SOVEREIGNTY, THE STATE, & SPACE:

THE PERSISTENCE OF

IMPERIALISM IN GEOPOLITICS

BARTHOLOMEW ROCKWELL CSORBA

2010

Submitted to the Faculty ofHistory and Politics

The University of Adelaide in partial fulfilment of the requirements for

the Degree of Bachelor of International Studies

(Honours in Politics)

2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

....................................................................................................................................... ABSTRACT 1

................................................................................................................................ DECLARATION 2

............................................................................................................... ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 4

I. ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGNTY, THE SOVEREIGN, & THE TERRITORIAL STATE ........... 8 Section 1.1: SOVEREIGNTY: ABSOLUTE AND SUPREME......................................................... 9 Section 1.2: ........................................SPACE & SOVEREIGNTY: THE TERRITORIAL STATE 13

...................................... Section 1.3: LIFE AND POWER: INSIDE THE TERRITORIAL STATE 23

II. SPACE & LIFE: OUTSIDE THE SOVEREIGN STATES OF EUROPE ................................ 35

Section 2.1: ..........................................CARL SCHMITT: THE ORDER OF (GLOBAL) SPACE 36 Section 2.2: ..................................................DISCIPLINE ON THE PERIPHERIES OF ORDER 43 Section 2.3: ........EXCEPTIONAL SPACES: ORGANISING THE GEOPOLITICAL TERRAIN 47 III. CONTEMPORARY PARALLELS & CONCLUSIONS ............................................................ 54

Section 3.1: PARALLELS WITH THE PRE-MODERN TERRAIN .............................................. 55 Section 3.2: THE U.S: POLICING OR ORDERING THE(IR) GLOBAL TERRAIN.................... 64 Section 3.3: THE U.S AS AN EFFECTIVE SOVEREIGN ENTITY.............................................. 68

............................................................................................................ Section 3.4: CONCLUSION 73

BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................................. 78

1

ABSTRACT

This thesis reconsiders the place of the sovereign state as the idealised unit that

characterises modern politics. It is argued that the primacy of the reified sovereign state

obscures the underlying dynamics the international system and provides a misleading

topography of the geopolitical terrain. Specifically, under the primacy of the state, the

formulation and exercise of the variously defined concept of sovereignty is obscured.

This thesis canvasses the considerations of sovereignty found in the work of Jean Bodin,

John Locke, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, against

the reified Westphalian narrative. This discussion endeavours to illustrate the relationship

between effective sovereign power and the space and ‘life’ it claims as distinct from the

normative principles associated with mainstream notions of the Westphalian state. An

exploration of the relationship between sovereign power and space reveals contemporary

parallels with certain aspects of both the pre-Westphalian era and the waves of imperial

conquest that followed it. Under the various pressures of the globalised world, including

the on-going war on terror, the mainstream notions of the sovereign state are revealed as

weak in comparison to entities which can discursively and effectively impose and control

the prevailing visions of order within the global space.

2

DECLARATION

This work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other

degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my

knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another

person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to this copy

of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being available for loan and

photocopying.

Bartholomew Rockwell Csorba

3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank everyone whose patience and advice assisted me in completing this

thesis.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my family: Frances, Steve, and Trafford, whose

support has been invaluable. Thank-you for believing in me and giving me a quiet place

to study.

Next, I would like like to thank Sarah Harman for her support and unbelievable

(superhuman) patience and care. Thanks Monster, I owe you big time.

Special thanks to my supervisor, Professor Greg McCarthy whose help and patience has

gone beyond the call of duty. In addition, my gratitude is extended to the Honours Co-

ordinator, Dr. Clement Macintyre, and Mr. David Olney for all of their advice and

assistance.

My sincerest thanks to you all.

4

INTRODUCTION

In the 1970s, Umberto Eco discussed a “return of the Middle Ages.”1 Writing during the

Cold War, Eco argued that a sustained medievalism is woven into the fabric of modernity.

“Our own Middle Ages will be an age of ‘permanent transition’ for which new methods

of adjustment will have to be employed.”2 In keeping with Eco, the following chapters

will propose one possible ‘method of adjustment’ that may provide some insight into the

contemporary condition of the geopolitical terrain. The methodological adjustment

discussed here concerns the explicitly modern paradigm through which mainstream

geopolitics is understood: the sovereign state. The sovereign state, born out of the

violence and turbulence of medieval Europe, is the idealised unit that characterises

modern politics. The primacy of the sovereign state obscures the underlying dynamics

the international system and provides a misleading topography of the geopolitical terrain.

Specifically, under the primacy of the state, the formulation and exercise of the variously

defined concept of sovereignty is obscured.

1 U. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1986) p.72

2 ibid p.84

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To understand sovereignty, in a geopolitical context, it is vital to explore the ways that

global space is perceived, ordered, and shaped by powerfully influential states. These

powerful sovereign entities operate to extend their organisational logic across an

increasingly interconnected global space. The extension and imposition of order, it will

be argued, is the defining characteristic of effective sovereign power. It will be proposed

that the logic and structure of imperial sovereignty provides the most apt paradigm

through which the configuration of contemporary geopolitics should be interpreted.

Moreover, the space of the geopolitical terrain, when considered from the perspective of

empire, is revealed as sharing similarities with the dynamics that prevailed in pre-modern

Europe.

At the core of mainstream political theory and practice lies a focus on the inception of the

territorial state and its claims to sovereign authority. This narrative is derived from the

reified European epoch of the Treaty of Westphalia. The defining notion of the

Westphalian narrative - territory - will be discussed in relation to the impact of

globalisation on the rigidity of state borders. Moreover, reactions to non-sovereign

violence, like that exemplified by the events following September 11, 2001, has shed a

critical light on some of the assumptions of the Westphalian narrative. Barry Buzan, for

example, argues that, “September 11 could become the iconic event that symbolises the

passage from a Westphalian international system,” to what he calls a “post-Westphalian

structure.”3 In the argument contained herein, this ‘post-Westphalian’ structure will be

3 B. Buzan, ‘Implications for the Study of International Relations’, in (eds) M. Buckley & R. Fawn, Global Responses to Terrorism: 9/11, Afghanistan and Beyond, London: Routledge (2003) p.306

6

shown to parallel that of the ‘pre-Westphalian’ world. Westphalian sovereignty, we are

told, granted state authorities supreme domain within their territories, and primacy, as a

political unit, in the presumedly anarchic international sphere of normative equality and

mutual recognition. The objective of the first chapter is to separate Westphalia’s

normative and institutional principles from the expression of effective sovereignty which

is exercised across the geopolitical terrain; organising space and imposing order. The

work of various thinkers, including, Jean Bodin, John Locke, Michel Foucault, and the

recently revived work of the enigmatic and controversial Carl Schmitt, will be canvassed

to assist in the process of differentiating between the authority of state institutions and the

exercise of effective sovereign power over space and the lives captured within it.

The second chapter will explore the role of imperialism in the definition of the adjudged

chaos and disorder of the global space. The methods employed by imperial sovereigns as

they established and extended order within and across territorial boundaries will be

examined. The disciplinary techniques employed as these effective sovereign entities

conquered the globe provide a sense of continuity with contemporary geopolitical

dynamics. Here, Schmitt’s work will be referred to; especially his understanding of

exceptionality, which sits at the core of his conceptions of space, order (in the figure of

the state) and sovereign power. From this perspective the relationship between the ‘life’

in the ordered spaces of the core and that which can be found on their peripheries will be

contrasted and connected from the exceptional perspective of an effectively sovereign

imperial entity. This discussion will employ reflections on, and the work of, the

7

prominent liberal theorist John Stuart Mill, who wrote from the core of the British

Empire, providing insights into the machinations of the imperial sovereign machine in its

encounters with the European ‘Other’ on the peripheries of its order.

The third chapter will examine the implications arising from the application of the

imperial paradigm for the organisational dynamics at play with the contemporary

globalised terrain. The work of Hardt and Negri, specifically their deployment of a

reconfigured imperial figure, will provide the basis for the geopolitical topography

averred in this thesis. Hardt and Negri’s post-modern political terrain and critical aspects

of its formulation of a new modality of sovereignty will be paralleled with the dynamics

of the pre-Westphalian world. Their specific descriptions of the apparatus and exercise of

power within an increasingly globalised world allow for a more general recognition of

the persistent medievalism posited by Eco.

8

I

ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGNTY, THE SOVEREIGN, & THE TERRITORIAL STATE

Conventionally, the development of the territorial sovereign state has been considered the

dominant factor in the spatial organisation of modern geopolitics. Clearly, states have

played a significant role in shaping the contemporary international system and its laws.4

Geopolitics, in the context of this thesis, equates to the study of various social, political,

economic, and historical forces that influence the ordering of the global space and the

subsequent seizure of the resources and life found in it. Geopolitics endeavours to

articulate the ways in which the entire surface of the planet is imagined as a space which

can be seized, organised, ordered, and understood by globally effective sovereign entities.

The organisational figure of the modern state and its normative and legal claims to (and

systems of) sovereignty can be traced to the reified narrative of the Peace of Westphalia.5

Various schools of thought hold that the ratification of the Westphalian treaty in 1648 saw

the birth of the territorial state and its sovereign institutions which have subsequently

shaped modern geopolitics.6 Sovereignty, however, was not itself a product of

4 D. Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2001) p.16

5 D. Held & A. McGrew, Globalisation/Anti-Globalisation, Cambridge: Polity Press (2002) p.11

6 R. Jackson, ‘Sovereignty in World Politics: A Glance at the Conceptual and Historical Landscape’, Political Studies, Vol.47 (1999) p.413

9

Westphalia. Discussions, expressions, and claims of sovereignty have a history reaching

back to before the seventeenth century. Sovereignty should be understood as a contested

concept; it is difficult to decisively define. Our discussion of the concept begins with the

work of Jean Bodin whose philology of ‘absolute and supreme’ sovereignty was

formulated approximately a century before Westphalia; his influence, however spreads

through to the thought of Michel Foucault.

SECTION 1.1

SOVEREIGNTY:

ABSOLUTE AND SUPREME

Bodin is one of the most significant contributors to a philosophical formulation of

sovereignty. Bodin’s formulation presents sovereignty as the possession and exercise of a

‘supreme’ power over a subjugated population: temporal laws having no purchase in the

restriction of its authority.7 In 1576, Bodin wrote that sovereignty was “the most high,

absolute, and perpetual power over the citizens and subjects in a Commonweale.”8

Sovereignty is ‘most high’ because it was understood as being unsurpassed and unrivalled

in its scope: it was (and arguably still is) “the greatest power to command.”9 Within the

scope of its domain and influence, the sovereign is seen as ‘absolute’ and answerable to

7 W.A. Dunning, ‘Jean Bodin on Sovereignty’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol.11, No.1 (1986) p.92

8 J. Bodin, Six Books of a Commonweal, (trans.) R. Knolles & K. MacRae, Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press (1962) p.84

9 ibid

10

no other temporal authorities; a sentiment that has been reflected in the discussions and

critiques of this contested concept for, at least, the past four centuries.10

Bodin’s Euro-centric sovereignty was only legitimate in its power over people and the

laws created by their rulers to govern them: defined as “the undivided and untrammelled

power to make and enforce the law.”11 It is in this absolute temporal authority that

Bodin’s sovereignty becomes recognisable, even at this early stage, as “the defining

characteristic of the state.”12 Bodin’s formulation, in its absolute and supreme command

over the space and the life that it controls was only applicable to the temporal realm.

Above its temporal authority, pre-Westphalian sovereign was bound, or subordinate, to

the divine laws of Christianity. These laws were espoused and interpreted by the

religious hierarchy of pre-modern Europe; primarily, the Pope and the Holy Roman

Emperor.13 As opposed to the Westphalian system, sovereignty was tied to and restricted

by the universalist dogma of Christianity and its earthly representatives.

The temporal power, of Bodin’s formulation, was also restricted by one other, less divine

(but no less ontological) caveat. The “prince,” the individual to whom sovereign power

is accessible to and exercised by, was not justifiably able to interfere with the

constitutional or foundational laws which were regarded as the source of that self-same

10 Bodin (1962) p.84

11 D. Held, ‘Laws of States, Law of Peoples: Three Models of Sovereignty’, Legal Theory, Vol.8 (2002) p.3

12 ibid

13 J. Camilleri, ‘Rethinking Sovereignty in a Shrinking and Fragmenting World’, in (eds.) R.B.J. Walker & S.H. Mendlovitz, Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community, Boulder, Colorado: Lynee Reinner Publishers (1990) p.16

11

power.14 The “laws of [the] empire” were seen as the perpetual font of “sovereignty

itself” and, with this in mind, the “prince” could “neither abrogate nor derogate them.”15

These constitutional laws provided the legitimacy and ontological potency of the power

available to a, for example, monarch. The supreme and absolute power described by

Bodin was not invested in, or derived from, the individual figure of the ruler but is

located in the constitutional structure and logic of the particular political community in

question (e.g. empire, kingdom, republic, or state).

