Introduction On Dangers and Their Interpretation
On August 2, 1990, Iraq became a danger to the United States. For many, this was obvious—nothing could be more real and less disputable than an invasion of one country by another. Even though it was not the United States that had been invaded, this deed was regarded as a fact that could be observed and a danger that could be understood. Yet, without denying the brutality of such an action, the unproblematic status with which this episode is endowed deserves analysis. After all, an event of this kind (particularly one so distant from America)1 does not in and of itself constitute a danger, risk, or threat. It was possible for the leadership of the United States to have concluded that no matter how much it disapproved of the turn of events, the situation did not demand a full-scale response, and the initial period of what later became understood as a crisis was taken up with political debates over how and to what extent the United States should commit itself to act. Indeed, there have been any number of examples in which similar "facts" were met with a very different American reaction: only a decade earlier, the Iraqi invasion of Iran (an oil-producing state like Kuwait) brought no apocalyptic denunciations or calls to action, let alone a military response, from the United States.
Danger is not an objective condition. It [sic] is not a thing that exists independently of those to whom it may become a threat. To illustrate this, consider the manner in which the insurance industry assesses risk. In Francois Ewald's formulation, insurance is a technology of risk the principal function of which is not compensation or reparation, but rather the operation of a schema of rationality distinguished by the calculus of probabilities. In insurance, according to this logic, danger (or, more accurately, risk) is "neither an event nor a general
kind of event occurring in reality... but a specific mode of treatment |,,
of certain events capable of happening to a group of individuals." In I
other words, for the technology of risk in insurance, "Nothing is a £'.
risk in itself; there is no risk in reality. But on the other hand, anything |l
can be a risk; it all depends on how one analyzes the danger, cónsid- |-
ers the event. As Kant might have put it, the category of risk is a cat- |j
egory of the understanding; it cannot be given in sensibility or intu- ; >
ition/'2 In these terms, danger is an effect of interpretation. Danger !.
bears no essential, necessary, or unproblematic relation to the action |
or event from which it is said to derive. Nothing is intrinsically more ||
dangerous for insurance technology than anything else, except when [1
interpreted as such. I
This understanding of the necessarily interpretive basis of risk has |
important implications for international relations. It does not deny |
that there are "real" dangers in the world: infectious diseases, acci- J|
dents, and political violence (among others) have consequences that |;
can literally be understood in terms of life and death. But not all risks S
are equal, and not all risks are interpreted as dangers. Modern soci- |
ety contains a veritable cornucopia of danger; indeed, there is such "|
an abundance of risk that it is impossible to objectively know all that |
threatens us.3 Those events or factors that we identify as dangerous |f
come to be ascribed as such only through an interpretation of their var- |j
ious dimensions of dangerousness. Moreover, that process of inter- |
pretation does not depend on the incidence of ''objective" factors for I
its veracity. For example, HIV infection has been considered by many |
to be America's major public health issue, yet pneumonia and influ- |
enza, diabetes, suicide, and chronic liver disease have all been indi- I
vidually responsible for many more deaths.4 Equally, an interpreta- |-
tion of danger has licensed a "war on (illegal) drugs" in the United I
States, despite the fact that the consumption level of (and the num- |
ber of deaths that result from) licit drugs exceeds by a considerable |
order of magnitude that associated with illicit drugs. And "terrorism" §
is often cited as a major threat to national security, even though its §
occurrence within the United States is minimal (notwithstanding the J
bombings in Oklahoma City and at the World Trade Center in New 1
1 York) and its contribution to international carnage minor.5 |i
Furthermore, the role of interpretation in the articulation of dan- I
ger is not restricted to^the process by which some risks come to be I
considered more serious than others. An important function of inter- J§
pretation is the way that certain modes of representation crystallize J|
around referents marked as dangers. Given the often tenuous relation- J|
ship between an interpretation of danger and the "objective" inci- §f
dence of behaviors and factors thought to constitute it, the capacity for a particular risk to be represented in terms of characteristics reviled in the community said to be threatened can be an important impetus to an interpretation of danger. As later chapters will demonstrate, the. ability to represent things as alien, subversive, dirty, or sick has been pivotal to the articulation of danger in the American experience.
In this context, it is also important to note that there need not be an action or event to provide the grounds for an interpretation of danger. The mere existence of an alternative mode of being, the presence of which exemplifies that different identities are possible and thus denaturalizes the claim of a particular identity to be the true identity, is sometimes enough to produce the understanding of a threat.6 In consequence, only in these terms is it possible to understand how some acts of international power politics raise not a whit of concern, while something as seemingly unthreatening as the novels of a South American writer can be considered such a danger to national security that his exclusion from the country is warranted.7 For both insurance and international relations, therefore, danger results from the calculation of a threat that objectifies events, disciplines relations, and sequesters an ideal of the identity of the people said to be at risk.
These qualities of danger were evident in the Persian Gulf crisis. In announcing that the United States was sending military forces to Saudi Arabia, President Bush declared: "In the life of a nation, we're called upon to define who we are and what, we believe."8 By manifestly linkin^gAmerican identity to.danger, the president highlighted the indispensability of interpretation to the determination of a threat, and tacitly invoked the theme of this study: that the boundaries of a state's identity are secured by the representation of danger integral to foreign policy.
The invasion of Kuwait is not the subject of this book. But it does serve as a useful touchstone by which to outline some of the assumptions undergirding this study. Consider, for example, this question: How did the Iraqi invasion become the greatest danger to the United States? Two answers to this question seem obvious and were common. Those indebted to a power-politics understanding of world politics, with its emphasis on the behavior of states calculated in rational terms according to the pursuit of power, understood the invasion to be an easily observable instance of naked aggression against an independent, sovereign state. To those indebted to an economistic understanding, in which the underlying forces of capital accumulation are determinative of state behavior, the U.S.-led response, like the Iraqi
invasion, was explicable in terms of the power of oil, markets, and the military-industrial complex.
Each of these characterizations is surely a caricature. The range of views in the debate over this crisis was infinitely more complex than is suggested by these two positions; there were many whose analyses differed from those with whom they might normally be associated, and indebtedness to a tradition does not determine one's argument in every instance. But the purpose of overdrawing these positions (which we might call, in equally crude terms, realist and Marxist) is to make the point that although each is usually thought to be the antinomy of the other, they both equally efface the ^dispensability .of jnterpretation.m.the articulation of danger. As such, they" share a disposition from which this analysis differs. Committed to an epistemic realism—whereby the world comprises objects whose existence is independent of ideas or beliefs about them—both of these understandings maintain that there are material causes to which events and actions can be reduced. And occasioned by this epistemic realism, they sanction two other analytic forms: a narrativizing historiography in which things have a self-evident quality that allows them to speak for themselves, and a logic of explanation in which the purpose of analysis is to identify those self-evident things and material causes so that actors can accommodate themselves to the realm of necessity they engender.9 Riven with various demands, insistences, and assertions that things "must" be either this or that, this disposition is the most common metatheoretical discourse among practitioners of the discipline of international relations.10
But there are alternative ways to think, and this book exhibits a commitment to one of them. Contrary to the claims of epistemic realism, I argue that as understanding involves rendering the unfamiliar in the terms of the familiar, there is always an ineluctable debt to interpretation such that there is nothing outside of discourse. Contrary to a narrativizing historiography, I employ a mode of historical representation that self-consciously adopts a perspective. And contrary to the logic of explanation, I embrace a logic of interpretation that acknowledges the improbability of cataloging, calculating, and specifying the "real causes," and concerns itself instead with considering the manifest political consequences of adopting one mode of representation over another.
