Counterinsurgent Reconfigurations of Empire by Tiqqun

The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#10, DEC/2013-FEB/2014

Empire’s reconfiguration of hostilities has gone largely unperceived. It has gone unperceived because it initially manifested itself far from the metropoles, in former colonies. Placing war outside the Law - begun by a simple proclamation with the League of Nations then actualized by the invention of the nuclear weapons – produced a decisive transformation of war; a transformation that Schmitt tried to account for with his concept of “global civil war”. Since all war between States has become criminal in regards to world order, not only do we now see only exclusively limited conflicts, but the nature of the enemy itself has changed: the enemy has become internal. The liberal State has folded into Empire to such an extent that even when the enemy is identified as a State, a “rogue state” in the cavalier terminology of imperial diplomats, the war waged against it now takes the form of a simple police operation, of an affair of internal management, a peacekeeping initiative.

Imperial war has neither beginning nor end, it is a permanent process of pacification. The essential methodology and principles of Empire have been known for fifty years. They were developed during the wars of decolonization during which the oppressive State apparatus underwent a decisive alteration. From then on the enemy was no longer an isolated entity, a foreign nation or a determined class, but somewhere lying in ambush amongst the population, without visible attributes. When necessary, the population itself became the enemy, the population as insurgent force. The configuration of hostilities specific to the Imaginary Party thus immediately reveals itself in the guise of guerrilla warfare, of partisan war. Consequently, not only does the army become the police, but the enemy becomes a “terrorist” – the resistance to the German occupation was a “terrorist” activity, the Algerian insurgents against French occupation, “terrorists”; the anti-imperialist militants of the 1970’s, “terrorists”; and, today, those all-too-determined elements of the anti-globalization movement, “terrorists”. Trinquier, one of the chief architects as well as a theoretician of the Battle of Algiers: “The role of pacification given to the military comes to pose problems that the military is not normally accustomed to resolve. Exercising police powers in a large city was not something it knew well how to do. The Algerian rebels a new weapon for the first time: urban terrorism. [...] It offers an incomparable advantage, but it has one serious drawback: the population that harbors the terrorist also knows them. At any time, given the opportunity, it can denounce them to the authorities. Strict control of the population can rob them of this vital source of support.” (Le Temps Perdu).(1) Historical conflict hasn’t followed the principles of classical warfare for over a half-century; for more than a half-century now there have been only extraordinary wars.

It is these extraordinary wars, these irregular forms of war without principles, that have gradually dissolved the liberal State into the Imaginary Party. All the counter-insurgency doctrines – those of Trinquier, Kitson, Beauffre, Colonel Chateau-Jobert – are categorical on this point: the only way to fight against guerilla warfare, to fight against the Imaginary Party, is to employ its techniques. “One must operate like a partisan wherever there are partisans.” Again, Trinquier: “But he must be made to realize that, when he [the insurgent] is captured, he will not be treated as an ordinary criminal, nor as a prisoner taken on the field of battle. [...] For his interrogations, he will certainly not be given a lawyer. If he gives without difficulty the information demanded, the interrogation will be rapidly terminated; if not, specialists will have to, by all means, pry out his secrets. He will thus have to, like the soldier, confront the suffering and perhaps death that he knew how to evade until now. The terrorist must know and accept this as conditions inherent in his trade and in his methods of warfare that, with full knowledge, his superiors and he himself have chosen.” (Modern Warfare).(2) The continuous surveillance of the population, the labeling of at-risk individuals, legalized torture, psychological warfare, police control of Publicity, the social manipulation of affects, the infiltration and exfiltration of “extremist groups,” the State-run massacre, like so many other aspects of massive deployment of imperial apparatuses, respond to the necessities of an uninterrupted war, most often carried out without public outcry. Because as Westmoreland said: “A military operation is only one of a variety of ways to combat communist insurrection” (“Counterinsurgency,” Tricontinental, 1969).

