Bipolarity redux: the mimetic context of the ‘new wars’

Abstract

This article challenges the theorem of non-polarity in international relations theory by employing ‘mimetic theory’, a notion associated with the French anthropologist René Girard. The article argues that non-polarity is a distorted visual effect that conceals the actual polar configurations in global politics. So-called ‘new wars’ are seemingly asymmetrical and are said to mobilize fronts ‘on the basis of identity’. However, on closer inspection new wars appear to be shaped by underlying mimetic forces, whereby the contenders behave like ‘doubles’, each reflecting its own image in the wishes and actions of the other. The article picks up and develops a clue from political theorist Herfried Münkler, that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a miniature copy ‘of global political line-ups’. The conflict is placed here in its mimetic context, and implications for political theory and the theory of international relations are drawn.

Notes

¹ Readers may object that this attempt to generalize the individuationist model is a nice exercise in straw-man construction. I use the term ‘individuationist’ largissimo sensu to indicate that such ‘units’ as individuals, groups, states, etc. remain, if not a locus of agency, the ultimate realities in IR theory. Maybe I am tempted to universalize the critique of Alexander Wendt to Kenneth Waltz, that despite his ‘professed structuralism, ultimately he is an individualist’ (Wendt 1999, 15). I am not denying some actual differences, but I believe that mimetic theory offers a new vantage point from where the distinctions diligently negotiated by scholars in IR theory (mainly along the agency–structure axis) seem to vanish. Individual units, whether their capacity for agency is localized or dissolved, are not the ultimate realities in the IRs. One of the aims of this article (the ‘general’ aim) is to credit the mimetic perspective with special epistemological value, and present it as a valuable resource for IR theorists.

² ‘Wars of rivalry are wars between equals’ (Vasquez 1993, 64).

³ Retrospectively, the British Empire and the Spanish Empire can be considered members of a mimetic dyad—as illustrated in Fuchs (2001)—whereas the United States and Vietnam are definitely not. Girard himself puts the point strikingly when he discusses ‘envy’ as a specific form of rivalry. To Girard (1991, 5) ‘all envy is mimetic, but not all mimetic desire is envious’.

⁴ Girard's incursion in IR theory is limited to parts of Girard (2009).

⁶ ‘“Reciprocal action” is therefore always functioning, even when combat has not yet occurred: the two adversaries, the attacker and the defender, will become more and more similar as they observe each other, and their “hostile feeling” will grow. If they both withdraw, it will only to attack each other more fiercely later; if one withdraws, that withdrawal could be a sign for the other to attack. One thing is thus sure: there will be a clash, and it will occur when the lack of differentiation between the two adversaries reaches a point of no return. Reciprocity and the loss of differences are one and the same thing’ (Girard 2009, 56).

⁵ For this notion of Asymmetrisierung see Münkler (2003). I shall use (very sparingly) such notions as ‘asymmetry’ and ‘asymmetrization’ in ways that are consistent with Münkler's use of the terms. Kalevi Holsti (1996, 12) uses the notion of ‘wars of a non Clausewitzian type’ to describe precisely the same type of wars Münkler is referring to, namely, wars that seem difficult to sort out in symmetric dyads. ‘Asymmetrization’ describes then the process of progressive deterioration of nexuses (e.g. the nexus borders–sovereignty) and practices (of warfare and negotiation) that were obvious within the Clausewitzian paradigm. These conflicts are no longer duel-like contests between items belonging to the same ontological sets (for example, ‘states’), but they are inherently ubiquitous and ‘asymmetrical’ new wars.

⁷ ‘Since Israel made peace with the neighbouring states, the conflict is no longer expressed in terms of interstate war and has begun to exhibit some of the characteristics of the new types of conflict’ (Kaldor 1999, 109).

⁸ Tensions in Middle-Eastern politics resonate globally, and the Israeli/Palestinian schism has often been described as arising from a deep-seated East/West fault line, a deep cleavage that is being displaced from its original setting between Asia and Europe and has exploded now in major ‘global political line-ups’.