Bodin’s formulation separates sovereign power from the figure to which it is accessible.

In conceiving sovereignty in this way, the persistent notion that it is unrestricted in its

temporal authority was established.16 There are two important points which need to be

emphasised at this stage. First, the temporal legitimacy of sovereignty must be

contextualised within the pre-Westphalian European political landscape; dominated by

the authority of the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire. Second, is the way in which

Bodin’s formulation separates the individual figure of the sovereign from the source of

that power. The absolute supremacy of Bodin’s sovereign was deeply rooted in ‘the laws

of the empire’ to which the ruler was indentured.17 Bodin’s sovereign was expected to

defend the physical space over which they ruled while serving and preserving the

constitutional source of the power it was able to exercise.18

14 Dunning (1986) p.96

15 ibid

16 R. Lapidoth, ‘Sovereignty in Transition’, Journal of International Affairs, Vol.45, No.2 (1992) p.326

17 Dunning (1986) p.96

18 ibid

12

Susan Buck-Morss, in writing about the modern state, echoes Bodin’s formulation. She

writes, “[s]overeign power exists before and beside” the ruler, and could “never be

subsumed” within them.19 Here, sovereignty “can be considered a transcendent power.”20

Transcending even the individual figure of the ruler but rendering unto them absolute

temporal supremacy over their domain.21 In a pre-Westphalian context, there were

sovereign entities which considered themselves legitimate regardless of any territorial (or

spiritual) impediments. Borders, like those of the modern state, had no normative or

institutional power in medieval Europe under the gaze of the Pope and the Holy Roman

Emperor. These religious authorities considered themselves able to exercise sovereignty

over the entirety of humankind and the space that it occupied. All spaces, individuals,

and rulers were understood as subject to the mandate of the authorities of the Church. It

was not until the Westphalian “revolution in sovereignty,” that notions of territory,

statehood, and population were introduced into the evolution of the concept.22

19 S. Buck-Morss, ‘Sovereign Right and the Global Left’, Cultural Critique, Vol.69 (2008) p.152

20 ibid

21 ibid

22 Philpott (2001), especially chapters 5 & 6

13

SECTION 1.2

SPACE & SOVEREIGNTY:

THE TERRITORIAL STATE

The Westphalian revolution marked the birth of the sovereign state, the system in which it

would operate, and the paradigm Europeans would use to organise and interpret the

geopolitical terrain.23 In mainstream theory, Westphalia institutionalised the principles of

“autonomy, territory, mutual recognition and control” within the newly sovereign

imperial states of seventeenth century Europe.24 Here, the term ‘imperial states’ is used

to refer to those European states which would become the major empires whose actions

would shape the global space throughout modernity.

Westphalia is often linked to the delegitimisation of the universalist structure and logic of

Christendom which stretched across the collective space of medieval Europe; especially,

the power of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. Before Westphalia, all authorities

and individuals, from “the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, down through kings to

barons, bishops, dukes, counts, and peasants.” were considered “a single social entity,

reflecting the unity of the church.”25 Within Europe, there was no separation of the

spiritual and temporal spheres thereby fostering a dynamic where political and religious

authorities were tightly intertwined. Europe, for the dominant religious authorities, was

23 D. Philpott, ‘Westphalia, Authority and International Society’, Political Studies, Vol.47 (1999) pp.579-582

24 S.D. Krasner, ‘Rethinking the Sovereign State Model’, Review of International Studies, Vol.27 (2001a) p.17

25 D. Philpott, ‘The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relations’, World Politics, Vol.55 (October) (2002) p.72

14

seen as an undifferentiated space under a Christian God. This dynamic created a

patchwork of indistinct sovereign claimants absorbed into a singular social order which,

with the institution of Westphalia, was delegitimised.

Before Westphalia, religious authorities considered themselves able to legitimately

intervene in civil and spiritual affairs. They could utilise force and coercive violence

(including making declarations of war), impose taxes, and exercise legislative, juridical,

and executive powers.26 Poignantly, in the context of this thesis, the religious authorities

of the Christian Church, in an expression of effective sovereignty, envisioned a universal

order and divided the global space amongst its loyal monarchs.

In the fifteenth century, alongside the singular territorial and social entity of Christendom,

a new extra-European space was discovered: the ‘New World’.27 In 1494, Pope

Alexander VI issued orders which granted, to the Spanish initially and then the

Portuguese, the right to appropriate this new space and incorporate it into the Church’s

single territorial and social entity.28 Pope Alexander VI divided the newly accessible

parts of the globe into two spaces. He drew a line, between the North and South Poles,

dividing the spaces of the ‘New World’, known and unknown, autocratically. These

spaces, either side of this imaginary and arbitrary line, were gifted to the Spanish and the

26 Philpott (2002) p.72; See also, J.R Strayner, The Medieval Origins of the Modern State, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1970); M. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1964) for a thorough examination of the intertwined dynamics of pre-Westphalian Europe.

27 C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeaum, (trans.) G.L. Ulmen, New York: Telos Press (2003) p.88

28 ibid

15

Portuguese for the purposes of appropriation into both their empires and Christendom.29

Attached to this gift, was the papal caveat that the territories claimed and colonised by

these Christian rulers could not be rightly removed from their possession.30

Regardless of any civilisations that existed there, these spaces, distributed by papal

mandate between these two Christian empires, set in motion a period of imperial

conquest and expansion out of Europe. Pope Alexander VI, in envisioning the spatial

organisation of the ‘New World’ was manifestly claiming and exercising the capabilities

of an effective sovereign entity: the ability to appropriate and order space. The religious

authorities of the pre-Westphalian era not only exerted control over its European core but

also began to extend its vision of order across the entire planet.

It is assumed that with Westphalia, the transcendent and hegemonic sovereignty of the

Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor was delegitimised in favour of a system of

autonomous territorial states. These states formerly understood as part of a “single social

entity,” would now be able to operate independently.31 According to the received

wisdom, Westphalia signalled the rise of the sovereign state and the initiation of a nascent

inter-state system, or order.32 The Westphalian treaty is said to be the moment in which

“the idea that international relations should be driven by balance-of-power considerations

29 Schmitt (2003) p.88

30 Pope Alexander VI, ‘The Bull Inter Caetera (1493)’ in, (ed.) F.G. Davenport, European Treatises Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648, Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington (1917) p.77

31 Philpott (2002) p.72

32 S.D. Krasner, ‘Sovereignty’, Foreign Policy, Vol.122 (2001b) p.21

16

[between sovereign states] rather than the [universalistic] ideals of Christendom.”33 What

is important to note here is the separation, at least discursively, of the temporal and

spiritual spheres that occurred with the Westphalian epoch.

Universal Christian ideals, alongside the race to appropriate territory, can be said to be

one of the major causes of the fractious religious wars which plagued Europe (and the

lands to its East) throughout the Middle Ages up until the seventeenth century.34 These

wars, waged to maintain the order of Christendom’s perceived singular territorial and

social entity, under the banner of religion and divine authority, led to the development

and dissemination of the principles associated with Westphalia.35 Hans Morgenthau

summarised this aspect of the Westphalian narrative writing, that by “the end of the

Thirty Years’ War, sovereignty as supreme power over a certain territory was a political

fact, signifying the victory of the territorial princes over the universal authority of [the

Holy Roman] Emperor and Pope.”36

Sovereignty, understood before Westphalia as an absolute and supreme authority, became

linked to, and limited by, the principle of territory.37 Further, we are told, Westphalia’s

principles provided the basis for “a system of political authority based on territory and

33 Krasner (2001b) p.21

34 Y.H Ferguson & R.W Mansbach, ‘Political Space and Westphalian States in a World of “Polities”: Beyond Inside/Outside’, Global Governance, Vol.2 (1996) p.265

35 ibid

36 H.J. Morgenthau, ‘The Problem of Sovereignty Reconsidered’, Columbia Law Review, Vol.48, No.3 (1948) p.341

37 Krasner (2001a) p.17

17

autonomy.”38 The Westphalian system would become the conventional way of

envisioning the organisation of global space as a set of neatly defined autonomous

sovereign entities at the expense of all other actors; including those who claimed divine

right. However, this state-centric paradigm obscures the continuity between the pre-

modern and the modern eras. The contemporary persistence of imperial visions of order,

carried out by powerful or effective sovereigns, is masked by the methodological reliance

on the unit of the territorial state and its Westphalian principles. By focussing on the

prevalence of imperial states in shaping the geopolitical terrain it is possible to account

for the asymmetry of the international system: the dominance of some states over the

internal and external operations of others. As we continue it will become clear that this

imperial dynamic is in direct opposition with the principles heralded by Westphalia’s

advocates; “autonomy, territory, mutual recognition and control.”39

Importantly, “the victory of the territorial princes” also marked an end to the religious

wars which surged across the single social and territorial entity of Europe.40 War, after

Westphalia, became a matter for, and between, sovereign states. Carl Schmitt stressed

this point, when he wrote that war became recognisable as a mode of extreme political

relations between the sovereign states of Europe, waged in the pursuit of strategic

objectives (e.g. the appropriation of territory).41 English School scholars, like the late

38 S.D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organised Hypocrisy, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1999) p.20

39 Krasner (2001a) p.17

40 Morgenthau (1948) p.341; Krasner (2001a) p.17; Philpott (2002) p.72

41 Schmitt (2003) p.248

18

Hedley Bull, reliant on the Westphalian narrative as a presupposition of their work, argue

that legitimate wars are “organised violence” exercised “by political units” (i.e. states),

“against each other.”42 This point will be returned to later where a discussion of

contemporary conflicts (specifically, the ‘War on Terror’) will feature of an example of

the breakdown of this understanding of legitimate sovereign violence in the international

realm which, it will be argued, is a feature of “[o]ur Middle Ages.”43

The territorial state signalled a recognition of a normative sovereign equality amongst the

powers of seventeenth century Europe: all states, we are informed, recognised the

sovereignty of the other states within the Westphalian compact. The aforementioned

transformation in warfare, along with the principle of non-intervention, reflect this

assumed equality. The notion of the sovereign equality of states, reflected in the

principles of autonomy and mutual recognition, extends into the exclusionary principle of

non-intervention: no state had the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of other states.

Each Westphalian sovereign was permitted to manage the internal workings of their state

as they deemed appropriate, without coercion or interference from other sovereign states

or other potentially potent and disruptive entities (i.e. religious authorities).44 Non-

intervention, in this sense, is an exclusionary idea. It delineates between the apparatus of

a state and the forces which are considered external or excluded from it. This right of

exclusion prevented the influence of external forces (i.e. the Pope, Holy Roman Emperor,

42 H. Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, New York: Columbia University Press (1977) p.178

43 Eco (1986) p.84

44 J. Mayall, ‘Sovereignty, Nationalism and Self-Determination’, Political Theory, Vol.47 (1999) p.475

19

and/or other states) from influencing the structures, methods, and means of authority

established within the bounds of a given state.45 “At the international level [Westphalian

sovereignty] implies that states follow the rule of non-intervention in the internal affairs

of others.”46 Unwelcome intervention by one entity in the affairs of another could cause

war between them or, in a contemporary context, a variety of sanctions or military

measures levied by the international community against the offending entity.

