The phenomenon of war.

The phenomenon of war is inextricably linked to historical development, since, since ancient times, the human being has internalized it, becoming part of his identity, that is, the way in which he thinks, perceives, feels. and conceive reality. Wars would thus begin in the minds of individuals. However, war threatens life and social organization, replaces civil order with military norms and standards, and not only implies the death of people, but also the loss of their autonomy.

The war will ultimately represent a resounding failure of Reason and modern civilization. Therefore, it would be a "total social phenomenon", since it usually implies:

• the suspension of the rule of law and, consequently, of certain citizenship rights;

• the transformation of economic activity from a civil and consumerist model to another of a war economy, thus making the majority of the population suffer innumerable hardships and calamities;

• Military recruitment of civilians from all activities, at the cost of significant economic losses for those abducted or enlisted;

• The profound alteration of the conventional sexual patterns both of the soldiers and of the affected civilian population, to the point of using rape as yet another weapon of war;

• the symbolic and material reward of the brave deeds of war carried out, which in times of peace would be nothing more than simple crimes.

On the other hand, despite its apparent eternity, numerous and different thinkers and intellectual traditions put all their faith, determination and effort into contributing to the creation of a world in peace, where that maximum expression of barbarism that is the war.

Thus, the Enlightenment believed that the general happiness of mankind would be attainable through Reason, economic growth, and scientific knowledge. Kant and Rousseau also trusted in Reason and in the innate goodness of the human being.

Adam Smith also showed his optimism, considering that industrialization would prevent some nations from having to go to war with others to improve their material conditions. However, plain war for Sorokin and, specifically, class war for Marx will determine social change.

And, finally, liberalism tried to exorcise the monster of violence through the pacifying market, tempering passions; war would be considered a pre-modern relic, the result of an aristocratic warmongering mentality or the whim of some despot (Joas, 2004).

But, the nationalist disputes at the beginning of the 20th century in Western Europe would give rise to two world wars and the re-intrologization of violence, destroying not only the pacifist discourse, but also the dream of a modern civilization, "[returning] dangerously to barbarism" (Beriain, 2004:9). History has thus shown itself stubborn, war and violence continue to form part of modernity and not only of its prehistory.

One of the fundamental reasons for the timelessness of war is simply the fact that states have the ability to administer military violence. War and State form a symbiosis, to the point that, as Charles Tilly (1975) already indicated, war makes the State, and the State makes war, through one of its basic pillars of power: the army.

A State would thus obtain legitimacy by protecting its citizens from possible predators, and the war would also serve to reinforce or rebuild group solidarity, especially against external enemies, or to obviate the internal difficulties that the State might be going through. regime or the leader of the day, since a latent function of modern warfare is to mobilize support that is wavering. On the contrary, the war could contribute to weakening the apparatus of state coercion, in the event of an imminent or consummated defeat.

In any case, although the events that precipitate the outbreak of war are very varied, the warlike conflict usually happens when States or groups enter into dispute and their disagreements cannot be successfully managed through negotiation, pact or diplomacy. Thus, a country can go to war because of its desire to control the territory or natural resources of another, and/or as the result of political, ideological, religious or ethnic confrontations.

War is the macro-conflict par excellence, since a great multiplicity of variables of a psychological, social, cultural, economic, political and normative nature intervene in it. Although it has often been difficult to distinguish between the real causes and the alleged pretexts, the declared objectives and the unconfessed, the apparent and the underlying functions, wars do not usually respond to a single cause, and their analysis and understanding will require, by definition an interdisciplinary approach.

However, it is at least surprising how little attention Social Sciences pays to this phenomenon, despite being such a dramatic, transcendent and global social fact. In this sense, after an exhaustive analysis of the Annual Review of Sociology, Edward A. Tiryakian, Professor of Sociology at Duke University, concludes that war is a legitimate sociological issue, but sadly forgotten. Sociology has studied "[...] education, politics, economics, sex, gender, deviant behavior, gambling, race and everything else. Everything except war" (Tiryakian, 2004). Therefore, war would continue to be the hidden face of modernity.

