War, Peace, And That Other Thing.

Understanding political violence.

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I was thinking of writing something about Gaza this week, but frankly I don’t have the detailed knowledge of the region, nor for that matter experience of fighting in tunnels, to add to what’s already been said elsewhere. But reading some of this coverage made me realise, again, how little our society really understands and is prepared to acknowledge about the roots and purposes of political violence, and so I thought it might be interesting to discuss that subject, looping back to the current situation in Gaza at the end.

Let’s start with the obvious point that western Liberal society likes clear distinctions and opposites in all areas of life. We are a profoundly Aristotelian society: everything is either A or B, there is nothing in the middle. Because real life itself is messy, this produces endless complex and ultimately pointless arguments about precisely where to draw a dividing line, and whether this or that act or event or pronouncement is ultimately acceptable, or whether it should be rejected and cast into outer darkness. Thus, everything to do with the use of force in politics is presented in stark, opposed terms: war vs. peace, violence vs negotiations, conflict vs cooperation, and of course good vs. bad. And then we wonder why we cannot understand the world, and why the behaviour of many of its actors surprises us so often.

Most civilisations before the modern western era have not seen things this way, and quite a few still don't. According to taste, we can follow the theories of Ian McGilchrist, arguing that we live in an epoch of dangerous left-brain domination, which sees everything in terms of binary opposites and infinitely detailed differences. Or we can follow the slightly different approach of Jean Gebser, who argued that humanity, having passed through the magical and mythical stages of civilisation, is now in what he called the “mental-rational” phase, and moreover in a degenerate part of that phase.

Both theories spark the thought that earlier civilisations, more right-brain dominated, less aggressively rational, had no difficulty with the idea of paradox or just plain contradiction, as part of life. As Gebser points out, mental-rational societies think in terms of duality (X is completely different from Y) rather than polarity (X and Y are two extremes of the same thing.) Our society loves piling up complex criteria to use in differentiating things clearly: other cultures (including some contemporary ones) have always been happy to tolerate degrees of ambiguity and overlap.

Such cultures have not necessarily seen violence as a separate, irrational and distressing state of affairs, but rather as a component of life. Relations between villages might include cattle-stealing and wife-stealing, and sometimes feuds and even brief periods of organised violence, but the inhabitants would have been surprised indeed to receive a visit from modern conflict management specialists talking about creating a culture of peace: for them, a degree of violence was just part of life, and often a symbolic rite of passage into manhood. At a much higher level, we can see this same dynamic in many traditional epics, such as Beowulf or the Iliad. Fighting and violence there are part of life. We call it the Trojan “War”, but, as presented by Homer, it has few of the attributes of a war as we understand it. It’s really a punitive expedition to avenge an episode of wife-stealing, that goes nowhere and degenerates into a series of performative heroic combats which serve no practical purpose, punctuated by feasts and sports competitions. Everyday life in the Bronze Age, in other words.

So it will be helpful if we put away rigid boundaries, and think instead of a continuum (Gebser’s polarity) in which events and initiatives occupy various different places. Politics, negotiation and violence, even war, are thus not antipathetic to each other, nor wholly separate states that we reach through some quantum leap, but something like an escalation ladder, which we can go up and down. More than that, we also see a version of what mathematicians call a “tangled hierarchy” or a “strange loop”, where movement in one direction brings you back to where you started. Thus, stages of escalation are not tidily distinct from each other, but mixed together and often occurring at the same time, as the consequences of one action have an effect elsewhere.

