Spatiality Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt Geographie... - (17. Air Power Nasser Hussain)

17 Air power
Nasser Hussain
The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum is a work of astonishing breadth and prescience. It combines
Schmitt’s particular understanding of a legal order with a global focus that is
at once juridical, geographical and historical. The book is also a nostalgic elegy
of sorts. Published in 1950, Nomos is as much a lament for the irretrievable
passing of a European public law as it is a document of its operation. For
Schmitt, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century a distinct European
public law regulated relations of war and peace not only between the Euro-
pean sovereign states but also, if only by negative exclusion, between Europe
and the ‘free’ space of the new world and the colonies. This law was based
on a concrete spatial order in Europe and organized the world with Europe as
its centre: ‘this European core determined the nomos of the rest of the Earth’
(Schmitt 2006: 126–7). This public law conceived of war as a conflict of
interests between mutually equal and sovereign states – justus hostis as
opposed to rebels or criminals – and as a result produced a crucial bracketing
of war, whereby it became possible to no longer consider prisoners as objects
of vengeance or as slaves, and private property as booty (Schmitt 2006:
308–9). For Schmitt, the crucial bracketing of war that took place within Europe
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century involved the observation
of certain basic rules. But paradoxically such a rule-based warfare comes about
not because war is brought into the domain of law but precisely because it
is removed from theological and juridical conceptions of justice and placed
firmly in the domain of political conflict between sovereigns: ‘the formal refer-
ence point for determining just war no longer was the Church’s authority in
international law, but rather the equal sovereignty of states. Instead of justa
causa, international law among states was based on justus hostis’ (Schmitt
2006: 121). For Schmitt then the central and defining elements of the nomos
were both the stable definition of war, and the concrete political and spatial
order of European states. Indeed, the bracketing he speaks of applied only
to war between Europeans on European soil and not to non-Europeans or
their lands. From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, Europe expanded
its colonial acquisitions both through the discovery of the new world to the
west and through the adventures of the great trading companies to the east.
Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt : Geographies of the Nomos, edited by Stephen Legg, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gatech/detail.action?docID=692382.
Created from gatech on 2020-07-24 19:43:42.
Air power 245
1111 The wars that marked this expansion both between the competing European
2 powers and between these powers and the indigenous people they encountered
3 were distinctly outside the Jus Publicum Europaeum, and, in fact, by being
4 ‘beyond the line’ constituted the nomos of the Earth as a whole. Schmitt
5 repeatedly utilizes the concept of ‘beyond the line’ – a distinction that he makes
6 clear was not just conceptual but physical, marked along longitudes in secret
7 agreements between the Portuguese and Spanish or the English and the French
8 – to explain the difference in warfare within the constitutive European core
9 and that which lay beyond it: ‘everything that occurred ‘beyond the line’
1011 remained outside the legal, moral, and political values recognized on this side
1 of the line’ (Schmitt 2006: 94).
2 By the twentieth century, however, first in 1919 with the Treaty of Paris
3111 and the League of Nations, and later with the decisive entry of air power,
4 this very concrete and bounded spatial order gave way to a ‘spaceless
5 universalism’, (Schmitt 2006: 192) with a lack of a central (that is for Schmitt
6 a Eurocentric) orientation and was hence lost forever.
7 It is the introduction of air power that combines at a historical moment
8 specific spatial transformations within a global nomos with changes in the
9 technology of weaponry. Schmitt is both insistent and persuasive about the
20111 fact that bombing campaigns cannot be assimilated into existing notions of
1 warfare proper to the Nomos. This is because first of all air war upsets any
2 sense of the territorial demarcations of war, converting, for example, entire
3 stretches of land and open sea into a battleground. Second, the object of a
4 bombing campaign can be neither seizure nor occupation, nor even a blockade,
5 but simply destruction. Certainly as Schmitt recognizes land war may also be
6 based on a principle of destruction both as an offensive and defensive
7 manoeuvre – consider the scorched earth policy – but that is not its only and
8 immediate purpose. Land wars often involve occupation, and even temporary
9 occupation involves some emphasis on order and utility. By contrast, as
30111 Schmitt repeatedly insists, ‘the only purpose and meaning of an air raid is
1 destruction’ (Schmitt 2006: 316). The rule created to contain that destruction
2 to objects of ‘military necessity’ has turned out, as Schmitt astutely predicted,
3 ‘only a problematic formulation, not a precise rule’ (Schmitt 2006: 316).