As such, my argument is part of an emerging dissident literature in international relations that draws sustenance from a series of modern thinkers who have focused on historically specific modes of dis-
I course rather than the supposedly independent realms of subjects and
[' objects.11 Starting from the position that social and political life com-
f • prises a set of practices in which things are constituted in the process
f. of dealing with them, this dissent does not (and does not desire to)
j, constitute a discrete^methodological school claiming to magically illu-
|\ minate the previously dark recesses of global politics. Nor is it the dis-
[ sent of a self-confident and singular figure claiming to know the error
| of all previous ways and offering salvation from all theoretical sin.
I Rather, this form of dissent emerges from a disparate and sometimes
| divergent series of encounters between the traditions of international
f relations and theories increasingly prominent in other realms of so-
i rial and political inquiry. It is a form of dissent that celebrates differ-
\ ence: the proliferation of perspectives, dimensions, and approaches
I to the very real dilemmas of global life. It is a form of dissent that cel-
| ebrates the particularity and context-bound nature of judgments and
I assessments, not because it favors a (so-called) relativist retreat into
I the incommensurability of alternatives, but because it recognizes the
I universalist conceits of all attempts to force difference into the srrait-
| jacket of identity.12 It is a form of dissent skeptical—but not cynical—
, about the traditions of international relations and their claims of ad-
l equacy to reality. It is a form of dissent that is not concerned to seek
' a better fit between thought and the world, language and matter,
i proposition and fact. On the contrary, it is a form of dissent that questions the very way our problems have been posed in these terms and
: the constraints within which they have been considered, focusing in-
l stead on the way the world has been made historically possible.13
: Consequently, in attempting to understand the ways in which
l United States foreign policy has interpreted danger and secured the
j boundaries of the identity in whose name it operates, this analysis
! adopts neither a purely theoretical nor a purely historical mode. It is
) perhaps best understood in terms of a history of the present, an in-
• terpretative attitude suggested by Michel Foucault." A history of the
'. present does not try to capture the meaning of the past, nor does it try to get a complete picture of the past as a bounded epoch, with underlying laws and teleology. Neither is a history of the present an
[ ' instance of presentism—where the present is read back into the
; past—or an instance of finalism, that mode of analysis whereby the
I analyst maintains that a kernel of the present located in the past has inexorably progressed such that it now defines our condition. Rather,
; a history of the present exhibits an unequivocally contemporary orientation. Beginning with an incitement from the present—an acute man-
ifestation of a ritual of power—this mode of analysis seeks to trace how such rituals of power arose, took shape, gained importance, and effected politics.15 In short, this mode of analysis asks how certain terms and concepts have historically functioned within discourse.
To suggest as much, however, is not to argue in terms of the discursive having priority over the nondiscursive. Of course, this is the criticism most often mounted by opponents to arguments such as this, understandings apparent in formulations like "if discourse is all there is," "if everything is language," or "if there is no reality."16 In so doing they unquestioningly accept that there are distinct realms of the discursive and the nondiscursive. Yet such a claim, especially after the decades of debates about language, interpretation, and understanding in the natural and social sciences, is no longer innocently sustainable. It can be reiterated as an article of faith to rally the true believers and banish the heretics, but it cannot be put forward as a self-evident truth. As Richard Rorty has acknowledged, projects like philosophy's traditional desire to see "how language relates to the world" result in "the impossible attempt to step outside our skins—the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism— and compare ourselves with something absolute."17 The world exists independently of language, but we can never know that (beyond the fact of its assertion), because the existence of the world is literally inconceivable outside of language and our traditions of interpretation.18 In Foucault's terms, "We must not resolve discourse into a play of pre-existing significations; we must not imagine that the world turns toward us a legible face which we would only have to decipher; the world is not the accomplice of our knowledge; there is no prediscur-sive providence which disposes the world in our favour."19
Therefore, to talk in terms of an analysis that examines how concepts have historically functioned within discourse is to refuse the force of the distinction between discursive and nondiscursive. As Laclau and Mouffe have argued, "The fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition... What is denied is not that... objects exist externally to thought, but the rather ■> different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside of any discursive condition of emergence."20 This formulation seeks neither to banish arguments that authorize their positions through reference to "external reality," nor to suggest that any one representation is as powerful as another. On the contrary, if we think in terms of^a discursive economy—whereby discourse (the represen-
tation and constitution of the "real") is a managed space in which some statements and depictions come to have greater value than others—the idea of "external reality" has a particular currency that is internal to discourse. For in a discursive economy, investments have been made in certain interpretations; dividends can be drawn by those parties that have made the investments; representations are taxed when they confront new and ambiguous circumstances; and participation in the discursive economy is through social relations that embody an unequal distribution of power. Most important, the effect of this understanding is to expand the domain of social and political inquiry: "The main consequence of a break with the discursive /extra-discursive dichotomy is the abandonment of the thought/reality opposition, and hence a major enlargement of the field of those categories which can account for social relations. Synonymy, metonymy, metaphor are not forms of thought that add a second sense to a primary, constitutive literality of social relations; instead, they are part of the primary terrain itself in which the social is constituted/'2' The enlargement of the interpretive imagination along these lines is necessary in order to account for many of the recent developments in world politics, and (as chapter 1 will show) to understand the texts of postwar United States foreign policy.
In the form of a history of the present, then, this analysis begins from the incitement of "the end of the cold war," a period that is thought to portend a qualitative change in world politics. For many, the dangers of the past are a thing of the past. But one does not have to deny that world politics exhibits considerable novelty at this juncture to appreciate that United States foreign policy recognizes a range of new dangers that might occupy the place of the old. The European revolutions of 1989 and their consequences; "new global issues" such as the environment; the interpretation of drug use and trafficking as a national security issue; the representation of Japan and Germany as economic threats to security; an awareness of disease, migration, and other population issues as sources of external threat; a renewed focus on the 'Third World" as the primary source of danger; the vigilance that is exercised toward new forms of violence such as "terrorism" or "Islamic fundamentalism"; and a general disquiet about the pervasive nature of ambiguity and uncertainty—all these orientations to the world stand as dangers that seem to challenge the long-standing and well-established modes of interpretation associated with the cold war.
For the most part, however, these developments have been represented in ways that do not depart dramatically from those dominant
during the cold war. To be sure, they are not represented as being reducible to Soviet behavior. But these challenges are.represented.as dangers, located in an external and anarchic environment, which threaten the security of an internal and domestic society, often via recourse to violence. This provokes a question: What functions have difference, danger, and othernessplayedin.consfit^ting the identity of the United States as a major actor in international politics? To pose the question in "these terms is a little misleading, for it is not intended to suggest either that it is a strict functional requirement of American identity that difference and danger be articulated as otherness, or that only certain groups or phenomena can be other. As Foucault argued with respect to the confinement of the insane^and the repression of certain sexual practices in the nineteenth century, these were not functionally the result of or required by bourgeois domination. The bourgeoisie was interested not in the mad or the phenomenon of infantile masturbation but in the procedural system through which such exclusions and controls were effected.22 In other words, groups or practices other than those targeted could have been the objects of surveillance and discipline, while those that were targeted could have been tolerated if not accepted.
In this context, for the United States, the current period in world politics can be understood as being characterized by the representation of novel challenges in terms of traditional analytics, and the varied attempts to replace one enemy with (ari)other. In consequence, the argument to be made here suggests that we need a more radical response to these challenges: a response directed at the modes of interpretation that make these challenges available for apprehension, the strategies and tactics by which they are calculated as dangers, and the means by which they come to be other.
Addressing the issue of the roles danger and difference play in constituting the identity of the United States involves a deconstruction of conventional political discourse and its self-presentation, especially that effected in the practice and analysis of both international relations and foreign policy. In reorienting analysis from the concern with the intentional acts of pregiven subjects to the problematic of subjectivity, this argument proposes that United States foreign policy be understood as a political practice central to the constitution, production, and maintenance of American political identity. In order to delineate more precisely the relationship between foreign policy and political identity, this argument is predicated on a reconceptualization of understandings .to which the conventional view of international relations
and foreign policy is deeply indebted—most specifically, a ^conceptualization of identity and the state.
