States of Political Discourse: Words, Regimes, Seditions

States of Political Discourse

Despite its protestations International Relations has had a restricted palate and fed from a restricted menu. Such exotic fare as there has been has been safe vindaloos, washed down with Englightenment lagers. Costas Constantinou has written the landmark book that finally frees the IR diet from English cuisine, even English School cuisine, and in a truly cosmopolitan way introduces us to new views of myths and pathologies and frees us finally to taste the truly and deeply international. Professor Stephen Chan, School of Oriental and African Studies, UK • How are states made possible, constructed in theory and practice, and what alternative possibilities are given up by conferring legitimacy on states? • How do ‘reasons of state’ appropriate and inform discourses of sovereignty, territoriality, historiography, diplomacy, security and community? • How can we employ language to challenge the problematic logics of international relations and imagine alternative ways of being with and relating to others? States of Political Discourse addresses these questions through a series of highly original and provocative essays that engage a range of political conditions and practices, exploring areas that are conventionally neglected. Topics include the representation of the state in Machiavelli’s play Mandragora, the language of normal and pathological states in psychoanalysis, the mythography of Europe, the political reification of the Himalayan region, the status of the Knights of St John, the spirituality of cosmopolitanism, and the literary exploration of diplomacy and security. This interdisciplinary volume artfully mixes international relations with philosophy, psychoanalysis, mythology and the arts. Constantinou’s work does not apply a single school of thought but develops an experimental framework to reflect on world politics and, in doing so, extends the limits of our political imagination and praxis.

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Costas M.Constantinou is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Keele University, UK. His research interests include global politics and culture, diplomacy, and the history of social and political thought. Dr Constantinou is also the author of On the Way to Diplomacy.

The New International Relations Edited by Barry Buzan, London School of Economics, and Richard Little, University of Bristol The field of international relations has changed dramatically in recent years. This new series will cover the major issues that have emerged and reflect the latest academic thinking in this particular dynamic area. International Law, Rights and Politics Developments in Eastern Europe and the CIS Rein Mullerson The Logic of Internationalism Coercion and accommodation Kjell Goldmann Russia and the Idea of Europe A study in identity and international relations Iver B.Beumann The Future of International Relations Masters in the making? Edited by Iver B.Neumann and Ole Wœver Constructing the World Polity Essays in international institutionalization John Gerard Ruggie Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy The continuing story of a death foretold Stefano Guzzini International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order Beyond international relations theory? N.J.Rengger War, Peace and World Orders in European History Edited by Anja V.Hartmann and Beatrice Heuser European Integration and National Identity The challenge of the Nordic states Edited by Lene Hansen and Ole Wœver Shadow Globalisation, Ethnic Conflicts and New Wars A political economy of intra-state war Dietrich Jung Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research Edited by Stefano Guzzini and Dietrich Jung

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Observing International Relations Niklas Luhmann and world politics Edited by Mathias Albert and Lena Hilkermeier Does China Matter? A Reassessment Essays in memory of Gerald Segal Edited by Barry Buzan and Rosemary Foot European Approaches to International Relations Theory A house with many mansions Jörg Friedrichs The Post-Cold War International System Strategies, institutions and reflexivity Ewan Harrison States of Political Discourse Words, regimes, seditions Costas M.Constantinou

States of Political Discourse Words, Regimes, Seditions

Costas M.Constantinou

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2004 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2004 Costas M.Constantinou All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Constantinou, Costas M. States of political discourse: words, regimes, seditions/Costas M. Constantinou. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. International relations—Philosophy. 2. State, The. I. Title. JZ1305.C663 2004 320.1'01–dc22 2004001291 ISBN 0-203-36273-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-66972-X (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-32835-7 (Print Edition)

To Daphne new life

Contents

Foreword by R.B.J.Walker

ix

Series editor’s preface

xii

Acknowledgements

xv

Stasis, or the seditious state Metastasis

1 14

1

States, ethnocratic states, and states within

15

2

Representations of sovereignty on the Himalayas

29

3

Piracy, knight-errantry, statehood

52

Antistasis

67

4

Poetics of security

68

5

Diplomacy, grotesque realism and Ottoman historiography

83

6

NATO’s caps

96

Ekstasis

108

7

Europa mythica

109

8

Hippopolis/cynopolis

122

Hypostasis

137

Notes

138

Index

175

Foreword

We live in disturbing times, times that disturb our sense of who we are and where we are. In our various states of anxiety we look for ways of analysing what is going on and try to see whether there might be possibilities for doing things differently. Looking at the daily news, it is not difficult to conclude that our existential sense of disturbance significantly exceeds our capacity to imagine ways of doing things differently. We may have been living though an era that has seen considerable creativity in many spheres. Claims about creativity might be made especially in relation to attempts to rethink some of the bases of philosophical critique or aesthetic practice. They might even be made in relation to attempts to develop new ways of acting politically in specific situations, whether local, global, or somewhere in between. At the same time, we have all been made uncomfortably aware that there are many forces in the world that prefer to respond to disturbing times in the most reactionary ways. Once again the resort to mass violence has triumphed over a politics of responsibility. Creative political imagination, we might well conclude, is in very short supply. There are, of course, many commentators who are prepared to say that they have seen many disturbing times before, and that we already have a persuasive mapping of why and where the disturbances occur. We live, we are told, in a world of states which coexist in an international system of states. States in a state system, they insist, are what exist in the world. Moreover, the system of states is coextensive with the world. This is what there is. One must learn to live with it, or perhaps try to improve it, but not imagine that any other options are on the immediate horizon. In this way we are led to the great lessons of what has come to be celebrated as modern political realism, and to the familiar narratives of the kind of theories of international relations that became entrenched in AngloAmerican academic life in the second half of the twentieth century. The trouble with this set of stories is that it rests on a contestable claim to scholarship. States do not simply exist in the world and the modern states system is not coextensive with the world. The reasons for this were already very well understood by thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, whose names are nevertheless still brazenly used to legitimize the conventional narratives. For better, or worse, neither the modern state nor the modern system of states express any simple givenness, solidity or permanence. We might find such

x

characteristics being expressed in normative accounts of what the state and states system must be, and these normative accounts might play an important part in sustaining the legitimating practices and institutional forms of state and states system that have been produced historically. But this is not what is meant when we are encouraged to think about political possibilities on the grounds that are already given in claims about a political reality or a political realism of the kind that enable modern theories of international relations to tell us what our options are, and what they cannot be. Still, it is becoming more and more difficult to get away with such stories about what states and state systems must be, and therefore are. Oversimplification about the foundations of modern politics and of the kind of knowledge we can have of modern politics may still work for many people. No doubt these can sometimes be justified as enabling useful insights into some essential logic or structural form, thereby enabling metaphorical linkages with other logics and structures that might prove useful in the construction of hypotheses, evidence and explanations. Established forms of international relations theory have pushed hard, and some would say very successfully, to make the most of these insights, and to deny the metaphorical and literary character of their reasoning. Whatever credit one may be prepared to extend in this direction, however, such theories require that we take an awful lot for granted. They take states for granted. They take certain forms of structural analysis for granted. They take clear distinctions between states and systemic structures for granted. They take whole fields of metaphor for granted. They take historically contingent accounts of spatialities, temporalities, subjectivities, freedoms, necessities, norms, exceptions and boundaries for granted. They especially take for granted claims about where we must begin, and end, a proper political analysis—claims that work so as to affirm a very specific statist account of what it must mean to engage in politics, and to legitimize the resort to mass violence. As any of the classic texts of political analysis are always so keen to insist, however, one must always be exceptionally careful about what is taken for granted in political life, not least in relation to those myths of origin that have congealed into universalizing accounts of freedoms, necessities, languages and worlds. Costas Constantinou’s wonderful set of explorations into the politics of modern political possibility offers an especially imaginative and scholarly engagement with many of the conditions under which we have been encouraged to normalize contingency as necessity. His is a world in which beginnings are never completely fixed and options are never completely closed. He rightly insists that classical works, like those of Machiavelli and Hobbes, can be read as acts of sedition towards the stereotypes that have been constructed in their name. He rightly resists the prejudice against poetics, mythologies and specificities that has been such an important part of the politics that tells us what politics must be since the days of Plato. He is alive to the paradoxes, contradictions, unintended consequences, shifts of meaning and options taken or not taken that we are

xi

so often encouraged to rip from the multiple and contested histories that have produced us so as to guarantee that we are what we are. He is rightly sensitive to the micropractices at work in the most unexpected sites that tell us so much about the workings of apparently much grander processes. Despite his eye for the variety of telling sites and for the fertility of etymological clues in many contexts, he is especially persistent in his interrogation of the contemporary status of what we so easily call the state, which has never been what it is supposed to be. As his narratives and etymologies unfold, we are encouraged to connect with a broad range of writers who have managed to ask what it might now mean to engage in political life on more imaginative and less violent terms. The results are provocative, and certainly neither certain nor conclusive. Different readers will, I am sure, be provoked to think differently about many different things over the course of this book. They will not be persuaded that we are all locked into an iron cage of international relations in which we have to replay our disturbances and anxieties over and over again. This is, I think, a considerable achievement. R.B.J.Walker Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria, Canada and Professor of International Relations, Keele University

Series editor’s preface

Conventional social scientists take it for granted that their task is to describe and explain the world that they observe around them. It is readily acknowledged that the task is a difficult one and, moreover, that our understanding of social reality will always be imperfect and incomplete, if only because social scientists have to aim at a moving target. Future events are seen to have a nasty habit of overturning past certainties. Nevertheless, social scientists, in general, and specialists in the field of international relations, in particular, have always accepted that they are engaged in a legitimate and worthwhile endeavour. As a consequence, it came as an unpleasant surprise to many established International Relations (IR) scholars when they had to confront an emerging body of postmodern thinkers who often give the impression of wanting to subvert the whole social science enterprise. Postmodernism had swept through almost all of the social sciences before its influence began to impinge on International Relations at the end of the 1980s. But it is now almost impossible to ignore the presence of postmodernists in the field. Nevertheless, many social scientists have simply failed to come to terms with this development and they either studiously ignore advocates of postmodernism or have attacked the approach for introducing a mode of analysis that is seen to violate all the essential canons of social science. The response has, in other words, been extraordinarily defensive. Yet there is no reason why social scientists should not view postmodernism as providing a distinctive but licit way of exploring social reality. But to do so, social scientists will have to acknowledge the limits of conventional social science thinking and recognize that postmodernists have access to invaluable tools of analysis despite the fact that these tools may be more closely associated with the arts than the sciences. The difficulty that social scientists usually have with postmodernists is the importance that they attach to language at the expense of what social scientists regard as the material world. There is a common assumption amongst social scientists that postmodernists deny the existence of a material world, whereas what postmodernists actually say is that we can only come to terms with the material world through language and that this is a more problematic process than social scientists appear to recognize. Social scientists assume that we can separate the world we are analysing from the words that we use to describe this

xiii

world. As a consequence, we can tie down what we mean by a word, through an operational definition. From the postmodernist perspective, however, such a position is naive in the extreme and reflects a failure to understand the nature of language. Houdini-like, the meaning of any given word will always escape its definition, because the definition itself requires the use of additional words that will also inevitably, by the same logic, escape definition. Social scientists quickly lose patience with this line of argument because it appears to lead to the conclusion that communication is inherently impossible. Words become meaningless, because it appears that they can mean anything we want them to mean. But this misses the point. Postmodernists primarily want to draw attention to the open-textured nature of language and then to use this truth about language to reveal the open-textured nature of the world that we live in. So the problem that postmodernists have with social scientists is their apparent belief that through the use of models and theories we can reveal the essence of the real world. From the postmodern perspective, by subscribing to this belief, social scientists are denying the inherently open-textured nature of our social world. As a consequence, for the postmodernist, by trying to reveal the unequivocal truth about social reality, social scientists are inevitably also helping to close off the much more significant truth about the open-textured character of social reality. There could only be unequivocal truth in a univocal world. The debate between social scientists and postmodernists, however, reflects a classic dialogue of the deaf. Neither side seems to be able to acknowledge that to understand the world we almost certainly need to be Janus-faced and have the capacity to draw on the techniques of postmodernists and social scientists. In this book, Costas Constantinou demonstrates the very significant strengths of the postmodernist perspective, opening up new insights on familiar topics, such as sovereignty, security and diplomacy, in ways that are simply not available to conventional social scientists. The book has an important message, not just for specialists in international relations, but for the whole of the social sciences and the humanities. His points of entry are always arresting and lead to complex but illuminating conclusions. A discussion of the state, for example, begins with an analysis of Machiavelli’s play Mandragola, which tells the story of a prince who agrees to be cuckolded. The play draws on very distinctive and, for a modern audience, unusual language to represent the state. Yet this language is also present in The Prince and other overtly political writings of Machiavelli, but it is all too easily overlooked because of our static and fixed view of the state. Constantinou argues that the prevailing conception of the state ignores the paradoxical and ultimately seditious view of the state that can be found in Machiavelli and should be present in our contemporary understanding of the state. The assessment of security is equally startling, opening with the smile on the face of the driver of the truck that in 1983 drove into the American compound in Lebanon, killing 260 marines. Constantinou draws on anomalies and unusual dimensions of international relations to prise open the Westphalian straitjacket that continues to constrain our understanding of international reality.

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By doing so, he is able to reveal that this reality is much stranger, more complex and paradoxical than conventional theorists in the field of international relations would have us believe. But it is also amenable to change. Richard Little University of Bristol

Acknowledgements

While working on the different essays of this book, I found support and inspiration from a variety of sources. A number of people helped me shape my ideas, but of course bear no responsibility for the end result. For insightful comments and conversations along the way I am indebted to Vassos Argyrou, Roland Bleiker, Thomas Diez, Mick Dillon, Annabel Herzog, John Horton, Ruth Keshishian, Farid Mirbagheri, Claire Moon, Rosemary O’Kane, Yiannis Papadakis, Necati Polat, Oliver Richmond, Michael Shapiro, Kara Shaw, Hidemi Suganami, Christine Sylvester, and especially to Rob Walker, who also kindly wrote the foreword. I am also indebted to three anonymous referees, who provided constructive criticisms and useful suggestions. The series editors, Barry Buzan and Richard Little, have been very supportive and patient with me from the start, though I know—to their credit— that they remain sceptical of my approach. I would also like to thank my students at the Universities of Hull and Keele, where I taught and teach respectively, as well as at the Middle East Technical University, Turkey, and Taras Shevchenko Univesity, Ukraine, where I taught visiting modules. I tested ideas on them and tried to provoke them, and they tested and challenged me back, keeping me constantly on guard about the claims I was making. I wish to acknowledge the financial support of Hull University, which granted me a research fellowship in support of this book in 1998, and then I repaid them by leaving and joining Keele University in 2000: mea culpa. I also wish to note the support of the Centre for Indian Studies, Hull University, for granting me the Caparo Fellowship, which made the fieldwork for Chapter 2 financially and practically feasible. My Routledge editors, Heidi Bagtazo and Grace McInnes, offered valuable advice, especially during the last stages, and were quite effective in making me rethink the title, in the end I think for the better. Fintan Power and Mary Donaldson made the copy-editing and proof-reading process an enjoyable experience, not an easy task. My thanks to the editors and publishers of the following journals for permission to use previously published articles. Alternatives: Local, Global, Political for ‘Poetics of Security’, vol. 25, no.3, 2000, pp.287–306 and

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‘NATO’s Caps: European Security and the Future of the North Atlantic Alliance’, vol. 20, no. 2, 1995, pp. 147–63. Millennium: Journal of International Studies for ‘Hippopolis/Cynopolis’, vol. 30, no. 3, 2001, pp. 785–804 and ‘Before the Summit: Representations of Sovereignty on the Himalayas’, vol. 27, no. 1, 1998, pp. 23–53. Postcolonial Studies for ‘Diplomacy, Grotesque Realism and Ottoman Historiography’, vol. 3, no. 2, 2000, pp. 213–226. Last, but not least, a number of people maintained a flow of love and support. Bulent Gökay kept popping in my office with herbal tea and Mediterranean delicacies for talking breaks. While in Cyprus, my mother kept cooking, my sister inviting and my father undertaking all kinds of ‘small’ matters. Mrs Eleni Siamma, our neighbour, kept asking important existential questions about the meaning of a writer’s work and solitary life. A number of friends kept me sociable and entertained (Aris, Costas, Lambros, Yiannos, to name the usual suspects). My partner, Demetra, kept a caring eye throughout this whole affair, making things simple, loving and beautiful. Finally, my daughter Daphne, who forced her way into the scene only recently, kept providing creative distraction, ever-teasing my writing pretensions with her barbarisms.

The one revolts against itself and becomes many. [To en stasiazon pros eauto polla kathistasthai] Gregory Nazianzus, Third Theological Discourse, 2.10

Stasis, or the seditious state

The altered representation of the state struck me as a political problematic when I first came across Niccolo Machiavelli’s play Mandragola. In this comedy of seduction and deceit, the state does not readily figure as a territorial entity or power regime, but as a peculiar kind of standing, personal, deeply psychological and socially constructed. It is what the king of France has and one of the protagonists, not a ruler but a lawyer, seeks. Perceiving the state as ‘status par excellence’,1 and bitterly acknowledging its elusiveness, the protagonist coins the aphorism that ‘you’ve got to have the state (lo stato) in this land, before even a dog will bark at you’.2 The social weight of statehood allows its possessor to advance and get by in the world, thus the importance of acquiring one at almost any cost. Machiavelli devises an overtly political plot, a series of dissimulations and improbable alliances through which the longed-for state is, among other things, negotiated. The one who is after the state is a certain Nicias, ‘the Victorious One’, tricked into sexually promoting his beautiful and childless wife, Lucrezia, to Callimaco, ‘the Good Fighter’. Callimaco poses as a famous physician who can cure sterility and prescribes that Lucrezia take a dose of mandrake, then copulate with a stranger (none other than a masked Callimaco) who is supposed to receive the poisonous effect of the drug. Though initially suspicious of the scheme, Nicias finally consents to be cuckolded, judging that the mandrake therapy is a universal practice to boost one’s estate and position, to activate the state. Though initially reluctant herself, Lucrezia seems happy with her treatment, and the Victorious husband invites the Good Fighter to cohabit with them, sharing in their newfound happiness and (dubious) status. Let us stay a little longer on the path opened up by this story and in so doing entice an introduction into both the language of the state and the state of political discourse. A theoretically conventional and discursively selective interpretation of statehood may quickly choose to ignore the mandragorically induced state of Machiavelli the playwright. I suspect that at best it will treat it as a curious or exotic representation of early Renaissance thinking; at worst a frivolous artistic depiction that is on the whole politically irrelevant. By contrast, ‘the state’ of Machiavelli the diplomat-theorist is generally considered to be a crucial moment in the history of political thought, gaining its author the reputation of the

2 STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE

founder of modern political science.3 In The Prince and the Discourses on Livy— in apparent antithesis to the use of lo stato in Mandragola—Machiavelli is seen to have pioneered a scientific investigation of the state as an impersonal and autonomous juridical entity. As a self-pronounced expert on the art of the state (arte dello stato),4 Machiavelli has been read as laying down clear and timeless maxims on how the state is propagated and maintained. In line with this canonical appropriation, Machiavelli has been elevated—and so reduced—to a paradigmatic realist, an advance proponent of raison d’état and realpolitik.5 The dominant story would have it that the state Machiavelli conceived is an ideal and universal form, the same as the one we currently have (and always had) in the form of a sovereign and/or territorial organization of power. As an instrumental term, as a discursively neutral and stable ‘known’, the state comes under the sway of pious discourses of truth and regimes of representation. Not surprisingly, such discourses and regimes marginalize alternative meanings and ‘unscientific’ stories, like the theatrical one above. That Machiavelli’s ‘fictional’ representation of the state scarcely merited the attentions of political theory—as opposed to his ‘non-fictional’ representations that do excessively so—seems to me revealing of the conventional scholarly attitude that I take issue with in this book.6 This attitude relegates the rich semiology and lexical interplay of Mandragola, even though it is quite clear from any serious reading of Machiavelli’s other works that the word stato had ‘a whole gamut of meanings’ and a ‘range of shades…in any given passage’, and as such presents us with a paradox.7 Yet fixing the meaning of words, and exterminating historical alternatives inconsistent with ‘current’ or ‘normal’ use, is a means of wishing away the paradox and in this regard constitutes a major problematic. It works contrary to the tradition of paradoxography—which seeks not to hide but to expose, illuminate and reflect on paradoxes, though not necessarily to resolve them—a tradition that I have been emulating in my own writing and do so again in this book.8 The conventional ‘scientific’ or antiparadoxical attitude misses a reading of Mandragola as a comedy to the celebrated tragedy of The Prince, or as a ‘dark satire’ that is itself a tragedy;9 in short, as a parodic staging of the historically complex world of the real by the arch-realist himself! In this sense, what has been missed is the fact that Machiavelli was writing theatrical plays within the commedia erudita tradition. This tradition practised a form of learned and reflective comedy, addressing the ‘essentially intellectual and aristocratic theatrical concerns of the academics’, and developed ‘within an environment of constant theoretical and interpretative debate’; in other words, quite unlike the improvisational commedia dell’arte.10 Mandragola is therefore not written just for laughs. There is a pedagogical plan behind it. Not only lo stato, in fact, but other key Machiavellian terms like virtù and fortuna are contextualized in this play. Specifically, in the history of theatre and within the commedia erudita tradition, Mandragola is credited for ‘breaking through the single level of meaning habitual in academic comedy, to offer each member

STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE 3

of [its] Florentine audience several layers of meaning’.11 As such, the play is diachronic, mixing political narratives of different periods, historically situated both in Machiavelli’s own time and the time of ancient Rome. In relation to lo stato, it seems to me, on the one hand, to allude to the complex and amorous power deals that went into the making of the state at the time Machiavelli was writing. The fictional character of Lucrezia bears real resonance to Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of the infamous Pope Alexander VI and sister of Cesare Borgia—the Machiavellian princely model of how to rule the state. To promote the papal and familial states, the Borgia Pope negotiated three alliance-marriages for Lucrezia (the first husband was divorced after a dubious charge of impotency; the second was strangled inside the Vatican). Rumours abound at the time that behind her virtuous exterior Lucrezia, while married, was not only the political but also the sexual partner of both her father and brother.12 Note that Cesare, just like Callimaco, comes to fight it out in Italy via France, the prince-maker at the time. The Borgias were also known users of the mandrake as a political tool to hallucinate partners and poison opponents.13 As a reflection on the making of the ‘personal’ Borgia states, consequently, the political allegory of sexual deceit and state pursuit enacted in Mandragola had already been inscribed in the popular imaginary of the period, that is, the real historical time of Italian city-state relations. On the other hand, the play can be read as a reflection on the classical founding of a republic, and more specifically as a narrative of liberation from a given political state and attachment to a new one, through an act of sedition. As suggested, the play also alludes to the famous story of Roman Lucretia, raped by Sextus, the son of Tarquinius Superbus, a story also covered by Machiavelli in the Discourses.14 The rape of Lucretia was the momentous event in Roman history that, as Machiavelli says, justified and made possible the sedition of Brutus, ended kingly rule and radically changed the character of the state (mutazione di stato) by establishing a republic. From this perspective, the staging of lo stato in Mandragola dramatizes a paradoxical aspect of the state that was perhaps evident to the Italian audience at the time, but not so clear to us today. Namely, that the state—be it in the form of the personal or collective standing—is a seditious affair, the product of an originary violence and deception, the formalization of a certain betrayal. There are no transparent social contracts here à la Hobbes or Rousseau, but a partnership in crime and dissimulation. To display a mandragola in old Italian meant simply to deceive (mostrar mandragola) and in the prologue Machiavelli precisely asks the audience to reflect on the name of the play. What does the mandrake, ‘one of the most magical and feared plants in the world’,15 stand for? Apart from its infamous uses in medieval culture for sorcery and murder, the mandrake was also employed in theosophic rituals and in early medicine as an anaesthetic.16 It is still used today in homeopathy to treat states of excitement and depression. But, significantly, in political discourse it became a symbol of sedition and betrayal quite early on. Plato mentions it in the Republic as

4 STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE

an instrument of sedition, a substance through which the captain of the ship of government is drugged and overthrown.17 That this plant prominently features in a play on the making of the state is thought-provoking. As is the fact that behind the therapy of the mandrake, behind the practice of sedition, lies a character named the Good Fighter, presumably practising, just like Brutus, the ‘good sedition’.18 Machiavelli’s vision of the state is unsanctimonious. Its seditious pursuit becomes tragi-comic. It comes about through the work of characters who are self-interested, imperfect and duplicitous. Without going too deeply into the details of the play here, note that all ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ characters in Mandragola live happily ever after, that is, benefit in working for and towards the state and even while deceiving each other.19 This is in line with Machiavelli’s positive view of the state in the Discourses and The Prince; that is how on the whole the free or forceful union of wills in pursuit of a fantasy ‘standing’ brings about order that benefits most people. The mandrake excites some and sedates others, and in the process reconciles otherwise complex and antithetical interests.20 The characters are true children of fortuna, who meet each other at the right time and, though they have contradictory objectives, are in need of each other more than they imagine. The Victorious One and the Good Fighter are allies in deception (Nicias plays stupid and Callimaco masks his desire for carnal possession), but in pursuing their own interest work together in partnership to build up a personal/ collective status. Lucrezia is apparently deceived through casuistry to yield to Callimaco’s advances, though she may have been feigning moral virtue all along. But in true Roman and Borgia fashion, she realizes she is an instrument of the state, married to a Victorious but sterile ruler and thus destined to entice the Good Fighter’s virtù, someone else’s desire to take charge. In the end, she confirms the mandrake therapy and welcomes the interventions of the Good Fighter, ascribing to him the traditional functions of the ruler: ‘I therefore take you for my lord, my master and my guide. You shall act as father and protector to me, and I will be yours completely. What my husband has willed for this one night, he shall have for good and ever.’21 To the extent that the Victorious One is a personification of a prince in search of his state, Lucrezia speaks for the public by signing in for advance sedition, sedition led by an energetic and virtuous Fighter, undermining the personal state of the prince and, in the fashion of Brutus, laying the foundations for a freer republic, a communal state of the people.22 *** The state is always already a sedition to another state of being, a betrayal to another performative possibility, condition or community. I do not draw this vision of the state simply from the ‘aesthetic’ political theory of Machiavelli. Even among theorists of the absolutist state, such as Thomas Hobbes, there are moments of recognition of the problem of granting the state not just instrumental but transhistorical legitimacy:

STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE 5

Therefore I put down for one of the most effectual seeds of the death of any state, that the conquerors require not only a submission of men’s actions to them for the future, but also an approbation of all their actions past; when there is scarce a commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified.23 Notwithstanding the Hobbesian view of the security benefits the state brings about, the act of an injustice, the history of an unfairness to something or someone underscores the conscience of its founders and subjects. This stained conscience of the state I seek to exploit a little further by reflecting on the paradox of legitimate authority and originary betrayal, retracing the forgotten lexical ties of the state that modern raison d’état renders invisible. But before doing so, a few words on the value of reflecting on this paradoxical image and language of the state. It seems necessary to do so in order to engage in some defamiliarization and ‘unthinking’ that is crucial for any critical rethinking of the state today. As Pierre Bourdieu explains: ‘To endeavor to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) a thought of the state, that is, of applying to the state categories of thought produced and guaranteed by the state and hence to misrecognize its most profound truth.’24 Put differently by R.B.J.Walker: ‘The very language in which we speak about the state is scarcely separable from the practices through which the state has been constituted historically, or through which we have been constituted as subjects of the state, or through which we continue to reconstitute our states of subjectivity.’25 Thus the urgent need critically to investigate the language of the state. The idea of the seditious state may appear strange to our political imagination and conventional discourse, yet it is etymologically plausible (as I show below) and speaks directly to the colonization of our thinking by static and exclusionary categories working to authorize contemporary rationales and state regimes. The seditious state is a transversal, cutting across and bringing together historical rationalities and specificities that currently appear incommensurable.26 This ‘apparent’ incommensurability brings forth the question of how to think and theorize contemporary political phenomena. On this point, I endorse a beautiful image from Cornelius Castoriadis reversing the domination of Platonic theorizing: To think is not to get out of the cave; it is not to replace the uncertainty of shadows by the clear-cut outlines of things themselves, the flame’s thickening glow by the light of the true Sun. To think is to enter the Labyrinth; more exactly, it is to make be and appear a Labyrinth when we might have stayed ‘lying among the flowers, facing the sky’. It is to lose oneself amidst galleries which exist only because we never tire of digging them; to turn round and round at the end of a cul-de-sac whose entrance has been shut off behind us—until, inexplicably, this spinning round opens up in the surrounding walls cracks which offer passage.27

6 STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE

Building a labyrinth in search of a way. Following from the late Castoriadis, we may enter the discursive maze of the state through the gate of psychoanalysis. As already suggested by Jacqueline Rose, ‘the word “state” has a psychological meaning long before its modern-day sense of polity, or rather one which trails beneath the shifting public and political face of the word’.28 In psychological terms, the word is commonly used to describe a psychic condition, but it is also specifically associated with the loss or relinquishment of authority, exemplified in discourse when we colloquially say that someone is ‘in a state’. As an abrogation of authority, as a giving-up of the ego’s ‘self-government’, the psychological state provides an antinomy to that of sovereign control and authority commonly found in political science and international relations. Nonetheless, as Rose says, these ‘private’ and ‘public’ attributes of the state may not be conceptual opposites, ‘but shadows—outer and inner faces precisely—of each other’.29 From this perspective, the state can be viewed as both supporting and undermining authority,30 and to that extent its psychic ‘biography’ can indeed be a site for investigating the character of the ‘seditious state’, the state that comes into being by suppressing another authorial voice or authorizing narrative. (I examine these ideas further in chapters 1 and 2.) Ironically, what nowadays requires ‘painful’ research and analysis used to be experienced effortlessly by ritual in the past. It is worth recalling here the Sacian Feast, the ritual overthrow and killing of the sovereign, periodically celebrated among the ancient Babylonians and Persians. It involved the symbolic elevation to the throne of a convicted prisoner, who for several days enjoyed the full privileges of kingship in the royal household before being taken to the streets to be whipped and killed by the people.31 This ritual meditation on the transience of sovereignty served as a warning for the king in power, yet it was also a reminder of whence his rule derived, the initiatory revolt and violence that made his authority possible in the first place. It served as a collective reflection on the ends of polity, a festive means, perhaps, through which the ancient Babylonians and Persians eased their ‘conscience’ on the origins of their commonwealth and empire. Or, to use Freudian terms, it served as a form of catharsis through which the community symbolically cleansed itself from the guilt of that pre-historic ancestral murder upon which its civilization was founded.32 At this point the etymology of the word state may be considered and specifically its pre-modern linguistic precursors that have been left unexplored. The etymological associations of the word can be retraced via Latin status/statio to ancient Greek stasis, which had not only the meaning of immobility, standing and status, but also of division, controversy, turbulence, strife and revolt. Stasis was translated into a variety of Latin terms such as statio, status, ipsa actio standis, collocatio, locus, seditio, factio, bellum intestinum, disputatio, contentio and controversia. On the whole, political and international theorists have been reluctant fully to engage the etymology of the state. This goes even for the likes of Quentin Skinner, whose committed study of the history of political vocabularies offers in this instance a highly insightful analysis of the change

STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE 7

of the term lo stato into the modern ‘vision of sovereignty as the property of an impersonal agency’. Still, Skinner finds not much worth contemplating in the medieval precursors of stato.33 A notable exception is Alan Harding, who wishes to redress the playing down of ‘the medieval senses of the word status, état, estate’, suggesting that the modern term crystallized out of such words, whose meaning was modified or recontextualized to meet particular historical needs.34 Despite these brief, yet important, explorations into the ‘personal status’ of the ruler or ‘state of the commonwealth’, neither Skinner nor Harding, nor any other political-international theorist to my knowledge, traces the etymology of the state beyond its Latin roots to the ancient Greek ones as suggested above. This is, I think, unfortunate, though explainable. First, because of the common translation of the ancient Greek polis as ‘city-state’, conveniently rendering polis as the conceptual ancestor of the modern state and in the process marginalizing stasis. Second, because stasis had dubious and apparently contradictory meanings to those conventionally reserved for the modern state, specifically in terms of disorder, instability and disunity. But it is precisely this antinomy of stasis that should provide a pause for reflection, as already suggested by Carl Schmitt: Stasis means in the first place repose, state of rest, position, arrest (status); the opposite notion is kinesis: movement. But secondly, stasis also means (political) unrest, movement, revolt and civil war. Most Greek lexicons juxtapose with no further ado the two opposed meanings, without attempting to explain them, something which, moreover, could never be legitimately demanded of them. However, even the simple juxtaposition of numerous examples of such an opposition is a gold mine for the knowledge of political and theologico-political phenomena.35 In similar vein, Nicole Loraux reflects on stasis, suggesting that it is a complex notion which is not easily translatable into modern political terminology. It would be wrong simply and singly to translate it as civil war, sedition or factionalism, or immobility as currently anglicized: Stasis is something completely different—movement at rest, a front that does not yield and introduces into the city the paradoxical unity that characterizes the simultaneous insurrection of two halves of a whole. If we add that substantives in—sis are verbal nouns that express action without referring to any agent, stasis becomes a self-sufficient process, almost a principle. To say that stasis exists is to locate conflict in the middle of the city in the configuration that is proper to it when, by being raised up in the very same movement, two parts become one.36 Stasis is what renders the polis both one and many. It is a process that guarantees the polyphony and polymorphy of the polis, its originary association to the many (polloi), but also to the polos, the pole or revolving tie.37 That we are

8 STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE

currently not sensitized to the stasis ‘within’ the state, or, for that matter, the stasis of any political community, is not just a modern predicament, not just a problem of ‘us’ thinking politically through vocabularies whose historical practice we erase or remain oblivious to. It is as much a problem of the ancient Greeks for, as Loraux says, ‘by 403BC the Greeks had quite forgotten to ask what stasis meant’.38 What the Greeks, and specifically the Athenians, tried to ‘ban from memory’ in 403BC, in seeking to overcome the factionalism that followed a violent civil strife, was how the polis was in its essence a divided one, how the city was characteristically a polyphonic space that bred disunion, and that in fact, paradoxically, it was precisely this disunion which defined it as a peculiar kind of unity. In the process, the Greeks installed a ‘fantasy of indivisibility’ with regard to the polis, the implications of which we still live with. In discursive terms, this means that stasis—the word etymologically linked to the modern state and which initially meant political position, standing and ‘good revolt’ —acquired the exclusive sense of destructive factionalism and insurrection, in the process idealizing the polis as a harmonious whole that had universal and permanent interests.39 Within such idealization, homonoia, concord or same-mindedness, became a prime political principle and stasis got linked exclusively to dichonoia, or apart-mindedness, whose end result was the destruction of the polis. Stasis acquired the sense of a political disease (nosos) that could be located not only in the assembly but also in language (‘the sedition of names’ in Thucydides that causes wars)40 or in the individual psyche (such as Plato’s internal dissension within oneself that could be reflected in the constitution of cities).41 From ‘self-sufficient’ political process, stasis mutates to city-destructive process that needs to be redressed through philosophical, gymnastic and musical pedagogy, that is pedagogy which reverses the movements of sophistry, demagogy and psychological dissonance. Still, even within Plato, stasis retained in rare instances the positive value of its past as a principle of movement and innovation within the ruling class,42 or of hermeneutic movement in language.43 Note, however, that Plato’s philosophical problematization of stasis is a radical departure from the mythic and tragic sense that saw ‘good revolt’ as part of (political) life, as cosmic creative-destructive unease, foretelling the impermanence of all political arrangements. For example, in Alcaeus, the reputed ‘stasiotic’ poet and practitioner,44 stasis is part of the world movement that cannot be readily deciphered or rationalized. In one of his fragments he declares that he ‘cannot understand the stasis of the winds’, the position/movement that sometimes throws one on one side and then on to the other, which (mis) directs people and brings about turbulence in the ship of government.45 What is beyond comprehension is spiritualized in another fragment, coming under the rule of Hera, whom he brands Aeolian, windy.46 Hera as a personification of stasis captures the paradox of authority and sedition in rather striking terms. She is the sister and wife of Zeus, the cosmic ruler, but their relationship is far from harmonious. She sometimes supports and at other times undermines his

STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE 9

many schemes. She personifies royal order and status but she is also the committed stirrer of discord among the gods and humans. She is the embodiment of the aetherial ‘good revolt’, which Zeus officially endorses and never considers divorcing. There is nothing strange in Hera’s persona, which only exemplifies the sacred order of ancient Greece, founded upon the Olympic cosmogony of revolt and sustained through a series of familial strifes and betrayals. As Hesiod reminds us, there is bad and destructive discord, but also positive-creative discord that ‘one would praise when one comes to understand it’.47 Stasis emulates this peculiar sacred order in earthly political rule, the kind of rule that both recognizes the initiatory revolt that founds authority as well as the smaller revolts and disunities that render its rule non-monolithic, make the continuous creative movement within it possible. But, to reiterate, in Plato’s ‘monotheism’ ideal political rule begins to be identified in opposition to stasis, which now figures as unreflective passion endangering both the stability of forms and the human soul, rendering the polis liable to factions and disharmony. Plato depoliticizes stasis by introducing it as an epistemic puzzle that ideational philosophy could break and in the process repoliticizes it as a dangerous psychic condition and negative discord. Through philosophical questioning, Plato seeks to find a way for the human being to escape the tragedy of internal dissension and remain free of stasis (astasiastos o toioutos en eautō), thus turning stasis from existential unease to personal, social and political disease.48 What has been lost, in losing this tragic sense of stasis, is a temporal, existential vision of politics. What does an existential vision of politics entail? Here it helps to revisit the Heideggerian notion of existence. When Heidegger says in Being and Time that ‘the “essence” of being there lies in its existence’ what he explicitly reads in the word existence is the root meaning of the Greek ek-stasis.49 Ekstasis is the experience of alteration, what derives from and out of stasis, and, to that extent, it is not a romantic condition or priestly preserve. It is rather ‘primitive temporality’ or ‘in-stancy’, sensing the turbulence of life, of being thrown from the past and into the future. In other words, ekstasis is ‘standing out’ towards and enduring one’s possibilities, and this is where Heidegger’s conception of existence as ‘ecstatic relation to the lighting of Being’ differs from the humanist conception of existentia as absolute subjectivity, actuality or objectivity of experience.50 With Heidegger, stasis regains its pre-Platonic promise by rendering the ahistorical and atemporal experience of life an ‘inauthentic’ condition of being. With Machiavelli too, though not explicitly articulated, a certain notion of stasis is recovered in the reflective understanding of stato, the practice of which requires not only the virtuosity of the leader but also his reconciliation with the temporality of fortuna, the intrusion of that great factor which remains beyond one’s control. What is at stake, today, is that we are no longer attuned to the stasis of our personal, social and political states and to that extent remain insensitive to the ecstatic; insensitive to the memory of the revolt and otherness that is the

10 STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE

condition of possibility of our (and any) state of being. This has important implications in defining the terms of human existence but also for questions of representation, community and identity. It challenges the vision ‘in which every being has a particular form, a definite place, and a particular essence in a fixed world that ensures each his own identity that will encompass him forever, the same and unchanging’.51 The ecstatic experience of alteration—or allegiance to what I call the ‘seditious state’ —sensitizes us to the contingency of identity and in-dependence to the Other. It is a recognition that one’s state, however personal or collective, is never an authentic or stable condition but a product of strange, contradictory and ever-changing forces. From this perspective, ekstasis liquidates the ‘positivist’ boundaries of meaning, brings forth ‘the experience of an extra dimension, an expansion of the human condition’ that entices the logos of the Other. Ancient Greek ekstasis has been popularly—though not exclusively— identified with the Dionysian thiasos, the precursor of tragedy, the organized group of devotees that had a political mission. Specifically, [T]o procure a changed state of being, through music and dancing, for a group of people, in ritual costume, in a setting of wild nature either real or simulated. The aim is for this group momentarily to undergo the experience of becoming ‘other’, within the very framework of the city, and with its agreement, if not authority: ‘other’ not in an absolute sense, but in relation to the models, norms, and values peculiar to the particular culture of that city.52 Yet in the ancient world there were different means beyond tragedy through which the community was periodically re-introduced to the ecstatic, ranging from shamanic techniques to the worshipping rituals of Remus, or the philobarbaric stories and ethos of Herodotus (further on this in chapter 7). Ecstatic gnosis, it seems to me, was not knowledge with the purpose of controlling or mastering the Other, but a cosmological knowledge, a means of knowing the Other in order to know oneself anew (further on this in chapter 8). It is a mental revolt against the normalized and naturalized self. It is not an ideological revolution, ‘a rejection, pure and simple, of the old [that is] destined to be replaced by new dogmas’.53 It is more an Augustinian se quarere (well, minus the ideology), a retrospective questioning, a struggle with and in quest of oneself. To that extent, ecstatic gnosis bears a similar motif to the practice of theoria which I studied elsewhere; that is, the journey of problematization, the mission to the oracle which seeks to bring about (and bring back to the polis) new words, empathetic knowledge and cathartic vision.54 In this sense, stasis as both word and practice serves as my reflective tool in this book. It helps to revisit the originary, linguistic and paradoxical associations of the state and in this way renew a series of questions, questions whose value is not in the provision of straightforward answers but in sustaining critical reflection on contemporary practice. What does it mean to

STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE 11

approach the state today as a disputed being or controversy? What does it mean to explore it as the pursuit of status by other means? What does it mean to see it as one political movement among many? What does it mean to view it as the global spreading of factionalism or as sedition to other states of being? How far could such critical reviews make citizens better equipped to judge and resist the reasons and practices of states, and generally whatever is done in the name of states? *** My main claim in States of Political Discourse is that the state gets enacted as a global actor through the kind of practices that systematically hide the complexities and contradictions—social, historical, diplomatic—that bring it into being. Consequently, I explore how one might go about developing staseis, unrests, countermoves, alternative discourses that unsettle the vision of the state as found in conventional international relations (IR). The book moves away from the established categories and classifications that we use to make sense of IR, and seeks to devise ‘revolts’ and experimental frameworks, playful—but plausible— narratives through which to expose the complexities and problematic claims of ‘possessing’ statehood. It does not aim to reconstruct an authentic narrative of stasis, but rather to take a cue from stasis to encourage a revisioning of our states as ports of call—not as destinal or final habitats. To that extent, it aims to deconstruct practices inextricably linked to the practice of the modern territorial state such as sovereignty, security, diplomacy, territoriality, historiography and governmentality. By opting for a more narrative than epistemological formulation, following linguistic leads rather than established IR categories, I seek to challenge the metanarrative or extralinguistic pretensions of conventional scholarly investigation, and the downgrading of experimental-poetic forms of looking at world politics as non-empirical or utopian. I take it as my starting point that international studies should not be restricted to ‘high’ politics and policyoriented concerns, or only to the discourse of agents of national power and/or epistemic authority. By focusing on the small-h history of international relations, the micro-politics of language, imagery and daily life, one can explore what is conventionally branded marginal and unimportant, something that allows its knowledge/power implications to go unnoticed. This move towards micropolitics and the ‘wonderful’ encourages the re-enchantment of international relations as well as the de-professionalization and democratization of theory.55 It would, however, be intellectually dishonest to frame this ‘free pursuit’ in complete isolation from other—more or less methodical—theorizations. It is true to say, and will become evident later on, that the book has been mostly inspired by scholarly and literary writings outside the IR discipline as well as images and practices of everyday life. But it is also indebted to a number of works ‘within’ the discipline that have opened up thinking space and made it academically possible to write differently.56 In this regard, the book utilizes the corpus of critical, postcolonial and postmodern theories, though it does not apply these in

12 STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE

any methodical sense, nor does it directly engage with their esoteric debates, within or outside the discipline. Others have done this and the reader interested in these debates and specific applications should look there for answers.57 Roughly, the critical approach adopted in this book encourages the reader to see how the way we relate ‘internationally’ depends greatly on the way we relate to political beings, that is to say, how we understand and come to make claims about the ends of identities, nations, genders, faiths, securities, etc. Ancient Greek terminology is occasionally used to subvert ‘Western’ regimes of representation from within, but the book deliberately does so catachrestically, i.e employing the contribution of Greek tradition lightly and transgressively, symbolically undermining the nostalgia of primordial political returns. Still, critical and globally sensitive engagements require, in my view, not just the retrieval of native and subaltern thought from around the globe (the ‘globalization of knowledge’ as Arjun Appadurai put it),58 but also the reinvention of the classical origins of Western political and international thought as they have been monolithically interpreted to support dominant regimes of representation. The postcolonial critique of things thus assesses how far conventional IR understandings, fixing or naturalizing specific claims about political beings, depend on the domestication and globalization of particular versions of Western knowledge, employed to support hierarchical thought and hegemonic practice. The postmodern approach explores the relevance of altered sites and formulations in offering new interpretations of world politics, not assuming (as popularly believed) that ‘anything goes’ but rather that we may look anywhere for answers. Put differently, these interlinked approaches aim, on the one hand, to display the power/knowledge nexus of global political discourse and, on the other hand, to retrieve and explore other vocabularies that recapture global phenomena, adequately explain the heterogeneity of our contemporary condition and extend the limits of our political imagination and potential praxis. *** The book is divided into three parts, three conceptual modifications of stasis that also stand for three actualizations of a ‘state of political discourse’. These actualizations are not self-contained practices but intertwined ones. In this sense, the parts are artificial as the chapters engage on occasions in more than one typology. The first part, Metastasis, engages with the problem of the spreading of staseis, the movement of the ‘seditious state’ from one place to another and the blocking of other movements, standings and possibilities. Chapter 1 looks at the link between states of mind and political states, and the erasing of archaic and diasporic states in pursuit of modern territorial ones. Specifically, it examines Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and the effects of his nation-state images and political metaphors. It also brings together and critiques the Nazi and Zionist discourses on the normal and pathological conditions of statehood. Chapter 2 focuses on the discourse of state sovereignty and how specific metaphors have been employed to delimit its representation in the colonial and postcolonial

STASIS, OR THE SEDITIOUS STATE 13

world of South Asia. Here, the theoretical and political implications of the territorial state are investigated, specifically as historically applied in the reification of the Himalayan region. Chapter 3 turns to the enactment of the current state of the Sovereign Order of St John (the Knights of Malta), and the role of international legal discourse in making up for its missing territory, the ‘hard’ and ‘objective’ condition of statehood. It examines the transformation of the Order from a crusading and piratic entity (periodically in Jerusalem, Cyprus, Rhodes and Malta) into an irregular state actor without territory (in Rome). The second part, Antistasis, considers forms of resistance to dominant regimes of representation, antidotes to particular metastaseis. Chapter 4 provides a poetic exploration of narratives of security that resist securitization, that is to say, narratives that do not offer rhetorical legitimation to different regimes of power or justify the intervention of security experts and practitioners. Chapter 5 assesses the role of grotesque narrations in problematizing diplomacy as an interstate affair and in re-examining Ottoman diplomatic historiography. It shows how in other epochs grotesque writing was equally ‘official’ and functioned as a means of underscoring the contingency of identity. Chapter 6 employs pro-memorative discourse to resist the politics of forgetting as practised by NATO in the post-Cold War era, i.e in the process of NATO’s redefinition and search for new enabling Other(s). The third part, Ekstasis, is the standing-out, the temporary release from fixed identity and subjectivity, the ‘freedom’ of experiencing the Other of the Self. This part traces the marginalized or repressed in political discourse, be it the trace of Asia in Europe, myth in history, irrational in reason, the cosmic in cosmopolitanism, and god or animal in human. Chapter 7 examines the discursive and mythical uses of continental identity. In the first instance, it looks at the Cypriot politics of continental belonging and then, more generally, at the ancient and modern appropriations of the myth of Europa. It suggests an alternative reading of the myth, which sees the European project as a constant effort to recognize and reunify with the non-European, the Asian, the continent’s enabling and legitimating Other from where Europe ‘mythically’ came. Chapter 8 explores political and cosmopolitical narrations, as exemplified through two complementary animal images, the horse and the dog. It suggests that it is only by recognizing the Other within any given representation that we will be able to turn a more welcoming face to the world and cultivate cosmopolitan practices that not only recognize the story of the Other, but also use that story to problematize and rediscover the self.