⁹ Polat (2012) is a most recent attempt to revisit a number of issues and concepts in IR theory from a non-canonical perspective that acknowledges the significance of mimesis in politics.

¹⁰ Vasquez (2012)—notably chapters 4 and 5—revisits the concept of rivalry by testing its applicability in the field of IR. Brandon Valeriano (chapter 4 of Vasquez 2012) seeks to determine ‘what the field knows about the origins of rivalry’ to explain the process of rivalry development (Valeriano 2012, 81). Alliances and military build-ups compound the power status of a state and escalate the rivalry. For Valeriano this is the very origin of ‘proto-rival’ status, in the sense that alliances and build-ups turn a situation of non-rivalry into a proto-rivalry. However, this genetic story of rivalry fails to acknowledge a penumbra of psychological factors (including a possibly existing record of mimetic exchanges) before the tactical escalation of rivalry. Mimetic theory is concerned with a variety of phenomena that occur in the interim between the ‘non-rivalry’ condition and ‘proto-rivalry’ status. From this perspective—from the perspective of mimetic theory—I still believe that there has been little reflection on how and why states become rivals.

¹¹ There are minor internal fractures within the same paradigm. An interesting contribution to the discussion is Goertz et al (2005) that challenges the ‘repeated conflicts’ literature (which focuses on the impact of recent disputes), and argues for the primacy of the longer-term history of the rivalry in explaining recurring conflicts.

¹² The most widely used dataset on international rivalries was offered in Diehl and Goertz (2000). More recently Klein et al (2006) introduced new conceptual criteria, like ‘rivalry symmetry’, to amend an earlier collection strategy. The paper, though, does not challenge the genetic story of how rivalries come about but it rather tackles other rivalry collections.

¹³ The violence against the scapegoat is ‘sacrificial violence’ because the unanimous killing of the victim is the origin of the sacred. The members of the group have a faint grasp of what they perceive as a causal nexus between the killing and the resolution of all conflicts. Because of its resolutive effects, the killing is endowed with special powers; mindful of its peace-making effects, the group becomes cautious and predictive, and in order to avoid, contain, and control mimetic violence its members reiterate and ritualize the sacred origins. Other scholars, more or less all tributaries of Freud's theory about the origins of culture in Totem and Taboo, have argued that ritual, religion, and culture eventuate from mechanisms of collective aggression. See Burkert (1986) and Hamerton Kelly (1987).

¹⁴ ‘Mimesis is cumulative’ (Girard 2008, 66).

¹⁵ ‘The escalation to extremes is a completely irrational phenomenon that only Christianity explains because over 2000 years ago it revealed the inanity of sacrifice, and regardless of those who still like to believe in its usefulness. Christ took away humanity's sacrificial crutches and left us before a terrible choice: either believe in violence, or not; Christianity is non-belief’ (Girard 2009, 21).

¹⁶ The same dynamic of polarization has picked up within each field of the divide, so that more twin-like polar opposites are generated by the same dynamic. The case of the Zionist–Arab conflict is revealing, inasmuch as structures of internal polarization plague the political discourse of both Palestinians and Israelis. Morris (2001, 612) has described the polarization effect of the first Gulf war on the Palestinian side of the cleavage: ‘Tension and conflict between various groups of Palestinians—secularists and fundamentalists, Left and Right—also increased considerably’.

¹⁷ Hallward (2010) shows how scholarly discourse and methods of analysis in IR theory bias the representation of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and not merely in academic fora. It is the very notion of ‘conflict’ that is fraught with assumptions that bias the argument towards one set of conclusions.

¹⁸ See < http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1054838>.

¹⁹ See < http://www.willybrandtcenter.org/de/ueber/medien/focus>.

²⁰ Similarities between Israelis and Palestinians, though, are not registered only at the boutique level. ‘After a colloquium on the narrative of creation, a deputy representative of a league of mosques confessed: “I didn't know that we had so many religious traits in common” (Ich wusste gar nicht, dass wir so viele religiöse Gemeinsamkeiten haben)’ (Jähnigen 2010, 10).