Identity and the State
Identity is an inescapable dimension of being. No body could be without it- Inescapable as it is, identity—whether personal or collective— is not fixed by nature, given by God, or planned by intentional behavior. Rather, identity is constituted in relation to difference. But neither is difference fixed by nature, given by God, or planned by intentional behavior. Difference is constituted in relation to identity.23 The problematic of identity/difference contains, therefore, no foundations that are prior to, or outside of, its operation. Whether we are talking of "the body" or "the state," or of particular bodies and states, the identity of each is performatively constituted. Moreover, the constitution of identity is achieved through the inscription of boundaries that serve to demarcate an "inside" from an "outside," a "self" from an "other," a "domestic" from a "foreign."
In the specific case of the body, Judith Butler has argued that its boundary, as well as the border between internal and external, is "tenuously maintained" by the transformation of elements that were originally part of identity into a "defiling otherness."24 In this formulation, there is no originary or sovereign presence that inhabits a prediscur-sive domain and gives the body, its sex,.or gender a naturalized and unproblematic quality. To be sure, many insist on understanding the body, sex, and gender as naturalized and unproblematic. But for their claim to be persuasive, we would have to overlook (among other issues) the multifarious normalizing codes that abound in our society for the constitution and disciplining of sexuality. In seeking to establish and police understandings of what constitutes the normal, the accepted, and the desirable, such codes effect an admission of their constructed nature and the contingent and problematic nature of the identity of the body.
Understanding the gendered identity of the body as performative means that we regard it as having "no ontological status apart from the various acts that constitute its reality." As such, the idea that gender is an interior essence definitive of the body's identity is a discursively constructed notion that is required for the purposes of disciplining sexuality. In this context, genders are neither "true" or "false," nor "normal" or "abnormal," but "are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity." Moreover, gender can be understood as "an identity tenuously constituted in time,
instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts"; an
identity achieved, "not [through] a founding act, but rather a regulated '■ process of repetition."25
Choosing the question of gender and the body as an exemplifies- f
tion of the theme of identity is not to suggest that as an "individual" !
instance of identity the performative constitution of gender and the j
body is prior to and determinative of instances of collective identity. ;!
In other words, I am not claiming that the state is analogous to an in- ■(
dividual with a settled identity. To the contrary, I want to suggest that I the performative constitution of gender and the body is analogous
to the performative constitution of the state. Specifically, I want to |
suggest that we can understand the state as having "no ontological 1
status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality"; that '£
its status as the sovereign presence in world politics is produced by 1
"a discourse of primary and stable identity"; and that the identity of I
any particular state should be understood as "tenuously constituted in |
time... through a stylized repetition of acts," and achieved, "not [through] I
a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition." 1
Moreover, the similitude between the body and the state exceeds 1
the status of being simply heuristically useful if we think of gender 1
as the effect of a discourse about primary and stable identity, in terms I
of what Joan Cocks has called a "regime of Masculme/feminine."26 1
For Cocks the regime of Masculine/feminine is a disciplinary regime 1
of truth that is prevalent in our culture and contains contingency 1
through the production of "male" and "female" as stable identities. I
Most important, this regime effects a double move: "it imposes on I
each of the two kinds of bodies a particular norm and characteristic I
deviation, fand] it imposes on all bodies the rule that masculinity is I
the norm of active desire and femininity is active desire's deviation."27 I
Informed by the understanding of power as productive and not con- g
fined to the boundaries or institutions of the juridical state, Cocks's I
regime of Mascuhne/fermnine is one of the ensemble of practices I
that give rise to the "society of normalization" about which Foucault I
wrote.28 Characterized by discipline and domination through multiple 1
forms of subjugation, rather than by the uniform authority of sover- I
eignty located in a single point, a society of normalization secures §
the content and confines of its identity through the imposition of a I
norm rather than the enforcement of a rule. In so doing, it encour- I
ages and legitimizes certain dispositions and orientations while op- 1
posing and delegituruzing others, a process that is neither determin- I
istic in its operation nor totally hegemonic in its consequences. f
Cocks's argument is directed primarily at how the regime of Masculine/feminine disciplines the sexed body. But given the culturally pervasive nature of the gender norms it is concerned with, it is not implausible to suggest that a similar regime—or at least the gender norms that it effects—operates in other domains and disciplines other identities, such as the state. Indeed, if we consider how our understanding of politics is heavily indebted to a discursive economy in which reason, rationality, and masculinity are licensed as superior to unreason, irrationality, and fenominity, it is not difficult to appreciate that gender norms have also helped constitute the norms of statecraft. Therefore, in terms of the axiological dimension of spatializing practices, "the body" can be understood as being a historically well-established analog for the constitution of state identity. This becomes even more apparent when we think of how "the body politic" functions as a regulating and normalizing trope for "the political" (a discussion found in chapter 4). Moreover, central to that regulation and normalization, and to be understood as a privileged instance of the stylized repetition of acts, is foreign policy and the articulation of danger.29 Accordingly, the identity of the state that is contained and reproduced through foreign policy is likely to be inscribed with prior codes of gender that will in turn operate as norms by which future conduct is judged and threats are calculated.30
But if there are no primary and stable identities, and if the identities many had thought of as primary and stable, such as the body and the state, are performatively constituted, how can international relations speak of such foundational concepts as "the state," "security," "war," "danger," "sovereignty," and so on? After all, isn't security determined by the requirements of a preexisting sovereign state and war conducted in its name as a response to an objective danger? How then can we speak of these categories once we acknowledge the non-essentialistic character of danger?
Indeed, much of the conventional literature on the nation and the state implies that the essence of the former precedes the reality of the latter: that the identity of a "people" is the basis for the legitimacy of the state and its subsequent practices. However, much of the recent historical sociology on this topic has argued that the state more often than not precedes the nation: that nationalism is a construct of the state in pursuit of its legitimacy. Benedict Anderson, for example, has argued in compelling fashion that "the nation" should be understood as an "imagined political community" that exists only insofar as it is a cultural artifact that is represented textually.31 Equally, Charles Tilly
has argued that any coordinated, hierarchical, and territorial entity should be only understood as a "nationo/ state." He stresses that few of these national states have ever become or presently are "nation-states" —national states whose sovereign territorialization is perfectly aligned with a prior and primary form of identification, such as religion, language, or symbolic sense of self. Even modern-day Great Britain/ France/ and Germany (and, equally the United States, Australia, and Canada) cannot be considered nation-states even though they are national states.32 The importance of these perspectives is that they allow us to understand national states as unavoidably paradoxical entities that do not possess prediscursive, stable identities. As a consequence, all states are marked by an inherent tension between the various domains that need to be aligned for an "imagined political community" to come into being—such as territoriality and the many axes of identity—and the demand that such an alignment is a response to (rather than constitutive of) a prior and stable identity. In other words, states are never finished as entities; the tension between the demands of identity and the practices that constitute it can never be fully resolved, because the performative nature of identity can never be fully revealed. This paradox inherent to their being renders states in permanent need of reproduction: with no ontologi-cal status apart from the many and varied practices that constitute their reality, states are (and have to be) always in a process of becoming. For a state to end its practices of representation would be to expose its lack of prediscursive foundations; stasis would be death.33 Moreover, the drive to fix the state's identity and contain challenges to the state's representation cannot finally or absolutely succeed. Aside from recognizing that there is always an excess of being over appearance that cannot be contained by disciplinary practices implicated in state formation, were it possible to reduce all being to appearance, and were it possible to bring about the absence of movement which in that reduction of being to appearance would characterize pure security, it would be at that moment that the state would wither away.34 At that point all identities would have congealed, all challenges would have evaporated, and all need for disciplinary authorities and their fields of force would have vanished. Should the state project of security be successful in the terms in which it is articulated/ the state would cease to exist. Security as the absence of movement would result in death via stasis. Ironically, then, the inability of the state project of security to succeed is the guarantor of the state's continued success as an impelling identity.