Psychology would also have seriously ignored the phenomenon of war. The predominance of a psychological or individualistic orientation in the study of human nature, during most of the trajectory of this discipline, would have truly distanced it from social problems or, at most, would have led it to conceive of the social as a extrapolation of the individual. For this reason, the reductionist approach sought to assimilate war to individual aggressive behavior. But, lately, this nonsense is being resolved from a sociological Social Psychology, more in line with the social essence of war.

After the serious convulsions of all kinds caused by the Second World War, scholars of war begin to rethink, however, the classic conception of it. War will no longer be considered, exclusively, as the demonstration or violent confrontation between two or more groups or nations with the purpose of defeating the adversary, to be conceived, more broadly, as the set of forces that contribute to its maintenance. even in times of peace; including, therefore, the budget items that each one of the States allocates annually to the purchase of weapons.

War will no longer be just a violent act, but will constitute, above all, a social system: the war system, based on the glorification of force or violence as the ultimate arbiter of social conflicts. This institutionalization of war is what allows the persistence of the ideas that sustain it, the norms that regulate it, the communities that lead it and the ways of acting of each of the sides in the periods in which the war did not take place. It manifests itself openly, that is, as long as there are no combats and, consequently, no deaths or destruction.

Armed conflicts will presuppose, therefore, the existence of at least two hostile groups, the priority use of force, a certain continuity in the confrontations and a level of organization on both sides (Djalili, 1991). The war is going to represent, in short, "[...] a confrontation of social interests, which resort to arms as a resource to settle their differences [...] what counts is no longer the force of reason, [ but] the reason for its strength, its military power, its ability to hit and destroy the opponent" (Martín-Baró, 1990a: 28)

It could be affirmed, without fear of being mistaken, that death, hunger, poverty and destruction represent, in a universal way, the semantic space of war, but this is not the case, surprisingly, when it comes to politics, economics, power or the arms race. This was revealed in a study by Wagner, Elejabarrieta and Valencia (1994) on the social representations of war and peace in Spain and Nicaragua, that is, a country that lacked close experience of war and another that had just live it, and still suffer its consequences.

The first terms were part of the stable core of social representations of war, but not the second. And this does not stop being functional for the objectives of the establishment, more interested, obviously, in this global village that Mcluhan spoke of, in continuing to focus the attention of public opinion on the consequences than on the causes of the war.

Traditionally, the political and economic prominence of a country on the international scene has been derived, on the other hand, from its military might. However, it is from the Second World War when, especially in the Western world, the security and importance of a country begin to be defined by reference to something more than weapons or its territory, acquiring much more importance the economic situation. , stability, and political and psychological legitimacy (Chubin, 1991).

Good examples of this are two of the most thriving economies on the planet, Germany and Japan, which, after being defeated in said world war, were able to dedicate all their efforts to their economic and social development, as their military capacity was enormously limited. Likewise, the armed peace, fostered by the policy of balancing terror and nuclear deterrence (see Martín and Fernández-Rañada, 1996), put into practice throughout the Cold War stage, has paradoxically entailed that, over the course of Over the years, in the Western world in general, and in post-Clausewitzian Europe in particular, war is no longer a desirable alternative, especially if it has to be lived and suffered directly by the Western populations themselves.

The fall of the Berlin wall, and the consequent disappearance of the communist enemy, would also have contributed to the fact that the advantages of peace have penetrated even more in Western public opinion.

In addition, the pragmatic morality characteristic of this global capitalism, tending to value armed interventions in terms of costs and benefits, would be inhibiting the involvement of the Western world in conflicts for humanitarian reasons, as happened in Rwanda in 1994, but it does not prevent, on the contrary, the direct intervention of the great Western powers in those other conflictive scenarios where they plan to preserve their interests, as occurred in the Gulf War and is currently happening in these new episodes of the Iraq War.