4 But Schmitt’s account of air power is also limited by certain omissions
35 and inaccuracies. For example, when he insists that air power is ‘purely
6 destructive’, he neglects a whole theory and practice of strategic bombing that
7 seeks to exert political pressure through the select targeting of key nodes. This
8 sort of bombing is, as Schmitt claims for all bombing, certainly destructive,
9 but what is important here is the choice of what is being destroyed, the way
40111 that such a theory attempts to shape the exertion of power by emphasizing
1 selectivity and precision. It is this type of morale bombing that informed the
2 project of air power from the very beginning, both in Europe and in the colonial
3 air control programmes of the interwar years, such as in Iraq, where the air
4 force replaced ground troops in the occupation and maintenance of the
45111 mandate. No matter how tortured its shape, morale bombing was used, contra
246 Nasser Hussain
Schmitt, to maintain occupations. Moreover, while Schmitt is certainly correct
that the rule restricting bombing to targets of ‘military necessity’ (Article 147
of the Fourth Geneva Convention) is notoriously imprecise, he sometimes
assumes a reductionist approach to the complexity of how rules work. Thus
since Schmitt, even the thin doctrinal prohibition of indiscriminate bombings
of civilians has taken on a more global and normative weight. This has,
however, not prevented states from using the so-called dual exception of the
laws of war, which permits the incidental targeting of civilian objects if the
purpose of the attack is one of military necessity. Thus, on the one hand,
prohibitions against civilian targets have been internalized in the air forces of
modern democracies; on the other hand, neither legal nor ethical restraint has
managed to curb the destructive effects of bombing on civilians. Indeed, such
bombing campaigns have been facilitated by the rules themselves, with the
dual use exception coupled with claims of ever increasing technological
precision offering powerful justification. Such claims no matter how strained
in practice importantly inform the conceptual project of air power, from the
colonial air control programmes of the interwar years to more recently the
air war in Kosovo. Any contemporary theorizing of air power that turns to
Nomos will have to accommodate Schmitt’s neglect of these and other claims.
Indeed, given how pivotal the role of air power is in Schmitt’s account of the
passing of the nomos, it is a bit startling how little detail Schmitt offers
on what such a power entails. Absent are not just any detailed accounts of
bombing campaigns, but even more importantly, any consideration of the
important modernist theorists of air war, such as the Italian Giulio Douhet or
the Englishman Hugh Trenchard. Douhet’s absence from the stunning range
of Nomos’ ‘Name Index’ is particularly perplexing, given that his 1921 work,
Il Domino dell Aria (The Command of the Sky) had a profound impact on
military thought throughout Europe (Douhet 1983). Prior to Schmitt, Douhet
also argued that air power had transformed the space of war, effectively
cancelling out any distinction between the front and the interior, and between
soldiers and civilians. For Douhet unlike for Schmitt this did not pose a
problem: air power could and should be used to attack the ‘vital centres’ of
the enemy, thereby effectively bringing any conflict to a quick and decisive
conclusion. Later theorists such as J.F.C. Fuller, Liddell Hart and Hugh
Trenchard would modify Douhet’s call for attacks on population centres,
concentrating more on targets that would produce a profound ‘dislocation’
rather than an outright destruction – an idea that was to become the cornerstone
of air policing in the colonies (Linqvist 2001: 43–4; Meilinger 1996; Salmond
1922). But even these more ‘humane’ theorists of bombing shared Douhet’s
central insight that with air attacks ‘the psychological effects of bombardment
would be more pronounced than the physical effects’ (Meilinger 2000: 472).
