Privatizing civil society: outsourcing governance in John le Carré’s post-Cold War novels

ABSTRACT

John le Carré’s post-Cold War novels investigate the effects of the disinvestment in Euro-American civil societies and the diminishing justifications for securing democracy and the ‘free world’. As privatization and outsourcing function as primary techniques of ‘good governance’ in many western nations, security studies has offered numerous analyses of this phenomenon, particularly with the privatisation of military force in light of the GWOT. By putting contributions in security studies in dialogue with le Carré’s post-Cold War novels, I argue that le Carré’s post-Cold War novels explore how outsourcing war strategies during the Cold War become essential components of statecraft and security during the neoliberal moment when economic national security dominates in the face of the loss of clear sovereign enemies and state actors. Specifically, le Carré’s post-Cold War novels dramatise critically how market-driven security works between national or international legal orders, particularly in colonial and neocolonial contexts. I conclude that le Carré’s novels reveal an important ethical function for literature in modelling speculative scenarios for reflection on intelligence, security, and transformations in sovereignty while this paradoxical reality unfolds

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Notes

1. See Martijn Konings, Capital and Time.

2. ”No Such Thing as Society.”

3. ”Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge.

4. See Michel Agier, Managing the Undesirables.

5. For celebrations of outsourcing, see Emanuel Savas, Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships. For a more pragmatic account, see Damien Van Puyvelde’s Outsourcing Intelligence: Contractors and Government Accountability.

6. Thomas Bruneau, Patriots for Profits; Deborah Avant, The Market for Force; Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams, Security Beyond the State; Van Puyvelde, 118–160.

7. Paul Verkuil, Outsourcing Sovereignty; Elke Kramann, States, Citizens and the Privatization of Security.

8. Avant, 253, 261.

9. Abrahamsen and Williams, 218.

10. Van Puyvelde, 39–75.

11. For a similar point see Simon Willmetts, “The Cultural Turn in Intelligence”, Intelligence and National Security, 34 no. 6 (2019): 800–817.

12. David Remnick’s review of the The Night Manager, “Le Carré’s New War.”

13. See Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of the American Empire. According to Lindsey O’Rourke’s research, the US tried to overthrow 72 regimes, many democratically elected, during the Cold War. See ‘The U.S. tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War’, Washington Post (December 23, 2016).

14. ”Don’t Be Beastly to Your Secret Service”, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life, 18–19.

15. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2015), 31.

16. Lisa Adkins, The Time of Money; Randy Martin, The Financialization of Everyday Life.

17. Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.

18. Adkins, 14.

19. ‘The Moral Imperative of the Market’, The Unfinished Agenda.

20. John Agnew, “Taking back control? The myth of territorial sovereignty and the Brexit fiasco”, Territory, Politics, Governance, 8 no. 2 (2020): 259–272.

21. Agent Running in the Field, 55. Hereafter cited as Agent.

22. Wendy Brown, Walled States and Waning Sovereignty.

23. Oliver Bullough, “Nevis: How the World’s Most Secretive Offshore Haven Refuses to Clean Up”, The Guardian. (July 12, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/12/nevis-how-the-worlds-most-secretive-offshore-haven-refuses-to-clean-up.

24. For recent revelations of the Panama Papers and Putin-backed oligarchs in London see Spencer Woodman, “How a Network of Enablers Have Helped Russia’s Oligarchs Hide Their Wealth Abroad”, Investigative Consortium of Investigative Reporters (March 2, 2022), https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2022/03/how-a-network-of-enablers-have-helped-russias-oligarchs-hide-their-wealth-abroad/.

25. Hannah Marshall and Alena Dreischova, “Post-Truth Politics in the UK’s Brexit Referendum”, New Perspectives 26 no. 3 (2018): 89–106.

26. The investigation was conducted in 2017–2019, but published only on July 21, 2020. https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/20200721_HC632_CCS001_CCS1019402408-001_ISC_Russia_Report_Web_Accessible.pdf, 15.

27. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals.

28. Quoted in Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, 29–30.

29. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 28.

30. Le Carré critiques parliamentary investigations as theatrical coverups in “A Legacy”, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life.

31. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, 203.

32. A Legacy of Spies, 116. Hereafter Legacy.

33. John le Carré, Absolute Friends, 421. Hereafter Friends.

34. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, 17–18.

35. Krahmann, 66.

36. Shorrock, 18–19.

37. Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, 66–70, 206–229. P.W. Singer, “War, Profits, and the Vacuum of Law: Privatized Military Firms and International Law”, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 42 (2004): 521–549.

38. Van Puyvelde, 118–160; Verkuil, 23–56; Singer, 151–168.

39. Verkuil; Krahmann, 124,132,145–150; Avant, 219–252.

40. Bruneau, 163.

41. Krahmann, 87.

42. Beth Elise Whitaker, “Exporting the Patriot Act? Democracy and the ‘war on terror’”, Third World Quarterly 28 no. 5 (2007): 1017–1032.

43. Society Must Be Defended, 103.

44. The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens, 9.

45. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution, 13, 19.

46. Xan Rice, “The Looting of Kenya”, The Guardian (August 31, 2007). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/aug/31/kenya.topstories3.

47. John le Carré, The Constant Gardener, 217.

48. Constant Gardener, 391.

49. Abrahamsen and Williams, 196–215.

50. ”The Great Moving Right Show”, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 374–392.

51. I argue how speculative fictions become important forms of critique of the rapacious effects of speculative capital in Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition.

52. See Blistène and Van Puyvelde, “A delicate truth”.