Metastasis

1 States, ethnocratic states, and states within

Normal and pathological states We inhabit and relate to more states than our passports, visas and horizontal cartographies indicate. Many different kinds of state grow, both inside and outside of us, rise and fall over and above one another, come and go peacefully or violently, leaving deep, faint, or no visible traces of their past existence. From territorial and diasporic states to states of being and fantasy, we come to know the state less for what it is and more for what it incites. Let me start by giving you two polemic illustrations. The first illustration concerns an image from Sigmund Freud. In his book Moses and Monotheism—written during that turbulent period leading to the Nazi occupation of Austria, and where he psychoanalyses the Jewish nation as a whole, suggesting that Moses was an Egyptian—Freud offers a description of pathological phenomena: ‘They are, one might say, a State within a State (ein Staat im Staat), an inaccessible party, with which co-operation is impossible, but which may succeed in overcoming what is known as the normal party and forcing it into its service.’1 Freud separates the normal phenomenon, or state, from the pathological one. The normal state is produced by and conditioned upon ‘mental processes which are adjusted to the demands of the real external world and obey the laws of logical thinking’. The pathological state, however, displays ‘great psychical intensity’ and ‘far-reaching independence’, that is to say, it is ‘insufficiently or not at all influenced by external reality, pay[s] no attention to it or to its psychical representatives’.2 The pathological state may thus come to antagonize the outside world and its mental predicates, intruding into the normal state and even overtaking it. The complete domination of the state within ‘over the reality of the external world’ equals psychosis, whereas milder forms of aggression are associated with paranoia and neurotic fixations. This image of a state within endangering a state without has been used before. It bears affinity to my second illustration, which concerns the pseudopsychological reckoning of a different text, authored by another Austrian, also ‘schooled’ in Vienna, written only a decade or so before Freud’s text: namely

16 METASTASIS

Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Hitler embarks on his own group psychology of the Jewish people, and there are no surprises here: he spends as much time and effort as Freud does. In three instances in Mein Kampf he describes the Jewish people as forming ‘a state within a state’.3 Hitler argues that though restricted to one race, ‘[t]he Jewish state was never spatially limited in itself, but universally unlimited as to space’; never a nomad (the Aryans probably were a nomad at some point in history) ‘but only and always a parasite in the body of other peoples’.4 Hitler’s unequivocal, if somehow complimentary, conclusion is that the Jewish ‘invention’ of establishing a state within the German nation ‘is one of the most ingenious tricks that was ever devised, to make this state sail under the flag of “religion”, thus assuring it of the tolerance which the Aryan is always ready to accord a religious creed’.5 The ‘cunning craftiness’ of the Jewish state within endangers the ‘heroic virtue’ of the German state without in two ways: first, by economizing the life of German people, thus undermining their Aryan instinct of preservation and will power; second, by strategically allying itself with the Marxist ideology seeking to denationalize the Germans.6 For Hitler, the Jewish phenomenon is a pathological state undermining the racial purity of the normal state, a disease responsible for the spiritual decline of the German nation, a virus that can only be dealt with via a policy of sanitation (in fact Hitler’s discourse on the so-called Jewish question is highly medical). The two analyses above share more than a figure of speech. Both narrate visions that are important for what they explicitly say about statehood as much as for what they imply about it. Freud’s imaginative internationalization of our psychical condition bridges in a creative stroke two vocations (psychology and politics) which we conventionally separate despite the common denomination they share in dealing with the formation of states and the analysis of relations between states.7 Hitler’s revolutionary recognition of diasporic, non-territorial statehood could have constituted a major theoretical breakthrough out of the Westphalian model, had it not been so blatantly partial and racist. Both positions are, however, highly problematic on their account of normality, on the assumed criteria under which certain psychical-political phenomena constitute normal states and others pathological ones. To be sure, there is a clear and sharp distinction between Freud’s clinical practice and Hitler’s sanitation policy. Nevertheless, both can be criticized for not considering that what is treated as a pathological phenomenon may simply result out of naming and idealizing the normal, and for wrongly assuming that what is commonsensically taken to be a normal condition axiomatically cannot be a pathological phenomenon: e.g., in the case of Freud, the condition of adjusting oneself to the demands of the real external world; in the case of Hitler, an individual’s crude and complete identification with the German nation. The main problem with this kind of thinking is that the normal escapes being posed as a problem. The discourse of the pathological confirms the ontological status of the normal. It encourages conformity to the rule that renders the normal a hard fact of life rather than a value system. This problem is exacerbated when

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combined with the realist philosophical tradition that reads in generality the sign of an essence.8 Habitual practices become ideal states that pass for real ones. Vocational work provides the service of defending or perfectly realizing those states. It took the creative linguistic input of Jacques Lacan to save the Freudian corpus from the biological and causal determinism that most Freudians articulated and ‘the father of psychoanalysis’ encouraged. It took, more tragically, the accumulated horrors of the Holocaust and World War II to discredit the purified racial state Hitler envisioned. In this first chapter I bring together the ‘great psychoanalyst’ and the ‘demented statesman’, not just because their biographies and vocations meet and collide (i.e., Hitler’s racist policies forced Freud to emigrate, and some say that it was the rising anti-Semitism, including the burning of his books in Berlin, that prompted Freud to write his book psychoanalysing monotheism and Jewish identity). Rather, I find it interesting that both Freud and Hitler invariably imagined, implicitly or explicitly narrated, particular versions of statehood as normal and others as pathological. I investigate the narrative and political implications of these discourses of the state, which in combination provide only a starting point for making connections between—and exploring the implications of connecting—internal and external states, national and racial states, psychic and political states. Psychic states Psychology concerns itself with our mental or psychic condition. By studying the functions of the mind, it looks at what is most private and esoteric to us. Dealing with the constitution and relationship of different states of being, it assesses the way internal workings affect, disturb or dominate the lives of individuals. Arguably the most revolutionary—if not the most significant—interpretation of this internal order in the twentieth century has been the Freudian exposition of the unconscious. Freud’s general theory of psychoanalysis is highly topographical and can be read politically. The mind for Freud is the location of a complex organization. Freud rejects the conventional (which he terms ‘philosophical’) view that the mind comes under the government of a single and universal state of consciousness. Instead, he suggests that the dynamic relations of the mind can be better understood as a division between two primary states: the state of consciousness and the state of the unconscious. This division is not anatomical. It constitutes a ‘hiatus…which at present cannot be filled’.9 Freud’s topographical imagery of the mental apparatus sets free a mythopoetic possibility. As he recognized in a letter to Albert Einstein, the mythic is not at all alien to a theory of psychoanalysis. ‘It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this?’10 Freud’s psychoanalytical myth blends psychic with political states,

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attributes of the mind with territorial regimes. As such, international political metaphors and discourses are employed to explain the workings of the human psyche. Freud’s system of states is not ruled from a single power centre. It is neither an imperial rule nor a world government. By seeking to analyse the psyche by reference to two primary states, it comes closer to a bipolar system. Mental activity is separated into two conflicting camps—the conscious and the unconscious—with the one roughly representing passions, instincts and repressed ideas,11 and the other common sense, reason and ideas that are manifest.12 The conflict between the conscious and the unconscious is elevated to a diplomatic arena, appropriating its very terminology of competition, and that it must be noted, as Freud clearly says, takes place even in situations that are not pathological: Even within the limits of normal life we can recognize that a constant struggle for primacy over affectivity goes on between the two systems Cs. (the conscious) and Ucs. (the unconscious), that certain spheres of influence are marked off from one another and that intermixtures between the operative forces occur.13 For two reasons, however, it would be highly simplistic to proceed to read the Freudian power struggle in the terms described by the hardcore ‘realists’ of international relations. First, though the conscious and the unconscious seem to engage in power maximization, they do not operate uniformly, i.e., they cannot both be approached as ‘rational’ actors sharing distinctive features. Second, the frontier separating them is far from clear-cut, and especially in the later Freud (i.e., following the reformulation of id, ego and superego) comes closer to a condition of complex interdependence. In Freud’s terms, ‘[t]he three realms, regions, provinces, into which we divide an individual’s mental apparatus’ should not be represented by ‘sharp frontiers like the ones drawn in political geography’.14 Freud now thinks that a better description would be that of a region of mixed ethnic population, territorially partitioned along ethnic lines but not ethnically cleansed, that is, one ‘inhabited by Germans, Magyars and Slovaks, who carry on different activities’.15 In this respect the id and the ego are seen as the autonomous parts of a new country, a loose federation or confederation, which formally succeeds the primary states of the unconscious and the conscious respectively. In the new states or ethnic areas, however, some original provinces, a few territorial remnants, seem now to ‘belong’ to both sides. This complex theoretical renewal and reconstitution is necessary, for Freud is now convinced that keeping to ‘habitual forms of expression’ will lead ‘in endless obscurities and difficulties’.16 This is because a new powerful nation has entered the picture, namely the superego: a frontline power-broker between id and ego, a giant censor of images whose independence and authority Freud underestimated in his

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original formulation. Freud’s interethnic or interstate power scheme still remains part of the new picture, but it is now a tripolar conflictual arena and the psychoanalyst’s task is that of describing its diverse governmentality. Freud approaches mental occupation—i.e., attention, interest and attachment to particular images—in both economic and military terms. The psychoanalytical term cathexis, employed for this distribution of psychical energy, is a neologism that has both the sense of investment and of the deployment of troops from one place to another.17 This is where the differences between the id and the ego begin to surface. The energy invested or deployed by the id is, according to Freud, ‘mobile’ whereas that of the ego is ‘bound’. By attaching the id to mobile energy, to the primary or primitive processes of thinking, Freud portrays a form of mental occupation that is nomadic (i.e., images move quickly, hit and go; also images fuse and are exchanged with one another, as in a barter economy). By linking the ego to bound energy, to secondary process thinking, he projects a mental occupation that is sedentary (i.e., as in a standing army, images are put in order, follow rules and move according to commands; and as in the capitalist economy of mercantile centres, they also enter a value system). The anarchic id is governed by the ‘pleasure principle’, akin to hallucination and wish-fulfilment. The archic ego is governed by the ‘reality principle’, follows the laws of logic and adapts to the requirements of the external world. But psychical life, which is a series of mental occupations, is not one of id or of ego but, as outlined, a struggle and a mixture of the two. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, neither can permanently dominate over the other. Psychic health very much depends on the balance of power between the id and the ego being maintained. The id is a republic of libertines. The ego is a totalitarian regime. The ego is described by Freud as ‘almighty and autocratic’,18 as ‘His Majesty’,19 though not always and unconditionally an absolute ruler. It has constantly to take into account the demands of external reality and in that sense ‘the ego’s position is like that of a constitutional monarch, without whose sanction no law can be passed but who hesitates long before imposing his veto on any measure put forward by the Parliament’.20 Mediating between the id and reality, the ego may now even submit, assist and rationalize id’s behaviour, and ‘only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.’21 What turns the ego sometimes into a powerful monarch and sometimes into a puppet regime is its asymmetric alliance with the superego or ego-ideal. In this psychic pact, the ego stands in a position of dependency. The superego is a superpower, a force of a different rank altogether. It is, in Freud’s words, ‘a dictatorial “thou shalt”’.22 It communicates its demands and launches its struggles from ‘a higher region, like the Battle of the Huns in Kaulbach’s painting’, where warriors continue to fight after their death in the sky above the battlefield.23 The ego may thus suffer severe punishments, harsh and cruel treatments, by the ‘dictatorial “thou shalt”’. The ego domesticates the ‘foreign’

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law and judges everything that comes into its realm, into the region of consciousness, accordingly. Compliance to the moral edicts of the superego means that the ego follows a continuous policy of ‘repression’: ‘We know that as a rule the ego carries out repressions in the service and at the behest of its super-ego’.24 Put differently: ‘For the ego the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning factor of repression’.25 The ego represses impulsive ideas that penetrate it from the id, as well as images originating from the external world. Repression is a normal ‘defence mechanism’ of the ego. By repressing, the ego does not exterminate these images, but expels them or prevents them from becoming conscious. These fleeing images find their way into the id, which is an abundant safe haven. The repressed remain active in exile. Still, their symptomatic effects are often felt by the ego, for these mental exiles occasionally return uninvited and in a disguised form to make their representations. ‘Symptoms are derived from the repressed, they are, as it were, its representatives before the ego; but the repressed is foreign territory to the ego—internal foreign territory—just as reality (if you will forgive the unusual expression) is external foreign territory’.26 The id is the most difficult state to understand. ‘It cannot say what it wants; it has not achieved a unified will’.27 It is incapable of clear communication and does not speak any of the lingua franca. In trying ‘to mediate the id and reality’, the ego tends ‘to conceal the id’s conflicts with reality, to profess, with diplomatic disingenuousness, to be taking notice of reality even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding’.28 But we come to know that the id is caught in between two instinctual drives: eros and thanatos. That helps Freud to filter the Pythian messages of the unconscious through a particular ideological framework. The role of the trained psychoanalyst becomes that of the interpreter of the unconscious. The overall aim of psychoanalysis, to that extent, is ‘to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id’.29 It has been recognized, at least since Plato, that states of mind affect ways of living politically, and so they require investigation. Still, Freud’s attempt to interpret the workings of the mind in terms of interstate power relations and govern-mentality exposes a complex interconnection, reveals that an intertext is already in place. In this respect, our mental states get psychoanalysed partly through a narrative analysis of the political relations of states and their forms of government. Freud provides a revolutionary but often deterministic description of these psychical-political relations. In an interesting dream presaging his break with Freud, Carl Jung saw Freud working as an imperial customs official in a mountainous area on the Swiss-Austrian border. Jung interpreted the international border as that ‘between consciousness and the unconscious’ and Freud’s presence as that of a sovereign regulator, a ‘censor’ of what was allowed to pass from one territory to the other. The customs official was a peevish and

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melancholic figure, a ghost from the past ‘who still couldn’t die properly’.30 Just like the Freudian state scheme. Ethnocratic states The concept of territorial statehood has been appropriated in modern history for the spiritual fulfilment of distinct ethnic groups or the sanguine continuation of a nation. Nazi Germany and Zionist Israel are two notable contemporary examples where radical versions of territorial ethnocracies have been promoted. As strange as it sounds, the horror of the former project assisted the practical completion of the latter in the form of the UN resolution that territorialized the suffering Jews. Interestingly—and though parallels should not erase significant differences in application and degree—both ethnocracies have been presented as normal conditions of being or becoming, and supported by forms of (state) governmentality that were often in the business of naming the abnormal and pathological, fostering political diagnoses and promoting particular acts of therapy. Hitler’s sanitation policy in the form of the ‘Final Solution’ against the Jews, gypsies and communists was a most terrible by-product of the medicalization of political thinking in the twentieth century. Beginning with the assumption of a certain state as normal, Nazi policy proceeded with the eradication of the pathological. It was generally thought that condemning these terrible acts simply amounted, in turn, to our diagnosing and condemning Hitler as a pathological phenomenon. But branding Hitler an insane statesman is exactly what saves the sanity of the interstate system within which he was operating. The problem of the conventional diagnosis of Hitler as an irrational megalomaniac was initially exposed in A.J.P.Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War. Taylor denounced the tendency of the easy conclusion of what caused the war, i.e., Hitler’s insanity. Such tendency was primarily a complacent and antihistorical analysis: ‘Little can be discovered so long as we go on attributing everything that happened to Hitler’. It led subsequently to a gross simplification of events: ‘It seems to be believed nowadays that Hitler did everything himself, even driving the trains and filling the gas chambers unaided.’ Finally, it served as a means of distraction from the fact that in foreign affairs Hitler did in Europe what other imperial powers and ‘civilized’ nations had been doing around the globe at the period: ‘Other Powers have pursued similar aims, and still do. Other Powers treat smaller countries as their satellites. Other Powers seek to defend their vital interests by force of arms. In international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was German.’31 An analysis seeking to limit the pathological state inside Hitler’s head, or by extension to a few Germans in command at the period, prevents any serious consideration of the normality of the state in whose name racist and aggressive policies were pathologically pursued. Government officials and mobilized citizens executed commands with the coolness, efficiency and allegiance of an

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ideal Weberian bureaucracy, and not with the loss of control and authority commonly associated with irrational or pathological conditions. The complete identification of people with their nation, transferring their actions to acts of state or done by reason of state, though not a ‘sufficient condition’ for the excesses of Nazi Germany was nonetheless the ‘necessary condition’ for them. In this respect, to paraphrase Zygmunt Bauman, the Holocaust by combining both ‘uniqueness and normality’ can be utilized to powerfully display the ‘hidden possibilities’ of the modern nation-state and of the Westphalian interstate system.32 This is not meant to downgrade Hitler’s personal obsession with ‘the Jewish question’. But there are, I think, some tragic ironies that ought to be noted. First, Nazi anti-Semitism in the form of judenfrei Germany was not concerned in the beginning with the extermination of the Jews but rather with their normalization. The forced expulsion of the Jews from Germany and then from Austria was combined with Nazi efforts to establish a separate and autochthonous Jewish state, putting ‘permanent soil under the feet of the Jews’.33 First, for a period, a barren region around Nisko in central Poland was designated for this purpose but then it was thought to be unmanageable in terms of administration and policing. In any event, in the increasingly expanding Germany at the time, the question quickly became one of judenfrei Europe, not of creating a new Jewish state within the ‘new Europe’. Then the Madagascar project gained prominence, which involved ‘the evacuation of Jews en masse’ to the colony of defeated France, granting Jews their own state under the trusteeship of Germany. But again the impracticability of shipping four million people in the midst of war and British naval supremacy soon became apparent.34 It was the impracticability of expelling and normalizing the Jews that led—granting the Nazi ideological commitment to ‘solving the problem’ —to the ‘only’ available option of extermination: ‘The “Final Solution” did not clash at any stage with the rational pursuit of efficient, optimal goal-implementation. On the contrary, it arose out of a genuinely rational concern, and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose.’35 As Bauman suggests, ‘the rules of instrumental rationality’, which are commonly taken as the realistic way of approaching political problems, ‘are singularly incapable of preventing such phenomena’, as the Holocaust, whose abnormality was not evident to those working under the bureaucratic state. For the state officials the division of labour meant that they kept on doing what they were always doing without feeling responsibility for the end result.36 Moving from the goal of Jewish territorial state to racial extermination was entirely comprehensible within the rational bureaucratic framework. A second tragic irony was that the Nazis, for some time at least, found themselves associated with the Zionist project. Eichmann, one of the protagonists administering the expulsion and extermination of the Jews, prided himself on reading the Zionist classics and for his cooperation with the Zionist movement. As Arendt says, ‘quite apart from all slogans and ideological quarrels,

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it was in those years a fact of everyday life that only Zionists had any chance of negotiating with the German authorities’;37 i.e., the Jewish assimilationists who saw themselves as full German citizens became by definition an enemy to the German state. By contrast, the Jews who thought in independent national terms, who saw their destiny as distinct from that of Germany, were an ‘ally’ as far as the Nazis were concerned and so deserved support. Eichmann cooperated with Jewish emissaries from Palestine to arrange for the illegal immigration of ‘suitable material’, that is of skilled and highly educated Jews to build the new Israeli state. He personally visited Palestine, though was quickly expelled by the British, and, even when the German authorities felt that the emissaries from Palestine were becoming too independent, proceeded to arrange some immigrations on his own. As Arendt put it, this alliance of purpose between the Nazi and Zionist movements ‘must have been one of the most paradoxical episodes of the entire period’.38 Nazi and Zionist thought fundamentally differed but also shared common political assumptions about the Jews. For both, the Jews were not simply a religious group but a distinctive national community. In this respect, true and full assimilation was not a politically viable option: for the racist Nazis this constituted a pollution of the national Aryan model; for the radical Zionists it constituted national denial and betrayal. Equally, the diasporic presence of the Jews in Europe was for both Nazis and Zionists a serious abnormality. ProtoZionists, such as Moses Hess, even went so far as to describe the Jewish presence inside other states as parasitic, i.e., though earlier, in frightfully similar terms to Hitler’s position. Hess argued that without soil the Jews and other diasporic groups sunk ‘to the status of a parasite, which feeds at the expense of others’.39 Zionists viewed the normalization of the Jewish nation in terms of the acquisition of territory over which the Jews could exercise sovereignty. Various regions circulated in Zionist circles and featured in proposals to the governments of great powers, including Palestine, Sinai, Cyprus, Argentina and Uganda. In this respect, Zionists like Theodor Herzl saw anti-Semitism as a natural ally for the establishment of a territorial Jewish state. On the one hand, anti-Semitism was a means of self-constitution and nation-building: We are one people—our enemies have made us one without our consent, as repeatedly happens in history. Distress binds us together, and, thus united, we suddenly discover our strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a State, and indeed, a model State.40 On the other hand, anti-Semitism supported the idea of a Jewish state outside Europe as a matter of national self-interest for European states: ‘The Governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want’.41

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Archaic and diasporic states There is still another paradox. The Nazi discourse of naming the Jews in Germany as a pathological state did so on the assumption that the normal state was and should have been the Westphalian model of territorial statehood. But this Westphalian model was but a normalization of political organization, not dissociated from the secularization of the early Jewish imaginary, by which a people divinely associated themselves with a given and/or promised territory. ‘For all the land which thou seeth, I will give it to thy seed for ever’.42 Within such a perspective, when literally taken, ethnocracy is normal. There is little tolerance of other people inhabiting the land or moral reflection on national movements, past and future, to and from the land. For its constitution, the normal subjectivity was more indebted to its pathological condition than Hitler ever knew or cared to admit. Less paradoxically, the Zionist Herzl saw the normalization of the Jewish state as a new exodus from Egypt and a return to the Promised Land.43 But where lies the Promised Land? And how do individual identifications with it relate to and problematize collective ones? Let us return to a more private moment of Freudian psychoanalysis. In a passage in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud psychoanalyses a series of his own dreams ‘based upon a longing to visit Rome’.44 According to Freud, his fascination with Rome had been largely determined from childhood memories, his youthful identification with Hannibal, the Semitic general, longing to conquer Rome. In the analysis of the dream, Freud connects the latent content of this obsession to see Rome to a more general but also personal longing to see ‘the Promised Land’. When in 1901 he overcame certain health phobias that hindered travelling in the south, he became a regular pilgrim to ‘his’ Promised Land. Let us keep in mind, for the moment, this Freudian diversity in the location of the Promised Land, a point to which I will return later. It should be noted that already for Freud ‘the eternal city’ of Rome establishes a meeting point of archaic and contemporary states. It becomes an excellent illustration of the ‘general problem of preservation in the sphere of the mind’.45 This is because of the similar ‘manner in which the past is preserved in historical sites like Rome’.46 Despite his admission that there are fundamental spatial disparities between the city and the mind, Freud indulges in an analogy that Romanizes mental life. Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.47

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Rome symbolizes the co-existence of psychic images which are likewise repressed, compressed and concealed and may be retrieved or return at any given time. Mental constructions of the most archaic past are preserved in the id, just like the Roman architectural edifices of different historical periods that stand side-by-side, or remain buried below the visible layer, the city of consciousness. Still, unlike historical cities that have suffered destruction or demolition, in the case of any mind not suffering from an incurable pathological condition, nothing is lost and anything may be recovered or return no matter how far in the past it occurred. The workings of the mind—like Freud’s ideal city—are there for eternity. What could threaten that eternity is the fixation with or domination of a single historical past. Here, the Freudian cartography of the human psyche meets Freud’s own past and unconscious. According to Freud’s own analysis, his identification with the Carthaginian general and his desire to visit Rome involved another psychical dimension: ‘To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church’.48 This conflict solidified when as a boy Freud realized he belonged to ‘an alien race’ and personally experienced or heard stories of ‘Christian’ anti-Semitic feelings. Childhood fantasies of siding with the Carthaginians against the Romans in the Punic Wars were in psychological terms an unconscious revenge against Roman Catholicism. As his biographer, Peter Gay, put it: ‘He viewed the Church of Rome and its Austrian minions as the principal obstacles in the way of full Jewish integration into Austrian society… The luxuriant growth of populist racial anti-Semitism provided him with new targets of hate, but he never forgot the old enemy, Roman Catholicism’.49 By an ironic spin of events, during his lifetime and some years before embarking on Moses and Monotheism, sovereignty over the Vatican city was ceded back to the Catholic church. The Holy See therefore became a state within a state, and a state within that archaic and eternal city that served as a metaphor for the working of the mind. From this perspective, Freud’s fascination with Rome had to do also with his ‘own’ archaic state, this one relating to his Jewish background. As Freud explained in his work on group psychoanalysis, the individual’s psychical life cannot be restricted to one’s lifetime experiences and the mnemic residues of those experiences, but also concerns those experiences ‘innately present in him at his birth, elements with a phylogenetic origin—an archaic heritage’.50 Though Freud resisted the imaginative leap of the Jungian ‘collective unconscious’, he nonetheless recognized the existence of a genetic mental framework that individuals inherit and within which he also operated. This created a powerful connection for his case too: What bound me to Jewry was…neither faith or national pride… But plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible—many obscure emotional forces, which were the more

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powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction.51 Freud saw in the Christian tenacity of anti-Semitism yet another psychical conflict, an unresolved phantasm relating back to the question of patricide. It was typically articulated as a charge of Jewish non-acceptance of the act of deicide: ‘“They (the Jews) will not accept it as true that they murdered God, whereas we (the Christians) admit it and have been cleansed of that guilt.”’52 The Jew thus figured as an abnormal Christian who failed to recognize the Messiah and the crime committed against God, the truth of the New Testament. To that extent, as Pope Pius X explained to the Zionist Theodor Herzl, only if the Jews converted could the church recognize them as a people and sanction their return to Palestine: ‘If you come to Palestine and settle your people there, we shall have churches and priests ready to baptize all of you’.53 In this sense, what is most fascinating in Freud’s fascination with Rome is not his use of it as psychical illustration, or his (unconscious?) identification of the Vatican with the pathological state threatening the normal. What is most fascinating is—and given the specific archaic heritage he identified himself as carrying—the emotional and intellectual identification of Rome with ‘the Promised Land’. This peculiar charge challenged in the most provocative way the historically fixed site of the Promised Land, the sacred link between nation and territory as pursued by (and not only) the Nazis and the Zionists at the time. Though his attitude towards the territorialization of the Jews was often ambivalent, Freud refused to support the increasing immigration of Jews into Palestine and criticized the policy of changing ‘a piece of Herodian wall into a national relic, thus offending the feelings of the natives’.54 By pluralizing the Promised Land, Freud dissociates the Jewish nation from a specific or singular territory. What is more—without rejecting the possibility of inherited genetic commonalities in nations and ethnic groups—he seems to undermine the whole idea of single, non-diverse nations, with single migrations or diasporic experiences, with a single and final political destiny. The consecration of Jewish identity by the establishment of the state of Israel is fundamentally challenged by Freud, who, as Edward Said put it, ‘mobilized the non-European part (i.e., the Egyptian, non-European background of Jewish identity) in order to undermine any doctrinal attempt that might be made to put Jewish identity on a sound foundational basis, whether religious or secular’.55 To that extent, the idea of territorialized racial or national identities—a modern version of occupying the Promised Land—as normal condition is highly problematized. Territories figure not just as physical landscapes but as sites psychically invested. Psychically speaking, the Promised Land becomes a portable homeland. Furthermore, one’s Promised Land tends to betray someone else’s, when the diversity of visions is not recognized, when a single vision is formalized as sovereign and exclusive national space, as normal condition.

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In ‘Zionisms’, specifically on the diasporic experience, Emmanuel Levinas formulated an ethical and political problem: ‘Already the place—or the Diaspora, or the migrations—of the Jewish people among the nations, its antiquity as one people across the diverse and contradictory periods of History, should call into question the excluding nature of political conceptualisation’.56 The long diasporic history of the Jewish people as ‘one people’ radically exposes the multinational character as well as the normality pretensions of the territorialized sovereign state. But it also imposes on the new state of Israel an ‘ethical destiny’ and a ‘difficult freedom’ for being that ‘one extreme limit of human potential’: ‘Such a potential disturbs and irritates the awareness of sovereignty that is assumed by well-settled nations firmly installed on their lands, whose self-affirmation is sustained by the firmness of the land beneath their feet, by this certainty, this original experience of the immovable.’57 In other words, the problem of linking the nation, through sovereignty, to a specific territory, that has become the problem in and of Israel today. Another Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, put the national-territorial predicament more poetically: The peoples of the world are not content with the bonds of blood. They sink their roots into the night of earth, lifeless in itself but the spender of life, and from the lastingness of earth they conclude that they themselves will last.’58 Therein lies the illusion and danger, for [w]henever a people loves the soil of its native land more than its own life, it is in danger—as all the peoples of the world are—that, though nine times out of ten this love will save the native soil from the foe and, along with it, the life of the people, in the end the soil will persist as that which was loved more strongly, and the people will leave their lifeblood upon it… cling to the soil more than to their life as a people. Thus the earth betrays a people that entrusted its permanence to earth. The soil endures, the peoples who live on it pass.59 A Promised Land that betrays its ‘chosen people’, especially those who forget ‘that being a people means something more besides being rooted in a land’.60 That is why Rosenzweig suggests by implication that the promise of the Promised Land lies in the wandering, i.e., not in the territorial state but in the diasporic one. From this perspective, the state’s role is to facilitate the putting of a people into an orbit: ‘The state must seek to turn into an orbit that pure sequence of time to which the peoples as such are committed. It must transform the constant alternation of their life into preservation and renewal and thus introduce an orbit capable, in itself, of being eternal.’61 The potential of the Jewish (and African) diasporic state ‘as a practice of dwelling (differently), as an ambivalent refusal or indefinite deferral of return and as a positive transnationalism’ has been explored by James Clifford.62 Clifford reflects on a number of diasporic discourses, ‘anti-Zionist visions drawn from both Ashkenazic and Sephardic historical experiences’ which are critical of

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the political teleology of ‘return’ to Palestine, or elsewhere.63 Works such as those of W.D.Davies or of Boyamin and Boyamin, which are not necessarily antithetical to but often based on religious ideology, challenge the territorial dimension of Jewish identity and the idea of the exclusive national possession of land. In this sense, diaspora is not seen negatively as ‘exile’, but ‘as a theoretical and historical model to replace national self-determination’.64 This idealized vision is not meant simply to delegitimize the Jewish state or modern states en masse, but to function as a general transgressive category that recalls the road not taken in normalizing territorial statehood. As put by Clifford: Viewed in this perspective, the diaspora discourse and history currently in the air would be about recovering non-Western, or not-only-Western, models for cosmopolitan life, non-aligned transnationalities struggling within and against nation-states, global technologies, and markets— resources for a fraught coexistence.65 That is, evidently, not an easy task for the content subjects and agents of the modern state that remain attached to and defensive of its Westphalian legacy. But even then deconditioning may begin, perhaps, with a recognition that the state is more personal than political and international theory generally presents it to be. It is closer to us as a psychic occupation and desire for selfidentification.66 To that extent, states can be recognized less as entities we possess (individually or collectively) and more as things we are possessed by. The territorial state is commonly legitimated as a rational remedy, a normalization combined with an imaginary promise of redeeming a pathological condition (e.g., the Hobbesian state of nature, the Nazi and Zionist defined ‘abnormalities’). As such, even as a rational response—perhaps precisely because of that—the state can become that overwhelming pathos it is meant to eradicate.

2 Representations of sovereignty on the Himalayas

Before the summit In one of those moments of poetic licence, of sheer diplomatic ingenuity, the personal representatives of heads of state or government, responsible for the arrangement of the Group of Seven (G7) Summits, came to be known in the profession by the name of ‘Sherpas’ —the Himalayan people living on the borders of Nepal and Tibet, skilled in mountaineering.1 These newly baptized Himalayans, currently roving G7 capitals, meet officially three or four times a year to set the agenda of the summit, prepare formulae for agreement, and release press communiques. Though remaining in the background and out of media focus, it would be wrong to dismiss the Sherpas as dignified but essentially insignificant escorts and helpers who ascend summits by default. They are already held responsible for gradually changing the original G7 idea of the leaders’ ‘fireside chat’ into a more or less formal system of negotiation.2 Yet the rationale behind the employment of the term ‘Sherpa’, reserved for that exclusive summit of the powerful industrialized states, should not be neglected.3 The adoption of a vocabulary associated with the Himalayas is a means of giving further credence to the accustomed metaphor of summitry and the peak representation of sovereignty. The use of such a highly specific term, however, locates this particular type of summit diplomacy in the politically ethereal, highest and most difficult of terrains, rhetorically tying G7 meetings to—and legitimizing them as—‘the summit of summits’. In other words, this metaphor fosters conventional ways of ordering the world, celebrates hierarchy and works to shape the global imaginary by recollecting popular stories or images of mountaineering, of high or noble objective, of control, of progress, of fortitude and of human mastery. In this respect, one needs perhaps only to remember the story of how the pioneers historically negotiated ‘the summit of summits’, and how its ascent was ultimately seen to bear imperial emblems and exemplars of sovereignty.4 The reported success of the British expedition in climbing to the top of Chomolungma (Everest), on the eve of the Coronation Day of Queen Elizabeth II, was quickly declared by the media as the ‘brightest jewel of courage and

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endurance…added to the Crown of British endeavour’ and as ‘the seal on a new Elizabethan ag’.5 The New Zealand Prime Minister, Sidney Holland, also linked the event to the coronation, and saw it ‘as a symbol that there are no heights or difficulties which the British people cannot overcome’.6 That the climb of Chomolungma summit was linked to the Crown was not just a lucky coincidence, but a calculated diplomatic ploy. The message reporting the success was sent by the expedition in code to the British ambassador in Kathmandu, Christopher Summerhayes, who forwarded the news to London, ‘ensuring that Her Majesty the Queen should receive it first’,7 treating it as top secret for more than a day, and, to the dismay of many, not even informing King Tribhuvana of Nepal.8 British diplomacy coded the whole event as a hieroglyph, a pictorial metaphor interlacing historical ascents, crowning mountain and royal heads. In addition, the marks of British sovereignty were made evident in the highly political/ colonial discourse of ‘the conquest’ of the summit: ‘Everest—Everest the unconquerable—has been conquered. And conquered by men of British blood and breed.’9 Climbing the highest peak on earth symbolically annexed a final frontier, an enchanting and inaccessible territory, whose significance had already been inscribed in the colonial imaginary. For this was a terrain already mentally invaded by the Europeans, being made cartographically accessible through British sovereign practices, and even known to the West through an imperial vocabulary, bearing the name of Sir George Everest, the surveyor-general of the British empire in India. It is not surprising, to that extent, how the ascending traces of the 27 Sherpa porters of the British expedition and of their chief, Bhotia Tenzing—who accompanied Edmund Hillary to the very top—were erased by a media concerned with glorifications of national sovereignty.10 This suggests that, to invert the famous summit slogan, one of the problems with sovereignty and its representations is precisely that it—the Other—is never there.11 The Other only prepares the way for the summiteers. It has no foothold in the forefront. It cannot occupy the summit.12 The language and the logic of the summit are neither neutral nor disinterested. Nor is the discourse of sovereignty a simple, direct and literal articulation, restricted to appear in preconceived epistemological sites. Their trappings, consequently, need to be investigated not as an aberration of transparent speech, but rather with an awareness of the tropological mode of language—that is, the figurative, rhetorical and ironic twist of the words we use. Tropes are metaphoric. Metaphors are, like Sherpas, in the business of transportation, connecting signs and sites, moving by analogy and similitude to establish signification. The summit may turn out to be, for instance, a general metaphor for sovereignty: politically, as a highly dramatized meeting point of sovereigns; ethically, as a high moral ground (e.g., the ascent of Jesus, the Christian sovereign, to the mount and cross); scientifically, as a grand or final theory reaching ‘the ideal limit of knowledge’, the construction of which, as Albert Einstein says, ‘is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting point and its rich environment’;13

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philosophically, as an omnivoyant space of revelation (e.g., Nietzschean philosophy: ‘[p]hilosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains’;14 and divulged only to a superman or supermountaineer: ‘In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall in stature.’).15 However, the summit can also figure—admittedly, by imposing this image as the crown of my text—as a more specific metaphor for the intersection of the discourse of sovereignty with the Himalayas. This coming together of the two takes the metaphor seriously and at its word, signalling that the tropological mode is not external to the very process and discourse of investigating it (i.e., a caveat to the reader to be aware of the writing, of the figurative language of the critic, which discloses something only by concealing something else, which carries one to the summit only by denying one an alternative view or revelation).16 The summit, just like any metaphor, orients thinking by telling a story. Since the metaphor is a story of signification, it provides an opportunity to prise routes of thematic repatriation and outlook, that is, to consider the political ontology of metaphor itself by grounding it empirically on the Himalayas, and so also to examine, in some detail, how different claims to sovereignty in the region are tropologically staged and argued. In the maze of language, metaphors are close companions: guides, helpers, and co-travellers. They work, like Sherpas, in a discreet and unstated fashion towards the summit that is our search for meaning. Metaphors mark out the space of representation, the horizon within which concepts, like sovereignty, are formed and defined. This chapter seeks to explore the discursive contours of sovereignty by looking into altered, marginal and neglected forms of its Himalayan exposition. It assesses the political role that certain metaphors (e.g., gun-salute rating, durbar protocol and reincarnation principles) perform, by drawing together different domains to give meaning to sovereignty and contrive its presence. The chapter argues that a putatively lucid but problematic notion of sovereignty has been conventionally employed as an extralinguistic or timeless given to reify the Himalayas, to objectify the region in particular ways and then proceed to read it politically in terms of this very objectification. First, I examine how claims to sovereignty are politically allied to logics of representation. Second, I consider how the discourse of sovereignty objectified the Himalayas during the British colonial period, and how it recently framed debates concerning control over the issue of the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama of Tibet. In conclusion, I suggest that knowledge about sovereignty tends greatly to underestimate—and so urgently needs to be informed by and reconsidered through—the rhetoricalpower effects of the language employed in the signification, conceptualization and interpretation of sovereignty.

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The sovereignty of representation Sovereignty is presence, and the delight in presence.17 It is often contended that illustrations such as the above tell us more about the language or metaphors of sovereignty and less about its real value, everyday application and political effects. Such reservations seem to follow either from restrictive interpretations of sovereignty or simplistic understandings of language, or both.18 On the one hand, sovereignty is not only a question of who monopolizes legal violence, nor just an issue of internal supremacy, external equality and political independence, nor simply a channel for pursuing the highest form of self-government. Nor is it only an acclaimed principle for resisting foreign intervention and neocolonialism. Nor even is it only a device of domesticating certain matters and morally excluding others. This is not to deny that the discourse of sovereignty does address and does refer to such questions in theoretical debates and political arenas.19 On the other hand, significantly, claims to sovereignty presuppose, or prescribe, in all these instances, as I argue below, a way of confidently thinking about truth and knowledge, of speaking and ordering the world in terms of a metaphysics of presence. This is not to say that the issue of sovereignty is purely a philosophical one and, in essence, non-political. It is highly political and has serious implications for what politics is or entails and how it is approached, for it foregrounds a strategic, Cartesian device—masked as rational or commonsensical thinking—by which meanings get stabilized and references fixed. Political practices and international actions may be subsequently legitimated, based on such reified, static and already framed understandings.20 The philosophicalpolitical move of thinking of sovereignty as primarily ‘sovereign’ thinking—that is, the dominance of technical, calculative or instrumental discourse typical of policy oriented or total and systemic renditions of world politics—has only recently begun to be explored in International Relations (IR) theory with the advent of critical theory, feminist, postcolonial and postmodern critiques. The sovereignty-representation problematic can be approached in two interlinked ways: first, by looking at how sovereignty is implicated in the question of how the Other is represented, or misrepresented, or denied representation altogether; second, by looking at how sovereignty cannot be dissociated from the question of representative thought, that is, the promise of language to deliver—by indicating that something ‘is’ —historical presence or essence at will. By critically examining sovereignty and representation not separately but jointly, we examine, on the one hand, the exclusionary effect of dominant interpretations and, on the other hand, the essentializing tendency of political discourses. In this vein, it has been suggested that the discourse of state sovereignty reproduces assumptions and treats as answered fundamental questions about the nature of political community and world politics.21 In the process, political

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representation gets locked by practitioners and analysts into ‘the more general paradigm of a sovereign identity; that is, within a spatiotemporal metaphysics governed by a logic in which universality is both distinguished from and privileged over difference and diversity’.22 State sovereignty is normalized as a tight fit universal despite varied circumstances around the globe rendering political uniformity unsuitable or difficult to wear.23 In a special issue of International Studies Quarterly, Richard Ashley and R.B.J.Walker suggest, in addition, that the question of sovereignty should be extended to cover the scientific sovereignty of the IR discipline, a discipline traditionally functioning through ‘sovereign centers of interpretation and judgment’.24 They argue that the practices of the discipline do often emulate those of the sovereign state, in the way they seek to exclude ‘alien’ problematizations, police interpretive limits, and generally control epistemological processes and their legitimation. The authority of disciplinarian or other interpretive communities works, effectively, constantly to produce and stabilize the terms of reference.25 The notion of sovereignty is therefore proposed as neither ontologically independent of knowledge, nor its scholarly study an epistemically unhegemonic field. State-scientific sovereignty is not exercised separately but predicated on ‘the sovereignty of man’. The sovereignty of man is deeply linked to the idea of Enlightenment, and, as put by one of its early proponents, Francis Bacon, it far surpasses even the dominion of monarchical absolutism, implying that the latter is in constant need of the former to maintain command and control: [t]herefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen and discoverers cannot sail where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions, but we are thrall unto her in necessity; but if we would be led by her in invention, we should command her in action.26 State, scientific and human sovereignties are accomplices. The claims of the state cannot be interrogated as if the claims of the other two were not part of the scene. With modernity, the thinking ‘individual’, the Cartesian reasoning subject, becomes as much an indivisible locus of sovereignty as the state claims to be. By authoritatively re-presenting, confidently rationalizing its relations and environment, the modern subject manages to control ideas, classify objects, produce knowledge about identities, and, thus, secure meaning about them. Discursive practices put into operation representations which, by being taken as truth, render courses of action possible, natural, and unproblematic. To that extent, modern statecraft is modern mancraft ‘as an art of domesticating the meaning of man by constructing his problems, his dangers, his fears’,27 assuming or prefiguring ‘a version of human subjectivity upon which sovereignty is predicated’.28 Sovereignty becomes, in effect, a principle for organizing

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(political) reality into separate domains, implicated but treated as objectively distinct.29 Sovereignty figures also as the condition for fully, and without loss, duplicating the presence or essence of these domains, that is, disseminating knowledge and certainty about them, rather than weak thought or opinion. Claims to sovereignty, thus, propagate regimes of truth which are regimes of power. At this point, it must be clarified that there is nothing wrong per se with representation. Neither the act of naming things, nor the interpretation of phenomena, nor the practical necessity of delegation are problematic in themselves. What can be a cause for concern, however, is when high (scientific, ethical, political) authority is associated with representation, which can subsequently finalize events, systematize signification, reinforce absolutes, and determine relations between humans. Dominant representation is incidentally what is lacking, at least by some accounts, from the Eastern philosophical language: ‘[i]t lacks the delimiting power to represent objects related in an unequivocal order above and below each other.’30 By contrast, as graphically put by Paul Valéry’s Chinese scholar, for the Western mind human ‘intelligence is not one thing among many’ but worshipped ‘as if it were an omnipotent god… A man intoxicated on it believes his own thoughts are legal decisions, or facts themselves born out of the crowd and time. He confuses his quick changes of heart with the imperceptible variation of real forms and enduring Beings.’31 This is not to say, however, that in the absence of a Cartesian equivalent the Eastern mind does not or cannot engage in total and absolute representations when thinking or theorizing, or that there is no counter-tradition in Western philosophy developing in parallel with and challenging Cartesianism.32 The legitimacy of the ‘objective’ representations of human subjectivity may originate from Western philosophical sources associated with the project of modernity, secularizing divine omnipotence, radicalizing Plato’s philosopher-king, but its methodological application, far from remaining regional or civilizational, has spread worldwide. Representing sovereignty on the Himalayas The Lotus-Born One, upon seeing a crow chasing a partridge, which took refuge under a raspberry bush and escaped, thought to himself, ‘The raspberry bush represents the kingdom, the crow represents the king, and the partridge represents myself; and the significance is that I must gradually abdicate from the kingship.’33 There are some serious implications emanating from the expansion of thinking within the metaphysics of presence, within the paradigm of sovereignty, through an authorial, complete and indivisible identity. Simply put, in the case of the Himalayas, the paradigm of sovereign (national) identity, when adopted, reifies the region as a space of contesting state sovereignties—be it Bhutanese,

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Nepalese, Kashmiri, Pakistani, Indian, Tibetan, Sikkimese or Chinese ones—that are subsequently presented, rationally re-presented as geographically normal, historically evident and politically inevitable. Consequently, ‘realistic’ political action gets formulated, practically contextualized and ethicalized, through reasons and interests of sovereignty, and within the ambit of representative thought, confidently reading past presence and authoritatively restoring final presence. What follows is but a short, preliminary excursion into the problems encountered in struggles to stabilize reference and impose meaning, in events where logics of representation are allied to claims of sovereignty: The Chinese government opens to foreign inspection the magnificent and inaccessible Potala Palace in Lhasa, the now vacant, official residence of the Dalai Lama, and points to Tibetan frescoes showing the Dalai Lama lowering himself before the Chinese emperor. (Is this an instance of protocol? Is the Chinese emperor ‘Chinese’ [were the Manchus a domestic or a foreign dynasty?]? Should this be seen, as officially suggested, to be symbolic of subservience? Does this—should this—rationale apply equally to all other states whose rulers or their representatives lowered themselves, and even kowtowed, before the Chinese emperor, or for that matter the Mongolian, or Byzantine or Ottoman, in the past?) • British Prime Minister John Major refuses to meet the Dalai Lama, the leader of the Tibetan government-in-exile. US Vice-President A1 Gore meets him, and US President Bill Clinton ‘drops in by chance’. The Chinese government issues an official complaint. (What does the Dalai Lama represent? A sovereign, a religious leader, a political refugee, a Chinese criminal, an incarnate deity? Under what status should foreign governments receive him, at what level of representation, and with what purpose? Can political, religious and social matters, or private or accidental meetings, be clearly separated from each other? How far do they affect explicit or implicit recognition of Tibetan sovereignty?) • In Ladakh, India and China assume the existence of a ‘traditional boundary’ separating them, but in order to discover where it lies they have to resort to and fight over incomplete British maps and fanciful colonial delimitations. In the disputed area of the Siachen Glacier—a frontier that no one mapped during the 1947 partition—India and Pakistan continue to fight an unreported war. (The problems of places left unmarked or obscurely marked by sovereignty in a region already divided, objectified, and represented in terms of sovereignty.) • The Bhutanese government accuses India of ‘cartographic aggression’. In an Indian government official publication, a map of Bhutan suspiciously looks like another federal state of India. (This is not just an innovative, but perhaps a proper, use of the term ‘aggression’, for the map is constitutive of territory and identity, rather than just representing them, as is commonly held. Still, the representation of Bhutanese sovereignty is not unproblematic. Was the

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Maharaja of Bhutan historically any different from the other Indian princes? How is the special Bhutanese relationship with India—including Indian guidance in foreign policy and security matters according to the 1949 IndoBhutanese treaty—to be coloured? To what extent does this treaty represent the ‘limited sovereignty’ of Bhutan? How far is the light yellow colour of Bhutan on the map then appropriate or sufficiently different from the white colour of India to mark the quality of its sovereignty?) • Nepal, a Hindu kingdom, marks its territorial distinction from India. It decides on a 15-minute time difference from the single time zone of India. (In other words, the Nepali government uses the rights of sovereignty to reinscribe a condition for sovereignty, to simulate the presence of ‘national’ difference through temporal divergence.) • The traditional architectural planning of the capital of Sikkim, Gangtok, is irrevocably changing. Before the Indian merger/annexation, it used to have all of its buildings facing Mount Kanchenjunga, the protecting deity of the kingdom mythically associated with its independence, power and destiny. (Does mythical topography matter in modern ‘rational’ representations of sovereignty? If not, why is it then rhetorically appropriated and diluted by state architects concerned with inscribing, re-orienting national sovereignty?) Contemporary regional and international debates become, in this respect, essentially concerned with the validity of claims and counter-claims made in the names of these sovereign identities—thus accepting the reality of their presence —subsequently attempting to mediate their problems through negotiation or to resolve them through intervention.34 What is less examined, however, are the paradoxical effects of sovereignty—from dominant conceptualizations of power to struggles for freedom from foreign domination—on our very understanding of the region, and on the kind of politics sovereign claims could incite and prescribe. Presented as a universal, state sovereignty homogenizes and essentializes political identities, and grossly simplifies the complex network of historical relations among the Himalayan people. The discourse of state sovereignty is a borrowed language, a colonial legacy to this region.35 That is not to say, however, that there was no imagery or underpinning of supreme authority in the region before, or that mythological and artistic depictions of such authority were defunct of power implications.36 Rather, this is to recall that there was no geo-graphical discourse of sovereignty, imposing supreme political meaning upon space, charged technically and developed legally and morally as a condition for governance and independence. Demarcated states and national boundaries as we know them today have been the result of Western imperial knowledge and strategy, specifically, in the case of the Himalayas, an extension of the British occupation of South Asia. In the early nineteenth century officials of the East India Company travelling for trade missions to the Himalayas assumed that the authority of local rulers with whom they had agreements was or could be translated territorially. Thus, they were

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‘constantly watching for signs of the frontier’, observing where the rulers’ authority began and ended.37 This led to arbitrary drawings of ‘traditional’ boundaries. For example, the frontier was thought to be reached if the natives denied the British officials further access despite local letters of recommendation, or if the natives could not convey any knowledge of what lay beyond, or simply on the basis of when and where taxes had to be paid. Subsequently, the British empire imposed the frontier on ‘strategic’ grounds, while at the same time trying to get the Himalayan rulers and the Chinese empire involved in Boundary Commissions. As Lord Curzon admitted, the idea of a demarcated frontier is ‘an essentially modern conception’ and in Asia ‘there has always been a strong instinctive aversion to the acceptance of fixed boundaries… It would be true to say that demarcation has never taken place except under European pressure and by the intervention of European agents’.38 According to Walter Leifer, not only for the Himalayas but ‘for the majority of Asiatics’, the state was (and for some still is) ‘something strange, inimical, something to be avoided’.39 Typically, when the British authorities sent delegates to survey and mark the northern colonial frontier with Tibet in 1902, the Tibetans sent not a native, but a certain ‘rascal’ and ‘clever scoundrel’ from Darjeeling who ‘knew their ways’.40 This event signalled not just the problem of marking boundaries with people untrained in or unconcerned with territorial delimitation, but also registered the distinctive mark of a new era for the Himalayans, the globalizing and normalizing of Westphalia. During the process of decolonization, sovereign political authority began to be transferred to territorial entities—spaces charged with collective representation—with which the people of the Himalayas were increasingly called upon to identify, as well as, and sometimes as opposed to, their religious rulers and local dynasts. Today the principle of sovereignty and territorial statehood has become an instrumental feature for both local and global expressions, for resisting imperial domination, as well as a licence for objectification, control and gagging. In strictly legal terms, of the ancient Himalayan polities currently only Bhutan and Nepal ‘enjoy’ sovereignty, while the claims of Tibet, Kashmir and Sikkim have been superseded by Chinese, Pakistani and Indian claims of sovereignty. In practice, however, whether sovereignty effects expression or repression, power or disempowerment, radically depends on ‘who’ and ‘where’ one is: whether one is an ethnic Nepali in Bhutan, a committed Hindu in Nepal, a marginalized Lepcha or Bhutia in Sikkim, a persecuted Muslim in Kashmir, or a privileged Chinese in Tibet. The presence of state sovereignty figures in the political debates of the Himalayas as both obvious and necessary. This is rendered so through systematic forgetting. To reiterate, state sovereignty has not always been the principle the various people of the Himalayas employed to describe their political organization. That is, they did not employ the term before their encounter with the colonial reification of sovereignty and the violence of territorial delimitation.