The persistence of the non-intervention principle is evident in the Charter of the United

Nations: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorise the United Nations to

intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”47

Here it is still held, in principle or at least discursively, that the sovereign is free to

operate domestically unfettered by intervention. This notion creates an image of the

sovereign state as a bordered container which encloses populations, resources,

production, and exchange. It will be argued that within these closed spaces, where the

sovereign has monopolised force and “authoritative decision making”, populations are

subjected to the service of the state.48

This exclusionary aspect of Westphalian sovereignty assisted in creating, within Europe,

a geopolitical topography that was characterised by the borders of autonomous sovereign

45 Krasner (1999) p.4

46 S.D. Krasner, ‘Abiding Sovereignty’, International Political Science Review, Vol.22, No.3 (2001c) p.232

47 Charter of the United Nations, ‘Chapter I: Purposes and Principles’, Article 2, Paragraph 7,retrieved from: http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml retrieved on: 23/2/2010

48 Krasner (2001c) p.232

20

territories. We are told that these borders demarcated the legitimate territorial realm of

each sovereign while, importantly, establishing a relationship between the people

enclosed therein and the formative institutions of the state. Borders between the

European states had the effect of creating a perceived consistency between sovereign

authority, the space (or the appropriated territory) of the state, and the collective figure of

the population.49 Subsequently, this consistency between the sovereign enclosure of the

state and (the life of) the population had the effect of creating geopolitical groupings that

became recognisable as political communities.50

These political communities stand in contrast to the pre-Westphalian vision of the single

social and territorial entity of Christendom.51 With the division of Europe into sovereign

enclosures, Bodin’s formulation of absolute and supreme sovereignty was reconfigured

and fused to the constitution of the closed space of the state. Domestically, Westphalian

sovereignty is thereby characterised as the right of state authorities to exercise an

unsurpassed temporal power over the resources (human or otherwise) within its territorial

boundaries.52 Here the sovereign, can exercise its authority through the monopolisation

of juridical decision making and the legitimate use of coercion and violence.53

49 R. Falk, ‘Evasions of Sovereignty’, in (eds.) R.B.J Walker & S. Mendlovitz (1992) pp.61-78

50 ibid

51 Philpott (2002) p.72

52 See: J.H. Jackson, ‘Sovereignty-Modern: A New Approach to an Outdated Concept’, The American Journal of International Law, Vol.97, No.4 (2003)

53 J. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, (ed.) C.B. Macpherson, Indianapolis: Hackett (1980) p.8; M. Weber, Essays from Max Weber, London: Routledge & Kegal Paul (1946) p.78

21

Max Weber wrote that, domestically, the sovereign state could be characterised as “a

human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of

physical violence within a given territory.”54 This internal monopolisation of violence

can be conservatively perceived as the right to conduct police actions.55 For Schmitt,

police actions, were a legitimate sovereign act utilised to secure the domestic order.56

Moreover, this domestic policing was to be differentiated from acts of war, which can

only occur between sovereign entities.57 This differentiation has sustained the

relationship between sovereignty and violence: war in the international realm and

disciplinary or coercive police action domestically. In its purest form, the sovereignty-

violence paradigm can be understood as the “right of life,” as expressed by Michel

Foucault.58 Foucault argued that the “right of life” was initially expressed as the

sovereign “right to kill.”59 Foucault reduced the absoluteness and supremacy of

sovereignty to a decision: the sovereign decision “to take life or let live.”60

The “right of life” can also be understood as a “right of seizure” claimed by a sovereign

entity.61 The “right of seizure” materialised in the sovereign ability to lay claim to “all

54 Weber (1946) p.78 (emphasis is mine)

55 M. Dean, ‘A Political Mythology of World Order: Carl Schmitt’s Nomos’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol.23, No,5 (2006) p.16

56 ibid (emphasis is deliberate)

57 ibid

58 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, (trans.) R. Hurley, New York: Vintage (1978) p.136

59 ibid

60 ibid

61 ibid

22

things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” within the territory it appropriated.62 The

culmination of this right was the sovereign “privilege to seize hold of life in order to

suppress it.”63 This “right of seizure” represents a transcendent relationship between the

sovereign’s decision-making power and the life of the individual enclosed within the

geopolitical bounds of their respective states.64 Within the space of the state, sovereignty

can be understood as the imposition and maintenance of a domestic order, envisioned and

arbitrated over by a supreme authority who legitimately exercises (sometimes deadly)

violence over a captive population. In the context of this thesis, the “right to kill” is

understood as one of the elements that facilitates an effective sovereigns ability to order

space (domestically and internationally).

SECTION 1.3

LIFE AND POWER:

INSIDE THE TERRITORIAL STATE

Another classical political philosopher, John Locke, considered the perceived consistency

between the figure of the sovereign and the populations over and through which power

was exercised. Locke argued that the absolute supremacy of the early territorial

sovereigns needed to be curtailed. Locke advocated a modified interpretation of the

62 Foucault (1978) p.136

63 ibid

64 ibid

23

transcendent “right to kill” where the state would be placed in the service of the

population; providing security for those enclosed within its territorial bounds.65

Locke also afforded the sovereign (and its associated power) a central position in the

logic and structure of the territorial state: sovereignty represented the “one supreme

power” above all others.66 Locke conceived “supreme power” as primarily legislative,

positioning all other authorities as subordinate to its temporal and territorial dominance.67

Locke’s supreme legislative power manifested in the sovereign “right of making laws

with penalties of death”; merging the ‘right to kill’ with the monopolisation of decision-

making and violence by the authorities of the territorial state.68 Locke delimited the

absolutism of Bodin’s formulation to the service of “the people”: “the legislative being

only a fiduciary power” acting “for certain ends.”69 Unlike Bodin’s sovereign, always in

the service of the constitutional “laws of empire” that were regarded as the source of its

potency and legitimacy, Locke argued “the certain ends” of the sovereign should amount

to the provision of security and stability for its captured population.70 Locke’s is a

consensual mode of sovereignty, finding legitimacy in social contracts rather than in the

ontology of a perpetual power flowing from the structure and logic of an imperial

constitution.

65 Foucault (1978) p.332

66 D.G. Ritchie, ‘On the Conception of Sovereignty’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol.1 (1891) p.393

67 ibid

68 Locke (1980) p.8

69 Ritchie (1891) p.393

70 Dunning (1986) p.96; D.G. Ritchie (1891) p.393

24

Candace Volger and Patchen Markell summarise the idea (and possibility) of a social

contract as,

a compact among men who are long accustomed to the use of force in the bloody

business of self-assertion and self-preservation. These men, so the story goes,

surrender their right to fight one another (and to dominate the defenseless),

investing in a common sovereign power with the right to command obedience for

the sake of peace, justice, prosperity and reasonable expectations of security. In

turn, their consent legitimates this common power - the state - at least as long as

its use of coercion serves the welfare and good future of its voluntarily toothless

citizenry.71

Locke’s legislative modulation of sovereign ‘the right to kill’ has, in the context of this

contract, an added caveat to its “supreme power.”72 As is indicated by Volger and

Patchen, in amassing the power to make laws and utilise force, the figure of the sovereign

required the consent of the population contained within the boundaries of the state. By

designating the source of sovereign power as resting in “the people”, Locke and other

advocates of a social contract, acknowledged the ability of the population to delegitimise

that selfsame power.73 Simply, “there remains still in the people a supreme power.”74 It

71 C. Volger & P. Markell, ‘Introduction: Violence, Redemption, and the Liberal Imagination’, Public Culture, Vol.15, No.1 (2003) p.1 (emphasis is mine)

72 Locke (1980) p.8; Ritchie (1891) p.393

73 Volger & Markell (2003) p.1; Ritchie (1891) p.393

74 Ritchie (1891) p.393

25

is possible, in Locke’s modulation, for a sovereign to meet some sort of resistance in the

exercise of it authority; “when [the people] find the legislative act[s of the sovereign]

contrary to the trust reposed in them.”75 Rather than being entirely ‘toothless’ and

subjected to the constant threat of violence or death by sovereign decision, ‘the people’ in

Locke’s modulation are positioned as the source, object, and purpose of legitimate

power.76 ‘The people’, captured within any sovereign enclosure, are only ‘voluntarily

toothless’, yielding their individual right to exercise violence, thus, it is within the realm

of possibility that, ‘the people’, if unsatisfied, could take this right back and employ it

against the state. For this reason, it is necessary for sovereign authorities to order the

domestic space in a way that facilitates the continued voluntary subjugation of its

population so that it can maintain legitimacy.

To illustrate this it is necessary to turn to Foucault’s biopolitical understanding of power.

Foucault deduced that from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European

sovereignty, as discussed above, had been displaced by the development of certain

disciplinary mechanisms.77 Born out of the burgeoning military sciences, discipline had

the objective of monitoring, organising, and sculpting individual bodies.78 First applied

to the bodies of those who would exercise violence on behalf of the sovereign - soldiers

and, later, police - its methods were soon applied in various institutions within the state

75 Ritchie (1891) p.393

76 Volger & Markell (2003) p.1

77 R.S. Rose-Redwood, ‘Governmentality, Geography, and the Geo-Coded World’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol.30, No.4 (2006) p.472

78 Foucault (1978) p.139

26

(i.e. Churches, prisons, hospitals, and schools).79 Foucault’s explication illustrates the

way that transcendent sovereignty, at least within European states, was displaced by the

organisation of the domestic space as a collection of disciplinary mechanisms. These

mechanisms gave sovereign authorities the ability to regulate and shape the lives that

these spaces enclosed for the benefit of the state.

Disciplinary institutions operate “to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their

multiplicity can be dissolved into individual bodies” by modifying the sovereign right to

“take life” into the “power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.”80 This post-Westphalian

development saw the diminution of supreme and absolute sovereignty alongside the

increasing application of less immediately violent power relations between rulers and

those they ruled. Operating at the level of “individual bodies”, discipline, and the spaces

constructed for its application, allowed for populations to be “kept under surveillance,

trained, used, and if need be punished” by state authorities.81 Thus, discipline facilitated

the production of a population of “docile bodies” within the space of the state, ensuring

the continuance of its legitimacy.82

The production of ‘docile bodies’ provides an insight into the process by which Locke’s

‘people’ and the ‘supreme’ power resting in them was “subjected, used, transformed and

79 Foucault (1978) p.139

80 M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, (trans.) D. Macey, New York: Picador (2003) pp.241-242

81 ibid p.242

82 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (trans.) A. Sheridan, London: Penguin (1991a) p.135

27

improved” by sovereign authorities.83 Regardless of their Lockean ‘supremacy’, the

individuals enclosed within the state, continued to be subjected to the transcendent

objectives of the sovereign authorities. Here, the “certain ends” of the sovereign

authorities are revealed as being the manipulation of a multiplicity of individuals so as to

maintain domestic order and ensure the continued legitimacy of its power.84 The figure

of the soldier and the archetypal disciplinary space of the state aptly illustrates this

process.

“[B]y the late eighteenth century,” Foucault contends that, “the soldier [had] become

something that could be made: out of formless clay, an inapt body.”85 Here, the

manufacture of the soldier, should be thought of as comparable to the experience of the

“voluntarily toothless” citizen.86 Foucault describes the disciplining of soldiers, as a

process that got “rid of the peasant” and instilled in the individual “the air of the

soldier.”87 It can be said that the application of this process to the broader population had

the result of disposing of the peasantry and instilling, within these bodies, the ‘air of the

citizen’. Of particular interest is the way that these disciplinary institutions featured in

the organisation of the space of the state and their role in monitoring, regulating, and

sculpting the life it enclosed. This relationship between the space of the state and the

development of an “ensemble of technologies of power” within it is central to the picture

83 Foucault (1991a) p.136

84 ibid; Ritchie (1891) p.393

85 Foucault (1991a) p.135

86 Volger & Markell (2003) p.1

87 Foucault (1991a) p.135

28

of effective sovereignty posited by this thesis.88 This ‘ensemble of technologies’ stands

as an example of the way that effective sovereign entities produce space and manage

populations with the objective of maintaining their potency and specific vision of order.89

The soldier, and in turn the citizen, are enclosed within disciplinary spaces (internal to the

state) in which each individual could be “transformed and improved” in line with the

objectives of sovereign authorities.90 For the soldier, this process took place within ‘the

barracks’. Within the space of the barracks techniques were employed which enabled

“the meticulous control of the operations of the body” ensuring “the constant subjection

of [the body’s] forces” imposing on it “a relation of docility-utility.”91 The imposition of

a relation of ‘docility-utility’ meant, for the soldier, that the individual obeyed superiors

and was useful to the group to which they belonged. This is the same relation required

between sovereign and citizen: they yield their right to interpersonal violence and are

useful in their voluntary subjugation to, and legitimisation of, the state and its authority.

Rather than simply invoking the ‘right to kill’, disposing of unacceptable forms of life,

disciplinary spaces allowed for the production of a specific form of docile and productive

life which was amenable to conforming with the order envisioned by sovereign

88 G. Ó Tauthail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1996) p.7

89 ibid

90 Foucault (1991a) p.136

91 ibid p.137

29

authorities.92 This is recognisable as a transformation in sovereignty within the domestic

spaces of seventeenth century Europe; power manifested in the propensity to “make

live”, according to ‘certain ends’, rather than the right to “take life.”93

Initially, the barracks operates as an “enclosure” which creates a space, inside of which

the population (or a portion of it) is easily and efficiently monitored and controlled.94

The use of enclosure can be seen in other institutions which constitute domestic space:

hospitals, factories, workshops, schools, and prisons, indicating the way that the state (an

enclosure in its own right) proliferates its internal space with disciplinary mechanisms to

produce the specific forms of life it endeavours to foster.95 In these enclosures,

disciplinary techniques (some which may not be considered acceptable in other contexts)

are seen as necessary in the production of a docility and utility: the soldier (and the

citizen) must submit to ensure the functioning and legitimacy of the sovereign state.

