it was. It is to be noted that these laws were turned into the ideologies, the two ideologies of Nazism on the one hand, of Bolshevism on the other. For Arendt, it is interesting that the ideologies themselves were a substitute for a principle of action in totalitarianism. She speculates, not in "The Origins of Totalitarianism", but in manuscripts afterwards that the perfect totalitarian state, a state of XXXX neither Nazism or Bolshevism, there is a tension between I believe Arendt's description of totalitarianism and her concept of totalitarianism, but the concept would not in its perfect instancing issue would need no ideology, I'll come back to that. The world alienated masses proved all too susceptible to totalitarian movements, at their own peril, as they soon discovered, but the harder task was to uproot those who believed their roots were fixed in the world, to some extent as God's Chosen People, for example, or as members of a successful class, such as the Kulaks in the Soviet Union. Members of these groups must not simply be liquidated, the totalitarians thought, but turned into living corpses before they were killed, precisely as if they had been born in order to die. In is thus that Arendt understands is the most advanced concentration of slave labour camps as the central institutions of totalitarianism. I cannot imagine a more appalling image of the living corpse than a man starving to death not alone in a dungeon but in daylight where he appears and is seen by others. The Nazi factories of death whose final products were corpses first rid men of the juridical status then their ability to make moral choices and finally of their individuality, their potentiality for freedom, their spontaneity, their ability to act. Totalitarian regimes were not lawless, but so to speak, legally criminal which is the primary reason I believe that they baffle our minds to this day. The nature of their criminality required a new category, crimes against humanity, which to Arendt meant crimes against the human status of plurality, the distinctness of every human being including totalitarians themselves. The point of this quick look at Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism is that when as has happened Amnesty International has asked for permission to cite word for word Arendt's description of how the Nazis deprived human beings of their juridical status but now in regard of the United States' suspension of habeas corpus in Guantanamo Bay and likewise in its practice of extraordinary rendition of men guilty of no crime to a network of prisons all over the world where they are subjected to torture, humiliation and degradation, when Amnesty International asked to do that, to repeat that phrase in its publications, not that phrase but that whole section of Arendt's book, it is not because Amnesty International has discovered a new or unprecedented phenomenon, but because on the contrary and thanks to Arendt, it has been able to recognize a certain very ominous phenomenon for what it is.
Even if they were not perfect embodiments of totalitarianism, the concept of totalitarianism, Nazism and Bolshevism committed crimes that in Arendt's view broke the Tradition of our political and philosophical thought in the sense that the categories we've thought in for more than 2000 years were irrelevant to comprehending those crimes. We know from Arendt that terror is the essence of totalitarianism, of the concept of totalitarianism. Now that the Tradition is broken, it seems that there is no authority or superpower as fore. There is no negotiating, no relinquishing of sovereignty as Elizabeth pointed out, I have this sense that sovereignty has so changed its role in the world that instead of establishing security, it is actually inviting terrorism. This is very tentative, and it is something I really want to think with Elizabeth about, with all of you, about, I'm not sure I can explain and may be I should not try to explain it now, but in a sense the only way that terrorists, stateless terrorists, can seem to make an impression on sovereign states and to turn America for instance into a pitiful, helpless giant, a figure grown week through the very excess of its strength, seems to be through the methods of terrorism and that's what I mean when I say that sovereign states, not intentionally of course, but in fact, invite terrorism today.
letter #4
IV. EYB
I certainly agree with you that terrorism has emerged in the five year period 2001-2006 defined by the “war on terror” as the chief source of insecurity, although this development had been in course during the entire Cold War period and only saw something of a lull after 1989. Your argument could be illustrated by a graph tracking the dip in the international arms trade after 1989, which was then followed by a slow restoration as arms transfers became more a matter of transnational corporations selling than of governments selling. The last five years of the graph would show a spike of government promoted private trading up to levels way beyond what was going on prior to 1989. What we are witnessing in response to the identification of terrorism as the chief source of insecurity in the world, and the resolution to make war upon terrorism itself (not any particular group), is the militarization of the entire world. There is hardly a state on the planet that is not increasing its military budget exponentially –even Japan and Germany, which after the Second World War committed themselves to living without armies, now have military budgets larger than they have had in fifty years.