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Nor did the discourse of sovereignty, as partially employed by the colonial powers in the Himalayas and in their adventures around the globe, necessarily have the same sense of domestic, final and complete jurisdiction, of constitutional and political independence, of external legal equality, of selfdetermination or contractuality between the rulers and the ruled, as it has in conventional IR debates today.41 This prompts the classic question of where—if anywhere, if such a locution is still of the order of knowing—does sovereignty ultimately refer to? Or a more critical array of questions: what sort of references does the discourse of sovereignty on the Himalayas produce? What altered sites and what kind of metaphors does it use? How have these been employed in practice? How is the presence of sovereignty contrived, its representation effected? The rating of sovereignty All sovereigns are equal, but some sovereigns are more equal than others.42 The British encountered in South Asia a complex system of princes (rajas and maharajas), spiritual leaders (gurus), sages (maharishis) and castes that had both fragmenting and unifying tendencies, with power centres that were territorially dispersed but integrated at different levels. Knowledge had to be produced regarding this system in order to articulate, understand and ultimately control it. What is especially interesting, for our purposes, is that British imperial knowledge in this instance did not involve the typical colonial denial of preexisting sovereignty, which would automatically legitimize occupation—either by declaring the Indian subcontinent terra nullius (belonging to no one), or as not effectively governed by any other sovereign. Instead, the colonial process of reification was more of a concerted effort to reemploy and redefine the meaning of sovereignty. The words sovereign and sovereignty were used both to describe the ‘Paramount Power’ of the British Crown and the ‘local authority’ of the numerous Indian great princes, the maharajas. However, the latter found that in different historical periods their power had to be negotiated with a variety of colonial, legal and political devices, such as the British ‘sphere of interest’, the ‘sphere of influence’, the ‘extraterritoriality’ of British agents, the limitations of the temporary or perpetual ‘lease’, the British ‘protectorate’ and, in the end, the British ‘empire’.43 The South-Asian rulers were therefore sometimes treated as ‘complete’ and at other times as ‘partial’, ‘semi’ or ‘imperfect’ sovereigns. That is, the rulers were neither treated as undisputed ‘civilized’ non-European sovereigns, like the Ottoman sultan or the Chinese emperor, nor reduced to ‘uncivilized’ African or Aboriginal chiefs. The ambiguity of this situation did not escape the attention of the Foreign Office, which by the 1880s realized that ‘[i]n India the practice had been worked out but it had not yet been embodied in

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theory or law. The time had arrived for the British government as a matter of policy to decide what the [international] law should be.’44 In short, the discourse of sovereignty was put into practice in the Indian subcontinent—particular representations were put into operation—without being given ‘positive’ legal reference or foundation. Sovereignty was yet to be theorized. Specifically, in the pre-‘Mutiny’ (pre-1857) period, Roland Inden informs us that the East India Company related with ‘the states [sic] of South Asia as though they were sovereign states’.45 During this period, British scholars also described and theorized the Indian maharajas as ‘feudal sovereigns’ (James Tod) or ‘sovereign despots’ (James Mill), thus only temporally—and as a matter of degree, rather than principle—different from the postfeudal nation-states of Europe.46 However, this approach to princely sovereignty changed with the official incorporation of India into the British empire. Scholars subsequently tended to define princely sovereignty as ‘tribal’, ‘clan’ or ‘pre-feudal’ (Alfred Lyall, Henry Maine and B.H.Baden-Powell), thus shifting it further back historically and weakening its association with the European nation-state.47 What is more, the gun-salute rating system, which the British officially adopted in 1857, provided South Asian princes with varying degrees of ‘sovereignty’ or ‘nonsovereignty’ (21, 19, 17, 15, 13, 11,…down to no gun-salutes).48 This rating system was not finally or absolutely fixed, but was constantly manipulated by the Viceroy-Governor through underrating and overrating to signal disapproval or reward loyalty. Colonial protocol offered no doubt, however, who the ‘Sovereign of Sovereigns’ was, for in the coronation of Queen Victoria as ‘Empress of India’ in Delhi on 1 January 1877 a salute of 101 salvos was fired feux-de-joie.49 Thus, the gun-salute arithmetically and unambiguously inscribed paramount sovereignty in colonial India: perhaps as an apology for theory, ceremoniously greeting the advent of the law that was to support the regime of representation thereon. The colonial reinterpretation of sovereignty, or the theoretical distinction the British authorities ultimately made between internal and external sovereignty (South Asian princes at best having the former, but definitely not the latter), was essential for legitimizing British imperial sovereignty in the region.50 What constituted princely or imperial responsibility was defined by the colonial authorities according to colonial interest and convenience. The term sovereignty was, therefore, given distinctively different tones and meanings by the colonial authorities. British sovereignty was presented as of a different quality, authority and value to that of the South Asian princes. Lord Curzon used legal rhetoric to argue his way out of the problematic of multilayered and unequal sovereignties (what John Austin described as ‘a political mongrel’),51 suggesting that even though ‘the sovereignty of the Crown is everywhere unchallenged: it has itself laid down the limitations of its own prerogative’.52 On the question of the status of colonial treaties with Indian ‘Sovereigns’, Lord Reading maintained that ‘[t]he sovereignty of the British Crown is supreme in India and therefore no ruler of an Indian State can justifiably claim to negotiate with the British Government on an

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equal footing’.53 Still, just a few months before the declaration of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli described India as ‘an ancient country of many nations’, noting that ‘this vast community is governed under the authority of the Queen, by many Sovereign Princes, some of whom occupy Thrones which were filled by their ancestors when England was a Roman Province’.54 The British colonial authorities were adept in setting up a hierarchical system that manifested not only their own difference from the princes, but also differences between the princes themselves. They utilized and recharged the system of durbars (i.e., the imperial assemblages and audiences of the Indian princes with the Moghul emperor), where the ranking of ‘Sovereigns’ was ceremoniously negotiated, and where not only the Viceroy-Governor but the ‘Sovereigns’ themselves, in effect, assumed the role of Sherpas, assisting the rise of the sovereignty of the British Crown. Specifically, [a] code of conduct was established for princes and chiefs for their attendance at the durbar. The clothes they wore, the weapons they could carry, the number of retainers and soldiers that could accompany them to the viceroy’s camp, where they were met by British officials in relation to the camp, the number of gun salutes fired in their honour, the time of the entry into the durbar hall or tent, whether the viceroy would rise and come forward to greet them, where on the viceregal rug they would be saluted by the viceroy, where they would be seated, how much nazar they could give, whether they would be entitled to a visit from the viceroy, were all markers of rank and could be changed by the viceroy to raise or lower their ranks.55 British general policy and detailed measuring of sovereignty in South Asia at the time objectified the Himalayan region within the same context of colonial practice. However, the relationship of the Himalayan princes to the British ranking system proved to be neither uniform nor consistent. Partly because of the inaccessibility of the Himalayas, and partly because the colonial authorities strategically defined the region as a natural barrier-buffer zone, they did not always figure or fully participate in the political and politicizing processes of the British empire.56 The rulers of Sikkim and Bhutan did not attend durbars in the nineteenth century, and only reluctantly began to send delegations in the early twentieth century. Sir Claude White, the first British political officer to Sikkim and Bhutan, managed to arrange a visit of the Maharaja and Maharani of Sikkim, the Tongsa Penlop of Bhutan and even the Panchen Lama of Tibet to the 1904 assembly of chiefs that gathered in Calcutta to pay homage to the Prince and Princess of Wales. In White’s words, the three rulers with their retinue: were an extraordinary collection of wild, only partly civilised creatures, especially those from Tibet, and most picturesque… It was a new

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departure, as none of the chiefs on this frontier had ever before left their mountain homes, nor had they, with the exception of one short visit of the Maharaja of Sikkim to Darjeeling, been guests of the Indian Government, neither had any high Tibetan lama before visited India.57 Following this visit, where they were impressed and were impressive, the Himalayan rulers, with the exception of the Panchen, joined in the future durbars, and so joined officially in the colonial ranking system which rated their sovereignty.58 The British colonial discourse of sovereignty had to presuppose, or through policy sought to install, unified centres of decision-making where there were often only disparate political practices. For instance, there is still uncertainty among historians concerning the first British mission to Bhutan in 1774, that is, whether the mission ever visited the place, or whether Bhutan was mistaken as a name for Tibet. Nonetheless, this mission was confidently dispatched with letters of accreditation to the Panchen Lama in Lhasa, whom the British knew from previous correspondence regarding trade routes and so casually granted him the status of ‘The Sovereign of Bhutan’.59 Subsequently, the British colonial authorities discovered that the area of Bhutan was actually ruled by a diarchy of lay and religious rulers. They bypassed this complex system in 1902, when they patronized the crowning of the first Maharaja, and the Viceroy-Governor’s complimentary letter confirmed that ‘the Maharajaship is not only a gain to Bhutan, but is of great advantage to the British Government, who will henceforth have a settled Government…to negotiate with’.60 In Sikkim the British faced the unpredictable shifting of dynastic ‘sovereignty’ that the polyandric system created, as well as Sikkimese rulers who had to be ‘persuaded’ to spend more time in their ‘own’ country, a country that nonetheless, according to the first British political officer, ‘was a new one and everything was in my hands’.61 In the case of Nepal, as William Barton suggests, while initially Nepalese rulers ‘allowed [its] sovereignty to be diminished in favour of the British Indian Government’, they increasingly followed a more independent policy. The British government apparently accepted Nepalese ‘independence’ in the 1860s, and in 1923 officially changed the designation of the British representative in Nepal from ‘Resident’ to ‘Envoy’, and the ‘Residency’ to a ‘Legation’.62 This situation was, of course, a direct result of the very good—post-1816—relations between Nepalese rulers and British authorities, rewarding Nepalese loyalty during the 1857 ‘Mutiny’ and also of the fact that Nepal remained available as a Gurkha recruiting ground for the British Army overseas. However, the British-Nepali pact of perpetual friendship of 1923, though confirming Nepal’s ‘independence’, significantly left out the word ‘sovereignty’. The choice of words was a deliberate legal move by British diplomacy to upgrade the political status of Nepal when compared to the other South-Asian principalities, whilst denying it full equality of status enjoyed by sovereign independent states in the West, or the British empire, the paramount sovereign in South Asia. It was not until the Indo-

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Nepalese treaty of peace and friendship of 1950 that ‘the complete [sic] sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence’ of Nepal were formally enshrined and pledged to be respected by India, the colonial successor.63 The marking and quality of sovereignty on the Himalayas involves a historical and highly problematic imperial vocabulary. However, it concerns and informs contemporary political rhetoric as well. The debate concerning the political status of the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim offers one recent example. Following a process that culminated in the Indian ‘merger’ with or ‘annexation’ of Sikkim in the 1970s, Indira Gandhi’s government resorted inter alia to past colonial representations to reject Sikkimese claims to sovereignty. In their claim to supremacy, Indian officials pointed out that the British gave the Maharaja of Sikkim only a fifteen and not a twenty-one gun-salute that was saved for ‘more important’ princes under the Raj. The Maharaja of Sikkim further sat in the Chamber of Princes, something that the Maharajas of Nepal and Bhutan never did.64 That Sikkim was six gun-salutes short of independent statehood, or that the air of sovereignty was stifled inside particular spaces of consultation, apparently reveals the wide range of rhetorical armoury available for claims and counterclaims to sovereignty. Interestingly, however, it is possible, through the same rationale that the Indian government used in order to deny sovereignty to Sikkim, to reach opposite conclusions. In other words, it can be argued that these signs (the number of gunsalutes and the participation in colonial chambers) do not necessarily signify the absence but the presence of sovereignty, not subserviency but instead conditions of supremacy. Namely, under the British Raj, the Maharaja of Bhutan received a fifteen gun-salute but still presides over a sovereign state today. Or one could point out the fact that the Maharaja of another Himalayan kingdom, Kashmir, received a twenty-one gun salute, but that this is neither a precondition nor an argument currently used by the Indian government to determine the status of this territory, though, in view of India’s position with regard to Sikkim, others could. Additionally, one could examine the extent to which participation in the Chamber of Princes was not presented at the time as a limitation of the ‘sovereign’ authority of a principality, but even as a dispensation of it. For example, the Conference of Ruling Princes and Chiefs which convened in 1919, two years before the Chamber of Princes was established, recommended that the term ‘Sovereign Princes’ be used for those princes joining the Chamber who had full and unrestricted jurisdiction in their ‘States’, and, subsequently, the proclamation of the Chamber specifically stated that ‘the existing rights of these States and their freedom of action will in no way be prejudiced or impaired’.65 In short, the colonial legacy of reification has left the region with many metaphors, multiple signs of sovereignty, which now serve as a semiotic pool available for pursuing national claims rhetorically. These signs cannot with finality resolve disputes over sovereignty for they cannot provide singularly or by accumulation ultimate references over either their own meaning or the

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meaning of sovereignty. However, as shown, this does not stop ‘realist’ scholars and state officials from trying to fix their meaning and stabilize their reference or, by working within a positivist view of language, objectively or empirically, from reading fixed meaning and stable references in them. The reincarnation of sovereignty The conferring of titles on Tibetan religious leaders has always been a form of embodiment of the sovereignty of the Chinese government since the Yuan dynasty.66 In a recent spiritual quest a dignified group of Sherpas (of the native as well as of the naturalized, state-representative type) found themselves climbing, yet again, the mount of sovereignty. On 30 January 1989, two days after the death of the tenth Panchen Lama—considered by most Tibetans only second to the Dalai Lama in the religious hierarchy, and by some even above him—principles were laid down by the Chinese government for the location and confirmation of his eleventh reincarnation. Simplifying the complex historical trajectory of SinoTibetan relations as an ‘exercise of sovereignty’ and, like the Indian example with Sikkim, utilizing an imperial economy of signs, the Chinese government defined the issue of reincarnation as another aspect of its sovereignty. Still, as I suggest below, the intensity of the sovereignty debate over the Panchen Lama affair tells us less about who is sovereign under international law over a certain Himalayan region or who should have control over the reincarnation issue, and more about the multiple and absurd ‘reincarnations’ of sovereignty itself—all the different transformations and reformulations this term goes through in practice. The metaphoric transportations of state sovereignty, in respect of this issue, frame—and work to effect—the illusion of its real presence, its historical continuity and political inevitability, and the privilege of those who ‘have’ it in having a final say over all kinds of affairs. Additionally, these claims to sovereignty display dependence on representative thought. That is to say, the claims are made on the assumption that there are signs and practices which, when appropriated, can disclose in an unequivocal form the presence of sovereignty. In brief, the events unfolded as follows. The Chinese government’s ‘Decision on the Funeral Arrangements and the Issue of Reincarnation’ in 1989 accepted religious tradition, specifically that the search group should be composed of the eminent lamas of the Tashi Lhumpo lamasery in Tibet. However, it added significantly that the search group was to be assisted by the advice of the China Buddhist Association, in effect bringing the questing lamas under the control of the Chinese state. The Tibetan government-in-exile, headed by the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, announced in response its own search group, having been refused participation in the ‘official’ search efforts by the Chinese authorities.67

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Following divinations and in secret collaboration with some lamas of the official group, the Dalai Lama announced on 14 May 1995 that he successfully identified a 5-year-old Tibetan boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as the eleventh reincarnation of the Panchen Lama. The Chinese government denounced the Dalai’s choice as an action which ‘negates Chinese sovereignty over Tibet’, and begins a ‘splitist’ process,68 kidnapped the identified Panchen, dismissed and branded as a traitor the head of the official group, silenced dissent among the members of the Tashi Lhumpo lamasery, which considered the matter resolved, and continued its search efforts.69 These efforts culminated in the declaration on 29 November 1995 of another Tibetan boy, Gyaincain Norbu, as the real reincarnation.70 The Chinese authorities endorsed the ‘choice’ of a new committee flown to Beijing specially for the selection, and enthroned Norbu amidst reported riots and arrests in Lhasa in December 1995.71 A month later the Dalai Lama’s choice—‘the world’s youngest political prisoner’ —was enthroned in absentia by members of the exiled Tashi Lhumpo lamasery in southern India.72 This is not the first time in the Buddhist tradition where opposing views have been strongly held about the reincarnation of major Lamas (e.g., Dalai, Panchen and Karmapa). Nor is it the first time in Tibetan history where foreign powers, be it Mongolian, Chinese, British or Nepalese, have interfered to support particular reincarnations or particular sects against others.73 In view of this, the Dalai Lama’s position—that the Panchen’s reincarnation should be strictly treated as a spiritual issue—was perhaps more wishful thinking than a lesson drawn from history.74 Despite ironic accusations against the Dalai Lama for ‘politicizing’ the issue, the Chinese government maintained all along that this was not simply a religious matter, but a test of loyalty and confirmation of national authority.75 The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson and other government and party officials had on many occasions during that period consistently defined the search efforts and Panchen confirmation as a matter of ‘state sovereignty’ (safeguarding or exercising it), and accused foreign governments, such as those of the United States, Australia, India, France and Germany, of interfering in the domestic affairs of China by giving support to the Dalai Lama over this issue.76 Chinese scholars further endorsed the view that the Dalai Lama’s declaration of ‘the real reincarnation of the tenth Panchen Lama has damaged the sovereignty of the central government’.77 They also stated that ‘the government should never give up its rights to sovereignty in this matter, otherwise the state will have no dignity as a state’.78 During the same period the Tibetan pro-independence movement, and in particular the government-in-exile, began to consider the serious political implications if such a situation were to be repeated in the case of the Dalai Lama’s future reincarnation, since the Dalai is constitutionally the ex officio head of the Tibetan state. In other words, by ‘hijacking’ the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama (which is not just confirming a certain person to the post, but also being in charge of his special education from an early age) the Chinese government could also hijack, in effect, his de jure authority.79 To avoid this, the

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Dalai Lama announced that he will not be reincarnated inside a Chineseoccupied Tibet.80 Note that, similarly, the idea that sovereignty can be succeeded to or transmigrated from one political regime to another is the main assumption under which China historically justifies its current occupation of Tibet. The People’s Republic, notwithstanding its revolutionary rhetoric, is presented as a corporeal ego, ‘embodying the sovereignty’ of the feudal imperial dynasties. Specifically, in this instance, the Chinese government capitalized on its imperial inheritance to maintain that the principles enshrined in the ‘Constitution for Coping with the Aftermath of a Disaster in Tibet as Compiled and Published by Imperial Order’ should be strictly followed in the reincarnation process. Article 1 of the ‘Imperial Order’ prescribes that the identification of short-listed major lamas (e.g., Hutuketu, Panchen and Dalai) should be conducted by drawing lots from the golden urn in front of the statue of Buddha Sakyamuni at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa.81 The Chinese government sought the strict observance of this rule for the identification of the Panchen Lama, pointing out that the eighth Dalai and seventh Panchen welcomed this condition in 1792, and that the deceased tenth Panchen reportedly made this his final wish five days before his death.82 This old rule offered a considerable advantage to the Chinese government of the 1990s. By being in control of Lhasa, it could ensure that the Dalai Lama’s choice was never put in the lots to be drawn from the golden urn, and even if the golden urn was smuggled out of Tibet, as feared at the time, it would still not meet the condition of the drawing of lots taking place in front of the statue of Sakyamuni, thus bearing divine judgement and authority. The rhetorical play over the location of sovereignty has been extensive and deserves to be examined in detail. The Chinese authorities argued that the golden urn was indicative of their long established control over the reincarnation issue, since the urn had been granted to the eighth Dalai Lama by the Chinese emperor. That an imperial gift, despite its functionality in an election procedure, can subsequently become a paramount sign, and attain a political status signifying ultimate control, points directly to the core problematic of the simulated character of sovereignty. By registering the golden urn as a sign of sovereignty, the Chinese government rendered it as a front upon which contesting sovereignties were to clash, and in the process be constituted. As the Tibetan government-in-exile argued, the golden urn was neither a fully historically endorsed nor a traditionally exhaustive symbol. It was only one of twenty-nine suggestions made by the Manchu emperor to the eighth Dalai Lama, which were not original, nor mandatory, as the relationship between them was that of patron and priest rather than of sovereign and subject. Since the establishment of the system, only three Dalais (tenth, eleventh, twelfth) and two Panchens (eighth and ninth) were identified from the golden urn. More importantly, only in one case (that of the tenth Dalai Lama) was this done in front of the statue of Sakyamuni. In the case of the other four identifications, the drawing of lots took place in the Potala Palace.83 In other words, the use of the

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urn had not been a recent practice, which was proved by the fact that neither the deceased tenth Panchen nor the current fourteenth Dalai were identified from the golden urn under the Imperial Order. In short, the system of drawing lots from the golden urn was only one of many other ways of identifying short-listed candidates, though clearly (if defined as such) inscribing Chinese authority when it was followed, and resisting it when not. As it happened, a different, equally authentic system in the Tibetan tradition was followed in the case of the Dalai’s identification of the Panchen Lama (i.e., identifying the reincarnation through the cake, rice-ball, drawing of lots).84 The abbot of the Tashi Lhumpo lamasery in Tibet, before his removal by the Chinese authorities and subsequent disappearance, repeated the drawing of lots and confirmed the identification in front of the stupa of the deceased Panchen Lama in question.85 The Chinese government, however, registered another sign of sovereignty. It insisted that as far back as the Yuan dynasty (1280–1368) Tibetan political and religious leaders were appointed by the Chinese imperial authorities, and that by the time of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) the search, confirmation and installation of all Dalai and Panchen Lamas had to be reported by the Tibetan regents to the Chinese emperor. The Chinese government claimed that reporting the succession to the Chinese emperor was not a post facto announcement, but a means of seeking approval. Even the current fourteenth Dalai Lama, the Chinese authorities pointed out, reported and received confirmation from the ‘sovereign’ at the time; that is, the Kuomintang nationalist government, whose representative, Wu Zhongxin, presided over the enthronement in Lhasa on 22 February 1940. It must be noted, though, that the current Dalai Lama rejects the view that in reporting his ascent he actually sought government confirmation or approval to undertake his spiritual functions. It was the Tibetan National Assembly that confirmed the fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1939. As to the Chinese envoy, the Tibetan government-in-exile insists that he was one of many guests at the enthronment, which included emissaries from Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal and British India, and, despite Chinese nationalist propaganda at the time, that this envoy ‘had no special role to play’.86 Claims to sovereignty also extended to the theological discussions, reading challenge to its exercise through religious hermeneutics. The Chinese discourse of state paramountcy sought not to exclude totally the value of religious principles on the matter of reincarnation. Instead, it employed these principles by offering absolute interpretations and authoritative judgements on their application. The authorities decided, for example, that there was a ‘deliberate delay’ by the Tashi Lhumpo lamasery to move from the so-called first stage search for the Panchen (praying, chanting scriptures, distributing alms and observing prophetic visions in the holy lake, Chokhor Gyal Latsho) to the socalled second stage search (conducting secret searches and asking candidates to identify the Panchen’s belongings).87 The Chinese government was particularly critical of some lamas of the search group who wanted to view the holy lake once more. The government considered this to be an already completed task and

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branded their action ‘illegal’. Furthermore, it considered the search group’s seeking of any outside spiritual guidance other than the officially assigned advisory body to be a scheme to undermine sound religious opinion. These ‘problems’ dominated the second meeting that the central authorities convened on the search efforts on 20 July 1993. The meeting was aimed at laying down ‘requirements on accelerating the search efforts, seeking unity in thinking, and gaining a better understanding of the work’.88 On behalf of the Chinese State Council, comrade Luo Gan, state counsellor and secretary general, clarified to the participants the five principles that the search committee had to adhere to in its search: (1) patriotism; (2) carrying out the search only in China (thus restricting the reincarnation to Chinese citizens); (3) accepting that the Tashi Lhumpo lamasery should be in charge (i.e., no outside intervention that was not assigned by the government was allowed); (4) requiring the approval of the central authorities for short-listed candidates and for the final choice; and (5) requiring the installation ceremony and training to take place in the Tashi Lhumpo lamasery (i.e., rejecting the Buddhist master-disciple doctrine, which would grant the Dalai Lama the right to get involved in the Panchen’s education).89 As evidence of government commitment, the search group was generously offered vehicles, escort and other facilities, in order to move to and speedily complete the so-called second stage: the supposedly secret search for candidates. It is precisely at this juncture of the debate that one begins to realize the intense intertwining of sovereignty with representation. The political implications of the alliance of claims to sovereignty with representative thought were hereby exposed: specifically, in the attempt to stabilize the references that are to guide action and explain events. Again, Chinese government propaganda has been generous with illustrations of the point, this time in directly addressing Tibetans through a widely circulated paper with 58 questions providing official answers to crucial points on the reincarnation of the Panchen. In this paper ‘the Dalai clique’ is accused of ‘messing up people’s thinking’, which, in turn, points to the urgent need ‘to unify our thinking and deepen our understanding’.90 Three questions and answers are telling in themselves, exemplifying how the Chinese government has sought to frame a particular representation of the reincarnation process, suggesting that any deviation is a direct challenge to Chinese sovereignty. Question 52: In this struggle, on what basis should we unify our thinking? Answer: On the basis of earnestly studying and comprehending in depth the relevant guidelines, we should deepen our understanding and unify our thinking. On what should we unify our thinking? We should unify our thinking on the principles and policies laid down by the central authorities concerning the appointment of a reincarnated child of the 10th Panchen, on the series of important instructions and plans set forth by the Party Central Committee since the Dalai announced on

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14th May without authorization the reincarnated child of the 10th Panchen, on the historically established system and religious formality and procedures, on upholding our national sovereignty and the central authorities’ authority and prestige, on maintaining Tibet’s stability, and on opposing splitting and trouble making. As long as we unify our thinking on these things, we will have an extensive ideological foundation and assurance for Panchen’s reincarnation work.91 In similar fashion, Question 53 deals with the principles that the Chinese authorities required adherence to in the reincarnation issue. The answer: ‘[w]e should adhere to the following points in our thinking, speech and action’ and denounce the Dalai Lama’s choice as ‘completely illegal and invalid’; insist that the issue should be ‘free from the Dalai Lama’s interference and influence’; insist on religious rituals and historical conventions and identification by drawing lots from the golden urn; and insist that the results of the search ‘should be reported to and approved by the central government’.92 Finally, an ominous Question 54 asks ‘what policy boundaries should we attach importance to’ in the struggle against ‘the Dalai clique’? The answer: [w]e should pay attention to the following four boundaries. First, we should distinguish between those who are patriotic and those who are not. For those who are patriotic, we should welcome them and give them support and enthusiastic encouragement. For those who are not patriotic, we should educate and save them if they can be educated and saved… Second, we should distinguish the deeds of the majority from that of the minority. An overwhelming majority of monks and ordinary people in our region are loyal to the central authorities… An extremely small number of people, who are colluding with the Dalai Lama, are the scum of Buddhism. Third, we should distinguish those who have made wrong remarks from poor judgement from those who are stubborn. ‘No man is perfect in every respect’ Those who have made wrong remarks or even made mistakes because of ignorance of the facts are to be pardoned and sincerely welcomed by the party and the people so long as they repent, take a firm position, and reveal the separatist deeds of the extremely small number of people… Fourth, we should distinguish normal religious activities from those which aim at political purposes under the disguise of religion…we should resolutely crack down on those people who use religion for their own ends, attack the party and the government by using religion as a bargaining chip, attempt to split the motherland and sabotage stability and unity.93 In sum, by marking the ‘four boundaries’ of thought, the Chinese government has sought to control how the reincarnation affair is represented and thereby to fix a specific version of events, a supreme interpretation reigning over alternative

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forms of thinking about it. False, unpatriotic, abnormal, stubborn and unauthorized depictions crossing the boundaries are seen as directly challenging the exercise of Chinese sovereignty. The processes for safeguarding the unity of state and the unity of thinking become indistinguishable boundary-setting activities, intertwining the Chinese nation and given context as endangered spaces requiring protection, policing and violent enforcement. Dismounting sovereignty Sovereignty lies only in the mastery of appearances, and complicity lies only in the collective sharing of illusion and secret.94 Despite conventional presentations of its primordiality and utility, state sovereignty appears to be a historically specific, theoretically overdetermined, and often politically problematic rendition of world politics. The Himalayan example should not be approached as the exception which proves the rule of sovereignty and affects the legitimacy of its norm.95 The illustrations discussed form part—a rarely reported and marginalized one—of the global architectonics of sovereignty and the subsequent political and verbal edifices they install worldwide.96 Of course, that is not to say this is how sovereignty is universally applied or rationalized. As shown from the Himalayan case, and contrary to positivistic accounts, the referent of sovereignty was not stable but constantly changing—recontextualized through the operation of metaphor— finding its way to the most altered spaces. The meaning of sovereignty had to be narrated, often articulated in contradictory terms, and explained by tracing other referents and producing new ones. These referents of sovereignty were essentialized and became dominant in different historical moments, not only by excluding other forms of political representation, but also by assuming that representational form, appropriating the presence or essence of sovereignty, was the only (meaningful) way of conveying political problematics and disclosing the ‘real world’ of the Himalayas. A map of the Himalayas displaying sovereign states also displays a cartography based on historico-topographical amnesia, and a global imaginary tied to specific theoretical and geopolitical predicates.97 It is true that sovereignty is a useful word that commonly describes claims to final and absolute authority in the Himalayas and elsewhere, but what should not be forgotten is that it is a word also technically applied to effect just that. Those who have it mount high. How should one, then, engage with the practices and current representations of sovereignty? It has been suggested that, in the absence of an ultimate referent, the problem of sovereignty is no longer of the order of representation—that is, no longer a task of trying to distil the essence of its referent or simply to examine critically how it is fabricated—but of simulation, that is, moving from one sign of sovereignty to another, from metaphor to metaphor, feigning its existence.98

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Accordingly, I think that the theoretical task should be to point out this critical movement, exposing how it is rhetorically effected, disclosing what its power implications are; in other words, staging the staging of representation while dislocating the presence of sovereignty, the presence of dominant objects and identities. This approach may offer an advantage in bringing the debate beyond the crude observations of representational logic, such as the self-referential, selfsustaining truisms of how states exhibit the presence of sovereignty through policies enacted in the name of sovereignty, or always follow their own interests in performing functions contextualized as national interest. It may also offer a strategic opening from which to prise foundational assumptions and rigid structures of more sophisticated representational projects, like neo-Marxist or cosmopolitan theses, which may substitute sovereignty and national interest with globalism and emancipation.” The instability and manipulation of political referents, the constant shifting of contexts and chains of signification, mean that our rich and complex experience of world politics lies beyond the fancy models or final vocabularies of IR theory. Global affairs cannot be securely represented or totally theorized, not because the existence of sovereign practices precludes normative analysis, as Martin Wight suggests, but rather because claims to sovereignty, individual or collective, can no longer (if they ever could) guarantee the stability of norms.100 In an increasingly postmodern world, challenging the existence of secure foundations for acquiring knowledge, such claims can only pretend to validate paradigmatic standards of knowing. To that extent, we need to move to a more an-archic, less principled, less technocratic and systematic view of politics, and one where prose could provide a manner of speaking that is less indebted in negotiating the sovereignty of the discipline, or the sovereign presence of agents.101 Political prosaics could, thus, be a way of telling those other stories, retrace those tropological expeditions that mark out the spatial imperatives within which representation is both made possible and tied to epistemic sovereignty. A critical attitude towards sovereignty, towards the logocentrism of representative thought, should, however, be cautious of not leading to a generalized anti-representative or mimetic hostility. Derrida explained this tendency elegantly. A criticism or a deconstruction of representation would remain feeble, vain, and irrelevant if it were to lead to some rehabilitation of immediacy, of original simplicity, of presence without repetition or delegation, if it were to induce a criticism of calculable objectivity, of criticism, of science, of technique, or of political representation. The worst regressions can put themselves at the service of this antirepresentative prejudice.102 The trap of delegitimizing each and every act of representation in a grand theoretical sweep must be avoided, but at the same time the political and global implications of homogenizing thought, speech, action, attitude and way of living

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should be seriously addressed. In challenging dominant representation, it may not be appropriate or sufficient just to reject and reverse, just to provide opposing references and counter-representations, simply to shift meaning to new mounts and abodes, and declare the truths of a new logos. It may be necessary to infiltrate and subvert regimes of representation from within, that is, engage in radical hermeneutics, apply creative catachresis, accept non-teleological movement, and perhaps be content with a voyeuristic, meditative understanding, not always utilizable, not corresponding to specific philosophical or conceptual realms.103 This latter route, however, should neither take a methodological form nor acclaim para-mountcy, dismiss one set of political metaphorics over another. For, significantly, the politicization of metaphor—the task of unfixing, staging the shifting of meaning from one context to another, manifesting the remainder of translation when one term replaces and is used for something else—is a practice required in order to keep investigating and deconstructing sovereignty. It should be acknowledged that if one chooses contingency or transcendence of spatial imperatives, one might not be able to determine who the real reincarnation of the Panchen Lama is, or resolve the dilemma of the policymaker on whether Sikkim is a sovereign state or not. Still, one may achieve a small step—a politically enabling step—towards viewing the politicized Sherpa, that representative of sovereignty and fixer of summit deals, also as the metaphor of it, as the metaphoreas or carrier of tools and knowledge, which may be employed in servicing the ascendancy of sovereignty, but also for resisting it.

3 Piracy, knight-errantry, statehood

In a piratic attack narrated on the way to Eldorado, the victorious outlaws ironically enforce the rule of international law. Lining their captives on deck, stripping them stark naked, the pirates proceed with a ritual fingering of their private orifices in search of diamonds. A young captive who enjoys the experience but finds the practice irregular is corrected by the more learned and told this is a custom practised ‘among civilized seafaring nations’ and to that extent ‘an established point of international law which has never been called in question’. It was performed most consistently by ‘the Maltese Knights of St John’, who ‘never fail to observe it when they capture any Turks and their ladies’.1 Voltaire is certainly having his fun at the expense of European civility and ecclesiastical morality. The captured nobility enjoy the treatment and mannerisms of unscrupulous adventurers. The Knights of St John enrich themselves by liberally handling infidel bodies despite their monastic vows of poverty and chastity. Voltaire’s parallelism of knights with pirates thus engineers an inversion of roles and norms; the pirates are commonly viewed as outcasts, offensive to the civilized society of states, whereas the knights, supposedly, as its high and noble protectors. The ‘obscenity’ of national custom transgresses the moral frame of international law, exposing the arbitrary and dissembling image of legal identity. By focusing on the piratic and immoral activities of the Sovereign Order of St John (the Knights of Malta), Voltaire pursues a radical semiology—a semiology that has eyes for the transversal, words for the irregular. Contrary to Voltairian vision, the irregular tends to escape the conventional frame of international relations knowledge.2 The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (as it is formally known) is a neglected actor in world politics. That is, even though it is currently recognized by more than ninety states as a sovereign entity on a par with states, having full diplomatic relations despite lacking territory, one of the formal conditions of statehood under international law.3 In this chapter I examine how the legal status historically accorded to the Order was used to legitimate violent international activities and organized piracy, something that in Voltairian fashion blurs the distinction and exposes the discursive character of knight/pirate and law/ crime. I then move to investigate the legal claims and interpretations put forward

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to justify the missing principle of territory, which is considered to be the ‘hard’ and ‘objective’ prerequisite for inter-state recognition. By focusing on transversal and irregular practice, I seek to challenge the kind of analysis pursued through universals that claim to unproblematically represent ‘the rules of the game’ of international relations. As the political and historical specificities of the Order illustrate below, a more critical attitude towards international legal discourse and the constitution of legal subjectivity is required to account for the continuous practice of sovereign knight-errantry. The other face of knighthood The concept of religious knighthood as developed during the crusades contradicted and so had to overcome two principles of the early Christian church: first, the idea of pacifism, which could not accept the notion of armed priests; second, the idea of religious charitable service, that is service not done for personal glorification and private gain. The first problem was addressed through a skilful redefinition of militia Christi, a crude interpretation of Paul’s parallelism of those engaging in spiritual struggle as ‘soldiers of Christ’. Also, through a more militant application of the Augustinian just war doctrine, Christian pacifism was in effect transformed into a holy war—a war against the enemies of peace. There was no lack of ecclesiastical and political precedents morally to support these ideas, either in the image of soldier-saints like St George, or in the symbol of the cross leading the army of Emperor Constantine, or in the papal sanctions of Charlemagne’s military expeditions. Popes Leo IX in 849 and John X in 915 even accompanied armies to fight Muslim pirates at the Tiber river.4 To that extent, given the circumstances, it was not so difficult to move to the next logical step of military Christian orders. St Bernard of Clairvaux in his famous apologia De laude novae militiae (In praise of the new soldiery), encapsulated their purpose with the motto: ‘In the death of the pagan, the Christian is gloried because Christ is glorified’.5 St Catherine of Siena went further, urging the Knights of St John before a crusade to ‘bathe yourself in the blood of Christ crucified’.6 Secondly, the profiteering side of secular knighthood was resolved by complete renunciation, that is, by requiring religious knights to take the monastic vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. In this respect, St Bernard’s apologia turned into an attack on what he saw as the luxury and indolence of secular knights as opposed to the poverty and zeal of the religious ones. Playing on the word, he accused secular knights of not being real soldiers (‘militiae’) but knaves (‘malitiae’). The new soldiers of Christ, by contrast, fighting both a temporal and a spiritual conflict, were not to deviate from Christian moral precepts or be separated from the love of God.7 Bernard’s confidence about the noble spirit and beyond-reproach conduct of the new religious knighthood proved grossly optimistic. Even from within the church there were widespread criticisms that the military orders fell short of

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what was ethically expected of them (and that is long before the famous trial of the Knights Templars, their dismantling and incorporation with the Hospitallers, and the auto-da-fé of their Grand Master in 1308). The Hospitallers, like all other religious knights, got involved in the internal politics of the crusading kingdoms and were ‘forced’ to engage in dubious campaigns to protect their institutional rights. As dramatised in The Jew of Malta, ‘policy’ was the Hospitallers’ profession, ‘[a]nd not simplicity, as they suggest’.8 The local church in Jerusalem complained that the knights were abusing their papal privileges. The Hospitallers were the subject of accusations that they openly accepted people during interdictions to enjoy the oblations, offered religious rites on payment to the excommunicated, and enlarged their hospice to ‘a more sumptuous building than the near-by church of the Holy Sepulchre’, a sign of their growing vanity. When the Patriarch of Jerusalem complained, he was insulted and ridiculed by the Hospitallers, who ‘deliberately rang their bells’ every time he preached, so that he could not be heard by the faithful. The Patriarch’s direct appeal to the people was met by an unambiguous show of force, when the Hospitallers entered the church of the Holy Sepulchre and showered the grotto with arrows.9 In addition, the Knights Templars and Hospitallers became fully involved, often in opposite camps, in the internal politics and strifes of the Christian kingdoms of Jerusalem and Antioch. The Templars generally favoured the baronial camp, whereas the Hospitallers the royalists. Given the revenues and financial exceptions they gained over their possessions, both Orders were accused of losing sight of their religious mission. Sometimes they were too eager to go to war to enforce ‘theoretical rights’ given to them over unconquered lands or to defend possessions delegated to them by feudal lords. At other times, the Orders were criticized of being too reluctant to enter into conflict with ‘the infidel’, if a change of status quo could endanger their possessions or temporary alliances. For example, the Egyptian campaign of 1168, which was fiercely promoted by the Hospitallers and opposed by the Templars, was, according to William of Tyre, a profit-making expedition devised by the Grand Master of the Hospitallers as ‘a last desperate attempt to recoup the finances that he had squandered’.10 The defeat of the brethren in this adventure for booty saw the rise of Saladin, the great hero of Arab-Muslim history, and the beginning of the end of the Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land. In sum, the activities of the religious knights during this period did not differ in principle or practice from the mercenary, privateering and filibustering activities of European adventurers in their continent and later around the globe. Though not all religious knights were politicking, profiteering or lost their crusading zeal, it is generally accepted that the religious military orders did not exactly stay in touch with the pronounced ‘moral objective’. The low-entry standard Pope Urban II set in his mobilizing call typically re-emerged: ‘Now become soldiers of Christ, you who once were robbers. Now legally fight against

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barbarians, you who once fought against brothers and blood relations… those who were the enemies of the Lord, now these will be his friends’.11 Not everyone made, or felt they had to make, this moral conversion. After the fall of Acre in 1291 and their retreat from the Holy Land, the Knights of St John succeeded in redefining their mission and reinventing their role. Moving via Cyprus to Rhodes and finally to Malta, they dismounted their horses, boarded galleys and became knights-corsairs pursuing ‘the infidel’ at sea. While in Cyprus, they diverted their interest away from repossessing Jerusalem for a more practical project. The Grand Master, Fulk de Villaret, made an agreement with a Genoese pirate, Vignolo de Vignoli, on a plan to capture Rhodes and some other Dodecanese islands. Two-thirds of the booty and subsequent revenues was to go to the Order, and one-third to the pirates. Subsequently, Pope Clement V issued a Bull confirming Rhodes as a possession of the Order, though it is still unclear whether this was done before or after the capture of the island.12 Rhodes under the Knights was to become an important centre for corsairing and slave-trafficking. The crusading mission became not just an activity of secondary importance, but a parergon. The knight-corsair was more a mixture of pirate and merchant employing religious discourse to legitimate violence, repression and profiteering. Among the many plunderings of Muslim shipping and ports was the infamous sack of Alexandria in 1365. It started as a crusade, together with Lusignian Cypriots, but motivated by the unimaginable booty in Alexandria, the Knights returned and carried out terrible massacres of the local population and the burning of most of the city, including the great library with its unique collection of ancient manuscripts.13 Moreover, at least from 1413 onwards, the Order developed a corso system of licensed privateering for individuals, who used the Order’s flag and paid a levy on profits.14 Moving to Malta after the loss of Rhodes in 1522, knight-corsair activity reached its golden peak, and the island became a magnet for ‘footloose Europeans’. The Order continued to harass Levantine shipping and attack NorthAfrican ports under Ottoman rule. Letters of marque were given more frequently by the Order, and sometimes individuals were even allowed to sail under the Grand Master’s flag, to technically overcome corso restrictions imposed by the Pope. Specifically, ‘an elaborate schedule of distribution reserved 11 per cent of the booty to the victorious captain, 10 per cent to the Grand Master, and so on down to a small proportion set aside for the nuns of St Ursula’.15 So successful was the Order that by 1647 it was ready to expand to the buccaneering market and taste some Caribbean fame. The Order acquired, though only for a period of eight years, the islands of St Christopher, St Croix, St Bartholomew, half of St Martin and significantly Tortuga, a renowned centre of buccaneers, and where ‘a more active policy of freebooting’ was initiated.16 It is at this juncture of the debate that one begins to get a clearer view of international law’s complicity in the historical affair of the Knights of St John. It is important to realize how the crusading and corsairing activities of the Knights

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did not take place in a legal vacuum. The support of the Popes and Christian rulers in different historical periods was based on juridico-rhetorical rationales, which provided the Order with its raison d’être and legitimated its practices as normal or civilized ‘international’ conduct. The problematic and hairsplitting distinctions the law of nations offered between privateering and piracy, authorized and unauthorized violence, provided not only the Order of St John but European states too with wide room for manoeuvre in this area. The retort of the pirate to Alexander the Great, ‘elegant and truthful’ as recalled by St Augustine, hit the nail exactly on the head: ‘Because I do what I do with a small ship, I’m called a pirate; you, doing the same with many ships, are called a great emperor’.17 In other words, the difference is not in what we do, but in the different designations given to what we do according to who we are. In this respect, the development of international law in this area did not only concern the criminalization of piracy and the violence of private agents. For, in the process of effecting this, international law also legitimized and encouraged ‘official piracy’ in the form of privateering, as well as the violent pursuits of individual adventurers authorized in advance or endorsed post facto as acts of sovereignty. Specifically, the law of privateering allowed private owners of vessels to sail under a commission of war and, thus empowered by the authority of state, ‘to carry on forms of hostility which are permissible at sea by the usages of war’.18 Due authority of state was what was lacking with acts of piracy, which were violent acts ‘by a body of men acting independently of any politically organized society’.19 So, in effect, the privateers were allowed to attack any commercial vessel of the enemy or cooperating with the enemy, sharing their loot with the sovereign. In practice, the distinction between piracy and privateering was further blurred by letters of marque authorizing private reprisals during peacetime, as a means to seek redress for depredations suffered by foreigners during wartime.20 Moreover, even while piracy was branded illegal, pirates were often tolerated, sometimes encouraged by European states, if their activities were directed against those states’ economic and political competitors. Famous piratesprivateers often moved from one role to the other, cutting through the lines of legality-illegality. Some notorious ones, like the Sea Dogs, were even knighted for their service.21 As Thomson argues, the history of ‘European piracy reveals how culpable states were in perpetuating it.’ The state would authorize privateering, which was legalized piracy, during wartime. When the war concluded, thousands of seamen were left with no more appealing alternative than piracy. The state would make some desultory efforts to suppress the pirates, who would simply move somewhere else. With the outbreak of the next war, the state would offer blanket pardons to pirates who would agree to serve as privateers, and the process would start all over again.22

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By officially sanctioning forms of violence by private agents when reasons of state so demanded—repackaging and reinterpreting criminally-defined activities — states as authors of international law encouraged the very practices they officially condemned. The concept of ‘plausible deniability’, invented at the beginning of the seventeenth century, offered European rulers ‘maximum freedom with minimum responsibility’, on the one hand fully embracing private undertakings as public when they offered political or economic advantages to the state, and on the other severing representation, denying responsibility, if they caused problems or unwanted conflicts.23 By selective causality and interpretation it was possible to employ legal discourse both to legitimize and delegitimize the same act. That was until the final denial of all forms of privateering, its ultimate transformation ‘from “patriotic piracy” into “a Kind of Piracy which disgraces our Civilization”.’24 Still, what is particularly interesting in the case of the Mediterranean corsairs, beyond the bias of international legal discourse on the side of sovereignty, are the limitations of international norms to account for phenomena which exceed their representational capabilities, i.e., that run against the established forms of the ‘realist’ IR scene. It is especially intensified in this case because Mediterranean corsairing oscillated across the boundary of privateering/piratical acts, but also that of religious/secular, national/international, neutral/hostile and state/nonstate ones. On one side, the Barbary corsairs operated from states on the coast of North Africa whose ultimate status was unclear, i.e., nominally under the control of the Ottoman empire but at different historical periods, especially from the early seventeenth century onwards, practically independent. Also, though predominantly Muslim, the Barbary corsairs included Christian Europeans who introduced new naval strategies and even became leaders of Barbary states. Finally, though branded barbarians and excluded from the European society of states, they were in constant contact and reached numerous agreements with ‘civilized’ European states, through which they were given payments for the protection of these states’ commerce, which practically amounted to financing and encouraging Barbary attacks on the ships of competitors. On the other side, the Maltese knights-corsairs, though practically engaging in the same business, were often selected from the cream of European nobility. As monks and priests, they were soldiers of Christ fighting a religious war and thus using the sanction of hostility to differentiate their attacks from Moorish piracy. As an international order, its members covered a wide range of nationalities, but from which the Knights did not dissociate during their service. The influence of the French knights was most significant and corsairing activities were often openly financed by French capitalists, which created further legal complexities in the numerous cases when France signed alliances with the Ottoman empire. The knights-corsairs operated from a practically independent principality in Malta, which nonetheless, having been given as a fiefdom, meant that the Order and its Grand Master still ‘owed feudal vassalage to whoever should be the ruler of

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Sicily, the king of Spain and later the Bourbon kings’.25 That was as well as being under the ultimate paramount control of the Holy See. Finally, by making common use of flags of convenience, especially registering their ships under the Tuscan flag, the knights-corsairs were legally entitled and thus able to attack not only Muslim but also Christian Greek vessels, something that the religiously defined constitution of the Order specifically prohibited. Statehood, missing territory and legal interpretation Why is it, then, that a Catholic order of knighthood, with such a dubious reputation during and after the crusades, presently has such a privileged international status? What is the basis under which, without possessing or claiming territory, the Order currently receives recognition from many states, enjoys the right of active and passive legation, signs international treaties and is a member of international governmental organizations, when, since the Treaty of Westphalia, these practices are supposed to be exclusive features of territorial statehood? Though rarely addressed, the significance of this problematic has not totally escaped the attention of legalists. As put in Oppenheim’s International Law, by reflecting primarily on the status of the Holy See but also referring to the Order, the ‘true significance [of this problematic] in international law lies in the fact that international personality is here recognized to be vested in an entity pursuing objects essentially different from those which have hitherto composed the society of states.’26 Malcolm Shaw also briefly mentions the ‘special case’ of the Order in his chapter on the subjects of international law.27 Finally, Ian Brownlie addresses the issue in passing, suggesting that ‘[it] would seem that the personality of political and religious institutions of this type can only be relative to those states prepared to enter into relationships with such institutions on the international plane.’28 The most comprehensive attempt to interpret this ‘anomaly’ from an international legal perspective has been Professor Aldo Pezzana’s submission, endorsed by the Order and issued as an official publication.29 Pezzana examines first the formal diplomatic relations of the Order with other states, as well as its contacts with states with which paradiplomatic relations exist. He then looks at the numerous international conventions concluded by the Order and assesses in more detail the relations of the Order with Italy (the Order’s seat is currently at Via de Condotti 68, Rome), the Holy See and international organizations. He submits that these international relations and agreements provide ample evidence that the Order enjoys both internal and international sovereignty, despite losing its territory in 1798, when the island of Malta was occupied by Napoleon and then, as recognized in the Treaty of Paris (1814), annexed by Britain. Pezzana’s legal account is competent yet ideological, based on a specific understanding of world politics that is statecentric, Christocentric and chivalric. Its problems are more evident in the concluding section, where he ventures to

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explain ‘The Theory and Practice of the Sovereignty of the Order’. His empirical analysis leads him into a submission that ties practice with ‘reality’ and theory with the ‘juridical doctrine or formula’ that may explain this reality, but does not in any way alter or enact it. Pezzana argues that ‘the theoretical grounds of the Order may be construed in various ways: but since this is a matter involving juridical doctrine, the Order should not take up a position thereon’.30 To that extent, he proposes—but does not elaborate on—three theories that may account for this reality: The essential point is that the sovereignty of the Order is an historical, social and political reality. Contestation of its sovereignty implies negation of that reality, ignoration of the fact that the Order engages in political and juridical relations with a large number of States, that it has in the past played and that it still plays a completely autonomous role in the international community, that it exercises supreme powers over its members. Juridical formulae may explain this reality in various ways: the theory of original juridical, non-statutory legislation, the theory of sovereignty as an instrument for pursuance of the religious and humanitarian objects of the Order, the theory of the existence of an international ius singulare precept that attributes sovereignty to the Order as a sui generis international entity.31 It is worth examining Pezzana’s three theories in some detail. (1) On original legislation First, ‘the theory of original juridical, non-statutory, legislation’, by which Pezzana wants to distinguish the Order from international organizations, is typically ‘realist’ and statecentric. It presents states as original, primordial actors, the prime cause of world politics, the autonomous source of non-statutory legislation, the law of law. According to this view, states (and the Order of St John) create national and international law ex nihilo rather than being themselves constructed in and through legal discourse. Not surprisingly, Pezzana follows the declaratory rather than the constitutive view of state recognition: ‘But, in practice, recognition constitutes nothing else than taking cognizance of an existing de facto and de jure situation.’32 For Pezzana, therefore, the practice of mutual recognition is not ‘self’-constitutive, but only formally declares the existence of pre-existing ‘realities’. But is this what is taking place, especially with an irregular actor such as the Order of St John which lacks territory? It will be an oxymoron to apply the declaratory theory of recognition in this instance. In fact, contrary to Pezzana’s claim, his monograph provides nothing less than a testimony to the constitutive effect of recognition. The Order is presented as an ‘undisputed’ subject of

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diplomacy and international law by reference to an extensive factual catalogue of: (a) when and how states recognized the Order; (b) the treaties the Order signed with other states; and even (c) the informal communications the Order has with states that do not formally recognize it, but acknowledge its international role. In other words, Pezzana’s thesis is that the Order is an ‘irregular state’, because authorized others recognize, say or behave as if it is like an ‘irregular state’. Pezzana also ignores the statutory acts of states, that is the foundational acts— mythological, political, constitutional—that state states as subjects, stage them as sovereign entities, and thus activate and authorize their ‘original’ legislations. So as to maintain the required pretence that the Order has no legal superior and in order to circumvent the obvious question about the conflict between the laws of the Order and the national legislation wherever it operates, Pezzana argues that ‘the sphere of application of the sovereign powers of the Order and of its legislation essentially regards spiritual matters, extraneous to the legislation of States’.33 Assuming the distinction between spiritual and temporal legislation holds in the case of the Order, and again assuming that the application of the former can be the basis for the international sovereignty the Order claims to possess, may still not be enough to support Pezzana’s theory of original legislation. For, on the one hand, being a religious institution also means that all rules and decisions of the Order are subject to canon law. On the other hand, the history of the Order and its sphere of autonomy has always been presented, legitimated and maintained as that of an except order of the Catholic church. Specifically, the foundation charter of the Order was established by the Papal Bull Pie Postulatio Voluntatis (1113), and subsequent Bulls meant that by 1154 the Order, through the accumulation of financial, constitutional and ecclesiastical freedoms, had acquired a privileged status and considerable autonomy from local episcopal and secular authorities.34 But these papal exceptions established local independence at the expense of constitutional and ecclesiastical dependence on the Holy See. In fact, even the very legitimacy of the Order today in its struggle against the many ‘bogus’ Orders of St John worldwide is based on the rule (as argued in the case of the so-called Russian coup by which Tsar Paul I was elected Grand Master by the Knights after the loss of Malta) that the election of a new Grand Master is not an independent decision, that is, it cannot be recognized de jure without papal confirmation.35 Under Pope Urban’s Bull (1634) the Papacy even acquired the right to nominate the Grand Master under certain circumstances. Contrary to Pezzana’s argument, therefore, the ‘original’ legislation of the Order—by the Order’s own acknowledgement—remains liable to the commissions and edicts of the Holy See. In other words, the Order’s legislation is subservient to canon law, and is always secondary to papal legislation.

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(2) On religious and humanitarian objects Pezzana’s second proposition about the ‘theory of sovereignty as an instrument for pursuance of the religious and humanitarian objects of the Order’ recycles a legal rationale that has been employed before. Specifically, it was used to explain the continuation of the diplomatic relations of the Holy See from 1870 until 1929, that is, after the loss of the papal territories and before the Vatican city was ceded back by Italy.36 Pezzana employs here the idea of spiritual, ceremonial or functional sovereignty ‘necessary’ for globally discharging religious and humanitarian aims—a concept that is not required any longer to account for the diplomatic relations of the Holy See nor was widely accepted at the time (that is why the Vatican city was ceded back). This theory only makes sense within a Christocentric understanding of world politics, and of course directly contradicts the secularization thesis of the Westphalian states system. In other words, why should it be that only a Christian, Catholic order be accorded sovereignty to fulfil its religious mission, and not other religious orders? (It is especially ideologically loaded in the case of the Order of St John, for this is an order associated with the crusades, and among whose stated objectives in the form of the St John Alliance is still ‘to reduce to silence the enemies of Christ’).37 The other main objective of the Order, ‘to help the sick and the poor’, is apparently a humanitarian one, but then again why should this be a reason for sovereignty, and why this specific entity be accorded sovereignty and not, say, the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Naqshibandi or the Bektashi Order, or the Hezbollah? This inevitably also raises the question of what kind of sovereignty the Order claims it has, and how and where it is exercised? Here the innovation of the Order lies in that it frames the exercise of scopic sovereignty, substituting hospitalized and ascetic bodies for absent territory. On the one hand, the Hospitallers are presented as being in a mission to save ‘suffering humanity’, a mission that in Pezzana’s words ‘knows no political frontier or ideological barriers’. This medical mission employs the clinical gaze to constitute a sovereign subject self-charged with the global protection of the body and the alleviation of its sickness. The body is thus framed as an endangered territorial site requiring militant-type protection: To live is the greatest good for any animate creature, and its stronger instinct is to preserve this existence… Above all, during the course of our lives, this determination to exist is marked by a constant struggle against the elements of destruction which surround us and penetrate us inexorably. The living body is a besieged citadel whose defences have already been forced by the enemy; and its rigour is measured by the energy it opposes to the wiles and violence of that enemy.38

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Enter the Knights Hospitallers, promising safety through their sovereign therapeutical service. On the other hand, the Order’s scopic sovereignty is extended to cover not only the hospitalized bodies but also the ascetic bodies of the professed Knights of the Order (currently numbering around forty) who still take the monastic vows of chastity, obedience and poverty. These vows constitute ‘the heart of the Order’, which ‘proves’ the historical continuity of the Order as a spiritual corpus.39 The professed Knights are the Order’s caravan to Christian praxis and victory. In this adventure of sanctification, a ‘caravan’ against evil and for the flowering of Faith, the three virtues of perfection, chastity, obedience and poverty, may be compared to the galley or galleon which is to carry the soul to combat and triumph.40 The Order’s religious mission incorporates the task of redeeming humanity to its pre-Fall condition. This is a tall order requiring constant spiritual struggle, a model ascesis performed for the permanent viewing and benefit of sinful humanity, and one that—as it is claimed—necessitates and earns the Order the application of sovereignty.41 (3) On singular law Thirdly, the most impressive move in Pezzana’s legal gymnastics is ‘the theory of the existence of an international ius singulare precept that attributes sovereignty to the Order as a sui generis entity’. The language here speaks for itself. The phrase ‘the theory of the existence’ implies basically that there is no such principle enshrined or employed in international law. This precept needs to be assumed, but at what risk. Pezzana retrieves this principle from Roman law, which contrasts the ius singulare with the ius communis. The ius singulare was used to distinguish exceptional legal regimes established under a different legal logic from the general one and so not subject to common law. However, Roman law specified that ius singulare could not be applied by analogy; it could only be applied to a case named for that purpose in advance, i.e., during the constitution of the legal regime.42 To that extent, Pezzana’s analogical assumption of an ius singulare is invalid under Roman law. In practice, Pezzana’s assumption seeks to legislate ‘the chivalric’ into international law, the idea that there are unique individuals or corporations, fully dedicated to high and noble objectives, that need to be given special titles, and judged by different legal standards. Apart from the fact that this idea directly clashes with the notion of state sovereignty as legal equality, the idea of uniqueness is problematic for another reason.

