Review essay

Political Geography, Vol. 15, No. W7, pp. 64-645, 1996 Published by Elsevier Saence Ltd. Printed in Great Britain 0962-6298/96 $15.00 + OMI

Review essay David Campbell:

Writing Securi[y: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics qf’ Identity University Of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1992; David Campbell: Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War; Lynne Reinner, Boulder,

The

conflict

geopolitical

between theorists

the

United

Campbell a recent

States-led

with a pressing

massive and massively-celebrated

coalition

destruction relations

theory to explicate

(see, among others, Connolly, the

its enemies. national

of

state

the practices whereby

books work

These

relations

construction

theory,

in

1991

to explain

presents how such

could occur. Two recent books by David

‘politics of othering’

practices of distinction,

Iraq

to help address that challenge.

Campbell

explores

and

and difficult challenge:

attempt to provide a framework trend in international

1993.

consciously

1991; Dalby, 1990; Walker, 19931,

identity

through

the

the state constructs against

in part by attempting

In extending

what one might call the morality-laden

itself as it constructs

the mainstream

to problematize

grain of inter-

IR’s basic

unit, the

state. The

state,

contradictory tic practices,

Campbell

argues,

and, importantly, for example,

instead is constitutive

is not a pre-given, inseparable

static entity,

from its practices.

but is ambiguous,

A state’s set of diploma-

does not flow naturally from a pre-given

of the state; the state does not exist before

set of interests, but these practices,

rather is created by them. A particularly important set of state practices, consists

of those

that distinguish

the internal world of the sovereign

but

for Campbell, state from the

external world of dangerous others. Such practices, Campbell argues, are crucial to the construction of a state’s identity because they help develop its interior realm by defining

it in contradistinction

development construction

of a state’s of dangerous

In Writing Security,

to an

identity

inferior

is dependent

constituted

upon,

one. even

In other

words,

the

from,

the

inseparable

others.

Campbell

lays out an elaborate

and applies his analysis to several historical been

exterior

by distinguishing

development

instances

itself from

of his arguments,

in which the United States has

a morally

inferior

other.

In Politics

Without Principle, Campbell uses his framework to analyze the Gulf conflict, In making his arguments,

Campbell

explicitly

disputes the epistemological

assump-

tions of neo-realist international relations theory. In particular, Campbell criticizes the basic grounding of mainstream IR theory in ‘epistemic realism’, the assumption, as he defines it in Writing Security, that the world ‘comprises

objects the existence

of which

is independent of ideas or beliefs about them’ (p. 4). By contrast, Campbell argues for the importance of discourse in constituting reality, and thus underscores the importance

of interpretation

in the theory

and practice

of foreign

policy.

Campbell’s perspective, theory is practice, because it helps constitute constructed reality that practitioners of foreign policy engage,

Indeed,

from

the discursively

642

Review essay

Campbell’s

project,

then, is to question

the theoretical

theory, many of which, he asserts, were used in defense of Iraq. Such a questioning some

of the practices

assumptions

creates a conceptual

that structure

of traditional IR

of the coalition’s

destruction

space in which Campbell can describe

the state’s

identity.

Three

central

interrelated

undergird his analysis,

The first is that identity is ‘an inescapable individual or collective, given

justifications

essences;

there

is no firm, fixed foundation

rests. Instead, identity is something third assumption

dimension

can exist without it. The second

of being’

(p. 8); no body,

is that identities are not pre-

upon which

any body’s

identity

created on a regular and ongoing basis. Campbell’s

is that one crucial

act in creating

identity

is the identification

of

others. In fact, he argues that the two are inseparable. From these three assumptions the state engages

in ongoing,

itself in contradistinction often, dangerous. more

flow the central argument in Campbell’s necessary

to others.

flows

to secure

from some

does not flow organically pre-given

analysis: that

its identity by defining

Further, these others are defined

This danger, however,

than identity

practices

state essence;

as inferior and,

from the other any both

are constituted

through discursive practices. Campbell

devotes

have worked

much of Whiting Security to demonstrating

to construct

have been especially While Campbell

is careful to note that discursive constructions

One construction

tendencies.

parishioners

created a sense of societal anxiety at the same time that they to undergo spiritual renewal through the exorcism of unwanted

people as Thomas Morton and Anne Hutchinson, the Indians, the latter for questioning because

it threatened

of such

to subvert the necessarily

threatening,

according

to Campbell,

inferior position of the Indians in the

of Puritan self-identity.

