Evolution of the Enemy Idea
Ingrid Creppell
George Washington University
Department of Political Science
Presented at
The Center for Research on International and Global Studies (RIGS)
Research Seminar Series
University of California, Irvine
October 8, 2010
DRAFT: DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION
2 Evolution of the Enemy Idea
Ingrid Creppell
George Washington University
In July 2010, thousands of documents tracking nine years of war against the
Taliban and Al Qaeda were released on WikiLeaks. At the same time, a series of articles
appeared in the Washington Post on the enormous expansion of the American national
security and intelligence bureaucracies in the decade following the 9/11 attacks. In
August 2010, debate over the placement of the “Ground Zero mosque” in Manhattan
roiled American public opinion and highlighted anti-Muslim attitudes around the US.
These data points bring to life the powerful force of an enemy idea: huge systems set in
place to destroy or control threatening enemies as well as the raw emotions sparked
through vilification of others. The prospect of enemies – invisible and lurking as well as
caricatured in vivid images – is tied to concrete consequences. Enmity justifies and
prolongs war, or obstructs other options for addressing conflict; an idea of an enemy may
catalyze action in collectively debilitating suboptimal directions or toward self-defining
achievements through revolution in the name of a better world. It may also serve to
siphon resources and attention away from more long-term or subtle political necessities
toward a vivid and seemingly imminent danger. Thus the enemy idea shapes identity and
action, directs the allocation of resources, and infuses public emotions and beliefs. We
still have much to understand, however, about what constitutes having an enemy, its
causes – how, when and with whom the emotions, beliefs, and processes of enmity
develop, and its consequences – the possibilities for modifying them.
3 In this paper, I begin to examine the meaning and sources of enmity from a
particular angle, by taking enmity’s historical character into account. After defining the
phenomenon of an enemy idea or enmity, I seek to defend the proposition that enmity –
as a type of public, collective state of mind – has changed over time. Having enemies
now is not the same as having an enemy in the past. The knowledge we gain from a
historical perspective has not been adequately engaged. I try to start such a project in this
paper. Surprisingly, little has been written specifically on the idea of the enemy itself. If
we have studied friendship a great deal, then we should see the value of studying enmity.1
Before launching into my argument about the nature and historical character of enmity,
however, I first consider the approaches of other research agendas to the enemy question.
1. Eternal presence of the enemy?
Approaches to the enemy question tend to fall into two main categories: war and
propaganda, yet these are quite limiting rubrics for understanding the phenomenon. In
1
Not much systematic study of the enemy as a general phenomenon has been undertaken,
esp. in the field of political theory, which would seem to be a natural home for it. A
recent fine exception is Ioannis D. Evrigenis’s Fear of Enemies and Collective Action
(Cambridge, 2008) in which he explores the essential role that “negative association”
plays in the political theories of Thucydides, Augustine, Hobbes, Schmitt, and others.
Other treatments include: Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From
Clinical Practice to International Relationships (J. Aronson Inc., 1988); Vilho Harle, The
Enemy with a Thousand Faces (Praeger, 2000); Gil Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab: A
History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); and the large literature
on Carl Schmitt touching on themes of the enemy in response to his famous book: The
Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), in which he
defines the essence of the political as the decision between friend/enemy. On the other
hand, the concept of friendship has a long history of study, beginning with Aristotle,
through Cicero, Montaigne, and many modern writers (e.g. J. Derrida, Politics of
Friendship,Verso, 1997). In addition, continental philosophy has explored the concept of
“the other” extensively. See also contemporary works on the stranger and foreigners: J.
Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (Columbia, 1991), and B. Honig, Democracy and the
Foreigner (Princeton, 2001).
4 the literature on war, enmity appears as a byproduct of causal accounts of specific wars or
of theories of armed conflict. Monographs on particular wars do not explain enmity as a
distinct phenomenon with unique and generalizable features. In regard to the war
literature in general, the connection between constructing or perceiving an enemy and
war is usually unexplained: does a cognitive process of constructing an enemy precede
war and act as a cause? Does it accompany or follow war, justifying and rationalizing
violence that was provoked by causes or motives separate from the mental apparatus of
enmity?2 Does war itself cause perceptions of enmity rather than the reverse? The
perception and designation of an “other” as an enemy serves powerful rhetorical and
ideological purposes, giving people emotional, cognitive, and moral justifications for
violent behavior against another. Yet explaining war as a result of changes in balance of
power due to changes in material wealth or resources fails to make sense of the mental
component. Clausewitz's general definition of war was: “an act of violence intended to
compel our opponent to fulfill our will.” Here “our will” is designated as a unitary point
of view. Most theories of war, operate at a level at which the indeterminacy of a unified
will-to-war is not in question; these theories leave unaddressed the processes whereby
enemies take shape at the level of the collective attitude.3
2
The fact that war or collective violence is a potential consequence does not however in
and of itself explain the origins of enmity. War, in contrast is a subject of ancient
contemplation. It’s possible to view one origin of systematic reflection on the human
condition as itself triggered by a discursive community’s reaction to the continual
realities of collective violence.