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Uniqueness implies uniformity and requires an essentialist interpretation of identity. However, an additional historical exposition of the Order of St John can illustrate that the Order was not a uniform entity. The official historians of the Order, such as Cyril Toumanoff, try to bypass this by suggesting that the Order was in its essence polymorphous (a persona mixta). But I suggest that the mixed personality argument is a device to cover up the fact that the Order produced different roles for itself—as Pezzana inadvertently admits—‘in the manner suited to the times and to the circumstances’.43 If one historically examines, for example, the Order’s famous hospital function, presented as one of the rationales, if not the rationale, for its current sovereign status, one encounters less a regime of exceptional constitution and more a practice of problematic reading and selective service. The founding Papal Bull of Paschal II in 1113, which placed a certain Hirosolimitani Xenodochii under ‘the protection of the Apostolic See’, mentions an establishment that the Order currently proudly translates as a hospital in Jerusalem. This is a very dubious translation. No mention is made in the Bull of the treatment of the sick as part of this establishment’s activities, rather only of the general care of pilgrims and the poor. The word xenodochium did not in fact have any clinical meaning; it was a term employed for a hostel offering shelter to travelling guests/strangers (xenoi), a hospice for lodging. The Order’s historians, however, currently translate xenodochium as hospital, conveniently tying hospitium (hospitality) to modern hospitalization, and the medieval hospitalarius (hostellier) to the practice of nursing.44 Furthermore, the epitaph of Blessed Gerald, considered by the Papal Bull as the founding figure of the Order, declares that he was ‘servant of the poor, hospitable to strangers’ (pauperibus servus et pius hospitibus), but mentions nothing about taking care of the sick.45 In fact, the Jerusalem hospice the Knights are supposed to have inaugurated has been established by some other accounts, prior to the first crusade, as the lodging house of the Amalfitan merchants, which was attached to the monastery of St Mary of the Latins.46 The Order of St John appropriated and extended this hostel service by establishing houses of hospitality (domus hospitales) for pilgrims at points of embarkation and on the way to the Holy Land. The Order thus instituted a commercial network for spiritual travel. The term ‘caravan’, subsequently used for military campaigns, is a remnant of this service.47 By 1113, as mentioned in the Bull, guest houses under the administration of the Order of St John were being run at Bourg St Gilles, Asti, Pisa, Bari, Otranto, Tarento and Messina. Increasingly, however, the Order assumed other functions. The Order’s hospitality was extended to ‘our lords the sick’. It was then that the Order began to associate itself with clinical lodging and legendary therapeutics, and be given in the writings of the Miracula ‘a venerable antiquity and its early existence scriptural authority’.48 Not only was the location of the hospice associated with the place Jesus reappeared after the resurrection, but also ‘[m] any references to the sick by Christ or by the Apostles for which the Evangelists had carelessly failed to provide geographical locations were assumed to apply to

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the hospital’.49 Consequently, during the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Order did in fact engage in hospitalization in the Holy Land, but this was only one of its functions, definitely not its primary function, which had become by then military activity. That is to say, these were hospitals associated not only with the poor faithful but also with the knights and crusaders fighting the infidel, as well as the feudal lords who after treatment often gave generous donations to the Order. In Rhodes and in Malta from 1309 until 1798, where the Order possessed territory, ‘the hospital’ was but one institution of the Order, primarily for the personal use of the Knights and rich visitors. Not surprisingly, during this period that began with their integration with the Templars, the Knights of St John were hardly known by the name Hospitallers at all. In the case of the famous infirmary in Valetta, even though it offered excellent service to the sick and wounded and involved the whole hierarchy of the Order, ‘with the passage of time, these visits (to the hospital by the Knights), with their pomp and ostentation, became a mere ritual motivated more by the grandiose formalities of the Order than by humanitarian sentiments and Christian piety’.50 But the Knights again reinvented themselves after the loss of Malta. The word ‘Hospitaller’ (just like the word ‘Sovereign’) was adopted as part of the official name in the nineteenth century.51 As put by Sire, the ‘hospitaller vocation’ has been the secret of the Order’s resurgence, for it ‘gave the element of idealism and service without which the schemes for revival would have remained at the level of mummery’.52 To that extent, the Order’s contemporary patronage of hospitals (though currently real and worthy) is a selective interpretation of its past historical activities. In short, the Order’s mission has not been exactly disinterested or uniform hospital service, that is, one that exercised sovereignty to fulfil this specific mission. The rich and exceptional history of the Order is beyond dispute —but for a different kind of story. Epilogue Pezzana’s venture has been supported by a version of law that is descriptive and uncritical. His narration of history is single, linear and continuous. A less pious jurisprudence and a slightly more curious genealogy, however, exposes another story and another law. It uncovers the Order’s historical knight-errantry as organized violence and piracy and, to that extent, the role of legal discourse in covering up, even authorizing, the very privateering, mercenary and piratical activities it is supposed to render illegal. Put differently, the historical activities of the Order can be rendered both legal and criminal by reference to different provisions of international law, according to whether the legal subjectivity of the Order is identified as ‘this’ or ‘that’, knight or pirate, sovereign or nonsovereign. Note, furthermore, that in contemporary international practice the peculiar legal status of the Order of St John has given rise to multiple claims of

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sovereignty. Many organizations and individuals have been making use of this ‘errancy’ or ‘anomaly’ of international law. There are currently many splinter groups all over the world, and especially in the United States, bearing the name Order of St John or variant names, and claiming to possess the historical and international privileges of the Order. Some of these Orders are mainly concerned with aristocratic titles and spiritual missions (e.g., those associated with the Grand Priory of Russia); others are more concerned with the ‘artificial’ construction of statehood and its financial benefits in terms of selling passports and tax evasion (e.g., Colonia Saint John); others combine both characteristics. Not surprisingly, the Order in Rome defines and condemns these institutions as ‘bogus’ or ‘self-styled’ Orders and their representatives as ‘usurpers’ of nobility and state sovereignty. Still, some of these institutions have managed to gain international recognition, though not to the extent enjoyed by the Order in Rome. For example, one group managed to gain observer status at the United Nations for a period; another included in its members prominent NATO officials; another was recognized by Seychelles and opened an embassy there; and another, which managed to infiltrate the Japanese imperial family, had also been recognized by Vanuatu.53 These problems led the Order in Rome to seek to normalize its legal identity by once more associating itself with territory. To mark the millennium turn and its ninth centenary the Order sought to negotiate its own spectacular scheme in the form of a grand repossession of land in Malta. Under an agreement that was to be signed in December 1998 with the Republic of Malta, Fort St Angelo (the middle one of three promontories in the grand harbour), already rented to the Order, was to be ceded as token territory upon which the Order could once again exercise its sovereignty. The Order in return was to present a falcon to the President of Malta for annual rent in similar fashion to the token of fealty paid to Emperor Charles V and successively to the rulers of Sicily, and under which the Knights were given possession of Malta in 1530. The Order was to move its headquarters from Rome to St Angelo, and would have exercised the full functions and paraphernalia of territorial sovereignty, e.g., border control; a token army; registering of ships, aircrafts and companies; complete jurisdiction and enforcement of the law. The idea, as stated, was the spectacular creation of the smallest state on earth, styled on the Vatican treaty arrangements. This draft agreement was negotiated with the Labour government of Malta, but a surprise election in September 1998 brought the Nationalist party to power, which took a more conservative view of the whole affair. The Nationalist party, viewing Maltese sovereignty as a hard-core and non-negotiable concept, found the idea of ceding territory abhorrent, as opposed to the Labour party, which took the more casual view of commercializing sovereignty and saw the whole scheme as a means of rejuvenating the area around Fort St Angelo and boosting tourism. In the end, the Fort was leased to the Knights for 99 years but without giving them sovereignty over it; that is, until further notice.54

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Still, the current sovereign status of the non-territorialized Order of St John unsettles the regular scene of international law that we are popularly accustomed to, and so-called realists present as a given. It exposes international law as a writing practice, not as an already written text with clear and fixed rules awaiting application. The Voltairian suspicion of international legal discourse, be it in the form of ethical or technical norms, is as pertinent today as ever. What the case of the Order radically displays is the function of legal discourse as a practice of political legitimation, empowering particular regimes of representation, which can effectively turn pirates into knights, religious orders into states, and laws into moral eldorados.

Antistasis

4 Poetics of security

On 23 October 1983, at around 6.20 a.m., there was a suicide attack against the US Marine battalion in Beirut. A lorry loaded with an estimated four thousand pounds of explosives was driven inside the military headquarter and exploded, killing 260 American marines and resulting in the withdrawal of the multinational force from Lebanon. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack. Later it was revealed that a security camera had captured the truck crashing through the perimeter fence into the entrance lobby. After routine technical treatment, the experts managed to recover, and subsequently released to the media, the face of the driver seconds before he detonated the explosives. The expression on that face was very unexpected, and for some deeply shocking. The driver was smiling.1 Poetic death, maimed corpses, disabled bodies, a cinematic relic and a mesmerizing sign were the parting gifts of our brother-in-arms. Mementos of a security mess, loaded with the heavy burden of a tragic event and armed with their own mind-blowing expositions. The driver’s haunting smile—no longer his —is ours to interpret. It has already been seen to invoke a variety of conditions: the heroic defiance of extraordinary faith; the blissful martyrdom of the blessed; the irrationalism and fanaticism of Islamic militancy; the psychological state of high narcotic consumption. But as a visual narrative not reduced to self-evident storytelling, it surpasses the conventional dichotomies of us/them, religious/ secular, Christian/Islamic, Eastern/Western, rational/irrational and psychological/ praxeological. This snapshot of the other face of incarnated terror riding unsafely but secure in its mission captures a picture that remains ever ambivalent, both sublime and dangerous, beautiful and violent. It is eminent that someone can approach certain death with such serenity and peace of mind; it is alarming that a deadly mission can be discharged with such confidence and detachment. By introducing this other picture I, too, aim to capture and photograph. I am not so much concerned with analysing the Beirut incident in detail but with rethinking the broader manner in which security is constituted. My target is the dominant story that reduces security to ominology. I seek to illuminate a story of security that is less ‘evident’, not merely commuted into accounts of safety and certitude, or in perfect tune with the presence of protection and of knowledge. In

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this respect, the security camera’s collateral shot shatters, albeit momentarily, the contemporaneous narrative of security, safety and certitude. It does so in the way the driver’s smile in the midst of clear and present danger has been so easily and surely perceived as most untimely. The time of security has been colonized by a peculiar kind of poetry in contemporary politics: the uni-versal. A few tales massively communicated and reiterated as the single truth are often enough to get political issues securitized.2 Securitization as discursive practice works by synchronizing security, safety and certitude. It depicts all three as co-temporal occurrences. To be secure is to be safe is to be sure. To secure is to protect from danger is to know the danger and how to go about doing the protection. This constitutes the security problematic as automatically and exclusively a question of providing safety and producing knowledge.3 Thus strategists and defence experts are able to continue with their totalizations, identifying threats in uncertainty and confidently naming the enemy, assuming the endangered, and prescribing the deterrence. Thus also critical security scholars are able to continue their epistemological debates, introducing their ethics, and exposing the statecentric, ethnocentric, phallocentric and anthropocentric assumptions of conventional works. Put differently, by naturalizing the time of security as an experience of safety and certitude, many authors authorize, moralize and empower their security discourse, while others conveniently convert their critique of traditional regimes of power into powerseeking regimes of truth. Needless to say that, within different frames of safety, the work of both critical and traditional scholars can provide rationales that— depending on space, time and identity variables—emancipate or furnish protection to groups of people or individuals in need. But we also need to acknowledge that currently (critical) security studies support a booming business, a proliferation of knowledge about security from which many invariably benefit (the author not excluded) and many more still suffer. This chapter seeks to develop, through poetic exploration, narratives of security that resist securitization; i.e., narratives that do not offer rhetorical legitimation to different regimes of power or justify the intervention of security experts and practitioners. Developing such narratives is not a purification exercise that seeks to restore a primordial story, or return to an authentic and autonomous time of security. Its purpose is not to reject in an arbitrary and complete manner scholastic forms of knowledge or technical instruments of protection. It is not meant to be a glorification of gnosis or narratology. Rather, I use poetry to point—to point back to some other times; to look at traditions and counter-traditions of security; to illustrate how some notions of security have prevailed over others, and how this relatively arbitrary choice has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of security today. In this sense, poetic intervention is political; that is, if we do not reduce the political merely to praxeology, or at least to a praxeology defined in opposition to theory.4 Poetry can envision and revision forms of political life. Yet its closer emphasis on words sometimes illuminates—recalls or reinvents—their narrative

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construction. That is to say, it can highlight how words are not just narrative material but, as I show below, can themselves have stories to tell. Poetic-word exploration can thus be a means of freeing political narratology from the sentential regime of storytelling, the ‘tyranny’ of grammar and of the fullstop. It can help to expose how the dominant world narratives we are called to accept and act upon are in turn but a collage of word-stories forgotten, interpreted or synchronized to suit the rhetorical moral of the grand narrative. There is an increasing recognition today that to rule the world would be to rule over the meaning of words. In the battle over the meaning of security, temporality meets spatiality, and synchronization the politics of inclusion/ exclusion. The synchronizing narrative popular in IR texts outlines security as ‘freedom from danger or risk’. This sets aside or dominates over other narratives, like that of security as ‘freedom from care’, a narrative close to its Latin etymology se/sinecura.5 The four poetic passages chosen in this chapter are open to readings that, in my view, break the synchronizing story of security, but also retrieve and reorient the ‘freedom’ of security. These poetic passages come from different historical epochs, but are neither typical of security thinking in those epochs nor epically immuned from securitization. I do not consider it an argumentative liability that some of these extracts are part of traditions that have been used to support securitizing agendas. For, to repeat, the question is not the discovery of the poem or the story of security. It is rather a question of utilizing the polysemic character of poetry, realizing the hermeneutical potential of stories that—just like the narration of the Beirut incident—can serve in different contexts, within or outside tradition, as ammunition against securitization. The first extract comes from an ancient Greek fragment by Archilochus, the second from Saint Paul’s Epistles, the third from a Sufi poem by Jalaluldin Rumi, and the fourth from a contemporary poet, Kahlil Gibran. The rise and the ride Remains of the fragmentary verse of Archilochus. My soul, my soul, overwhelmed by many cares, rise up, and cast a chest against them, and near your foes be secure: neither in victory boast out open nor beaten fall in weeping at home, take joy in joys, and give in not too much to evils: knowing what rhythm holds humanity.6 Archilochus’ passage provides an early reference to security from the seventh century BCE. This reference comes from a poet who by his own account was a dedicated ‘servant to the god of fighting’ (fragment 1) and by that of others a

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mercenary.7 The fighting he prescribes in this poem, however, is of a different type. It is a fight of thumos (soul) against kēdesin (cares), a calling out to his soul to rise up, mobilize and resist his cares, to revolt against a condition that constantly grieves and agitates him, arrests and overpowers him. In other words, the poet seeks to change his agony into agonism, an agonism for security. As spiritual emancipation from cares, he delivers an advance photograph of the etymological narrative of securitas. The Archilochean struggle leading to security next to one’s foes (endokoisin ekthrōn plēsion katastatheis asphaleōs) is explicitly not a military struggle. It is not a struggle against an external adversary or with the purpose of defeating an enemy. This struggle is a psychological one: not a fight to eliminate the danger but of literally facing up to the danger. That is to say, to fight to reach a mental state where one is secure-in-danger, where one can dwell (katastatheis) next to one’s enemy in security, without surrendering to, or dominating, or making a friend of the foe. Put differently, Archilochus’ thymic security spiritualizes enmity. It preserves the enemy; it safeguards danger and risk; for this form of security is in accord, Archilochus says, with our basic humanity, with the rhythm of life, with the recurring fluctuation of human affairs; that is, with instability, uncertainty and mortality.8 Locating the security condition in thumos is learning to live with one’s own fears, forging a struggle that is primarily internal, personal and spiritual—not external and material. In this respect, two points need to be further explored concerning the etymological and mythological aspects of asphaleia, the ancient Greek word for security. This word was not a single, homogeneous term but carried with it at least two additional meanings as shown by its etymology: (a) rightness, not to err (sphallō), and (b) to remain standing and firm, not to fall (sphallō). That is to say, asphaleia could also mean certitude and firmness, just like safety and certitude are currently synonymous with security. Asphaleia was also used sometimes in the sense of safety, but another word, sōtēria (etymologically linked to the Latin salus and English safety) was more generally used. Archilochus’ verse plays with the etymological ramifications of asphaleia. His call to ‘rise up’ is another way of saying ‘secure’. Here he uses an interesting word for ‘rise up’: anadu(ō)—a rising up as an emergence from the seas. Note that anaduō also means to retreat, to withdraw one’s troops, to avoid military confrontation, and to desert the army. In other words, what leads to Archilochean security is an act of withdrawal from military service that is also a spiritual reemergence from the sea. The tragic rhythm that holds humanity figures in sea-like tempo, invoking the liquidity and fluctuation, the instability of the ground upon which humans are called to stand and secure. Negotiating the sea-element is contrasted to the earthly, firm knowledge upon which a particular type of nonspiritual security is founded in and as certitude. The rise from the sea is also a ride into it. The task, as put in another Archilochean fragment (58), requires of anyone claiming to be a ‘strategist’ (stratēgos) to fully develop an amphibious

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nature: ‘one has to secure (stand firm) (asphaleōs bebēkōs possi), while his heart sails’. Staging the spiritual battle for security in the seas brings it under the rule of Poseidon. In ancient Greek mythology, Poseidon had the cult title Asphaleios. Whereas many deities were given the epithet for Saviour (Sōtēr, Sōteira; e.g., Zeus, Athena, Artemis) only Poseidon was literally ‘the Securer’. The security regime of Poseidon was neither a deliverance from danger nor that of certitude. Poseidon was perhaps the most unstable god of the Olympian pantheon. Not only as a sea-god in charge of an unstable element, but also in his other stabilizing functions as the holder of the earth (gaiēochos; posis das), the god of foundations and constructions (themeliouchos, teichopoios), Poseidon figured in the Greek imaginary as most temperamental, the father of many dangerous and violent children, like the Laestrygones and the Cyclopes, the cause of earthquakes, floods and tempests (the ironic contrast to the etymological ramifications of asphaleia is quite striking).9 In fragment 114 Archilochus reproves Poseidonian safety with a clear touch of irony: ‘Out of fifty shipwrecked the kindly Poseidon saved only one (sōthent’ena)’ And in fragment 10 he advises: ‘let us encrypt the profane gifts of Lord Poseidon’. A profane divinity. An insecure securer. Dark, unstable and tragic is the mythical archetype of ancient Greek security whose gifts mortals need to disclose and accept in their mundane ambivalence.10 Archilochus’ fragment displays security as thymic and Poseidonian. In this sense, security is not a rescue from danger but freedom from the care of danger, not a given or permanent condition, but continuous, spiritual, seafaring agon. To emerge secure, one must free oneself and withdraw from the obsessive mental cares one is commonly submerged beneath. To remain afloat, one must cast an airy chest, learn to live with fluidity and instability, ascend and descend with the sea’s tempo, sail its dangerous rhythm and successive waves, come to terms with the sea’s dark unknowns that are beyond one’s control, learn to ‘stand on the edge between wave and wind’ (fragment 43), and be ready for the trident. In this extreme reversal of ground, nothing is impossible or unexpected. Fragment 74 strikes a resonance of denaturalization: ‘Let none of you marvel, though you see the beasts of the field exchange pasture with the dolphins of the deep, and the roaring waves of the sea become dearer than the land to such as loved the hill’. Dissociating security from the feeling of certainty, Archilochean poetry strikingly differs from the synchronizing narrative of security and its legitimation of political regimes at the time. (See, for example, in Thucydides where the exalted ‘common safety’ (koinou sōtērias) of the Athenians is opposed to the dishonourable safety-of-servitude (asphalōs douleuein) of others, and is rhetorically linked to the tyrannical interests of imperial Athens that can only be guaranteed, according to Pericles, by those who maintain firm views based on knowledge of facts.)11 By contrast, the thymic-Poseidonian security of Archilochus is not something that can be attained or guaranteed through religious or political rituals. Its way cannot be perfectly known or controlled. Archilochus locates security in the unstable ground, the god who more than all others is

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bound to bring you low as he brings you up. The spiritual struggle for security— learning to live with Poseidon—was marginalized as political discourse, not surprisingly, since it could not empower the dominant regime of power at the time, i.e., the polis. Typically, Poseidon was not a popular poliouchos, the protecting deity of the polis, responsible for its prosperity and permanence. Mythology furnished the Greeks with another justifying narrative. The one famous polis where Poseidon the Asphaleios was the patron god, and that was both a country of abundance and a great power, was none other than Atlantis: a most ‘secure’ polis, risen above the rest, and then totally submerged by Poseidon himself. The last terror Towards the end of his First Epistle to the Thessalonians (5.1–10), Paul indicts: About the times and the seasons, brothers, there is no need to write to you. For you yourselves know perfectly well that the day of the Lord comes as a thief in the night. When they say peace and security (eirēnē kai asphaleia; pax et securitas), destruction comes upon them, sudden as the pangs that come on a woman in childbirth; and there will be no escape. But you, brothers, are not in the dark that the day will come upon you like a thief… we, who belong to the daylight, must keep sober, armed with the breastplate of faith and love, and the hope of salvation (sōtēria; salus) for a helmet. God has not destined us for retribution, but for the attainment of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that awake or asleep we might live in company with him.12 The apostle to the nations employs the ‘peace and security’ phraseology presaging the contemporary terminology and founding principle of the United Nations. However, this phraseology is currently charged in political discourse— occupying diplomatic discussions and legitimating global action—in a manner quite antithetical to the Paulian spirit. The proposition that the Christian discourse of orderly peace with justice deferred is what predominates in the UN system, as opposed to the Islamic discourse more concerned with justice, is certainly interesting but misplaced if unqualified.13 For, at least with regard to Paul, ‘peace and security’ should not be a guiding principle on how to lead a Christian life. Paul’s epistle deflates an overrated discourse. His move concerning security is notably unsettling. The Thessalonians are reminded of what they ‘already know’ in the gospel; namely, that they may achieve some security on earth but that this security is a bogus one. What really matters, according to Paul, is not historical but eschatological security—that is, the last security, security at the end of the world, after the Apocalypse that, for the early Christians, was imminent and could come suddenly ‘as a thief in the night’. By saying that destruction will come to those who say ‘peace and security’, Paul explicitly warns that those who

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are complacent in their historical peace and security are eschatologically insecure. Destruction will come surely like the pains of a woman in labour. Their peace and security, to follow his metaphor, is pregnant with danger. Not only will it not protect them after the Second Coming, but will even give birth to new, eschatological dangers and the possibility of eternal damnation. To that extent, mundane security is not real security. Real security is not of this world. Real security is not daily physical or personal safety but posthumous salvation. This radical change of focus should not be construed as a complete abandonment of the concerns of historical security. In his Second Epistle, Paul begs the Thessalonians ‘not to lose their heads’ over the Second Coming (2.2). In another epistle, he tells the Philippians that what he preaches is also for their security or physical safety (umin de asphales), warning them ‘against those dogs’ (kunas) who insist on trying to circumcise them (peritomē) but in truth want to mutilate them (katatomē) (3.1–3). In a daring passage, Paul muses how beneficial it will be if those who preach bodily circumcision—as opposed to spiritual circumcision, which is what really opens the way to salvation—go the whole way and castrate themselves (Galatians, 5.12).14 Furthermore, in his First Epistle to Timothy, Paul takes the trouble to divert from his homily on Christian conduct that guides the faithful to salvation in order to strike a note on biological safeguards. He reproaches the bishop of Ephesus for neglecting his own welfare and gives him a piece of therapeutic advice: ‘Stop drinking only water; in view of your frequent ailments take a little wine to help your digestion’ (5.23). Paul’s soteriology is terroristic. But his terror is an act of love. Paul terrorizes the faithful in order to save them. He himself is in ‘great fear and terror’ (1 Corinthians, 2.3) when preaching the gospel; Christians should be in ‘fear and terror’ when receiving it and while working towards their salvation (meta phobou kai tromou tēn eautōn sōtērian katergazesthe; Philippians, 2.12).15 Terror cultivates the memory of death, the memory of what is to come last and last. It promotes Christian weakness and humility, and thus faith in the power of God rather than human wisdom (1 Corinthians, 2.5). Paul’s favourite binary is faith over knowledge—his epistles an ample poetic celebration of the former and shaming of the latter, dissociating the work of salvation from the ‘chaterous’, ‘contradictory’ and ‘false’ gnosis that strays from faith (1 Timothy, 6.20–21). Paul goes further. Worldly wisdom has been rendered foolish in the act of crucifixion and resurrection. It is in order to shame worldly wisdom and the power of the strong that the Saviour did not come as a conquering messiah, but is shown apparently incapable of saving himself and scandalously surrendered to a most degrading death (1 Corinthians, 1.18–24). Like Jesus Christ—the model and medium for the attainment of salvation—Christians must keep their faith in the gospel, the wisdom of the divine ‘folly’, and build their spiritual strength in ‘weakness’. The good message was that the Son of Man conquered through humility and faith the terror of death. The price was that he reinstated the terror of afterlife.

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Paul’s eschatology of terror is not just negative, annihilating fear and repression. There is an evangelical side to it; namely, ‘the hope of salvation’. Salvation is played in two parts. The advent of Jesus is the first act of rescue, the message of God’s reconciliation with sinful humanity, the display of divine love. Here lies the redemptive power of crucifixion: ‘For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son, how much more, now that we have been reconciled, shall we be saved by his life’. (Romans, 5.10). The First Coming establishes a new world order (2 Corinthians, 5.15–17). Old history comes to an end, time starts anew. Security is radically reconfigured as the fight and hope of salvation. The fight for salvation is not against human foes but cosmic powers, such as the evil forces of the dark world, the stratagems of demons, rebellious angels and diabolic thoughts (Ephesians, 6. 12). Paul still employs military metaphors and terminology, but the kind of armour is clearly of a different calibre; i.e., for breastplate, faith and love; for helmet, the hope of salvation. In Ephesians a more complete armour is displayed: for belt, the Christian truth; for shoes, the gospel of peace; for shield, faith; for sword, the Holy Spirit (6.13–17). The hope of salvation is the end of human life for which there is no certainty or guarantee. Observance of the law cannot deliver it either. ‘For no human being can be justified in the sight of God by keeping the law: law brings only the consciousness of sin’ (Romans, 3.20). No one can give or take salvation but God. Faith that Jesus is Christ and the spiritual unity in the life of Christ, the life of love, is the only vehicle for grace, the only hope of salvation. Soteriology provokes uncertainty, fear and terror, though at the same time it could be liberating and securing for the faithful in exposing the insignificance of all other human cares. It can provide historical security as sine cura. Within such personal ‘carelessness’ —which is not selfish indifference—Christian love as caritas for the Other is rendered possible, not as duty or vain individual act but as the work of the Holy Spirit. Though often didactic and canonical, in another sense Paul’s discourse is quite revolutionary and effective in seeking to dissociate salvation from the Judaic regime of power. His acceptance of the authority of the Pax Romana and call to obey one’s rulers, perhaps a pragmatic response under the circumstances, could also be explained as a genuine belief that political regimes were irrelevant in either cultivating the way to salvation or providing the spiritual freedom promised in securitas. His exaltation of personal faith over law, his warning against entering the exchange economy of good works and salvation, indicates that the church he was trying to build was meant to be more a spiritual state than a power institution. As he says to the faithful: ‘we have no dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy’ (2 Corinthians, 1.24). No wonder he became the favourite apostle of apostates and heretics, such as the famous Marcion (who took Paul’s writing to its logical conclusion and rejected the Old Testament), to whom we owe the early collection of Paul’s epistles in the Apostolicon. That Paul was adopted by the church may have more to do with the decision of the early apostles to go fully international, especially after the failed Jewish Revolt (66–73

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CE) that seriously discredited the Jews in the Roman Empire.16 It is interesting to note, however, that Paul’s epistles still inspired the Reformation by invigorating resistance against the Roman ecclesiastical regime. Paul’s teaching served as the main reference point to Martin Luther’s Concerning Christian Liberty, especially his view on salvation through faith and grace rather than law and works that empowered the canon of the Holy See. Thus, for Luther, following Paul, a Christian should be servant to everyone but subject to no one. Paul helped to introduce a new vocabulary of faith for dealing with the problem of salvation individually and without resort to ‘the safety’ of the established regimes of power. Note how this vocabulary—subsequently as part of a more general Christian doctrine of obedience—was rhetorically employed and modified in a way that did legitimate regimes of power. Two examples may suffice. First, for the Byzantine chronicler Procopius, writing five centuries later, the term asphaleia, though historical, is theologically informed and not antithetical to but a mimesis of the sacred order. In Buildings, Procopius offers a panegyric of security, specifically commending Emperor Justinian for securing the empire through construction works, like the fortification of frontiers and the building of walls, castles and irrigation systems. This security is the result of the continuous inspiration and guidance that God provides to his vice-regent on earth. It is maintained through the emperor’s religious work that glorified and pleased God. For example, in the account of the building of Hagia Sophia, Procopius informs the reader how, after failures by able architects, the emperor managed to secure the arches of the great church (en tō bebaiō tēs asphaleias estērichtai) through a divine disclosure of the architectonic formula.17 The continuous favour of God is secured in turn by giving the church back to him (the mosaic of Justinian literally handing over the church to God can still be seen today in Hagia Sophia). In short, the methods of security of the Byzantine sovereign are legitimated in having direct access to the ultimate sovereign. Historical security becomes the everyday concern of the kingdom of heaven. Second, in the case of Thomas Hobbes, the security that is contractually and technically provided by the sovereign can be explained better as a secularization of Christian salvation than as securitas. Significantly, this is not the Paulian salvation that is possible outside the discipline of law. The famous Hobbesian theme—no security outside the state—paradigmatically follows the medieval motto of extra ecclesia nulla salus (no salvation outside the church). From the introduction to the Leviathan we find out that the ‘business’ of the state is ‘salus populi’, which Hobbes brackets in translation as ‘(the people’s safety)’. No business for the church without salvation; no business for the state without security/safety. However, Hobbes is also highly interested in salvation per se, and especially in bringing it outside the ecclesiastical regime of power.18 He is highly critical of how the church has become an autonomous political and militant regime, challenging temporal sovereignty by ‘annexing’ the kingdom of God. Hobbes’ determination to reclaim salvation from the church literally brings the kingdom of heaven down to earth:

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On one side, by kingdom, which is an estate ordained by men for their perpetual security against enemies and want, it seemeth that this salvation should be on earth. For by salvation is set forth unto us, a glorious reign of our king, by conquest; not a safety by escape: and therefore there where we look for salvation, we must look also for triumph; and before triumph, for victory; and before victory, for battle; which cannot well be supposed, shall be in heaven.19 Hobbes’ neomessianic discourse reveals its temporal mask. Unlike Paul, Hobbes explicitly identifies the enemies of the kingdom of God not as cosmic entities but as earthly ones.20 Going a full circle, salvation becomes retemporalized security, in the image and character of historical safety. After the Day of Judgement, the Christian sovereign will succeed earthly sovereigns to establish the kingdom of God on earth with its capital Jerusalem, a new State that will proceed in full Hobbesian vein to guarantee ‘perpetual security against enemies and want’. Surrender and self-annihilation A passage from Jalaluldin Rumi’s Mathnawi (1, 2959–73), ‘the Persian Qur’an’: The Prophet said to Ali: ‘O Ali, you are the Lion of God, you are a valiant knight, But do not rely upon your courage: come into the shade of the Palm-tree of hope. Come into the shade (sayeh) of the Sage whom none can waylay. His shade on the earth is like Mount Qaf, his spirit is like the Simurgh that soars aloft. Though I should sing his praises until the Resurrection, do not look for any end to them. The Divine Sun has veiled Himself in Man: apprehend this mystery, and God knows best what is the truth. O Ali, above all works of devotion in the Way is the shadow (sayeh) of God’s Servant. When others take refuge in some act of devotion and discover some means of deliverance, Go you, take refuge in the shadow of the Sage against the enemy within you.’ Having been accepted by the Pir, surrender (taslim) yourself to him: submit, like Moses, to the authority of Khizr. Whatever your Khizr may do, bear it patiently, lest he say, ‘Begone, here we part’ Though he scuttle the boat, be dumb! Though he kill a child, do not tear your hair!

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God has described his hand as His own, for He said, ‘The Hand of God is over their hands.’ This ‘Hand of God’ slays his disciple, then brings him to life everlasting.21 The celebrated Sufi of Konya opens his poem with a prophetic call to Ali. Rumi has Mohammed instruct Ali (his gifted son-in-law and controversial third imam) to seek out the protection of the Sage. Ali certainly lacks neither courage in the physical sense nor wisdom in religious terms. He is well known in the Islamic tradition as the Lion of God. He is a valiant knight, ready for jihad, the holy battle. But this courage, the prophet maintains, will not be enough, or better it will not be reliable for the spiritual struggle ahead, the greater jihad. For Ali is subverted from within. He incorporates an internal enemy, the most personal of foes—himself. Protection is thus necessary and must come from outside. It cannot be furnished by traditional regimes of power, as Rumi warns in another poem: ‘O Kings, we have killed our outer enemies but the inner enemy, which is worse than the outer one, is still living. To slay this enemy is not the work of reason and intelligence: the inward lion is not subdued by the hare’ (1 Mathnawi, 1373–4). Protection from the enemy within requires the shade of the Sage, the Mevlana, the spiritual guide. Shade offers a powerful image of protection for Near and Middle Eastern people. It is a place of everyday rescue. The shade of the palm-tree is the longedfor safety to desert and nomadic existence. It provides a form of historical security closely linked to the life of Mohammed and the early beginnings of Islam. But it is also a Quranic image of salvation: ‘On the day of Resurrection, I will call out, “Where are those who love one another through my divine glory alone and for the sake of my glory alone? Today I am offering them refuge and sweet refreshment under my shade, for this is the day on which there is no shade but my shade.”’22 There are different kinds of shade as there are different types of security. The shade of the spiritual guide is both historical and transcendental, an all-encompassing one akin to the shade of Mount Qaf, the inaccessible holy mountain of Islamic cosmology encircling the earth. Moving from shade to shadow (sayeh means both in Farsi), Ali is asked not merely to come under but obediently to follow the Sage, to become his shadow, and thus also the shadow of God’s servant. Note that this prophetic advice is an autobiographical parallel to Rumi’s spiritual life, his mystical awakening when he came across his Sage, Shams of Tabriz. Shams had a profound impact on Rumi, who abandoned his prestigious scholarly life and became his passionate follower. Shams, which literally means sun, was the spiritual fire, the divine love that both burned and liberated Rumi as his poetry passionately recites over and over again.23 Rumi’s sagely protection has been peculiarly heliocentric as personification of and recurring metaphor for enlightenment. Rumi’s shade is the sun. It protects by melting the seeker.

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Rumi’s protecting shade reverses the norms of formal religion. It concerns not a simple question of safety or salvation. Others seek a safe, ordinary life or salvation through religious work, and there is no suggestion by Rumi (unlike Paul) that their devotion will prove dangerous or bear no eschatological fruit. These others, however, do not partake in the Sufi way, they cannot apprehend the mystery that ‘the Divine Sun has veiled Himself in Man’. They do not tear off the sensory curtains to behold the truth of creation. They separate themselves from God, and thus do not do justice to their divine nature. This is where the ultimate insecurity lies. For ‘Hell exists due to separation and the old man trembles so much because of separation’ (3 Mathnawi, 3694). Those who are not Sufis do not cross over fully to embrace God, body and soul. They do not dance with the Beloved but remain in constant fear of God and life. For Rumi, the one who is on the Sufi way rejects and seeks to overcome the ManGod separation, strives to unite with the divine in the actual moment and not in some distant afterlife. Such unity is not easy. It comes after surrendering (taslim) to the Sage. Muslim, Islam and taslim have the same etymological root, and thus the latter strikes an explicit religious resonance to being a Muslim, a Submitter and to Islam that literally means Surrender (to God). To be on the Sufi way is to surrender, to burn under the shade/shadow of the enlightened one who already travels on the way. Rumi gives another reference from the Qur’an, this time relating to Moses and Khizr, or Al-Khadir, the Sage to whom Moses fully submitted after God reprehended him for his vanity, in displaying to others his knowledge and wisdom.24 To stay with Khizr, Moses has to bear with that which is constantly beyond his own knowledge. Personal understanding cannot be trusted. Human knowledge veils the path of life. Rumi employs the same Quranic images to make the point of complete and unconditional surrender. The Sage’s action can be shocking: the sinking of the boat of life, the killing of a child. But even after the most terrible acts one should not withdraw submission to the Sage, one should not say I have understood, because that is exactly when one does not understand. Divine reason rules. The hand of God is over the Sage’s hand and God knows best what is the truth. To believe in God is to sacrifice human certitude when it is most obvious. It will of course be easy to read Rumi simplistically as legitimizing thoughtless violence or blind obedience to such behaviour. However, this is to read him out of context. His extreme examples seek to show that nonduality is not an easy option. One has to constantly experience not only the joy but also the pain of divine force. To be with God is to reach such a state of passionate detachment. The complete surrender to God through the Sage subverts the provisional arrangement of the ego, moves the disciple away from the realm of knowledge and into that of faith. Unity with the divine is secured through self-annihilation, where the newly initiated mystic effaces the ego, dies-to-self (fana) in order to live-in-God (baqa). Fana is the condition of being without ego or self, that ecstatic moment

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when one is completely overtaken by God. Baqa is mystical rebirth, everyday resurrection, subsistence and survival. It is within this context that the hand of God slays the disciple. The disciple becomes the prey of God, who kills the ego or false identity so that the mystic is flooded with divine life. But fana and baqa are not unbroken ecstasy, mental redefinition, or loss of conscious thought. Instead, in Rumi’s terms: ‘Define and narrow me, you starve yourself of yourself. Nail me down in a box of cold words, that box is your coffin. I do not know who I am. I am in astounding lucid confusion.’25 The Sufi is reborn an allencompassing being, a greater self, one with God and faith: ‘I am dead to the soul, I am living through the Soul of souls. Inasmuch as I am dead to senses of man, God has become my hearing, perception, and sight. Since I am not I, in the presence of this breath if anyone breathes (a word) he is an infidel’ (1 Mathnawi, 3124–6). The acts of the believer, even when they may turn physically against one, can never be insecuring for they are the acts of God and restore life-in-God. Rumi radicalizes security as self-annihilation. He does so by radicalizing in turn the Muslim understanding of faith as security. For, significantly, the word used in the Qur’an for believer, mu’min, is etymologically connected to certainty, assurance and also to security, emniyet. However, in Rumi, security as radical faith downgrades human certitudes and safeties as defined through both mundane and eschatological dangers. The Sage cultivates faith, puts the Sufi on the way, but does not determine the subsequent manifold ways the Sufi may choose to unite with the divine. The Sufi faith is not the vanity of defending a particular religion. Nor is it the certainty of the philosopher’s opinion. For Rumi both these are the opposite of faith; they constitute clear signs of infidelity.26 The infidel is the one who stumbles around the earth, walks on a path, but does not know the terminus: the overcoming of the self.27 The believer, on the other hand, is a mirror, ‘his face is safe from dust and dirt’ (2 Mathnawi, 30). God’s creations are reflected in him, but never dwell in his soul permanently. The believer incorporates the creator without identifying with the created. He bears inside him the boundless but remains empty of idols. Being free from the spell of forms, the Sufi is also free from the care of protecting, maintaining or restoring them. The mist of security In The Garden of the Prophet the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran devises a final inspirational homily. O Mist, my sister, my sister Mist, I am one with you now. No longer am I a self. The walls have fallen, And the chains have broken;

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I rise to you, a mist, And together we shall float upon the sea until life’s second day, When dawn shall lay you, dewdrops in a garden, And me a babe upon the breast of a woman.28 Secure, free from care, just like an infant on its mother’s breast, defenceless and unknowing. Almustafa, the prophet, is now liberated from the walls of mental confinement, the chains of attachment. United with his ‘deathless’, ‘winged sister’ Mist, he is finally ‘at peace’ (64, 66). Mist, as the prophet earlier told his disciples, is an image of freedom: ‘If you would freedom, you must needs turn to mist’ (4). It is not just any freedom, but ‘our greater freedom’ (5). Turning to mist is not naive nostalgia of infancy, but an esoteric return, a rest upon the body of a woman-earth, a passionate reunion with what is close and always there but from which one is egotistically separated. The prophet no longer a self is now ‘A desire throbbing and aimless even as [Mist’s] desire, A thought not yet gathered, even as [Mist’s] thought’ (65). Mist features as the ‘careless’ ecstatic moment of disseminating desire and incomplete thought. It provides a shelter that is no shelter, the shelter that saves one from shelters. One returns to it as ‘a word not yet uttered’ (64). I turn to Gibran’s mist not to propose a culminating metaphor of security but to register an internarrative sign of it pointing back to the poetic exploration undertaken. For current purposes, it recollects our poetic journey, the rise and the ride into the sea, the second day of life to come, the overcoming of the self. Turning to mist, Almustafa says, ‘is the law of mariners and the sea’(4). Mist is an ocean of little seas and, like the sea, ‘formless’. It clouds the known, blurs the sight of the familiar, hides danger. To rise into the mist is ‘to learn of the beginning’, to be initiated into that which gives what there is (4). To be one with mist, for Gibran, too, is to float upon the sea, ride upon the groundless until death and beyond, until life’s second day. Unity with mist provides an image of greater freedom, the mystical overcoming of the self, a security outside self-centred care. Mist, then, as our greater, formless, multi-versal security. It will be wrong, I think, to quickly reject it as poetic or mystical idealism, or to simplistically endorse it as something that can be handed over by gurus or gnosis. It seems to be less of the order of knowledge and more a matter of experience. Greater freedom/security has its moments of calling, both in silence and in logos, and humans can appropriate or develop by themselves multiple paths, di-verse ways of inviting or extending those moments. Sometimes it could even come uncalled for, accidentally and effortlessly. In that moment of calling, not temporally predetermined, smaller security concerns get desecuritized; i.e., in the light of selfless consciousness they are no longer concerns. Uniting with mist is to learn to live with higher vibrations that desynchronize security from safety and certitude. In this respect, our poetic exploration above

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made some moves that problematize security’s contemporaneous narrative. Its aim has been to cast doubt on three related-foundational stories about security: first, that security is something achieved through more safety and protection, through the constant accumulation of political insurance; second, that security should involve primarily a ‘practical’, external, material and technical dimension —and not a spiritual one that is the critical task of deconditioning; third, that security can be attained through a regime of power/knowledge and, consequently, that it should be the special preserve of it. Furthermore, this problematization has tried to render visible that—more than international and more than narrational—security is internarrational. Security discourse finds itself in between narratives, here seeking to differentiate or judge the truths of official and subaltern security stories, there trying to mediate or interrogate rival security metaphors. To that extent, a political narrative can be seen to gain prominence not only by marginalizing contesting narratives from public space, or simply by covering the fact that it is a heterology—that is, not selfsustained but the result of impacts with enabling oppositions. A political narrative gains prominence—significantly, and this may be the most politically subtle way—by erasing the fact that the words it is using, as translated across ages and languages, are in and of themselves narratives, and as such become a frontier for the clash of narratives. As suggested, the narrative of security as freedom from care, a narrative that happens to be etymologically close to the word in English, has been systematically erased from conventional IR works and security analysis. This narrative has been retrieved with different intensity from the poetic extracts discussed, in turn putting into perspective the uses of safety and certitude. For Archilochus, the spiritual struggle for security is explicitly concerned with freedom from overwhelming cares. For Paul, the hope of salvation seeks to liberate the faithful from the terror of death and mundane human cares, even from eschatological cares if one acts spiritually and not by constant reference to law and good works. For Rumi, an all-embracing faith and surrender to the protection of divine fire are the means of emancipation from an egotistical and false identity. For Gibran, our greater freedom outside self-centred care is our greater security. But our predicament remains: to be primarily martyrs of smaller security, troubled by dangers, fears and uncertainties, bearing witness to security’s different forms and manifestations throughout history and around the globe. Stories of security are used, again and again, in order to justify or explain our actions as well as to legitimate, deconstruct and reconstruct regimes of power. Like the early Romans—who came up with not one but many stories of security —we buy and celebrate the fables of authors, legislators and interpreters.29 There is a certain joy in listening to stories. But what is joy on closer reflection than our hidden sorrow unmasked?30 Perhaps we listen, read and believe security stories only to alleviate a deeper pain…managing somehow to live meaningfully, more comfortably, and even with a smile, within our boundaries of violence.

5 Diplomacy, grotesque realism and Ottoman historiography

I In Chapter III of her mock-biography Orlando, Virginia Woolf comes to narrate in some detail the grotesque character of diplomacy.1 Orlando, we are informed, being appointed by King Charles as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople, engaged in the most delicate negotiations with the Sublime Porte and received a dukedom for invaluable services to his country. Notwithstanding these successes, or probably because of them, Woolf’s satiric account of his daily work exposes that inescapable comic dimension of a reverential profession, the funny intricacies of Ottoman protocol, and in the end, significantly, diplomacy itself as an absurd performance. It merits exploration if only for the provocation it levies to the conventional (Western) vision of diplomacy as the rational and fully representational dialogue between sovereign states. It also deserves attention for its implicit challenge to putatively neutral but in practice hegemonic attempts to theorize diplomacy in strict scientific language and tectonic style. For, under the pretext of science, such theoretical ventures generally seek to sedate rather than laugh at diplomacy, pursue ‘the real’ firmly and methodically rather than come upon it contingently—precariously limiting theory to the solemnity of epistemic rites and pious contemplations—wrongly assuming that we cannot parody, anecdotize and theorize at the same time. Woolf describes ambassadorial life in the Ottoman capital as masterly planned and routinely practised. Orlando would rise at around seven in the morning and for an hour divide his time bathing, enjoying the city panorama, and projecting himself in fantastic Oriental episodes. Afterwards, ‘properly scented, curled, and anointed’ he would receive his ‘red boxes’, which opened only to ‘his own golden key’. Orlando would read his secret papers and prepare others, ‘kept busy, what with his wax and seals, his various coloured ribbons which had to be diversely attached, his engrossing of titles and making of flourishes round capital letters, till luncheon—a splendid meal of perhaps thirty courses’. After luncheon he would enter his coach to visit other ambassadors and imperial officials, escorted ‘by purple janissaries running on foot and waving great ostrich feather fans above their heads’. At this event there were strict ceremonial rules that had

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to be followed without deviation. Woolf collapses all meetings with Ottoman officials to one single scene, repeated several times over each afternoon, a scene which involved a grand entrance into a courtyard of some prestigious edifice followed by entrances and exits from one chamber to another. In the first chamber only the weather was mentioned; in the next only a comparison between London and Istanbul was made; in the next only the healths of the Sultan and the English King were discussed; in the next, compliments were exchanged on the host’s furniture and the ambassador’s attire; in the next food dishes were served; in the last chamber, there was a simulation of smoking a hookah and drinking coffee (‘there was neither tobacco in the pipe nor coffee in the glass as…the human frame would have sunk beneath the surfeit’). The ‘biographer’ informs us that Orlando was generally tired by this ambassadorial routine ‘though [he] performed these tasks with admiration and never denied that they are, perhaps, the most important part of a diplomat’s duties’. But, in the end, it was not in court and only to his dogs that Orlando managed to talk ‘in his own tongue’. Soon the ambassador started behaving in a manner incompatible with his diplomatic profession. He mixed with natives in bazaars, joined mosques, chanted hymns and recited poetry in the nearby hills, got married to a dancer of unknown ancestry and dubious morality…and, finally, as a climax to this whole affair his sex mysteriously changed: yes, he became a woman and, amidst the surrounding anarchy, she left Istanbul on a donkey and joined the gypsies. This literary image of diplomacy in the Ottoman empire may appear historically incredible. But that is only within an understanding of history exclusively concerned with credible knowledge, with accrediting norms, with the accumulation of data that discover ‘reality’ behind the text, not considering in other words the fictive capability of historiography, the view of history as imaginative explanation and narrative.2 Woolf’s story may not have the benefit of being found in the Ottoman archives, recently opened to Ottomanist scholarship, but after all this same scholarship is nowadays not immune to the narratological approach to history. As Cemal Kafadar suggests in his study of Ottoman historiography: ‘Turning the tables around, historians now indulge in the application of literary criticisms or narratological analysis to archival documents, to even such dry cases as census registers, which have been seen as hardly more than data banks in previous history-writing’.3 Such narrativization of history has some important implications. It works to recontextualize events read as accessible reality, to retrieve the silences hidden in official hagiography, to reinvent practices viewed as given experience, and to reimagine visions fixed to grand and dominant narrative. Woolf’s fantastic narration may also appear an episodic monad, being a nomadization of thought about diplomacy which leads to hyperbolic arithmetization of ritual and possibility. But an exception it can only be, if one supposes that the sovereign standard of knowing should be imperial or sedentary thinking, that is thinking which assumes the role of a colonial map-maker, confidently marking the conquered diplomatic terrain from an epistemic

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metropolis and geometricizing it into theorems.4 Harold Nicolson, for example, could be seen as a classic representative of this type, drawing and measuring the cartography of diplomacy throughout the ages, showing ‘in simple but precise forms, what diplomacy is, and what it is not’.5 Martin Wight criticizes Nicolson precisely on this point, i.e., for assuming that ‘his’ diplomacy ‘is the only form of diplomacy (just as one might talk of “civilization” rather than civilizations)’.6 Whereas imperial thinking reigns from hierarchical centres and walls of exclusion, nomadic thinking rejects settling within fixed boundaries or dwelling in enclosed and static constructions. Woolf’s grotesque image of diplomacy is possible and comprehensible because her writing is borderless. It subverts and reformulates the known by crossing the boundaries of ideal form. Her encounter can be both anti-imperial and post-colonial. During a dinner conversation, a few months before the publication of Orlando, Nicolson ventured to explain to Woolf how ‘our English genius…for government’ legitimized the empire and colonial expansion: ‘We do our job: disinterestedly; we don’t think of ourselves, as the French do, as the Germans do.’7 Woolf recorded in her diary her response to him: ‘Why not grow, change? Can’t you see that nationality is over? All divisions are now rubbed out, or about to be.’8 Perhaps too optimistic, but no wonder her literary ambassador left a historic capital, ashamed of the stigma of nationhood, and joined the gypsies to rove around the world, to ponder upon the world. There was indeed a time when journeying was enough for one to be literally in theoria, to engage in theory, and even to be practising diplomacy.9 II How is one to engage in surveying the historical landscape of diplomacy? How far should the epistemic yardsticks of geometrical space be adopted as diplomatic norms or proven theorems? What is the colonial package they carry with them in disclosing the ‘real world’ of diplomacy rather than narrative equation? Taking a more specific and closer look at the imperial encounter as opened up by Woolf’s transgressive example in Istanbul: how to approach a scholarly plan, such as Hurewitz’s legitimate call for further research into the much neglected subject of Ottoman diplomacy, with the stated objective to ‘seek to determine its techniques and its rationale and try to differentiate between those features that are primarily Muslim or Ottoman and those that are universal?’10 What must we presuppose or risk if we are to follow in all good faith such a research programme? Must we infer, firstly, that, assuming they can be distilled, those features which are not Muslim or Ottoman axiomatically constitute universals? One may readily admit that there are principles of diplomacy, either codified in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations or as part of customary international law, that currently enjoy general universal application. But this is a long way and should be distinguished from taking such principles as universal per se. In other

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words, shouldn’t the way they got universalized and became dominant matter in historical investigation? Here one can refer to a variety of practices, ranging from the way Western powers forced permanent legations and continuous diplomacy on the Chinese emperor to the assumption of territorial sovereignty and the capacity to represent it internationally as an ‘objective’ condition for decolonization and self-determination. With regard to the latter, European powers denied in their imperial adventures that colonized peoples belonged to, or had the capacity to enter, their society of states, but subsequently during decolonization required adherence to the principles of that very ‘international’ society. This is neither to deny the functional work of international law or diplomatic immunity nowadays, nor is it to acquit Ottoman imperialism for its own violent imposition of law, such as the sending of the infamous palace gardeners, the bostancis, as emissaries of death (still, Ottoman principles are not presented as universals today, they are not much known, as Hurewitz says). The point is rather that such universal principles, like all universals, are not legal givens but are products of normalization. They are not neutral and should not be taken for granted. They can be employed as a cover for the exercise of power. They have been used in the past as a means of fixing a specific understanding of ‘diplomatic relation’ which conveniently excluded the encounter with natives, downgrading the status of treaties signed with them, and so in effect were employed as a rationalization for assuming control over their polities and lives. Specifically in the Ottoman case, as clearly stated by another author, ‘a new era of Ottoman diplomacy’ came about, inter alia, in the ‘imposition of European diplomatic concepts and practices’.11 Such ‘universal’ principles as extraterritoriality were adopted by the Sublime Porte not because it was convinced of their universality or technical necessity, but rather as a result of treaties of capitulation with European powers. Don’t we need to consider, secondly, the extent to which the European-turneduniversal principles we may adopt for testing Ottoman diplomacy have been influenced by Christian cosmology and theological concerns? Specifically, I refer here to the idea of continuous diplomacy or resident embassy that is commonly considered as an essential principle, the distinctive mark of modern diplomacy, presented as the innovation of Renaissance Italy and necessitated for the more efficient regulation of relations between states. Or, as Hurewitz puts it, ‘a concrete response to a concrete need’ that the Ottoman dynasts only belatedly realized they needed.12 Ottoman diplomacy is distinguished from the more ‘developed’ European practice by being reluctant to send resident missions abroad until the very late eighteenth century, non-reciprocating the foreign resident missions accepted in Istanbul, and thus ideologically attached to images of false grandeur and employing ‘the most elementary principles’ that ‘classical Islam’ offered for dealing with non-Muslims.13 (Hurewitz’s argument is that the Ottoman rulers could have demanded reciprocation from the very beginning, leading to entry into the European society of states before the nineteenth century.) This inward-looking, Muslim-centric approach of the Sultans meant,

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for Hurewitz, that ‘the Ottoman state had inherited only rudimentary practices for conducting external relations’.14 Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether ‘classical Christianity’ offered anything more than elementary principles for dealing with nonChristians, there is a more pressing question of whether the continuous diplomacy that Hurewitz sees as the high technical development of the West was anything other than an ideological reformulation of Christian metaphysics. This is a view persuasively argued by Ernst Kantorowicz in his writings on political theology, specifically that a new emphasis on the continuity and infiniteness of time, substituting the transitoriness and apocalyptic imminence of it, gave rise to a general ‘quasi-infinite continuity of public institutions’, of which diplomacy was part.15 In this respect, ad hoc embassies which served only momentary needs in the Middle Ages were assigned for longer periods, given time and credentials to readdress diplomatic business, and here Kantorowicz mentions the legal procuratores of kings sent ‘almost permanently’ to the Papal Court in the early thirteenth century, and the permanent representatives sent to secular courts in the early fourteenth, as stated in the Acta Aragonensia. This evidence, however, Kantorowicz points out, has been neglected by scholars treating resident embassies as a technical, non-ideological innovation—scholars like Garrett Mattingly, who is an important authority on the matter for diplomatic theorists. It is not surprising to discover that Hurewitz too formulates his reading of modern diplomacy out of Mattingly’s particular conceptualization, generously footnoting him in his article: ‘The classic and indispensable study of the origins of continuous diplomacy is Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy.’16 Such readings, exclusively concerned with the technical novelty of continuous diplomacy, fix also the epistemic, putatively secular standard, and consequently the framework within which Ottoman diplomacy is to be studied. Why follow Hurewitz’s call, thirdly, to seek ‘Muslim’ features in the diplomacy of the Ottoman empire, an empire that incorporated other religions too, and where Christians, e.g., Greeks, Armenians and many other Europeans, participated in the formulation and execution of imperial diplomacy? How is one to classify the practices of highly influential and controversial figures—such as Alexander Mavrocordato, the Grand Dragoman—agents of Ottoman diplomacy who could move with ease across civilizations and religions, whose diplomatic representations could hardly be reduced to acts of single subjectivities, international diplomatists for whom nationality was a career? Hurewitz interestingly acknowledges, though ultimately underestimates, the input and significance of, say, Phanariot Greeks.17 This practice of erasing the ‘Christian’ impress on Ottoman diplomacy is characteristic of ‘civilizational’ authors like Nicolson, who just like Hurewitz acknowledges the role of Phanariot Greeks,18 but at the same time identifies a (politically loaded) shift of Byzantine diplomatic theory to Venice after the conquest of Constantinople.19 There is suspect silence on the possible shift of ‘Christian’ features to the ‘Muslim’ empire as well, even though, by only connecting some of Nicolson’s scattered images in his texts