In order then to explicate Schmitt on air power fully, to parse his omissions
along with his enduring insights, one needs to consider, I would suggest, even
if very briefly, the question of what sort of critical posture one should adopt
to Nomos as a whole? Kenneth Surin notes that part of the confusion arises
Air power 247
1111 because Schmitt was deeply indebted to Weberian ideal types (which in a sense
2 the Nomos certainly is) and yet gives the Nomos an ‘ontological solidity’ so
3 that it is not clear when it is an ‘ideal type masquerading as a real type’ (Surin
4 2005: 189). This leads to historiographic difficulties because, as Surin also
5 notes, ‘Schmitt was always a scholar of philosophical jurisprudence, and despite
6 his formidable learning no expert in historical sociology’. And yet Surin insists,
7 and I would agree, that the correct response here is not some ‘no-nonsense’
8 factual history but a parsing of Schmitt’s fundamental insights, which no single
9 detail can obscure. In the case of air power I would argue that such an
1011 approach bypasses any singular pronouncement or omission and returns us to
1 Schmitt’s central organizing themes of the Jus Publicum: the definition of the
2 enemy as justus hostis as opposed to a criminal, and the definition of war as
3111 analogous to a duel.
4 Schmitt saw with clarity that air war would not only create an ‘intensification
5 of the technical means of destruction’ and the ‘disorientation of space’, but
6 that these factors would themselves in turn intensify the problem of unequal
7 sides thereby accelerating the process by which the enemy is labelled a
8 criminal. One can certainly imagine air war as aerial dog fights between equally
9 powerful states, but Schmitt understood that air power was just as likely if
20111 not more so to create a world where those who commanded the sky could
1 police and punish those who do not. For Schmitt, this widening gap is both
2 the cause and result of a juridification of war, a shift towards conceptualizing
3 war as a policing activity of criminals. It is worth quoting Schmitt on air power
4 here in full:
5
6 Both sides have a specific relation to the types of weapon. If the weapons
7 are conspicuously unequal, then the mutual concept of war conceived of
8 in terms of an equal plane is lacking. To war on both sides belongs a certain
9 chance of victory. Once that ceases to be the case, the opponent becomes
30111 nothing more than an object of violent measures. Then the antithesis
1 between the warring parties is increased exponentially. From the

2 distinction between power and law, the vanquished are displaced into a
3 bellum intestinum (internal war). The victors consider their superiority in
4 weaponry to be an indication of their justa causa and declare the enemy
35 to be a criminal because it no longer is possible to realize the concept of
6 justus hostis.
7 (Schmitt 2006: 320–321)
8
9 Here Schmitt offers us a tantalizing glimpse of a different approach to the
40111 question of what constitutes the justus hostis? Earlier I emphasized that for
1 Schmitt the justis hostis of the Nomos were European sovereigns enclosed
2 within a rationally ordered centre. Everything outside the centre was free space,
3 where actions were unfettered by the rules of warfare that obtained within the
4 Jus Publicum Europaeum. In short, it was ‘beyond the line’. What is it that
45111 discounts these lands, peoples and governments from the status of justus hostis
248 Nasser Hussain
accorded to European states? At different points in the book, Schmitt
offers us a reasonably standard explanation that emphasizes the cultural and
political ‘deficits’ of non-Europeans. These people do not and cannot share
in the civilization of rationalism and commerce, and their governments do
not deserve the title of full sovereignty, either because they are nomadic
or despotic (Schmitt 2006: 216). So far, so standard colonialist rhetoric, but
Schmitt also offers us another, more intriguing reason why non-Europeans
cannot be offered the status of the proper enemy. This has to do with the
technological capability, or lack thereof, to conduct a war in which both sides
have a more or less equal capability. Aerial bombing over those who have no
chance to reply in kind then is by definition not a war but an unequal contest
– asymmetric conflict is the currently popular term – which by its very nature
accelerates the process by which war becomes a policing action and the
adversary becomes a criminal or a mere object of violent reprisal. As Schmitt
makes clear in the quote above, such policing actions both begin and end with
the criminalization of the enemy. Schmitt thus offers us a conceptual
framework for productively analysing current deployments of air power, from
the ‘humanitarian’ air war in Kosovo to the drone attacks that are shaping the
Americans’ war on terror.