3
Take for instance, Geoffrey Blainey’s notable The Causes of War (1973). He argues
completely from the point of view of national will as an unquestioned unitary
phenomenon. Nations are personified and the extent of his consideration of enmity
appears in passages like this: “War marks the conviction of nations that they can impose
their will on one another more effectively by fighting than by peaceful methods of
persuasion. Anything which increases leaders’ beliefs that they can forcibly impose their
5 The propaganda literature offers another perspective on the genesis of the enemy
idea. Many studies of the enemy begin with the actual imagery that governments and
groups use to vilify and dehumanize the other side, in order to stir up fear and hatred, to
justify the government’s actions and to rally people to join the fight. Sam Keen’s Faces
of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (1991) is a popular examination of
enemy constructions. Walter Lippmann highlights the indeterminacy and ignorance of
public opinion in The Phantom Public (1927, 1993): “We must assume that a public is
inexpert in its curiosity, intermittent, that it discerns only gross distinctions, is slow to be
aroused and quickly diverted; that, since it acts by aligning itself, it personalizes whatever
it considers, and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict”
(108). The power of images and the ignorance or malleability of the people (mass
publics or atomized individuals) are two sides of the same coin. Constructions do not
have to track a rationally ascertainable threat in “reality” but are elaborated based on a
variety of pretexts. A major research agenda in social psychology as well as in media
studies focuses on public or group susceptibility to stereotyping, vilification of an Other,
etc. The readiness to rally round the flag, or hate others as collective entities, continues to
pose deep questions about human psychology, at the individual and group levels. The
visual manipulation of an enemy idea may appear as the core of the enemy question, but
that ignores the fact that outbreaks of hostility are premised upon previous factors making
such a build-up possible. It may look easy to manage the public into flights of hatred or
will on an enemy, and anything which increases the desire to impose their will, should be
called a cause of war” (p. 104). This quintessentially realist approach holds that every
nation stands ready for enmity to happen because of the inherent drive of each nation to
impose its will upon the other. Such an assumption defines the issue of enmity out of the
equation or rather reduces the enemy to the role of the antagonist, whoever that happens
to be at the time of activated combat for dominance.
6 vilification, rendering the people passive and gullible marionettes, easily handled by
clever machinations from the top. Many studies of propaganda take this approach.
Nevertheless, although the language of the enemy is highly manipulable and subject to
the fear factor, we ought to be wary of interpreting the decision for enmity in such a light.
This for two obvious reasons (at least): leaders must take their cues from publics and
effective leaders are highly attuned to the constraints of the possible. Indeed elites and
leaders are as reflective of public experience as they are masterminds behind it.
Furthermore, enmity is a severe, heavy, and energy-intensive state of mind. And if war is
the outcome, that state of mind will be one of the most momentous and consequential. Is
it so simple to just construct enemy images on thin grounds? The ease with which people
accept the justification of their own potential sacrifice must be looked at with some
skepticism.4
In this paper, I develop additional theoretical tools for studying this essential
aspect of political existence. The enemy experience does not consist in an eternal
recurrence in new garb of a primordial tendency to hate, vilify, or fight the Other carried
in individual psychology or the collective DNA. Nor can it be reduced to an ideological
and psychological byproduct of structural forces bringing about group conflict. Enmity
4
Tied to the explanation based on dehumanizing surface images is that of psychoanalytic
theory which provides a deeper psychology to account for the power of those images.
Vilification is explained on the basis of fundamental drives to project self-abnegation
onto a scapegoat. See for instance, Arthur Gladstone, “The Conception of the Enemy,”
1959; Vamik Volkan in The Need to Have Enemies and Allies (1988). For example,
Gladstone wrote: “Projection is the defense mechanism which is most relevant for
understanding the conception of the enemy” (1959, 133). Psychoanalysis may make
sense of some dimensions of a society’s cultural tendencies to work out collective
identity through hostility. I do not dismiss the possibilities of these ideas, but they are
limited, not least because collective political identity cannot be equated with the
individual mind. This approach must always remain a supplementary and suggestive one.