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covering Byzantine and Ottoman diplomacy, the striking similarities between the two cannot be avoided. For example, the painstaking Ottoman ceremonies associated with the mubadele, the exchange of ambassadors across the frontier, are characteristically close to Nicolson’s distinctive feature of Byzantine diplomacy, namely ‘the extreme importance attached…to questions of protocol and ceremony’.20 In this respect one can also point out the general inaccessibility of both the emperor and the sultan to foreign delegates, not talking to them directly during audiences, addressing them instead through the logothetēs, an official whom Nicolson refers to in the Byzantine case on page 26, and whose Ottoman equivalent is inadvertently displayed in the picture serving as the cover illustration of the same book.21 Furthermore, the conditional immunity of foreign delegates in Istanbul, as pictured in the Castle of the Seven Towers, a prison ‘kept permanently ready’ to accommodate them if Ottoman policy so required (page 35), is a modified practice and in principle not different from the qualified immunity of the Xenodochium Romanorum in Byzantine Constantinople, an honourable prison used to accommodate, in Nicolson’s words, foreign delegates ‘where their movements, visitors and communications were carefully scrutinized by a guard of honour composed entirely of the secret police’ (page 26). Fourthly, there is the important question of the constitution of Ottomanness, which refers back to the problem of historical and geographical boundaries and which is not seriously addressed in Hurewitz’s plan. Far from a pre-given or natural entity, Ottoman subjectivity is a discursive, spatio-temporal practice. What kind of practices count as diplomatic is furthermore highly at stake here.22 Definitions can of course be given. But definitions involve limits as well as limitations. The ease with which the former are readily adopted is matched by the ease with which the latter are conveniently ignored and, even if initially acknowledged, tend to remain as a matter of common practice frequently unvisited. Take as an example pipe-smoking, which had become a distinctive part of Ottoman etiquette by the nineteenth century, with the French ambassador even threatening to leave Istanbul as a protest for not obtaining ‘the honours of the pipe in the Sultan’s palace’. This highly charged practice was only introduced in the Ottoman capital by English merchants in 1601. Not only was this alien to earlier Ottomans, but it was also considered in the beginning as an ‘abominable innovation’ which Murad IV forbade in 1633 ‘on pain of death’.23 That is to say, in different historical moments, Ottoman subjectivity was constituted differently: as non-smoking subjectivity in 1633 and as idiosyncratically smoking one later. In a similar fashion, pipe-smoking can expose different conceptualizations and approaches to diplomacy: as nonverbal communication and ceremonial ranking of status (i.e., who smokes with whom); as an instrument facilitating a change in diplomatic perspective (i.e., the inhaling of substances making one less selfcentred, less self-interested and so more akin to compromise during negotiations); as a spiritual or vertical mediation of estrangement by which good spirits are called to participate and sanction an agreement, and evil ones chased

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away (i.e., the function of the Native American pipe-of-peace). In sum, when opened to the genealogical and semiological approach, methods of (Ottoman) diplomacy tell us not only about the diplomacy of particular subjectivities, but also about the role of the diplomatic process in the constitution of subjectivity; not only about the principles of diplomacy, but also about the ontological assumptions of principles and of finally drawing the limits of diplomatic practice. III What we address here, lest this has not yet become clear, is the colonization of diplomatic imagination. And it is also the implications of working with dichotomous vocabularies, binary oppositions of high/low, developed/ undeveloped, religious/secular, enlightened/mythical, technical/ideological forms of diplomacy, measuring the practice of others according to normalized types and processes. This very often leads to political distortions and caricatures, which like Woolf’s narrations offer extreme and exaggerated images, but, unlike them, do not subvert and remain unaware of their narrative suppositions. Put differently, these images save and legitimate a sovereign, omnivoyant objectification. It is in this respect that the writings of Hurewitz and Nicolson serve to confirm a normal, commonsensical and universal type of diplomacy. Though interestingly, the latter’s work, which covers history, biography and literature, is sometimes even quite satiric of diplomacy (for instance, his novel Public Faces).24 Still, it is stereotypically so. For Nicolson’s amusing style and mocking opposition are generally concerned with the irony of the inappropriate. In this respect, as a few examples illustrate below, Nicolson’s genre is quite informative about its ideological commitments concerning Turkish, Ottoman or Oriental diplomacy. Firstly, early in chapter one of his Diplomacy, he downgrades the diplomacy of the Seljuk Turks to the ‘primitive’ level, where foreign delegates get mythologized and magically dealt with: It must be remembered that in primitive society all foreigners were regarded as both dangerous and impure. When Justin II sent ambassadors to the Seljuk Turks they were first subjected to purification for the purpose of exorcising all harmful influence. The tribal wizards danced round them in a frenzy of ecstasy burning incense, beating tambourines and endeavouring by all known magic to mitigate the dangers of infection.25 Nicolson’s totalizing edict about primitive prejudice regarding all foreigners fails to remember a few other things: for example, the sacred laws of hospitality often furnished by the very mythology Nicolson downgrades, or the prejudice of rational-racist policies in his own time, seeking to expel migrants, demonizing foreigners, and which were based on their own mythology of national purity.26

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Nicolson quotes here, without acknowledging, a Byzantine historian, Menander Protector, who narrates Zemarch’s embassy to the Seljuk ruler Dizaboulos in 568 CE.27 A close reading of Menander’s fragments, however, reveals that the purification ceremony described by Nicolson was conducted by shamans the Byzantines met on their way, some time and quite a journey before they met Dizaboulos. In other words, it is arguable whether these people were officials of the Seljuk ruler, and whether this ritual was linked to protocol and the impending negotiations. Yet it is treated by Nicolson with certainty. Moreover, it is clear from Menander’s fragments, to anyone who cares to read one or two paragraphs below this event, that the ‘primitive’ Turks actually had a highly instrumental ceremonial system which they manipulated for diplomatic signalling; specifically in this instance, by explicitly giving precedence to the Byzantine ambassadors over the Persians. A second, and perhaps more provocative, caricature appears in a passage concerning the ideal diplomatist and how such a person ought to conduct negotiations with Oriental officials. As Nicolson advises: A similar rule [to ‘others may: you mayn’t’] is applicable to those who have to deal with the subtleties of the Oriental mind. A notable British diplomatist, who had long experience in the Far and Middle East, was in the habit of providing younger negotiators appointed to Oriental capitals with the following piece of advice. ‘Do not waste your time in trying to discover what is at the back of an Oriental’s mind; there may, for all you know, be nothing at the back; concentrate all your attention upon making quite certain that he is left in no doubt whatsoever in regard to what is at the back of your mind.’28 This being a view that Nicolson endorses, it is hardly surprising there is no mention of Oriental practice and innovation in ‘the development of diplomatic theory’ in his book. How could there be? If, in the negotiation process, there is nothing at the back of the Oriental mind worth discovering—rendering the Oriental incapable of reasoning or representation—what can Oriental ‘diplomacy’ offer or teach Nicolson’s ‘diplomacy’, ‘which in its essence is common sense’?29 The evasive, elusive or mysterious character of the Oriental mind makes it by definition the alien face of diplomacy, which is neither ‘invention’ nor ‘pastime’, ‘but is an essential element in any reasonable relation between man and man and between nation and nation’.30 As Nicolson mused elsewhere, ‘the age of reason’ was an entirely Occidental affair.31 Concerning the Turks, he unambiguously states his position in his reminiscences of the 1919 Peace Conference at Versailles: For the Turks I had, and have, no sympathy whatsoever. Long residence at Constantinople had convinced me that behind his mask of indolence, the Turk conceals impulses of the most brutal savagery. This conviction was

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not diminished by his behaviour towards the Kut garrison or towards the Armenians within his borders. The Turks have contributed nothing whatsoever to the progress of humanity: they are a race of Anatolian marauders: I desired only that in the Peace Treaty they should be relegated to Anatolia.32 Finally, in his biography of Byron, Nicolson suggests the total, natural incompatibility of the Turkish mind with the technical requirements of statecraft: For the arts of settled government are alien and obnoxious to the Turkish genius (the obvious contrast is the English genius quoted above); it is difficult for them either to conciliate or even, perhaps, to crush; they can neither construct nor maintain; the word ‘preservation’ does not, in fact, exist in their ungainly language.33 A view that must have come as a surprise to the person to whom the book was dedicated: namely, E.K.Venizelos. Moreover, it must remain a mystery how, with such mental, linguistic and ultimately political deficiencies, the House of Osman managed to rule a huge empire and maintain an unbroken familial succession for more than six centuries. Nicolson’s problematic views perhaps need to be qualified with a different explanation. For as he acknowledges in his Diplomacy: ‘Had I myself spent two years as a Vice-Consul at Adana, I should have learnt much more about Turkey than I did as Third Secretary to the Embassy at Constantinople.’34 IV That embassy at Constantinople! It was destined to haunt Nicolson for another reason. For Woolf’s festive writing was not a mere product of literary imagination but bitterly real and personal. Her Orlando was dedicated to Vita Sackville-West, that is to say Mrs Harold Nicolson, with whom Woolf was having an erotic affair at the time. The picture of Orlando as ambassador on page 77 is in fact a photo of Mrs Nicolson especially dressed for the occasion. The ‘Hon. Harold Nicolson’ is acknowledged in the preface of Orlando (though it is not specified exactly for what), and upon reading it Harold Nicolson sent the following telegraph to Woolf from the British embassy in Berlin, on 13 October 1928: ‘Orlando has filled me with amazed excitement. I feel deeply grateful to you Virginia for having written something so lovely and so strong.’35 In a letter to her, on 15 October 1928, he confirmed: ‘It really is Vita… She strides magnificent and clumsy over 350 years.’36 Furthermore, as it seems, Woolf expressed openly to her Orlando-to-be, on a number of occasions, her strong opposition to the pretentious, shameful and non-sensible practice of diplomacy: ‘have you talked to Harold about giving up silk stockings and swords and gold lace and humbug and nonsense and becoming a sensible man?’ (18 February

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1927); ‘Look here, Vita, you must wring Harold’s neck, if the worst comes to worst. You have my sanction. A dead diplomat in a dust heap.’ (28 February 1927); ‘I will write to Harold, whose letter enchants me, but shows a guilty conscience. He is ashamed of being an Ambassador (Nicolson was informed by the Foreign Office that he was soon to be made an ambassador). I am ashamed that any friend of mine should be married to a man who may be an Ambassador.’ (12 March 1928). The climax of Orlando, its domestic aiding and abetting, and the mocking of diplomacy at Nicolson’s first post, raise a number of questions: did Woolf mix stories she heard from the Nicolsons about diplomatic life in Pera? Were certain images tacit references to Harold’s own bisexuality? In the exchange of roles, was she also sodomizing diplomacy, the other ‘woman’ and great love affair of Harold Nicolson?37 Did Orlando have its share in Nicolson’s decision to resign from the Foreign Office in September 1929, less than a year after publication? The conjectures of these questions need not be affirmed for Woolf’s narration of diplomacy to become ‘realistic’. It does not require an historical association with the real life of a diplomat or the sanction of a real ambassador (is Nicolson’s experience of Ottoman diplomacy any more realistic?). The evidence of such associations, however, may be more unsettling for those working within conservative and restrictive understandings of the empirical. The association of realism in conventional international theory with the rational empiricism of agents of power is founded upon a particular—not to say singular—interpretation of reality. Contrary to popular international relations (IR) rhetoric, critical theoretical approaches do not aim to destroy realism, or, if they do, seek to destroy a particular version of realism. In other words, these approaches seek to reinterpret and reconfigure realism, to deconstruct the epistemic conditions by which one form of realism gains prominence over another.38 Employing the heterorealisms of art and literature is not only a means by which we begin to read diplomacy and world politics differently, but also a way to extend and pluralize the claim of self-identified realists in IR that realism can be a broader paradigm.39 Importing thus from literary theory, the Bakhtinian distinction between classic and grotesque realism could be of use for current purposes—which are, I argue, not simply interdisciplinary but postdisciplinary. This is not to propose a new epistemic opposition for separating and thereby testing IR texts. It is rather to suggest that some of the representational limitations of classic realism (which I here associate with Nicolson’s problematic assumptions about a commonsensical, complete and non-ideological vocabulary of diplomacy) can be challenged and recharged through more transgressive/aesthetic representations of diplomacy. Even though I have clearly laid down my preferences (and I am not retracting now), I also believe that the question is not simply one of endorsing one style over another. If—despite their ideological differences and emotional claims— Nicolson and Woolf could read, appreciate and review each other’s work on a regular basis, it was perhaps because they both recognized that writing

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is heteronomous; that is to say, it thrives in contest and it is conditional upon such differences and antinomies. Classic realism, for Bakhtin, is the glorification of perfect and complete being, the idealization of form. Grotesque realism, however, celebrates incompleteness and abundance. It always exceeds the ‘official’ boundaries of being, and in deconstructing finality, the claims of ideal form, it embraces becoming. The grotesque mocks authority, derides typology, subverts piety. Though its primary feature is degradation, Bakhtin insists that grotesque realism is never only—never in fact—negative. Its comic critique reforms, its laughter renews and regenerates. For it brings forth a festive or gay relativity, where one can shake routine practice, mock stasis, and temporarily be liberated from authoritative structures, be free to imagine change, and play with new forms. As imaginatively put by Bakhtin: To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better… Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of non-existence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.40 In this respect, Bakhtin dissociates grotesque writing from cold humour, cynical irony and sarcasm, which degrade an object or individual but place one ‘above the object of his mockery’, leave the author’s beliefs intact, high and in a hierarchical position. Grotesque laughter is cosmic laughter, non-individual, postegotistic, ambivalent, and thus ‘expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it’.41 This collective spirit, far from romanticizing the comic, was experienced according to Bakhtin, in the Roman saturnalia, medieval festive culture and early Renaissance carnivals, where distinctions, prevailing truths and authorities were suspended, ‘establishing a special type of communication impossible in everyday life’.42 To that extent, grotesque realism ‘discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life. It leads men out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity, of the indisputable and stable’.43 But it comes with a caveat: its temporary, carnivalesque inversion of hierarchy can be a safety-valve, letting off steam, used instead to reinforce the prevalent order; its liberating promise may become the rhetoric of optimistic populism.44 Put differently, the freedom it furnishes can be empowering, but its excessive gesture always takes place within specific historical conditions, carries with it its own limitations, and potentially a new bondage. In short, grotesque realism emphasizes temporality and ambivalence, contrasting to the realism of presence and ideal form, aesthetic representation and alterity.

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V The grotesque is an epistemological double agent: it subverts and degrades the scientific (ideal or complete) form, but at the same time its excess displays the heterogeneity of forms, works to reconstitute them, joins their service. On the one hand, the grotesque alters, trivializes, exaggerates and laughs at human experience; on the other hand, it is a means by which knowledge about such experience is gathered, recorded and disseminated. Frivolity serves as its camouflage, making it easier to move across barriers and pomposities, like the dwarf eunuch in the Ottoman palace, who, by being laughed at or ignored, gains access to forbidden chambers and corridors of power, thus, intentionally or accidentally, bearing witness to the secret or unpublicized background, the heterology of events. We need to study the grotesque as a way of investigating the fabrication of the normal. The grotesque should be restored as the grotta, the crypt that hides fragments of historical awareness, altered modes of being and becoming, conditions of (political) possibility. To give a few examples. The parodic embassies of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (with the Athenian and Spartan ambassadors holding effigies of their erect phalluses as maces, while negotiating with pacifist women abstaining from sex) prompt a reconsideration of the exclusion of women from the political realm, of the foundational distinction between private and public affairs, of the mislocated male desire in war, and of experiencing the polis as an independent state with interests over and above the people that constitute it. Thomas Middleton’s satire Game at Chess may have offered an exaggerated account of the influence of the Spanish ambassador in London, Gondomar (Black Knight), in the diplomatic chessboard of England (White Kingdom) and Spain (Black Kingdom), but it prompts also the need for reconsidering the politics of bilateral representation, specifically that rulers or their representatives unproblematically represent given national interests, and not conflicting and contradictory ones. Colonel Qaddafi’s diplomacy—featuring a poststate jamahiriya, people’s bureaux, student ambassadors, macho ‘state’ visits secured by women bodyguards, carrying abroad the official Bedouin tent and camels—has a true Almodovarian effect, being at the same time light and serious, shocking and operatic, unconventional and realistic. By not taking diplomacy ‘seriously’, by comically transfiguring specific typologies, grotesque interventions work to defamiliarize events, exploit similarities and mix stories that review and criticize normal practice. To that extent, whereas a genealogical narration helps to expose how at different historical moments diplomacy was viewed differently (i.e., that it did not always involve the interstate or the logocentric-negotiating mode commonly accepted as the standard today), a grotesque narration can in addition illustrate how people at the time were often both aware of the contingency of their condition and could imagine alternatives. For instance, consulting the Delphic oracle was not just a sacred institution where the ancient Greeks sent their most

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solemn embassies, but also the site for comic and disreputable stories about Pythia. Theogamy was not only a mythic pact, a union guaranteeing ancestral lineage to a pantheon or divine protection, but also a narrative act by which humans derided their gods by overplaying their desires, and thus brought them down to size. As Bakhtin argues, in different historical periods comic protocols mimicking serious rituals, such as the coronation of a king, tended to flourish in parallel to official ceremonies. In some cases, serious and comic aspects even coexisted and ‘were equally sacred, equally “official”’, as in the case of the triumphant procession in early Roman history which included both the glorification and the derision of the victor.45 We also need to employ the grotesque as a means of transgression: in other words, as part of the wider ‘project’ of providing a festive repertoire that challenges official and hegemonic discourses; of degrading dominant views and renewing vocabularies; of constantly inventing new modes of articulation and interpretation which more satisfactorily account for and do justice to the complex realities of the world in which we live and act politically. Jorge Luis Borges once said that ‘comic truth’ has the advantage of being ‘able to tolerate cyclical and contradictory representations of reality’.46 Perhaps there was something in Abraham de Wicquefort’s old definition of the ambassador as ‘a kind of comedian’, for we are now, more than ever, in need of a newly appointed Orlando to expose the assumptions, intricacies and absurdities of modern diplomacy. The language of clichés, the routine and normalized activity, the taken-for-real simulations of diplomacy have been common features of Orlando’s ambassadorial life but so they are of contemporary diplomatic practice too. Orlando’s turn is thus the epitome of diplomatic theory today. As a grotesque figure, as a transmogrifier of ‘natural’ or ‘real’ subjectivity, Orlando transgresses essentialist interpretations of male and female, Occidental and Oriental, public and private, political and literary, historical and fictive. Istanbul, the place where s/he comes to practise diplomacy, is itself a topos of ambiguity— a civilizational hybrid as much as an imaginary meeting point of East and West. Orlando’s diplomatic-transgressive move exposes the need to substitute our dichotomous vocabularies with more ambivalent ones. More than a representative of sovereignty, therefore, Orlando exceeds formal identity to become an intermediary of opposites, mediating worlds of our making, while recalling the equivocality of diplomatic reality and of the conceptual media chosen to produce and investigate it.47 In this other diplomacy, Orlando’s performance—more critical and less strange—stages the real anew.

6 NATO’s caps*

Recall that there is another cap, the cap being not only ours but the other, not only that which we identify, calculate, and decide upon, but the cap of the other, before which we must respond, and which we must remember. (Jacques Derrida, L’autre cap) In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Czech novelist Milan Kundera defines the struggle against power as ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting’.1 He begins by narrating that important event in Czech history, in February 1948, when the communist leader, Gottwald, surrounded by his comrades on the palace balcony at the Old Town Square in Prague, addressed the nation and proclaimed its future. It was a cold night, and comrade Clementis dutifully took off his fur cap and put it on his leader’s bare head. After Clementis’ purge in 1952, the propaganda section typically airbrushed him out of all history and photographs. The only thing that stubbornly kept reminding the Czechs of his existence was that cap on Gottwald’s head, which figured in this historic photograph that every child was shown in schoolbooks, posters and museums. History plays curious games. Our situation in this particular juncture of (postCold War) history has its own ironies. This chapter, for example, was initially written as a paper for a conference on the role NATO could play in the future of European security, hosted in the Czech Republic, a ‘divorced’ country that during the Cold War was a NATO ‘enemy state’ and one that officially espoused the position that the Atlantic Alliance was not the solution but the very cause of European insecurity. Those days are surely gone and we are now told we live in the more secure days of a ‘partnership for peace’. One could even say—if the term was not so overdetermined—that we are all comrades now. However, what has not been asked at this point is whether this partnership for peace is after all not such a novel idea. It is possible that we already had a partnership for peace in the past without even realizing it. In fact, I do not think it would be at all inappropriate to describe the relationship that existed between East and West during the days of the Cold War as an unofficial partnership for peace. For all

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opposites are partners in the politics of identity. And so, during the Cold War, the opposites that articulated ‘peace’ (by constantly preparing for war) in their own antithetical way were joined in a partnership that was apparently conflictual but more cooperative than the adversaries cared to admit. Here I refer not only to the ‘cooperation under the threat of nuclear war’ that is supposed to have kept the ‘peace’ in post-World War II Europe. Nor do I simply point to the fact that both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were ‘partners in arms’ charged, in their respective and mutually recognized spheres of influence, with the production of deterrence under the madly reassuring discourse of mutual assured destruction. I refer also to the legitimizing credentials that each camp provided for the other, credentials that accredited the two military alliances as the sole guarantors, the indispensable missionaries of European security—a task they sustained in turn by credibly insecuring European space. In those days, NATO and the Warsaw Pact were like ‘partners in crime’, not really trusting each other but joined in a single purpose; not a purpose outside some domestic or international law but an ideological mission that in its parity laid down the very rules of European and world order. Now that the latter partner has been purged, I ask you to allow me to recall the cap, the cap of the enabling Other, the cap that was lent to NATO as a cover during the cold years of the Cold War, the cap that also established NATO as the captain or figurehead of (Western) European security for more than forty years, the cap we can laugh about but not forget. Recalling the cap in the old and new pictures of European security is a political struggle, a form of resistance to the ‘truths’ of security and the picture of world politics they paint for us.2 It is a commemoration of what these truths made people do on both sides of the iron curtain and around the globe. For the cap speaks and calls us to account for our adventures of the past before venturing, once again, to frame our visions of the future. To that extent, the cap is also a way of remembering the ‘true/truth’ role of the discredited partner now ostracized to the oblivion of international history, a partner whose truth was at some time an equally significant realpolitik, a partner whose truth prompted NATO’s ‘counter-truth’. This loss has been celebrated by many—particularly those in Eastern Europe eager to share in Western spiritual goods accumulated, ironically, via their Cold War exclusion—but NATO is already beginning to realize the high price of such loss, that is the threat of the absence of the Warsaw Pact. In the end, for NATO these days of peace may prove infinitely colder than those of the Cold War. And there are good reasons to worry about NATO’s immune system in these apparently peaceful times; it is widely recognized that there is no small danger of NATO catching a bad (fatal) cold if left with only its old Communist cap. NATO can no longer capitalize, nor can it capitalize out of this cap.3 Recalling the cap is additionally a way to constantly bring to mind the new partner(s) and the new cap(s) that have to be found for NATO to be cap-able of articulating a new security discourse. A serious role in ‘the future of European security’ can be played by NATO only if it succeeds in finding and capitalizing

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on a new serious adversary/partner—a threatening, but saving, Other. In this respect, not just anybody or anything can award NATO the longed-for cap. The authorizing credentials need to be established and won in the battle of global representation before the cap can have a legitimizing or practical authority. The ‘imperial’ Russian cap, for example, could be seen to confer upon NATO a security degree that is currently of only limited recognition (i.e., not all NATO members accord to it the significance that the Baltic states do;4 could Chechnya change this view? is Chechnya enough? is Chechnya a bad omen, or an exception, or a domestic affair?). Similarly, desert caps and gellabayas cannot provide the Alliance with adequate shielding from the storms that lie ahead (attempts by the Allies to institutionalize Saddamite global risk in the aftermath of the Gulf War have apparently not worked, at least not as expected). And even a case such as that of the Balkan ethnic and religious Others, whose threatening potential is full of historical resonance and in the name of whom military actions may be legitimized, could simply mean enveloping NATO in a series of percussion caps. In this captivating quest for a new Other we should, however, be aware that it might be impossible to find a ready-made cap to fit NATO’s (big?) head. NATO is no longer the capstone of security. If it remains a state-centric organization, then it may run the risk of discursively invalidating itself out of much future security action, branded a wholly incapable forum for dealing with increasingly ‘new security concerns’ that cut across national and European boundaries and interests (e.g., human rights and environmental problems). Similarly, if NATO continues to define itself as a military/strategic alliance, then it will also be seen as an inappropriate institution through which to address security issues that do not require a violent response (e.g., feminist concerns). How far then, if at all, can NATO change? Can its organizational structures sustain enlargement or, more significantly, thematic redirection? The question of NATO’s future will therefore increasingly involve not only its cap but also its head (caput), what goes on inside it, what different discourses are to be articulated in its head-quarters, and how these new discourses will subsequently decide how NATO moves ahead and in the end where it is heading. To that extent, the security discourse voiced by the post-Cold War head of NATO, Willy Claes, was a tired capriole. Addressing the 40th General Assembly of NATO in his first major speech after becoming Secretary General, Claes gave a breathtaking review of regional and global risks (well recognized nowadays as a familiar strategy for selling insurance): I am not a pessimist by nature. I would prefer to call myself a realist. And so as I look ahead to the rest of this decade, I see plenty of reason to hope that we are indeed on the verge of achieving a Europe which is truly whole and free, and at peace with itself. But I also see dangers—the growing threat of weapons of mass destruction; the situation across the Mediterranean; the still fragile experiment in democracy to our east; the

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persistence of conflict in the Balkans; and even the danger that within our midst the ties of solidarity that bind the members of this Alliance could weaken, and our commitment to maintaining and modernizing our defence forces falter.5 If one examines the ‘new’ dangers emanating out of Claes’ apocalyptic capriccio, one soon experiences not only feelings of anxiety about the way ahead but also uncomfortable images of déjà vu. To enumerate: first, we were told during the Cold War that weapons of mass destruction were needed as a means of deterrence, and thus asked to accept the rationale that nuclear capsules per se did not make war but kept the peace; now we are told that these weapons constitute in themselves a grave danger. Second, this skilfully/carelessly undefined ‘situation across the Mediterranean’ (that could mean anything from the Maghreb to South Africa) is an extremely interesting shift to new areas of concern that were traditionally seen as falling outside NATO’s security umbrella. (Note that no country ‘across the Mediterranean’ threatened the ‘territorial integrity’ of a NATO member state to legitimate Alliance action; indeed, in view of the colonial legacy and the recent history of Western intervention in the region, the opposite point could be made more convincingly.) Certainly, this ‘danger…across the Mediterranean’ also strikes resonances with the situation in Algeria (and the widely reported terrorist or migration threat), but it is again important to remember that an equally bad, if not worse, situation existed in Algeria a few decades ago, treated in that instance not as a European security issue but as the domestic affair of a certain NATO member. Third, the ‘fragile experiment in democracy to our east’ —which presumably could cover not only East European countries and Russia but also—if the need arises—China, Thailand and Cambodia—is another innovation. Again, we should recall that in the past the absence of democracy (although a useful means of demonizing communist regimes) was not in itself treated as a threat to European security; democracy was not even considered a precondition for NATO membership. The new interest in the consolidation of democracy, particularly in East European countries that welcome cooperative association or political integration with Western Europe, is a worthy purpose, but this matter needs to be examined together with the question of who or what is excluded from the new Europe in the process. Although NATO has a role to play (i.e., the democratization of army structures) the overall programme is effectively (not, however, unproblematically) handled by the European Union (EU). Fourth, the mention of the Balkan conflict seems an unwise reference to NATO’s inability often to reach agreement on how to solve the problem.6 Cynical suggestions about NATO’s ‘successes’ in containing the Yugoslav conflict need to be re-examined by asking whether, in the final analysis, this policy of containment within European space (a space that is supposed to be the

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object of a truly European security) is what NATO’s vision of how-to-secureEurope-in-the—1990s entails. The final ‘danger’ could have constituted a stroke of genius by the NATO head, if he managed to get it accepted as official agenda. It also quite clearly expresses NATO’s desperation. That the weakening of Alliance links or cutting of defence budgets (i.e., ‘the ties of solidarity that bind the members of this Alliance’ and ‘our commitment to maintaining and modernizing our defence forces’) could become a future danger for this same Alliance and its member states, and one that NATO itself should be charged to deal with (via a strategy of deterrence?), would have been the most interesting development of post-Cold War security discourse and a spectacle worth seeing—if the whole idea were not so preposterous, incomprehensible and dangerous. As a direct relation to all these ‘new security concerns’, one should not shy away from the fact that ‘we’ (academics gathering from all over Europe and North America for NATO-organized conferences) constitute an integral part of NATO’s capricious and capacious process of redefinition. By asking academics to identify new dangers and risks, and define new areas of intervention, we are reminded that it is not only politicians and policymakers that are engaged in— and can be held responsible for—the shaping of future European security. Scholars can be viewed at least as partly responsible, even as first-rate accomplices, in the production and reproduction of a dominant security discourse that will again be used to formulate policies and determine political practices. That is why my initial reaction was one of concern, as was that of others, when asked to join this particular NATO conference. Not only was I not an expert on NATO and things military, but I was also sceptical about whether NATO could or should be made to fit future European security. I was much relieved, however, when I received the official invitation, which asked me for a ‘short’, ‘candid’ paper that reflected my ‘personal views’ and was ‘provocative’. This made it possible for me to gather my many concerns while dispensing with the obligation of a paper and not feeling responsible for offering the Western Alliance a ‘warm’ cap. Thus I found myself working under this cold, slightly crude title, which provided me with the space to cut a few capers at the expense of NATO. It took just a simple, ironic (for we should remember that we live not only in dramatic times, as we are constantly reminded, but also ironic ones) rearrangement of the conference’s theme to come up with a heading that best reflects, in my opinion, the Alliance’s critical and ironic condition. So the question that interests me in this paper is not so much whether NATO can secure Europe in the 1990s but whether one could develop credible discourses and find a way of securing a place for NATO in a Europe with new and fundamentally different security concerns. Could we then secure NATO in the 1990s? Should we? Who could possibly save NATO’s head, or offer it a new shielding cap? It is true there are voices arguing that NATO’s not-so-unproblematic past calls, particularly in post-Cold War times, for NATO’s decapitation. Not surprisingly, at the governmental level, France has been the one most often associated with

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such nasty propositions; it has been by far the most reluctant member of the organization and many times articulated the view that the Alliance’s security agenda often conflicted with an independent security policy or specific political concerns of member states. In effect, NATO was accused of constantly stealing France’s cap.7 Moreover, at a theoretical level, a number of scholars challenged the validity of NATO’s security discourse during the Cold War. This discourse worked within the so-called realist framework of international relations, which approaches politics as ‘a struggle for power’ and in which military strength (as threat or potential) is considered as ‘the most important factor making for the power of a nation’.8 Some scholars challenged the presuppositions upon which this security discourse was founded, that is, the capacity of states to be moral agents and the primacy of effective military defence as an exclusive concern of security policy.9 Others illustrated the vicious circle of the security dilemma, the perception between potential adversaries of defensive build-up as offensive military capability, leading to an arms race and thus to more insecurity.10 And still others argued that despite the impressive military build-ups of the United States and the Soviet Union, the superpowers and their European allies succeeded in being, in fact, far more insecure than were the weaker states.11 In view of these criticisms the loss of NATO will not be greatly missed. These scholars and others are not just (not really) after an organization when putting a price on NATO’s head. They are after a particular way of strategic thinking associated with NATO —a way of thinking that fixed understandings of world politics and security, a way of thinking that determined (without censoring) news headlines and academic headings. To that extent, I thought, NATO’s contribution to the history of thought was wittingly, and quite rightly, acknowledged in a book entitled Plato to NATO: Studies in Political Thought.12 But in the political-discursive practice of the 1990s, more important than the question of whether NATO could legitimate its existence in the past is the question concerning NATO’s raison d’être in the present time. The issue here concerns the extent to which NATO has outlived its purpose as an alliance established with the specific purpose of deterring the communist threat, and whether, by continuing to subscribe to its security discourse, states and individuals remain captives of a nasty, bipolar or polarized world that no longer makes sense. Combined with this is the issue that now, more than ever, an exclusively European security organization (perhaps under the umbrella of the Western European Union [WEU] or the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe [CSCE]) is what is needed in a Europe that draws closer together. In short, as argued, NATO needs Europe, but does Europe need NATO? An additional practical consideration of legitimizing authority—of what sticks in the 1990s—is whether the military/strategic security regime offered by NATO can be made relevant to contemporary and future security concerns. That is certainly not to say that the military aspect of security has no place in the present circumstances, in what has been dictated as a new but unpredictable (as if this is

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anything new) world order. It may be the case, however, that many ‘new security concerns’ require a non-military approach or solution.13 Barry Buzan, for example, has already proposed that the military dimension of security, while important, is only one of five principal categories of security, which also include political, economic, societal and environmental threats and pressures.14 Caroline Thomas illustrated the intrastate dimension of security, which involves the securing of financial markets and trade as well as systems of food, water and health.15 These other issues are nowadays widely accepted by ‘responsible’ governments. In a world where military and strategic security will be one among many securities, NATO may consequently have to capitulate its prominence and become one of many security organizations. Unless, of course, NATO begins to change direction and head towards new grounds, capturing these new security concerns and dimensions. In a way this is not a new debate inside the Alliance. In December 1956, the North Atlantic Council approved the recommendations contained in the Report of the Committee of Three (the foreign ministers of Italy, Norway and Canada) on nonmilitary cooperation. For current purposes, however, I briefly deal with three ‘new’ dimensions of security and discuss NATO’s cap-abilities in addressing them. That is not to say these aspects of security did not exist before; they did exist, but they were highly overshadowed by Cold War security discourse. Note, finally, that the following list is in no way exhaustive of potential semi-, non- or post-military securities that are currently up for grabs. Cultural and ethnic security This form of security refers to basic human rights issues and the persecution of cultural and ethnic minority groups. On the one hand, not all European states will recognize the political existence or fully and practically implement the human rights of such distinct communities within their borders. On the other hand, many governments will readily point to affiliated ethnic groups and their repression within the borders of other states. Ethnic and cultural cleavages affect all European states, whether we speak of Kurds and Greeks in Turkey, Turks in Bulgaria, Turks and Albanians in Greece, Greeks in Albania, Albanians in Serbia, Hungarians and Gypsies in Romania, Gypsies in the Czech Republic, Russians in the ex-Soviet Republics, numerous ethnic minorities in the Russian Federation, Turks and East European migrants in Germany, North Africans in France and Italy, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Basques and Catalans in Spain, and so forth. NATO could claim its share of success in this area of ethnic security. The Kurdish ‘safe haven’ operation that followed the Gulf War has been generally successful in protecting the Kurds of northern Iraq from a ruthless regime, although it is increasingly unclear whether it can protect the Kurds from killing each other or from the Turkish army. Although NATO as an organization was not officially involved, the NATO military base in south Turkey was of paramount

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importance. We should remember, however, the post-Gulf War pressures that led the Western Alliance to wear this particular cap. The Bosnian operation is obviously a more difficult case and, as mentioned above, opinions about its success as well as NATO’s future capabilities differ. But the point is that NATO has been involved and seen to have an important role to play. But, interestingly, so has been the WEU—an almost unimaginable occurrence during the Cold War period. The WEU is emerging as a rival to NATO when it comes to issues perceived as peculiarly European ones. This is despite current NATOWEU suggestions that most security issues could come under a ‘double-headed’ formula. There may simply be too many security heads in the European market or too few caps to cover them. Perhaps the unsolvable problem for both the WEU and NATO is how to deal with similar issues that concern not easily identifiable pariahs but specific member states or partners for peace. We know from the past of NATO’s reluctance to be drawn into conflicts between member states (e.g., Greece and Turkey), let alone within member states. So NATO needs to reconstitute itself, if it is to have the jurisdiction to address Europe’s numerous ethnic and cultural problems. Such reconstitution could take the form of the CSCE, and surely the fact that such an institution is already in place makes NATO’s task all the more difficult. In short, effectively to accommodate future problems concerning ethnic and cultural security in Europe, NATO needs to steal the CSCE’s cap.16 Environmental security Concern for the environment gains significance by the day, and the need for securing it has already been argued by IR scholars.17 The nature of the environmental problem is such, however, that it is extremely difficult for strategic alliances to fit in. Not only is this a problem that cuts across state boundaries, it is also one that in its deep ecology approach challenges anthropocentrism (the view that the environment is open to human mastery and exploitation, or that it should be safeguarded simply for human ends) and instrumental rationality (thinking about the environment objectively and teleologically—in other words, finding scientific and technological answers to these problems).18 Clearly, NATO has no place in a deep ecology world. But NATO’s role within a green European or global programme cannot be dismissed out of hand. Images of US soldiers saving birds from the discharge of Kuwaiti oil into the Gulf brought to mind not only the other security dimension of the Gulf War but also the capacity of highly organized units to respond rapidly to ecological disasters. NATO surely has the potential to address environmental disasters, although it has not yet developed a language for doing so. If, for a moment, one tried to imagine and examine the ecological problem at a regional level, then one would soon realize that contemporary threats in Europe do not emanate simply from nuclear missiles targeting the European cities, but also from Yorkshire industrial

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chimneys targeting the ozone layer, which are in turn responsible for the acid rain that destroys Scandinavian forests. In other words, the nature of this threat is fundamentally different from what conventional security discourse was made to address. Could NATO live up to the high expectations of the ecological challenge? Could it be made to wear a ‘green’ cap, to address, for example, the huge problem of pollution in East European cities or the discharge of toxic waste into the Atlantic? It is a question that brings to mind the limitations of the current constitution of NATO (its incapacity to address security issues that are not external to the member states but are rather produced by them, particularly by the highly industrialized states of Europe and North America). I cannot, however, stop imagining a situation in which NATO finally becomes what its name says it is: a North Atlantic Alliance. And so an alliance that begins to protect primarily the populations of the North Atlantic. Ultimately, if this means arming the minky whales (the way the Soviet army armed dolphins with mines for blowing up enemy submarines), so be it! A less extreme position, however, may involve establishing and protecting safe havens for endangered species or escorting whales during their migrations (i.e., things that NATO forces have some ‘human’ experience of). The challenge then, as I see it, is how NATO deals with the problem of member states that have whale-hunting communities such as Iceland and Norway, or the ritual killing of whales in the Faroe Islands. The other challenge, finally, is how to find ways of incorporating nongovernmental groups such as Greenpeace into a governmental (military) organization. Gender security Recent feminist voices in IR theory suggest that conventional security discourse is not only state-centric but also andro-centric.19 They argue that important security concerns relating to women are excluded from the international political agenda, issues ranging from forced sterilization in China to female circumcision in Somalia, compensation for ‘comfort women’ who were forced to prostitute themselves in Japanese camps, social security concerns about equal pay and opportunities, and even ordinary rights of women to drive cars in Saudi Arabia. Of particular importance to the exploration of engendered security seems to be the whole reproblematization of the question of the ‘domestic’ that feminist IR scholars propose. For example, these scholars approach the problem of violence and oppression not only when occurring between states but also when it happens within states, and interestingly here feminists include all ‘domestic affairs’, such as household violence against women and children and the whole issue of patriarchy and its effects. Although definitely far from being on NATO’s security agenda, nor on the agenda of any other global or governmental security regime, the gender issue possibly will figure in the future of European security. Only recently the rights of women were quite forcefully advocated by the prime minister of a NATO

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member state at the World Population Conference in Cairo (September 1994). Calling for a just and respectful place for women around the globe, Gro Brundtland, the prime minister of Norway, dismissed the hypocrisy of the idealist talk of family values, the political reification of woman’s body, and determination of woman’s proper place. In fact, during the conference it did not require much thinking to see where the new security threat was coming from: even more than many traditional Muslim countries such as Iran (with which it had a Holy Alliance), it came from the Holy See.20 It will be interesting to see in the end which regional or global organization or movement will be charged to raise these issues, wear the feminist cap and deal with this peculiarly ‘European’ problem. *** I have thus suggested three aspects of security that I believe will rise in importance in the future European security agenda. I prefer to leave as an open question whether NATO could (perhaps with changes in its constitution) or should (in view of its disputed role during the Cold War) be involved in any of these securities. What I can say with a bit more confidence is that NATO will not retain its caparisons by simply offering military solutions to European problems. The military dimension will remain a significant factor in the security jigsaw for the foreseeable future (but it will not be the only one) and for this reason alone it might be wise not to rush into destroying the Atlantic Alliance, which at least keeps potentially lethal forces under joint command. This is an additional reason for actually extending NATO’s membership and for even overcoming current reluctance to include Russia in the Alliance. As Sedivy put it: ‘It will either be European security with Russia, or European defence against Russia.’21 By contrast, scholars such as Kissinger campaign for a strict limit to be imposed on the Alliance’s expansion. In this equally dramatic stormy weather to come, NATO should tightly wear its old capote and at most offer cover to a few ‘lightweight’ Europeans. Kissinger favours expansion towards the East as a means of filling the security vacuum between Germany and Russia created by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. But this view of NATO as ‘vacuum cleaner’ tells us less about the security condition of Eastern Europe and more about Kissinger’s own understanding of security; that is, it presupposes that the East Europeans, now found in a vacuum, were previously furnished with security under the communist regimes and their collective defence arrangements. In addition, Kissinger wishes to maintain a sovereign distinction between defence alliance and collective security; NATO is the former and ought not to provide the latter. That is why Russia should not be admitted to the Alliance, as this will dilute NATO into a ‘general system of collective security’.22 There is, in other words, an ongoing debate of what kind of security NATO could or should provide. In the end, it seems that the question of NATO’s capping cannot be separated from the question of Europe’s heading. What Europe will it be, what are we

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supposed to secure in the Europe of the 1990s, and what kinds of insecuring will this securing involve? These questions break down into a number of other crucial and disturbing ones. First, what is Europe? What are the cultural and political implications entailed in old and new definitions of European space? Could it be an all-encompassing Europe, a Europe whose boundaries remain flexible and undefined? Or will it be a fortress-like Europe, a restricted and highly privileged club? In terms of security, what form will it take, who will be included in Europe, who will be excluded, and why? Who will be the new European Others, what will they ‘threaten’, and what will they enable the Europeans to do? What constitutes a threat to Europe, how is it constituted as such, and who decides on it?23 For example, how is it that Islamic fundamentalism in the Maghreb and the Middle East is now becoming a security threat? How is it that international terrorism is a security threat, and not domestic terrorism that holds families hostage to the will of a patriarch, and which can be equally violent and cause more deaths than the officially defined one? How is it that drug trafficking constitutes a security threat, and why is it not its illegality that causes its underground criminalization? (In this respect we should not forget the nineteenthcentury Opium War fought by Western countries against a ‘threatening’ China precisely for its decision to ban the trade of opium in its territory.) When closely addressed, issues such as these pose serious questions about current debates concerning the European security agenda. They also put considerable weight behind suggestions that in these apparently public and plural discussions there is, and always has been, another heading—a secret agenda, a hidden cap, be it a modern version of a res publica christiana or a form of European cultural neo-imperialism. Implicit to these propositions is that Europe has yet to come to terms with the supposedly erased Others of its past—its medieval crusades or its colonial insecurities.24 From this perspective, the whole strategic thinking of the West could be perceived as continuing the long march of Western cultural and political fulfilment,25 a strategic project that involves a political discourse currently causing as many insecurities as it seeks to resolve, a discourse inevitably implicated in its own violence.26 To that extent, these reflections are not peculiar to NATO (after all, NATO was not the only Western organization that fell in love with itself by gazing in the mirror of the Berlin Wall). These qualifications apply independently of who or what is capped as a security paragon; they could well apply to the EU, the WEU, the more amorphous CSCE, or any other regime of power. In other words, these considerations matter and have to be reckoned with, even if the cap crowns what may currently seem a worthy purpose or is charged to address an ‘undisputed’ danger (perhaps more in such cases). What is often forgotten is that it is not only totalitarian regimes but also security regimes that have the capacity or potential to be violent and dangerous. Dangers are encountered not only in the ‘real-world-out-there’, and violence not only in the way one practises security. These things are produced beforehand in the way one thinks about security and

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the world. That is why, in the end, one is led back to and needs to confront the core question of what it means to secure and what this meaning entails (see chapter 4). This question, however, cannot be answered through capitularies. It involves a permanent critical task and a constantly reborn challenge: looking for ways to protect without insecuring ‘ourselves’, ‘others’ and the environment, and modestly learning to live with one’s fears, standing next to one’s enemies in security without necessarily making these foes friends or overcoming them.27 Such problematization is not just captious talk. It is not a formula for inaction as proposed by those conventional theorists and practitioners now fully occupied in preparing new security agendas for the next century, in crafting caps for the new season. It is rather a call for actively reconsidering our technological approaches to threats and dangers, and for actively reflecting on the meanings and effects of contemporary security discourse. In fact, if the Yugoslav crisis has taught us a lesson, it is that attempts to maintain international or regional security and avoid another Balkan crisis mingle with attempts to restore national or state security (the identity of which constantly changes), which in turn mingle with attempts to enhance the security of ethnic or religious groups, which in turn mingle with attempts to secure individuals caught in the middle of all these (and for whom all these identities make no sense, such as mixed marriages or atheist ‘Muslims’), which in turn mingle with attempts to secure the place and safety of UN troops on the ground, which even mingle with attempts to secure European cultural heritage (Dubrovnik) or historical copyrights (Macedonia), and which lastly mingle—not to be underestimated— with attempts to secure a face for the West. (See, for example, the statement by the former US Assistant Secretary of State Eagleburger: ‘If we don’t do something in Bosnia, we’ll look absurd!’)28 In other words, in official pronouncements there were multiple views of what we were supposed to secure in ex-Yugoslavia, or how to go about doing the securing. Many actors and agents intervened, but in order to secure different things. In the meantime there are still ‘risks’, ‘dangers’ and ‘worst-case scenarios’ floating around the wavelengths of transatlantic debates, and so there must be also a cap flying somewhere in the European air. In fact, as suggested above, all kinds of caps are up for grabs. The discourse of European security is therefore capacious and its destination an adventure, a capriccioso. That is, its study involves the cap of the Other but also still the cap of sovereignty; graphically expressed, such study engages in a kind of surreal, obsessive following of the KLM flying logo—that royal crown, that majestic cap, that flying signifier simulating sovereignty across the celestial pathways of Europe and beyond, which nowadays appropriately offers ‘mystery’ flights ‘to those incurable romantics for whom flying is the high point of every journey, who would rather travel than arrive’.29 If—in these late modern times that another Czech told us are characteristic of the crisis of the Enlightenment project and of Western rational thought30—a cap is flown its way, NATO amidst its own identity crisis might not believe its luck.