Within its enclosed space, the barracks employs the technique of “partitioning.”96

Partitioning has the effect of organising the space within ‘the barracks’ and other

disciplinary spaces by individualising the surveillance of the individuals enclosed

92 J. Reid, ‘Life Struggles: War, Discipline and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault’, in (eds.) S. Morton & S. Bygrave, Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society, Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan (2008) p.17

93 Foucault (2003) p.241

94 Foucault (1991a) p.141; J. Reid (2008) p.17

95 Foucault (1991a) pp.141-148

96 Reid (2008) p.18

30

within.97 This individualised surveillance was a means to “[k]nowing where and how to

locate individuals” allowing for the supervision of “the conduct not only of the [entire

population] but the life of the bodies individually.”98 Partitioning represents a

microcosmic perspective on the operation of the state as a whole. The state, through

policing and planning, monitors and manages entire populations. The imposition and

maintenance of domestic order necessitate the need to be able to monitor whole

populations while identifying individuals within the space of the state that require

training or punishment by state authorities.99 This process of partitioning the individual

members of the population enclosed within these spaces is extended through the

remaining disciplinary measure employed there: ranking and serialisation.

Military systems of ranking hierarchically organise individual members of the population

(or portions of it) into “a network of relations of exchange.”100 This hierarchical network

provided the means, by which the movements of individuals around the enclosure of the

barracks (and, later, the state as a whole) could be controlled. This control of movement

enabled the circulation of populations, within these spaces, in a way that would maximise

their utility for the state. Ranking is paired with the technique of serialisation.

Serialisation involves the creation of “serial spaces” which served as “fixed positions for

individuals” which facilitated the regularisation of “their circulation and their exchange”

97 Reid (2008) p.18

98 ibid

99 Foucault (2003) p.242

100 Reid (2008) p.18

31

around the various enclosures of the state (including the state itself).101 In the barracks an

unfit soldier might be identified and directed into activities which would increase their

use to the state. An individual citizen might, in the same way, be identified and directed

towards a hospital, a prison, or an educational institution, to increase their compatibility

with the form of life envisioned by the sovereign.

The example of the barracks illustrates the way that, “discipline proceeds from the

distribution of individuals in space.”102 The ability to organise and control space enabled

the exercise of discipline alongside the sovereign ‘right to kill’. The enclosure of

individuals within the state and the disciplinary spaces that constitute its inside allowed

for governments to manage populations in the same way that the military managed its

resources (human or otherwise). Foucault called the power to manage the life of entire

populations, “biopower.”103 These two modes of power, discipline and biopower, form

“two poles around which the organisation of power over life is achieved” by sovereign

authorities.104 The barracks illustrates the way that the organisation of space, and the

management of the life captured within it, has assisted in co-opting the Lockean

supremacy of ‘the people’ into the service of the state.

101 Reid (2008) p.18

102 Foucault (1991a) p.141

103 Foucault (1978) p.139

104 ibid

32

‘Biopower’ has its foundations in the aforementioned independent disciplinary

mechanisms. The surveillance required and provided by these disciplinary enclosures

enabled sovereign authorities to “form a body of knowledge” about the individuals that

made up the population; life expectancies, along with the rate of births and deaths, for

example.105 This knowledge accumulated and interpreted “by the institutions,

procedures, analyses and reflections” of governing authorities allows for sovereign power

to administer or improve the life of its population, rather than arbitrarily deciding to

exercise violence or not.106 Foucault wrote: “Thanks to its mechanisms of observation,

[the state] gains in the efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men’s behaviour.”107

The mechanisms of discipline and biopower enables the “calculation of tactics” which, in

turn, allowed sovereign authorities to understand and control the life of their respective

populations; shaping the space of, and sculpting the life within, the state according to

‘certain ends’; the imposition of a preferred vision of order.108

It should be emphasised that the rise of discipline and biopower did not render sovereign

violence or decision-making obsolete. Rather, these two biopolitical poles saw the

development of a tripartite array of power; a “triangle” of “sovereignty-discipline-

government” which operates through the states “apparatuses of security” (e.g. the

105 Foucault (1991a) p.220

106 Foucault (1978) p.139; Ó Tauthail (1996) p.7

107 Foucault (1991a) p.204; M. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in (eds.) C. Gordon & P. Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1991b) p.102

108 Foucault (1991b) p.102

33

military and police).109 The police surveil the domestic space and play a front-line role in

the regulation of the life enclosed within it. Importantly, for Foucault, we need to see the

contemporary trajectory of power not as the chronological replacement of sovereignty

(i.e. ‘the right to kill’) with discipline, or discipline by biopower (i.e. governmentality),

but as the exercise of a complex set of integrated modalities of power.110 Vital to the

argument of this thesis, however, is the way in which all of these modalities require the

effective sovereign capability to envision, shape, and order the domestic space of the

state. This is a sovereign logic that, it will be argued, has, and still does, affect the

geopolitical terrain.

While Locke observed a shift away from the absoluteness of Bodin’s formulation,

Foucault observed a conceptual move away from these transcendent modes of sovereign

power. Foucault, did not consider sovereign power as a “right which can be possessed in

the way one possesses a commodity.”111 Power, for Foucault, is manifest in the

accumulation of the lives of an enclosed population and the construction of spaces in

which this population is produced as both docile and productive.112 In this biopolitical

formulation, “the population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate means of

government.”113 The welfare and the improvement of the population become the means

through which sovereign authorities could “govern effectively in a rational and conscious

109 Foucault (1991b) p.100

110 ibid p.102

111 Foucault (2003) p.13

112 Foucault (1991a) p.137

113 Foucault (1991b) p.93

34

manner”: characteristics which have become synonymous with the internal life of the

(European) state.114

Like the effective sovereign act of Pope Alexander VI, dividing and organising the global

space, Foucault’s sovereign authorities exercise their power by ordering and maintaining

their domestic spaces. For any authority to be able to impose order “it is necessary to

render visible the space over which government is to be exercised.”115 The barracks

serves as an example of the way that the space within the state (and the state itself) was

imagined and constructed by effective sovereign entities inside of Europe from the

eighteenth century onward. The territory of the state and the disciplinary spaces within it

are “measured, directed, and standardised” in the establishment of a domestic order,

creating a space that, along with the resources (human or otherwise) captured within, can

be monitored, controlled, and sculpted by sovereign authorities. Simply, effective

sovereignty is manifest in, and dependent on, the production of “a space within which

movements and flows are regulated in ways which enable authorities to act.”116

114 Foucault (1991b) p.102

115 N. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1999) p.36

116 A. Barry, ‘Lines of Communication and Spaces of Rule’, in (eds.) J. Barry, T. Osborne, & N. Rose, Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1996) p.128

35

II

SPACE & LIFE:

OUTSIDE THE SOVEREIGN STATES OF EUROPE

The outside of Westphalian Europe was regarded as a space that was the antithesis of

order, rationality, and conscious government: a space characterised by its perceived

chaos. The Westphalian epoch heralded many transformations in the dynamics of the

European political terrain. With these transformations in mind, it is necessary to turn our

attention to their ramifications for the global space. The first geopolitical implication was

the aforementioned division of the ‘New World’ by Pope Alexander VI in the fifteenth

century. This act of spatial organisation, by Papal authority, was seen by Schmitt as a

fundamental moment in the development of an international, or global, order, emanating

from Europe. For Schmitt, the achievements of Westphalia, particularly those pertaining

to sovereignty, territory, and war, were directly related to the earlier discovery of the

‘New World’.

36

SECTION 2.1

CARL SCHMITT:

THE ORDER OF (GLOBAL) SPACE

Schmitt saw, in both Pope Alexander’s spatial division and the fusing of territory and

sovereignty, what he called a “global linear thinking.”117 Like Foucault’s thinking about

the domestic configuration of space, Schmitt saw the development of an international

order as the product of spatial organisation by effective sovereign entities (i.e. the

European empires). These entities had established, through Westphalia a normative

system which regulated their activities. Central to this normative system was the way

that with the territorialisation of sovereignty the external exercise of violence had

become, according to Schmitt, ‘bracketed’ or ‘regulated’.118 Schmitt recognised that,

with the territorialisation of sovereignty within Europe, war had become a matter for and

between states (or, more precisely, sovereign entities).119 This transformation stems form

the delegitimisation of the theological underpinnings of life in the perceived single social

and territorial entity of Christian Europe. The sovereign entities born out of this process

were able to autonomously organise space within their borders “in order to govern in a

rational and conscious manner.”120 These developments resulted in the European state

117 Schmitt (2003) p.87; It is common to read Schmitt, specifically the concept of exceptionality, through Giorgio Agamben’s interpretations of his work. This thesis returns to the original for its clarity regarding the state, space, and sovereignty. For Agamben’s interpretation see, G. Agamben, State of Exception, (trans.) K. Attell, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (2005)

118 ibid p.246

119 ibid p.248

120 Foucault (1991b) p.100

37

being understood as the “adequate bearer of order” in a world previously dominated by,

what Schmitt called, “chaos.”121

For Example, the ‘chaos’ of the Thirty Years’ War, which claimed an approximated eight

million lives from Christian Europe’s perceived ‘single social entity’, was fuelled by the

universalist “ideals of Christendom.”122 The ‘linear thinking’ applied in its aftermath,

established a recognition of the territorial sovereign unit as the agent of “detheologisation

and rationalisation” and the emergence of a European system of international law.123 This

system of law would serve as a code by which the interactions (particularly the conduct

of war) between sovereign entities would be regulated within Europe.124 The

establishment of this system combined with the earlier discovery of the extra-European

space created global order consisting of two-opposing realms: the European realm,

characterised by order and rationality buttressed by a regulatory system of law, and its

‘outside’.

These two realms were separated by, what Schmitt called, “amity lines.”125 On the non-

Westphalian side of the line was a space identified as “open” or “free”; a space where no

121 A. Columbo, ‘The ‘Realist Institutionalism’ of Carl Schmitt’, in (eds.) L. Odysseos & F. Petito, The international Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order, London: Routledge (2007) p.26; C. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, (trans.) G. Schwab, London: Massachussetts Institute of Technology Press (1985) p.13

122 Only about only about 350,000 of the approximated eight million casualties were combatants, See: E. Markisen, ‘Genocide and Total War: A Preliminary Comparison’, in (eds.) I. Wallimann & M.N. Dobkowski, Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, New York: Greenwood Press (2000) p.103; Krasner (2001b) p.21; Philpott (2002) p.72

123 Schmitt (2003) p.159

124 ibid

125 ibid pp.92-99 & p.287

38

order, or at least one recognisable by European sovereigns, had been established.126 It

was into this “open” space that the newly autonomous sovereign entities of Europe could

expand.127 Moreover, as there was no established order in this space, these sovereign

entities could operate outside of the prevailing legal and normative systems established

within Europe. Sovereign entities, within the collective space of Westphalian Europe

operated according to the principles of “autonomy, territory, mutual recognition and

control”; outside, these entities assumed that no such norms existed.128

On the ‘open’ seas and ‘empty’ lands of the European outside these sovereign entities

could engage in unchecked “tests of strength” as they appropriated, managed, and

defended new territories.129 These states, through the appropriation of territory, expanded

the ‘linear thinking’ of Westphalia across the global, dividing global space and imposing

order, could resort to any means to collect and protect their colonial assets.130 The

exercise of unregulated violence was extended to the subjugation of the populations

found, by the Europeans, in this assumedly ‘free’ space. Simply, violence served as the

basis for the relationship between the order of the European imperial cores and their

colonies on the peripheries of their visions of order.131

126 Schmitt (2003) pp.94-95

127 ibid

128 Krasner (2001a) p.17

129 Schmitt (2003) p.99

130 ibid p.87

131 M.W. Doyle, Empires, New York: Cornell University Press (1986) p.130

39

Schmitt saw this spatial arrangement a shift which secured, amongst European

sovereigns, a more rational and controlled use of violence, manifestly warfare, within the

ordered Westphalian space. Within Europe, the legal and normative systems established

in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War, worked “to prevent wars of annihilation” and

minimise the atrocities associated with them.132 The unregulated wars of pre-

Westphalian Europe (e.g. between Catholic and Protestant) were “creeded disputes that

had justified the worst atrocities” in the pursuit of religious superiority.133 These were

wars that, due to the universalist claims and objectives of Christendom, that could course

unregulated across the entire social and territorial body of Europe. For Schmitt, the

Westphalian order of Europe transformed war between its recognised sovereign entities.