The constant articulation of danger through foreign policy is thus not a threat to a state's identity or existence: it is its condition of possibility. While the objects of concern change over time, the techniques and exclusions by which those objects are constituted as dangers persist/Such an argument, however, is occluded by the traditional representations of international politics through their debts to epistemic realism and its effacement of interpretation. Grounded in an interrogation of discursive practices within the study of international relations and the conduct of United States foreign policy, this study seeks to show how these themes and issues are immanent to these domains. Through a rethinking of the practice and theory of foreign policy in chapters 1,2, and 3; a discussion in chapter 4 of the dominant modes of representing danger; and a consideration of the figuration of difference at various foundational moments in the American experience in chapter 5, this book posits the validity (though not incontestability) of an alternative interpretation of the cold war, which is elaborated in chapter 6. The hope is that this analysis can highlight some of the political issues at stake in the post-cold war era, as chapters 7 and 8 argue. The epilogue evaluates the efflorescence of concern with the politics of identity by those perspectives previously inattentive to these concerns, and considers the modes of interpretation that are more adequately attuned to the issues.
Three
Foreign Policy and Identity
Hobbesian Strategies
Within the discipline of international relations there is a widely recognized if imperfectly understood "^obbesjan tradition"; a tradition in which Hobbes is regarded as having providing the pivotal images of anarchy, conflict, the state of nature, and war that are taken to be the conditions of possibility for international relations and our conventional understandings of foreign policy.1 Regardless of the nuanced understanding of Hobbes's contributions that some within the discipline have exhibited, the more frequent casual references to this tradition use the name of Hobbes to evoke a "commonsense" understanding the entailments of which are more extensive than indicated by the simple reference that is offered. Robert Gilpin provides a particularly clear example when he remarks in his discussion of the fundamental assumptions of realism that "as Thomas Hobbes told his patron, the Second Earl of Devonshire, 'it's a jungle out there/ Anarchy is the rule; order, justice, and morality are the exceptions."2
The basic features of this "Hobbesian tradition" are said to proceed from an "individualist anthropology"3 to the construction of a political theory in which the security of individuals and their ability to engage in commodious living is threatened by their existence in a state of nature, but achieved by their mutual surrender of sovereignty to a common power. The implications for international relations are taken to evolve from the transference of Hobbes's understanding of individuals within the state to the realm of relations between states. This logic is succinctly presented by Hedley Bull. Bull is far from being the only person to argue for the significance of Hobbes's work for international relations,4 but his reasoning is particularly clear on how this comes to undergird subsequent realist understandings of in-
53
ternational relations and foreign policy, thereby making his position worthy of examination.
Bull argues that although international relations was a subject of peripheral concern for Hobbes (a mere cupboard in the vast mansion of his philosophy), his account of conflict within states is integrally linked to relations between them. The commonwealth formed to bring an end to the rancorous religious and civil conflicts that were Hobbes's primary concern serves also as the source of protection from foreign invasion.5 Hobbes's understanding of international relations, argues Bull (a "rigorously systematic" understanding that makes him a figure of "towering importance" who provides "the principal impetus" for realism), comes when Hobbes "makes his celebrated appeal to the facts of international relations":6
But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of warre against one another; yet in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their Forts, Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continual], Spyes upon their neighbours; which is a posture of War.7
Bull concludes that "from this and comparable passages in The Elements of Law and De Cive we are entitled to infer that all of what Hobbes says about the life of individual men in the state of nature may be read as a description of the condition of states in relation to one another,"8 A number of logical objections can be raised against the complete transference of the state of war from the realm of individuals to the realm of states, objections that Bull sometimes notes. In the first place, this transference fails to give the significance deserved to the first sentence of the famous passage that Bull quotes from Hobbes. This declares that there never was a time in which the state of war was the general condition among all individuals. Hobbes states in chapter 13 that "the savage people in many places of America" live in such a condition, as do subjects in a civil war, but that he "believe[s] it never was so, all over the world."9 Second, the quotation from Hobbes that is so often cited usually (as above) omits an important sentence that follows immediately from the declaration of states existing in the condition of war. Hobbes continues: "But because they uphold thereby, the Industry of their Subjects; there does not follow frorriTt, that misery, which accompanies the Liberty of particular
men.
"10
1
The state of nature among states is, according to Hobbes, qualitatively different from that among men; because states are the guarantors of their subjects' rights and property they recognize each other as free personae morales. Bull and others recognize this qualification, though as Smith has noted, later realists were less aware of the distinction that Hobbes made between the two realms." Moreover, unlike individuals who are autonomous and equal—and thus in a condition of perpetual insecurity because they are situated in an environment of scarcity—states exist in different structural relations whereby they are both more unequal and less vulnerable.12
In this context, the war of all against all in international relations did not produce the misery of civil war but was "pared down to a purely interstate relationship... war became a means of princely politics, guided by raison d'etat and reduced to the common formula of a European balance of power."13 This interstate relationship resembles more a conception of international society and less an understanding of pervasive conflict. That the end result of Hobbes's schema should be the existence of sovereign states in a network of relationships that was considerably less destructive and violent than the original state of nature is hardly surprising given that these states were supposed to be the site in which civil and international war was mediated: "Logically it was impossible for them to be in the same position as that which they transformed."14
These critiques raise serious and fundamental objections to the use of Hobbes's state of war to undergird a crude realist understanding of international relations (an understanding that makes possible the conventional representation of foreign policy) as the perpetual struggle for power among states in a pervasive condition of anarchy. However, all these critiques proceed from one important starting point. These critiques all treat Hobbes's text as a transparent rendering of the social and political reality of the time. Implicitly or explicitly, they support the contention that Leviathan stands as a factual, historical narrative intended to educate his and subsequent generations about the perils of their ways. We can object to this understanding by maintaining that Hobbes was not a historian, that he was "not a collector or reporter of past and present facts."15 This is not an objection based on the arbitrary disciplinary grounds that divide up intellectual activities. It is an objection based on the proposition that in seeking to overcome civil war, Hobbes self-referentially took the condition of civil war as evidence for his proposition that peace could only be restored by a return to the status quo ante, hi other words, Hobbes's conclusion
of a powerful state is implied in the premise of civil war; individuals are always described as "subjects," that is, as people subordinated to a higher sovereign authority.16
Moreover, in the famous chapter 13 discussion of the state of nature where Hobbes denies its universal applicability, he declares that where "there were no common Power to feare"—a condition "which men that have formerly lived under a peacefull government"17 have known— there would be civil war. But the absence of a common power to fear is not a feature that characterizes contemporary society, for men have formerly lived under peaceful government. Clearly, then, it is the fear of slipping back into the state of nature should men give up their allegiance to the sovereign power in the state, rather than ari.argument that men should proceed from the state of nature to the state, that is the force behind Hobbes's reasoning. Hobbes needs to establish this dire prospect as the grounds from which his radical prescriptions can be judged as worthy of pursuit.18 In this context, Leviathan comes to be seen as a text implicated in, and fundamental to the form of, modernity's discourses concerning the "state" and "man." An explication of this theme will demonstrate its significance for the conventional understandings of international relations and foreign policy. But it is worth noting that this reading will emphasize—indeed, probably overemphasize—the role fear and danger play in Hobbes's rendering of identity and order. This reading is not designed to foreclose the possibility of an alternative interpretation.19 Instead, its concern with the constitutive nature of fear and danger is intended to problematize international relations' realist rendering of fear and danger as either natural conditions or instrumentalities deployed by settled identities.