Ekstasis

7 Europa mythica

O Europe! Europe! We know the horned beast which always attracted you most, which again and again threatens you with danger! Your ancient fable could once again become ‘history’ — once again a monstrous stupidity could master you and carry you off! And no god concealed within it, no! merely an ‘idea’, a ‘modern idea’! (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil) Locating Cyprus In the portico of Atticus under the Athenian Acropolis, during his speech for the ceremony of the signing of the Accession Treaty to the European Union, the President of the Republic of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, thanked EU institutions and member states ‘for offering Cyprus the possibility to accede where it belongs historically, geographically, politically and culturally’.1 Blunt in its oversimplifying identification, this unequivocal pronouncement of Cyprus’ continental location brushes over historical, geographical, political and cultural factors that tie the island as much to its two closest continents, Asia and Africa. One can mention, in this respect, etymological factors too, irs or Alasia, the ancient name of Cyprus in Akkadian and Hittite transcriptions, the originary word which according to some gave the Asian continent its (Greek) name.2 Or the ‘Cypriot character’ in Aeschylus, grouped together with Libyans, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Nomads and Amazons, and in specific opposition to Argive Greeks.3 Of course, Papadopoulos’ statement can be explained as being part of the GreekCypriot agenda of institutional Europeanization. Yet it is also symptomatic of the unique geographical position of Cyprus, which has allowed different Cypriot regimes in different historical periods to selectively employ continental identities as a means of fostering political solidarity and framing moral progress. It is perhaps worth remembering that at the same time as Cyprus ‘joins the EU’, at the United Nations the country remains in the Asiatic Group of states, and historically in the Afro-Asiatic Group before its break. It suffices to recall here

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another speech, by the first president of the newly established Republic of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, his first address before the UN General Assembly on 7 June 1962. Initially, in typical vein, Makarios eulogized the position of Cyprus at the crossroads of continents and civilizations: ‘Our geographical location in the midst of three continents and our close relations with the peoples of these continents open great possibilities and create responsibilities for us.’ But on the same day, addressing the UN Afro-Asiatic Group, Makarios gave his intercontinental image a different spin: ‘The relation of Cyprus to the [Afro-Asiatic] group does not simply arise from its geographical location…but more importantly, from our faith in common ideals and objectives as well as from common historical experience.’4 The indirect elimination of Europe as a continent with which Cyprus had common ideals, objectives and history was not an arbitrary rhetorical move by Makarios. At that period of anti-colonial struggle, Europe represented a morally problematic space, a space that made the Holocaust possible, a place of imperialist powers that hypocritically and anachronistically denied the rights of humans and nations around the globe. At that time, the ‘winds of freedom’, the resistance to the violent order of things and old-fashioned colonial regimes, were coming from the other continents, from the political spirituality of Gandhi, the struggles of Nkrumah and Kenyata, the Non-Aligned Movement, etc.5 That is why the diplomatic embracing of Africa and Asia at that historical period was a progressive move that among other things inflated the political status of Cyprus and the Cypriots. In the case of Cyprus, the Afro-Asiatic identification, then, functioned in an ideological and egocentric way, just like the European identification nowadays.6 The Cypriot application to join the EU in 1990 coincided with the decision to launch a new Cypriot coin in 1991, the polygonous fifty cent, which depicted on one side the legendary abduction of princess Europa from Sidon by a metamorphosed Zeus.7 This numismatic image was a version of an ancient Cypriot coin, issued by the ruler of Marion, Timocharis, and one of the earliest depictions of Europa on the bull, which was redesigned to support the credentials of Cyprus as a peculiar easternmost representative of European cultural space.8 The same design became the logo of the Cypriot Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the following rationale: The logo of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a multidimensional symbolism. First of all, it symbolizes the rich culture and civilization of the island that dates back to antiquity. Moreover, it reflects the crucial role that Cyprus is destined to play as a future member of the European Union: as Europa was carried via Cyprus to the Continent that was to assume her name, in the same way Cyprus has to face the challenge of becoming the bridge that will link the European Union with the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.9

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Setting aside the fact that there is no classical reference that Europa has ever been to Cyprus (the Ministry’s webpage on the previous paragraph says ‘very possibly via Cyprus’) or the Continent (something Herodotus makes a fuss about as I show below), the mythical appropriation of Europa by the ancient and modern Cypriot regimes bears ironic similarities.10 We can only speculate about the reason Timocharis issued his Europa coin in the fifth century BCE, but we know that he was a pro-Greek ruler who came to power after a period of proPhoenician and pro-Persian rulers in Marion. That he tried to propagandize and spite his pro-Asiatic opponents is a distinct possibility. But unlike modern rulers he had no illusion and no mission to prove that Cyprus was geographically in Europe. For it would have been a geographical oxymoron for an island that was ‘in the middle of the earth’ (meso-gaia; medi-terranean) to seek to belong to one of its constituent continents. This chapter looks at the rhetorical use of continental representation as well as the political appropriation of the myth of Europa, an appropriation that in Nietzschean terms turns the fable into ‘history’ and seeks to rule Europe by a ‘modern idea’. It suggests a reading of the myth that challenges its conventional appropriation, which fosters continental essentialism and European supremacy over the other continents. As shown in the case of Cyprus, counterrepresentations of the island’s ‘true’ location are sacrificed in the process of developing new and expedient reference points. Political visions in and about Cyprus are subsequently supported through essentialist narrations of geographic identity, that is to say, according to totalizing interpretations of what Europe, Asia or Africa are or ought to be. But continental representations change as official ideologies get revised. And though the predicament of continental extension intensifies on border locations like Cyprus, it is neither the prerogative nor the monopoly of such locations. Moreover, the production of continental meaning cannot be restricted to the organizational agendas of governmental policy, though it is often driven by such concerns, as is, for example, the case of the EU.11 State interests and governmental dilemmas may be predicated on and shaped by continental imaginings produced at different historical periods and under different political conditions. Early continental representations The core story of European supremacy with all its modern colonial and neocolonial manifestations is already part of the archaic ‘knowledge’ that inaugurated the science of Western medicine and geography. In his Airs, Waters, Places Hippocrates outlines the impact of topology and meteorology on human health, but also passes judgement on the health of the continents. The section on Libya (Africa) is largely lost, but the diagnoses of Asia and Europe, ‘how they differ in every respect, and how the nations of the one differ entirely in physique from those of the other’ are unequivocal.12 Hippocrates identifies in Asia temperate climate, beauty and good nourishment. Nonetheless, ‘courage,

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endurance, industry and high spirit could not arise in such conditions, either among the natives or among the immigrants (i.e., the Africans or Europeans)’.13 On the whole ‘Asiatics are feeble’ and an important contributory cause that sustains this condition has to do with their despotic institutions, being governed mostly by kings, and thus lacking in freedom and independence.14 Hippocrates notes exceptions of Asiatics in non-despotic regimes that surpass themselves, but which in the end prove the rule of feebleness. By contrast, ‘Europeans are more courageous than Asiatics’, given the harsher climate in which they live and conducive political institutions that encourage independence of thought and risk-taking. 15 Though differences among the Europeans are greater than among the Asiatics, Hippocrates is still confident that such diversity in physique, character and constitution is not critical to his general scheme and continental hierarchization. Similarly, in the second book of his Geography, Strabo begins his description of the three continents with an explanation on precedence: ‘But I must begin with Europe, because it is varied in form and admirably adapted by nature for the development of excellence in men and governments’.16 It is characteristic of Europe to deserve and be given priority not only because of its own human and political development, but ‘also because it has contributed most of its own store of good things to the other continents’.17 As such, Strabo reduces the effects of transcultural interaction and Roman colonialism to an epistemic claim of geographic nature. Europe is proposed as the ‘most independent’ continent, having the right balance between war and peace. Even when coming across European regions of poverty and piracy, Strabo does not alter his positive reading of Europe, suggesting such negative states to be the result of bad government and against continental nature. Unsurprisingly, he is unwilling to extend such a generous reading to the other continents. Strabo’s geography is explicitly strategic as much as it is political. Geography should serve the needs of ‘the greatest generals’ who hold sway over land and sea and who seek to unite nations and cities under a single government.18 Geographical knowledge is strategically important for imperial expansion, and this, of course, is one of the early forms of European integration or intercontinental union. Geography is also crucial in assisting rulers and men of political affairs. That is why, for Strabo, geography should not be concerned with the uninhabited world, as it risks overrunning its utility to the art and practice of government.19 Strabo, at least, was no hypocrite. Feeling that a geographer had an imperial mission to fulfil, he politicized continental geography. By glorifying Europe, Strabo played his part to epistemically validate the spatial origin of the Pax Romana and legitimate its intercontinental rule. By contrast to Hippocrates and Strabo, Aristotle seems to be more balanced in his representation of the continents, but only so as to elevate politically the inbetween:

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The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbours. The people of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skilful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent; hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains constitutional unity.20 However, in one of the earliest known uses of the word Europe, Herodotus viewed the continental predicament quite differently. Herodotus voiced an interesting array of questions that we are yet to answer. But of Europe it is plain that none have obtained knowledge of its eastern or its northern parts so as to say if it is encompassed by seas; its length is known to be enough to stretch along both Asia and Libya. Nor can I guess for what reason the earth, which is one, has three names, all of women, and why the boundary lines set for it are the Egyptian river Nile and the Colchian river Phasis (though some say that the Maeetian river Tanais and the Cimmerian Ferries are boundaries); nor can I learn the names of those who divided the world, or whence they got the names which they gave.21 The lack of knowledge displayed by Herodotus about the continents is not merely cartographical. It is clear that it becomes difficult for him to explain not just the contingency of boundaries, but the peculiar practice of (if not desire for) geography, what causes men to write the earth, delineate, and then give parts of it the name of women. To devise an etiology requires for Herodotus an inappropriate move from historical to mythical time. However, his reluctance to recite epically the mythical—which is what gained him the reputation ‘father of history’ —is a conceit. His literary genre is as much influenced by as written against the mythopoetic tradition. His historiography transforms myth into logical argument. Human reason measures and corroborates the events of his narrative performance. In the case of Europe, Herodotus artfully appropriates and reconstructs the legend of Europa. He is of course aware of the orthodox myth of how Zeus, in the form of a golden bull, seduced and abducted princess Europa from Asia, taking her to the island of Crete, and impregnating her with the seed of the Minoan dynasty. Herodotus states that this has led some ‘to say that the land took its name from the Tyrian Europa having been till then nameless’. Even then, Herodotus considers it important to recall that Europa ‘was an Asiatic, and never even came to this land which the Greeks call Europe, but only from Phoenice to Crete and from Crete to Lycia’.22 Still, for Herodotus the divine intervention and

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act of hierogamy are not a simple romantic narrative but a complex historical event. The story of Europa is therefore retold and from the very beginning of his Histories. He narrates a number of stories that are similar to that of Europa in Greek mythology (including other famous women such as lo, Medea and Helen), only to place them as part of a mortal male practice of seducing and stealing women among the Phoenicians, Greeks and Trojans.23 Herodotus emphasizes that Persians and Phoenicians told him these stories, not Greeks. He simply conveys to his audience what was said to him, and he does not know whether it is true or not. To that extent, Herodotus rationalizes myth. He subverts and revises Greek mythology by narrating it as barbarian history (for Plutarch he’s therefore a liar and philobarbaros; for Seneca at the same time ‘the father of history’ and the ‘teller of tall tales’). The Greek audience before which he performs, on payment or in oral competitions, may thus critically review their own tradition, discovering their core myths to be transgressive versions of the common history of foreigners. Herodotus introduces a new narrative style which reformulates the world of mythos as historiography by reference to the logoi of historical others. Put differently, his audience is made to confront the mythopoetic constitution of Greek subjectivity by being transported outside Greek temporality, momentarily undergoing the experience of barbarian rationality, temporarily becoming an Other: a Persian, Phoenician, Lydian, Asian. By explicitly striving to step outside the national time and ‘known’ myth, early history employed the stories of foreigners in order to bring about an ec-static experience. Herodotus therefore warns the Greeks: Europe is not what you think it is; others, importantly nonEuropeans, have a different version of how Europe came to be; their version probematizes our core myth and it should therefore concern us.24 Appropriating the myth of Europa In the contemporary world, by contrast, non-travelling or ‘metropolitan’ history tends to underestimate the need to unpack the mythopoetic constitution of subjectivity.25 It assumes that scientific historiography has axiomatically overcome myth, which is, as Bataille says, the greatest myth of all.26 But mythological references about the origin of Europe are far from uncommon, even today, and that in the midst of intensifying rational debates on Europe and its future. The legend of Europa may be commonly approached as a strange narration of an ancestral imaginary. But note how it is also read as an allegory, a moral and political tale pregnant with symbolic significance, empowering interpretations and rationalizations of Europe. This has been the case with the celebrated book by the historian Norman Davies, Europe: A History (bed-time reading for the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, as admitted in an interview). This book of history begins with nothing less than a conventional interpretation of the myth of Europa. ‘In the beginning’, we are told, ‘there was no Europe…[only] a long, sinuous peninsula

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with no name, set like the figurehead of a ship on the prow of the world’s largest land mass.’ Davies initially appears generous to the other continents but that is only a device to elevate Europe. On the one hand, Davies says, the myth points to the Asian origins of European civilization, including the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet by the Greeks (according to the legend the alphabet was brought to Greece by Prince Cadmus, the brother of Europa, who searched for her in vain and in the end stayed in Greece, founding the city of Thebes). On the other hand, however, Davies argues that the legend ‘captures the essential restlessness of those who followed in her [Europa’s] footsteps’. At this point, the author makes a Strabo move. He spiritually charges the Mediterranean civilization with ‘a constant ferment of ideas’ and ‘energetic activity’, as opposed to the Egyptian, Indian, Mesopotamian and Chinese civilizations that were ‘lethargic in their geographical and intellectual development’. The European civilization has not been lethargic for, ‘like the vestments of Europa [while riding the bull], the minds of those ancient mariners were constantly left “fluttering in the breeze’”. The myth thus spiritually charges an identity of distinctive (and higher) cultural value: ‘a new civilization that would eventually bear [Europa’s] name and would spread to the whole Peninsula’.27 In a different tone, Sorbonne Professor Hélène Ahrweiler uses the myth of Europa to hellenize completely the meaning and destiny of Europe. In her embarrassingly Grecophilic The Making of Europe, she reads in the myth a ‘legendary reality’, a primordial statement about Europe’s eternal essence. There is one thing I would like to emphasize: that whatever is linked with Greece has always to do with the root of things; it has always at its core the essential. This applies to Europa too. The name is Greek; she of the broad brow, the embracing gaze, the loud voice. She who in any case is farsighted; the myth of the birth of the land called Europe, is Greek. That, anyhow, is the hidden meaning of Zeus’ passage over the waves and the high seas in the form of a bull, with Europa, abducted on his back. Europa who, incidentally, was the daughter of Okeanos; so she is herself organically linked with the waves and the seas.28 What follows from this suggestion is an attempt to distil the ‘intellectual stature’ of Europe in contradistinction to Asia: ‘I refer to the need for freedom as the basis of life, meaning the freedom which constitutes Europe’s stand against despotism; the despotism which in history is always represented by Asia.’29 To that extent, the resistance to the alterity represented by Asia is, according to Ahrweiler, ‘always Greek’. The exploits of ancient Greece are nothing less than the ‘exploits of the civilized world, of Europe’ against Persians, Arabs, Ottomans, against ‘Asians of a different creed’.30 Like Strabo, she interprets the dark moments of European history, like war and genocide, to be somehow extraterritorial, aberrant and un-European.31

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By contrast, in his two novels Europa and Europa in Limbo Robert Briffault reformulates the legend to critique the social and political conditions in Europe before World War II and to imagine alternatives.32 The protagonist, Princess Daria Devidof, is nicknamed Europa and ‘came from the East, like her mythological Phoenician predecessor, but the East was now Russia, the place of revolution and of a new order, with which Briffault identified’.33 On the one hand, the protagonist figures within the wider sociological context of archaic matriarchial power capable of regenerating the world, which was already expounded by Briffault in his scholarly text The Mothers.34 On the other hand, more specifically, she ‘stands for both Europa and the fate of Europe in the novel, because her character alludes both to a process by which decadence gives way to the hope of a new world, and to a power which women once had and might in some ways regain in the course of a vast process of liberation’.35 Europa mythica is therefore repackaged as an ambivalent figure encapsulating both continental pessimism and future hope. In another book with the title The Meaning of Europe the legend is employed to problematize the fixed idea or limits of Europe. Specifically, the myth is used to explain the constituted nature of Europe, starting from the political foundation of Thebes. Subsequently, the author, Denis de Rougemont, changes his problematization into a romanticization, which renders the project of Europe an incessant creative movement or adventure. It was by pursuing the mythical image of Europe that the Phoenician seamen discovered her geographical reality. But it was also by ceasing to look for Europe exactly as she lay in his memory that Cadmus set about building her. And ever since that age of the fable, how hard it has been to establish ‘where Europe was to be found’, that is if we are talking in terms of abstract principles, of platonic ideas, or of defining her as a complete and given fact of history; for it is the search for Europe which has created her. To seek Europe is to make her!… Perhaps she is simply an infinite quest, and this I call: adventure.36 Taking a cue from its originary legend, just like Davies after him, de Rougemont ventures to explain ‘the secrets of Europe’s vitality’ and its political potential, though not unproblematically.37 In his foreword to Peter Gommers book, a former Commissioner of the EU, Karel van Miert, views the continued use of the myth by different ‘European’ countries as carrying a ‘political message’. Van Miert suggests that ‘[t]he inquiry into the origin and the use of the name of Europe…makes us realize how throughout the ages myths, facts and interpretations around the name Europa have been known and analysed in the participating countries of the European Union’.38 This provides evidence of a ‘common culture’ which is ‘based on our Hellenic and Christian heritage’ and ‘is not a conscious activity, but it impregnates our daily life’. ‘Only when we leave this common cultural area, do

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we suddenly realize that we are in a region with populations that have different cultural conceptions and appreciations.’39 But given that stories of Europa as well as the Hellenic and Christian heritage cut across the geographical borders of Europe, this suggestion is highly problematic. Van Miert exaggerates the cultural capital of the myth, erasing cultural differences within Europe and commonalities without. Finally, in her collection of essays, Café Europa, the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic ponders on the question of the meaning of Europe after the Cold War. Here she speaks of how East Europeans saw in Europe nothing but a ghost—a phantom they constructed and dreamt about: ‘Europe was built by those of us living on the edges because it is only from there that you would have the need to imagine something like “Europe” to save you from your complexes, insecurities and fears.’ To be sure, this is an exaggeration that seeks to deflate the image of Europe for East Europeans. Drakulic demythologizes Europe, but interestingly by implicitly recalling and challenging the myth of Europa: ‘Europe is not a mother who owes something to her long-neglected children; neither is she a princess one has to court.’40 Rethinking the myth of ‘European unification’ How to respond then to this mythical appropriation of continental identity? In modern times there have been two general responses towards myth. First, the Enlightenment or Cartesian response which counts myth among the prejudices that the rational subject must overcome, sweep aside so as to achieve scientific knowledge. Second, the Romantic response that criticizes the Enlightenment tradition by calling for a ‘new mythology’ or a return to the old, inherited myths. Both these responses to mythology have come under challenge in contemporary social and political theory. First, the Cartesian response has been criticized for assuming a highly dubious and ethnocentric passage from mythos to logos, culminating, supposedly, in the overcoming of religious myth in the Enlightenment, and the secularization of the sphere of politics and science. As far as European unification is concerned, the point in question is whether the discourse currently circulated (that is of civilizational or cultural unity, of common social and political ideals) is not supported by its own essentialist mythology as secular and technocratic rationales imagine. Second, the Romantic response to mythology has been challenged in the way it assumes the existence of a secure epistemic or literary starting point projecting an authentic poetics or a primordial narrative. Founding Europe on a new myth or reinvented narrative could prove as teleological as contemporary logics of policymakers are. The romantic resurrection of a more authentic image of or destiny for Europe can render particular stories canonical to the exclusion of others; that is, privileging certain spatiotemporal beginnings and so empowering specific epistemic and political discourses.41

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Perhaps we need to approach mythical appropriation neither in the traditional Enlightenment framework nor in the Romantic sense. That is to say, neither to take myth to be a ‘primitive’ or ‘pre-logical’ mode of articulation, a prejudice that needs to be swept aside if knowledge is to be attained; nor to take the Romantic view that mythical exploration can restore an essential lost truth. My suggestion is that myth and rationality can co-exist, especially if we accept that foundational logic is a logic of narration. Narrations become foundations when a story is established as part of a tradition; elevated to grand narrative; narrated collectively or en masse, giving reasons for being; offering imaginative accounts which seek to connect people, ideas, events and geographies. In this sense, the technical may be defined against but can never escape the mythical, the complex web of stories surrounding a past phenomenon. Consider, for example, the foundational ‘European’ ideal of democracy as recently submitted by the Secretariat of the European Convention in the Draft ‘Constitution for Europe’. The Draft Constitution starts with an epigram from Thucydides, taken from the Funeral Oration of Pericles, which the President of the Secretariat, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, complimentarily read in ancient Greek in the EU Thessalonica Summit on 20 June 2003. ‘Our constitution…[sic] is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the greatest number.’42 What the points of omission pass over in this selective epigram is the written testimony of Periclean imperial chauvinism, namely how the Athenian constitution ‘borrowed nothing from others’ and is rather ‘a model for others’. By using points of omission, it seems that the drafters have been politically correct, perhaps even sensitive to the Fanonian critique that Europe should not become a model for the rest of the world, that there is a lot politicallypostcolonially at stake in overcoming the idea that one should always look there to imagine and produce political ideals.43 Still, by idealizing Athenian democracy, the de-contextualized epigram appropriates a selective and crude version of the history of Thucydides, a version which airbrushes out Thucydides’ vision of Athenian ‘democracy’ in its oratorical application later on: ‘In name a democracy, but in fact a government of the principal man.’44 To that extent, the myth of Europa may nowadays appear an incredible origin or ground, but it is not untypical—perhaps it is even exemplary—of narrations currently circulating in European wavelengths, such as the prolific recital of stories of civilizational or cultural unity, of shared social and political ideals. As shown above, the myth has been used mostly to support claims of cultural distinctiveness and superiority rather than to promote intercontinental fraternity, reintegration and cosmopolitan ethos. My proposition is that contemporary mythical appropriations or political rationales of European unification offer but historically and ideologically specific interpretations of the legend of Europa. I argue that these interpretations of European identity are at odds with a different interpretation of the myth of Europa, which is my interpretation, not the interpretation of the myth.

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Modern political interpretations are historically and ideologically specific in two ways. First, because they approach the quest and question of Europe as referring to the life and politics of a separate geographical entity—and consequently understand unification as an esoteric process of integration. This esoteric process is sometimes problematic even for those countries that are geographically at the centre. Javier Solana, fomer Secetary-General of NATO, defined NATO membership for the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland as a ‘signal to the world that these countries’ journey back to Europe is complete’.45 But my point goes beyond the mere rejection of Solana’s unreflective identification of European integration with NATO membership. For an equally credible understanding (based on a reading of the legend of Europa and the restless pursuit Davies and de Rougemont allude to) suggests that European unification originarily concerned not the union of political entities in Europe but rather the unification of Europe with Asia. That is to say, the venture was the taking of the Asian princess back home to Asia, reunifying Europa with her family. To this purpose, Europa’s four brothers set forth to search for her, instructed by their father (King Agenor of Sidon) never to return unless they find her.46 On other versions of the myth, Agenor even threatened to slay them with his own hand if they ever returned without her (this is significant, as they did not return). To that extent, the task of ‘the unification of Europe’ can be narrated as a political quest addressing and seeking to redress an arbitrary familial separation —pictured geographically as the separation of the European peninsula from the Asian continent. Nowhere in the Western imaginary is the violence of geographic separation more vividly illustrated than in the myth of Europa. It is only by erasing—and thus legitimizing—this originary separation that an application from an Asian or African country to join the ‘European Union’ could appear strange. An example is the application of Morocco in 1987 to join the EU, which was ‘naturally’ rejected without much consideration because Morocco was not in Europe. Though, according to the myth, one of Europa’s brothers, Phoenix, travelled along the whole coast of North Africa in his European quest, building cities whose inhabitants are commonly seen today as non-European others and not as descendants of the European family. Another case in point is Turkey, the region where another brother of Europa, Cilix, went, and a country whose European family credentials are still debated, be it among the neo-Christian exclusivists or the institutional demonologists like d’Estaing. The European motto of ‘unity in diversity’ goes only so far in its narration of familial genealogy.47 The second reason why I think modern dominant interpretations of European unification are historically and ideologically specific is because they work within an understanding of community that is (to employ Nietzschean terms) Apollonian: in other words, a community of technē, reason, form and boundaries.48 To that extent, these dominant interpretations neglect the Dionysian aspects of daemonic energy and plural identity; communal bonds and

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idioms that are beyond order and control, and therefore conventionally relegated to non-political factors. Still, the sweeping power of Dionysus, requiring political recognition, was taught to those ‘early Europeans’ (the relations of Europa) in Thebes. This is the polis Cadmus founded following the Delphic oracle in search of Europa, after marrying Harmony and bringing together ‘the opposite extremes of the world…in visible accord’.49 This is the polis that was to become the most tragic of all in the ancient Greek world, forcing Cadmus and some of his descendants to move westwards, towards the still unnamed continent. The story of the return of Dionysus— ‘the Asian god’ —and his confrontation in Thebes is tragically narrated by Euripides’ Bacchae. A lesson taught to these ‘Europeans’, remembered through the theatrical performance for the benefit of all Greeks, was how a community can change from Apollonian form to Dionysian ekstasis—meaning that identity is never complete, that every imposed political form hides within it the conditions of its own metamorphosis, the possibility of stepping outside its own self.50 The Dionysian celebrations—introduced in Hellenic cities after the triumph of Dionysus in Thebes—constitute an acknowledgement and a celebration of the annihilation of identity. Dionysian epiphany, as Vernant put it, is ‘an extra dimension, an expansion of the human condition’: What the vision of Dionysus does is to explode from within and shatter the ‘positivist’ vision that claims to be the only valid one, in which every being has a particular form, a definite place, and a particular essence in a fixed world that ensures each his own identity that will encompass him forever, the same and unchanging. To see Dionysus, it is necessary to enter a different world where it is the ‘other’, not the ‘same’ that reigns.51 By giving Dionysus his due, the political community gives recognition to the liquidity of identity, including its own political identity, recalling, and thus remaining aware, that the Apollonian community of technē and being is alwaystragically—subject to the Dionysian community of phusis and becoming. However, if that is so, contemporary political debates about European community currently remain almost entirely Apollonian—rational and technical —celebrating instead single, fixed and formal identity (they seem more prepared to expand that identity numerically and less, if at all, to consider or redefine it). They deny, consequently, the relevance and significance of other bonds that do not technically serve that identity, other forms of community, other common things that people ‘in’ and ‘around’ Europe share: from religious beliefs, history and oral traditions, to household customs and protocols of festivity and hospitality. In short, certain commonalities are rejected and marginalized in order for other commonalities—which legitimate specific political projects—to take centre stage, produce sameness and empower specific regimes. These

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commonalities are subsequently presented as the natural and normal state of Europe. Epilogue To the extent that our modern secular myths are versions of older narratives, they display not only our ‘paganism’ or mythical muse, but also the limits of our political imagination. Whether we are inside or outside Europe, whether we are Europeans or non-Europeans, Cypriots or non-Cypriots, we confront the boundary, the limit of identity. Still, we do not consider often enough how we are part of others, and others are part of us. Often forgotten in modern historiography is how Herodotus’ historical narrative inaugurated a giant leap not so much out of mythical identity but of self-identification, rendering the knowledge of the Other and the story of the Other a condition for knowing the Self, a knowledge that could still be mythical for all he knew.52 Jacques Derrida sought to re-launch something of the kind while reflecting on this very question of Europe: ‘And what if Europe were this: the opening onto a history for which the changing of the heading, the relation to the other heading or to the other of the heading, is experienced as always possible?’53 This calls for other headings, other agendas, other histories, otherwise than being, but also new openings, new responsibilities, new ecstasies that renew the possible and the probable. And, from this perspective it cultivates a European identity whose feature and narration work transcends the geo-graphic limit.

8 Hippopolis/cynopolis

Animating the political A persistent image has dominated my memory of Alexander the Great. It features a child holding the reins of a horse made to face the sun, and then changes into a youthful warrior on horseback, galloping in regal facility across lands known and unknown. An early pedagogical formation I thought for some time, tracing the image back to my primary education and favourite schoolteacher, garlicky Elli. She introduced us to Greek mythology and the past glories of Hellenism as well as the legendary stories of Alexander, who, among many great deeds, ‘unified’ the ancient kingdoms of Cyprus (that I distinctly remember, for it was immediately after the 1974 war and the division of the island).1 The mythic and pictorial economy of the Alexander romance charged my imagination early on: the story of the oracle of the wild horse forecasting the advent of empire; the breaking of Bucephalus by a pre-pubescent genius; the transgressive friendship between man and animal; the military conquests their partnership brought about. To my perplexity, I discovered years later that a version of this ‘Greek’ story and ‘private’ signified formed part of a wider collective unconscious recalling an explicit image of the political. The etymology of the word politics in Arabic (siyāsa) is taming or handling a horse.2 Lexical communions exceed the logics of narrative-free thought, thought premised on simple and straightforward correspondence. Familiar representations find their way to ‘strange’ locations; altered ones intrude into words whose meaning we thought we knew. Dominant interpretations yield to supplementary meanings, ‘soft’ currencies awaiting conversion in the linguistic market. An hippocentric conception of the political, for example, resuscitates narrative accounts that historically charged the popular imagination in peculiar ways, narratives that are now marginalized or forgotten, at least in the West. Built on a cross-cultural image, this conception might well be part of the Greek imperial and civilizing fantasy, but also of the daily experience of early Arabic or nomadic power structures, reviving historical moments of cavalier governmentality.3 As such, it animates a way of being political that is apparently foreign, primitive or exotic to the rational and dialogic representations of

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(Western) political thought. Commonly founded on logocentrism, this thought is at odds with the animal, the horse, the a-logon.4 By explicitly tying the animal to the political, the hippocentric conception incorporates in political practice visions of bestial fraternity, creative passion, instinctive or sensual perception, and non-logocentric skill and performance. It returns to politics an originary horse sense, not as plain commonsensical activity but as practical wisdom that goes beyond mental business, as practice that constantly negotiates mind, body and soul, thought, power and desire.5 Beyond the simile, to say that desire is a ‘horse’ is, in ancient Greek, literally to say that it is ‘irrational’ (alogon). Within this context and linked to the legendary imperial romances, the lives of Alexander and his horse notably run in parallel and at times become indistinguishable. Some accounts have them both born on the same day, and conceived of the same father, Nectanebus, a priest of Ammon, or Ammon himself.6 In some other accounts, horse and emperor die on the same day.7 In some versions of the Alexander Romance the distinctive horns of Bucephalus, a sign of divine origin and destiny, later sprang on Alexander’s head (the horns become a symbol of Alexander’s divinity, his ‘discovery’ of being a son of god).8 In the Arab-Islamic tradition, Alexander (Iskandar) appears as the powerful king and prophet Zul-qarnain, the Two-Horned One, who unites East and West and establishes an ecumenical rule.9 Alexander becomes paradigmatic of the Aristotelian ‘political animal’, whose soul temperament in terms of phronēsis is aligned to tame, not wild, beasts.10 Significantly, in the Romance Aristotle is not just the emperor’s pedagogue, but often his travelling companion, co-ruler and alter ego.11 Alexander becomes a mythical power figure, an animal/ god/philosopher whose cosmic life and polity are a metaphor for different things, and possibly—and not surprisingly—a metaphor for politics. His name in Greek means literally the gathering of men (a-lex-andros), that is a corporal and mobile vision of the polis, one that encompasses the whole world—a vision of the cosmopolis. Words are meeting points and places of rest. We meet there, in and across cultures and languages, to unload the burden of mental images. This constant unloading ties words to a complex web of myths. It is a clear sign that words have lost their value as mythic signifiers when their narrative performance appears strange or surprising to the modern mindset. This mindset—committed to the metre of correspondence and frenzy of communication—arrests the images of mental contemplation and attaches them to lexical formations that are available as narrative material but themselves presumed to be narrative-free. Stabilizing conceptual metaphors privileges particular stories over others, branding the former as true and logical and the latter as false and irrational. Conventionally viewed as the enlightened victory of logos over mythos, this move can be traced back to the initiations of Platonic ideational philosophy. But in a pre-Platonic, say, Homeric cosmology, mythos is neither a true nor a false story. It is, rather, that which radically displays and celebrates the narrative construction of the world. Logos is not a servile empirical tool but a polemic and often

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mystical gathering of things. In its gathering of worldly stories and images, logos is the ally of mythos. This final chapter explores alternative narrations of the political and the cosmopolitical. It focuses on two animal images: the horse and the dog. Animal images have been commonly used in political literature, leading to such acclaimed masterpieces as Pancatantra, Attar’s Conference of the Birds and, more recently, Orwell’s Animal Farm. In this chapter, however, I want to look beyond the instrumental usage of animal images and examine the theoretical potential their symbolic exchange establishes and the popular imaginative charge it installs in (cosmo)political discourse. In this respect, I employ the Arab etymology of the political as an entry point to ancient Greek texts that articulate similar or contrasting narratives. I have no evidence that these Greek sources influenced the Arab etymology, nor am I interested in proving the point. I am rather more intrigued by how a ‘non-Western’ conceptualization can problematize ‘Western’ thought, and the extent to which it can provide a key to unbar the largely repressed streak of the alogon and unlock other political narratives and conceptions. In this sense, the essay is directly concerned with what these narratives enable in terms of political practice, and what their exclusion and marginalization disables. For example, the enabling of political analysis that looks beyond the science of government and order and into the everyday impact of mythic and psychic states; or the framing of the cosmopolitan debate essentially around Western human rights discourse that excludes animal life, or ecological and theosophic knowledge. Moving from the horse-rule exemplifications of ancient Greek mythography to the politicization of the dog image in the cynic way of life, the essay finally turns to a mythic depiction of cosmopolis as the guiding of the chariot of Zeus, which involves the task of mediating the world through spiritual or cosmic politics. In this sense, the cosmopolitan becomes not someone who owes allegiance to universal humanism or ventures to unite and organize the world, but one who opens oneself to the cosmos and allows that cosmos to enter and transform oneself. Parallel to this cosmopolitan practice is the task of altering the political currency or dominant vocabulary, the critical uses of which I explain in the final two sections of the chapter. Given the foundational (and often problematic) use ancient Greek terms and thought ‘enjoy’ in Western political and international theory (as I have shown in the case of theoria and stasis), I think it is important to revisit and re-imagine putative origins, if only to critically engage putative ends. Hippophilics and hippophobics Alexander the Macedonian was raised in and became the ruler of an hippophilic nation. Macedon, son of Zeus, and the mythological origin of the Macedonian country and people, is given by Hesiod the epithet hippioharmēs, that is ‘the one who rejoices in horses’.12 Many kings of Macedonia, including

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Alexander’s ‘father’, were called Philip (philippos meaning ‘lover of the horse’). As Plutarch recounts, Philip especially liked to engrave his chariot victories at Olympia upon Macedonian coins. Typically, the message of the victory of his race-horse at the Olympic games on the very day of Alexander’s birth (and news of a military victory) were given an auspicious interpretation of future invincibility.13 Within such a tradition, the taming of Bucephalus served as a rite of passage, and one that was seen by the interested parties as surpassing the borders of Macedonia. Interpreting the event politically, Philip is said to have advised Alexander: ‘My son, seek thee out a kingdom equal to thyself; Macedonia has not room for thee.’14 In Plutarch’s biography of Alexander, horsetaming becomes a distinctive metaphor for the rule of Greece. Unlike Philip, who only manages to disturb and change the state of affairs in Greece, Alexander does a Bucephalian move and makes Greece ‘tame under his yoke’ (katazeuxai kai tithaseusai).15 Then he moves to ‘tame barbarian kings’ and ‘the wild and brutish Asia’ (basileis barbarous ēmerountes; Asian…tēs anēmerou kai thēriōdous).16 Associating Alexander with paradigmatic horse-taming transports the Greeks to a lost heroic era. It is a spatiotemporal strategy that explicitly links Alexander to the Homeric epos. On the one hand, Alexander’s mystical relationship with Bucephalus follows that of Alexander’s favourite hero, Achilles, with his talking horses, Xanthus and Balius.17 There is, however, an interesting contrast here, for Achilles’ horses speak to remind their master of his mortality and thus limit his ambition, whereas the breaking of Bucephalus and his symbolic riding in expeditions (even when the horse is very old) serve as a reminder of a great empire to come. On the other hand, the epithet horse-tamer had a specific usage in Homer, which was common to both Greek and Trojan heroes. Horse-taming, hippodamoio, is literally the last word of the Iliad.18 It serves as an epic irony when one recalls that the Trojans were deceived and defeated by a wooden horse. To that extent, Alexander’s heroic parallelism seeks to restore that victorious epoch of great military expeditions.19 Horse-taming also links Alexander to Heracles, the greatest of Greek heroes, whose Labours spread geographically from Greece to the end of the known world and beyond. Alexander claimed to be a Heracleid (a Temenid who is descendent from Heracles), a title he managed to receive recognition for at Olympia.20 Heracles is the mythical protector of horse-taming as he saves Hippodamia, the female personification of horse-taming, from being raped by a Centaur. Two Heraclean Labours—the taming of the Diomedian horses and the taking of the Girdle of the Amazon queen Hippolyte—were more specifically associated with the Alexander Romance. In the first Labour, Heracles breaks the terrifying, human-eating horses of Diomedes and brings them to the Peloponnese. Displaying the practical wisdom that was subsequently to characterize Alexander’s tamings, Heracles pacifies the horses by serving them the flesh of their master, starting a breed which, according to the myth, continued down to the reign of Alexander.21 In two versions of the Alexander Romance, Bucephalus

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is in fact a man-eater, surrounded by human corpses, and is miraculously transformed into a vegetarian the moment he feels the ‘divine presence’ of Alexander.22 In the second Labour, Heracles is sent to bring the Girdle of Hippolyte, ‘the one who sets the horse free’, to the priestess of Hera, Admete, ‘the untamed one’. Stealing the symbol of Amazonian sovereignty, and killing the queen in the process, elevates the Girdle to a political trophy, glorifying the tamed androcentric polity. In the Romance Alexander also meets the Amazons and, although their relationship is initially conflictual, it ends up in an erotic submission and historic reconciliation boosting the Alexandrian cosmopolis. Under a deal, a constant flow of Amazons joins Alexander’s army on an annual basis; at the end of the year the deflowered (tamed) women remain in the expedition whereas the chaste (untamed) ones return to Amazonia.23 It was politically significant for Alexander to be associated with Heracles. Even from the time of Philip, reference to the Heraclean kinship and deeds was rhetorically appropriated to boost the panhellenic project.24 Heracles was the classical version of a rapid reaction force. His deeds were seen as selfless, post-‘national’ and ecumenical. Emulating Heracles legitimated both the Macedonian rule of Greece and the ecumenical mission of Alexander. The rule of the polis was not just the object of philosophical discourse but had its mythical metaphors and images: the colt or unbroken horse (pōlos) being, at least vocally, associated to the word politikē. In particular, horse-taming was a Dorian/Peloponnesian conception of power and politics. It struck a direct resonance with the romantic story of Pelops and Hippodamia (Pelops won Hippodamia in a chariot race, assisted by Poseidon, who was his lover and gave him a winged chariot).25 Pelops is the legendary father of Atreus, grandfather of Agamemnon and Menelaus, and the eponymic hero of the Peloponnese. His epithet in the Iliad is plēxippos, ‘driver of horses’, whose sceptre of sovereignty, traced back to Zeus, is handed down to Agamemnon.26 Pelops is a paradigmatic figure in Greek political mythography. He is a runaway from Asia Minor, who fought against the Trojans before, and was chased away by the Trojan king, Ilios. Pelops’ bones had to be brought back to Troy by the Greeks in order to meet the seer’s condition for victory. Pelops’ union with Hippodamia could serve as an uplifting political metaphor, a commemorative reference to the Peloponnesian possession of horse-taming and its consequences for the enemy. Note that the Trojan Horse, Doureios Hippos, was a play on words; it was not just a wooden effigy that the Trojans failed to ‘tame’ but a Dorian horse-gift, a fatal symbol of the Dorian-Peloponnesian as the sovereign horse-tamer.27 Contrary to the Dorian-Peloponnesian celebration of horse rule, the Athenians displayed a notorious political hippophobia. In ancient Athens the knights (hippois) were perceived as second-class citizens, given that they were of aristocratic background, pursuing ‘idiotic’ private interests, and therefore of potential danger to democracy. Xenophon, an Athenian knight and author of treatises on Anabasis (campaign-mounting a horse) and Horsemanship, was looked down on by most Athenians as pro-Spartan. It was a typical move of

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Aristophanean inversion that the knights in the eponymous comedy were elevated to wise counsellors, saving Athens from the rule of demagogues, satirizing the limits of Athenian democracy.28 In the Athenian foundational mythography, the citizens reject the horse of Poseidon for the olive tree of Athena. Also Theseus—who united the Athenian tribes into a single polis—saves the polis from an invasion of horses and Amazons. The Amazonomachy reproduces Athenian hippophobia for, unlike the Heraclean and Alexandrian deeds, Theseus does not seek an Amazonian adventure but fights against an invasion of Attica and the imminent terrors of horse-female rule.29 The west side of the Parthenon features, below the pediment of the contest of Athena and Poseidon, the heroic battle against the Amazons. To that extent, the fight against the Amazons inscribed and validated in the most sacred of places the androcentric rule of Athens. The Amazons are not just dangerous enemies, but generally depicted as culturally inferior, perverse and barbaric. They are a military polity. They cut off one breast. They exile male children, or let them starve or kill them. This condition is not irrelevant to their historical and spiritual connection to the horse. They are brought up suckling on the breasts of mares. They are sometimes depicted as the offspring of horses, mating with stallions in orgiastic feasts. They are the first to mount horses, the orator Lysias recalls.30 Athenian hippophobia gets fully dramatized in Euripides’ Hippolytus (‘the one who sets the horse free’). The tragedy builds upon the legend of Theseus’ capture and rape of the Amazon queen, who bears him a son, Hippolytus.31 Theseus’ wife, Phaedra, falls in love with ‘the son of the horse-riding Amazon’, who nonetheless rejects her indirect advances, worshipping Artemis and living a life of chastity, a situation that gains Hippolytus the wrath of Aphrodite, who triggers a series of defamations against him. Driven into exile after Phaedra’s suicide, Hippolytus’ chariot-horses, which he tamed and ‘fed with his own hand’, run wild, disobey his commands and, in a dramatic hippolysis, break lose and abandon him. Hippolytus is symbolically crushed in the process, ‘entangled in the reins, bound in a bond he could not untie’, and killed.32 Theseus admits to his own lack of political judgement as he tragically learns about the might of Aphrodite: ‘[un]happy me, how well I shall remember, Cypris [Aphrodite], the woes you have brought to pass’.33 The moral of the story is perhaps that hippodamia, horse-taming, is never fully possible, never complete, but liable to hippolysis, the breaking free and unleashing of desire. Pausanias recalls that the sepulchral mound of Hippolytus in Athens was found near the shrine of Aphrodite, the Pandemos (Common to All).34 Built by Theseus on the way to Acropolis, the conjunction of shrine and mound was symbolic, and Euripides points out that it was commonly named by Athenians as the shrine of Aphrodite, the Hippolytus.35 Worshipping her cult was a political commemoration of the untaming potential of desire and the destructive forces it could unleash. Fostering the illusion that desire could be broken and absolutely controlled, through logos and dialogue, was a recipe for

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political disaster. As Euripides reminds us in the tragedy, mortals in the end tame nothing; it is instead the humans who are yoked to the gods.36 From this perspective, the politicization of horse-taming was a hubris against Aphrodite, who was bound to let the horses free, to unleash desire and the alogon. As such it could affect the houses of the greatest and mightiest. Phaedra, in one of her moments of frenzy, wishes she could control eros through hipparchy and fancies herself to be an Amazon: ‘[m]istress of the salt lake, Artemis, mistress of the gymnasium for horses, O that I might find myself on your plains taming Venetian colts’.37 In another such moment, however, she turns to a different kind of authority, canine authority, to put off the fire of desire, desperately seeking to ‘shout to the hounds’ and walk on the path of the dog ‘that kills wild beasts’.38 At the other side of the hippocentric polis stands the dog. The polis and its dog A strange beast made its appearance in the city of Athens in the fourth century BCE: Diogenes, the Cynic. An exile of Sinope, Diogenes (‘the one of the Zeus family’) adopted in Athens a lifestyle that gained him the honorary nickname Kuōn, the Dog, and from which the word cynic (kunikos) is derived. In Rhetoric, for example, Aristotle just refers without further explanation to the Dog, assuming that his readers understood whom he meant.39 Hanging around festivals and living off the food of passers-by, resting not in houses but in open-air public places and tubs, hounding philosophers and demagogues, Diogenes remained radically undomesticated. Far from shying away from the jest, he fully acted out the dog image, running after bones thrown at him, urinating dog-style, copulating in public, and often hanging around with the other stray dogs of the city. But Diogenes was also a reputable thinker, his ‘philosophy’ being inextricably linked with his cynic way of life. He is the first known user of the word cosmopolite (kosmopolitēs), a term employed to describe his ambiguous political status, emanating from his dog-like or performative politics of exile. That the character of dogs displayed similarities to that of philosophers was already established by Plato in the Republic.40 As explained by Socrates, the guardian of the polis, just like ‘a well-bred hound’, ought to have keenness of perception, quick pursuit of apprehended beings and fighting spirit. Moreover, the dog’s hypersensitive nature in relation to the foreign and the familiar—its readiness to be angered by the former and fawn on the latter—rendered the dog, according to Socrates, nothing less than a ‘true philosopher’. But far from being a well-bred dog, Diogenes inverted the Socratic parable, systematically denigrating the familiar and embracing the foreign. Plato, who had a love-hate relationship with Diogenes, described him in no uncertain terms as ‘a Socrates gone mad’!41 Like Socrates, Diogenes believed that humans were not inhabiting an authentic polis, but corrupted versions of it.42 Unlike Socrates, who founded the

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republic (politeia) in a heavenly or contemplative ideal, Diogenes saw the politeia grounded ‘in the world’ (en kosmō).43 Socrates lived and died proudly as a citizen of Athens. Diogenes was an exile (apolis), a self-proclaimed citizen of the world, and towards the end of his life a slave (captured and sold by pirates to Xeniades of Corinth, he passed over many offers to regain his ‘freedom’). Denigrating the Socratic ideal polis in word and action, Diogenes seems to me to be engaging in an early critique of its possible manifestations, such as the subsequent less radical cosmopolis of the Stoics, say Cicero’s and Marcus Aurelius’, or the Christian exposition of the celestial city in Augustine.44 Cynopolis is both discursive and performative. Through a strategy of alterity and defamiliarity, the Dog reclaims the polis from its ‘low’ materiality or ‘high’ idealism. The canine motto, as given by the oracle of Apollo, becomes the need to ‘alter the political currency’ (sugchōrēsantos to politikon nomisma).45 In other instances, the phrase used is to debase, counterfeit or re-inscribe the ‘coinage’, a word that in Greek also means ‘thought’ (paracharaxai to nomisma).46 This is put to practice through a politics of mockery of systems of thought, ways of being and eminent reputations, and here the Dog differs from contemporary cynical attitude in two ways. First, with regard to the object of his mockery, he deliberately sets low not only others but also himself. Second, he is not incredulous of human goodness and indeed sees it as an image of divinity, but still resists the elevation of the views of the good to the position of philosopherrulers, to the status of political currency.47 Contrary to the common belief that Diogenes did not engage in politics—at best a sage upon whom the stoics built a cosmopolitan philosophy, at worst a mad anti-political extremist—his caninepolitical involvement prioritizes direct and catachrestic action. Altering the currency involves sustained introspection, a focus on bio-politics. Emulating the dog, life becomes a transgressive strategy through which humans can paradoxically reclaim their ‘humanity’, a humanity commonly enslaved in three vices: love of riches, love of pleasure and comforts, and love of honour and glory.48 The canine way is an antidote to the customary approach to religion as well as the pious-ritualistic appropriation of spirituality. The cynic way of life is a spiritual opening to ecumenism, feeling at home and at ease in the world. It is ‘the same as Heracles when he preferred liberty to everything’.49 Melting down convention, sustaining a practice of spiritual catharsis, engages the Dog in a series of micro-political expeditions. Such expeditions work to cultivate alternative visions, challenging hierarchical thought, exposing the high as low and the low as high. Noble birth and fame, and all such distinctions, are seen as ‘showy ornaments of vice’.50 Greek religious piety is ridiculed or undermined by reference to barbarian custom.51 Challenging the victorious athletes in Olympic games, Diogenes used to crown himself winner to emphasize the spiritual side of Olympicism, the Heraclean athlos commemorated yet forgotten in the frenzy of the physical contest and triumph. Furthermore, challenging the emerging philosophical currency—with the same vigour Socrates attacked sophistry—Diogenes took a particular interest in

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denigrating Plato and the Academy. Invited to Plato’s house, he would trample upon the carpets, symbolically ‘trampling upon Plato’s vainglory’.52 In answer to Plato’s definition of the human as ‘a two-legged animal without feathers’, Diogenes plucked the feathers of a fowl and let it free in the Academy shouting ‘here goes a human being’.53 Scoffing at Plato’s ‘talking without end’54 and his theory of forms,55 Diogenes proved to be an original and crude critic, who still maintained a degree of humour and lightness in his responses. As opposed to the seriousness and vanity of the Academy, the Dog would venture to philosophize while defecating in full public view. The idea that Diogenes systematically inverts and subverts is that of kingship. Being a cynic, exile and cosmopolite does not in the least stop the Dog from styling himself as a king. Even while a slave and about to be sold to the highest bidder, asked to state what he can do, he jestingly declares: ‘Rule men.’56 Common kings are slaves of passions; cynics seek to overcome them, to rule over them and, thus, better deserve the name. Arrested and dragged to King Philip after Chaeronea, and asked if he was a spy, Diogenes confesses but to the vagaries of kingship: ‘I am indeed a spy upon your insatiable greed.’57 There are also various stories surrounding the legendary meeting between Diogenes and Alexander, what the cynic philosopher did or did not do, and how he treated Alexander. These anecdotes develop in an interesting way into political and ethical discourses. For example, in Dio Chrysostom’s Fourth Discourse, the encounter is turned into a philosophical discussion on kingship. The ‘true king’ is the one who cultivates the good attentive demon, and struggles against possession by the bad demon, which can take the three forms outlined above: love of riches, love of all kinds of pleasure, and love of honour and glory. Diogenes lectures Alexander on how his political project is driven by a bad demon and how these negative associations bring forth nothing useful or serviceable ‘but only strange irrational creations that resemble the centaurs, the political acts of certain demagogues and the treatises of the sophists’.58 To that extent, Alexander’s aspiration that he would become a great king by overthrowing the king of Persia features a corrupted Heraclean mission, resembling more children’s play when simulating different roles.59 For Diogenes, emulating the Zeus-like rule, propitiating and cultivating the attendant demon—with all the catharsis and soul therapy this entails—is what constitutes ‘real’ kingship. The typical depiction of this meeting has been of the emperor humbling himself by visiting the Cynic in his ‘court’, and Diogenes remaining unimpressed, having even the audacity to ask Alexander to move away from blocking the sun. What is generally missed when reading Diogenes’ response literally is the apocryphal side of it. The Dog’s laconic request, at least as found in Diogenes Laertius, is ‘enlighten me’ (aposkotēson mou), which could mean both not to cast his shadow over him and a political call to engage in a mission of spiritual enlightenment.60 The latter was particularly relevant for Diogenes, who used to go around the polis with a torch during daylight, looking for a

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‘human being’. It also became of particular importance for Alexander, who had a burning desire to emulate the life of the Dog, making Onesicritus (a disciple of Diogenes) his lifetime companion, and according to some accounts becoming himself a kind of cynic philosopher: ‘[a]nd [Alexander] also, like Diogenes, must alter the standard of currency and stamp barbarians with the impress of Greek government’.61 In his encounter with the Indian gymnosophists, he found the Eastern equivalent of the Greek dog and discussed cynic philosophy with them: ‘[b]ecause of [Alexander], even those faraway sages shall come to know of Diogenes, and he of them’.62 The emperor used to go around saying that ‘if I were not Alexander, I should be Diogenes’,63 and biographers romanticized their destinies, looking for the dog in the horse rule and the horse in the dog rule. It was believed that Alexander and Diogenes died on the same day, leaving the earthly world as soulmates, the Dog passing away by deliberately holding his breath.64 Cosmic politics, or riding on the chariot of Zeus There is reason to believe neither that cosmopolitanism began with cynic philosophy, nor that ‘the very old idea of the cosmopolitan, [concerned] the person whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of human beings’.65 There is also no reason to suppose (and good imperial reasons to claim) that cosmopolitanism was first or only conceived in ancient Greece and from there moved to Rome and the West.66 There is even less basis in imagining that in a sacralized cosmology, cosmopolitanism was anterior to republicanism. The latter assumption is only too common in contemporary political and scholarly discussions on cosmopolitanism that seek to universalize Western human rights discourse, or debate the terms of postnational citizenship and global organization. By focusing exclusively on, and so privileging, the ‘political’ side of cosmopolis, such debates totally miss what was highly important in non-secular conceptions of it. That is to say, the whole cosmic background of the cosmopolis, its imagery, vocabulary, narrative and spirituality. Within such a context, the political could follow different paths.67 The site of ancient Greece should be further excavated for a quite different story, an alternative cosmopolitan vision that can be found if one is prepared to stray away from the classical canons. The cosmic polis can be retrieved as an active revealing, ordering and embellishing (kosmeō), a ‘cosmetizing’ of the world through which humans may partake in the Zeus polity. In a gnomic hexameter—two centuries before Diogenes—the poet Phocylides dramatizes this cosmo-politan location: The cosmic polis, small and set on a lofty rock, is stronger than frantic Nineveh.68

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Imaged as small and isolated, gazing into the abyss, the cosmic polis (polis kata kosmon) is graphically contrasted to mighty Nineveh, the source of a frenetic imperial expansion under the legendary king Ninus (Ninou aphrainousēs). This particular conception depicts a cosmopolitan, as opposed to a universalizing, possibility. Within the contemporary perception of cosmopolis as ‘the worldwide community of human beings’, the poet’s cosmic polis appears a typical ‘noncosmopolitan’ location, a lonely site of indigeneity possessing only limited knowledge of and contact with the wider world. Indeed, if a past election for the Tory leadership offers anything much to go upon, what in public opinion differentiated the ‘cosmopolitan’ Portillo from the ‘commonsense’ Hague and the ‘familial’ Duncan Smith was his social outgoing and global holidaying, being elected as MP ‘for ultra-cosmopolitan Kensington and Chelsea’ and appearing in ‘cosmopolitan surroundings, like the Moroccan holiday, [which] proved a touch too exotic for some’.69 Phocylides’ cosmic polis, or for that matter Diogenes’ political life, can hardly be imagined, let alone conceptualized, within such an understanding of the cosmopolitan. Why then does it befit locations where the polis seems small and transient for the cosmopolis to grow stronger? Why does it require a move to the political limits? Perhaps because it is there and then that willingness to listen to, appreciate and appropriate the story of the Other, rather than mere knowledge of the Other, becomes more intense and relevant. This is where the mythos of the Other can turn to be the logos of oneself, and the cosmos not something the cosmopolitan ventures to occupy and organize but rather that which is allowed to occupy and transform oneself. The political reach of modern cosmopolitanism falters because its organization always has to delimit a (cosmic) locality. In this respect the effort to reach beyond locality might be more effective when it is not a mere discursive expansion of ‘the local’ or embracing of ‘the global’, but if understood, revised and experienced spiritually. The dialogue between religions and the growing work on ecumenism within theological studies are certainly welcome, though they do not appear sufficient to overcome spiritualities that are themselves rooted locally or seem incommensurable.70 That is why the cosmopolitan should remain permanently open to the call—and there is always such a call—to be hospitable to the foreign way of doing things and to the nondomestic, unknown god.71 To employ Paulian terminology while resisting its canonical appropriation, a wider world community is made possible by being hospitable to the cosmic (holy) spirit, a community where ‘you are no longer aliens in a foreign country, but fellow-citizens of the saints and members of god’s household (sumpolitai tōn agiōn kai oikeioi tou theou)’.72 In this sense, the radical expansion of political community takes place not only horizontally but vertically, and not primarily in the form of religious organization and law but in politicizing/communicating cross-nationally and cross-temporally, discouraging ‘self’-confidence and spiritual certainty, and encouraging psychic reflection and spiritual ex-tension.