This construction

of Indians continued throughout the settlement of the frontier, as did

a similar construction necessity

this meant the condemnation

the former for living happily amongst

the authority of the male Puritan leaders. Morton’s

of the Indian lifestyle was especially

construction

history.

are always historically

of some themes in American foreign policy.

In the case of the Puritans themselves,

celebration

practices

that persists, Campbell suggests, is the Puritan jeremiad, or political

These sermons

admonished

these

crucial to the United States, given its lack of pre-founding

specific, he illustrates the persistence sermon.

how such practices

the identity of the United States. Indeed,

of African-Americans.

for sharp discursive

In both of these cases, Campbell argues, the

differentiations

was especially

pertinent

given the close

proximity of the European settlers to the ostracized groups, and the extensive imbrication of their social worlds. From

early

phenomena-the

United

States

history,

Campbell

turns

to

more

contemporary

Cold War, the ‘war’ on drugs, and the fear of Japanese

economic

imperialism. In each case the analysis is similar; state policy is seen not as a reaction to a pre-given, objective danger, but rather creates the danger to which it responds. What has become especially important more recently, according to Campbell, is the discourse

of security.

Not only did the alleged threat of Soviet Communism provide an important axis around which the US state defined itself, it also provided a justification for regulations to enforce a particular domestic order. Loyalty oaths, for instance, provided a mechanism by which the fear of contaminating external influences was used to control a domestic group. More generally, charges of ‘Bolshevism’ were used to discredit various social reform movements, up to and including efforts to increase child-care programs. In developing this point, Campbell acknowledges one of his debts to Foucault, the

STEVEHERBERT

643

intellectual figure who looms large behind the analysis. Not only does Campbell’s study itself follow Foucault’s attempts to write a ‘history of the present’, and make use of the notion of the productive capacity of power, it also depends, in its discussion of security, on Foucault’s work on ‘governmentality’. Here, Campbell follows Foucault in suggesting that security lies at the intersection between the macrophysics and microphysics of power; its practices, in other words, seek to domesticate at both the global and individual level. In this, Campbell seeks to develop Foucault’s argument that the state is ‘an ensemble of practices that are at one and the same time individualizing and totalizing’ (p. 253). What is of especial interest to geographers in Campbell’s analysis of the politics of othering is its implications for the state’s discursive construction of territorial boundaries. Such cartographic demarcations become more than just geometric lines on the abstracted grid of the map; instead they are morally laden separations between inside and outside, good and evil. This was particularly obvious in the Gulf conflict, where geography and morality fused such that the reinstating of Kuwait’s territorial integrity was constructed as the exorcism of a barbaric, primitive aggressor. It is to an analysis of this conflict that Campbell turns his attention in Politics Without Principle. This work relies on the framework in the previous book without much elaboration, and instead devotes much of its attention to explaining how many of the key issues of the war could have been understood differently. Campbell pays special attention to the numbers of ways that extremely complex issues were registered in black-and-white terms. For example, contrary to the Bush administration’s rhetoric, the territorial boundary between Kuwait and Iraq was itself not especially clear, a longstanding object of a dispute complicated by the legacy of colonialism and the volatile politics of oil. Campbell also disputes the US contention that all diplomatic avenues were exhausted prior to the conflict, showing instead that the USA acted consistently to thwart peace efforts. Less an elaboration of the framework developed in Writing Security than a reasoned response to the simplistic constructions of Bush administration rhetoric, Politics Without Principle is most effective as a succinct compilation of much of the work that has critically re-examined the Gulf conflict. Taken together, the body of evidence quite effectively questions the Bush administration’s construction of the conflict and, at the same time, underscores how the politics of identity is so central to foreign policy. Theoretically, the major contributions of Politics Without Principle are its critique of Just War Theory, and its plea for a new ethics in international relations. The ambiguity inherent in the ongoing interpretive practices of foreign policy, Campbell suggests, makes untenable the seemingly absolute dictums that undergird Just War Theory, e.g., the sacrosanct nature of territorial boundaries. Also, changes in the economic and military order make the seemingly absolute boundaries separating territorial states both more impervious and more vulnerable to attack. This critique of the seemingly objective criteria used to justify Just War Theory, which Campbell argues ultimately devolve to a justification for raison d’ktat, leads to an elaboration of a new ‘ethicopolitical disposition’. Here, Campbell draws on his central argument, that states are drawn together in mutual acts of construction, to encourage a new politics that accepts interdependence, not anarchy, as the fundamental organizing principle of the world system. Acceptance of this idea, Campbell suggests, would create a new sense of responsibility between states for the care of each other, and might displace the unfortunate tendency to construct other states as demons who can only be ostracized and/or confronted militaristically.