Hobbes begins Leviathan with a statement significant for the subsequent way in which his political theory is framed. It is a statement that indicates that his political theory is directed toward the discourse of "man" through the discourse of the "state":
Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that can make an Artificial Animal ...Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great leviathan called a common-wealth, (in la-tine Civitas) which is but an artificial man.20
"Man" imitates nature through art to construct an artificial "man" in the form of the state, and the state is a form of rational "man." The state is rfat the author of "man" and "man" is not the author of the
state. Neither agency nor structure are prior or determinant. "Man" and the state are simultaneously constituted; each is constitutive of the other and cannot be without the other. "In other words, the primary question is not one of analogies or parallels but one of the simultaneous emergence of 'inner' and 'outer,' or 'us' and 'them' in the development of Hobbes's concept of the state."21
Hobbes's intention is to theorize an end to religious and civil conflict by arguing for a renewed commitment to the transfer of sovereignty, which first enabled the emerging state forms of seventeenth-century "Europe." This argument takes place in the period of Christendom's declining authority, but it does not presuppose a complete secularization of social and political life. On the contrary, the state at the center of Hobbes's theory is a temporal body that takes the place of God. Once subjects "conferre all their power and strength upon one Man or Assembly of men," they are united in a commonwealth. The result "is the generation of that great leviathan, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Im-mortall God, our -peace and defence."121 In occupying the place of God, the state has a need for some mechanism (or art) to occupy the place of the "Feare of things invisible" that was the product of ignorance, the seed of religion, and the genesis of the civil conflicts.23 That mechanism or art is the sanction that exists in a new fear: the fear of anarchy, danger, and the subsequent return to the state of nature that would be possible were fear not to be permanently located in a common power of which all are in awe. The victory of reason over rhetoric and of knowledge over superstition that is marked by submission to a common power is a major achievement, but it is not something that is self-sustaining. The battle is constantly being fought and victory has to be constantly sought. A mechanism that can perpetuate this continual struggle is necessary because "even if the struggle between enlightenment and superstition were won by the forces of reason, their victory would never be so secure that their enemies could be forgotten."24 As a consequence, the state of nature is a sanction, a threat, a discourse of danger, and not a description of an unproblematic reality:
The state of nature is shock therapy. It helps subjects to get their priorities straight by teaching them what life would be like without sovereignty. It domesticates by eliciting the vicarious fear of violent death in those who have not had to confront it directly. And when one confronts the fear of early and violent death, one becomes willing to regulate oneself and to accept external regulations that will secure life against its dangers. The fear of death pulls the self together.
It induces subjects to accept civil society and it becomes an instrumentality of sovereign control in a civil society already installed.15
Ironically, then, the overcoming of fear requires the institutionalization of fear. But fear and danger are put into place by reason rather than (as previously) by superstition. Reason understands that because there is "a general inclination of mankind, a perpetuall and reste-lesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death," the desire for peace, unity, and a contented life dispose "man" to obey a common power.26 In obeying this common power "man" is doing more than subjecting himself to authority; he is forming himself to be a member of the order that ensures arts, letters, and society and saves him from the life that is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."27 Such is the fifth law of nature, "compleasance":
that is to say, That every man strive to accommodate himselfe to the rest. For the understanding whereof, we may consider, that there is in mens aptnesse to Society; a Diversity of Nature, rising from their diversity of Affections; not unlike to what we see in stones brought together for building an Aedifice. For as that stone which by the asperity, and irregularity of Figure, takes more room from others, that it selfe fills; and for the hardnesse, cannot be easily made plain, and thereby hindereth the building, is by the builders cast away as unprofitable, and troublesome: so also, a man that by asperity of Nature, will strive to retain those things which to himselfe are superfluous, and to others necessary; and for the stubbornness of his Passions, cannot be corrected, is to be left, or cast out of Society, as comber-some thereunto... The observers of this Law/may be called sociable ... The contrary, Stubborn, Insociable, Froward, Intractable.28
In this metaphor of the stones brought together by builders to construct an edifice lies the central textual strategy of Hobbes's political theory: a strategy of otherness designed to discipline the self. Because the "unformed matter of the World, was a God, by the name of Cltaos,"29 order requires discipline. And because there is a propensity to diversity in "man" and society that can readily undermine order unless corrected, "man" must remove his "irregularity of Figure" and accommodate himself to the rest. If he does not undertake this self-discipline, he will be cast out of society and signified as troublesome, cumbersome, stubborn, unsociable, and intractable.
To be cast out is not to be physically removed but to be politically marginalized. Hobbes's text is replete with examples of others from whom the self of rational, disciplined "man" must be distinguished. Most obviously, the reference to "savage people" in chapter 13 is in contrast to the unnamed but ever present "civilized people," who have
lived (and hopefully continue to want to live) under peaceful government in an ordered society. The implication is that unless the power of the sovereign is reinscribed, "we" run the danger of becoming like "them." Hobbes does make this move explicit in other texts. In a short essay written at the same time as Leviathan he distinguishes "the civility of Europe, from the Barbarity of the American sauvages."30 In the Elements of Law he asked the rhetorical question: without the developments of arts and sciences, "what do we differ from the wildest of the Indians?"31
In a similar vein, there are numerous references to the contrasts between those who are good and evil, mad and sane, drunk and sober, and modest and arrogant.32 In later sections of Leviathan metaphors of disease and illness are employed to understand disorder within the society: commonwealths are dissolved not by external violence but by "intestine disorder"; large numbers of men rebel, just as children's bodies break out into "biles and scabbs" when they are not purged of illness; the struggle between temporal and spiritual powers in society is akin to "epilepsie" in the body; a mixed government is equated with "a man, that had another man growing out of his side, with a head, armes, breast, and stomach, of his own"; the immoderate greatness of a town or corporation in the commonwealth, and those who dispute the sovereign power, are like "wormes in the entrayles of a naturall man."33
Hobbes argues that the "antidote of solid Reason" is all that is required to overcome these maladies.34 Hobbes's continual invocation of reason and rationality indicates the importance of the strategy of otherness to his enterprise. The strategy of otherness is not just an occasional rhetorical device employed by Hobbes to make a point with clarity; it is at the very heart of his political theory. Reason and rationalism are not simply modes of thought that are desirable; they are dispositions that are produced through differentiation from their op-posites. The narrative of Leviathan is, therefore, not just an instance of scientifically rigorous argument that derives its form from an admiration for Euclidean geometry. The narrative of Leviathan is a polemic for science and the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It is actively engaged in molding a consensus around one orientation to life at the expense of another. In this context, the opposition of reason and rhetoric that Hobbes employed in the Elements of Law is replaced in Leviathan by the contrast between knowledge, reason, and science on the one hand, and ignorance, superstition, and magic on the other. The forces of light and the forces of darkness are engaged in the struggle between enlightenment and superstition.35
The strategies of otherness are pivotal to Leviathan and, as a consequence, integrally related to Hobbes's understanding of international relations. Hobbes's strategies of otherness are directed at the treasonous subjects who wish to subvert the state, but they give rise to the problematic through which it is possible to impose discipline on a wider domain and to constitute the ambiguity and upheaval of seventeenth-century "European" politics as an ordered multistate system in a chaotic world. The metaphor employed by Hobbes in his discussion of the fifth law of nature indicates how this is achieved. In constructing the edifice that is the ordered polity (the state), "man" forms and disciplines himself so that he can take up his rightful place in the walls. These walls are the fundamental structures in the building, but they do more than simply constitute the form of order that arises. The walls, or boundaries, that are constructed serve to separate the inside from the outside. But the boundary both separates and joins, thus making it impossible to conceive of a space that could be traversed by a bridge between independently existing realms. The spaces of inside and outside serve to delineate the rational, ordered polity in which good, sane, sober, modest, and civilized "man" resides from the dangerous, chaotic, and anarchical realm in which the evil, mad, drunk, arrogant, and savage people are found. The division between inside and outside, and the normative distinctions between the two realms, means that these strategies constitute a world in which sovereign states exist in a condition of anarchy and war.