7 has a history, and its historicity is key to understanding it. This history is made possible
because central to the enemy idea are the normative public justifications through which it
is constructed. The propositions I shall argue for are the following:
1. The enemy idea – as a collective state of mind – constitutes a distinct
phenomenon with features particular to it and is not subsumable in the
phenomena of war.
2. Essential to enmity is a normative frame of mind: public justification.
3. Not only do enemies change and vary (of course), but enmity itself as a public
mental state has evolved. Having an enemy today is different from what it
meant to have an enemy in a previous time.
To show its evolutionary nature, I begin by presenting three important historical
transformations of the enemy idea. These examples are meant to be illustrative of
change. I then use the awareness of the deeply historical dimension in enmity to build
conceptual tools that we might use to study various histories and contemporary cases of
enmity more analytically.
2. Illustrating historical transformation
Restricting ourselves to contemporary cases of hostility deprives us of a wealth of
information regarding how enemies have come about. Enmity itself as a type of public
and collective state of mind changes. To make that case, I present three examples of
transformation.
(a) In Plato’s Republic, Polemarchus offers this definition of justice: “justice is
doing good to friends and harm to enemies.” Enmity plays an integral part in the
conception of moral equilibrium. The distance from our own approaches can be gauged
8 in part by the centrality of a dictum of conventional ethics: “do good to friends and harm
to enemies” which we find in Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and many others.5 Plato is the
first to challenge this traditional definition of justice in the Republic (Book I, 332d-336a),
and his discussion there shows how fundamental was this norm of treatment.6
Given enmity’s integral role in one’s self-definition and family life and in the
orientation of public, political life toward battle and conquest, a nearly technical usage of
terms would be expected. In ancient and medieval norms, we find a difference in
terminology between personal (or private) enmity and public enmity. One version of
such division is explicitly marked in the linguistic distinction in ancient Greek between
5
See for instance Mary Blundell in her work on ancient Greek ethics, Helping Friends
and Harming Enemies (1989), in which she examines the moral good and even pleasure
in harming one’s enemies. Aristotle notes in his Rhetoric that “all things are good which
men choose to do; this will include…whatever may be bad for their enemies or good for
their friends” (Rhetoric, 1363a20). Blundell studies this code in the tragedies of
Sophocles but provides a very useful analysis of its pervasiveness in conventional Greek
ethics. See also Marshall, 1987, p. 35-36, who notes about this dictum: “There are
numerous appeals to the maxim to justify and to determinine behaviour. It was accepted
by the Greeks as part of the fixed order of things. It was simply what a man just do” and
finds reference and emphasis upon this norm not only in works of Plato and Aristotle, but
also in Aristophanes, Hesiod, Theognis, Solon, Pindar, Xenophon, and Euripides.
6
Again, see Blundell and Marshall for excellent discussions of the complex emotional
and social intricacies involved in negotiating and managing relations with enemies.
Marshall writes: “With good humour, Plutarch cites Chilon’s remark to the man who
boasted that he had no enemies: ‘The chances are that you have no friend either’” (p. 45).
Having enemies was unavoidable, but in any case not a state one ought to wish to be
relieved of, according to commentators. It pointed to an energetic, engaged existence.
Furthermore, one inherited enemies as a member of a family: “The handing down of
quarrels from generation to generation is linked to the traditional maxim in Sophocles
that it is ‘the hope of parents that they may rear a brood of sons submissive, keen to
avenge their father’s enemies and to count his friends their own’” (p. 37). Still,
exhaustion from the continual need to challenge, compare, compete – and thereby
generate envy, hate and enmity did occasionally lead to a desire for repose and pervasive
friendship. He cites Dio Chrysostom “who yearned to be free of the ‘fatiguing burden of
enmity’” (44). In contrast, most persons with whom the modern individual interacts in
large complex societies is neither friend nor enemy. Elaborate norms of behavior toward
“strangers” (used in a non-threatening sense) or acquaintances are still not as a morally
demanding as friendship or enmity.
9 echthros and polemios and in Latin between inimicus and hostis. Echthros and inimicus
refer to one’s personal enemy and carry connotations of emotional charge – hate, anger,
envy/vindictiveness– whereas polemios and hostis designate the public adversary in war,
an objective position of one people toward another (which may or may not be
accompanied by emotion but which is certainly not defined by it). This sharp
demarcation, nevertheless, fails to delineate all the permutations of contentiousness
governing social and political relations. We as modern interpreters may be tempted to
take the private (personal) versus public (political) contrast as parallel to such a contrast
in our language, minus the ubiquity of personal enmity in modern complex society. But
that would be misleading. If one of the most prominent features of enmity is its power to
bring about violent interaction, then the reference to one’s “enemies” in modern personal
life is not at all comparable to private enmity in the ancient and medieval worlds.