This type of morality has been characterizing, above all, US foreign policy in those conflictive areas of the planet. In this sense, the new world order established after the end of the Cold War would not prevent the United States, as the only surviving global superpower, from intervening directly in those places where it tries to preserve its interests by force or, simply, they insist on guaranteeing their hegemony, yes, as long as the war takes place far from their territory.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States declared a merciless war on terrorism, which, fundamentally coupled with the shortcomings of the international relations model implemented after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is promoting preventive and virtuous wars, and the violation of the most elementary principles of international legality and, even, of universal ethics and morals, as has been evidenced in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and with the enactment of the Patriot Act (see Zulaika and Douglas, 2004).

For this reason, some critical voices have classified the US anti-terrorist policy as terrorist in itself, as well as illegal. Today, more than ever, it seems clear that the future development of any war will depend on this complex network of interdependent interests of those who make up the MIME-NET network (military, industrial, media, entertainment network) (see Der Derian, 2004) i.e. the military, the arms industry, the media, and the Hollywood imagination, whose predictable advantages would be a dearth of insider criticism for governments, lucrative ratings for the media, and infotainment for a practicing public. of sports militarism.

As if time had stopped, the aphorism enunciated by von Clausewitz (1976) in the 19th century is unfortunately still fully valid: war continues to be a continuation of politics by other means.

"Post-modern" peace, being absolutely contemporary with war and barbarism, constitutes a "post-democratic" institution of a permanent state of exception. Peace is, then, the continuation of war by other means, it is the reduction of sovereignty to the imbalance of terror according to the principle of distinction between friend and enemy.

The authors propose the "Combat against war" as the path that must be followed to destroy the system of evidence of false social peace, and thus open ourselves to the construction of a new possible world for any singularities. Possible world as an in-common, as a community to come.

War and peace in its classic-modern form, the conjunction of war and peace preserves the disjunctive value implied in the chiasm of these common notions, showing the impossibility of producing, historically and conceptually, a positive definition of peace. Peace, like disarmament, negatively designates a social state characterized by the absence of war.

It is peace through disarmament, as Raymond Aron maintains: "it is said - he writes - that peace reigns when trade between nations does not involve military forms of struggle" (Raymond A, 1962). Neither essential nor existential, peace does not exclude struggles and conflicts (it demilitarizes them) since its principle "is not different from that of wars: peace is founded on power" [ibid], and this in a world at that now must be considered, the imperative of public safety requires it, as a whole (Aotus orbis).

Of an insurance essence, this first secular form of political globalization is inseparable from the War/Peace antinomy that subjects the “law of nations” (jus gentium) to the universal perspective of power (potestas). Antinomy – is the word used by the old Proudhon to explain that “peace demonstrates and confirms war”, while “war, in turn, is a vindication of peace” (P. J. Proudhon, 1861.).

Despite the surprising topicality of this last formula, Proudhon thus describes what he calls "the alternative conditions of the life of peoples", subjected to the historical, "phenomenological" alternation of states of peace and states of war. , in a world in which the national logic of state centralization implies and explains the propensity for military confrontations.

Peace and war in its hyper-modern imperial form, the conjunction between peace and war must be understood according to the substitute value that the two absolutely contemporary terms take on, beginning by inverting their “classical” functions and relationships. While war means the regulation of the constituted powers and the constituent form of the new order, peace is only a deceptive illusion that sustains the power of disorder and its threat, urbi et orbi, against the security of the world.

In the end it happens as if, in that world without inside or outside, where "trade between nations" has masked external peace with the worldwide disintegration of living together (the "inner peace"), peace and war are so amazingly intermingled that simply form the right and the reverse of the same fabric projected on the planet.

Peace, in other words war... which is less a hypothesis than a fact confirmed by all, about this hybrid identity that launches "everyone" into a meta-politics in which peace seems only to be the continuation of war by other means. Otherness, in fact relative, of a police action continuously exercised on the globalized polis under the exceptional jurisdiction of an infinite war. Peace is deduced as an institution of a permanent state of exception.