NATO’s March 1999 war in Kosovo against the Milošević regime was purely
an air war, with the avowed intention from the very beginning of avoiding
ground troops. What initially was meant to be a two-day airstrike stretched
on for 78 days. The story is a complex one and opinion remains divided to
this day over key questions leading up to the war. Was the war a response
to a budding humanitarian crisis or was it a geostrategic move to emphasize
the dominance of NATO? Was the failure of diplomacy at Rambouillet pre-
dictable given NATO’s demands? Even if the war was a genuine humanitarian
intervention, when and should force be used in the pursuit of human rights
(Ignatieff 2000)? The last question in particular, posed as a novel issue for a
post Cold War world, has absorbed so much interest that it has almost eclipsed
the form of the war itself. Despite all its claims of technological prowess
and global humanitarianism, or to follow Schmitt’s logic because of these
claims, the Kosovo war is perhaps closer to the logic and structure of colonial
air control and air policing. Even prior to Kosovo, as early as 1993, the Clinton
Administration had explored similar plans to use air strikes (without ground
troops) in Bosnia. As David Parsons notes,
since these strikes had little chance of destroying all of the Serbian
artillery positions and were not going to be coordinated with any ground
operations, they would have amounted to little more than punitive attacks.
The concept of using aircraft based on the periphery of an isolated conflict
to bring peace by meting out punishment when and where it is deserved
is the essence of air control.
(Parsons 1994: 7)
Air power 249
1111 In Kosovo, if we follow Schmitt’s conceptual framework, we are able to see
2 how claims of Milosevic’s crimes against humanity (regardless of the full
3 veracity of such claims, which were obviously to some extent true), claims of
4 humanitarian intervention, and the accelerating and widening scope of the
5 bombing targets to include vital civilian infrastructure, are not contradictory
6 but perfectly consistent when war between the justus hostis of the Nomos has
7 given way to the aerial policing action of criminals in a global bellum
8 intestinum.
9 Similarly with the increasing use of Unarmed Aerial Vehicles, more
1011 popularly known as drones, Schmitt’s argument about how air power destabil-
1 izes the definition of war, converting it into a policing and punitive action
2 against criminals, has enduring relevance. It has, of course, become a truism
3111 to say that the war on terror is a different and unprecedented kind of war.
4 Everyone from Slavoj Zizek to George W. Bush himself has made that claim
5 (Bush 2001; Zizek 2002). The war has been described as global, asymmetric,
6 hybrid, perpetual. In retrospect while Bush was actually quite accurate in his
7 description of the hybrid nature of the war, as well as its particular temporality,
8 he perhaps exaggerated its unprecedented quality. In fact, it would be more
9 accurate to claim that the war on terror has rendered explicit and global, trends
20111
in conflict that had been emerging for many decades. These claims are evident
1
in the use of drones to carry out targeted killings of terror suspects, far from
2
the conventional battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, in Somalia, Yemen and
3
the tribal areas of Pakistan (Bergen and Tiedermann 2009: 2; Dworkin 2002:
4
Mayer 2009; Moore 2009). Once we move past a simple fascination with the
5
fact that the piloting of these aircraft is done remotely, it is clear that drones,
6
7 despite the technological changes in the delivery, remain very much within
8 the imaginary of aerial bombing and air control. This is a condition which,
9 following Schmitt’s argument, one could describe as the violent reprisals
30111 against criminals in a global bellum intestinum. It is a condition that is both
made possible by and itself adds to the dissolution of any stable definition
1
2 of war. The legality of drones for targeted killings is said to be based on the
3 fact that they are part of an ongoing ‘armed conflict’, that is to say a war (Koh
4 2010). And yet the more the drone programme expands as a global ‘policing’
35 programme of potential terrorists, scattered around the world, the more difficult
6 it will be to slot into existing laws of war categories of ‘armed conflict’. Thus
7 inconsistencies in legal justifications of drone attacks actually reflect the
8 hybrid nature of the practice itself.