(b) In medieval Europe, finding oneself in a relationship of personal enmity
indicated not simply a state of emotional hostility or ethical demands but triggered legal
regulation by the common law (a secular jural landscape marked by exceptions,
discontinuity and diversity, rather than legal uniformity). Enmity signified, as medieval
historian Robert Bartlett has argued, an institution bound by “ritual, expectation and
sanction.” Linguistically, again, this was reflected in the distinction between inimicitia
mortalis, mortal enmity, also referred to as mortal war (pro guerra mortali) and “war
between kings” or bellum, a condition in which persons stood as hostes, people at war,
with one another. Both customary (or secular) law and “learned law” premised upon
Roman and canon law emphasized the distinction between personal enmity and public
enmity. The obvious question emerges: what led to the diminution of the power of the
10 personal enemy in legal and ethical terms? Some have tied this to the growth of the
modern state, one theory contending that “the strength of legal enmity and that of the
state vary inversely.”7 Bartlett challenges this conjecture, arguing instead that it was the
king’s need to maximize his own resources in conducting wars against other kings
(glorified Guerra mortali instead of bella?) that led to restrictions on the pursuit of
personal enmity. Personal enmity carried spillover into public enmity. Therefore, it was
accompanied by attempts to regulate it through “legal” channels. I simply want to point
out here the previous legal dualism in traditions of the enemy idea. Feuds, duels, and
legal challenges served as the means to pursue redress or to prosecute one’s personal
enemies.
(c) Famously in the Melian Dialogue, and remaining a powerful mindset up until
the end of WWI, the justification of aggression based on the “right of conquest” stood as
a cornerstone in arguments about the naturalness of the enemy condition. As Thucydides
has the Athenians exonerate their action: “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know,
that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we
were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before
us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that
you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we
do.” The law of the stronger is presented as a norm – a “law” – not just as a selfreferential political excuse. The Athenians refer to it as a component of the order of the
universe, encompassing behavior of the gods themselves. To our modern sensibilities the
notion of a right of the stronger to conquer the weaker looks like pure naked exploitation
7
Otto Bruner, Land and Lordship, quoted in Robert Bartlett, “Mortal Enmities: The
Legal Aspects of Hostility in the Middle Ages” T. Jones Pierce Lecture, 1998.
11 and the antithesis of normativity; Rousseau argued forcefully that pure power could never
grant “right.” Yet, as Sharon Korman explores in her fine book on the history of the
principle of the “right of conquest:” “[I]n the Middle Ages….war was seen as a kind of
judicial procedure or ‘trial by conquest’. On this view war was a contest between two
opponents, each of which thought itself to have the just cause, but with no court to decide
the question between them; and in going to battle they were appealing to the decision of
God, who was thought to have ordained that the just side would win” (1996, 11).
Demonstrating one’s superior power essentially constituted verification of one’s rightful
domination. A non-theological version of might makes right was resuscitated using
Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest, applied to the right of colonial powers in the
19th century to conquer Africa and other racially and economically inferior peoples.
Korman examines the legal evolution of this idea over millennia and its ultimate demise
in the 20th century. She points to two main normative developments: the principle of
self-determination of peoples claiming territorial rights and the prohibition on the use of
force by states for acquisitive aims. The importance of her study to explaining what leads
a people to view another as an enemy is indirect but critical: the justification of
domination had framed what peoples and political bodies conceived as expected and
justifiable. Enmity then as a public disposition was a normal state of affairs between
groups, who might always be in the process of increasing their powers vis-à-vis
comparable groups for purposes of superiority. If this is a law of the universe, it denies a
ground for righteous indignation against the powerful. The emergence of ideas of
equality and national autonomy against the powerful seems to me a highly significant
transformation in arsenal of public justifications of enmity. If it is no longer considered
12 (as) legitimate to assert the right of the stronger, then a people’s outrage at aggressive
actions or even the more powerful who may not intentionally attempt to oppress another
can emerge as motivating factors in constructing enemy ideas.
