The political production of ethical war: rethinking the ethics/politics nexus with Laclau

ABSTRACT

Taking Maja Zehfuss’s War & the Politics of Ethics as a starting point, this paper thinks through the ethics/politics nexus from the perspective of ‘Essex School’ poststructuralist discourse theory. Specifically, it asks how ethics – or, rather, morality, the temporary, contingent and context-dependent normative framework that regulates what is commonly seen as good or bad within a given society – is produced. From a discourse theoretical perspective, notions of the moral good are the result of political struggles over meaning. Here Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of hegemony can provide significant insight into how this process works, that is, how some claims about what is morally right become widely accepted as the (only) right thing to do while others fail to do so. The paper illustrates the theoretical argument with a brief case study of the changing articulation of the threat and use of military force in the German security discourse after unification. This case is of particular interest because Germany’s allegedly deeply engrained antimilitarist culture should, from aconventional constructivist perspective at least, stand in the way of any arguments about ethical war ever becoming accepted. Nevertheless, this is precisely what happened.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• morality
• war
• politics
• the political
• discourse
• Ernesto Laclau
• Chantal Mouffe
• Critical Security Studies
• German foreign policy
• out-of-area debate

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nisha Shah and Dirk Nabers for the invitation to contribute to this symposium. I am also grateful to the participants in the workshop that is the basis for this symposium as well as two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The empirical case study presented here was conducted as part of the author’s doctoral studies at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences [GSC 263], funded by the German Excellence Initiative. Funding by the German Excellence Initiative as well as the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. I am using the term ‘violence’ here instead of ‘force’ to minimise the risk of inadvertently whitewashing the violence involved also in allegedly ‘ethical’ war (Thomas 2011). Moreover, in contrast to in particular quantitative peace and conflict research, Zehfuss understands war broadly referring to all kinds of military violence, not necessarily that limited to a certain number of battle deaths. Since her (and my) focus is on the legitimation of any military violence, not necessarily only full-blown war, we can neglect these definitional issues here.

2. There is a small but growing literature drawing on discourse theory in IR. Due to lack of space, I cannot discuss these extensively here, but see for example Herschinger (2011), Solomon (2014), Nabers (2015), Rothe (2015), Eberle (2019) and, most recently, the contributions to issue 2/2019 of New Political Science.

3. The empirical illustration is based on a discourse analysis of German parliamentary debates from 1987 until 2013 (for a more detailed case study of the out-of-area debate, see Stengel forthcoming). In the following, parliamentary protocols are cited using the following format: speaker, legislative period/session no., date: page no

4. Here, Zehfuss is referring to ethics-as-morality.

5. Very similar to critical IR, Laclau insists that there is no such thing as a ‘neutral factual description’ of reality (Laclau 2014c, 134), and that in attempting to describe social reality, we are in fact intervening.

6. If this seems familiar, that is because IR poststructuralist studies usually also emphasise the differential construction of meaning.

7. There is an extended, more complicated argument to be made here about antagonism, the (possibility of) limits of discursive systems, etc., but I will leave it aside here for practical reasons (see Laclau 1990, 1996).

8. See Stengel and Nabers (2019) for a more detailed summary.

9. Here one can distinguish between the political as an ontological horizon and politics as the ensemble of concrete decisions made at the ontic level (Laclau 1994, 2012; Nabers 2015).

10. I use here ethics and the ethical interchangeably. As opposed to that, Nabers (2015) draws the line between the ethical as an ontological horizon and ethics/morality as ontic content(s).

11. That changed only with the Federal Constitutional Court ruling in 1994 (Philippi 1997).

12. To be precise, the Cold War security order was also dislocated by Cold War détente and the Soviet demise, which put the Bundeswehr’s raison d’être in doubt. Since the focus here is on the rearticulation of the morality of military violence, I will limit my discussion to the latter.

13. This is not to say that troop requests emerged out of nowhere at the end of the Cold War. For instance, in the context of the Vietnam War the U.S. had already requested troops from Germany (Philippi 1997, 60). However, before the end of the Cold War, the consensus had been that out-of-area operations were unconstitutional.

14. For a more detailed discussion of the project, see Stengel (forthcoming, ch 3).

15. At the same time, ‘war’ continues to be closely connected with the past and to this day is considered an immoral endeavour.

16. On the delegitimation of pacifist positions more generally, see Jackson (2017).

17. See also the discussion in Zehfuss (2007) that highlights the construction of equivalence between the Bundeswehr and the Allied forces during the Second World War.

18. Similar arguments were taken up by the SPD/Green government which assumed power in 1998 (e.g., Schröder, 14/3, 10 November 1998: 64).

19. The importance of responsibility has been discussed by a number of authors (see Crossley-Frolick 2017; Schwab-Trapp 2002; Geis and Pfeifer 2017; Stahl 2017; Stengel forthcoming).

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Notes on contributors

Frank A. Stengel

Frank A. Stengel is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University and a Research Fellow (on leave) at the Research Group on International Political Sociology, Kiel University. His work focuses on International Political Sociology, discourse theory, Critical Security Studies, and German and US foreign policy. His work has been published in, among others, Global Discourse, Journal of International Relations and Development and International Peacekeeping. He is the co-editor of Populism and World Politics: Exploring Inter- and Transnational Dimensions (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) and a symposium on the utility of Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory for IR and IPE published in New Political Science (2019). His monograph The Politics of Military Force: Antimilitarism, Ideational Change and Post-War German Security Discourse is forthcoming with The University of Michigan Press.