At the dawn of modern times, when the paradigms of sovereignty and the Nation-State are in gestation, Thomas Hobbes tells the history of humanity as the great story of the exit from the state of war of each one against all that identifies the state of nature.

Founded on the dissolution of the relations of nature and the alienation of the indefinite desire for power of individuals, the political institution of sovereignty invents Law as its own principle and guarantee of civil peace. Paid the high price of alienation, without retribution, of freedom in obedience to the sovereign, peace is the only counterpart of a pact of submission (transfer of power) of which the legal absolute (transfer of rights) is a condition real body politic.

The sovereign is absolute in the obedience of the subjects for the sole benefit of security; the “security of the people” is a condition of reality of the power (of) the sovereign to “judge what is in accordance with reason and what is not”, according to the formula of Leviathan, XXVI. He will hold in his hands the sword of justice by which he preserves internal peace and the sword of war, by which he ensures external defense and punishes the rebel who declares his will to disobedience (non jure imperio sive dominion, sed jure belli : the internal enemy relieves of the right of war because "the rebellion is simply the return to the state of war" [Leviathan, XXVIII] that directs "the multitude against the people" [De Cive, XII, VIII]).

Thus war is presented as the negative condition of peace; represents the reason of State that determines the voluntary submission to the Master of the Law. For the omnipresence of war and its representations is necessary to create an Order that makes a single subject body out of a dispersed multitude, with the empty name of People, to the "absolute power" of one's will... The modern State is born from this political representation that is sustained by war, monopolizing, in the name of peace, the logic of accumulation of power subtracted from the "primitive confusion" of the multitudes.

The Thirty Years' War is not at all associated with the birth of modern sovereignty: it ends with a peace that seals the definitive victory of the legal morality of force over politeia as a "just" distribution of power (Hobbes perceives what Greek fair as a school of sedition). But, have we believed in this peace without justice that crosses the landscapes of the massacre on the cart of Mére Courage? Between 1618 and 1648, Germany lost half of its inhabitants... the peace achieved by the modern State is an ideal torn between the theory of just war (Grotius) and the program of a universal peace to which it is convenient to give the name of utopia .

In the age of a vindicated postmodernity, in which the planetary picture is much less fixed by the United Nations Organization – distant heir to the projects of perpetual peace – than by the World Trade Organization, war has become a power of order authorizing the character of "beyond" the territorial conquest.

Unlike the classical-modern age that had conceived a regulating idea of ​​peace by the international community, associating the practice of trade and commerce (usus commerciorum) to the sovereign will of the States, peace only manages to express itself, under the word of Peace Research, in war and for a logic-logistics of war. Arguing the "exception situation" to replace the international relationship of forces by a unitary world power. War as peacekeeping, guardian of the peace police. The difference with respect to the founding myth of political modernity is manifested in the reversal of the relationship between War and Peace.

Peace and war freed from the secularized utopia of the Christian Republic, peace is no longer the “solution” of war built on a (relative) balance of forces or on a “reasoned” hegemony (on the side of war) – peace is the procedural condition inherent in the conduct of war founded on the distinction between friend and foe.

In this context, which must be called opacity, Schmitnian decisionism, which sets the production of sovereignty in motion, animates the empire. The notion of politics, in its last affirmation of the emptiness of its true state in the face of theological analogies of the reality of the state, is only valid to make sovereignty and decision coincide in an imperial megalo-politics in which the axis makes the whole world turn. , totus orbis, around the sovereign power that continuously decides on the “exceptional situation”. (It is the sovereign who decides on the exceptional situation [of the state of exception]).

We will avoid, then, ironizing about the Axis of evil –or the judgment of God– to take into account the hyper-modernity of a situation that marks a complete displacement with respect to the hegemonic model of the pax Romana, as is perceived in the precept of the “Si vis pacem, para bellum”. It is not a question, then, of preparing for war in order to have peace (this is the principle of deterrence), but of making peace in war based on continued destruction (reversal of the "progressive" theological scenario of continued creation) reducing sovereignty to the imbalance of terror. Is peace the postmodern name of war? A project to perpetuate war in the world, a project of perpetual world war.