This review of specific histories should have provided a glimpse into how
complex and multi-layered the phenomenon of enmity has been and remains. It enables
us to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of enmity for our own purposes. I
want to step back, switching gears from the historically descriptive to formulate a number
of analytical concepts that might be used more broadly to help parse the narratives such
as those we’ve just reviewed.
3. Making sense of the varieties of enemy experience
It may seem odd to only now offer a definition of “the enemy idea” or “enmity.”
But the historical review has provided access to the range of meanings given the term
over time, before we set out a useful definition for our own purposes. I shall consider
enmity as an acutely hostile state of mind shared by many individuals as members of a
group directed against another human grouping. This is itself a modern starting point;
personal enemies carried grave social and legal consequences in previous centuries, but
we are interested in assessing how collective forms of enmity emerge and are
constructed. In order to understand the distinctiveness of the state of mind/actionorientation, we can begin by defining the object of attention and action: an enemy. An
enemy is that collective entity – a people, government or political body – believed to pose
a severe danger to the identity or physical existence of another people, government or
political body. Subsumed in this definition are several important characteristics: (1) The
13 enemy is believed to stand as a threat of a fundamental nature, potentially destroying
one’s physical survival or well-being, undermining a form of life, or an order constitutive
of a world-view. (2) The enemy is seen as a hardened, impenetrable other whose will
is not amenable to communication or noncoercive, nonviolent interaction. Therefore (3)
the enemy is conceivable and justified as an object of violent response (killing others
and self-sacrifice). The state of mind toward an enemy contains both negative and
positive components; it is emotionally and cognitively powerful. It involves strong
emotions of negativity: fear, anger, hate, antipathy, and insulted or aggrieved pride. But
as importantly, those emotions are given shape, direction and purpose by positive
cognitive beliefs – i.e. principles – about normative order and self-identity. Finally, the
state of mind as a collective point of view implicates a relationship between leaders and
people within each collective entity. To sum up, the state of mind occupied by an enemy
idea – or “enmity” – is a collective perspective hardened into emotionally charged and
principle-driven hostility objectifying another human group.8 To define the enemy
concept and to propose this description of an enmity state of mind does not explain how it
emerges or who becomes an enemy for whom. We must look for other conceptual means
as well.
8
The OED provides three main definitions of the word enemy: “an unfriendly or hostile
person;” “one belonging to a hostile army or nation; an armed foe;” and “the hostile
force.” Interestingly, the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences does not include “enemy” as a separate entry and omits it from its
comprehensive subject index at the end of twenty-six volumes. It includes specific
articles on “war,” and related ideas of “otherness” and “evil” appear in the final index,
indicating where discussion of them may be found (though again no separate entry
articles for either of these two). In none of these cases is the concept of enemy used, the
encyclopedia writers preferring the terms “opponent” and “adversary” when discussing
war. The absence of any mention of the concept of the enemy as a socially and political
significant conception seems noteworthy.
14 The phenomenon of enmity appears as a kaleidoscope of variation. Ancient
Greeks fight one another or they fight “barbarians;” ethnic groups explode into
internecine battles; imperial powers march across indigenous peoples as obstacles on the
way to power & wealth; famous animosities like Rome/Carthage, England/Spain,
France/England, Ottomans/Christian Europe, India/Pakistan, China/Japan, US/Soviet
Union move dramatic action on a world stage; genocides are large and small – Nazi
elimination of Jews, Turkish extermination of Armenians, Hutu slaughter of Tutsis; civil
wars, revolutions, and anti-colonial movements all generate distinctive conceptions of
enemy relations. Not only do we witness the embodiment of enmity in vastly different
forms, we may also be struck by the fluctuations in friend/enemy attitudes between the
same peoples or political bodies at different times in their relationships as they move
from enmity to friendship and back.
Out of such great variety across cultures and time, how might we begin to order
this phenomenon? What general categories help delineate the possible frames of mind
listed above? Lewis Coser (1956) in his classic treatment of social conflict develops one
possibility: a demarcation between realistic and nonrealistic conflict (a dichotomy he
takes primarily from Simmel without unqualifiedly endorsing it).9 Realistic conflict is
pursued for specific purposes, hence conflict is a means to an end, whereas nonrealistic
conflict is sought for its own sake, precisely in order to enact hostility. This distinction
can be of great use for some heuristic purposes; for instance, it may help to illuminate the
sources of feuding or of specific phases in civil wars, when the pursuance of one’s enemy
comes to take on nonrational aims. As some have argued, locked-in hostilities become
9
The Functions of Social Conflict, Lewis Coser, NY: Free Press, 1956.
