1 The dramatic statement made by Walter Benjamin in his 1940 Theses on the Concept of History, during the darkest hours of the 20th century, is now, after 9/11, more actual than ever: the "State of Emergency" -the temporary suspension of law within the legal order itself - becomes rather the rule than an exception, an emergency.
As the "war on terror" launched by the Bush Administration and its "Coalition of the willing" does not know limits in time and space and it becomes permanent, the same happens to the internal dimension of that war: the emergency security measures take the form of a permanent State paranoia and a permanent nightmare for citizens and travelers in the United States themselves and in the European Union. This systematic attack on civil liberties and democratic rights is non-stop and escalating: Patriot Act II follows Patriot Act I in the US; the new more draconian antiterror legislation follows the previous one in Britain and all EU countries; the EU has signed in June 2003 a treaty of extradition with the US -where the death penalty is in vigor in contradistinction to Europe- of all those suspected, judged, sentenced or even found non-guilty for offences against US interests; in Greece (... )(in) the trial by a special court, under an emergency law, of those accused of being "terrorists" of the "17th of November"group (...) The Chairperson of the court, Mrs. Brilli, has said (provoking an uproar and the exit of all the defense team lawyers) "the law against terror can be beyond the limits of the Constitution" - the supreme Law of the land! The Prosecutor Mr. Lambrou made a similar statement: "Because of the emergency situation, the anti-terror squad and the police can act beyond the limits of the law.
"This is the exact definition of the state of emergency given by Carl Schmitt, the conservative legal philosopher of catholic counter-revolution and later of Nazism: the suspension of the law by the law.
The Guantanamo concentration campand torture center is emblematic of the New Style State of Emergency emergingin the early 21st century as a permanent mode of governance in the major capitalist countries. As is openly acknowledged, Guantanamo is a real legal "black hole," a zone of anomy, an area of lawlessness outside the jurisdiction of US courts (or of international law), where no law or provision in the US legal system and constitutional order itself is complied with and the‘detainees' are considered neither as war prisoners or even as common criminals; they are incarcerated indefinitely, interrogated every day, tortured indefinitely. (...)
Who decides the state of emergency? The Sovereign decides it, according to the famous formulation by Schmitt. Today this means, first of all, the imperial sovereignty of the United States of America. (...) Apparently the sanctity and inviolability of the principle of national sovereignty does not apply to other nation states, particularly in oppressed nations, if "vital US interestsare involved." William Cohen, former Defense Secretary in the Clinton administratin had presented the list of those vital interests making necessary a US military intervention abroad: "ensuring inhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources" and whatever else is determined as vital interest "by domestic jurisdiction." (...)
In general a new sub-category of nation states is discovered by the US administrations: the Rogue States, or outlaw States or pariah States whose sovereignty is irrelevant. And which States are Rogue States? Robert S. Litwak of theWoodrow Wilson Center and former member of Clinton National Security Council, gave an accurate definition: "A rogue State is whoever the United States says it is" (R.S. Litwak, Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Hopkins University Press 2000).
This is the echo of Schmitt's definition of sovereignty in relation to the State of Emergency. It does not express solely the arbitrariness of an imperialist nation state (...) it is the principle of national sovereignty as such that is in crisis. Commander of U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid, after the experience of Iraq, consciously or unconsciously has acknowledged that: "The terrorist threat knows no boundary and when we operate only on a nation-state basis we will be unable to really get at the heart of the terrorist problem, which is transnational." (Stratfor, Geopolitical Diary February 17, 2004).
2 The permanent ‘state of emergency'connected to the ‘war on terror' is not a temporary disturbance of normal conditions nor a set of security measures linked to conjectural security risks facingt he nation state, particularly in the West; it is an epochal manifestation of the historical decline of the nation state and of the capitalist system itself.
Responsible for that is neither what it is currently fashionable to call "globalization", nor Tony Negri post-imperialist "Empire", claiming that the nation state has already disappeared. The internatinalization of economic life under capitalism has a long history behind it and a first phase of globalization was already completed at the end of the 19th - early 20th century, when the crisis of the state originated.