In the end, only partisans of urban guerrilla warfare have understood what the wars of decolonization were all about. Only those who modeled themselves on the Uruguayan Tupamaros grasped the contemporary stakes in these conflicts presented as “national liberation”. They alone, and the imperial forces. The chairman of a seminar on “The Role of the Armed Forces in Peace-Keeping in the 1970s,” organized by the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies in London in April 1973, thus declared: “if we lose in Belfast, perhaps we will be beaten in Brixton or Birmingham. Just as Spain in the thirties was a rehearsal for a wider European conflict, so perhaps what is happening in Northern Ireland be a rehearsal of widespread urban guerrilla warfare in Europe and more particularly in Great Britain.” All their current pacification campaigns, all the activities of “international peacekeeping forces” currently deployed on the margins of Europe and throughout the world, evidently foreshadow other “pacification campaigns,” this time on European territory. Only those who fail to understand that their role is to train people struggling against us seek in some mysterious global conspiracy the reason for these interventions. No personal trajectory better sums up the expansion of exterior pacification into interior pacification than that of the British officer Frank Kitson, the man who established the strategic doctrine thanks to which the British State defeated the Irish insurgency and NATO the Italian revolutionaries. Thus Kitson, before recording his counter-insurgency doctrine in Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, took part in the decolonization wars in Kenya against the Mau-Mau, in Malaysia against the communists, in Cyprus against Grivas, and, finally in Northern Ireland. From his doctrine we will focus on only a bit of first-hand information concerning imperial rationality. We will condense this into three postulates. The first is that there is an absolute continuity between the pettiest crimes and insurgency, which are the two terms of a process with three phases: “the preparatory”, “the non-violent”, and genuine insurrection. For Empire, war is a continuum – warfare as a whole, says Kitson; it is necessary to respond from the first “incivility” to whatever threatens the social order and in so doing to ensure the “integration of military, police, and civil activity on all levels.” Civilian-military integration is the second imperial postulate. Because in the era of nuclear pacification, wars between States become increasingly rare and because the essential task of the army is no longer external but internal war, domestic counterinsurgency, it is helpful to accustom the population to a permanent military presence in public places. An imaginary terrorist menace – Irish or Islamic – permits the justification of regular patrols of men in train stations, airports, subways, etc. In general, the multiplication of points of indistinction between civilian and military will be sought. The computerization of the social sphere, that is, the fact that every movement tends to produce information, is at the heart of this integration. The proliferation of diffuse surveillance apparatuses, of tracing and recording, serves to generate an abundance of low-grade intelligence on which the police can then base their interventions. The third principle of imperial action following this preparatory phase of insurrection – which is the normal political situation – concerns “peace movements”. As soon as violent opposition to the existing order arises, pacifist movements among the population must be accommodated if not created out of whole cloth. Pacifist movements serve to isolate the rebels while they are infiltrated in order to make them commit acts that discredit them. Kitson explains this strategy, employing the poetic formula of “drowning the baby in its own milk.” In any event, it is never a bad idea to brandish an imaginary terrorist threat in order to “make the living conditions of the population sufficiently uncomfortable so that they create a stimulus towards a return to normal life.” If Trinquier had the honor of counseling the American counterinsurgency bigshots, the man who in 1957 had already established a vast system of neighborhood policing, of controlling the Algiers population, a system given the modernist name “Urban Security Apparatus,” Kitson for his part saw his work go to the highest circles of NATO. He himself quickly joined the Atlanticist organization. Hadn’t that always been his calling? He who hoped that his book would “draw attention to the steps which should be taken now to make the army ready to deal with subversion, insurrection, and peace-keeping operations during the second half of the 1970s,” which he concluded by emphasizing the same point: “Meanwhile, it is permissible to hope that the contents of this book will in some way help the army to prepare itself for any storms which may lie ahead in the second half of the 1970’s.”(3)