It seems to me that as the identified source of insecurity has evolved in the direction of terrorism, the content of the ideologies buttressing the sovereignty embraced for security’s sake has shifted accordingly. All around the world, in variant forms, we see apolitical identities framed in religious terms replacing the mid-century staples of totalitarian ideology: triumph of the Aryan race in the Nazi case, and triumph of the proletariat and the withering away of the sate in the Communist variant. Arendt analyzed these as an ideology of Nature and an ideology of History. We might call what we see around us now an ideology of Transcendence. But, like the ideologies of Nature and History, the various types of ideologies of Transcendence both justify terror against enemies and, further, look forward to the elimination of politics –now in the form of the secular state, which stands in the way of Divine sovereignty in human affairs.
Religiously motivated terrorism is very different than the terrorism practiced by cultural or ethnic groups who are in rebellion against the predominating nation in an established nation-state. Such groups want either to take over the state or to form a separate one. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its off-shoots and the Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA) have often resorted to terror, as have the Tamil Tigers guerillas in Sri Lanka; the Front for the Liberation of Quebec (FLQ) and the National Liberation Front of Corsica (FLNC) occasionally resort to terror. These nationalist groups are, in turn, quite different than the groups organized along the Cold War ideological lines as leftwing -- like the Red Brigades based in Italy or the Baader-Meinhof Gang based in Germany, or the Weather Underground in the United States or Direct Action in Canada—or those that are ideologically rightwing –like the Klu Klux Klan or Aryan Nation in the United States, and the various neo-Nazi groups in Europe like Third Position in Italy and the multitude of smaller groups in Germany, Austria, and France, some connected to rightwing political parties. Religion is not the primary ideological inspiration in these groups, and their cohesion has lessened (particularly on the left) since 1989. It was these Cold War rooted groups that Arendt was considering in her 1969 On Violence, where she began to analyze why violence was, then, becoming so determinative of political life generally –that is, why politics was receding in the face of consistent resort to force by such groups as well as by states practicising state terrorism.
I want to look for a moment more closely at some variants on the ideologies of Transcendence or of religious identity that we live with at present, focusing on why and how they foster violence, including by permitting terrorism for fighting terrorism.
In the United States, the religious identity movement is mostly Christian, and there are two distinct sub-divisions of it that support and justify their members in the practice of terrorism. At the center of one is abhorrence of abortion, and the chief terrorist technique advocated is assassination of abortion providers. Reconstruction Theology, claiming roots in Calvinism, envisions a fully theocratic Christian state; Dominion Theology wants the dominion of God over politics and society without advocating a state formation. By contrast, the second type is less exist and more racist. The so-called Christian Identity movement is an anti-Semitic and racist vision of European whites overthrowing the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) and any people of color associated with it in order to establish a state ruled by biblical law.
Neither of these sub-variants, one primarily sexist, the other primarily anti-Semitic, and both primarily concerned with internal threats, has the influence of diverse Christian fundamentalist groups that support the use of terror by the United States government in foreign affairs, but the common denominator for all is embrace of theocracy.
Like Christianity, Islam includes many, many subgroupings and doctrines, some of which support terorrism, most not. After the War, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Islamic Assembly (Jamaat-i-Islami) in Pakistan galvanized oppositions to the emergent secular nationalisms of Egypt and Pakistan; both groups wanted modernization, but within states that reflected Muslim teaching, and they wanted pan-Muslim unity of the sort that had been envisaged at the end of the 19th century by pan-Slavists. and Pan-Aryans. The secular nationalism advocated by Muslims like Gandhi and Nehru in India or Sukarno in Indonesia seemed to the Islamic critics to be just variations on the hated Western theme of secularism, a threat to Muslim identity. When the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran joined the Egyptian and Pakistani theorists concerned with preserving Muslim identity, corrupt Muslim societies were identified as just as dangerous to Muslim purity and the influence of sharia law as the corrupting Western ways that began challenging Islam as far back as the Crusades. Jihad or struggle against corruption and for true Islam was advocated, as it had been for 250 years by the Wahhabi movement , which became the official religion of Saudi Arabia and has been promoted by the Saudi government throughout Africa and southern Asia. Many Wahhabists –including Osama bin Laden of al-Queda—have denounced the Saudi rulers as corrupt and Westernized themselves, but, nonetheless, the official promotion of Wahhabism by the Saudis has made it the most influential single ideology in the Muslim world, and after the Israeli victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and then the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that brought Khomeini to power, advocates of violence against Israel and for Islamic purity have gained even more ground. But there is much dissension: the Saudis now fear the growing influence of Iranian Shites who are not Arabs but Persians.