It is noteworthy that crucial ideological debates, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War - on globalization and the nation state, on democracy and human rights, on the state of emergency - first emerged with the First World War and the 1917 October Revolution and the violent eruption of an epoch of wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions engulfing Europe - particularly Germany - and the entire world.
Lenin had stressed that imperialism was not just a brutal policy of expansion, annexation and colonisation but a specific historical epoch of social economic development, "the highest and last stage of capitalism", according to his famous definition; the epoch of capitalist decline and transition to communism worldwide. Trotsky has based his re-elaboration of the theory of permanent revolution precisely on the changed historical nature of the epoch, on the establishment of the world character of the division of labour, of the modern productive forces, on the emergence of a world economy and market and consequently of world politics and culture, colliding now with the too narrow framework of the nation state, which had initially given a powerful impulse to capitalist development. "Imperialism", the Manifesto of the Second Congress of the Communist International, written by Trotsky, says, "consists of overcoming national frameworks, even those of the major states".1
The nation state was not abolished, neither then nor in a second phase of globalization with the expansion of capital during the protracted boom after World War II, nor during the finance capital globalization of the last two decades of the 20th century, a third phase in the same epoch of capitalist decline, which has risen out of the collapse of the post war expansion and the eruption of the world crisis of capitalist over production from the early ‘70s onwards. But definitely the nation state's crisis has deepened incommensurably.(...) The nation state is insolubly connected with capital and cannot be abolished without the abolition of capitalism on a world scale.
Marx, analysing the share holders companies and the emerging forms of fincance capital, in vol. III of Das Kapital, speaks about "the abolition of capitalist property within the system of capitalist property". In the same way, we can say that under Globalization there is an abolition of the nation state within the system of bourgeois nation states. The sharper this contradiction becomes, the deeper becomes as well the decline of the system and with it the decay of bourgeois parliamentary democracy tied from its inception with the national framework. (...)
3 The first important theoretical confrontation on the question of the state of emergency in our epoch took place precisely in the aftermath of the Great War and the October Revolution, during the social upheavals in Germany. It is the confrontation between two of the most conscious representatives of the opposite camps of revolution and counter-revolution: the revolutionary Walter Benjamin and the counter-revolutionary Carl Schmitt, who became later the legal philosopher of the Nazi regime. Giorgio Agamben in a recent insightful book2 had demonstrated the relevance today of this "battle of giants on Essence", as he calls it using the expression of Plato in the Sophist on the battle between materialism and idealism.
Both Benjamin and Schmitt grasp the state of emergency as the suspension of law by law, the emergence of a zone of lawlessness within the legal order. The differences, from this point on, become unbridgeable.Schmitt tries to secure the connection between the violence of this anomy and the legal order, strengthening the power of the sovereign state, while Benjamin drives to break it and to move beyond the law, through "pure" revolutionary violence, to a realm of justice, where state power itself will be abolished 3
For Schmitt the Sovereign is the power deciding the state of emergency. For Benjamin, there is in the instance of sovereignty itself an internal fracture between decision and its actualization producing a crisis. For Schmitt the connection between legal order and the area of its suspension in a state of emergency is clearly defined by law and it leads to a miraculous restoration of the system in its situation before the crisis. For Benjamin, there is growing indeterminacy between law and anomic state, plunging the entire system into a historic catastrophe. For Schmitt, a state of emergency cannot be but temporary. For Benjamin, in our epoch becomes the rule.
Agamben has shown in his book how the state of emergency has developed historically and legally from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the 20th century, and from the tragic experiences of Germany under the Weimar democratic Constitution, Nazism and Aushwitz to George W. Bush USA and Patriot Act and Guantanamo.The transition from the state of emergency as it was defined initially in post-revolutionary France - a temporary suspension of law to face an internal or external enemy - to its use in the imperialist epoch and particularly today as a permanent mode of governance, the transition from an exception into a rule, as Benjamin put it, marks the transition from anascending into a declining capitalism.