Wars between these sovereign entities became “regulated contest[s] of forces gauged by

witnesses” within the “bracketed space” of the territories involved.134 This was, in

Schmitt’s thinking, one of key achievements of the Westphalian epoch.135 Restricting

war to an act between sovereigns by spatially and objectively bracketing its exercise,

rather than between different segments of an undifferentiated population, resulted in the

“renunciation of the criminalising of the opponent.”136

132 Schmitt (2003) p.246

133 ibid p.141

134 ibid p.187

135 ibid p.100, 187, 246

136 C. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediary Commentary on the Concept of the Political, (trans.) G.L. Ulmen, New York: Telos Press (2007) p.90

40

This starkly contrasts with the enemies of the religious wars that ravaged pre-Westphalian

Europe. The enemies of these wars were imagined as “an inhuman monster that must not

only be fended off, but definitively annihilated.”137 This category of enemy, “absolute

enmity” was, with Westphalia’s alleged religious delegitimisation combined with the

earlier discovery of the ‘New World’, negated.138 The enemy became relativised in the

figure of the territorial sovereign, establishing a mutual respect between these entities

who, in Schmitt’s thinking, renounced the “discrimination and defamation of their

enemies” in favour of the pursuit of strategic objectives (e.g. the appropriation of

territory).139 This form of bracketed and regulated war, unlike the religious ‘wars of

annihilation’, can be described as being limited to the pursuit of rational goals, with a

distinct and formal declaration and conclusion.140 This rejection of ‘absolute enmity’ is

something that, post-9/11, appears to have been reneged on by, particularly the U.S.

Outside of Europe, “beyond the line”, no such normative or legally binding order

prevailed. Schmitt saw the extra-European space as being dominated by “chaos” and, as

he wrote, “there exists no norm that is applicable to chaos.”141 This chaotic space became

available “for the consignment of unrestrained violence” by the sovereign entities of

137 H. Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, (trans.) J.H. Lomax, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (1995) p.26

138 Schmitt (2007) p.90

139 C. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political, (trans.) A.C. Goodson, Michigan: Michigan State University Press (2004) p.64

140 E. Balibar, We, the people of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2004) p.138

141 Schmitt (1985) p.13

41

Europe as they appropriated territory.142 For Schmitt, it was only through the

appropriation of this ‘free’ space that order, in any form, could be imposed: “Prior to

every legal, economic, and social order, [...] there is this simple question: Where and how

was it appropriated? Where and how was it divided? Where and how was it

produced?”143

In Schmitt’s thinking, these questions of appropriation were answered by turning to

Locke’s image of the labourer who mixes their labour with the earth and, thus garners

profit from what is extracted. The appropriation of territory, its organisation, and the

extraction of its resources (human or otherwise) was the process by which the

geopolitical ordering of the ‘New World’, by effective European sovereigns, began.

Schmitt saw the application of a ‘global linear thinking’ in the ways that these effective

sovereign entities (i.e. empires) operated throughout their periods of “global conquest.”144

By mixing their labour with the lands of the ‘New World’, the colonisers appropriated

territory, like “a machine of global striation,” preparing the framework for the extension

of their visions of order.145 These imperial machines worked to divide the global space:

“engraving and embedding” the ‘open’ space of the European exterior.146

142 W. Rasch, ‘Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol.104, No.2 (2005) p.258

143 Schmitt (2003) pp.327-328

144 ibid p.225; M. Hardt & A. Negri, Empire, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (2000) p.332

145 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.332

146 Schmitt (2003) p.42

42

This process of division and organisation was characterised by the construction of

“fences, enclosures, boundaries, walls, houses, and other constructs” in and around the

newly appropriated colonial spaces.147 In doing so, the imperial sovereign entities

“render[ed] visible the space” into which order was to be imposed.148 This process of

appropriation and organisation fostered a world of “closed spaces” through which the

imperial sovereign entities could expand their preferred visions of order via violence, and

domination.149 It was only after these spaces were defined by these effective sovereign

entities that, according to Schmitt, “the orders and orientations of human social life

[became] apparent.”150 In terms paralleling Foucault, this ‘order and orientation’ of life is

comparable to the establishment of disciplinary spaces through which the population can

be sculpted, according to the sovereign’s’ ‘certain ends’.

Schmitt’s vision of the geopolitical terrain is rooted in the spatial, normative, and legal

presuppositions of Westphalian Europe. For Schmitt, the existence of a territorial

sovereign unit (i.e. a state) represented the “undoubted proof” of a supreme and exclusive

claim “over the validity of the legal norm.”151 Put simply, where there was no state, there

could be no sovereignty, and, in turn, no recognisably valid order. As this logic emanated

from its European core, sovereignty, as supreme and absolute, was exercised violently

and freely. These sovereigns seized the “things, time, bodies, and ultimately [the] life

147 Schmitt (2003) p.42 (emphasis is mine)

148 Rose (1999) p.36

149 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.182

150 Schmitt (2003) p.42

151 Schmitt (1985) p.12

43

itself” was appropriated in the chaos of the Westphalian exterior.152 The work of

nineteenth century liberal utilitarian John Stuart Mill provides some insight into the way

that the life enclosed within the colonial space was understood as the antithesis of that

which occupied the imperial core of Europe. Moreover, his work, and post-colonial

critiques of it, provide us with a glimpse of how this peripheral life was indoctrinated into

their colonisers visions of order.

SECTION 2.2

DISCIPLINE ON THE PERIPHERIES OF ORDER

Mill, writing from the core of the British empire during the nineteenth century, divided

the populations of the world into “four broad stages of civilisational development -

savagism, slavery, barabarism and civilisation.”153 Mill used the term ‘civilised’ as a

synonym for the rational, educated, and liberal European.154 The ‘non-civilised’

populations of the European exterior were painted as the uneducated, unorganised, and

inferior ‘other’.155 Mill provided some prescriptive advice as to how the ‘other’ could be

prepared for, and guided towards, the attainment of the civilisational (or biopolitical)

standards imposed by their imperial colonisers.

152 Foucault (1978) p.136

153 B. Jahn, ‘Barbarian Thoughts: Imperialism in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill’, Review of International Studies, Vol.31 (2005) p.604

154 B. Parekh, ‘Superior People: The Narrowness of Liberalism from Mill to Rawls’, Times Literary Supplement, February (1994) p.11

155 ibid

44

His pedagogical prescription for ‘civilising’ populations who were deemed to belong to

the derogatory category of ‘savage’ provides an insight into the way that the sovereign

‘right of seizure’ and the imposition of discipline were utilised to produce docile and

productive colonies. Mill suggested that imperial agents could utilise violence, coercive

discipline, and enslavement to sculpt the ‘non-civilised’: “The motive determining them

must not appeal to their interests, but to their instincts; immediate hope or immediate

terror.”156 The use of ‘terror’ to appeal to the populations enclosed within the colonial

space is typical of the dialectic of core and periphery. The ‘non-civilised’ periphery is

imagined as a space which needs to be “disciplined through the forceful projection of

order” by the rational, orderly, and ‘civilised’ core.157 It is crucial to emphasise that in

this imperial dialectic, the periphery is deemed by the core to be inherently lacking order

or the propensity to autonomously impose one from within.158 Here, if, as is argued in

the first chapter, the imposition of order is a function of effective sovereignty and there is

seen to be, by the coloniser, an absence of a recognisable order in these colonial spaces, it

follows that there must also be an assumption of the absence of an indigenous sovereign

power. Sovereignty was deemed non-existent in the spaces colonised by the imperial

core.

156 J.S. Mill, ‘The Criterion of a Good Form of Government’, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XIX - Essays of Politics and Society Part II, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1977) p.395

157 D. Gregory, ‘Baring Life - Cities, Military Violence, and the Politics of Representations’, Cities of Collision, Birkhäuser Basel (2006) p.212

158 ibid

45

The discipline imposed on the periphery, for Mill, should first involve the enslavement of

the ‘non-civilised’ populations of ‘savages’. By enslaving these populations, the imperial

sovereigns could impose a specific pedagogical schema upon them. Mill saw

enslavement as a means of teaching the ‘non-civilised’ to “obey” the supremacy of their

colonisers sovereign authority.159 Obedience, for Mill, was the “first lesson of political

society.”160 This was a lesson that the populations of the core, through the (less violent)

discipline imposed there, had already learnt.

Mill characterised Europeans as rational possessors of liberty. Liberty, understood by

Mill as the possession of individual autonomy could only be applied to individuals who,

through their participation in the disciplinary process of societal education, could be

considered as “human beings in the maturity of their faculties.”161 This maturity could be

characterised by the capacity to be “improved by free and equal discussion,” rather than

the exercise of interpersonal or sovereign violence.162 A ‘civilised’ population, in the

context presented here, is comparable with the production of a docile population,

described in the first chapter, engaged in a social contract with their sovereign authorities.

159 Mill (1977) p.395

160 ibid

161 J.S. Mill, On Liberty and the Subjection of Women, New York: Henry Holt and Co. (1879) pp.24-25

162 ibid

46

In Mill’s view, the Europeans has established a “system of education”, which in the same

way described by Volger and Markell, worked to produce an ideal citizenry.163 This

citizenry had been disciplined “in the habit, and thence the power, of subordinating his

personal impulses and aims, to what were considered the ends of society.”164 This

discipline ensured that the ‘supreme’ power resting with ‘the people’, as described by

Locke, was wielded responsibly and in such a way that it legitimised the sovereign power

that governed them.165

The imperial core became synonymous with political stability and social cohesiveness,

juxtaposed against the perceived ‘chaos’ of the colonial periphery. The sovereign entities

emanating from Europe saw it as their ‘burden’ to bring order and (often violently)

deliver “peace and prosperity into a disorderly world.”166 It is the opinion of this thesis

that this ‘burden’ was enacted through the exercise of, what is described here, as effective

sovereign power. Through the appropriation of space and the seizure of life, it was

possible to impose a “legal, economic and social order”: the European normalisation of

the chaos of the ‘free’ space of the ‘New World’.167 By focussing on the imperial

appropriation of space, its delineation, and its domestic ordering it becomes possible to

163 J.S. Mill, ‘A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence of Scientific Investigation (Books IV-VI and Appendices), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume VIII, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1974) p.920

164 Mill (1974) p.920 (emphasis is mine)

165 Ritchie (1891) P.393

166 Volger & Markell (2003) p.2

167 Schmitt (2003) pp.327-328; Schmitt (1985) p.13

47

identify the techniques used to effectively impose sovereign authority over a territory,

organise it, and subjugate and sculpt the life enclosed within it.

SECTION 2.3

EXCEPTIONAL SPACES:

ORGANISING THE GEOPOLITICAL TERRAIN

In an imperial context, global order should be understood as a relationship “in which one

state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society.”168 This

expression of the potency of the effective sovereign entities (i.e. empires) resulted in the

core being able to control the domestic order and foreign policies of the periphery.169

This command of the political and social life of the periphery is established through the

organisation of the space of the colonial space by an effective sovereign power. As noted

above, there was no recognition of a pre-existing sovereign entity in these peripheral

spaces, leaving it open for the imposition of a particular vision of order emanating from

the imperial core. The effective sovereignty of the coloniser here encompasses the ability

to decide “who could rule and what those rulers could do.”170 This relationship stands in

contrast to the principles established during the Westphalian epoch. Notions of

“autonomy, territory, mutual recognition and control” were of little relevance in the

168 Doyle (1986) p.45

169 ibid p.130

170 ibid

48

colonial spaces.171 The populations enclosed within these peripheral spaces were unable

to exercise effective sovereignty; they were unable to organise their own political spaces

or establish their own visions of order.

In these peripheral spaces, from a European perspective, there was no existing order.

Drawing on Schmitt’s logic, this absence could be illustrated by the perceived dearth of

discernibly appropriated territories. For the early modern European sovereign entities the

absence of recognisably organised spaces was a symptom of an absence of any effective

or legitimate sovereign power in the periphery. To reiterate a point made earlier: the state

was recognised, within Europe, as “undoubted proof” of an established legal order.172

For the European sovereign entities, this lack of an established legal order indicated the

absence of a sovereign entity able to arbitrate over a ‘normal’ legal situation.173 Schmitt

declared, “he is sovereign who definitely decides whether the normal situation actually

exists.”174 In this line of thinking, the sovereign entities emanating out of Europe could

effectively shape the ‘open’ spaces of the ‘New World’ unhindered by existing orders by

deciding that no ‘normal situation’ existed in their colonial claims.