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It is interesting to note here the context within which Phocylides’ poem has been preserved, that is as part of Dio Chrysostom’s Thirty-Sixth or Borysthenetic Discourse, written in the first or early second century. The poetic exploration of the cosmopolis in Borysthenes is highly symbolic, for Borysthenes is located at the limit of the Roman empire and has a foot in two worlds, ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’, ‘literary’ and ‘oral’. The Borysthenetians are themselves a Grecobarbarian hybrid close to extinction, thus encapsulating the mortal polis; the city is half-destroyed and at that time under attack (the conversation with Dio takes place during a reprieve from the fighting). Yet the Borysthenetian hospitality, their willingness to listen to Dio’s political meditation, is unyielding and phenomenal. Dio introduces the cosmic polis through a marginal Greek poem (the Borysthenetians worshipped Homer, but had never heard of Phocylides) and then exemplifies it through a Persian myth, a ‘barbarian song’ recited by the Magi of Zoroaster. In doing so, Dio is not only challenging the authoritative uses of political philosophy (the Borysthenetians declared themselves to be inexperienced in ‘refined philosophy’ and likened Platonic philosophy to ‘the voice of Homer’), but also seeks to challenge the orthodox uses of Greek mythology as found in Homer and Hesiod. Upon the Borysthenetic site, Dio is altering both the political and the mythic currency of cosmopolis. Cosmopolis is a narrative construction; the cosmos, Dio clarifies, is likened to a polis only in order to bring together and harmonize the human and divine races.73 Here, the mediatory role of myth is revealed; myth is not put forward as scientific allegory or lie and prejudice, but as an empirical necessity, to steer and guide the mind around the cosmic maze and the powers it contains. Featured as the polis of Zeus, cosmos is a material-spiritual entity, a community of gods and humans, and where humans have ‘a share in law and citizenship’.74 The Persian myth narrated by Dio depicts cosmic rule in terms of the driving of the chariot of Zeus with its four celestial horses. This mythic image is generally missed by the Greek poets, Dio says. Greek poetry is handicapped in its cosmology because its mythography is newer than the Persian, and so envisions the celestial chariot to be under the rule of Helios, not Zeus, father and ruler of all. The Greeks are taken by the ‘visible’ chariot of the Sun, lighting up the world, and miss the older, invisible, world creating and governing chariot of Zeus.75 Greek mythology lacks a certain ‘monotheistic’ perspective into the plurality of the cosmic forces. The governance of the cosmopolis (that is the driving of the celestial chariot, ensuring that the four horses retain their synchronicity and do not lose sight of their ‘destination’) is an agon between the universal and the particular. Zeus is the driver, ‘perfect and original’, but the horses are sacred to different gods, Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and Hestia, or in other cosmological versions aether, air, water and earth.76 The cosmopolitan chariot impacts on the world of mortals in two ways. One way concerns the great cosmic phenomena, the violence of the universe, like great fires and floods, which are explained as part of divine providence or accident, either a deliberate steering of Zeus or the result of forces beyond his control,

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such as the rebellion of the horse sacred to Poseidon. There isn’t much humans can do about this chariot violence except learn how to live with it. The other way the cosmopolitan chariot impacts on the world is through the pathways of the human mind. This movement relates to spiritual condition, which again ‘the Magi dare to liken to the guidance and driving of a chariot, though to do so they need even stranger imagery’.77 The four horses amalgamate into a single one, in which the disposition of the horse sacred to Zeus predominates. This new horse represents the divine, god-like capacity of the mind to be fertile, imaginative, and to regenerate and transform worlds.78 Through hippomorphosis as monotheosis, through the mythic creation of a human soul depicting divine disposition, the feeble mortals are empowered and given back a stake in the cosmopolis. Their mind, like a stray horse, moves sometimes in clear paths and at other times becomes wild and unpredictable. Thinking and logos are the yoke but also humans’ only hope, through which they can re-imagine and embellish the world, ‘reveal the existent world (ton onta kosmon) as once more a thing of beauty’.79 Beautifying the world, cosmetizing beings through images and narratives, makes the cosmos more resplendent and ‘lighter’, brings forth an exalted state wherein the cosmic citizen is taken for a ride on the celestial chariot. But while engaging in cosmic mythmaking, one must recognize, Dio warns, that ‘no human can conceive and fitly express…the form of the world’.80 The Platonic form, idea and true vision of the cosmos remain inaccessible to humans. One must further recognize that the mind, the divinestray horse, cannot be fully tamed and that one can be a passenger in the celestial chariot but never the driver. Dio but also Herodotus recall that this is something the Persians commemorated, for they ritually parade ‘the sacred chariot of Zeus, drawn by eight white horses, the charioteer on foot following the horses and holding the reins; for no mortal man may mount into that seat’.81 In this sense, the ‘political’ task of the cosmopolis becomes nothing more and nothing less than good mythmaking, the telling of stories that encourage the human to turn a more welcoming face to the world, but without allowing any single story to become political currency, become paramount, and take the power seat. At this stage the contrasts between the ‘cosmic polis’ and the ‘frantic Nineveh’ become apparent. Nineveh is the epitome of the imperial, hubristic conception and expression of cosmopolis. Nineveh, ‘the habitation of Ninus’, represents for Phocylides and Dio a violent cosmopolitan vision, frenetic and non-cosmetic (aphronos, akosmos). It is an Asiatic precursor to the project of Alexander. As ‘the old Babylon’, it signifies an imperial space whose expansion takes place both horizontally and vertically (but not psychically, or only in negative-demonic terms), ambitiously seeking to conquer the earthly as well as the heavenly cosmos. In horizontal terms, Nineveh represents not just any imperialist power but the site of the birth of empire. Ninus is identified by Justin as the first emperor, a mighty king who

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first of all changed the moderation of the ancient manners, incited by a new passion, the desire of conquest. He was the first who carried on war against his neighbours, and he conquered all nations from Assyria to Libya, as they were yet unacquainted with the arts of war. [Having conquered his neighbours] he went forth against other tribes, and every new victory paved the way for another, [till] he subdued all the peoples of the east.82 In vertical terms, Ninus becomes a deity, and specifically an ambitious child-god. His name literally means ‘the child’, which accounts for being depicted as both the husband and the son of the legendary queen Semiramis. For many Ninus is Nimrod, an interpretation that brings him under the cross-cultural web of pantheistic belief and the Christian mother-child worship. Nimrod/Ninus is represented as a supernatural genius, a divine offspring, at times re-establishing contact with a lost Father, at other times revolting against Him. Certain animal symbols are associated with him: the bull-horned head, the mighty hunter, the centaur, the horse breaker, the first to do battle from a horse-drawn chariot.83 There is an ambiguous similarity between Ninus and Alexander. On the one hand, the Macedonian king explicitly fights in the Alexander Romance against the successors of Nimrod and their satanic rule, the Persian dynasty that sacked Nineveh in 612 BCE but was seen as its imperial continuation.84 On the other hand, Alexander often appropriates and emulates oriental practice, and in the Romance he is even seen as the brother of Darius, returning home to reclaim his share of power.85 His imperial mission aims to integrate nations and continents, to bring the world under the ‘enlightened’ Greek civilization. Alexander displays an amazing philobarbaric attitude, a cynic love for the foreign, though in the end his imperial promise of cosmopolitanism remains a conceit, a universalization of Hellenism and a new cosmic division: [Alexander] bade them all to consider their country to be the whole inhabited earth, as their acropolis and protection his camp…and they should not distinguish between Greek and Barbarian by cloak and targe, or scimitar and jacket, but the distinguishing mark of the Greek should be in virtue and that of Barbarian in iniquity.86 Still, it is over the issue of deification that for many Greeks the Alexandrian fantasy loses all sense of (Greek) measure and joins the folly of Ninus, the childgod.87 Not a mere passenger, Alexander in the end fancies himself ‘the driver’ of the celestial chariot. Addressed by the oracle of Ammon at Siwah as paidion (child), Alexander ‘mistakes’ the word as a confirmation of the aspiration that he is indeed the Son of Zeus, pai dios.88 Finally surpassing Diogenes, ‘the one of the Zeus family’, Alexander becomes a self-anointed Christ, a conquering messiah.89 A hubris precipitated by the barbaric pronunciation of the Egyptian prophet talking in Greek, Plutarch says;90 seemingly deifying and yet

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exposing Alexander’s childishness and immaturity…counterfeiting and returning to the emperor the new currency he was bringing to the people of the East.

Hypostasis

Notes

Unless otherwise stated, for the classical Greek and Latin references I used the Loeb Classical Library bilingual editions (Heinemann/Harvard University Press) but have occasionally modified the translations. Stasis, or the seditious state 1 Reminiscent of Carl Schmitt’s conceptualization of the state in The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976. 2 Which literally translates ‘chi non ha lo stato in questa terra, de’ nostri pari, non truova can che gli abbai’ in Act 2, Scene 3. See the bilingual edition of Mandragola, which nonetheless offers a freer translation; The Comedies of Machiavelli, edited and translated by David Sices and James B.Atkinson, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985. 3 There are important works that have already examined the use of the word stato in the work of Machiavelli, though, to my knowledge, not in Mandragola, and with a view of underscoring the birth of a new concept in political science. See, for example, J.H.Hexter, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation, London: Allen Lane, 1973, pp. 150–78, and Quentin Skinner, ‘From the State of Princes to the Person of the State’, in his Visions of Politics, Volume II: Renaissance Virtues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 368–413. 4 In saying so, Machiavelli differentiated himself from the noble Ciceronian art of government through knowledge of civil science (civilis scientia) or civil philosophy (civilis philosophia). See Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 42–72. 5 Contrast, for example, Wight’s International Relations (IR) categorization of Machiavelli with Walker’s problematization of Machiavelli’s IR appropriation; see Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991, and R.B.J.Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 6 Among a few notable cases of political interest in the literary works of Machiavelli, see, for example, Albert R.Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (eds), Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993,

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7

8

9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18

19

and Vickie B. Sullivan (ed.), The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli: Essays on the Literary Works, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. An argument made by many scholars of Machiavelli; in this instance the quotes are from the abridged version of J.H.Whitfield’s Machiavelli as republished in Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, edited by Robert M.Adams, New York: Norton & Co, 1992, p. 194. Though as a distinct literary genre paradoxography is thought to have originated with the works of Callimachus (3rd century CE), it can be traced back to the voyage of paradoxes in Homer’s Odyssey and Herodotus’ Histories. On this point, see Roland L.Martinez, ‘Tragic Machiavelli’, in Sullivan, Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli, pp. 102–19. In the history of theatre Machiavelli is considered to be one of the major representatives of the commedia erudita on a par with Ariosto. See Glynne Wickham, A History of the Theatre, London: Phaidon Press, 1992, p. 100. Ibid., p. 101. See Francesco Guicciardini, History of Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 124. Specifically on how the Borgia Pope was inadvertently murdered by Cesare’s poison, see ibid., pp. 165–9. Machiavelli, Discourses, 3.2–3. The link of the character of Lucrezia to the Roman Lucretia has been pointed out, among others, by Hanna F.Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 111–12, Harvey C.Mansfield, The Cuckold in Machiavelli’s Mandragola’, in Sullivan, Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli, pp. 3–4, and Ronald Martinez, ‘The Pharmacy of Machiavelli: Roman Lucretia in Mandragola’, Renaissance Drama, 14, 1983, pp. 1–43. Deni Brown, New Encyclopedia of Herbs and Their Uses, London: The Royal Horticultural Society/Dorling Kindersley, 2002, p. 13. Adding to its mysticism is the fact that the root of the plant resembles the human form, sometimes equipped with a huge phallus, which thought to shriek when plucked. In the Old Testament the mandrake figures as a rare magical substance, a bunch of which Rachel borrows from her sister Leah in exchange for her husband; Genesis, 30.14–17. The mandrake is also an aphrodisiac. Aphrodite, for Hysechius, is the Mandragoritis—She of the Mandrake. See Alan H.Walton, Aphrodisiacs: From Legend to Prescription, Westport: Associated Booksellers, 1958, pp. 24–8. Plato, Republic, 488C. Note also similarities between Mandragola and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (from which Machiavelli used name variants of the characters for the characters of Mandragola). In Lysistrata female sedition against the authority of men is used to critique the warring condition of the polis. A party of women captures the acropolis, makes an alliance with ‘enemy’ women and all abstain from sexual activity to bring about interpolis peace. In the play the female revolt (stasis) targets political stagnation by exacerbating male stiffness (stēsis). The political/phallic regime is challenged by exacerbating erection, i.e., through political/phallic riot. The interplay of phallic and political exposes the internal struggle of personal and socially negotiable states that affect the destiny of the polis. As put by Mansfield: ‘Trust is the theme of the Mandragola, the creation and the testing of trust. The main lesson can be given here: every ordinary human trust in

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20

21 22

23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30

31

Mandragola is betrayed. Whether it is the relationship of husband and wife, mother and daughter, host and guest, master and servant, ruler and ruled, or confessor and confessed—all are betrayed… But one, and only one, relationship of trust holds— an extraordinary one, the trust of coconspirators in a common crime.’ ‘The Cuckold in Mandragola’, p. 7. Nicias will get the issue he always longed for. Callimacho satisfies his carnal obsession. A go-between and a friar are financially rewarded. Lucrezia becomes a happy mother/mistress. There may be a few lowerings, depending on one’s moral perspective, but on the whole everyone ‘gains’. Mandragola, op. cit, Act 5, Scene 4. Though Machiavelli is not romanticizing sedition, and he could in fact be read as a philosopher of order, the idea of conflict and disunion as paradoxically strengthening the state is quite prominent. Machiavelli combines his princely advice on how to conquer and maintain the state with a republican eulogizing of this internal conflict and disunion. For example, he suggests in the Discourses 1.4 ‘that discord between the Plebs and the Senate of Rome made this Republic both Free and Powerful’. This thesis has been outlined by F.R.Ankersmith, who also suggested that the institutionalization of dissent and discord is made possible—and indeed necessary— because of the brokenness of political reality, meaning that a political event cannot be totally represented from a single perspective, always leaving a gap for another perspective, a new representation, a new political intervention or movement. See F.R. Ankersmith, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy beyond Fact and Value, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 119–21, 171–3, and Political Representation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 189–92. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Michael Oakeshott, Oxford: Blackwell, 1960, p. 463; my italics. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 35. R.B.J.Walker, ‘From International Relations to World Politics’, in Joseph A. Camilleri, Anthony P.Jarvis and Albert J.Paolini (eds), The State in Transition: Reimagining Political Space, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995, pp. 21–38; 21. On transversal politics see Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, and David Campbell, ‘Political Prosaics, Transversal Politics and the Anarchical World’, in Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R.Alker (eds), Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996. Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984. Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 6. Ibid., p. 8. Put rather provocatively by the psychiatrist in The Madness of King George, ‘the state of monarchy and the state of lunacy share a common frontier’, as people in a state sometimes fancy themselves to be kings and kings can take refuge in whatever they fancy. See Alan Bennett, The Madness of King George, London: Faber and Faber, 1995, pp. 43–4 See Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, 4.65–70. Cf. Strabo, Geography, 11.8.5.

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32 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (reprinted in the Penguin Freud Library, vol. 13, The Origins of Religion), London: Penguin, 1990. 33 See Skinner, ‘From the State of Princes to the Person of the State’. 34 ‘What happened to turn the medieval concept of “the state of the king and the kingdom” into the ambivalent modern state was the recognition of the complexity of the ordering of a large commonwealth, the subordination of the different types of regime to the one essential quality of sovereignty, and the shifting of this sovereignty from king to people.’ Alan Harding, ‘The Origins of the Concept of the State’, History of Political Thought, 15, 1, 1994, pp. 57–72; 66. 35 This is a quote from the yet untranslated Political Theology II. I quote this passage in English from Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins, London: Verso, 1997, p. 109. 36 Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens, New York: Zone Books, 2002, p. 108. 37 ‘Polis is the polos, the pole, the place around which everything appearing to the Greeks as a being turns in a peculiar way. The pole is the place around which all beings turn and precisely in such a way that in the domain of this place beings show their turning and their condition. The pole, as this place, lets beings appear in their Being and show the totality of their condition. The pole does not produce and does not create beings in their Being, but as pole it is the abode of the unconcealedness of beings as a whole.’ Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 89–90. 38 Loraux, The Divided City, p. 104. 39 As suggested by M.I.Finley, ‘Athenian Demagogues’, Past and Present, 21, 1962, pp. 3–24, and Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 198. Typically the word state in modern Greek, kratos, has linguistically nothing to do with stasis. For an opposing view of stasis as always having a negative sense and more specifically on its Aristotelian application, see Kostas Kalimtzis, Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease: An Inquiry into Stasis, New York: SUNY Press, 2000. For a re-articulation of agonal political vision, see William E.Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, and Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. 40 For Thucydides there is a clear association of violent stasis with the sedition of names, ‘the changing of the ordinary acceptation of words in their relation to things as humans thought fit’ (History of the Peloponnesian War, 3.82). The loss of the true corresponding character of words was subsequently connected to the failure and destiny of cities. 41 Republic, 554E and generally books 8 and 9. 42 Republic, 545D. 43 Cratylus, 438D. 44 According to Strabo, Geography, 13.2.3. 45 Alcaeus, Fragment 208. 46 Alcaeus, Fragment 129. 47 Hesiod, Works and Days, 10–15. Hera’s etymological equivalent, Eris, literally means discord. 48 Plato, Republic, 554D.

142 NOTES

49 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962, pp. 67, 377. 50 See Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in his Basic Writings, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1972, p. 204 ff. 51 Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, New York: Zone Books, 1988, p. 394. 52 Ibid.,p. 389. 53 Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 6.1 find many commonalities in the use of Kristeva’s notion of revolt and ancient Greek (ek)stasis, especially in the sense of movement. Though Kristeva’s reading of the historical evolution of the word revolt takes her back to the Sanskrit varutram, Greek elutron, eilima, and the notions of twisting, rolling and wrapping. See Julia Kristeva, The Sense and NonSense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 1–19. 54 Costas M.Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996. 55 For an exploration of the political implications of enchanting the modern world, see Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 56 It would be, of course, impossible to acknowledge all such works here. If there is a pattern in my selection, it is not because of a wish to accredit a particular ‘school of thought’ in IR, but because these are works that have encouraged me to be theoretically ambitious and to look outside the discipline. In terms of the state of the discipline, James Der Derian and Michael J.Shapiro (eds), International/ Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989, R.B.J.Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, and more recently Barry Buzan and Richard Little ‘Why International Relations Has Failed as an Intellectual Project and What to Do About It’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30,1, 2001, with whose provocative observations I fully agree but differ in their proposition about the way forward. In terms of the state, I found most illuminating the works of Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, Robert H.Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, and Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. I have also been inspired by a number of works critical of a variety of global political practices, including Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998, William E.Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought, London: Routledge, 1996, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War, New York: Basic Books,

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1987, Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations, London: Pandora Press, 1989, Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, Necati Polat, ‘Poststructuralism, Absence, Mimesis: Making Difference, Reproducing Sovereignty’, European Journal of International Relations, 4, 4, 1998, pp. 447–77, Michael J.Shapiro, Violent Cartographies, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997, Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999, Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, and others too numerous to mention. 57 Among many, see for example Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994, and Scott Burchill, Richard Devetak, et al. (eds), Theories of International Relations, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 58 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Globalization and the Research Imagination’, International Social Science Journal, 51, 1, 1999, pp. 229–38.

1 States, ethnocratic states, and states within 1 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. James Strachey (reprinted in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 13, The Origins of Religion), London: Penguin, 1985, p. 319. 2 Ibid. 3 Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim, London: Pimlico, 1992, pp. 138, 277, 280. 4 Ibid., pp. 138, 276; emphasis in original. Hitler’s explanation for Jewish migration as opposed to the idealized Aryan one is categorical: ‘That he (the Jew) sometimes left his previous living space has nothing to do with his own purpose, but results from the fact that from time to time he was thrown out by the host nations he had misused. His spreading is a typical phenomenon for all parasites; he always seeks a new feeding ground for his race.’ Ibid., p. 276. 5 Ibid., p. 138. 6 Ibid., pp. 140–3. 7 There are, of course, important works that have explored the political dimension of psychoanalysis, like Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, London: Ark Paperbacks, 1987; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997; and Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989. 8 For a brilliant and detailed exposition of these points, see Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, New York: Zone Books, 1991. 9 Freud emphasized ‘for the present’, believing that it might be possible to bodily locate the conscious and unconscious some time in the future; see Sigmund Freud, ‘The Unconscious’, trans. James Strachey [reprinted in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, On Metapsychology], London: Penguin, 1984, p. 177.

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10 Sigmund Freud, ‘Why War?’, trans. James Strachey [reprinted in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12, Civilization, Society and Religion] London: Penguin, 1985, p. 358. 11 The word used by Freud is vorstellung, which covers ‘idea’, ‘image’ and ‘presentation’. 12 This conflict accounts for the constitution of psychic phenomena, why some come into prominence rather than others, and under what conditions they may do so. 13 Freud, ‘The Unconscious’, p. 181; emphasis added. 14 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey [The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 2], London: Penguin, 1973, pp. 104 and 112. 15 To quote Freud in detail: ‘I am imagining a country with a landscape of varying configuration—hill-country, plains, and chains of lakes—and with a mixed population: it is inhabited by Germans, Magyars and Slovaks, who carry on different activities. Now things might be partitioned in such a way that the Germans, who breed cattle, live in the hill-country, the Magyars, who grow cereals and wine, live in the plains, and the Slovaks, who catch fish and plait reeds, live by the lakes. If the partitioning could be neat and clear-cut like this, a Woodrow Wilson would be delighted by it; it would also be convenient for a lecture in a geography lesson. The probability is, however, that you will find less orderliness and more mixing, if you travel through the region. Germans, Magyars and Slovaks live interspersed all over it; in the hill-country there is agricultural land as well, cattle are bred in the plains too. A few things are naturally as you expected, for fish cannot be caught in the mountains and wine does not grow in the water. Indeed, the picture of the region that you brought with you may on the whole fit the facts; but you will have to put up with deviations in the details.’ New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p.105. 16 The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey [reprinted in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, On Metapsychology], London: Penguin, 1984, p. 356. 17 The German word is besetzung, which literally means occupation, capture of another country or space. 18 ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, trans. James Strachey [reprinted in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12, Civilization, Society and Religion], London: Penguin, 1991, p. 86. 19 ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, trans. James Strachey [reprinted in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, Art and Literature], London: Penguin, 1990, p. 138. 20 The Ego and the Id, p. 397. 21 Ibid., p. 398. 22 Ibid., p. 396. 23 Ibid., p. 379. 24 Ibid., p. 393. 25 ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, trans. James Strachey [reprinted in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, On Metapsychology], London: Penguin, 1984, p. 88. 26 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 88. 27 The Ego and the Id, p. 401. 28 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 110. 29 Ibid., p. 112.

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30 Carl G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, London: Fontana Press, 1995, pp. 186–7. 31 A.J.P.Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, London: Penguin, 1964, pp. 26–7. 32 I have followed here Zygmunt Bauman’s interpretation of the Holocaust and his problematization of the status of sociology after such an event was made possible in a‘civilized’ and highly modern society; see Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Bauman suggests that ‘the Holocaust was an outcome of a unique encounter between factors by themselves quite ordinary and common; and that the possibility of such an encounter could be blamed to a very large extent on the emancipation of the political state, with its monopoly of means of violence and its audacious engineering ambitions, from social control— following the step-by-step dismantling of all non-political power resources and institutions of social self-management’, p. xiii. 33 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London: Penguin, 1994, p. 56. 34 See ibid., pp. 56–82. 35 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 17; emphasis in original. 36 Ibid., p. 18. 37 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 59. 38 For an account of these activities, see ibid., pp. 60–1. 39 Moses Hess, The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question, trans. Meyer Waxman, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p. 165. 40 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, New York: Dover Publications, 1988, p. 92. 41 Ibid., p. 93. 42 Genesis, 13.15. 43 Herzl, The Jewish State, pp. 140, 155, 156. 44 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey [The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 4], London: Penguin, 1976, p. 282. 45 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey [reprinted in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12, Civilization, Society and Religion], London: Penguin, 1985, p. 256. 46 Ibid., p. 257. 47 Ibid. 48 The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 285. 49 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, London: Papermac, 1989, p. 17. 50 Moses and Monotheism, p. 343; emphasis in original. 51 Elsewhere Freud plays down the emotional effect, admitting only to a feeling of solidarity. ‘I can say that I stand as far apart from the Jewish religion as from all other religions: that is to say, they are of great significance to me as a subject of scientific interest, but I have no part in them emotionally. On the other hand I have always had a strong feeling of solidarity with my fellow people.’ Both quotes are from Jorge Canestri, ‘The Logic of Freudian Research’, in David Meghnagi (ed.), Freud and Judaism, London: Karnac Books, 1993, pp. 124–5. 52 Moses and Monotheism, p. 386. For an extensive reading of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and its relation to Jewish identity, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,

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53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Quoted in Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas, London: University College London Press, 1997, p. 8. Quoted in Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European, London: Verso, 2003, p. 36. Ibid., p. 45. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Zionisms’, trans. Roland Lack, in Sean Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, p. 279. Ibid. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985, p. 299. Ibid., pp. 299–300. Ibid., p. 300. Ibid., p. 332. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 269. Ibid., p. 268. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, ‘Diaspora: Generational Ground of Jewish Identity’, Critical Inquiry, 19, 4, 1993, p. 711. Clifford, Routes, p. 277. For a ‘peripheric’ exploration into the psychic elements of national discourse, see Homi K.Bhabha, ‘Anxious Nations, Nervous States’, in Joan Copjec (ed.), Supposing the Subject, London: Verso, 1994, pp. 201–17.

2 Representations of sovereignty on the Himalayas 1 As modestly stated in G7 accounts, ‘credit for this convenient label for those who prepare the way for the summiteers is generally given to one of the British participants’. Robert D.Putman and Nicholas Bayne, Hanging Together: Cooperation and Conflict in the Seven Power Summits, London: Sage, 1987, p. 61. 2 See Johan Kaufmann, ‘Summit Diplomacy: Conference Style’, in his Effective Negotiation: Case Studies in Conference Diplomacy, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989, pp. 166–7, and Putman and Bayne, Hanging Together, pp. 48–61. 3 Though initially used exclusively for G7 Summits, it recently began to be employed in a few other summits as well, cashing in on the rhetorical currency of the term. 4 For a history of the different ‘national’ expeditions, see Micheline Morin, Everest: From the First Attempt to the Final Victory, London: George Harrap & Co, 1955. 5 New Chronicle, 2 June 1953. Quoted from Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (eds), DeScribing the Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 1–3. 6 The Times, 2 June 1953. 7 Ralph Izzard, The Innocent on Everest, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1954, p. 234.

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8 James R.Ullman, Man of Everest: The Autobiography of Tenzing, London: George Harrap & Co, 1955, p. 277. Before reaching the British ambassador, the message reporting the climb was delivered to the Indian ambassador in Kathmandu, as the radio link used by the expedition at Namche Bazar operated through the latter’s embassy, but it appeared of no particular interest since the Indian ambassador was not aware that it was coded. See Izzard, The Innocent on Everest, p. 244. 9 Quoted from Tiffin and Lawson, De-Scribing the Empire, p. 1. Typically, the head of the 1953 British Everest expedition was a regular army officer, LieutenantColonel John Hunt, who had served in India and had experience of mountaineering in the Himalayas. Hunt published a detailed account of the expedition. See John Hunt, The Ascent of Everest, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1953. This was a lastminute change from his original title, The Conquest of Everest’. The military discourse was not peculiar to this expedition, but has been characteristic of mountaineering vocabulary in general, such as the common use of terms like ‘attack’, ‘assault’, and ‘capture’. 10 Although Sherpa Bhotia Tenzing was upgraded to an ‘exceptional’ Sherpa and often ‘domesticated’ as a full member of the British expedition, that was not done without problems. To start with, Tenzing was disappointed by a statement made by John Hunt shortly after the Everest climb that Tenzing was not that good a climber after all. He was also disappointed by the way in which the media (including British, Indian and Nepali) twisted the facts and tried to politicize the issue of who climbed the peak first. It ended with both Hillary and Tenzing having to sign a statement prepared by the Nepali government certifying that they ‘reached the summit almost together’. In addition, Tenzing felt that Hillary’s account of how they reached the summit (published in Hunt’s report of the expedition) was ‘not quite fair’ to him, since it gave the impression that Hillary was in charge and that he could have climbed the peak without Tenzing’s help. For a summary of these events, see Ullman, Man of Everest, pp. 264–6, 285–6. For Hillary’s account of how Tenzing ‘finally collapsed exhausted at the top like a giant fish when it has just been hauled from the sea after a terrible struggle’, see Edmund Hillary, ‘The Summit’, in Hunt, Ascent of Everest, p. 204. 11 When asked why he wanted to climb Everest, George Mallory, who eventually died in the 1924 attempt, replied: ‘[b]ecause it is there’. 12 Ironically, the photograph we have of the first man on the summit of Everest (29 May 1953) is that of Tenzing with an oxygen mask, holding aloft, from top to bottom, the flags of the United Nations, Great Britain, Nepal and India. A small crisis followed as to the political meaning of this order and it was exacerbated by the fact that only the British flag is clearly pictured. Tenzing subsequently said that he was ‘glad the UN flag was on top. For I like to think that our victory was not only for ourselves—not only for our own nations—but for all men everywhere’. Ullman, Man of Everest, p. 271. It should be noted that the issue of registering national sovereignty was not limited to the British media and politics. In his autobiography, Tenzing gave vivid accounts of how Nepali and Indian nationalists approached him (Tenzing was a Nepali Sherpa living in India) and how they tried to make him sign or make political statements intended to diminish the role of the British expedition and his co-climber Hillary. There was no photographic evidence that Hillary reached the summit, though the taking of Tenzing’s picture suggested that somebody else was there. In effect, Nepali and Indian nationalists sought to reduce

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13 14 15 16

17 18

19

20

21

the role of the British to that of escorts and helpers to Tenzing’s ascent. In other words, the nationalists sought to assign the role reserved for the Sherpas to the British. Similar stories affect the ‘national’ expeditions and political discourses of other countries, fifty years after the first ascent. Recently, a Greek-Cypriot climbing the summit as part of a Greek mountaineering team waved the Cypriot flag and brought it back to the President of the Cypriot House of Representatives, who said that ‘raising the Greek and Cypriot flag on the Himalayas gives the message that we have high aims and the highest of all, of course, is the restoration of our independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Republic of Cyprus with the support of Greece’; Politis (Cypriot daily), 28 October 2003. Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938, p. 152. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, London: Penguin, 1979, p. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, London: Penguin, 1969, p. 67. Georges Bataille put it more graphically: ‘The flight towards the summit (which is the constitution of knowledge—dominating the realms themselves) is but one of the routes of the labyrinth. Yet this route, which we must follow, false lead after false lead in search of being, cannot be avoided by us, no matter how we try.’ Georges Bataille, L’Experience Interieure, Paris: Gallimard, 1954, p. 112. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, p. 296. For one such example, see Fred Halliday’s reading of R.B.J.Walker’s work in Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994, pp. 42–3. Halliday first makes the assumption that Walker’s critique of sovereignty is limited to showing ‘the historically constituted, and contingent, character of theories of sovereignty’, thus ignoring what Walker primarily discusses, namely the philosophical and political implications of claims to sovereignty. Subsequently, Halliday criticizes Walker for not anchoring his thinking ‘in either social reality, or ethical and historical necessity’, without recognizing that sociological, ethical and historical contexts are not empirically and objectively given, but constituted in and through language. These issues remain in the midst of renewed theoretical and policy interest in the question of sovereignty—following assessments on the impact of international organizations, multinational corporations and new social movements; the challenges of religious politics; discussions on the effects of the communications revolution, the globalization trend, and the acceleration in the movement of people, information, capital, and culture; the post-Cold War self-determination claims and counterclaims; the debates concerning the rights and ethics of intervention; and the reconsideration of the Westphalian legacy of territorial allegiance. For a good account of such debates, see Joseph A.Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World, Brookfield: Edward Elgar, 1992. On framed theoretical discussions in IR, see Costas M.Constantinou, ‘Diplomatic Representations…or Who Framed the Ambassadors?’, Millennium, 23, 1, 1994, pp. 1–23. R.B.J.Walker, ‘Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice’, in R.B.J.Walker and Saul H.Mendlovitz (eds),

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24

25

26 27

28 29 30 31

32

Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1990, pp. 159–85, and in R.B.J.Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, chapter 8. Walker, ‘Sovereignty, Identity, Community’, p. 177. On this point, see Robert H.Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, and Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996. Furthermore, the term ‘sovereignty’ has not been applied uniformly in interstate practice. It has often been employed differently, and with exceptions or ‘anomalies’. For example, the constituent republics of former Yugoslavia were in name ‘sovereign’, although not recognized as such internationally at the time. Another example is the Knights of Malta currently treated as a ‘Sovereign Order’, having diplomatic relations with many states, enjoying the right of active and passive legation, despite the fact that the Order does not possess or claim any territory; see chapter 3. Richard K.Ashley and R.B.J.Walker, ‘Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies’, International Studies Quarterly, 34, 3, 1990, p. 368. As put in another work by Cynthia Weber: ‘Sovereign foundations are produced as signifieds in order to make representational projects possible, in order to allow sovereignty and the state to refer to some original source of truth. This is a fundamental way in which power and knowledge function in a logic of representation.’ Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 123. Francis Bacon, ‘In Praise of Knowledge’, in Basil Montagu (ed.), The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. I, London: William Pickering, 1825, p. 255. Richard K.Ashley, ‘Living on Borderlines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War’, in James Der Derian and Michael J.Shapiro (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989, p. 303. Michael J.Shapiro, ‘Sovereignty and Exchange in the Orders of Modernity’, Alternatives, 16, 4, 1991, p. 468. On this point, see Jans Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 237–48. Martin Heidegger, ‘A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer’, in On the Way to Language, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971, p. 2. Paul Valéry, The Yalu’, in History and Politics: The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol 10, New York: Pantheon Books, 1962, p. 373. Thus Walter Leifer suggests a more sensitive lens in the study of the Himalayas: ‘Knowledge of the Himalayan region, which in itself…scarcely bears the urgency of historical truth, should convince us that it is necessary to allow ourselves to be guided not by an egocentricity like that of existentialism, but only by a general perspective.’ Walter Leifer, Himalaya: Mountains of Destiny, London: Galley Press, 1962, p. 157. Such as that initiated by Spinoza. On this point, see Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

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33 Padma-Sambhava, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, London: Oxford University Press, 1954, p. 110. 34 For numerous illustrations of how Himalayan politics is reified through the application of sovereignty, see Dorothy Woodman, Himalayan Frontiers: A Political Review of British, Chinese, Indian and Russian Rivalries, London: Cresset Press, 1969; Margaret W.Fisher, Leo E.Rose and Robert A.Huttenback, Himalayan Battleground: Sino-Indian Rivalry in Ladakh, London: Pall Mall Press, 1963; and Nari Rustomji, Enchanted Frontiers: Sikkim, Bhutan and India’s NorthEastern Borderlands, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1973. 35 If anything, the Himalayan religious and philosophical tradition, commonly associated with Buddhist teachings, directly challenges notions of real entity, unitary selfhood, and pretensions to earthly or spiritual omnipotence. See, for example, Padma-Sambhava, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. 36 See Georges Dumèzil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, New York: Zone Books, 1988, and Michael Brand, The Vision of Kings: Art and Experience in India, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1995. 37 See Woodman, Himalayan Frontiers, pp. 18–46. 38 Curzon, Lord of Kedleston, Frontiers, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908, p. 49. 39 Leifer, Himalaya, p. 160. 40 J.Claude White, Sikkim and Bhutan, Delhi: Sagar Book House, 1992, pp. 82–93. 41 Two classic texts outlining the conventional discussion on sovereignty are F.H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, and Alan James, Sovereign Statehood: The Basis of International Society, London: Allen & Unwin, 1986. For critical readings of the concept and theory of sovereignty, see Nicholas G.Onuf, ‘Sovereignty: Outline of a Conceptual History’, Alternatives, 16, 4, 1991, pp. 425–46, and Justin Rosenberg, ‘A Non-Realist Theory of Sovereignty?’ Giddens’ The Nation-State and Violence, Millennium, 19, 2, 1990, pp. 249–59. 42 A catachrestic paraphrase of George Orwell’s famous motto: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, Middlesex: Penguin, 1951, p. 114. 43 Lord Curzon was very clear about the necessity and ultimate end of such instruments: ‘Of all diplomatic forms or fictions which have latterly been described, it may be observed that the uniform tendency is for the weaker to crystallize into the harder shape. Spheres of Interest tend to become Spheres of Influence; temporary Leases to become perpetual; Spheres of Influence to develop into Protectorates; Protectorates to be the forerunners of complete incorporation. The process is not so immoral as it might at first sight appear; it is in reality an endeavour, sanctioned by general usage, to introduce formality and decorum into proceedings which, unless thus regulated and diffused, might endanger the peace of nations or too violently shock the conscience of the world.’ Frontiers, p. 47. 44 W.Ross Johnston, Sovereignty and Protection: A Study of British Jurisdictional Imperialism in the Late Nineteenth Century, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973, p. 216. 45 Roland Inden, Imagining India, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p. 178. 46 See ibid., pp. 165–76. 47 See ibid., pp. 176–80.

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48 Bernard S.Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 174. See also Robin Jeffrey (ed.), People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978, Appendix. 49 As one scholar notes, ‘the noise of the cannon and rifle fire stampeded the assembled elephants and horses; a number of bystanders were killed and injured, and a large cloud of dust was raised which hung over the rest of the proceedings’. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, p. 205. While her coronation as Empress of India was celebrated in India, Queen Victoria never actually visited India. 50 The Earl of Halsbury, the standard authority on English law, explained the legal position as follows: The Indian States, ruled by native princes, did not form part of British India. Although they lacked international personality, in constitutional law they were endowed with attributes of independent states and their rulers enjoyed sovereign immunity from the jurisdiction of English courts. Their subjects were treated as British protected persons. All the States were subject to the suzerainty of the Crown. Paramountcy was exercised on behalf of the Crown by the GovernorGeneral through his agents and residents in the States. The powers of the Crown always included control over foreign relations and responsibilities for defence and the maintenance of internal order.’ Lord Simonds (ed.), The Laws of England, vol. 5, London: Butterworth & Co, 1953, pp. 528–9. 51 John Austin, Lectures on Jurisprudence or the Philosophy of Positive Law, vol. 1, London: John Murray, 1911, pp. 252–6. 52 Quoted from William Barton, The Princes of India, London: Nisbet, 1934, p. 271. 53 Quoted from ibid. 54 Quoted from Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, p. 184. 55 Ibid., p. 180; emphasis added. 56 As Lord Curzon put it: ‘Backed as they are by the huge and lofty plateau of Tibet, the Himalayas are beyond doubt the most formidable natural Frontier in the world.’ Frontiers, p. 18. 57 White, Sikkim and Bhutan, p. 49. 58 The Maharaja of Sikkim had already sent his son to the Delhi durbar, albeit reluctantly, the year before. 59 White, Sikkim and Bhutan, p. 236. 60 Ibid., p. 229. 61 Ibid., pp. 19 and 26. 62 Barton, The Princes of India, pp. 233–44. 63 See Leifer, Himalaya, p. 46. Even then, initial attempts by Nepal to join the United Nations in 1949 met the objections of the Soviet Union, which argued that Nepal was not a sovereign state. Although this was a general requirement for entry to the United Nations, this, of course, did not apply in the case of two constituent republics of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Byelorussia, which by contrast were given seats at the insistence of the Soviet Union. On the Nepali response to the UN, see A.S.Bhasin (ed.), Documents on Nepal’s Relations with India and China, Bombay: Academic Books, 1970, section 1. 64 ‘The Fifteen-Gun Maharajah’, Newsweek, 24 June 1974, pp. 25–6. See also James, Sovereign Statehood, pp. 103–4. For a slightly different interpretation of the 15 gun-salutes as a privilege granted ‘only to the rulers of Indian princely states’, so in

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65 66 67

68 69

70

71

72 73

74 75

76

77 78 79

effect with the same rationale of Sikkimese subserviency, see Satyendra R.Shukla, Sikkim: The Story of Integration, New Delhi: S.Chand & Co, 1976, pp. 34–5. See V.P.Menon, Integration of the Indian States, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1985, pp. 16–17. From an article in the Chinese government-owned newspaper Wen Wei Po, quoted in BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 19 December 1995, FE/2490 G/8. For a summary of the attempts by the Tibetan government-in-exile to join the Chinese search group, see the Official Website of the Tibetan government-in-exile: ‘Contact with the Chinese Authorities Regarding the Search for the Reincarnation of the Panchen Lama’. http://www.tibet.com/PL/index.html (accessed 20 January 1998). Quoted from Dawa Norbu, Tibet: The Road Ahead, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 313. According to the central committee, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the Dalai Lama’s choice, could not have been the real Panchen because he allegedly drowned a dog. See BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 30 November 1995, FE/2474 G/11. The choice of the government was reconfirmed ‘scientifically’ by the official photographer of the late Panchen Lama, who saw a striking resemblance between the deceased and the boy. See BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 4 December 1995, FE/2477 G/16. Jiang Zemin, the Chinese Communist Party Secretary General, less concerned with the ideological irony, thanked all relevant ‘monks and comrades’ for their work. See BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 14 November 1995, FE/2460 G/8. Amnesty International has published a report on the events. Amnesty International Tibet’ (18 January 1996). For a number of examples, see Tsepon W.D.Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967; Peter Fleming, Bayonets to Lhasa, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961; and Charles Bell, Tibet: Past and Present, London: Oxford University Press, 1924. In relation to the Panchen Lama, see Norbu, Tibet, pp. 297–321. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 19 June 1995, FE/2333 G/14–15. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 24 May 1995, FE/2311 G/14; 8 August 1995, FE/2376 G/17; 21 September 1995, FE/2414 G/5–6. For the spiritual and historical role of the Panhen Lama, and a summary of the events from the point of view of the Tibetan government-in-exile, see The Panchen Lama Lineage: How Reincarnation is Being Reinvented as a Political Tool, Dharamsala: Central Tibetan Administration, Department of Information and International Relations, 1996. For a range of illustrations, see BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 28 February 1996, FE/2547 G/7; 15 December 1995, FE/2487 G/1; 13 November 1995, FE/ 2459 G/5; 21 October 1995, FE/2440 G/5; 21 September 1995, FE/2414 G/6; 12 July 1995, FE/2353 G/6; 3 June 1995, FE/2320 G/10. For international indictments from national assemblies and messages of support to the Tibetan government-in-exile, see The Panchen Lama Lineage, pp. 51–70. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 16 November 1995, FE/2462 G/5–6. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 16 November 1995, FE/2462 G/5–6. An interesting comparison of what could happen to the Dalai Lama authority was offered by Lee Feigon, suggesting that the Chinese government could gradually

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83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96

97

erode ‘any position of Tibetan leadership until its power was hardly greater than that enjoyed by the present-day descendants of the old Hawaiian kings’. Lee Feigon, ‘A Paper Tiger Picks a Panchen Lama’, quoted from The Panchen Lama Lineage, p. 86. Tibetan Review, July 1997, p. 8. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 27 November 1995, FE/2471 G/7–8. For a different interpretation of the late Panchen Lama’s speech on the issue of reincarnation, see ‘The Panchen Lama on the Recognition of Reincarnations.’ http://www.tibet.com/PL/index.html BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 27 November 1995, FE/2471 G/9. For a detailed account of the process of identification as conducted by the Dalai Lama, see ‘The Process by which the Reincarnation of the Panchen Lama Has Been Recognized.’ http://www.tibet.com/PL/index.html. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 30 November 1995, FE/2474 G/10. See ‘Baseless Claims and Allegations of Xinhua News Dispatch’. http://www. tibet. com/PL/index. html BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 20 November 1995, FE/2465 G/13. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 14 November 1995, FE/2460 G/9. Ibid. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 18 November 1995, FE/2472 G/8. Ibid, G/8. Ibid., G/8–9. Ibid., G/9. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, New York: Semiotext(e), 1990, p. 50. Carl Schmitt saw this in itself as a form of sovereignty, defining the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the exception’. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985, p. 5. An exceptional, and in many respects excellent, documentary by the BBC on the issue of the tenth Panchen’s reincarnation had the unfortunate tendency of exoticizing the problem ‘in the remote land of Tibet’ as that of the ‘Kingdom of the Lost Boy’, reinscribing the issue as a question of contested sovereignties: ‘Two small boys, two Panchen Lamas, two futures for Tibet. This struggle…is an epic one. It is bringing a 50-year conflict between China and Tibet to a tragic climax.’ (BBC 1, 21 April 1996). Exoticism, the magic and mystery stereotype, has been a common feature of Western literary and popular imagination when dealing with Tibet, inevitably something that tells us less about Tibet and its people and more about ‘our’ ideological predicates. A good review is offered by Jamyang Norbu, ‘Dances with Yaks: Tibet in Film, Fiction and Fantasy of the West’, unpublished lecture, delivered at Harvard University, 8 October 1997. On how imaginary predicates effect problematic and oppressive cartographies, see Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996, and Michael J.Shapiro, Violent Cartographies, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997. Shapiro suggests that an ‘ethics of post-sovereignty’ would seek to transcend spatial imperatives of any totalizing order that ‘produces intolerance or nonrecognition of difference’, by encouraging ‘encounters within a frame that recognizes and accepts the ambiguities and instabilities of the codes through which different peoples create their subjectivities and useful and intelligible spaces’. See Michael J.Shapiro, ‘Moral

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98 99

100

101

102

103

Geographies and the Ethics of Post-Sovereignty’, in Mark E.Denham and Mark Owen Lombardi (eds), Perspectives on Third-World Sovereignty: The Postmodern Paradox, London: Macmillan, 1996, p. 58. See Weber, Simulating Sovereignty. An important contribution, though liable to such criticism, is the work of Martin Shaw, Civil Society and Media in Global Crises: Representing Distant Violence, London: Pinter, 1996. Martin Wight, ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations, London: Allen & Unwin, 1966, pp. 17–34. For a review of various normative explorations in IR, see Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. For a full elaboration of this point see David Campbell, ‘Political Prosaics, Transversal Politics and the Anarchical World’, in Michael J.Shapiro and Hayward R.Alker (eds), Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996. Jacques Derrida, ‘Sending: On Representation’, Social Research, 49, 2, 1982, p. 311. For a discussion of this point in relation to legal discourse, see Necati Polat, The Same and the Similar: Nihilism and Mimetic Hostility’, Law and Critique, 5, 2, 1994, pp. 219–39. The work of Edward Said brilliantly challenges Western regimes of representation, although with generally uniform visions of East and West. See, for example, Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Random House, 1979. For a more tangential approach to questions of postcoloniality, unsettling regimes of representation from within, see Gayatri C.Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, London: Routledge, 1987, and Homi K.Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994. For an expanded discussion on the notion of theory ‘on the way’, see Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy.

3 Piracy, knight-errantry, statehood 1 Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, London: Penguin, 1947, p. 51. 2 A recent illustration has been Christopher Clapham’s ‘Degrees of Statehood’, Review of International Studies, 24, 1998, pp. 143–57. Clapham cites the historical example of ‘the government of Malta by the Knights of St John, continued for centuries until the changed strategic situation in Europe after the French Revolution led to [its] extinction’. By referring to the extinction of only ‘the government of Malta’ in 1798, Clapham is probably aware—but does not mention—that the Order of the Knights of St John is very much still in existence. It is remarkable but typical of IR knowledge ventures that this ‘state practice’ is missed, erased or not pursued, and especially in an otherwise excellent piece, offering a wide-ranging account of the conceptual problems encountered in adopting a rigid theory of statehood. Clapham’s basic proposition that statehood should be treated as a ‘relative concept’, that ‘entities that are, and are not states’ meet ‘to a greater or lesser degree’, though taking issue with the dominant conceptualization, still works within an idealized view of legal discourse. The relativization of the concept of

NOTES 155

3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

statehood is comprehensible as theoretical innovation today only by setting aside transversal diplomatic practice for the last two centuries. Ironically, it took us some time to catch up and theoretically recognize as state what has already been recognized as such by official state practice, and recognized against the universal principles we employ to test the existence of states in fact or in law. For a variety of historical accounts which also cover its contemporary status, see H.J.A.Sire, The Knights of Malta, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994; Joseph Attard, The Knights of Malta, San Gwann, Malta: PEG Publishers, 1992; Jonathan Riley-Smith, Hospitallers: The History of the Order of St John, London: Hambledon Press, 1999; Cyril Toumanoff, The Sovereign Order of Malta: Its Nature and Its Problems, Rome: The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, no date given; The Order of Malta: Yesterday and Today, Rome: The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, no date given; A Modern Crusade, Rome: The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, no date given. Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry, London: Longman, 1970, p. 212. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, 1050– 1310, London: Macmillan, 1967, p. 9. Sire, The Knights of Malta, p. 45. Riley-Smith, The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, p. 9. Or as put in an often-quoted reprove of Matthew Paris: ‘Oh ancient treachery of the Temple! Oh long-standing sedition of the Hospitallers!’ Quoted from Sire, The Knights of Malta, p. 13. Riley-Smith, The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, p. 399. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 216. Barber, The Knight and Chivalry, pp. 254–5. See Salvatore Bono, ‘Naval Exploits and Privateering’, in Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Hospitaller Malta 1530–1798: Studies on Early Modern Malta and the Order of St John of Jerusalem, Msida: Minerva Publications, 1993, pp. 351–97. Sire, The Knights of Malta, p. 90. Edward Lucie-Smith, Outcasts of the Sea: Pirates and Piracy, London: Paddington Press, 1978, p. 149. Augustine, City of God, 4.4. Janice E.Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 22. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., pp. 21 and 43. Quoted from ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 45. Robert Jennings and Arthur Watts (eds) Oppenheim’s International Law, Vol. 1: Peace, London: Longman, 1996, pp. 328–9.

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27 Malcolm N.Shaw, International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 218. 28 Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, p. 66. 29 Aldo Pezzana, The Juridical and Historical Foundations of the Sovereignty of the Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, Rome: The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, no date given. Two other interesting articles are: Professor Colonel Gerald I. Draper, ‘Functional Sovereignty and the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta’, in the Annales de Ordre Souverain Militaire de Malte, 1974, pp. 78–86, and Guy Stair Sainty, The Order of Malta, Sovereignty, and International Law’, http:// www.chivalricorders.org/chivalric/ smon/maltasov.htm (accessed 9 May 2000). 30 Pezzana, The Juridical and Historical Foundations…of the Order, pp. 36–7. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 37. 33 Ibid., p. 34 34 Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus. 35 See Olgerd de Sherbowitz-Wetzor and Cyril Toumanoff, The Order of Malta and the Russian Empire, Rome: The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, 1969, p. 124. 36 See Robert A.Graham, Vatican Diplomacy: A Study of Church and State on the International Plane, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959. 37 ‘The St John Alliance’, http://www.kwtelecom.com/chivalry/stjohn/stjal.htm (accessed 30 August 2000). 38 François Dugaud-Bourget, The Spiritual Heritage of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Vatican City: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1958, p. 3. 39 Desmond Seward, The Monks of War: The Military Religious Orders, London: Penguin, 1995, p. 317. This rationale was first pointed out to me by Fra Cyril Toumanoff, himself a professed Knight, in an interview in September 1991, Palazzo Malta, Rome. 40 Dugaud-Bourget, The Spiritual Heritage, p. 75. 41 Typically, the patron saint of the Order is St John the Baptist. In the Jewish tradition, baptizing in the river Jordan was an act specifically commemorating the passage through the Red Sea, the exodus from Egypt in search of the Promised Land. As a Church ritual of bodily purification and spiritual renaissance, baptism is a mystical rite by which the soul leaves the state of original sin and enters the Christian abode. 42 See ‘L’Evoluzione del Diritto Romano’ in http://www.scuolaitalia.com/zibaldone/ diritto/rom/stori.htm (accessed 3 July 2002). 43 Pezzana, The Juridical and Historical Foundations…of the Order, p. 37. 44 E.J.King, The Knights Hospitallers in the Holy Land, London: Methuen, 1931, pp. 26–8. 45 Sire, The Knights of Malta, p. 288. 46 See Alexander Sutherland, The Achievements of the Knights of Malta, vol. 1, Edinburgh: Constable and Co, 1831, pp. 21–2, and Sire, The Knights of Malta, pp. 3–4. 47 Sire, The Knights of Malta, pp. 4–6.

NOTES 157

48 Riley-Smith, The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, p. 32. 49 Ibid., p. 33. 50 Paul Cassar, The Holy Infirmary of the Knights of St John, Valetta: Mediterranean Conference Centre, 1994, p. 25. 51 Guy Stair Sainty, ‘The Order of Malta, Sovereignty, and International Law’. 52 Sire, The Knights of Malta, p. 275, and for a summary of the Order’s resurgence, see pp. 247–67. 53 For a detailed account, see Guy Stair Sainty, ‘The Self-styled Orders of Saint John’, in http://www.chivalricorders.org/chivalric/selfsty (accessed on 9 May 2000). 54 For a summary of the event, see The Guardian, 4 September 1998, The Times (Malta), 6, 7 and 10 December 1998, and The Malta Independent, 5, 7, 8 and 9 December 1998.

4 Poetics of security 1 There was a simultaneous attack against the French battalion in which fifty-eight soldiers were killed. For summaries of the events, see Keesing’s, vol. 30 (January 1984), pp. 32646–67, and Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 511–20. 2 I employ the useful term securitization, but do not follow the Copenhagen School methodology. The term was coined by Ole Wæver in his ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in Ronnie Lipschutz (ed.), On Security, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 46–86, and elaborated in Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998. For a review of the Copenhagen School and applications of the term, see Jef Huysmans, ‘Revisiting Copenhagen, Or on the Creative Development of a Security Studies Agenda in Europe’, European Journal of International Relations, 4, 4, 1998, pp. 479–505, and ‘The Question of the Limit: Desecuritisation and the Aesthetics of Horror in Political Realism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27, 3, 1998, pp. 569–89. 3 By contrast, see for example a 1641 definition that recalls that ‘the way to be safe is never to be secure’, The Oxford Universal Dictionary Illustrated, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 1828. 4 For more on this point, see Roland Bleiker, ‘Forget IR Theory’, Alternatives, 22, 1, 1997, pp. 57–86. 5 For two different approaches reintroducing the narrative of freedom in security studies, see Ken Booth, ‘Security and Emancipation’, Review of International Studies, 17, 4, 1991, pp. 313–26, and Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 61– 70. On the etymology and contested meanings of security, see James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 74–6, and Dillon, Politics of Security, pp. 113–28. 6 Fragment 66. I follow the numeration of Diels’ Vorsokratiker as edited by J.M. Edmonds, Elegy and Iambus with the Anacreontea, vol. 2, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931, but have modified the translations given by the editor.

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7 See Frederic Will, Archilochos, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969, and H.D. Rankin, Archilochus of Paros, New Jersey: Noyes, 1977. 8 See, further, for a Nietzschean elaboration of agonism, William E.Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. 9 For a summary of Poseidon’s deeds, see ‘Poseidon’ in Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (eds), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. An interesting contrast with Poseidon is Athena, the goddess of wisdom and of safety (Sōteira), of armies (Agēstratos, Dorutharses, Adamatos), and of victory (Nikēphoros), and also of peace (Eirēnophoros). She was the protector of fighters (Promachos) and of the greatest Greek heroes such as Perseas, Heracles, Achilles, Agamemnon and Odysseus. She was also generally associated with military technology and methodology, giving, for example, Heracles his arms and Odysseus the idea of the Trojan horse. But she was opposed to the other god of war, bloodthirsty Ares, thus punishing those who committed war atrocities. On the legendary contest between Poseidon and Athena for the possession of Athens, see Herodotus, Histories, 8.55, and Augustine, City of God, 18.9. 10 On the tragic condition of asphaleia through a reading of Oedipus Rex, see Dillon, Politics of Security. 11 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.60–64. 12 In this instance I used The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha, Oxford and Cambridge: Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, 1989, but interfered in the translations with a view to the Greek text. 13 For this proposition, see Ali A.Mazrui, Cultural Forces in World Politics, London: James Currey, 1990, pp. 21–4. 14 On spiritual circumcision, see Romans, 2.25–9. 15 On congratulating the Corinthians for receiving the gospel from Titus ‘in fear and terror’, see 2 Corinthians, 7.15. 16 See Michael Grant, Saint Paul, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976, p. 189. 17 See Procopius, Buildings, B 173.20-B 181.80. 18 See parts 3 and 4 of the Leviathan, especially chapter 43, ‘Of What is Necessary for a Man’s Redemption into the Kingdom of Heaven’. 19 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Oxford: Blackwell, 1960, p. 301. 20 Ibid., see chapters 37 and 38. On the Hobbesian discourse of security as an attempt to master uncertainty, see James Der Derian, ‘The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard’, in David Campbell and Michael Dillon (eds), The Political Subject of Violence, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 94–113. 21 I use the three-volume edition and translation of Reynold A.Nicolson, The Mathnawi, Cambridge: Trustees of the E.J.W.Gibb Memorial, 1977, but I have sometimes modified the translation; Nicolson also modifies the translation in his selection Rumi: Poet and Mystic, Oxford: Oneworld, 1995. With respect to the translation, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of Farid Mirbagheri, who patiently retranslated, word for word, the relevant poems. Responsibility for the interpretation remains mine.