Ironically enough, during the early years of the Cold War, the United States saw in the Islamic purity movement an opportunity to try to create in Central Asia a linkage of anti-Soviet states. Using their ally in Pakistan, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the United States CIA recruited Islamic jihadists in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Algeria to fight the Soviet Union, and it seemed to the CIA strategists that their plan had paid off as the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in 1989. But the CIA had, in fact, helped create and arm a transnational jihadist force that would, during the 1990’s, turn its violence upon the United States. There was a clear pattern to the increasing Muslim jihadist violence. A state would hope to use the Muslim jihadists against its enemy –as the United States did against the Soviet Union, as Israel did in enlisting Hamas to undermine Yassir Arafat’s secular PLO, as Anwar Sadat did in countering the leftwing movement in Egypt—and then end up facing jihadist guns.
Samuel Huntington’s phrase “clash of civilizations” has been widely adopted to present the complex political developments in the very diversified Muslim communities as a single phenomenon: an emergent Muslim superpower –the successor to the Soviet “Evil Empire”—opposed to Western civilization. This cliché is distorting in many ways, which I cannot go into here, but it is important in our context to note that it obscures how little the Islamicists who follow Wahhabism are concerned with state sovereignty. The majority of them –those who are not the rulers of sovereign states-- are opponents of the corrupt Muslim sovereign states and hopeful for theocracy, Divine sovereignty. Instead of defending the ideal of the secular state against the theocrats, the present American government leadership has shifted more and more into its own version of theocracy; but they want Divine sovereignty in and through a state. American officials –in the executive branch, but also in the Supreme Court--are now required to demonstrate their credentials as patriots but also as Christians. So there is no clash of civilizations here, there is a clash of two versions of the same anti-political ideology of Transcendence. We are back –but under modern world-wide conditions—to the 16th century European religious wars in which the concept of sovereignty was born.
#5
Thank you Elizabeth for making me see more clearly what I was tentatively calling an invitation to terrorism through/by sovereignty, by the concept of sovereignty.
For Hannah Arendt, the human condition of natality and mortality, of being born and having to die, guarantees change in the world. New generations, every new generation is a new beginning. Otherwise, we should not be so reluctant to die. At least as long as the world that lies between us still interests us. That is a tautology, that Latin words inter essa mean to be between. But it is not an empty tautology. The presence of terror in our world has changed it. Yet terror is not unprecedented, the essence of totalitarianism was terror to Arendt. But also the finest image of terror I know comes out of Homer at the onslaught of battle an Achaean is so terrified that he scratches digs into the earth for a place to hide. The language could hardly be stronger; he wants to take himself out of the daylight, out of the realm of appearances, out of the world. It is such fear that terror seeks to instil, I believe. It is not the same as destroying whole cities or populations, Hiroshima, Nagasaki for instance, not the same as what happened between Hutus and Tutsis, this is not genocide, but the fear of unanticipated, unpredictable violence with no identifiable target. It has a great deal in common with Hobbes pre-political or post-political state of nature. It was an alliance of sovereign states that defeated Nazi Germany in WWII. But the inadequacy of the response of a sovereign state to stateless terrorism is obvious in the case of Iraq which was not a totalitarian state, but a tyranny; not a producer of weapons of mass destruction; and most important, not a base of stateless terrorism. It is pretty clear that Iraqis were neither shocked not awed by the US invasion of that name. Al Qaida is not a sovereign state, and it is more than likely, I think, that the sovereign states' war on terror, which is not even a bad metaphor, has little chance of succeeding or even of ever ending.