15 constitutive of core identities (e.g. Israelis-Palestinians); the conflict itself is the point. In
addition, the realistic/nonrealistic distinction aids in understanding possible motivations
for individual participants in collective hostilities; individuals may project or displace
internal frustrations by joining against an outer object, which serves as a pretext for the
release of tension through conflict. Some psychoanalytic studies stress that the primary
goal of hostility against a vilified other rather than any particular purpose precisely is the
point. Many pretexts for animosity will serve the purpose.
But the realistic/nonrealistic framework carries distinct limitations. In most cases
of public enmity, the genesis of conflict must contain a “realistic” element, as Coser
emphasizes. Note, realistic here does not mean materialistic; status, reputation, and
expectations about how the world works constitute realistic objectives and these are often
(perhaps most) at stake. What matters is the existence of an external object beyond the
mere need to fight or kill. Even when we consider the enmity built into the warrior ethic
of the ancient Greek and Roman world, which might appear to satisfy the definition of
conflict for its own sake, the “realistic” nature of such conflict derives from the existence
of a cultural system in which power, order, status and identity derive from location in a
hierarchy of martial ranking (conflict here is not just an end in itself but a means to the
end of a world ordered through martial relationships). A further problem for the
applicability of the framework arises from the sharp either/or nature of its demarcation.
The two possible states of mind stand as dichotomous, but most enemy ideas are infused
with complex elements of realistic ends, psychological drives or predilections, and
importantly for our study of “evolution” of enmity, potential for transformations. Even if
an enemy has become a fetishized idée fixe whose motivating power goes way beyond an
16 “objective” goal, we might still want to assess the underlying rationale of that fixation.
What about one’s identity appears at stake for a people? Realism and nonrealism remain
for the most part inert descriptions, but conflicts and the accompanying perceptions of
enemies change over time. This categorization needs to be supplemented with others.
Agonistic and paradigmatic enmity
As an alternative, I develop a distinction between agonistic and paradigmatic
enmity. This categorization provides a vantage point from which we can start to analyze
the nature of changes in enmity over time. Let me define each of these in turn. Agonistic
enmity – or the enemy idea driven by agonism – consists in the state of mind generated
through a basic confrontation and competition of egos. This classic logic of enmity
begins with the encounter of two feeling beings with rudimentary cognition as they
experience a raw awareness of the separateness of their beings. That separateness
triggers a primal sensation of fight or flight. The raw awareness of separateness and
hence possible danger to the integrity of the self does not guarantee agonism; rather, the
latter grows out of the impulse to test oneself against that Other, from the fundamental
desires to protect or dominate. (The alternatives of protection or domination stand as
psychological encapsulations of the alternatives Hobbes is seen to have offered as natural
motivations to conflict.) Testing oneself holds out the proof of existence. Simmel
analyzed the “primary nature of hostility” as follows:
This instinct of opposition emerges with the inevitability of a reflex movement,
even in quite harmonious relationships, in very conciliatory persons. It mixes
itself into the over-all situation even though without much effect. One might be
tempted to call this a protective instinct – just as certain animals, merely upon
being touched, automatically use their protective and aggressive apparatus. But
this would precisely prove the primary, basic character of opposition. It would
17 mean that the individual, even where he is not attacked but only finds himself
confronted by purely objective manifestations of other individuals, cannot
maintain himself except by means of opposition. It would mean that the first
instinct with which the individual affirms himself is the negation of the other.10
My purpose here is not to assert that homo homini lupus (man is wolf to man). In
recognizing the fact and persistence of agonism, I make no claims about its pervasiveness
or predominance as what characterizes human relations. I do not believe it to be so.
Nevertheless, I take it as inevitable and profound as a primary feature of interaction. We
need to revisit the psychological predilection toward testing oneself in the face of
confrontations because this emotional impulse continues to infuse the formation of an
enemy idea among a public and has in no way disappeared or been rationalized or
bureaucratized out of existence even though its manifestation is counteracted in myriad
ways. Agonistic impulses provide one source out of which enmity has been constructed.
A model of agonism, we might say, provides an image of a motivational structure,
illuminating enmity at a number of levels. First, some societies are themselves
embodiments of agonism. In a well-known essay, Nietzsche lauded Homer’s apotheosis
of this warrior ethic propelling a specific type of cultural and psychological energy and
virility. Others argue that Americans have again become seduced by the lure of military
combat, at least as a cultural lodestone (volunteering for tours of duty in Iraq and
Afghanistan is another story).