Schmitt’s formulation of sovereign power, while including the aspects discussed in the

first chapter, added the qualification that the sovereign had the ability to declare a

171 Krasner (2001a) p.17

172 Schmitt (1985) p.12

173 ibid p.13

174 ibid

49

“suspension of the entire existing order” within the space of their legitimate rule

(typically, the state).175 The suspension of the existing order - legal, economic, and social

- was legitimate, in Schmitt’s logic, when an exceptional situation was identified by the

sovereign.176 A situation is exceptional when “it is not codified in the existing legal

order” of the space(s) that a given sovereign had appropriated.177 Schmitt characterised

the exception “as a case of extreme peril” and a “danger to the existence of the state, or

the like” which “cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed

law.”178 Schmitt posited: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”179 Inside of

Europe, when a sovereign declaration of an exceptional situation is made, “the

[sovereignty of the] state remains, whereas law recedes.”180 As the legal order recedes

the figure of the sovereign is able to act with, echoing Bodin, an “unlimited authority.”181

This ‘unlimited authority’ might allow for the violation of a citizens legally assured rights

and the exercise of unregulated sovereign violence, as Schmitt wrote: “The precise details

of an emergency cannot be anticipated, nor can one spell out what may take place in such

a case.”182

175 Schmitt (1985) p.12

176 Schmitt (2003) pp.327-328

177 Schmitt (1985) p.6

178 ibid (emphasis is mine)

179 ibid p.5

180 ibid p.12

181 ibid

182 ibid pp.6-7

50

Employing this thinking, it is possible to understand the ‘open’ spaces beyond the amity

lines, from the perspective of the European sovereigns, as ‘spaces of exceptionality’.

Schmitt does acknowledge that, “the exception is different from anarchy and chaos.”183

However, it could be argued that when the imperial powers appropriated territories in the

‘New World’ they connected these peripheral spaces with their respective cores. In other

words, as these colonial spaces were appropriated they were rendered visible as spaces

onto which the order, already established in the core, was to be imposed.184 As a given

‘order’ was extended into these newly appropriated spaces, so too was the relevant

sovereigns right to police these spaces. In the act of incorporating the colonial space into

their territorial holdings, the imperial sovereigns understood themselves as legitimately

able to police these spaces to secure the domestic order.185 From this perspective, the

identification of exceptional spaces by effective sovereign entities, their appropriation,

the imposition of order, and the subsequent policing of that order becomes apparent as an

organisational principle of the geopolitical terrain.

The life enclosed within these exceptional spaces, regarded as ‘savages’ accustomed to

the use of interpersonal violence “in the bloody business of self-assertion and self-

preservation,” stood as an obstacle to the successful monopolisation of violence and the

imposition of order.186 Further, the ‘non-civilised’ populations enclosed within these

183 Schmitt (1985) pp.6-7 & p.12

184 Rose (1999) p.36

185 Dean (2006) p.16 (emphasis is deliberate)

186 Jahn (2005) p.604; Volger & Markell (2003) p.1; Weber (1946) p.78

51

exceptional spaces stood as obstacles to the implementation of “a system designed to

serve the needs and further the interests of capital,” human or otherwise.187 The

appropriation of territory and the subsequent enclosure of the populations and resources

captured therein, was, for the effective imperial sovereigns of Europe, the first step in the

effective extension of a preferred vision of order into the ‘chaos’ of the outside.188 The

effective extraction of resources, relied on the imposition of a “relation of docility-utility”

upon the life enclosed within the colonial space.189

Due to the varying levels of acceptance of the production of docility amongst the colonial

populations, these spaces could become understandable as sites where imperial powers

could either gain or potentially lose power.190 By employing Schmitt’s logic, the risk of

losing power (through resistance or apathy) means that the colonial spaces can be seen as

potential sites of exceptionality, that required special measures by their imperial rulers.

Moreover, as the European powers created ‘closed spaces’ through the appropriation of

‘open’ space they were able to channel, code, and territorialise the flow of capital (human

or otherwise) by “blocking certain flows and facilitating others.”191 This is a logic that

echoes the surveillance and control of bodies and movement within the barracks as

described by Foucault. In the colonies, the ordering of space involved the “imposition of

187 Hardt & Negri (2000) pp.224-225

188 Doyle (1986) p.128

189 Foucault (1991a) p.137

190 Doyle (1986) p.128

191 Hardt & Negri (2000) pp.332-333

52

abstract command and the organisation of simple theft and unequal exchange”; always

directed at providing benefits to the imperial core.192 This logic parallels the hierarchical

structure and the “network of relations of exchange” established within the disciplinary

space of the barracks, designed to benefit the maintenance of a legitimate sovereign

state.193

However, “acceptance of domination is never total.”194 A threat to the control of these

flows, between periphery and core, can be understood as threatening the imposition of the

order envisioned by the appropriating sovereign entity. “[A]mbivalence - counterpoints,

contestation, [and] conflict” by, or amongst, the colonial populations resulted in “the

instability of any social construction” established by a sovereign entity.195 Such

instability could provoke their imperial rulers to invoke exceptional sovereign violence

and discipline, “on the basis of [the core’s] right of self-preservation,” the maintenance of

the systems of “simple theft and unequal exchange,” and the continued extension of its

imperial vision of order.196 This relationship between periphery and core, although not

‘exceptional’ in strictly Schmittian terms, established a geopolitical terrain that was

shaped by the exercise of sovereign violence and harsh discipline (i.e. enslavement)

rather than by a biopolitical system of governance. It was through the use of violent

measures, considered exceptional if exercised within the core, that the European empires

192 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.31

193 Reid (2008) p.18

194 J.N. Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World Scale, London: Pluto (1990) p.76

195 ibid

196 Schmitt (1985) p.12; Hardt & Negri (2000) p.31

53

enacted their effective sovereignty; ordering, organising, and sculpting the global space

(and the life found within it) according to the values, norms, and laws of the core.

The imposition of order, emanating from the various imperial cores, and the subsequent

policing of those spaces provided the organisational principle of the geopolitical terrain,

not the dissemination of an assemblage of principles promising “autonomy, territory,

mutual recognition and control.”197 Sovereignty is not adequately defined by these

principles. Rather, either in place of these principles, or in conjunction with them,

sovereignty should be understood as the ability to use violence, exceptional measures to

“render visible the space over which government is to be exercised.”198 The domestic

spaces of the core were governed using methods which have been described as a

biopolitical or “life-administering.”199 In the exceptional spaces of the periphery, it was

sovereign power - violent and able to appropriate and organise space - that were the

preferred mechanisms of rule. The essence of the effective sovereignty expressed by the

imperial powers of Europe was the ability to shape and maintain space at both the

domestic and global levels.

197 Krasner (2001a) p.17

198 Rose (1999) p.36

199 Foucault (1978) p.136

54

III

CONTEMPORARY PARALLELS & CONCLUSIONS

In the contemporary era, characterised by globalisation, there are parallels with the pre-

Westphalian and subsequent waves of imperial expansion. These parallels illustrate the

persistence of effective sovereign entities, claiming and shaping space as well as

sculpting the life within it. Specific examples of the persistence of the effective aspect of

sovereignty posited throughout the previous chapters of this thesis can be found in the

continuing ‘War on Terror’. The efforts, led by the U.S, to pursue a amorphous terrorist

‘enemy’ , alongside the pressures of globalisation, have revealed the tenuous nature of the

reified transformations and principles of the Westphalian ‘revolution’. The conduct of

the U.S, across the global space, reveals it as an effective sovereign entity. Like the

imperial powers of Europe, the U.S able to render visible spaces of exceptionality which

require the imposition, and subsequent policing, of a preferred vision of order. Moreover,

the multiple processes of globalisation have significantly altered the topography of the

geopolitical terrain. Global trade, transport, and communications technologies have, in

conjunction with the proliferation of a universally applicable human rights discourse,

changed the way that both the global space and its collective populations are perceived by

intergovernmental, transnational, and supranational entities operating alongside (or

above) the figure of the state.

55

SECTION 3.1

PARALLELS WITH THE PRE-MODERN TERRAIN

It is first necessary, to outline the conceptual parallels between the dynamics of the

contemporary geopolitical terrain and that of pre-Westphalian Christendom. To do this it

is useful to turn to the insights made by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire

(2000) and Multitude (2004) as they extend Foucault’s biopower beyond the space of the

state. Empire provides us with a new global political topography by deconstructing and

then reconstructing the conceptual presuppositions which have featured as central in

mainstream discourses of world order, as has been discussed over the previous chapters.

Hardt and Negri reconfigure the theoretical geopolitical topography by outlining a new

apparatus of global rule and provide us with a further re-conceptualisation of sovereignty.

In doing so, Hardt and Negri’s work illuminates the dynamics of “[o]ur own Middle

Ages.”200

Hardt and Negri outline the emergence of a new global apparatus of rule which they call,

Empire (always denoted with a capital ‘E’). Its first point of difference with the

conventional model of geopolitics is its disregard of borders. Similar in scope to the

authority claimed by the Church in pre-Westphalian Europe, this new mechanism of rule

has “no territorial boundaries limit its reign.”201 Echoing the logic of the religious

authorities of pre-modern Europe, particularly its categorisation of the ‘New World‘ as a

200 Eco (1986) p.84

201 Hardt & Negri (2000) pp.xiv-xv

56

“chaotic” and “open” space.202 The global mechanism described in Empire, operates

across a conceptually “unbounded,” “open,” and “smooth space,” which is characterised

by a preponderance of “uncoded and deterritorialised flows” of people, goods, money,

technology, and ideas.203 The suggested evolution of this deterritorialised apparatus of

rule undermines the primacy of the principles of Westphalian sovereignty: “autonomy,

territory, mutual recognition and control.”204 This new apparatus functions using a

reconfiguration of sovereignty which, does not find its loci within the appropriated space

of the state and rejects the exclusionary concepts of non-intervention and control.205

Simply, states, under the pressures of globalisation, have receded, their borders have

faded, and the differentiation between inside and outside, or core and periphery, is

allegedly no longer relevant or practical.206

Like the appropriation of space mandated by Pope Alexander VI, Empire’s apparatus

works to absorb the entire globe, and its populations, into a single social, economic, and

political entity: “Empire is a machine for universal integration, an open mouth with an

infinite appetite, inviting all to come peacefully within its domain.”207 Moreover, this

brushing aside of borders, along with the subsequent integration of the global space and

populations into a singular sovereign body, has broken down the difference between the

202 Schmitt (1985) p.13; Schmitt (2003) pp.94-95

203 Hardt & Negri (2000) pp.166-167, 332-333

204 Krasner (2001a) p.17

205 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.37

206 ibid p.187

207 ibid p.198

57

domestic and international spheres. As will be discussed, this has had a profound impact

upon the use of violence within the contemporary geopolitical terrain. With the effective

permeation of borders under the stresses of globalisation, the difference between the

domestic act of policing and the exercise of war internationally has also become less

distinct. This lack of distinction between the internal and external modalities of the

exercise of legitimate sovereign violence is a further indicator of the “return of the

Middle Ages” in the dynamics of global politics.208 For now, it is necessary to focus on

the ways that the conceptual topography described by Hardt and Negri contrasts to the

mainstream discourses regarding geopolitical organisation and sovereign power.