Under Empire, the very persistence of the formal trappings of the State is part of the strategic maneuvering that renders it obsolete. Insofar as Empire is unable to recognize an enemy, an alterity, an ethical difference, it cannot recognize the war conditions that it creates. There will therefore be no state of exception as such but a permanent, indefinitely extended state of emergency. The legal system will not be officially suspended in order to wage war against the internal enemy, against insurgents or whoever else it may be; to the current system will simply be added a collection of ad hoc laws designed to fight against the unmentionable enemy. “Common Law will thus transform into a proliferative and superfluous development of special rules: the rule will consequently become a series of exceptions” (Luca Bresci, Oreste Scalzone, The Exception is the Rule).(4) The sovereignty of the police, which have again become a war machine, will no longer suffer opposition. THEY will recognize the police’s right to shoot on sight, reestablishing in practice the death penalty which, according to the Law, no longer exists. THEY will extend the maximum time spent in police custody such that the charges will henceforth amount to the sentence. In certain cases, the “fight against terrorism” will justify imprisonment without trial as well as searches without a warrant. In general, THEY will no longer judge facts, but persons, a subjective conformity, an aptitude for repentance; adequately vague criminal qualifications like “moral complicity,” “belonging to a criminal organization,” or “inciting civil war” will be created for this purpose. And when this no longer suffices, THEY will judge by theorem. To demonstrate clearly the difference between arrested citizens and “terrorists,” THEY will invoke laws dealing with reformed criminals in order to allow the accused to publicly dissociate themselves from themselves, that is, to become infamous. Significantly reduced sentences will then be granted; in the contrary case, the Berufsverbot will prevail, outlawing the exercise of certain sensitive professions that require protection from subversive contamination. And yet, such a set of laws, like the Reale Law in Italy or the German emergency acts, only respond to an already declared insurrectional situation. Far more treacherous are the laws intended to arm the preventative struggle against the war machines of the Imaginary Party. Pseudo-unanimously ratified “anti-sect laws” will supplement “anti-terrorist” laws, as happened recently in France, Spain, and Belgium; laws that prosecute – without concealing the intention to criminalize – every autonomous grouping outside of the false national community of citizens. Unfortunately, it may become increasingly difficult to avoid local excesses of zeal like the “anti-extremism” laws adopted by Belgium in November 1998, which penalize “all racist, xenophobic, anarchist, nationalist, authoritarian or totalitarian conceptions or aims, whether political, ideological, religious or philosophical in character, contrary [...] to the functioning of democratic institutions.”

In spite of all this, it would be false to believe the State will survive. In the midst of global civil war, its supposed ethical neutrality no longer fools anyone. The tribunal-form itself, whether civil court(5) or the International Criminal Tribunal, is perceived as an explicit mode of war. It is the idea of the State as a mediation between parties that is falling by the wayside. The historical compromise – experimented with in Italy from the early 1970s but now a reality in all biopolitical democracies following the disappearance of all effective opposition on the classical political stage – has finished off the very principle of the State. In this way, the Italian State failed to survive the 1970s, to survive diffuse guerrilla warfare, or rather it didn’t survive as a State, only as a party, as a party of citizens, that is, as a party of passivity and police. And this is the party that the passionate economic turnaround in the 1980s sanctioned with an ephemeral victory. But the total shipwreck of the State truly comes about at the moment what at its head a man seizes control of the theatre of classical politics only to reject it and initiate an entire program which substitutes classical politics for pure entrepreneurial management. At this point, the State overtly assumes its role as a party. With Berlusconi, it isn’t a singular individual who has taken power, but a form-of-life: that of a narrow-minded, self-seeking, philofascist small businessman from the North of Italy. Power is now once again ethically based on business as the only form of socialization after the family and he who embodies it represents no one, and certainly not a majority, but is a perfectly discernable form-of-life with whom only a small fraction of the population can identify with. Just as everyone recognizes in Berlusconi the clone of the neighborhood idiot, the perfect copy of the worst local parvenu, everyone knows that he was a member of the P2 lodge that turned the Italian State into its own personal instrument. This is how, bit by bit, the State sinks into the Imaginary Party.

this is a revised English translation of what the French collective/journal Tiqqun published in 2001 as “and the State sank into the Imaginary Party” which relies heavily, though not exclusively on the excellent version found in Tiqqun, This Is Not A Program, (Semiotext, 2011) pp.92-99.