Only a decayed ruling class can be in permanent state of emergency, on alert against a permanent threat for its doom.To quote Benjamin: "The notion of class war can be misleading. It does not refer toa trial of strength to decide the question ‘who shall win, who shall be defeated?' Or to a struggle the outcome of which is goodfor the victor and bad for the vanquished. To think this way is to romanticize and obscure the facts. For whether the bourgeoisie wins or loses the fight, it remains doomed by the inner contradictions that in the course of development will become deadly. The only question is whether its downfall will come about through itself or through the proletariat. The continuance or the end of three thousand years of cultural development will be decided by the answer"4.
The understanding of the state of emergency as a rule in our epoch can lead, indeed, in another non-linear concept of History, far away from the gradualism of bankrupt reformism and the fetishism of the so-called ‘democratic process' - a fetishism, which becomes stronger and more misleading as parliamentary democracy itself degenerates and decays.
4 The decline of bourgeois democracyh as deepened from the First WorldWar onwards.
Hannah Arendt in a chapter of her book on Imperialism with the pertinent title "The decline of the Nation State andthe End of Human Rights" shows clearly the connection between this decline of the nation state and the radical crisis of the concept of human rights, with the emergence in the aftermath of the imperialist war of the new mass phenomenon of refugees, of expatriated and brutally displaced populations.
Karl Marx, quite early, had made a devastated critique of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen by the French Revolution, with the alienating and alienated separation between an abstract human being and the "citizen", the private bourgeois individual. Arendt confirms this critique by making the accurate and crucial remark in her analysis of the mass waves of refugees in the imperialist epoch: "The conception of human rights founded on the supposed existence of a human being as such was shattered when those who proclaimed it were faced for the first time with human beings who really had lost every other quality and specific relation - apart from the pure fact to be humans.
"The violent separation of nationality and citizenship in the imperialist era, the appearance of masses of dispossessed people, settled in the metropolitan countries as populations without citizens' rights, revealed the human being of the Declarationas an abstraction voided from all the potentialities that constitute the human being as species being (Gattungswesen, in the sense of the concept that Marx developed out of Feuerbach). The transition from the French Revolution to imperialism marks the rise and fall of the Declaration of human and citizen rights.
The exposure and crisis of the founding principle of bourgeois democracy in the aftermath of the First World War did not prevent but reveals the content of the paradox of the Charter of the UN following the Second World War, which is now called "Charter of the universal human rights"; after the revelation of the human being as an empty abstraction, now, apparently, the citizen as well has disappeared, probably in the proverbial dust bin of History...
The UN, in fact, was established as a ninstrument of international relations oft he Great Powers that emerged victorious from the war, to police the workings of theYalta Accords between Washington, London and the Kremlin, for a division of the world, with which to prevent the spread of social upheavals and revolutions, particularly in the neuralgic strategic metropolitan centers of capital in Western Europe and North America. The Bretton Woods agreement, on which the post war rebuilding and expansion of capitalism was based, and the Yalta Accords between the West and the Soviet Union became the two pillars of post war re-stabilization, "containment of the communist threat to Western countries" and Cold War.
The UN Charter of universal human rights represented the consensus of the Victors after the defeat of fascism. At the same time it was an expression of the new relatioship of class forces in post war Europe and America, with the emergence of a working class demanding and gaining substantial social gains, as well as an ideological part of the apparatus for socialcontrol. No return to the fascism of the '30 should be possible and capital's control has to be founded on all the fictions of formal democracy, including the fictitious universal rights of abstract human beings. Anticommunism, the cynical exploitation of Stalinism's crimes and Cold War were basic founding materials in this ideological construction of control.
With the collapse of the Breton Woods framework in 1971 and the transformation of the post war protracted boom into a protracted world crisis of over-accumulation of capital and, furthermore, with the collapse in 1989-91 of the second pillar of the post war world order, of the division of Europe and of the world established in Yalta, of the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Stalinism and the implosion of the Soviet Union, the UN Charter of human rights had a fate worse than that of the 1789 Declaration: it became the bloodstained banner for imperialist interventions and war in the ‘90s in the Balkans and the Middle East (...)