²¹ Stressing similarities is indeed the strategy pursued by all multiculturalists, not only the naïve ones. If one looks at the discourse of the women peace activists on both sides of the Israeli–Palestinian divide, one can see that ‘the underlying assumption has been that successful alliances should be based on similarities, and therefore that Palestinian women had to change and become more like Israeli-Jewish women’ (Sharoni 1995).

²² There is, to be sure, no ‘authentic’ Israeli or Arab cuisine: ‘The cuisine of the Levant—Syria, Lebanon and Israel—is a blend of Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Sephardic influences’ (Marks 2004, 10).

²³ Think of the seeming paradoxical reading proposed by Katja Lüthge (2008) in a brilliant review of this film in the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung: ‘Liegt die Lösung des Nahost-Problems also in der vorübergehenden Umsiedlung der gesamten Bevölkerung des Nahen Ostens nach New York?’

²⁴ This last paragraph may sound controversial as the process of undifferentiation remains ambiguous in Girard, and one can distinguish a long-term, cultural undifferentiation, and a short-term, tactical indifferentiation, which is the one examined in the book on Clausewitz.

²⁵ Surveying all these variants of a broader genus is not within the scope of this paper. For an overview and a critique see Henderson and Singer (2002).

²⁶ Kaldor's approach to both NWs and cosmopolitan democracy, for one thing, has been criticized by authors of both neo-realist and constructivist persuasion.

²⁷ Kaldor (1999, 110) continues by saying that ‘the new wars have political goals. The aim is political mobilization on the basis of identity. The military strategy for achieving this aim is population displacement and destabilization so as to get rid of those whose identity is different and to foment hatred and fear.’

²⁸ ‘The impenetrable web of motives and causes, which often leaves no prospect of lasting peace, is a direct consequence of the fact that it is not states but para-state players that confront one another in the new wars’ (Münkler 2004, 8).

²⁹ See the TV documentary Darfour: Autopsie d'une Tragédie, by Christoph Ayad and Vincent De Cointet, broadcasted on 6 December 2007 by ARTE France.

³⁰ Hagan and Rymond-Richmond (2009, 111) found that the creation of an Arab–Black African divide especially in Darfur dated back 20 years before the escalation of the civil war.

³¹ What for Kaldor is a ‘paradigm case’ is described by Holsti (1996, 192) as ‘the Bosnia prototype’.

³² ‘Far from seeing the violence as evidence of ethnic ties … one could argue that Bosnia shows how weak and how fluid political identity really is’ (Mueller 2004, 197). Mueller was reporting the views of Cheryl Bernard, who worked with Muslim refugees early in the Bosnia war.

³³ See, for a rich and sweeping account of the East/West contest, Pagden (2008).

³⁴ Girard suggests that the escalation of inimical reciprocity may take place between Arab nations and the Western world. ‘Note that it has already begun: the exchange of attacks and American “interventions” can only accelerate, as each side responds to the other. Violence will continue on its way’ (Girard 2009, 20).

³⁵ The Peace Research Institute in the Middle East founded by scholars from both sides at the Ben-Gurion University in Israel is working on a handbook of the history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that seeks to accommodate both perspectives. Similarly, scholars at the University of Skopje in Macedonia are working on an Albanian/Macedonian history book (Schenk 2009, 65). These handbooks are designed to provide an external insight into a mimetic scenario in which each member of the dyad ‘from the inside’ always believes in its difference, whereas the two members, from the outside, would look like what they actually are: ‘simple doubles’ (Girard 2009, 14). Here the external insight into the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is provided by the ‘Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung’ in Braunschweig, Germany, which sponsors the project.

³⁶ On the critical, reciprocal implication between the discourse of victimhood and mimetic theory, I wish to redirect the reader to Harald Wydra's article in this issue.