The work of this problematic is not the result of a thought experiment. This coeval emergence of the inside and the outside is made possible by the transference of "the right of war from within the group and the restriction of the right of war to relations between groups."36 The consequence of this is that "man," the "state," and "international relations" are mutually constitutive. No one authors the other. Multiple strategies of otherness give rise to identities that only exist in historically specific and spatially defined locations. Moreover, these strategies of otherness made foreign policy possible: "Nothing but [Hobbes's] strict separation of exterior and interior realms could make it possible to core an area of foreign policy out of the welter of religious jurisdictions."37 Hobbes's text can be read, therefore, as indicating that comparative foreign policy's understanding of its own domain of study is seriously impoverished. Foreign policy was not something subsequent to the state or the interstate system, but integral to their constitution. Foreign policy was not a bridge between two distinct realms, but something that both divided and joined the inside and the outside, the state and the interstate system.
Foreign Policy: War, the StatE, and Mai
To this point, the argument has sought to demonstrate: (1) how the conventional understanding of foreign policy depended on a particular representation of history in which the rise of the state is understood as the result of one form of social organization and identity (the church) completely giving way to another (the state) at a readily identifiable juncture (the Peace of Westphalia); (2) how an alternative historical representation makes it possible to understand the state as emerging through an "inducing process" in which it comes to offer a novel solution to a traditional problem, and thereby effects a historically specific resolution to the more general problematic of the constitution of identity through the negation of difference; and (3) how the project of securing the grounds for identity in the state involved an "evangelism of fear" that emphasized the unfinished and endangered nature of the world. In this sense, the discourses of danger that were pivotal to the church—where the fear of death disciplined lives via the promise of salvation—were rearticulated by (as Hobbes put it) the mortal god of the state, such that anarchy, danger, and a fear of slipping back into the state of nature effected political order through the promise of security. As a consequence, instead of seeing the state as made possible by a secularized eschatology, we can conclude that the state "is a ministry for collective salvation through a generalized politics of resentment."38
Put simply, the principal purpose of this historical and theoretical exegesis has been to show that it is an impoverished understanding to regard foreign policy as a bridge between preexisting states with secure identities. Given the alternative standpoints from which one can appreciate the coeval emergence of the "state" and the "international" system, it is not possible to simply understand international relations as the existence of atomized states that are fully fledged intensive entities in which identity is securely grounded prior to for-eignrelations. The consequence of this argument is a fundamental reorientation of our understanding of foreign policy. Foreign policy shifts from a concern of relations between states that take place across ahistorical, frozen, and pregivcn boundaries, fi» a concern" wiflVffe rs-jflBfistofg?^ one and the same time,
the "state" and_"the mtemational system." Conceptualized in this way, foreign policy comes to be seen as a political practice that makes "foreign" certain events and actors.39 Those events and actors that come to be "foreign" through the imposition of a certain interpretation are not considered as "foreign" simply because they are situated in oppo-
sition to a pregiven social entity (the state). The construction of the "foreign" is made possible by practices that also constitute the "domestic." In other words, foreign policy is "a specific sort of boundary-producing political performance."40 This conception thus differs greatly from arguments that maintain either that domestic influences are important in the construction of foreign policy, or that international influences play a role in structuring domestic politics.41 Both these perspectives rely on granting the domestic and the international realms existence prior to history and politics. In each case, the "domestic" and the "international" are regarded as independently existing sovereign presences that exert influence over each other.
Premised on the ontological assumptions of ambiguity, interpretation, representation, and discipline, this retheorization of foreign policy understands foreign policy to be one of a range of practices that make up the discourses of danger that serve as "an art of domesticating the meaning of man by constructing his problems, his dangers, his fears."42 Foreign policy is one part of a multifaceted process of inscription that disciplines by framing man in the spatial and temporal organization of the inside and outside, self and other: i.e., in the "state." These practices do not operate in terms of a domestic society that is pregiven, nor do they signify an absolute and preexisting space from which the threats to domestic society emerge. Their very operation frames the domestic society in whose name they claim to be operating through their claim to know the source of threats to domestic society and "man." In this sense, we can understand "international politics" as "a practice of the inscription of the dangerous, the externalization and totalization of dangers, and the mobilization of populations to control these dangers—all in the name of a social totality that is never really present, that always contains traces of the outside within, and that is never more than an effect of the practices by which total dangers are inscribed."43 Importantly, "man," understood as the identity of the social totality that is effected, is intrinsically gendered.44
The practices that impose boundaries and establish meaning \ through a reading of ambiguity—practices that can be said to operate in nonpurposive ways approximated by Bqurdieu's understanding of the "conductorless orchestration of collective action and improvisations" and Foucault's "strategies without a knowing strategist"45— usually locate the dangers to "man" in terms of threats emerging from other domestic societies. The dilemmas of international politics (e.g., nuclear war, interstate conflict, environmental degradation, or the relative autonomy of global capital) are conventionally understood as be-
ing composed of threats to a pregiven, already constituted and well-bounded identity in the form of the state. Clearly, such issues are vitally important, but an understanding of them does not depend solely on their interpretation as threats or their identification in the external, anarchic realm. Given all the possible locations of threats in an unfinished and endangered world, locating them in the external realm has to be understood as serving a particular interpretative and political function.
The principal impetus behind the location of threats in the external realm comes from the fact that the sovereign domain, for all its identification as a well-ordered and rational entity, is as much a site of ambiguity and indeterminacy as the anarchic realm it is distinguished from. When we speak of "man" we refer to more than just individuals or national types; the meaning of "man" incorporates the form of the "domestic" order, the social relations of production, the various subjectivities to which they give rise, the groups (such as women) who are marginalized in the process, and the boundaries of legitimate social and political action. It is easier to recognize the constructed character of "man" in societies other than our own (consider the attention given to "socialist man")46 than to acknowledge the cen-trality of this practice to the "West"47 But there are, in principle at least, a multitude of ways in which society can be constituted: the possibilities are limited only by the practices that focus on certain dangers, in a manner like the concerns exhibited by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service questionnaire. But such dangers are not objective conditions and they do not simply reside (as represented) in the external realm. Threats to identity are equally prevalent in the challenges to the dominant enfrarning of "man" from within. For some, feminism, homosexuality, and support for social ownership of the relations of production are as threatening as a foreign enemy. Inscribing domestic society, arriving at a representation of the state involves, therefore, a double exclusion. The interpretations of domestic society resistant to its inscription must be excluded from the internal realm: "In effect, differences, discontinuities, and conflicts that might be found within all places and times must be converted into an absolute difference between a domain of domestic society, understood as an identity, and a domain of anarchy, understood as at once ambiguous, indeterminate, and dangerous."48 This first exclusion is matched by a second, the purpose of which is to "hide" the status of the first as an exclusion. For the inscription of domestic society to appear as unproblematic, it is not possible for it to be understood as having the status of one interpretation among many. All interpretations that seek
to expose the inscription of "man" as a representation that should be historicized and problematized have to be excluded themselves.