While the Westphalian sovereigns found, as posited by Locke, that the legitimacy of their

rule rested in ‘the people’ that they enclosed (and disciplined) within their territories, the

mechanisms described by Hardt and Negri, utilise new methods to control and sculpt the

global population.209 Specifically, the dialectic relationship between the ‘civilised’ and

European core and the ‘non-civilised’ periphery, that dominated the periods of imperial

conquest, has, in the evolution of Empire’s global apparatus, become (purportedly)

irrelevant.210 Empire does not function by dividing and differentiating populations

according to the types of civilisational typographies explicated by Mill or on the basis of

“race, creed, colour, gender, [or] sexual orientation,” for example.211

208 Eco (1986) p.72

209 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.103

210 ibid

211 ibid p.198

58

In the place of fixing populations within the ordered space of the state, or the exceptional

spaces of the colonies, separating them by establishing separate identities

(‘civilised’/‘non-civilised’) which independently legitimise and strengthen their

respective sovereigns authorities, Empire prefers “[c]ontingency, mobility, and

flexibility.”212 Rather, than manufacturing a homogeneously docile and productive

population, through the construction of ‘closed spaces’ and the imposition of discipline,

Empire’s apparatus supposedly operates by affirming and arranging ‘difference’ within its

vision of global order.213 Hardt and Negri write that this new mechanism of rule operates

incorporating, celebrating, differentiating, and managing a combined global population:

promoting the fluidity and circulation of individuals within its deterritorialised space.214

As opposed to the territorially enclosed populations of states (the Lockean ‘people’) this

new apparatus incorporates all people, everywhere, within a singular mass of individuals

which Hardt and Negri call, the “multitude.”215

It needs to be stressed that the ‘multitude’ is not in itself a cohesive and homogenous

mass, rather it is “shot through with lines of conflict and antagonism.”216 This parallels

the dynamic of the Thirty Years’ War in which religiously motivated violence surged

across the entire social and territorial entity of Christian Europe as Catholic and

212 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.200

213 ibid

214 ibid p.201; M.A. Okur, ‘Rethinking Empie After 9/11: Towards a New Ontological Image of World Order’, Perceptions, Winter (2007) p.64

215 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.195

216 ibid

59

Protestant forces vied for supremacy and survival.217 The ethnic, religious, and cultural

discord, formerly contained within sovereign territories, that courses through the

contained and amorphous ‘multitude’, described by Hardt and Negri, creates a global

population, as will be discussed, that has the potential to be in a constant state of conflict,

or, borrowing from Schmitt, exceptionality.

The institutional recognition of a global population, or ‘multitude’, can be found in the

discourses concerning sovereignty in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

In 1999, former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, stated, that, during the post-Cold

War period, the state had been transformed from a space in which transcendent powers

manufactured and maintained a population of docile and productive bodies, to a set of

biopolitical “instruments at the service of their peoples.”218 Over the past decade or so,

the legitimacy of sovereignty, in the vision of the international community (i.e. the UN),

has become associated with certain biopolitical responsibilities: the protection of the

“safety and lives of citizens” and the “promotion of their well-being,” rather than the

traditional appropriation of territory, the monopolisation of violence, and the imposition

of order.219

217 Ferguson & Mansbach (1996) p.265; Schmitt (2003) p.141; Morgenthau (1948) p.341; Krasner (2001a) p.17

218 K. Annan, ‘Two Conceptions of Sovereignty’, The Economist, Vol.352, No.137 (1999) p.49

219 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001) p.13retrieved from: http://www.iciss.ca/report-en.asp retrieved on: 2/2/2010

2005 World Summit Outcome, G.A. Res. 60/1, ¶ 139, U.N. GAOR, 60th Sess., 8th plen. mtg., U.N. Doc. A/RES/60/1 (Oct. 24, 2005) p.30retrieved from: http://www.un.org/Docs/journal/asp/ws.asp?m=A/RES/60/1 retrieved on: 23/2/2010

60

States, in their membership in the UN, are obliged to acknowledge the “diversity of the

world” and commit “to advancing human welfare, freedom and progress everywhere.”220

In 2005, a UN World Summit produced a series of resolutions which advocated that,

“Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war

crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”221 The members of the

international community (embodied by the UN) are obliged to recognise and ensure “the

right of people to live in freedom and dignity, free from poverty and despair.”222 This

resolution, made by the UN General Assembly, recognises “that all individuals, in

particular vulnerable people, are entitled to freedom from fear and freedom from want”

they are to be given “an equal opportunity to enjoy all their rights and fully develop their

human potential.”223 Moreover, “the United Nations” itself, also claims the responsibility

to act and “help to protect populations.”224 The point here is to acknowledge the

possibility of outside scrutiny and subsequent intervention in the domestic affairs of a

state which, according to the international community, fail to fulfil these biopolitical

responsibilities.225

220 2005 World Summit Outcome (Oct. 24, 2005) p.2

221 ibid p.30

222 ibid p.31

223 ibid

224 ibid p.30

225 ibid

61

In making these resolutions, the U.N, is revealed as an example of one of the “national

and supranational organisms” which form part of Empire’s global apparatus of rule.226

According to Hardt and Negri, organisms like the UN, through the membership of states

and their subsequent recognition of its principles, assist in “govern[ing] the world.”227

Further, the advocation of this discourse of human rights, security, and the possibility of

international intervention indicates a shift away from the autonomy of states, able to act

with impunity, towards the establishment of a global culture, and apparatus, which

monitors and holds sovereign entities accountable for their actions.228

In the context of this thesis, this ability to promote the conformity of states, regarding

certain global biopolitical objectives, echoes the ability claimed by the religious

authorities of the Middle Ages to intervene in the domestic affairs of the various

sovereign entities its vision of order encompassed. Rather than claiming the divine right

to intervene to maintain the ‘single social entity’ of Christendom (and spread its

sanctioned logic), the U.N advocates intervention to protect and cultivate ‘life’

globally.229 In doing so, the U.N, its member states, and other organisations like it, are

advocating a discourse which recognises all populations as one undifferentiated category

which is assured the right to security, dignity, and human rights.230 In the geopolitical

226 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.xii

227 ibid xi

228 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001) p.14

229 2005 World Summit Outcome (Oct. 24, 2005) p.30

230 J.S. Barkin, ‘The Evolution of the Constitution of Sovereignty and the Emergence of Human Rights Norms’, Millennium, Vol.27, No.2 (1998) pp.246-248

62

terrain described by, and language of, Hardt and Negri, under these globally assured

provisions, the populations of the world become recognisable as the “multitude.”231

In addition to the way that Empire’s apparatus perceives the global population, Hardt and

Negri also suggest that evidence of this development can be found in the state’s decreased

capacity to regulate the “economic and cultural exchanges” that proliferate the global

space.232 The processes of globalisation have caused a “irresistible and irreversible”

proliferation of these exchanges across, above, and around the fading borders of the

normatively sovereign states.233 A “series of national and supranational organisms” have,

in the composition of Empire, displaced states as the regulators of these exchanges.234

Globally active organisations (i.e. GATT, the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, and the

UN) have been transformed, in the terrain described in Empire, into actors which, while

previously functioning according to contractual or negotiated agreements with states,

operate as the driving force behind legitimate juridical action in their own right.235

The increasing prominence of these inter-governmental organisations in the monitoring

and regulation of global networks of exchange has led to the autonomy of states being

compromised.236 The rapid proliferation of these technologically facilitated global

231 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.60 & pp.198-201

232 ibid p.xi

233 ibid

234 ibid p.xii

235 ibid p.336, 181

236 ibid p.307

63

networks has caused states to be absorbed within the apparatus of Empire. In doing so,

states become part of a greater mechanism, assisting in the articulation of a sophisticated

system of global governance.237 According to Hardt and Negri: “Even the most dominant

[states] should no longer be thought of as supreme and sovereign authorities, either

outside or even within their own borders.”238 Here, there is a parallel with the dynamics

of pre-Westphalian Europe where all authorities and populations, from the Pope down

through kings and peasants, were perceived and treated as “a single social entity” under

the divine mandate of Christendom.239 In its totality Empire’s apparatus works to unify

the various actors and forces which function across the global space: cultural, economic,

and political.

However, just as Pope Alexander VI granted the ‘open’ space of the ‘New World’ to the

Christian empires of Spain and Portugal for appropriation into the order envisioned by

the Church, Empire’s apparatus also relies upon the capabilities of certain states to extend

and maintain its geopolitical order. Specifically, the U.S is granted a “singular status”

within this new apparatus and topography.240 Hardt and Negri, correctly aver that the U.S

became, after the fall of the old empires and the Soviet Union, the worlds’ “one

superpower” and because of the dominance of its military capabilities, it “holds

hegemony over the global use of force.”241 However, while they posit that the U.S, like

237 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.307

238 ibid p.xi

239 Philpott (2002) p.72

240 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.309

241 ibid (emphasis is mine)

64

all states, has been subsumed within their suggested global apparatus of rule, this thesis

views this global military hegemony differently.

SECTION 3.2

THE U.S: POLICING OR ORDERING THE(IR) GLOBAL TERRAIN

In Empire, it is argued that the U.S, with the end of the Cold War, became the only power

“able to manage international justice” on behalf of their suggested emerging structure and

logic of global governance.242 For Hardt and Negri, the U.S uses force not in its own

interests “but in the name of global right” (e.g. human rights and the protection of global

flows).243 It is through the military capabilities of the U.S that Empire’s apparatus

allegedly exercises a global “‘right of the police’ in the name of humanitarian

intervention and ‘universal values’.”244 As Weber suggests, this ‘right of the police’, like

that monopolised within the normatively sovereign Westphalian state, must be claimed by

this global apparatus, so that it can be considered a legitimate sovereign entity able to

maintain order.245 They argue that the U.S acts as the global “peace police,” “called to

intervene militarily” by the international community and the apparatus of Empire.246

242 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.180; M. Hardt & A. Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London: Hamish Hamilton (2004) p.xii

243 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.180

244 P. Green, ‘The Passage from Imperialism to Empire: A Commentary on Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’, Historical Materialism, Vol.10, No.1, (2002) p.32

245 Weber (1946) p.78

246 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.181

65

Hardt and Negri suggest that the military capabilities of the U.S are summoned in

response to threats posed by uncooperative sovereigns (i.e. those who do not uphold their

‘responsibilities to protect’) and elements within the ‘multitude’ who resist Empire’s

global vision of order.247 Simply, the U.S confronts, contains, and represses any “enemy”

identified in Empire’s undifferentiated population and ‘open’ terrain.248 “[M]ost often

called terrorist,” these enemies are confronted by military force which is “presented as an

internationally sanctioned police action” exercised using the military might of the U.S.249

For Hardt and Negri, the categorisation of these military interventions as ‘police actions’

reveals a further consistency with the dynamics of pre-Westphalian Europe.

Just as the wars of religion (between Catholic and Protestant, for example) sent waves of

devastating violence across the singular and social entity of Christendom, so to is the

entire space and population of Empire under the ‘policing’ of the U.S (apparently on

behalf of Empire). Hardt and Negri argue that in the contemporary globalised terrain all

conflicts should be considered civil as they occur within the “single sovereign territory”

of the post-modern terrain they describe.250 Because the entire globe and its collective

populations are considered as Empire’s sovereign domain and object, wars should be seen

as police actions carried which are carried out by the U.S, as a regime of ‘day-to-day’

operations that aim to counter threats to the ‘multitude’ as well as the circuits of

247 Hardt & Negri (2000) p.181

248 ibid p.181 & 37

249 ibid p.37

250 Hardt & Negri (2004) p.3

66

production and exchange, which it monitors and regulates, anywhere around the globe.251

The blurring of the bracketed exercise of war (in the international realm) and the constant

sovereign mechanism of policing (to maintain domestic order) creates a situation where

the global space and population is plunged into a “permanent state of global conflict.”252

Contemporary wars, within the context of Hardt and Negri’s post-modern topography,

should be seen as functioning as a constantly active “instrument of rule” and not an

extreme situation occurring between states.253 This warlike instrument works as an

“active mechanism that constantly creates and reinforces” specific forms of life and

preferred visions of order at the global level, professed by Hardt and Negri as being

carried out for and by the global apparatus of Empire.254

However, the ongoing military deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other

regions, suggest that the order that is being envisioned and established is that of the

(effective sovereign entity of the) U.S and not that of some singular global apparatus of

rule. The U.S, not the suggested apparatus of Empire, does, however, exercise violence

as a globally active and immanent “regime of biopower.”255 The U.S, in the opinion of

this thesis, operates as an effective sovereign entity by identifying spaces and forms of

life which are perceived as threats to its ongoing dominance in the ‘open’ space created

251 Hardt & Negri (2004) p.20

252 ibid p.xi

253 ibid p.xiii

254 ibid p.21

255 ibid p.20

67

by globalisation. As will be expanded below, the warlike global ‘regime of biopower’

works to produce and reproduce “all aspects of social life” under the vision and potency

of the effective sovereign figure of the United States.256

While Hardt and Negri’s theoretical projections aptly characterise the space and dynamic

of the contemporary geopolitical terrain, it has become clear, since the events of

September 11, 2001, that the characterisation of the U.S as an altruistic force for the

global good is wholly optimistic. The U.S, as illustrated in its occupation of Iraq as part

of the on-going ‘War on Terror’ is more than willing to ignore the wishes of the

international community (embodied in the figure of the UN) and exercise its power, and

its effective sovereignty, unilaterally. Moreover, the identification of the ‘terrorist’ enemy

has re-instated the “absolute enmity” which was apparently negated by the institution of

Westphalia.257 This enemy is pursued across the entire global social and territorial entity.