Agonism remains a core source of enmity today at the level of individual
orientations toward bellicosity, social-psychological triggers to confrontation and
cultural-political identities. When one political unit provokes another, even if the two are
10
Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations, NY: Free Press, 1955, 29.
18 quite asymmetrical in power as was the case with Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the US, the
agonistic response elicits among individual members and potentially the political unit as a
whole a fundamental reaction to take up the agonistic challenge. Thus I explain the
category of agonism as the state of mind of a public as infused with emotional charge and
ready to interpret acts and other political bodies as belligerent. Some conflicts are the
result of the agonistic dynamic taking on a life of its own, and most enmities, whether
they begin with this seed or not, come to be intensified and exacerbated by it.
Nevertheless, agonism remains a diffuse sensation that must be translated and
objectified through publicly accessible justifications into a collective frame of mind. I
shall refer to the publicly formed and solidified set of ideas and symbols as the
paradigmatic enemy idea. A paradigm is defined as a pattern or model constituting a
view of reality. In the case of an enemy idea, the paradigmatic level includes the set of
justifications, ideas, and dramatic, narrative forms in which the enemy is objectified for a
community. This “objectification” differs from the flat caricatures of the propaganda
approaches. It necessarily includes a set of reasons which elaborate justification of the
other as an enemy, a set of reasons that also has the effect of pulling together a public
into a whole point of view, thought various persons and groups within the whole may
adopt the paradigm from different points of reasoning. The elements of normativity in
the enemy idea comprise the following:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Collective and public act
involves self-definition
entails duties and sacrifice
regulated and managed; rules & scripts
shame and sanction
intensity of emotion
19 The notion of paradigmatic enmity has a number of virtues then: it enables us to
recognize the reasoning, normative dimension of enmity (including ideas about order);
the public structuring force of the dramatic, narrative features (self-definition for a
collective); and the inherently historical, thus changeable quality of the objectification.
An example of paradigmatic enmity would be the set of arguments and theories
about “America” and the images of their community’s relationship to it which the 9/11
hijackers carried with them as they decided and carried out their actions. Or take the
Partition of India in 1947: we might describe the process at the levels of both the
agonistic and paradigmatic. Emotions of agonistic enmity within Muslim leaders and
communities required translation into a set of beliefs and normative reasoning about self
and the threat of remaining part of an independent Indian nation for Muslim nationalists
to seek a separate territorial state and for the appearance of the Other to take on an
objectified form.
I have been using the term “paradigmatic,” in contrast to the more inchoate
emotional triggers of agonism, to refer to the publicly solidified set of reasons and forms
of thinking that create an enemy. This enables us to study and comprehend aspects of
enmity in one slice of time. But we can also apply the notion to observations about
changes in types of enmity through history, across time. With these theoretical tools, I
now turn to suggest two possible logics of transformation in the enemy idea.
4. Motors of change: paradigms and self-reflection about means/end logic
The question of how the enemy idea emerges can be asked in two ways (at least):
(a) between two (or more) entities at a given point in time – how does hardened
20 animosity develop; and (b) in regard to large-scale historical changes over time, are there
inherent drivers to how enmity as a public disposition has unfolded? I address the second
question in the remainder of the paper, but I shall briefly comment on the first.
Who becomes or is one’s enemy stands as a timeless question of politics. Is that
“other” people or body politic a “real” enemy or rather a challenger or competitor who
one ought to engage in some form other than through the drama of enmity and potential
violence? Carl Schmitt writing in typically portentous style remarks: “Only the actual
participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and
settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the
adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or
fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.”11 In fact, this is a normative
claim and does not give us much to go on if we are trying to understand how enmities
grow. A better way to gain traction on this question starts by recognizing the intensity of
the enemy mentality. Oppositionality is part of this but certainly cannot explain it.
Enmity is a psychically intensive state of mind, and it requires a source of energy
to propel it forward. Contentment, happiness and passivity toward the existing state of
affairs do not typically produce environments incubating an enemy idea, unless the
existing state is under threat. The loss of what we care about is often more terrifying than
the hope for an imagined alternative, but both I would argue infuse enmity. The source
of the necessary energy bringing about enmity can be either active, in the aspiration
toward a different state of affairs, or reactive, in resistance against a force that one
believes poses a dire threat. One’s enemy may unfold as a process of revelation of a
11
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996, p. 27.