It is this, for example, which so puzzled foreign observers of the Bosnian War, who presumed that the warring factions were actually seeking a peaceful solution, and just needed a bit of help. Yet the leaders of these factions seemed to understand perfectly that there were different dynamics in play at the same time. This morning, we sell weapons and food to each other and exchange prisoners, and this afternoon we go out and kill each other. What’s strange about that? There is a story I heard at the time that I believe to be true, about one of the many missions to Bosnia by the Troika (the Foreign Ministers of the past, present and future Presidencies of what was then the Western European Union) led by the Italian Foreign Minister, Gianni de Michelis. De Michelis was not exactly naive (he was soon to disappear into prison on corruption charges) but even he was astounded at the duplicity of his interlocutors, who would happily sign a peace agreement one day, only to break it before his plane had even landed back home. Journalists had begin to notice this and expressed scepticism, on one occasion, about the Troika’s efforts. “This time” said de Michelis grimly “I’ve got it in writing.” But that agreement was broken too. None of this is odd if we simply understand that the politics of signing a peace agreement are one thing, but the politics of keeping to it are another. When violence seems to be more profitable, you resort to violence again, and your enemy understands this, and does the same. Only westerners are puzzled.

I’ve suggested previously that violence itself is a form of communication and an adjunct to normal political life. It can actually function as a signalling device to indicate, for example, how serious I am about some objective, or how strongly I am prepared to resist an objective of yours. You stage a demonstration. I see your demonstration and stage a violent one. You stage a riot. I use my control of the Police to violently suppress your riot. You attack and wreck the offices of my political party. I organise a bomb attack on your political party offices, where people are killed. At this point, though, we may quietly get together and ask if each of us is prepared to escalate indefinitely, or whether perhaps it’s time to call a halt. We may agree that I’ll allow you to stage a drive-by shooting of my political party offices, and we’ll call it quits, since neither of us has anything to gain by further violence.

Thus, simple progressive escalation towards serious conflict in the sense that is taught on Political Science courses is actually not the norm. It’s better to think of a discontinuous process, where players choose to play a certain card at a certain level of seriousness, as a way of passing a message, and perhaps making or rejecting certain demands. In the West, we identify a certain level of violence which we call “armed conflict,” and surround it with a whole set of norms, rules, laws and procedures which do not otherwise apply, even where violence is being used extensively. Typically, you will be surprised to hear, there is no agreed-upon definition, but “armed conflict” is generally thought to mean serious and protracted violence between armed groups, or between one group and the state. There are endless debates about the difference between international and non-international armed conflict, though in practice most conflicts have elements of both. But in reality, all this is just an arbitrarily-chosen point on a spectrum of intimidation and violence.

In real life, major players often have a strong interest in avoiding direct conflict, or passing a degree of escalation after which the situation becomes increasingly difficult to control. Sometimes, these are semi-official, as with the deconfliction agreements between Russia, the US and Turkey in Syria. Sometimes, as in the Ukraine conflict, there seems to be at least some back-channel set of understandings. And now in Gaza there seems to be a tacit agreement between the US and Iran not to let things escalate towards open conflict, and to put pressure on their surrogates to keep things under control. But Hezbollah and Israel continue to bombard each other, as a way of passing messages, less to each other than to their friends and allies.

It follows that much violence is employed on a pragmatic, case-by-case basis, and that violent incidents between states should not necessarily preclude cooperation in other areas, which might itself be switched on and off to convey different messages. Those who follow the twists and turns of Turkish policy in (and towards) Syria will have noticed a good example. Sponsoring an opposition group in another country, or withholding that sponsorship is a comparable tactic. During the western occupation of Afghanistan, for example, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence organisation was actually supporting the Taliban in some cases and for some purposes, whilst cooperating with the West in other cases.

One problem this gives rise to is that, whilst the West has developed an elaborate vocabulary of and about violence and conflict at different levels, in practice it just describes different manifestations of the same thing: the use of violence of a type and to a degree that the perpetrator thinks is appropriate to their political, financial or other goals. Thus, there have been conflicts in Africa where the military or militia groups seek to control access to natural resources, and it’s hard to see the immediate difference with the operations of organised crime. In the bloody civil war in the Congo from 1996-2000, for example, the seven nations participating managed at the very least to meet the expenses of the war from what they were able to take by plunder: much like Europe in the Middle Ages, actually.