5 (...) The U.S., as Trotsky had predicted since the ‘20s, cannot regulate its internal contradictions without the mediation of world equilibrium. Thus it accumulates in its foundations the explosive power of world contradictions. The post World War II world equilibrium, where the US emerged as the indisputable hegemon of the West, has irrevocably collapsed and finance globalizaton not only did not produce any new equilibrium but has globalized all contradictions to the point of explosion. The bottom less deficits of US economy manifest its gigantic parasitic existence on an agonizing world economy leading it into an abyss.
The re-organization of a radically changed world on the old social bases of a decayed social system with its center in a declining imperial power, with growing signs of a crisis of over-expansion, is the ultra-reactionary dystopian task that the neo-cons in charge in Washington put on the shoulders of the United States for the new century.
But imperial sovereignty has to face both the antagonism of competing imperialist centers, the EU and Japan, and challenges from rebellions of its victims, the oppressed masses all over the world; as well as challenges at home. To express it in Benjamin's language, imperial sovereignty is internally fractured and that fracture opens a gap between decision and actualization. This internal fracture is not originally nor primarily the well-known split between competing elites in the ruling circles, manifesting divisions within the capitalist class and the existence of different lobbies of competing capitalist interest groups. These splits do exist and deepen always but not ina vacuum; the antagonistic relations between labor and capital determine them.
Despite several reversals the working class and other exploited strata have not returned into the conditions of crushing defeats as in the ‘30s. The rise of the farright in some European countries is definitely linked to nationalist and racist anti-immigrant reactions to the crisis and the effects of capital's globalization, and are signs of the decay of the existing political bourgeois parliamentary system; but are not able to resurrect the material social conditions of the ‘30s, the mass petty-bourgeois basis of fascist movements and the return to the nation state as a fortress shielding from a global crisis. The ruling class is obliged, for the time being, to organize its attacks both abroad and at home in the name of democracy.
The re-organization of the post Cold War world, including the tremendous task of completion of capitalist restoration and re-integration of the former Soviet bloc and China in the world capitalist market, necessitates the radical transformation of social political relations in the major capitalist countries. The growing tension between this need and the still obligatory reference to the democratic framework reaches its climax producing "black holes", zones of anomy within the existing legal democratic order, a kind of implosion of the bourgeois parliamentary democracyn amed ‘state of emergency'.
The state of emergency tries to secure the connection between institutional and extra-institutional violence with the constitutional democratic order against the upsurge of the dispossessed masses and their revolutionary violence, what a neoconservative like Robert Kaplan calls "the coming anarchy".
It is not accidental that in Latin America, both the 2001 rebellion in Argentina, the Argentinazo, and the revolutionary events in October 2003 in Bolivia, have arisen to confront a declared State of Emergency whilst the main counter-revolutionary line of the ruling class and of imperialism to repel a social revolution was the rallying call to secure the continuity of the constitutional democratic order. Herein a condensed, specific form a more universal pattern can be drawn.
Contemporary decaying democracy, touse the accurate definition given by the ancient aristocrat but profound dialectician Plato in Manexenus, reveals itself as the rule by an authoritarian elite approved by a multitude - more exactly in our days, by an atomized, demobilized multitude. Under a permanent state of emergency, the connection and the dividing line between this democracy and the absence of norms becomes more and more blurred while the entire system, as Benjamin had predicted, is plunging into ahistoric catastrophe.
The only way out is the mobilization of the dispossessed masses with the proletariat at their head as a universal class for-itself to break that connection as well as the sacrosanct "continuity of the constitutional-democratic order" and establish what Marx appropriately has named the dictatorship of the proletariat: the taking of power by the working class, the smashing of the state and the revolutionary transformation of all relations, initiating the transition to communism, to the realm of freedom, of a global justice beyond the law, abolishing the law imposing and law preserving "mythical" violence of human prehistory, of class society.
The alternative either Socialism or barbarism today is transformed into either the barbarism of a permanent state of emergency declared by imperialism and the capitalist state or the dictatorship of the proletariat and permanent revolution.
Athens, 24 February 2004
* Paper presented at the "Critique"Conference 2004, London School of Economics, February 28, 2004
Notes
1. See The First Five Years of the Communist International, New Park Publications 1973 p.133.
2. Stato di Eccezione, Bollati Boringhieri 2003.
3. See Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt.
4. One Way Street, p. 80.