The case of Israel is instructive here. As you mentioned earlier, Hannah Arendt worked hard for a Jewish homeland in Palestine but she opposed the Zionist idea of a sovereign state of the Jewish people. The opportunity Arendt saw for Jews, after all they had been through, was to retrieve a fragment of their past and again become a light unto Nations. There are two important considerations here, the first is Arendt's well known and much debated concept of a right to have rights; the second is the structure of the state she thought Jews could establish in Palestine and its principle condition.
If the right to have rights were among an individual's civil rights, it would be among the rights of persons deprived of such rights, as Jews were so often deprived in the past and more radically than ever by the Nazis, it would simply make no sense. A right to have rights must be the right of a people to become a nation by founding a state whose institutions announce and guard the civil rights of its citizens. Arendt has an interesting statement to that effect, it's from "On Revolution", where she says "To mistake civil rights for political freedom is to equate the preliminaries of civilized government with the very substance of a free republic."
Wolfgang Hauer made the distinction between a people and a nation yesterday and Arendt makes it in an article that is not very well known, it was published in Buenos Ayres in 1940, and in it, she makes the same distinction, very strongly, between a people and a nation. She say, for instance, and perhaps here in this context it is interesting, that when Pétain signed the armistice with the Nazis, that he destroyed the French nation. What was left, she said, was the French people, by which she did not mean every Frenchman, she meant those people who fought in the Resistance. It's an example of the distinction between – for her – a people and a nation.
If the right to have right is the right of a people to become a nation, then it is not a civil but a political right and politics is always for Arendt what goes on between a plurality of individuals speaking together about what concerns them in common, generating the power to do what they together can be done by acting together. Founding a new state is a risky business, as we know from both ancient and modern history, hence Arendt's considerable interest in foundation myths, but because of what they suffered and endured, Arendt thought the Jews, her own people had the opportunity to found a state whose power potential might be very great. The Jewish people exercising their right to have rights and mindful of the role of justice in their past would be the foundation of their state, there would be nothing beneath them to sustain its existence, they themselves would be their own foundation. The structure of a new state in Palestine as Arendt saw it, could not be that of a European nation-state. The Jews are and island surrounded by a sea of Arabs, she says, and alone, without the help of the United States and others, could hardly survive if Arab peoples joined together to crush them. The aid in money and material the state of Israel receives has so far allowed it to survive. But peace has never appeared as the goal of the many wars and almost constant conflicts that have engaged it since it was carved out of the British mandate in 1948. And the various roadmaps to peace which have mainly be drawn not by Arabs and Jews together but by diplomats from outside states and organizations have led almost nowhere. Already in 1948 Arendt foresaw what now perhaps has come to pass, that Israel would become a militaristic state behind closed but threatened borders, a semi-sovereign state as she calls it, from which Jewish culture would gradually vanish. In 1948 Folke Bernadotte, the grandson of the King of Sweden who in mediating between Jewish and Arab interests called for the right of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians Arabs to return to the homes from which Palestinian Jews had driven them, the right of Arabs and Jews to live as neighbours was what Benadotte called for, and he was shot dead by a revisionist Lehi group, or Stern Gang. Bernadotte, a man of peace and judgment was in Arendt's words the agent of no one, murdered by the agents of war. The sovereign state of Israel bears never resemblance to the bi-national Arab-Jewish state envisioned by Arendt for whose realization in Palestine she worked with Judah Magnes and others. Its structure – this is for the state she worked for – would be a council system of governing; a system that one could say, is genuinely revolutionary. Not only because it appeared spontaneously after revolutions, it appeared as Arendt herself says that the council corresponds to and springs from the very experience of political action, this thing I am not too sure any of us including myself grasps, it springs spontaneously from action. Genuinely revolutionary council system, in that sense, but also in the sense that it is the point of revolutions to found – not to return us to the status quo ante but to found a new kind of state. Quoting Arendt: "local self governing and mixed Jewish-Arab municipal and rural councils on a small scale and as numerous as possible are the only realistic political measures that can eventually lead to the political emancipation of Palestine. In this structure, power would