And in reality, violence is almost always used or threatened for reasons that appear rational and defensible to the perpetrators, as well as useful, even if outsiders use words like “senseless” or “pointless” to show that they do not, or will not, understand what is being done and why. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago James Gilligan’s work on violent criminals, that showed how violence was often a way of defending pride and self-esteem. Nations do this as well: think of the US in Grenada. And of course violence can be a useful tool of intimidation in business relationships, the equivalent if a bank threatening to foreclose on a mortgage.

So we are dealing here less with a series of categories, still less categories clearly distinct from each other, than with a series of variations on a theme: the use of force or the threat of force to establish, maintain or overturn a particular set of political or economic relationships. I put it that way because I want to suggest that the symbolism of potential violence, and its deterrent or intimidatory use, is not only much more frequent than open conflict it’s generally much more effective as well.

Let’s start with one case, which exemplifies the utterly symbolic use of potential violence. You’ve probably seen military guards, often in dress uniform, around the residence of the President or Monarch. This is primarily a political statement, identifying who the legal and constitutional Head of the Armed Forces is, and the duty of the Army (usually) to protect him or her. (It’s worth pointing out that the practical everyday security of such people from real threats is provided by different means and much more discreetly.) A particularly large-scale exemplification of this theme is provided by the Bastille Day military parade in Paris every year. This has been going on in different forms since 1880 (ie just after the Republican form of government was finally definitively established) and celebrates that day as a performative expression of the subordination of the military to the Republic: something that had not always been evident in the past.

A slightly less symbolic use of force is the patrols by armed police and troops that you see now in some cities in the world. They may look superficially similar, but the circumstances of each case are often substantially different, and fall into two categories: reassurance of the population, and deterrence to potential threats. As I’ve pointed out a number of times, what’s sometimes described as “civil peace” (briefly, the ability for the citizen to go out into the street without the threat of violence) cannot ultimately come from overt intimidation, but only from an acceptance of certain rules by the mass of the population. So the presence of the Police, for the most part, is less to intimidate and enforce, than to remind people that this acceptance does in fact exist.

There are those who not accept these rules, and there are circumstances where the rules themselves might be a casualty of fear, anger or simple confusion. So many countries have elaborate arrangements for the use of trained forces to deal with the consequences. If you observe a demonstration in France, for example, you’ll see large numbers of gendarmes or riot police deployed, but in the side streets, out of view of the procession. Normally, the authorities liaise with the demonstration organisers, and it’s their stewards who supervise the march. But you can’t control who actually attends a demonstration (as the Gilets jaunes found to their cost), and it’s always possible that outside groups, or even simple street criminals will decide to take advantage of the situation. There’s then a difficult decision to make, between the risk of escalation and the risk to lives and property. The French tendency—the deployment of massive force, but to intimidate rather than confront—is one option. If you look carefully, you can learn quite a bit from observing the forces of order at work. If they don’t expect trouble, they will be wearing berets and sitting in their vans, or chatting with locals. Once they put the plastic armour on, you know they are anticipating trouble, and if you see them in formed units carrying shields and batons, it’s probably a good idea to be somewhere else.

The terrorist  attacks of the last decade in Europe have pretty much forced governments to deploy troops onto the streets, less to directly prevent attacks (since that’s impossible when literally anything is a potential target) than as a way of showing that governments take the threat seriously, and in the hope that potential attackers might be at least slightly discouraged at the thought of tangling with trained soldiers who know how to use their weapons. But we are back with symbolism, really: no state can retain legitimacy unless it shows that it is at least trying to protect its citizens.

Some examples of the use of potential or actual force to achieve different objectives, or frustrate those of others, can be quite complex. I happened to be in Beirut some years ago at one of the recurrent periods of tension, just after the high-profile assassination of a prominent Police Chief. As usual this had been instrumentalised by one faction, and there was a certain amount of calculated violence, including an attempt to storm the Serail, the rather grand building housing the office of the Prime Minister. The building was protected by a unit of the Lebanese Army, partly as a genuine security precaution, since political violence is common in Lebanon, partly as a symbolic act, partly because the Army is popular and well respected and used to being seen on the streets as a symbol of security. Approached by an angry and potentially violent crowd, the soldiers did not panic or open fire. They had undergone training in crowd control by a certain Foreign Power, and just slung their rifles over their shoulders and walked out into the crowd. What do you think you are doing? they asked. Why are you attacking us? Quite quickly the crowd dispersed. There were other demonstrations, some violent, and walking through a central area of the city a little later I was able to watch the response. Blue-uniformed personnel of the paramilitary Internal Security Force were patrolling in vehicles and on foot, pausing occasionally at intersections. They had weapons, including 0,50 calibre machine guns, but they weren’t pointing them at anybody. A Police General I spoke to the next day confirmed what I thought: they were sending separate messages to the general public (protection) and potential trouble-makers (deterrence.)  And indeed, after a while, things quietened down again.