644

Review essay

Taken together, Campbell’s works provide a provocative and thoroughgoing reading of American foreign policy, which provides, a theoretically useful window through which to understand geopolitical behavior. He suggests a fundamental rethinking of mainstream IR theory by rejecting conventional ideas about the state and the alleged anarchy said to constitute the world system. For critical geopolitics, Campbell’s analysis illustrates how the construction of territorial boundaries is tied up with the politics of identity in important and fundamental ways. This was obvious during the Gulf conflict. As Campbell’s analysis would suggest, the construction of the other led to a ‘geography of evil’, which not only demonized Iraq, whose transgression of Kuwait’s boundary was the principal evidence of its barbarism, but also justified the coalition’s militarized exorcism. In so demonizing Iraq, the administration simultaneously sought to position the identity of the United States rhetorically, in Bush’s words, as ‘the beacon of freedom in a searching world’. Despite these useful general insights, there are three areas where Campbell’s work deserves further elaboration. The first concerns the centrality of identity to his analysis. Campbell is quick to condemn the objectivist effort to locate an Archimedean point upon which social analysis can rest. Such an argument, however, can neglect the centrality of basic assumptions to any analysis. For Campbell, the importance of identity for social being is just such a basic assumption. Unfortunately, it is an assumption that receives no justification; it is, instead, simply asserted in a single sentence. This is less to suggest that Campbell is wrong to emphasize the importance of identity, but more to question whether this is necessarily the most significant hinge for an analysis of international relations. Why not, for example, begin from the assumption that the necessity for material comforts is central to existence? What difference would that make to the analysis? Given the importance of originating assumptions, it is important that they be justified a bit more fully. The second set of concerns involves the nature of explanation in analyses such as Campbell’s, Like most practitioners of discourse theory, Campbell explicitly eschews the search for ‘real’ causes of social action; because social reality is only ever discursively constructed, no extra-discursive point exists on which to anchor social analysis. This means a retreat from what he terms the ‘logic of explanation’, and an advance of one of interpretation. While Campbell is right to insist that such a position does not necessarily dissolve into a hopeless relativism, it still leaves one wondering about the role of explanation in discourse analysis. Campbell is primarily interested in considering the consequences of a state’s adopting one representation of itself instead of another, an admittedly important endeavor. However, it is not entirely clear how the logic of explanation falls entirely by the wayside. Indeed, Campbell seems to rely on this logic at several junctures; he regularly points to social phenomena that helped motivate a particular set of state practices. For example, he cites the context of social unrest in the late 1960s as an important backdrop helping lead to the war on drugs. On what basis can he make this claim? At another point, he refers to ‘fictional representations’ of an American past. Again, it is unclear how this claim can be sustained from a logic of interpretation. Such a statement, it seems, assumes an extra-discursive truth about history and society. The point here is not to assert that the non-discursive is somehow more important than the discursive, or that social phenomena can ever be understood extra-discursively, but rather to continue to problematize the relationship between discursive and nondiscursive. While Campbell would argue that such a distinction is itself untenable, his

645

STEVE HEKHEHT

analysis seems implicitly to accept it; the logics of explanation,

cause and truth appear

to persist. Finally, Campbell’s on international

analysis can be elaborated

by making it more explicitly focused

relations. His work is focused on the conduct of United States foreign

policy, and the various discursive strategies used to create American identity. Campbell implies,

however,

international

that such practices

politics

and reconstructions,

of othering

would be crucial to any state. As a result, the

would be a complex

a shifting web of cross-defined

array of various constructions

state identities. While the internal

pull of the jeremiad and the need to tame its domestic realm were obviously central to the way in which the United States constructed the Soviet Union in the Cold War, it would be interesting to explore similar dynamics in the Soviet Union. From there, one could begin to explore is an exciting geographers

challenge

how these dynamics that emanates

flow across as well as within states. This

from Campbell’s

work,

and it is one

that

are well suited to take up.

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Ithaca: Cornell

PKSS. I)AI.HY. S. (1990) W+I.I\I:K. R.HJ

Creuting the Secotzd Cold Wur The Discount qf Politics. London: hide/Outside. Cambridge: Cambridge Ilniversity Press.

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