Why politics should not stop at the water’s edge
In Issue 9 of Jacobin, Corey Robin argues that the issue of security should be put back on the political agenda. He doesn’t tease out all the ramifications of this position, but it is clear from his essay that we should no longer accept national security to be a non-negotiable issue in the name of which governments can ride roughshod over rights and liberties. Interestingly he lays the blame for much of our current silence at the door of liberal theorists.
Why has the issue of security (and especially national security) historically provided one of the strongest reasons for limiting or eliminating rights?
The answer, Robin says, seems obvious. When our safety is under threat, we will do anything to protect ourselves. But even though it sounds as if the right of everyone to seek his or her own safety and preservation provides a universal principle according to which society may be organised, it is in fact a source of conflict, since each individual is the “judge of his own situation”; free to judge, in other words, whether s/he is in danger and how s/he should respond to that danger.
The solution Thomas Hobbes suggests to this problem, is “to create an all-powerful sovereign to whom we cede the basic right … to be the judge of what might threaten us and of what actions we will take to protect ourselves from what might threaten us.”
Robin points out three implications for contemporary politics that follow from Hobbes’ argument.
1./ If the government implemented rules that were a direct translation of the people’s fears, Hobbes’ solution would have a chance of working. Hobbes assumed that
the sovereign would be so removed from powerful constituencies in society — in his time, the church and the aristocracy — that the sovereign would be able to act on behalf of an impartial, disinterested, and neutral calculation of what truly threatened the people as a whole and of what measures would protect them. Because the sovereign’s power depended upon getting these calculations right, he had every incentive not to get them wrong.
What happens in reality is that modern states have a lot of freedom in deciding what counts as threats to society and, in making their decisions, they lend their ear to the powerful. Far from making neutral calculations about what the people might want, they base their decisions on the interests and ideologies of the mighty (who, in turn, we assume, keep them in power).
This is why Robin argues that we live in failed Hobbesian states. In our current set-up, the sovereign is never impartial.
2./ Not only do states choose the threats that suit them at certain times, but they also have good reasons to exaggerate them.
Robin quotes Cardinal Richelieu to make the point:
In normal affairs, the administration of justice requires authentic proofs; but it is not the same in affairs of state….There urgent conjecture must sometimes take the place of proof…
In other words, the more severe the threat, the less the state needs to provide proof that the threat exists. If, say, you wanted to attack Iraq for some reason and you needed proof of a plausible threat, all you had to do was to link it to a threat people already found incontestable and to think up a really threatening name for the threat it presumably harboured. Think 9/11 and WMD. No further proof needed.
3./ “The sovereign can be the judge of our fears and of how we are to respond to those fears only if it possesses a unity of will and judgement.” But states hardly ever achieve this kind of unity in reality. There will always be dissent and the state will attempt to impose a kind of unity by various methods, among other things by showing up dissenters as unpatriotic, disloyal or even as traitors.
Getting back to the question Robin starts off with (How is it that security provides such a strong argument for suppressing rights and liberties?) it becomes clear that the very universality that underlies the idea of security in theory, is undermined by the diversity of ideologies and interests that define the issue of security in reality. So, the first simple answer to the question is that governments tend to choose sides, and they do so, usually with the powerful and against the powerless and marginal.
The second reason, according to Robin, has to do with the way in which liberal theorists have traditionally framed the issue of security. As Robin says,
While liberalism as a theory has given us excellent reasons to oppose the use of coercive state power on behalf of religious or moral orthodoxy, it has given us far fewer reasons to oppose the use of that power on behalf of security.
While liberal theorists have presented security as a universally grounding argument for the suppression of rights, they have not taken into account how, in practice, what purports to be universal, turns out to be just another tool in the hands of particular groups and ideologies.
What this means, is that liberal theory has defined the issue of security as something that lies outside politics. And this is the conclusion Robin comes to. If liberal theorists do not succeed in re-politicising the idea of security, they will keep on losing arguments against conservatives. In the same way we find religious, moral and political ends suspect when they are employed to exercise coercive state power, we should take security off its pedestal and bring it back in to the realm of political contestation. Politics should not stop at the water’s edge, since determining where exactly the edge is, is by no means a neutral affair.
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