You will have noticed that so far I have said very little about “war” or more politely “armed conflict,” although our society tends to assume that that is the base case for the use of violence, and everything else is some kind of exception. In fact, something like the opposite is true. Armed conflict is a very special case of the use of force, where the other side has the organisation and the weapons to fight back in kind. But violence is most usually employed precisely because the other side can’t fight back, or at least is substantially weaker. This violence does not have to be explicit: it can be implicit and intimidatory, to force people to do something or to stop them from doing it. Criminals often operate this way. Most organised crime gangs avoid overt displays of violence as far as possible, in favour of creating a climate of fear which enables them to exercise control over large numbers of people.

Which by a process of logical association, I suppose, brings us to the Nazis. From the time of the seizure of power in 1933, their objective was, in their charming vocabulary, a Germany “free of Jews.” The chosen method involved very little overt violence but rather threats and intimidation, backed up by actual violence in some cases, to make life so difficult and unpleasant for Jews that they emigrated out of fear. And indeed, two-thirds of them had left Germany by September 1939.

In their paranoid world view, the Nazis saw the Jews as “cosmopolitans,” who could by definition not be loyal to their country of residence. Their presence in Germany was thus a national security threat in itself, because they could never be loyal citizens. Yet this way of thinking is not exclusive to the Nazis: it is indeed the default way of thinking in societies where politics is based on racial, ethnic or religious identity. There’s also an influential school of political thought (Bodin, Hobbes, Schmitt) which sees any disunity or division in the population as a weakness in the face of adversaries. Thus, only a “pure” and homogeneous state, both ideologically and ethnically, can ever really be optimally safe. If you are frightened of your neighbours, and even in conflict with them, then if members of their community are present in yours, you have a security problem. So communities under stress tend towards homogeneity by expelling or even killing members of minority communities, to be “safe.” The best-known recent example of this is the famous “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia in 1992, where minority communities, often living in particular suburbs or parts of villages, were driven out by the majority community. But something similar also happened through the decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where violence and intimidation ensured that the minority community was effectively driven out of certain areas.

In certain cases also, religious difference was also seen as a divisive and potentially dangerous weakness for the state. Christian refusal to worship the Roman gods might incur their displeasure, and so was a national security threat to the safety of Rome. Christians who persisted in their beliefs had to be executed for the general good. Much the same logic was followed at the time of the Reformation. We tend to forget, for example, that France was wracked by religious civil war in the sixteenth century, and indeed could well ultimately have become a Protestant country. The tangled and extremely violent history of the repression of Protestantism thereafter had a lot to do with safeguarding the unity of the country, and under Louis XIV, Catholicism, together with political Absolutism and the monopoly of force (which Louis’s father had not enjoyed) were seen as the pillars of the security of the Monarchy, and by extension, of the country itself.

Which is to repeat that violence in almost all cases has a kind of logic behind it, even if not a logic that we would recognise and accept. Acknowledging this is very difficult, so historians and pundits often retreat into clichés about “scapegoats”, “ancestral hatreds” “manipulation” and so forth. But this is to confuse two things. One group or community does not target another group or community randomly: there is always some history or enmity behind the action, no matter how bizarre and tenuous it may seem to us. But the action itself is almost always guided by objectives which the originators themselves take to be rational. Our unwillingness to believe this has resulted in historians inventing all sorts of complicated theories to explain the behaviour of the Nazis, for example, rather than simply looking to see what they did, and how they explained (very publicly) why they did it.