Reconceptualizing foreign policy in these terms also affects the understanding of what is effective foreign policy. In this context, "successful" instances of foreign policy can be understood as instances where the double exclusionary practice operates continuously in the face of resistant interpretations about "man." For example, Australian society was originally enframed as Anglo-Saxon through the transposition of a perceived threat to cultural integrity and economic well-being from Chinese gold diggers in the 1850s into a fear of Chinese invasion in the 1890s. This served to ward off an emerging nationalist drive for an independent republic by maintaining that Australia's defense could not be secured outside the British empire. The differences within became the differences between in such a way that the resulting domestic order was seen as natural and alternatives were marginalized. This disposition—in which internal threats made possible external dangers and external dangers controlled internal threats— came to provide the interpretive matrix through which all subsequent instances of Australian foreign policy were understood.® "Unsuccessful" instances of foreign policy are those where the double exclusionary practice does not operate, thereby allowing the recognition that the boundaries of domestic society can be disputed, so that the grounds of state legitimation become the site of political contestation about interpretations of "man."50 In such cases, the inscription of danger is not able to transfer the differences within to the differences between, leaving political struggles to focus on the appropriateness of domestic policy to the dangers emerging (it is argued) from the external realm. For example, the Carter administration sought to make understandings of the international arena more complex by making East/West relations less central and highlighting North/South perspectives and global issues as the concerns they were. But neither the administration nor any other group could locate those new threats in a single, identifiable source. Without the internal/external nexus that had been at the base of postwar American identity, the administration's international strategy succumbed to the neoconservative effort to close off the domestic challenges of the 1960s and 1970s by reinserting a cold war domestic identity through the externaliza-tion and totalization of threats in the Soviet Union.51
The need to discipline and contain the ambiguity and contingency of the "domestic" realm is a vital source of the externalization and totalization of threats to that realm through discourses of danger. But the achievements of foreign policy for the state are not due to any in-
herent characteristic of the state existing in an endangered world. The effectiveness of foreign policy as one political practice among many that serves to discipline ambiguity and construct identity is made possible because it is one instance of a series of cultural practices central to modernity operating within its own specific domain. This can be understood by reference to Ashley's discussion of the "paradigm of sovereignty."
The paradigm of sovereignty is not a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense of a conceptual resource that man applies to make sense of the world: it is a problematization in the Foucauldian sense that serves to discipline the ambiguity and contingency of history by differentiating, hierarchizing, and normalizing the site in which it operates.52 But it is also more than that. Ambiguity is not disciplined by reference to a pregiven foundation. That "foundation" is constituted through the same process in which its name is invoked to discipline ambiguity.
The paradigm of sovereignty operates on the basis of a simple dichotomy: sovereignty versus anarchy. Although these terms have special significance within the discourse of international relations— a significance that depends on their effectiveness elsewhere—sovereignty and anarchy are replicable concepts that are pivotal for the construction of various mutually reinforcing dichotomies, such as subject/object, inside/outside, self/other, rational/irrational, true/ false, order/disorder, and so on. In each instance the former is the higher, regulative ideal to which the latter is derivative and inferior, and a source of danger to the former's existence. In each instance, "sovereignty" (or its equivalent) signifies a center of decision presiding over a self that is to be valued and demarcated from an external domain that cannot or will not be assimilated to the identity of the sovereign domain.
This practice is at work in most if not all realms of contemporary life. In the discourses of politics, its operation can be witnessed when, confronting ambiguous and indeterminate circumstances, those discourses are "disposed to recur to the ideal of a sovereign presence, whether it be an individual actor, a group, a class, or a political community. They are disposed to invoke one or other sovereign presence as an originary voice, a foundational source of truth or meaning."5* Most important, it is only those discourses of politics that replicate this heroic practice that are taken seriously as possible sources of truth and meaning. Alternative discourses that are less certain if not totally skeptical of foundations are themselves made objects of this heroic practice. If alternative discourses cannot be assimilated to some sovereign presence, they often find (as in the case of poststructuralism itself)
that they are designated as "anarchical" and hence are themselves problems to be solved.
Although the foundation, fixed ground, or Archimedean point that provides the point of reference for modern discourse varies from site to site, one particular foundation can be considered pivotal: that is the sovereign presence of "reasoning man." An instance of the paradigm of sovereignty, it takes its form in an identifiable historical location. Around the end of the eighteenth century, modern discourse took a novel turn and invoked the figure of "reasoning man" as the origin of language, the maker of history, and the source of meaning.54 The novelty of this turn was not the recognition of "man" as an object of knowledge—for the attempt to study "man" with objective methods had a long history—but the notion that this dimension was complemented with another to form what Foucault has termed an "empirico-transcendental doublet called man."55 For the first time "man" was both an object of knowledge and a subject who knows. As instances of this new problematization, we can highlight the literature that was once written as advice to a particular prince that was refigured to address the wider concern of "governmentality,"56 and the appearance of the concepts of "population" and "society" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although both are now treated as naturalized terms describing an unproblematic reality, they emerge in a specific (and recent) historical context as instances of a normalizing project that has "reasoning man" at its core.57
The paradigm of sovereignty and its manifestation in the notion of "reasoning man" depend on and reproduce a gendered understanding of the political imaginary. Specifically, the discursive formation to which the texts of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Clausewitz (among many others) are indebted is infused with notions of gender. These and other texts of importance to international relations and the rise of the state employ hierarchies drawn from the paradigm of sovereignty that establish both the boundaries and conduct of (international politics; such hierarchies include strong/weak, rational/irrational, public/private, sane/insane, order/disorder, reason/emotion, stability/anarchy, and so on. Gender is insinuated into each of these pairs, with the first term being "masculine" and superior to its "feminine" subordinate.58
Most obviously, there is Machiavelli's discussion of virtu and for-tuna, where virtu signifies the discipline and mastery needed to confront and do battle with fortuna, the "feminine" alliance of powers that cannot be understood or controlled and which threaten "man" and his life. In The Prince, Machiavelli declares: "What makes the prince
contemptible is being considered changeable, trifling, effeminate, cowardly or indecisive; he should avoid this as a pilot does a reef and make sure that his actions bespeak greatness, courage, seriousness of purpose and strength... he lays down decisions not to be changed."59 Equally, both Hobbes and Clausewitz can be understood as employing discourses of "danger" to constitute the impetus for political orders in which reason and rationalism play the central role. In Leviathan, the danger is posed by civil war and religious disputes that require a new commitment to sovereign power. But acceptance of this rein-scribed sovereign power is possible only if those who are subject to it see it as a moral necessity. The morality that makes it a necessity is for Hobbes a morality of reason. In effect, "man" reasons his way to the state to secure the conditions for commodious living. This outcome privileges later understandings of the importance of reason: reason was the ending of the civil war, but because the historical premise of civil war became for Hobbes a logically necessary premise for his conception of sovereignty, the end of the conflicts through the establishment of the state came to be reason.60 In other words, whereas reason begins as the path to the state, it ends up that the state becomes reason; it was, after all, Hobbes who came to refer to the state as the "empire of reason."61 Moreover, sovereignty in Hobbes's formulation is highly gendered because, unable to include contingent identities or to come to terms with ambiguity, the unity and indivisibility of Hobbesian authority renders sovereignty as masculine.62
Similarly for Clausewitz, reason, rather than a specific prince, is the sovereign: the pursuit of zweckrationalitat rather than a specific political order is the culmination of Clausewitz's discourse on war. For example, Clausewitz admired the campaigns of Frederick the Great in the Seven Years' War because they were enabled by the king's "acute intelligence," "wisdom," "boldness," "resolution," and "strength of will."63 These are durable terms of praise: they were applied to General Schwarzkopf's command of allied forces in the United States-led war against Iraq. The implication is that gendered discourses of power are synonymous with an understanding of politics in which reason, rationalism, and enHghtenment values are privileged. Indeed, the latter qualities are coded terms that instantiate a particular (gendered) understanding of the political.
In sum, whether we are speaking in terms of Foucault's notion of a problematization in which ambiguity is disciplined by practices that differentiate, hierarchize, and normalize, Blumenberg's "inducing process" in which a concern with the unfinished and endangered nature of the world means that the "state" comes to occupy the posi-
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tion previously established by the church, Hobbes's sovereign state as a mortal god existing under an immortal God, or Ashley's paradigm of sovereignty, we are left with an overall problematic about the constitution of political/state identity. While dependent on specific historical contexts, we can say that for the state, identity can be understood as the outcome of exclusionary practices in which resistant elements to a secure identity on the "inside" are linked through a discourse of "danger" with threats identified and located on the "outside." The outcome of this is that boundaries are constructed, spaces demarcated, standards of legitimacy incorporated, interpretations of history privileged, and alternatives marginalized.