9 Obviously there is more to these examples, just as there is more to Schmitt’s
40111 book than my brief synopsis covers, but my intervention here has been to try
1 to cover some of the limitations and possibilities of Schmitt’s analysis of air
2 power in Nomos. Thus we see how, despite a lack of detail about the theory
3 and practice of airpower, Schmitt’s central argument still has deep conceptual
4 relevance for analysing contemporary forms – a testament to the uncannily
45111 prescient quality of The Nomos of the Earth.
250 Nasser Hussain
References
Bergen, P. and Tiedermann, K. (2009) ‘Revenge of the Drones. An Analysis of
Drone Strikes in Pakistan’, New America Foundation (19 October). Available at:
www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/revenge_of_the_drones (accessed 22 June
2010).
Bush, G.W. (2001) Address to a Joint Session of Congress, 20 September. Available
at: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/ (accessed 22 June
2010).
Douhet, G. (1983) The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari, Washington, DC:
USAF.
Dworkin, A. (2002) ‘The Yemen Strike: The War On Terrorism Goes Global’, Crimes
of War Project (14 November). Available at: www.crimesofwar.org/onnews/news-
yemen.html (accessed 22 June 2010).
Ignatieff, M. (2000) Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, New York: Henry Holt.
Koh, H. (2010) Legal Adviser, Department of State, ‘The Obama Administration and
International Law’, Keynote Address at the Annual Meeting of the American
Society of International Law (25 March). Available at: www.state.gov/s/l/releases/
remarks/139119.htm (accessed 22 June 2010).
Lindqvist, S. (2001) A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg, New York:
The New Press.
Mayer, J. (2009) ‘The Predator War’, The New Yorker (26 October).
Meilinger, P.S. (1996) ‘Trenchard and “Morale Bombing”: The Evolution of Royal
Air Force Doctrine Before World War II’, The Journal of Military History 60.
Meilinger, P.S. (2000) ‘The Historiography of Air Power: Theory and Doctrine’, The
Journal of Military History 64(2): 467–501.
Moore, M.S. (2009) ‘What Are Those Warships Doing Off Somalia’ Miller-McCune
(18 November). Available at: www.miller-mccune.com/politics/what-are-those-
warships-doing-off-somalia-5046/ (accessed 22 June 2010).
Parsons, D.W. (1994) ‘British Air Control: A Model for the Application of Air Power
in Low-Intensity Conflict?’ Air Power Journal (Summer). Available at: www.
Airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj94/sum94 (accessed 22 June 2010).
Salmond, J. (1922) ‘Statement by Air Marshall Sir John Salmond of his views upon
the principles governing the use of Air Power in Iraq’, Air Staff Memo no. 16,
p. 7. National Archives, London: AIR 5/338.
Schmitt, C. (2006) The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen, New York: Telos.
Surin, K. (2005) ‘World Ordering’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 104: 2.
Zizek, S. (2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso.

Spatiality Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt Geographie... - (17. Air Power Nasser Hussain)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Spatiality Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt Geographie... - (17. Air Power Nasser Hussain)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Spatiality Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt Geographie... - (17. Air Power Nasser Hussain)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

17 Air power

1 between the warring parties is increased exponentially. From the

You might also like