be generated by agreements handed up, not down, from level to level of councils, the highest of which would be a parliament, but the power would arise from the levels in which ordinary Jews and Arabs came together to deal with a common problems that lie between them and relate them. Politically speaking, there is no other to be excluded in the council system and its power potential is immense, it could become, as Arendt suggests, a federation of Mediterranean peoples that is to say an Arab-Jewish council state if you will, could become a federation of Mediterranean peoples which would not be a sovereign state but a new autonomous polity in the strict sense of giving itself its own laws with its own large place in the world, the condition of the council system of governing does not entail loving one's neighbour which is for Arendt always anti-political but rather entering into political friendship with him, political friendship – Aristotle's philia politike – is much the same as the public spirit in which promises are made to be kept. The concept of rule which one might call the essence of sovereignty would be ruled out in a public spirited polity of different peoples. The continued renewal of a council, I should say, excuse me, the continuous renewal of a council state would, and I believe this is Arendt's chief point, return men to the world. Its continuous refounding would keep open its public spaces. The council state as Arendt puts it, offers the right to everyone to participate in public affairs, a state, she adds to which the principal of sovereignty would be wholly alien. Everyone would have a right to participate in public affairs and it would be a state to which the principle of sovereignty would be wholly alien. A state, that is, in which the principle of territorial sovereignty would be replaced by the principle of confederation. The likelihood of terrorism arising in such a council state is very small and the chances of its effectiveness virtually nil.
Draft letter #6
I want to an analogous distinction in the domain Arendt called “the life of the mind” to the distinction you have drawn between vertical and horizontal relationships in the political domain . You’ve noted clearly how vertical relationships tend toward assertions of sovereignty and violence while the horizontal ones of the council system both generate power and preserve freedom. As Arendt criticized verticality in the political domain, equating sovereignty with lack of freedom, she also criticized conceptions of “the sovereign self.”
Throughout her last work, The Life of the Mind, which was to have had sections on Thinking, Willing, and Judging, Arendt analogized the political domain and the mental domain. She praised the freedom-preserving republican form of government –particularly in a long discussion of the American Founding Fathers at the end of the Willing volume, a continuation of what she had written in On Revolution—and she imagined a kind of republic of the mental faculties. In the mental republic, no faculty was to be dominant. No faculty was to be sovereign or invoke the sovereignty of the mind as a whole under its leadership. Thinking, Willing and Judging were to be a system of checks and balances: a senate, an executive, and a court. (In On Revolution, Arendt had explicitly called the American Senate the governmental branch of opinions –for her, the products of thinking—and the Supreme Court the branch of judgment. )
Arendt did not think that political concepts or institutions arose as projections onto worldly affairs of internal or psychological experiences; she did not, in Nietzsche’s manner, for example, imagine “the microcosm swelling up to the macrocosm” via philosophical notions, as he described such a projective process in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, using terms that would have been congenial to Freud. But she did think that concepts which have arisen out of worldly, political experience –as the concept of sovereignty arose from the experience of radical insecurity in the period of the European religious wars—are reinforced and shaped by philosophical understandings of the self, which have their sources in internal, mental experiences. In the Western philosophical tradition, a concept of the sovereign self had been waiting for centuries to reinforce and shape the political concept of sovereignty that arose in the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s progenitor was Plato, but the form it took among the Stoics, in the Hellenistic period –when there was such a widespread unworldliness or search for transcendence—was crucial, and lay behind the Christian elevation of the Will (not Reason, Nous, or Thinking) as the sovereign faculty.
Arendt always stressed that Plato had believed that a ruler was qualified to rule over others by virtue of his ability to rule over himself. Reason should rule spirit and flesh, as in an ideal state the philosopher-kings should rule the guardians and the artisans. And the philosopher-kings were perfectly justified in ruling a state for their own security, the security of reason dedicated to unworldly ideas. Again and again, Arendt analyzed how philosophers following this Platonic image became unable to appreciate the political realm, and unable to tolerate action, people acting together, with all the unpredictability and unruliness that action entails.