Foreign policy (conventionally understood as the external orientation of preestablished states with secure identities) is thus to be retheorized as one of the boundary-producing practices central to the production and reproduction of the identity in whose name it operates. We have to be very careful, however, in specifying the exact nature of the relationship between state-based foreign policy and political identity. Foreign policy in the conventional sense is a modern cultural artifact implicated in the intensification of power in the state. It arises in a form that we would recognize as recently as the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, when organizations bearing the appellation "foreign" or "external" first appeared in a systematic form. Originally somewhat puny in size, it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that they took on the form of large-scale bureaucracies with global scope.64 This growth coincided with, and contributed to, a range of developments that led to the intensification of social power in the nation-state, produced the category of "citizen," and established nationalism as the primary form of social identity by the time of World War I. These developments included different modes of apprehending time in which literary forms such as the novel and the newspaper enabled people to think in terms of the "nation"; rearticulations of the conventional understandings of time and space in domains as diverse as science, art, and industry; and the concerted effort to invent traditions, create national holidays, and rebuild capital cities so as to provide a particular historical understanding of the emergence of the modern state.65
Foreign policy cannot, therefore, be seen as constituting identity de novo. To explicate this, we need to draw a distinction between two understandings of foreign policy. The first is one in which "foreign policy" can be understood as referring to all practices of differentiation or mod^s of exclusion (possibly figured as relationships of otherness) that constitute their objects as "foreign" in the process of dealing with
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them. In this sense, "foreign policy" is divorced from the state as a particular resolution of the categories of identity and difference and applies to confrontations that appear to take place between a self and an other located in different sites of ethnicity, race, class, gender, or geography. These are the forms of "foreign policy" that have operated in terms of the paradigm of sovereignty and constituted identity through time and across space. Operating at all levels of social organization, from the level of personal relationships through to global orders, "foreign policy" in this sense has established conventional dispositions in which a particular set of representational practices serves as the resource from which are drawn the modes of interpretation employed to handle new instances of ambiguity or contingency. For example, in the case of the United States, there has been an intolerance of ambiguity at all levels of social life from neighborhoods to the international order that is expressed (as chapter 4 will discuss in more detail) in terms of a hierarchical ordering of self and other through figurations of disease and pollution. In other words, the first understanding ("foreign policy") has provided the discursive economy or conventional matrix of interpretations in which the second understanding (Foreign Policy) operates. This second understanding—Foreign Policy as state-based and conventionally understood within the discipline—is thus not as equally implicated in the constitution of identity as the first understanding. Rather, Foreign Policy serves to reproduce the constitution of identity made possible by "foreign policy" and to contain challenges to the identity that results.
Conversely, the relationship of Foreign Policy to political identity in any given nation-state should not be underestimated. We can point to James Der Derian's genealogy of diplomacy as an analog for this retheorization of foreign policy.66 Der Derian examined not only the forms of modern diplomacy that can be dated from 1455 when the Duke of Milan established a legation in Genoa, but those forms of "diplomacy" (particularly "mythodiplomacy") that were paradigms for the way in which the fear of estrangement between "man" and God and among peoples was mediated long before there was ever a political community that could be considered a state. The point was not to establish a determinate intellectual pedigree for later modes of diplomacy, but to suggest that conventional dispositions for confronting ambiguity and estrangement were established that shaped the interpretation of later moments. While history does not repeat itself, "there are historical confrontations of power and truth which recur and generate parallel sets of mediatory rules and practices."67 Such is the case with the relationship between "foreign policy" and For-
eign Policy. Moreover, as Der Derian concluded, diplomacy does not have a historical origin, but rather "it emerges as the mediation of men estranged from an mfinite yet abstracted power which they themselves have constructed."68
The same can be said of Foreign Policy. Particularly in its late modern form of "rational security policy," Foreign Policy is a discourse of power that is global in scope yet national in its legitimation. Foreign Policy is only one of a number of discourses of danger circulating in the discursive economy of a nation-state at any given time: from weather reports to Central Intelligence Agency net threat assessments, modern life is disciplined by discourses that tell us what to fear,69 But in the context of the modern nation-state, Foreign Policy has been granted a privileged position as the discourse to which we should turn as the source of the preeminent dangers to our society and ourselves. Operating as such, Foreign Policy creates the very dangers to which we are supposed to accommodate ourselves. Much like the creature in Franz Kafka's The Burrow—which digs a complex maze of underground tunnels to provide security from predators thought to exist on the outside, but cannot in the end distinguish between the noise thought to come from the predators and the noise created by its own digging on the inside70—Foreign Policy cannot distinguish the "perception of objects from the object effects of perceptual acts."71
To conclude this retheorization of Foreign Policy, a couple of amplifications need to be made. The argument above paints a particularly negative picture of the processes implicated in a state's identity. It emphasizes the exclusionary practices, the discourses of danger, the representations of fear, and the enumeration of threats, and downplays the role of affirmative discourses such as claims to shared ethnicity, nationality, political ideals, religious beliefs, or other commonalities. Two reasons help justify this formulation.
If all meaning is constituted through difference (an assumption on which this analysis is based), then there can be no declaration about the nature of the self that is totally free of suppositions about the other. Although a positive declaration of some characteristic of the self might be devoid of specific reference to an other, it proffers nonetheless an at least implicit valuation of those who might be considered other. Of course, the nature of that valuation and its effects can vary considerably: a simple contrast need not automatically result in the demon-ization of the other, and the differentiation or distantiation of one group from another does not require that their relationship be one of violence. Buhnsofar as the logic of identity requires difference, the potential for the transformation of difference into otherness always exists.
Moreover, in the context of Foreign Policy, the logic of identity more readily succumbs to the politics of negation and the temptation of otherness. The claim is not that Foreign Policy constitutes state identity de novo; rather, it is that Foreign Policy is concerned with the reproduction of an unstable identity at the level of the state, and the containment of challenges to that identity. In other words, Foreign Policy does not operate in a domain free of entrenched contingencies or resistances. Whichever Foreign Policy practices are implemented, they always have to overcome or neutralize other practices that might instantiate alternative possibilities for identity; and the intensive and extensive nature of the "internal" and "external" political contestation that this presupposes means the efficacy of one particular practice will more often than not be sharpened by the representation of danger.
Finally, the above argument should not be taken to suggest that the boundary-producing performances of Foreign Policy result in borders of identity that are clearly demarcated, singular, and neat. Indeed, given the inherently contingent identity that is the result of the attempt to secure a domain as intensive and extensive as the state, the boundaries are blurred, multiple, and often violent. Gloria Anzaldua offers a particularly compelling formulation:
The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is a constant state of transition.'7
Rather than being just narrow topographical lines, borders are shifting horizons marked by flux and ambiguity/3 And rather than clearly demarcating the duality of self and other, they come into existence through a triadic relationship when the presence of those who are ambiguous and liminal confounds any simple or unified representation of identity: "The definition of identity, in nations and men... depends for its accomplishment on the recognition of that which is other, like, and simultaneously other and like, and on the abstract, objective understanding of the self that follows from this recognition."74 It is the objectincation of the self through the representation of danger that Foreign Policy helps achieve.
This process of objectification is achieved through certain recurring representations and figurations; ones that are general to foreign policy, and ones that are specific to the United States. Chapter 4 discusses those general to foreign policy in more detail, focusing on "the body" as a political metaphor and the discourses of discipline and containment that it enables, while chapter 5 considers how these figurations have functioned in certain key moments of American history—moments that are especially important to the identity reproduced through Foreign Policy discourses.