Modern literature, when dealing with war, always stages that moment in which man discovers his loneliness on the battlefield. Grimmelshausen, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Céline or Hemingway show this man miraculously unharmed or injured, stupefied by the noise and the fury, and even more so by the fact that the moon and the sun can still shine. The return to peace is a natural restoration of the sensible presentation of the world, an aesthetic restoration of being-in-an-outside.

The question now becomes: can we internally approach peace when the postmodern designates the anesthesia of life returned to the void, the mourning of our affinity with the space-time plasma and its generalized commodification, the disposition of the world as a theater of operation for a total war that aims at a total peace? How to avoid the filthiness of war whose goal is the definitive supremacy of "global security"? Would peace itself have reached its nihilistic age by submitting to the reign of a "humanitarian" as monstrous as war (according to the formula proposed by Rancière: “the category of the humanitarian as the double of the Realpolitik of States”)? Where to find peace, if not in a post-war period in which the civil deterrence of a post-democracy would have taken over from the "anti-Cities strategy", of nuclear deterrence? Is it enough to achieve the unforeseen, a new monster surely, to free us from the ordinary misery of this tele-acted peace and war in the turns of the new imperial order? It is no longer a question of being able to imagine or describe a battlefield after the massacre that overwhelms the still-living being with stupor, it is not, then, a question of feeling-being-alive on the verge of death.

"They made the desert and called it peace," writes Tacitus. And before him, Thucydides. Historians are hyper-realistic poets. They feel no discomfort at seeing brute force as the lever of political order. Placing himself under the sign of pure observation of the modalities of the political in its historical reality, Machiavelli scrupulously describes the military actions and the wars that are attempted in order to impose peace of arms.

It must be understood: the peace conquered by weapons that symbolize the virtue of the people gathered in the political affirmation of their (represented) power. Here peace discovers its transitory value, which only war can "realize" as a vector of the general system of power relations, of which the truth denies any difference other than the formal one between peacetime and wartime.

Except for precipitating rest in idleness and disorder that lead the State to its ruin, a State that has forgotten the permanence of war, the prince "cannot trust what he sees in peaceful times" (The Prince , IX).

Well, the prince, then, would succumb to the most dangerous of lures: the love of peace – when it is necessary for him to live, in all its aspects, peace in the thought of war. Realism and cynicism come together here in a discourse that identifies war with a truth condition of any political order. But does the Machiavellian affirmation, of "Roman" inspiration, according to which war is the creator of order, make sense in a world with a spirit as little "civic" as ours? , in a decoy conveyed by the state of urgency of a communication without being-common? The geo-strategic reality of the warlike illusionism of pentagon-capitalism – as Virilio calls it – dispenses with any supplementary rhetoric.

From now on war, peace and barbarism interact in one and the same story with no other rule than the common sense of the filthy. The great pacifisms –whether Christian pacifism or communist pacifism– apprehended war as a sacrifice to build peace: it was necessary to wage war with the thought and desire for peace “in order to lead the enemy to victory.” to the advantages of peace” (Saint Augustine, letter 189 to Count Bonifacio).

Clinging to this “liberal” idea of ​​peace as the goal of war and of war as a necessary means to peace – “peace must be wanted and war must be waged only out of necessity […] to obtain peace. One continues to be peaceful, even fighting…” (ibid)–, an idea that can only be conceived in the reconciled truth (in God or in humanity) of a universal subject, pacifism coming to be embodied only in the efficacy of a project of peace.

Peace and war: pacifism can no longer derive its authority from a chronology or teleology that is capable of taking us from war to a separate peace. Not being able to desire peace, but rather with a nostalgic desire, resistance to war as a constituent machine of the new order, it is stated: “war to war”. Or, better, combat against war – in the sense that Deleuze opposes war as a will to domination founded on the system of judgment (“a judgment of God that makes destruction something 'just'”) to the combat that mobilizes the forces against the powers of domination (G. Deleuze, 1993).

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