21 paradigm for mobilization, or through an agonistic dynamic. I believe the most important
factors to be the perceptions of threat people feel and see (or believe they see) as
members of a political body, when they believe that body to be in imminent danger,
either from destruction of a given order or according to the paradigms of a new vision of
order that gives them a focus of reinvention of the political self.12
Let me now sketch out what I see as two possible logics of transformation guiding
the large-scale historical changes in conceptions of enmity, features of which we set out
in the historical examples of section 2. At the risk of gross simplification I have
constructed the following table to visualize the historically significant paradigms of
enmity in the western tradition.
12
I have elaborated such a defense based on “order” and “self-definition” as constitutive
of grounds for threat in “Interpreting Threat,” unpublished manuscript.
22 Evolution of the Enemy Idea
Outer structure
Public paradigm
Structures of order:
Institutions/organization
of power, protection &
political cohesion
Ancient city-states
Empires
Identity and justification
of hostility
Holy Roman Empire
Feudalism
Decentralized warfare
The true believer:
transcendence
(salvation)
Sovereign States
State system
“National” enmity:
(a) The true-born:
difference (race and
communal boundary
sanctification)
(b) The liberated:
equality/freedom from
oppression
International society
The righteous: moral
universalism
The warrior: domination
(might makes right)
What do we see in this vector of transformation? If we focus just on the far right column,
the overall direction of change looks as if it moves from a foundation in the restricted
domain of the powerful to a foundation in a universalist point of view. Justifications of
enmity are always be offered, but the audience in terms of which reasons are directed
expands. As an example, in attacking Islam today Newt Gingrich gave this explanation
of the enemy threat:
One of our biggest mistakes in the aftermath of 9/11 was naming our response to
the attacks ‘the war on terror’ instead of accurately identifying radical Islamists
(and the underlying ideology of radical Islamism) as the target of our campaign.
This mistake has led to endless confusion about the nature of the ideological and
material threat facing the civilized world and the scale of the response that is
appropriate. Radical Islamism is more than simply a religious belief. It is a
23 comprehensive political, economic, and religious movement that seeks to impose
sharia—Islamic law—upon all aspects of global society.13 (emphasis added)
His argument takes as its point of reference a universal normative order of religious,
social and cultural freedom which sharia law is interpreted to undermine. Woodrow
Wilson’s explanation for entering WWI is also of the universalist variety: to make the
world safe for democracy in the face of a militarist, authoritarian Germany. One logic of
change, then, appears to move toward an ever-larger audience: the paradigm of the
enemy is that Other who is interpreted to threaten the open order of the world and the free
movement of people within it. Enemies sustain repressive cultures.
If we look to the right column of the table we can detect another logic of
transformation which has affected the nature of enmity. While this logic cannot be
extracted directly from this table, it can be reconstructed in light of the historical
examples I considered earlier in section two, read in conjunction with the structural
changes in forms of protective orders. I have argued that enmity must be justified. That
justification does not only pertain to why one’s opponent is an existential threat, i.e. the
ends to be pursued or protected, but also that one must use violent means. Still, what are
those means and how are they to be deployed? Even when the justification of a “right” to
conquer served not to constrain but to validate the self’s acquisitive, violent action, it
conceded the necessity of constraint on the means of enacting enmity. One of the striking
conclusions in tracing the defense and then rejection of the right of conquest was the
necessity at all times to constrain the use of violence through some form of legal
regulation. As I have stressed enmity is not solely about opposition or the condition of
13
http://www.newt.org/newt-direct/newt-gingrich-statement-proposed-mosqueislamiccommunity-center-near-ground-zero
24 antithesis. It is the coming into being of the reasoning about the ends/needs of collective
self-realization (existence) in combination with assessing justifiability of means of
antithesis, that is the use of coercion and violence to attain particular ends or needs.
Heraclitus chastised Homer for his desire to overcome strife: “It should be understood
that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass
through the compulsion of strife….Homer was wrong in saying, ‘Would that strife might
perish from amongst gods and men’. For if that were to occur, then all things would
cease to exist” (Fragments 26 & 27). But in doing so Homer testified to the eternal desire
of human beings to rise above the violence perpetrated on one another. The exaltation of
violence as opening access to glory, courage, salvation and transcendence has always
been counterbalanced by a view of it as horrific and tragic as well. The early Church and
Pope Urban XI in rallying knights and people to embark on a Crusade to the Holy Land
to reclaim it from the Muslims had to develop extensive justifications for violence. Jesus
counseled love your enemy, which served as a powerful incentive to ideological
rationalization. The history of enmity must include within it an account of the change in
means through which political bodies have attempted to rationalize those means.
Means/end reasoning evolved through ideational and institutional tools to place powerful
restrictions on the means of violence.