It goes back to one of the most embarrassing episodes in modern political thinking, deliberately forgotten now. Sometimes called Social Darwinism (though the term is disputed) it amounted to taking a vulgarised version of Darwin’s theory of competition between species and applying it to human “races.” This produced a mentality (which Darwin himself feared might arise) in which history was seen as a struggle between races for survival, and war, rather than being a curse, was a way of expediting the disappearance of “unfit” races. The confusion, of course, was between the concept of “fittest” as meaning “best suited” and “fittest” as meaning strongest and most powerful. Inasmuch as Fascism had an ideology worth mentioning, the struggle for power and survival between individuals and “races” was pretty much all there was to it.

These were mainstream views at the time, as common among the PMC of the epoch as the idea of ruthless economic competition between companies and nations is now: needless to say, the two are closely related. And just as economists claim these days to find “laws of the market,” so “racial scientists” of the day, some with impressive qualifications, believed they had identified “laws of nature.” Some nations would simply disappear: sad, certainly, but you can’t ultimately get round the laws of nature. And before criticising too strongly, it’s worth pointing out that before the days of DNA, and at a time when people lived a lot closer to Nature than we do, much of this seemed simple common sense. There were different breeds of dogs and horses, with different size, strength and other attributes, so why shouldn’t this apply to humans as well?

The Nazis, who do not seem to have had an original idea between them, picked this concept up in a garbled form, as they did so many others. The German Volk (not at all the same as Germany the country) was objectively engaged in a struggle for survival against various other Völker: that was something inherent in the nature of the world, and could not be changed. So a struggle to the death between, say, the German and the Slavic Völker was inevitable, and one of them would disappear from history. Not just war, but extermination, with everything allowable and all forms of economic competition, and even competitive birthrates, entered into the calculation. It’s probably the grimmest and most hopeless political philosophy ever conceived, and in some ways it’s surprising that it was so widely accepted. I think there are probably two reasons for that. One is that different groups all secretly felt they were superior to others, and so in any such struggle they would come out on top. The other is that, as I’ve pointed out before, fear is an enormously powerful factor in politics, and the very fear that something like this could be true encouraged people to reach as though it was true.

Needless to say, this attitude was, and is, the complete opposite of the dominant Liberal concept of War: a disagreeable but occasionally necessary struggle to settle points of detail in the relationships between recognised nation-states. A rough game, but a game with rules, nonetheless, a bit of a cross between  a law case and a game of rugby, where there was a clear distinction between the players and the non-players. But if you take the ideas the Nazis adopted as your starting point (I know, I know) then rules are dangerous, moderation is a weakness, and your logical objective is the extermination of the opposing group. Any more restrained policy will lead to them exterminating you.

Did people really believe this? Well, yes they did, and you can find the same logic, and occasionally the same actions, in different forms of virulent nationalism in Europe. Nazi occupation lifted up a lot of stones, and some really nasty things came crawling out. And because war has a radicalising effect, it’s not surprising that significant proportions of the British and American publics in WW2, and even more of those in uniform, said at different times the they were were in favour of simply exterminating the Germans and Japanese. But only the Nazis had the resources to put words into deeds on a large scale, and the campaign in the East was conceived, from the very beginning, as a war or racial annihilation. There are few documents more chilling than the German General Plan East, which foresaw tens of millions of Slavs being deliberately starved to death, the extermination of millions more of different races, and the expulsion of the vast majority of the rest east of the Urals, leaving only a slave class behind. In such a situation, non-Aryans had literally no value except as a disposable labour force, and those who could not work (like the two million Polish Jews murdered in 1942) were simply killed, to enable Europe’s insufficient supply of food to go further.