But for Plato and his Greek heirs, particularly the Stoics, human freedom still existed in the political realm, among acting free citizens (not slaves, and not women). Their questions were about how that freedom in and through action could be ruled, directed, by a knowing philosopher-ruler. That is, Plato and his Greek heirs did not have the mental experience of unfreedom or lost freedom that the early Christians, Paul and then, later, Augustine, described as a split in the mind: the mind, commanding itself to do, to act, meets resistance. An I-will provokes an I-nil, and paralysis is the result. For these Christian philosophers, freedom came to mean free will: a free will is one which can overcome its own internal obstacles, which is sovereign, independent from others and eventually dominating over them. Arendt noted how the ideal of the free, sovereign will translated into 18th century political writing by citing Tom Paine’s insistence that “to be free it is sufficient [for man] that he wills it,” and the corollary statement made by Lafayette about the nation-state: “Pour qu’une nation soit libre, il suffit qu’elle veuille l’etre.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau earned Arendt’s prize for being “the most consistent representative of the theory of sovereignty, “ which he derived directly from the will. He conceived of political power in the image of individual will power. Arguing against Montesquieu, Rousseau insisted that power must be sovereign, that is, indivisible, because “a divided will would be inconceivable”” and a will bound by the future intolerable. Rousseau’s vision of an ideal state in which each and every citizen was a little sovereign island and none was bound for the future in any way, is at the exact opposite pole to Arendt’s own vision of a council state in which “political business is…transacted within and elaborate framework of ties and bonds for the future—such as laws and constitutions, treaties and alliances—all of which derive in the last instance from the faculty to promise and to keep promises in the face of the essential uncertainties of the future.” Rousseau’s vision was of a tyranny made up of individuals tyrannizing themselves internally, mentally.
At the end of her passage in the essay “What is Freedom?” on Rousseau as the most consistent representative of the theory of sovereignty, Arendt made her strongest appeal for abandoning the ideal of sovereignty in the political realm and in mental life: “Where men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must submit to the oppression of the will, be this the individual will with which I force myself, or the “general will” of an organized group. If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce”(p. 165).
You have made it quite clear that Arendt thought that renunciation of sovereignty should entail embrace of the council system, the council state, but I think we need to ask, too what she offered as an alternative to sovereignty of the self –or of the will. Her image of the republican mind is one in which thinking, willing, and judging are equal and interactive. Thinking gives willing and judging “thought things,” images; willing gives thinking and judging the possibility of acting; judging, a “side effect” of thinking, gives willing guidance, direction, “what to do.” But just as important as this interactivity is Arendt’s emphasis on equality and interactivity among people in the little republics of friendships, where the dialogic experience of thinking can be shared with others. She spoke, as you indicated before, of philia politike, political friendship , but she also spoke of the loving mutuality in friendship of two people.
Speaking biographically, I think that Arendt herself discovered friendship in and through dialogue with Heinrich Bluecher, who was able to give her not just his love but the example of his accumulated political experience, his activism, while she gave him, with her love, the example of her scholarship and ability to formulate and write. Theirs was a complementary friendship –as, later, was the friendship she developed with Karl Jaspers. For her, psychologically, their friendship was rooted in a novel love experience, completely different from what she had known in her youth with Heidegger, who was older and had dominated in their relationship, making her feel she had lost her self. Arendt described the novelty to Bluecher in a 1937 letter, written while she was traveling in Switzerland with her Jewish agency and he was in Paris, where they had met.
You see, dearest, I always knew, even as a kid, that I can only truly exist in love. And that is why I was so frightened that I might simply get lost. And so I made myself independent. And about the love of others who branded me as coldhearted, I always thought: If you only knew how dangerous love would be for me.
And when I met you, suddenly I was no longer afraid…It still seems incredible to me that I managed to get both things, the “love of my life” and a oneness of my self. And yet I only got one thing when I got the other. But finally I also know what happiness is. (Geneva, 9.18.37. pp.40-41)