Characterised as criminal and “an inhuman monster that must not only be fended off, but

definitively annihilated.”258

256 Hardt & Negri (2004) p.13

257 Schmitt (2007) p.90

258 ibid; Meier (1995) p.26

68

SECTION 3.3

THE U.S AS AN EFFECTIVE SOVEREIGN ENTITY

Under the logic of global policing of the U.S, the “state of exception has become

permanent and general” across the unbounded global terrain described in Empire.259 The

U.S, in Schmitt’s terms, can be understood as the sovereign entity powerful enough to be

able to decide on existence of this globally applied state of exception.260 Exemplified by

the actions of the former Bush administration after 9/11, when the U.S operated outside

of the wishes of much of the international community represented by the United

Nations.261 The U.S argued that the threat of terrorism equated to “the constant presence

of an enemy and the threat of disorder,” within its borders and across the global space.262

The U.S identified and engaged spaces which, in their view, discipline and order needed

to be imposed for the sake of the sovereign order envisioned by successive regimes.

These claims work to characterise the U.S as a space in which a “normal legal situation

exists” in contrast to its exceptional exterior where the terrorist enemy constantly lurks.263

The juxtaposition of imperial order and peripheral chaos has rendered the “situation after

9/11 as one of perpetual war,” driving a permanent and global state of exception.264

259 Hardt & Negri (2004) p.7

260 Schmitt (1985) p.5

261 Okur (2007) pp.73-74

262 Hardt & Negri (2004) p.30

263 Schmitt (1985) p.13

264 B. Chappell, ‘Rehearsals of the Sovereign States of Exception and Threat Governmentality’, Cultural Dynamics, Vol.18, No.3 (2006) p.314

69

In an echo of the religious wars of the pre-Westphalian era, ex-president Bush declared,

“This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.”265 This open ended

declaration of the war has acclimatised the American population “to a new identity” of a

people living under the constant threat of attack.266 The terrorist enemy has been

presented as a threat to humanity, understood from the perspective of the imperial core.

The terrorists, as described by the regime of G.W Bush, are “those who perpetrate

premeditated, politically motivated violence against non-combatant targets.”267 In this

definition it is possible to locate two opposing categories: those classified as terrorist and

those who are considered as part of a non-combatant citizenry. These terrorists are,

within mainstream politics, always presented as the perpetrators of violence against the

innocent (docile, and productive) citizenry who circulate within the global space where

the U.S holds the hegemony of force.268 This indistinct description of the terrorist allows

for its application by different sovereign powers in different contexts: a states governing

authorities “empower themselves by defining who is their terrorist enemy, their Bin

Laden.”269 This parallels the identification of a ‘non-civilised’ other, typified by Mill’s

nineteenth century typography; the ‘un-civilised’ life found on the peripheries of the old

empires have been replaced by an identification of the exceptional figure of the terrorist.

265 P. Ford, ‘Europe Cringes at Bush ‘Crusade’ against Terrorists’, Christian Science Monitor, September 19, 2001, p.12

266 ibid p.12

267 U.S Department of State, ‘Country Reports on Terrorism’, Legislative Requirements and Key Terms,retrieved from: http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2006/82726.htm retrieved on: 12/7/2010

268 N. Chomsky & E.S Herman, Manufacturing Consent, New York: Pantheon Books (2002) p.131

269 U. Beck, ‘The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited’, Theory, Culture, and Society, Vol.19, No.4 (2002) p.44

70

In reacting to an act of terrorism, the U.S, and other powerful states (e.g. the U.K and

Russia), employed an array of disciplinary and exceptional measures to confront the

enemies hiding in the multitudinous global population and the ‘open’ space described in

Empire. These measures, rather than strengthening a global apparatus of governance,

illustrate the effective sovereignty of the U.S as being able to control and shape the

spaces of our neo-medieval terrain. The U.S does not stand alone as the only example of

effective sovereignty but it does represent the most dominant entity currently shaping the

open space of the globalised world. It operates, as the old empires did, by extending their

visions of order across the global space. The U.S, after 9/11, set about “engraving and

embedding” their vision across the allegedly “smooth space” of Empire.270

The physical spaces that the U.S has defined render visible the spatial order envisioned

through its imperial sovereignty.271 The US-Mexico border has been the site of some

notable reassertions of their power over space. In 2006, over one thousand kilometres of

wall was approved along the U.S-Mexico border; rendering visible its docile and ordered

core as distinct from the perceived exceptionality of its exterior.272 Individuals, members

of the multitude, crossing the Canadian border are now required to present their passports

to armed border guards, rather than flowing freely between the two allied states.273 The

U.S also requires that all freight transport is also scrutinised by an automated electronic

270 Schmitt (2003) p.42; Hardt & Negri (2000) pp.332-333

271 A. Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (2005) p.15

272 Okur (2007) p.70

273 ibid

71

risk assessment system, within Canadian territory, before they even arrive at the U.S

border.274 Thus, the U.S has not only set about shaping the individual members of the

multitude which attempt to enter its core but also remotely controlling the flows of goods

that it requires to maintain the life its borders enclose.

Extra-territorial disciplinary spaces have also been established by the U.S. These

disciplinary enclosures illustrate American efforts to identify and organise exceptional

spaces, and discipline the multitude found there, and manufacture a docile (global)

population. Camp X-Ray, in Guantanamo Bay, holds terrorists, enemies, and unlawful

combatants outside of the American legal (and Constitutional) zone of legitimacy. In this

extra-judicial disciplinary space the U.S administrations are able to prevent disruptive

members of the multitude from accessing their human rights; allegedly assured by the

U.N as a mechanism of Empire. In these spaces the aforementioned sovereign “right of

seizure” is plainly exercised by the U.S.275 This logic contrasts to the primacy of human

movement in the undifferentiated terrain of Empire. The same logic can be identified in

the ways that Afghanistan and Iraq have been identified as exceptional spaces in which

the (American vision of) imperial order is threatened.

The occupants of these spaces, amongst others, have been deemed by the U.S, in an act

which echoes the effective sovereignty of the old empires, to be the sources of

exceptionality in the global space and threaten the stability of the globalised networks

274 Okur (2007) pp.70-71

275 Foucault (1978) p.136

72

and flows. In the case of states that have been deemed to be in a condition of

exceptionality, the U.S essentially denies that there is any proof of a sovereign states

“superiority of the legal norm” justifying its intervention.276 Simply, from the perspective

of effective sovereignty, the U.S, in occupying these spaces, has decided that there is no

successfully sovereign state in existence in Afghanistan and Iraq, amongst other

countries.277 Moreover, in a parallel with the old empires, the U.S, sees itself as carrying

the ‘burden’ of imposing order within these spaces: delivering “peace and prosperity”

into a world deemed disorderly.278 The ongoing presence of the U.S, under President

Obama, in Iraq, to train and advise local authorities, even after ‘formal combat

operations’ have apparently ceased, is evidence of its imperial desire to organise and

discipline these ‘exceptional’ spaces within its preferred vision of order.279

The evidence of American military superiority appears, on the images provided by

surveillance satellites and drones, as “scratches on the face of the country.”280 These

distant images obscure the experience of the unfortunate populations captured within

these exceptional spaces. On the ground, the exceptional policing of these spaces

continues, as the domestic realms of Afghan and Iraqi life became perceived as

276 Schmitt (1985) p.12

277 ibid

278 Volger & Markell (2003) p.2

279 S. Shane, M. Mazzetti, & R.F. Worth, ‘Secret Assualt on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents’, The New York Times, August 14, 2010retrieved on: 16/8/2010retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/15shadowwar.html?_r=1&hp

280 M.L. Pratt, ‘Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen’, Critical Inquiry, Vol.12, No.1 (1985) p.119

73

exceptional spaces dominated by threats to the American vision of world order.281 In

these exceptional spaces, the terrorist enemy would be engaged with and removed from

the (global) population. These techniques of enclosure, surveillance, and violence have

been, since the invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, extended into many other regions.

According to a recent New York Times report these types of techniques have been

employed in Pakistan and Yemen, alongside a collection of African and ex-Soviet

states.282 In doing so the U.S, under Obama, illustrates its effective sovereignty, initially

exercised by the old empires, by continuing to identify exceptional spaces in which

violence and discipline will be exercised, as a means to imposing order on the global

space through the annihilation of the chaos brought by the presence of an amorphous

terrorist threat.

SECTION 3.4

CONCLUSION

This thesis began by canvassing the various formulations of sovereignty leading up to,

and including, the reified Westphalian epoch. The purpose of this discussion was to

separate the ontological potency of absolute and supreme sovereign power, described by

Bodin, from the normative and institutionalised notions associated with the authority of

the state. However, it was argued that these notions and principles, especially those

281 Gregory (2006) p.215

282 Shane, Mazzetti, & Worth (2010)

74

related to the Westphalian revolution, were only ever really considered applicable within

the combined space of Europe where, as Schmitt argued, the figure of the state was

understood to equate to the undoubted existence of an established legal, social, political,

and/or economic order. It was through the appropriation of territory that, in the argument

of this thesis, the conceptual adjustment concerning the mainstream interpretation of

sovereignty was revealed: a force potent enough to render visible the space within which

it could impose and maintain a preferred vision of order.

Within the early European states, the lives of captured populations were, initially, seized

as possessions of their sovereign rulers: embodied in Foucault’s ‘right to kill’. However,

as the relationship between sovereignty and territory was established, sovereignty was

reconfigured, illustrated by the work of Locke, into a power, the legitimacy of which

rested with the enclosure and recognition of ‘the people’. ‘The people’ were contracted

into the service of the state through the sovereign production of disciplinary spaces.

These disciplinary spaces, exemplified by ‘barracks’, manufactured a docile and

productive citizenry who would ideally conform to the preferences decided by the

sovereign and articulated through its governing authorities. In this way ‘the people’ were

incorporated into a biopolitical ‘ensemble of technologies’ which facilitated the

legitimacy of the sovereign authority of the state.

On its outside, the transformations relating to the Westphalian epoch (i.e. territory,

autonomy, and warfare) were disregarded in favour of the use of violence and exceptional

75

forms of discipline in the appropriation of colonies. The populations and resources

captured within these peripheral spaces were subject to the imposition of order by their

colonisers. Using the work of Mill and Schmitt, it was argued that the colonisers

perceived and constructed the colonies as exceptional spaces which contained threats to

the flow of resources (human or otherwise) that fed their imperial cores. The

construction of these exceptional spaces, the disciplining of the captured populations, and

the maintenance of the imperial sovereigns preferred visions of order illustrated the

exercise of effective sovereign power in the presumedly ‘open’ and unregulated space

that lay outside of Europe.

It was also argued that within the contemporary geopolitical terrain it is possible to

identify conceptual parallels with both the pre-Westphalian Middle Ages and the age of

imperial conquest. By utilising Hardt and Negri to conceptualise the forces of

globalisation and the rise of international, transnational, and supranational organisations

on the geopolitical terrain, this thesis was able to point to parallels with the pre-

Westphalian European terrain. Of particular interest was the concept of the global space,

and the populations circulating within it, as being recognisable as singular social and

territorial entities; unified under the influence of global markets and the advocation of

universal human rights. In the global space, it was argued that a new apparatus of global

rule has begun to emerge. This apparatus operates, similarly to the way undertaken by

the religious authorities of Christendom, to incorporate the entire global space and its

76

multitudinous population into a singular order which supersedes, or subsumes, the

geopolitical unit of the sovereign state.

Within this space it was identified that the monopolisation of the legitimate use of force is

held, predominantly, by the U.S. In its policing of the globalised terrain, the U.S is

revealed as a fitting example of the continued exercise of effective sovereignty. The

reassertion of its own borders identifies a core which is understood as being under threat

from a criminal terrorist enemy that occupies its outside. It was argued that the post-9/11

decision, made by Bush, to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, should be

understood as a continuation of the imperialism of the European powers; paralleling their

ability to appropriate and order space.

In sum, this discussion has illustrated that the normative understanding of sovereignty,

exemplified by Westphalia, conceals the true dynamics of the contemporary geopolitical

terrain. The contemporary geopolitical terrain is still characterised by the preponderance

of dominant figures who operate across the globalised space. Rather than the

proliferation of the well rehearsed Westphalian principles, these effective sovereign

entities parallel the religious authorities of Christendom and the empires that were born

out of Westphalia. They operate by imposing, extending and maintaining their preferred

visions of order through the appropriation of territory and the right to deem these spaces,

and the life within, as exceptional. Whilst, this thesis has referred to the dominant figure

of the U.S to illustrate these characteristics, this principle holds in the case of other

77

powerful entities - the E.U, Israel, and Russia, for instance - where specific spaces and

forms of life continue to be rendered as exceptional.

78

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