Part of the reason that the Nazis found this paranoid view of the world so congenial (and again, they did not invent it) was because they were genuinely afraid—terrified even—of German vulnerability. A country without natural defensive frontiers, menaced on one side by sub-human Bolshevik hordes and on the other by the world-spanning power of the City of London and the British Empire, would simply be wiped off the map unless it rapidly became strong, and struck first. And, adopting a popular cliché of the time, the Nazis saw the hand of the Jews behind everything from the Soviet Politburo to the American Democratic Party. (It’s a pity that serious study of the insane anti-semitic theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been overshadowed by banal recent polemics.)

To be fair (if that’s the word I am looking for) such rationally apocalyptic ideas were not confined to the Nazis, and have not always been directed at the extermination of racial enemies alone Two more contrasted examples (and I think that’s enough for one essay) will suffice to illustrate my point. One is the infamous Katyn Massacre, which took place in Poland in 1940. Something up to 20,000 Polish military officers were executed by the NKVD, during the time when the Soviet Union occupied the area. Grisly as it might be, there was a political logic to this approach. It effectively destroyed much of the Polish officer class, militarily weakening the country, and the political Right, to the profit of the Polish Communists. Moreover, many of the officers were reservists, representing the Polish professional and intellectual classes, whose loss would weaken the country further, and allow the Soviet Union to dominate it more easily.

A second, little-known but ultimately very significant example, was Burundi from the 1960s to the 1990s. The Tutsi, by definition a small aristocratic minority, had control of the Army, but lived in constant fear of the large Hutu majority. A series of bloody Hutu risings led to bloody reprisals designed to decapitate the Hutu leadership. Eventually, taking advantage of internal conflict within the Tutsi elites, Hutu rebels launched a serious challenge in April 1972. In reprisal, the Tutsi elite planned and implemented a policy of effectively wiping out anyone suspected to be concerned with the rising, and then anyone who might be a threat in the future, such as schoolchildren and university students, as well as teachers and priests. The exact number of dead will never be known but probably lies in the range of 100-300,000. Yet for all the unbearably grisly detail, the violence was not random, but highly targeted, and with precise objectives. In the words of the US Deputy Head Mission at the time “Repression against Hutu is not simply one of killing. It is also an attempt to remove them from access to employment, property, education, and the general chance to improve themselves.” Thus, the power of the Tutsi aristocracy and the Army would be preserved.

Survivors of the massacres fled to Rwanda where they felt safe, and were joined by other Hutu fleeing later but much more limited massacres. As Mahmood Mamdani has traced, fear of extermination fed on fear of extermination, in an escalating cycle of violence leading to the terrible events of 1994. Not just extremists, but many ordinary Hutu, feared that the Arusha Peace Agreement, which gave the Tutsi exiles from Uganda control of half of the Rwandan Army, would lead to a repetition of the nightmare of 1972. The time had come, in their view, to finish with the Tutsi aristocracy once and for all. And unlike ethnic conflict, class-based conflict like this has no obvious negotiated solution: an aristocracy without a peasantry may be impossible, but a peasantry without an aristocracy is possible, and some Hutu extremists in 1994 wanted exactly that. Only then would they be safe.

So that’s five thousand words on organised violence, intimidation and deterrence, and hardly a mention of war or “armed conflict.” If nothing else, I hope that the above puts recent events in Gaza and the region into a wider and longer-term perspective. If your objective is explicitly to create an ethno-nationalist-religious state, then the very presence of people of a different ethnicity or religion within your state is a security threat, which you are bound to fear will one day destroy you. This leads ineluctably to a policy of repression, exclusion from power, and ultimately expulsion and violence. But with every hostile act against other populations, you start to fear, quite reasonably, that you are creating even more resentment which will one day blow back against you. But you cannot change your objective, then that fear leads to more repression, which leads to more fear, which leads … And in the end, voices arise, saying that the only real solution is the complete expulsion, or even extermination, of the Others, and logically they are right, for some values of “solution.”

So what we are seeing in Gaza is not a “war”, or a national or international armed conflict, though it might superficially resemble one. It is the age-old story of the use of violence by the strong against the weak, in order that the strong should dominate and control the territory they claim, and thus feel safe. And it is hard to see why this episode should end any more positively, or any less violently, than comparable previous episodes in history have done.