NOTES 159

22 A poetic reconstruction quoted in Andrew Harvey, The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi, London: Souvenir Press, 1995, p. 197. For paradisical references to shade, see the Qur’an, 13.35, 55.49, 56.28, 76.15. 23 See Harvey, The Way of Passion, pp. 1–35. 24 See the Qur’an, 18.60–80. 25 Quoted from Harvey, The Way of Passion, p. 139. 26 See Mathnawi, 3.3347–8 and 3.3278, 3285. 27 Ibid., 3.4027–8, and 3.4032. 28 Kahlil Gibran, The Garden of the Prophet, London: Penguin, 1996, pp. 66–7. 29 I have in mind Numa, the scholar and peace-loving first legislator of Rome but also legitimator of Roman conquests, who used to tell the Romans incredible fables. See Plutarch, Parallel Lives, ‘Numa’. 30 Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, London: Penguin, 1992, p. 35.

5 Diplomacy, grotesque realism and Ottoman historiography 1 All subsequent quotes from the novel are from Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, London: Vintage, 1992, pp. 74–96. 2 On this point see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. 3 Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. xiii. 4 I re-employ here a distinction drawn by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, On the Line, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, p. 56. In more detail they suggest that ‘history has never understood nomadism; the book has never included the outside. Throughout a long history, the State has been the model of the book and of thought: the logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the tribunal of reason, the bureaucrats of thought, man as legislator and subject. Thus the State’s pretension to be the interiorized image of a world order, and to make man take root’. 5 Harold Nicolson, Diplomacy, London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 14. 6 See Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, London: Leicester University Press, 1991,p. 180. 7 Anne O.Bell and Andrew McNeillie (eds), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol III 1925–1930, London: Hogarth Press, 1980, p. 145. 8 Ibid. 9 Early uses of theoria as journey—‘to go abroad to see the world’ and learn about the doings of others—can be found in Herodotus, where the importance of such journeys for legislators such as Solon is explained. Plato reiterates their importance for the polis in the Laws. For a more detailed discussion, see Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, pp. xvi–xvii and 51–64. 10 J.C.Hurewitz, ‘Ottoman Diplomacy and the European State System’, Middle East Journal, 15, 1961, p. 143. 11 Thomas Naff, ‘The Ottoman Empire and the European States System’, in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, pp. 143–69; p. 158, emphasis added.

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22

23 24

25 26

27

28 29 30 31

Hurewitz, ‘Ottoman Diplomacy and the European State System’, p. 150. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid. Ernst H.Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, pp. 284–91. Hurewitz, ‘Ottoman Diplomacy and the European State System’, p. 141. Ibid., p. 149. In his biography of Byron. By Byzantine diplomatic theory Nicolson primarily refers to the system preoccupied with the ceremonial dimension of diplomacy and duplicity in negotiation. Nicolson generally views the input of Byzantine diplomacy negatively but nonetheless sees it as an important link for diplomacy’s institutionalization as statecraft. See Harold Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, London: Cassell, 1954, pp. 24–30 and Diplomacy, p. 47. Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, p. 25. For the practice of mubadele, see Norman Itzkowitz and Max Mote, Mubadele: An Ottoman-Russian Exchange of Ambassadors, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970. Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method. For a sustained problematization of diplomacy in the form of a genealogy, and for its more extensive theorization as the mediation of estrangement—able to accommodate a variety of historical paradigms from mythical to technological diplomacy—see James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. For a review of Der Derian’s work on diplomacy, see Costas M. Constantinou, ‘Late Modern Diplomacies’, Millennium, 22, 1, 1993, pp. 89–96. Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire 1453–1924, London: John Murray, 1995, p. 170. See Harold Nicolson, Public Faces: A Novel, London: Penguin, 1944; a satire of the Foreign Office and the politicking leading to a world crisis but where the career diplomats manage to save the day. On Nicolson’s style, moreover, his wife and author, Vita Sackville-West, commented thus upon reading his book Diplomacy: ‘I have been reading it with the admiration and amusement your writing always arouses in me, and thinking how very different the subject would have become in anybody else’s hands—dry, dead and pompous. How you have contrived to make it so lively, I can’t imagine.’ From a letter sent on 8 February 1939, quoted in Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters, London: Collins, 1966, p. 391. Nicolson, Diplomacy, p. 18. Nicolson, it must also be remembered, played his own part in the stigmatization and securitization of foreigners in Britain, as a Member of Parliament for Mosley’s fascist party and as Mosley’s confidant. See Menander Protector, Roman Embassies, a long passage of which is quoted in Z.Undaltsova, G.Litavrin and I.Medvedev, Byzantine Diplomacy, Athens: Hellinika Grammata, 1995, pp. 210–13. Nicolson, Diplomacy, p. 111; emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 14, emphasis added. Harold Nicolson, The Age of Reason, 1700–1789, London: Panther, 1968.

NOTES 161

32 Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933, p. 35. 33 Harold Nicolson, Byron: The Last Journey April 1823-April 1824, London: Constable & Co, 1924, p. 53. 34 Nicolson, Diplomacy, p. 210. 35 Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (eds), A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol III 1923–1928, London: Hogarth Press, 1977, p. 548n. In Nicolson’s biography, however, Harold’s discomfort is recounted: ‘At the beginning of October Vita warned Harold that the secret of Orlando was already out. People were talking and speculating about the theme of the book. The news made Harold nervous.’ J.Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson: A Biography, London: Chatto & Windus, 1980, p. 350. 36 Nicolson and Trautmann (eds), A Change of Perspective, p. 548n; emphasis in the original. The quotations from Woolf s that follow are from the same volume. 37 Vita Sackville-West often complained to Harold Nicolson: ‘You love foreign politics …you ought never to have married me. I feel my inadequacy most bitterly. What good am I to you?’ (13 December 1928); ‘Oh God, how I hate the Foreign Office! How I hate it, with a personal hatred for all that makes me suffer.’ (15 November 1928), in Nigel Nicolson, Harold Nicolson. Typically, Harold Nicolson could not escape from giving diplomacy the image of a woman, if only as a metaphor, in his writings. See Nicolson, Diplomacy, pp. 56–7. 38 This has been suggested and elaborated by James Der Derian, ‘A Reinterpretation of Realism: Genealogy, Semiology, Dromology’, in James Der Derian (ed.), International Theory: Critical Investigations, London: Macmillan, 1995, pp. 370– 73. 39 See Barry Buzan, ‘The Timeless Wisdom of Realism?’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 47–65. 40 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968, p. 21. 41 Ibid., p. 12. 42 Ibid., p. 10. 43 Ibid., p. 48. 44 On this see Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 73, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London: Methuen, 1986, pp. 8–12. 45 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 6. 46 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The European Writer in Exile’, in Richard Kearney (ed.), States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 113. 47 For further discussion on the ambivalent character of an archetypical diplomatic medium, namely Hermes, see Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, pp. 147– 53.

6 NATO’s caps

162 NOTES

* This essay was first delivered at a NATO conference on ‘The Future of European Security’ organized in Česky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 1–6 November 1994. Written as a polemic at the time of NATO’s redefinition, some of the issues addressed here have been overtaken by events, others ‘settled’, others developed in ways more or less predicted in the essay (e.g. NATO’s current involvement in Afghanistan). The main problematic, however, that is the pro-memorative resistance to the politics of forgetting practised by NATO and member states’ agents, is still very topical. I decided to maintain the vibrancy of the debate at the time of first writing it and consequently have neither updated nor airbrushed out ‘out of date’ examples. The essay should therefore be read within the context of what was taking place in 1994, a few years after the end of the Cold War, when academic and policy reflection on the future role of NATO was at its utmost. 1 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, London: Faber & Faber, 1982, p. 3. 2 Further on this, see chapter 4. 3 On NATO’s representation crisis, see Bradley S.Klein, ‘How the West Was One: Representational Politics of NATO’, International Studies Quarterly, 34, 3, 1990, pp. 311–25. Capitalism can, however, still capitalize out of NATO’s Cold War security discourse. One look through the advertisements in The Economist (28 October 1994) may suffice. The British Midland ad reminds the reader that ‘You can’t put a price on peace. So we don’t’ to advertize its new diamond EuroClass service. The Document Company points out that ‘If you can’t make a few quick changes to your training manual, you’re history’, and pictures a red book with the title ‘HOW TO BE A GOOD COMMUNIST [erased] DEMOCRAT [erased] ENTREPRENEUR’. It further informs that ‘the Xerox range of high volume digital publishing systems can make changes faster than you can say perestroika… No time wasted… Now, that’s what we call revolution’. 4 See M.Laurinavicius, ‘European Security: With or Without Russia?’, paper delivered at the NATO Conference on The Future of European Security’, Česky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 1–6 November 1994. 5 Willy Claes’ address to the 40th General Assembly of NATO, The Hague, 28 October 1994. 6 It was openly reported at the time that NATO ‘has become another victim of Bosnia’s War.’ See The Economist, 19 November 1994. 7 On French visions of European security and plans for NATO, see Anand Menon, ‘From Independence to Cooperation: France, NATO and European Security’, International Affairs, 71, 1, 1995, pp. 19–34. 8 Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1960. 9 See, for example, Ken Booth, ‘Security and Emancipation’, Review of International Studies, 17, 1991,pp. 313–26. 10 See Robert Jervis, ‘Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma’, World Politics, 30, 1978, pp. 167–214, and Robert Jervis, ‘Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter’, Political Science Quarterly, 94, 1980, pp. 617–33. 11 Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962. 12 Brian Redhead, Plato to NATO: Studies in Political Thought, London: BBC Books, 1962.

NOTES 163

13 See, for example, Martin Shaw, Post-Military Society: Militarism, Demilitarization and War at the End of the 20th Century, Oxford: Polity Press, 1991. 14 Barry Buzan, People, States, and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983. 15 Caroline Thomas, In Search of Security: The Third World in International Relations, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1987. 16 This was clearly proposed in the speech of Hans-Jochen Peters, head of NATO’s Central and Eastern Europe Section (Political Affairs Division), Česky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 2 November 1994. 17 Simon Dalby, ‘Security, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemma of Post-Cold War Security Discourse’, Alternatives, 17, 1, 1992, pp. 95–133; Mark Imber, Environment, Security and UN Reform, Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1994. 18 See, for example, Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, London: Routledge, 1990, and André Gorz, Ecology as Politics, London: Pluto Press, 1980. 19 Works in this area include Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland (eds), Gender and International Relations, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991; Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, London: Pandora, 1989; V.Spike Peterson (ed.), Gendered States: Feminist (Re) Visions of International Relations Theory, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992. 20 The Economist, 3 and 10 September 1994. 21 Jiři Sedivy, ‘European Security: Myth or Reality?’, paper presented at the NATO conference ‘The Future of European Security’, Česky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 1– 6 November, 1994. 22 Washington Post, 19 December, 1994. 23 For a discussion of threats and strategic thinking, see Gregory D.Foster, ‘Interrogating the Future: The Question of Long-Term Threats’, Alternatives, 19, 1994, pp. 53–97. 24 See, for example, Edward W.Said, Orientalism, New York: Random House, 1979, and Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus, 1993, and the special issue on ‘Post-Colonial Insecurities’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/ Theory/ Politics, 21,Winter 1993. 25 See also Bradley S.Klein, Strategic Studies and World Order: The Global Politics of Deterrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 26 For an exhaustive reading of Western strategic discourse and its implications, see Simon Dalby, Creating the Second Cold War, London: Pinter, 1990. 27 Some of these issues were discussed in chapter 4. They are also addressed in different ways in R.B.J.Walker, ‘Security, Sovereignty and the Challenge of World Politics’, Alternatives, 15, 1990, pp. 3–27; David Campbell, Writing Security, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. 28 BBC News, 25 November 1994. 29 ‘The Fun of Flying’, in Holland Herald (the KLM travel companion magazine, November 1994), p. 67. 30 See Václav Havel’s speech at the World Economic Forum, Davos, 4 February 1992.

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7 Europa mythica 1 http://www.pio.gov.cy/news/special-issues/special-issue 127.htm; accessed 19 April 2003. The speech was delivered on 16 April 2003. 2 See Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization; Vol II The Archaelogical and Documentary Evidence, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991, pp. 232–4. 3 Aeschylus, Suppliant Women, 274–90. 4 The Complete Works of Archbishop Makarios III (Apanta Archiepiskopou Kyprou Makariou III), vol. 2, Nicosia: Archbishop Makarios III Foundation, 1992, pp. 316, 322; my italics. I first discussed this historical contrast in the Cypriot government statements just after independence and on the eve of acceding to the European Union, in Costas M.Constantinou, Ēpeirōtikes Tautiseis (Continental Identifications), Phileleftheros (Cypriot daily), 29 December 2002. 5 Typically, the honoured statue next to the Cypriot House of Representatives in Nicosia is not that of a Cypriot, Greek, Turkish or other European but of Mahatma Gandhi. It is especially ironic since the anticolonial struggle in Cyprus was antithetical to the Gandhian principles of non-violence. Note also that nowadays, on the eve of Cypriot entry to the EU, the term ‘third worldism’ (tritokosmiko) is used negatively among Cypriot politicians and journalists to describe lack of development and civilization. This view is intensified because of the presence of thousands of Asian migrant workers, especially housemaids, who economically and socially support the Cypriot drive towards ‘modernization’, yet from a Cypriot popular perspective constitute a ‘disorderly other’; on this point see Taisha Abraham, ‘“I Am So Sari”: The Construction of South Asians in Cyprus’, The Cyprus Review, 14, 2, 2002, pp. 127–31. By contrast, ‘European standard’ is used to upgrade and advertize anything and everything, from the discourse of human rights and bureaucratic efficiency to car safety and washing powders. For a similar ambivalent attitude towards Europe in Greece, though also with different terms of reference, see Michael Herzfeld, The European Self: Rethinking an Attitude’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 139–70. 6 Of course, the ambivalence of Cypriot postcolonial nationalisms needs to be acknowledged here. That is to say, the tension between the continued GreekCypriot nationalism in the form of enosis and the pursuit by Makarios of ideological ‘third-worldism’ in the Non-Aligned Movement; but also TurkishCypriot nationalism fighting against Hellenistic nationalism yet under the umbrella of Kemalist prowestern ideology. More specifically on the impact of the European Union factor on ‘the Cyprus problem’, see Christopher Brewin, The European Union and Cyprus, Huntingdon: Eothen Press, 2000, and Thomas Diez (ed.), The European Union and the Cyprus Conflict: Modern Conflict, Postmodern Union, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. 7 The classical myth of the abduction of Princess Europa from Asia by a metamorphozed Zeus is mentioned in a variety of ancient sources but the story has been romantically immortalized in the second book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The myth captured the muse of the ancients but also of famous moderns, including,

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9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30

among others, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian and Veronese. For an extensive account of the variety of artistic representations of the myth of Europa, see Peter H.Gommers, Europe—What’s in a Name, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2001. As put in a pamphlet of the Cyprus Press and Information Office, which featured on its front cover the ancient Cypriot coin of Europa, ‘Cyprus, placed at the easternmost extremity of Europe can and must promote even further its cultural exchanges with the rest of Europe and constitutes a cultural springboard of Europe in the Eastern Mediterranean’. Europe and the Culture and History of Cyprus, Nicosia: PIO, 1992, p. 20. http://www.mfa.gov.cy/mfa/mfa.nsf/MFAMinistryLogo; accessed 1 August 2003. Cyprus is by no means exclusive in its ironic appropriation of European identity. See, for example, the ironic similarities in the Fascist and post-World War II discourses of a ‘united Europe’ in Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics between the Wars, New York: New York University Press, 1999, and Luisa Passerini, ‘From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony’, in Pagden, The Idea of Europe, pp. 191–208. Indicative of the latter point is the Commission’s attempt to change the image of the EU into that of ‘a Europe of the people’. Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places, 12. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 23. Strabo, Geography, 2.5.26. Ibid. Ibid., 1.1.16. Ibid., 2.5.34. Aristotle, Politics, 7.6.1. Herodotus, Histories, 4.45. Ibid. Ibid., 1.1–5. More generally, on Herodotus’ historiography and representation of alterity, see François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, and Norma Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of Political Community, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. For the term ‘metropolitan history’ and its postcolonial critique, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, London: Verso, 1994. Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xv– xvii. Hélène Ahrweiler, The Making of Europe: Lectures and Studies, Athens: Nea Synora, 2000, p. 110. Ibid., pp. 110–11. Ibid., p. 111. Quite apart from the crude representation of peoples, continents and civilizations, Ahrweiler erases the possibility and history of Asiatic Greeks.

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Without ignoring cultural differences, Cavafy reflected on the predicament from the other side of the (national) coin, in his poem Return from Greece (1914):

[…] Let us at last accept the truth; we also are Greeks—what else are we? — but with the loves and passions of Asia, with loves and emotions sometimes strange to the Greeks. 31 Ahrweiler, The Making of Europe, pp. 21–2. 32 Robert Briffault, Europa: A Novel of the Days of Ignorance, London: Hale, 1936, and Europa in Limbo, London: Hale, 1937. 33 Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe, p. 150. 34 Robert Briffault, The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions, 3 vols, London: Allen and Unwin, 1927. 35 Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe, p. 150. 36 Denis de Rougemont, The Meaning of Europe, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1965, pp. 18–19. 37 Denis de Rougemont is one of the major figures of the integral federalists whose problematic views are usefully explained and criticized in Thomas Diez, ‘International Ethics and European Integration: Federal State or Network Horizon?’, Alternatives, 22, 1997, pp. 287–312. 38 Karel van Miert, ‘Foreword’, in Gommers, Europe—What’s in a Name, p. 5. 39 Ibid. 40 Slavenka Drakulic, Café Europa, London: Abacus, 1996, pp. 212 and 213. 41 On modern approaches to myth and further to these discussions, see Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957, Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985, and Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Generally on historical attempts to define Europe and their political implications, see Pim den Boer, Peter Bugge and Ole Wæver, The History of the Idea of Europe, London: Routledge, 1995, Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson, The Question of Europe, London: Verso, 1997, and Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe. 42 Taken from Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.37. 43 See the conclusion of Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, New York: Grove Press, 1963. For an elaboration of Fanon’s critique, see James Tully, ‘The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives’, in Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe, pp. 331–58. 44 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.65. 45 Javier Solana, ‘Open Doors’ in the Time special issue ‘Visions of Europe’, 1998/99, p.55. 46 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.1–5. 47 For an extensive account of the production of European identity through the exclusion and marginalization of otherness, see Iver B.Neumann, Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999. On the changing appropriations of the Muslim Other, see

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48 49 50

51

52

53

Talal Asad, ‘Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?’, in Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe, pp. 209–27. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, New York: Vintage, 1967. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim Parks, London: Vintage, 1994, p. 389. Cf. Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Random House, 1979, pp. 56–8. The story of the Bacchae, in brief, unfolds as follows: Dionysus, the son of the niece of Europa, Semele, is not recognized as the divine offspring of Zeus and so banished from Thebes and Europe. Dionysus finds sanctuary in Asia, where he is accepted as god, and returns to Thebes with a chorus of Asiatic women, the Bacchanals, who escort the god, singing, dancing and in a general state of frenzy. The Theban women defy the commands of the young ruler of Thebes, Pentheus, leave their homes and join the Asiatic Bacchanals for a Dionysian festival in the surrounding mountains. Pentheus challenges and tries to arrest Dionysus, against the advice of the soothsayer Teiresias and the founder of Thebes, Cadmus. In the end, Dionysus triumphs and the ruler of Thebes is killed and dismembered. Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘The Masked Dionysus of Euripides’ Bacchae’, in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, New York: Zone Books, 1988, p. 394. For two other excellent analyses of the Dionysian, see Walter F.Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965, and Carl Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. For a sustained exploration of this point in terms of theoria, see Costas M. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996, and in terms of cosmopolitan practice, see the next chapter. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 17. For the utility of a Nietzschean genealogical perspective in thinking the meaning of Europe, see Stefan Elbe, ‘“We Good Europeans…”: Genealogical Reflections on the Idea of Europe’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30, 2, 2001, pp. 259–83.

8 Hippopolis/cynopolis 1 Recently, I tested the educational hypothesis by seeking the help of my 10-year-old goddaughter, Melina Christou. Though she delightfully mixed up Alexander with Constantine the Great (they both moved eastwards!), she nonetheless confidently produced her history school text with five pictures of Alexander on horseback plus one with Alexander in the act of taming Bucephalus; in Dionysios Aktupis, Aristeidis Belalides et al., Sta Archaia Chronia (In the Ancient Times: History—4th Form), Athens: Pedagogical Institute, 1996, pp. 9, 89, 90, 92 and 95. Note that the entry of Alexander into Greek national historiography is not unproblematic. His glorification is a mid-nineteenth century product, ideologically associated with the Megali Idea or Greater Greece project. Though Alexander remained legendary in Greek popular culture (as in Europe and the Middle East), Greek national historiography before that period viewed him as an outsider who corrupted and brought to an end the classical Hellenic civilization, paving the way for the

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2

3

4

5

6

Romans. On this point, see further Konstantinos Dimaras, Ellinikos Romantismos (Greek Romanticism), Athens: Hermes, 1985. For the term siyāsa, see Fauzi M.Najjar, ‘Siyāsa in Islamic Political Philosophy’, in Michael E.Marmura (ed.), Islamic Theology and Philosophy: Essays in Honor of George F.Hourani, New York: State University of New York Press, 1984, pp. 92– 110, and Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. Lewis gives the following account of siyāsa and suggests that the Western term management is based on the same metaphor of handling or training a horse: ‘While in most Western languages the imagery of travel is maritime, in the Islamic lands it derives from travel by land, and more particularly on horseback. The rider, the horse, the accoutrements, the stirrups, the reins, and even the tail are brought into service as metaphors and sometimes as symbols of authority. Western usage contains two dead metaphors, both derived from the man and his horse—chivalry and management, the one from French cheval, “a horse”, the other via French, from Italian maneggio, “the handling or training of a horse”, whence “horsemanship” and “riding school”. Both lines of development are present in Islamic political language, in such words as furūsiyya, “equitation”, “knightliness”, “valor”, and siyāsa, “horse-handling”, “statecraft”, “politics”…when the Ottomans used the horsetail as an emblem of authority, and designated certain high offices of the sultan as “the Ağas of the Imperial stirrup”, they were clearly evoking the image of the man on the horse as the symbol of effective power.’ Lewis, The Political Language of Islam, pp. 11 and 19. For the alogon as bestial irrationality, see Plato, Republic, 591C, and Timaeus, 42D. For the human as by nature a political animal (phusei politikon zōōn) and the only one possessing speech (logon de monon anthrōpos echei tōn zōōn) and for the nonpoliticized as either a beast or a god, see Aristotle, Politics, 1253 a 1–29. Western political logocentrism may exclude the alogon at the discursive level, but as shown in this chapter it is effectively saturated in ‘the animal’ via its mythical attachments. Following on from Plato’s four cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance and justice (as developed in Book 4 of the Republic), the Islamic philosopher and mystic al-Ghazali suggests that ‘he who combines within himself all of these traits is worthy to be a powerful king among men whom all creatures submit to and follow in all their deeds’. These highly political virtues are endangered by desire, and ‘desire is like a horse which one rides during the chase, and which is sometimes tractable and well-disciplined, and sometimes endeavours to bolt’. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, On Disciplining the Soul, Refining the Character, and Curing the Sickness of the Heart, Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1995, pp. 20 and 22. For the union of Olympias with Nectanebus/Ammon, see the different national versions of the Alexander Romance, based on a chronicle falsely attributed to Callisthenes of Olynthus, nephew of Aristotle and companion of Alexander. For the Greek Version, see The Greek Alexander Romance, trans. Richard Stoneman, London: Penguin, 1991; for the Armenian Version, see Pseudo-Callisthenes, The Romance of Alexander the Great, trans. Albert M.Wolohojian, New York: Columbia University Press, 1969; for the Hebrew Version, see Israel J.Kazis (ed.), The Book of the Gests of Alexander of Macedon, Cambridge, Mass.: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1962; and for the Ethiopian Version, see Ernest

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7

8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23

A.Wallis Budge (ed.), The Alexander Book in Ethiopia, London: Oxford University Press, 1933. On the simultaneous conception of Alexander and Bucephalus, see the Ethiopian Version, p. 9, which seems to be based on the lost Arabic one. The synchronization of the birth of Alexander and Bucephalus is also found in the Firdausi poetry, see Andrew R. Anderson, ‘Bucephalus and His Legend’, American Journal of Philology, 51, 1, 1930, pp. 1–21. Anderson, ‘Bucephalus and His Legend’, p. 1. Although the most dominant version is that Bucephalus died after the battle of the Hydapses in India and Alexander established a city, Bucephalia, in his memory; on this see Plutarch, Alexander, 61. Interestingly, Bucephalus dies just after Alexander comes across the power of the elephant in King Porus’ army; see Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, 5.9–19. (The term anabasis means both military expedition and mounting a horse.) For the elephant in India as ‘a royal mount’ and the ‘four-horse chariot as second in honour’, see Arrian, Indica, 17.1–2. For a detailed account, see Andrew R.Anderson, ‘Alexander’s Horns’, American Philological Association Transactions and Proceedings, 58, 1927, pp. 100–122. The word Bucephalus means ox head (boos kephalē). See the Qur’an, Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1975, 18.83–98. Although this is a well-established view, some Islamic scholars have challenged the idea that Zulqarnain is Alexander, suggesting that it is rather a reference, inter alia, to an early Persian king, or to a legendary king of Yemen, or to several persons. See commentary in Appendix VII of the Qur’an, Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1975, which generally leans on Alexander; also Anderson, ‘Alexander’s Horns’, and the Persian Version Iskandarnamah: A Persian Medieval Alexander Romance, trans. Minoo S. Southgate, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Aristotle, Politics, 1253 a 30–39. See, for example, The Persian Version. Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae, 3. Plutarch, Alexander, 3 and 4. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 11. Plutarch, Moralia, 328B–329A. Homer,Iliad, 19.400–424. Ibid., 24.804. It is said that in his expeditions Alexander carried with him the Iliad and the Odyssey, and when he crossed the Hellespont ‘he went to see the site of Troy, imagining to himself the heroic deeds enacted there’. Plutarch, Moralia, 327F and 331D. Perceived descent from a heroic figure was not something only Alexander aspired to, but also other rulers and republics commonly employed in ancient diplomatic conduct, and this often as a means of fostering communal and transnational identity. For a detailed discussion of this, see Christopher P.Jones, Kinship Diplomacy in the Ancient World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. See Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 4.15.3–4. The Greek Version, p. 48 and the Armenian Version, p. 38. See the Greek Version, pp. 143–5; see also variations in the Persian Version, p. 176; the Ethiopian Version, pp. 127–9; the Armenian Version, pp. 141–6; the

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25 26 27

28

29 30

31

32 33

34 35 36 37

Hebrew Version, pp. 120–3. For a less sensational account of Alexander’s meeting with the Amazons, see Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, 7.13. Isocrates, To Philip, 32–4. Contrasted to this is the view of Philip as a non-Greek and a barbarian, thus approaching the Macedonian expansion not as Hellenic integration but as anti-Hellenic imperialism. See Demosthenes’ Philippics. For the story of Pelops and Hippodamia, see Apollodorus, Epitome, 2.1–9. Homer, Iliad, 2.100–108. The Macedonians were also viewed as Dorians (when not seen as barbarians). The coming of the Dorians in Greece was linked to the return of the Heracleids whom the Macedonian kings saw as ancestors. Note here that Alexander’s empire rhetorically seeks to heal the wound of the Trojan Horse and restore faith in the ‘Greek gift’ while pursuing its ecumenical fantasy. If the Persian expedition against Greece was seen as taking revenge for the capture of Troy by the Greeks (see Herodotus, Histories, 1.5), Alexander was romantically viewed as a mediator (the Persian Version of the Romance even depicts him as half-Persian). For Plutarch, Alexander is a visionary philosopher, a rejoinder of Asia with Europe, ‘by the ties of lawful love and chaste nuptials and mutual joy in children that they join the nations together’; Moralia, 329F. See Aristophanes, Hippois; cf. Aristophanes, Clouds, where familial hippophilia and corrupting indulgence in horse games lead a disagreeable and desperate father to seek rescue in Socratic philosophy, in retrospect a highly unwise decision. Although there was a version that depicted Theseus accompanying Heracles in Amazon land. Lysias, Funeral Oration, 4. For a detailed account of Athenian Amazonophobia and its patriarchical uses, see W.Blake Tyrrell, Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. According to some versions of the story, the Amazon queen was abducted and became Theseus’ concubine/wife whom he later slew when he married Phaedra. The Amazon invasion of Attica sometimes precedes and sometimes follows Theseus’ betrayal of the Amazon nation. Euripides, Hippolytus, 1235–9. Ibid., 1460–61. There are some interesting contrasts between the Hippolytus tragedy of Euripides and that of Seneca. Whereas in Euripides the drama is precipitated by a repression of passions and the subsequent anger of Aphrodite, in Seneca it is Phaedra’s ‘unholy’ expression and publicization of her ‘illegitimate’ passions that lead to catastrophe. Unlike in Euripides, in Seneca there is no divine struggle between Aphrodite and Artemis, but a human moral problem (the expression and shifting of responsibility for one’s passions) that points directly to Phaedra’s desire and the nature of womanhood: ‘But the leader of all wickedness is woman; she besets our mind, cunning mistress of crime; by her foul adulteries so many cities smoke, so many nations war, so many peoples lie crushed beneath the ruins of their kingdoms, utterly overthrown.’ Thus, following Phaedra’s death, Theseus orders that she ‘be buried deep in earth, and may the soil lie heavy on her unholy head!’ Seneca, Hippolytus, 558–63 and 1279–80. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1.22. Euripides, Hippolytus, 31–3. Ibid., 1389–90. Ibid., 228–31.

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid., 215–22. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.10.7. Plato, Republic, 375A–376D. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.54. For the Socratic view, see Plato, Republic, 592A-B. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.72. The stoic cosmopolitan ideal, developed by a variety of authors from Zeno of Citium onwards, is sometimes viewed as a continuation of, and at other times as a break with, cynicism. For example, for Cicero, in contrast to Diogenes, cosmopolitanism is discharged through moral obligations towards humanity, follows a living according to nature and a preservation of propriety. The cynic immodesty and struggle with and against nature means that ‘we should give no heed to the cynics, or to some stoics who are practically cynics’, Cicero, De Officiis, 1.128, 1.148 and 3.26–8. Again, as opposed to Diogenes’ holistic approach, Marcus Aurelius’ cosmopolitan allegiance is split and conditional: ‘But my nature is rational and civic; my city and country, as Antoninus, is Rome; as a human being, the world’, Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.44. With regard to the Christian cosmopolis, for Augustine, the City of God ultimately becomes God’s Church with all the power implications upon those seeking to become its citizens. In this respect, the ‘canine philosophers’, and specifically Diogenes, only display in the eyes of Augustine a ‘ridiculous indecency’; Augustine, City of God, 13.16 and 14.20. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.20. Ibid. Ibid., 6.51. Cynophilia reverses these dominant human vices corrupting the polis; for stray dogs do not possess anything nor are possessed by anyone, do not weaken their spirit by indulging in domestic comforts, and without pride return and ‘beg’ from the places they have been chased away. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.71. Ibid., 6.72. Ibid., 6.37 and 6.73. Ibid., 6.26. Ibid., 6.40. Ibid., 6.26. Ibid., 6.53. Ibid., 6.29 and 6.74. Impressed by his response, Xeniades immediately bought him as a pedagogue for his children and himself. Ibid., 6.43. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, 4.131. Ibid., 4.46–70. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.38. Plutarch, Moralia, 332C. Ibid., 332B. For the meeting with the gymnosophists, see also Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, 7.1–2, and Arrian, Indica, 11.1–8. Plutarch, Moralia, 332A. For the simultaneous death passage, see Plutarch, Moralia, 717C, and Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.79. For the stories of Diogenes’ death,

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65

66

67

68 69 70

71 72

73

some disreputable and probably spread by his opponents, such as falling ill after eating a raw octopus, or being beaten to death while trying to divide it with the other stray dogs, as well as the idealized version of the retention of breath, preferable among his followers, see ibid., 6.76–9. A problematic view put forward by Martha C. Nussbaum in Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in her (ed.), For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1996, p. 4. For example, one can suggest the Buddhist sangha, the open community of monks and nuns following their enlightenment, as a ‘programmatically cosmopolitan community’ that survived continuously from around 500 BCE. On this point see Vinay Dharwadker, ‘Cosmopolitanism in its Time and Place’, in his (ed.), Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 6–7. There is an impressive and important literature around on cosmopolitanism, which for better or worse remains unconcerned with the spiritual or cosmic side of cosmopolis. Still, I am sceptical whether one can overcome the so-called Westphalian legacy without also re-addressing the halo of secularism with which it enveloped the scientific study of politics and international relations. For current cosmopolitan debates, see David Held, Democracy and Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era, Cambridge: Polity, 1998, Danielle Archibugi, David Held and Martin Köhler (eds), Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, James Bohman and Matthia Lutz-Bachmann (eds), Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997, and Kimberly Hutchings and Roland Dannreuther (eds), Cosmopolitan Citizenship, London: Palgrave, 1999. Phocylides, Fragment 5; as found in Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, 36.13. Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2001 and 18 July 2001. For an interesting collection of international religious/political dialogue, see the Special Issue of Global Dialogue, ‘The New Universe of Faiths’, 2, 1, Winter 2000. For an insightful essay on bringing the religious back in IR, see Stephen Chan, ‘Writing Sacral IR: An Excavation Involving Küng, Eliade, and Illiterate Buddhism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39, 3, 2000, pp. 565–89. There is a biblical reference to the altar of the unknown god in Athens in the first century AD; Acts of the Apostles, 17.23. Ephesians, 2.19. The Paulian quote has been recently employed by Jacques Derrida within the Kantian context of ‘the law of cosmopolitanism [that] must be restricted to the conditions of universal hospitality’ and in order to initiate a new ethic of hospitality for refugee and asylum seekers; Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 19–20. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, 36.29–31. By contrast, Marcus Aurelius offers a more ‘rational’ explanation for the politicization of the cosmos: ‘If the intellectual capacity is common to all, common too is the reason (logos) which makes us rational creatures. If so, that reason also is common which tells us to do or not to do. If so, we are citizens (politai). If so, we are fellow members of a polity. If so, the world is

NOTES 173

74

75

76

77 78

79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89

like a polis (ei touto, o kosmos ōsanei polis esti)’. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4. 4. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, 36.38. This is a definition also found in Seneca’s distinction of the two commonwealths: ‘Let us grasp the idea that there are two commonwealths (res publicas), the one great and truly common, embracing alike gods and humans (qua dii atque homines continentur), in which we look neither to this corner or that to measure the limits of our citizenship; the other, the one to which we have been assigned by the accident of birth.’ Seneca, De Otio, 4.1. The chariot of Helios, pulled by four wild horses (Pyrois, Eos, Aethon and Phlegon), daily carries the sun from east to west. Phaithon, the son of Helios, once attempted to drive the chariot but lost control of it, almost destroying the earth but for the intervention of Zeus. Helios represents the skilful driver and horse-tamer, and every day is literally speaking a new taming (ēmera). The myth of the celestial chariot concerns the remaining Borysthenetic Discourse, Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, 36.39–61. Note that the chariot, as a mystical vision of divinity mobilized by the Cherubin, is also found in the Torah; Ezekiel, 1 and 10, and for an exegetical analysis see Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 1.70 and 3.1–7. In the Kabalistic tradition, the Merkabah mystics commemorate the descent of the divine chariot through ritual prostration, as prescribed by the prophet Elizah (1 Kings 18.42). The descent of divinity is meant to assist the spiritual elevation of the believer who joins the chariot, and here note similarities with the Islamic prostration, which symbolically turns the praying carpet into a cosmic treadmill, an exalted state popularized in stories of the magic carpet. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, 36.51. A version of this relates to the story of Pegasus, the winged horse that sprang of the blood of Medusa, mounted with the help of Athena’s bridle by the hero Bellerephon, otherwise known as Hipponoos, ‘the mind horse’. Punished by Zeus for his ambition and overconfidence, Hipponoos fell from Pegasus while trying to fly to Olympus, that is to say, attempting the ultimate spiritual ascent. Ever since, Pegasus remained in the heavenly stalls of Olympus, employed by Zeus to carry his thunderbolts, and in spiritual terms as an image for the striking of thought. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, 36.58. Ibid., 36.60–61. Herodotus, Histories, 7.40. Justin, Epitome of the History of Pompeius Trogus, 1.1. See Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, Neptune, NJ: Loizeaux Books, 1990, and Dudley F.Cates, The Rise and Fall of King Nimrod, Raleigh: Pentland Press, 1998. This is clearly stated in the Ethiopian Version, p. 17. See the Persian Version, pp. 9–15. Plutarch, Moralia, 329C. After conquering the East, Alexander styled himself divine and expected ritual prostration (proskynēsis). Plutarch, Alexander, 27. To be a ‘son of god’ was not an uncommon characterization among the cynics and the stoics, who stressed the divine in every human; see for example Epictetus, Discourses, 1.3.1–3. The difference with Alexander is that he used the term in

174 NOTES

order to validate himself as a deity. Plutarch thinks this was done primarily for imperial reasons; Plutarch, Alexander, 28. 90 Ibid., 27.

Index

Achilles, Alexander’s favourite hero 129 Acre, fall of (1291) 57 Acta Aragonensia, permanent representatives sent to secular courts 90 acts of piracy, due authority of state lacking with 58, 158n.3 Agenor, King of Sidon, four sons to search for Europa 123, 168n.48 Ahrweiler, Hélène, The Making of Europe 119 Akkadian and Hittite transcriptions, irs or alasia ancient name of Cyprus 113 Alcaeus (‘stasiotic’ poet and practitioner) 8 Alexander the Great, breaking of Bucephalus 126; Diogenes lectures that his political project is driven by bad demon 134; encounter with Indian gymnosophists 135; fancies himself ‘driver’ of the celestial chariot 139; horse and he become indistinguishable 127; makes Greece ‘tame under his yoke’ 129; ruler of hippophilic nation 128 Alexander Romance 129, 139; Alexander meets the Amazons 130; horns of Bucephalus and 127 Alexandria, sack of (1365) by knightcorsairs 57 Algeria, danger across the Mediterranean 101–2 Ali, internal enemy—himself 81 Almustafa, the prophet, liberated from walls of mental confinement 83–4

‘altering the political currency’ 133, 172n. 45 Amazonomachy, Athenian hippophobia and 131 Amazons, dangerous enemies and culturally inferior 131 anarchic id, governed by ‘pleasure principle’ 21 ancient Greek ekstasis, identified with Dionysian thiasos 10 ancient world, community re-introduced to the ecstatic 10 animal images, instrumental usage of 128 animating the political 126–8 anti-Semitism, supported Jewish state outside Europe 25 Antistasis, resistance to dominant regimes of representation 13 Aphrodite, bound to let the horses free, to unleash desire and the alogon 132 Apocalypse, could come ‘as a thief in the night’ 76 Apollonian community of technē, subject to Dionysian community of phusis 124 Apostolicon, Paul’s epistles in 78 Appadurai, Arjun, ‘globalization of knowledge’ 12, 147n.58 archic ego, governed by ‘reality principle’ 21 Archilochean fragment (58), requires ‘strategist’ to develop an amphibious nature 74 Archilochean struggle leading to security next to one’s foes, not a military struggle 74 Archilochus, early reference to security 73; 175

176 INDEX

security as freedom from overwhelming cares 85; spiritual struggle 73–4; thymic-Poseidonian security cannot be attained by religious or political rituals 75 Arendt, Hannah 24–5, 149n.33 Aristophanean inversion, knights elevated to wise counsellors 130–31 Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, reconsideration of exclusion of women from political realm 97 Aristotle, balanced in representation of the continents 116–17; Rhetoric, reference to the Dog 132; travelling companion of Alexander 127 Artemis, mistress of gymnasium for horses 132, 171n.37 Ashley, Richard, International Studies Quarterly 35, 152n.24 Asia, aversion to fixed boundaries 39 asphaleia, ancient Greek word for security 74; not antithetical to but mimesis of the sacred order 79; rightness not to err 74 Aspheleios, cult title of Poseidon 75 Athenian foundational mythography, citizens reject horse of Poseidon for olive tree of Athena 131 Athenians, notorious political hippophobia 130 Athens, knights (hippois), perceived as second-class citizens 130 Atlantis, ‘secure’ polis 76 Attar, Conference of the Birds 128 Augustinian just war doctrine 55 Augustinian se quarere, retrospective questioning 10 Austin, John 41 auto-da-fé of Grand Master of Knights Templars (1308) 56 Bacon, Francis 35, 153n.26 Baden-Powell, B.H. 41, 154n.47 Bakhtin, Mikhail 95–7 baqa, mystical rebirth 82

Barbary corsairs, operated from North Africa and included Christian Europeans 59 Barton, William, on Nepal 43 Bataille, Georges 118 Bauman, Zygmunt 24 before the summit 31–3 Beirut (23 October 1983), suicide attack on US Marine battalion 71 Bektashi Order 63 Bhutan, first British mission (1774) 43; Maharaja had fifteen-gun salute but presides over sovereign state 44 Bhutan and Nepal, ‘enjoy’ sovereignty 39 Bhutanese government, accuses India of ‘cartographic aggression’ 37 bishop of Ephesus, given therapeutic advice by Paul 77 Blessed Gerald, ‘servant of the poor, hospitable to strangers’ 65 ‘bogus’ Orders of St John worldwide 62, 159n.32 Borges, Jorge Luis, on ‘comic truth’ 98 Borgia Pope, three alliance-marriages for Lucrezia 3 Borgias, users of mandrake as political tool 3, 144n.13 Borysthenetians, Greco-barbarian hybrid 137 Bosnian operation, NATO and 105 Boundary Commissions, Himalayas and 39 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 145n.24 Boyarin, Daniel 29, 150n.64 Boyarin, Jonathan 29, 150n.64 Briffault, Robert, Europa and Europa in Limbo 119; The Mothers 120 British colonial authorities, difference from Indian princes 41; recharged system of durbars 41–2 British empire, change in princely sovereignty 41; gun-salute rating system 41; imposes frontier on ‘strategic’ grounds 39 British expedition, climbing Chomolungma (Everest), Coronation Day of Queen Elizabeth II 31–2

INDEX 177

British sovereignty, highly political/ colonial discourse of ‘conquest’ of Everest 32 British-Nepali pact of perpetual friendship (1923), ‘sovereignty’ and 43 Brownlie, Ian 60, 158n.28 Brundtland, Gro (PM Norway) 107, 165n. 20 Brutus, ‘the good sedition’ 3–4, 144n.18 Bucephalus, man-eater transformed into vegetarian when he feels divine presence of Alexander 130; taming of served as rite of passage 129 Buddha Sakyamuni, golden urn in front of statue 46–7 Buzan, Barry, military dimension of security only one category 104 Cadmus, Prince (brother of Europa), brought alphabet to Greece 119–20; married Harmony 123–4 canon law, legislation of the Order of St John subservient to 62 Caribbean, the Order of St John and 57 Cartesian reasoning subject, indivisible locus of sovereignty 35 Cartesianism, Western philosophy and 36, 153n.32 Castle of the Seven Towers, prison ‘kept permanently ready’ 91 Castoriadis, Cornelius, Platonic theorizing and 5–6, 145n.27 cathexis, investment and deployment of troops from one place to another 21 Chamber of Princes (colonial India) 44 Charlemagne’s military expeditions, papal sanctions 55 China, forced sterilization 107 Chinese government, installation of Dalai and Panchen Lamas reported to Chinese emperor 47–8; opens Potala palace in Lhasa 37; principles search committee had to adhere to 48–9; questions and answers about reincarnation process 49–50

Chinese-occupied Tibet, Dalai Lama will not be reincarnated inside 46 Christian discourse of orderly peace with justice deferred, UN system 76 Christian pacifism, transformed into a holy war 55 Christian tenacity of anti-Semitism, psychical conflict back to patricide 27 Christians, must keep faith in the gospel 77; servant to everyone but subject to no one 79 Claes, Willy (post-Cold War head of NATO), major speech 101–2 classic realism, transgressive/aesthetic representations of diplomacy and 95 Clement V, Pope, Bull confirming Rhodes as possession of the Order of St John 57 Clifford, James, reflects on diasporic discourses 29–30 climb of Chomolungma (Everest), linked to the crown 31–2 Clinton, Bill (US President) 37 Cold War, relationship between East and West and partnership for peace 99; scholars challenged validity of NATO’s security discourse during 103– Colonia Saint John, ‘artificial’ construction of statehood 66 colonial India, gun-salute system inscribes paramount sovereignty 41 colonial process of reification, redefining the meaning of sovereignty and 40 colonization of diplomatic imagination 92 ‘comic truth’, ‘able to tolerate cyclical and contradictory representations of reality’ 98 commedia erudita tradition 2–3 community, change from Apollonian form to Dionysian ekstasis 124 Conference of Ruling Princes and Chiefs (colonial India) 44 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), European Security organization and 104, 109; Europe’s ethnic and cultural problems and 106 constitution of Ottomanness, question of 91

178 INDEX

Constantine, Emperor, crucifix leading the army of 55 continental identity, discursive and mythical uses 13; mythical appropriation, how to respond to 121 cosmic polis (polis kata kosmon), contrasted to mighty Nineveh 135 cosmic politics, or riding on the chariot of Zeus 135–9 cosmopolis, contemporary as ‘the worldwide community of human beings 136; guiding of the chariot of Zeus 128; narrative construction 137; political task of is good mythmaking 138 cosmopolitan, opposed to universalizing possibility 136 cosmopolitan chariot, impacts on world of mortals in two ways 137 cosmopolitan, the, hospitable to foreign way of doing things 136, 173n.71 cosmopolitanism 135 ‘cunning craftiness’ of Jewish state, endangers ‘heroic virtue’ of German 18 Curzon, Lord 39, 41, 154n.43 cynic, way of life, spiritual opening to ecumenism 133 cynopolis, discursive and performative 133 Cypriot application to join the EU (1990), new Cypriot coin (1991) 114 ‘Cypriot character’ in Aeschylus 113 Cypriot politics, continental belonging 13 Cyprus, in Asiatic Group of states 113; at crossroads of continents and civilizations 114; locating 113–15 Czech Republic, ‘divorced’ country, during Cold War a NATO ‘enemy state’ 99 Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, journey back to Europe 123 ‘Dalai clique’, accused of ‘messing up people’s thinking’ 49 Dalai Lama, accusations of ‘politicizing’ choice of Panchen Lama 46

Darius, Alexander seen as the brother of 139, 174n.85 Davies, Norman, Europe: A History 118, 120, 123; myth points to Asian origins of European civilization 119 Davies, W.D. 29 Day of Judgement, kingdom of God with capital Jerusalem 80 de Rougemont, Denis, The Meaning of Europe 120, 123, 167n.37 Delphic oracle, also site for comic and disreputable stories about Pythia 97 democracy, not precondition for NATO membership 102 Derrida, Jacques 52, 99, 125, 157n.102 d’Estaing, Valéry Giscard, EU Thessalonica Summit (20 June 2003) 122 Devidof, Princess Daria, nicknamed Europa and came from the East (Russia) 120 diaspora, not seen as exile but model to replace national self-determination 29 dichonoia (apart-mindedness), stasis linked to 8 dies-to-self (fana) to live-in-God (baqa) 82 Dio Chrysostom, Fourth Discourse 134; Nineveh and 138; Thirty-Sixth or Borysthenetic Discourse 136–7; warns that ‘no human can conceive and express the form of the world’ 138 Diogenes, the Cynic, Alexander and 134– 5; cosmopolite 132; exile, later slave 133; King Philip and 134; saw the politeia grounded ‘in the world’ 132–3 Dionysus, annihilation of identity in celebrations 124; sweeping power of taught to early Europeans in Thebes 123 display a mandragola (old Italian), to deceive 3 Disraeli, Benjamin (British PM) 41 dog image, cynic way of life and 128

INDEX 179

Dog, the, deliberately sets low not only others but himself 133 Draft ‘Constitution for Europe’, epigram from Thucydides from Funeral Oration of Pericles 122 Drakulic, Slavenka, Café Europa, meaning of Europe 121 drug trafficking, security threat? 109 Dubrovnik, European cultural heritage and 110 Duncan Smith, Iain 136 durbar protocol 33 Eagleburger (US Assistant Secretary of State), ‘If we don’t do something in Bosnia we’ll look absurd’ 110 early continental representations 115–18 East India Company, borders and 38; Indian ‘states’ and 40 Eastern mind, does not engage in total and absolute representations 36, 153n.30 ecstatic gnosis 10 ego, ‘almighty and autocratic’ 21, 148,18; carries out repressions in service of its super-ego 21–2 Egyptian campaign of the Order of St John (1168), profit-making expedition 56 Eichmann, Adolf, Zionist movement and 24–5 Einstein, Albert, Freud’s letter to 19; summit ‘the ideal limit of knowledge’ 32 ekstasis, experience of alteration 9; liquidates the ‘positivist’ boundaries of meaning 10; temporary release from fixed identity and subjectivity 13 enemy within, shade of the Sage, the Mevlana and 81 Enlightenment or Cartesian response, continental identity and 121 environment, deep ecology approach challenges anthropocentrism 106 eros and thanatos, id caught between 22 eschatological security 76

esoteric process of integration, unification of Europe and 122 ‘eternal city’ of Rome, meeting point of archaic and contemporary states 26 ethnic groups, repression within borders of other states 105 ethnocracy, normalization of 26 etymology of word politics in Arabic (siyāsa), taming of a horse 126 Euripides, Bacchae, return of Dionysus and 124; Hippolytus 131–2 Europa, appropriating the myth of 118–21; Asiatic, came from Phoenice to Crete and to Lycia 117; four brothers sent to search for her 123; myth exemplary of narrations in European wavelengths 122; myth of 13; no classical reference she had been to Cyprus 114 Europa mythica, continental pessimism and future hope 120 Europe, Fanonian critique, should not become model for rest of the world 122, 167n.43; flexible boundaries or fortress- like 108; has to come to terms with erased Others of its past 109; inside or outside we confront limit of identity 125; meaning of after Cold War 121; morally problematic space that made Holocaust possible 114; project of incessant creative movement or adventure 120; referring to life and politics of separate geographical entity 122 European community, almost entirely Apollonian—rational and technical 124 ‘European’ ideal of democracy, Draft ‘Constitution for Europe’ and 122 European identity, at odds with interpretation of myth of Europa 122 European motto ‘unity in diversity’, narration of familial genealogy and 123, 168n.47

180 INDEX

European security, discourse of capacious and its destination a capriccioso 110; gender issues possibly figure in 107; NATO and Warsaw Pact 100 European supremacy, archaic knowledge that inaugurated science of Western medicine and geography 115 European unification, Apollonian, community of technē and 123; essentialist mythology and 121; originarily concerned unification with Asia 123; rethinking the myth of 121–4 European Union (EU), democracy in Eastern Europe and 102, 109 ‘Europeans more courageous than Asiatics’, given harsher climate 116 Everest, Sir George (surveyor-general of British Empire in India) 32 existence, Greek ek-stasis 9 existentia, humanist conception of as absolute subjectivity 9 extra ecclesia nulla salus (no salvation outside the church) 79, 162n.18 fana, condition of being without ego or self 82 Fanonian critique, Europe should not become model for rest of the world 122, 167n.43 Final Solution, did not clash with rational efficient goal-implementation 24; medicalization of political thinking and 18, 23 First Coming, establishes a new world order 78 Foreign Office, case of India and 40 fortuna 2, 4; beyond one’s control 9 ‘fragile experiment in democracy to our east’ 101–2 France, alliances with Ottoman Empire 59; attitude to NATO 103 French knights, corsairing activities financed by French capitalists 59

Freud, Sigmund, Hannibal and Rome symbolized tenacity of Jewry and organization of Catholic church 27; identification of Rome with ‘the Promised Land’ 28; mental occupation in economic and military terms 21; system of states not ruled from single power centre 20; theory of psychoanalysis highly topographical 19; workings of the mind in terms of interstate power relations 22; The Interpretation of Dreams 26; Moses and Monotheism 17, 27 frivolity, camouflage making it easier to move across barriers and 97 future of European security by NATO, new serious adversary/partner and 100 Gandhi, Indira, rejected Sikkimese claims to sovereignty 43–4 Gandhi, Mahatma 114, 166n.5 Gay, Peter 27 genealogical narration, different historical moments diplomacy viewed differently 97 Gibran, Kahlil 73; greater freedom outside self-centred care is greater security 85; The Garden of the Prophet 83 Gommers, Peter 120 Gore, A1 (US Vice-President), meets Dalai Lama 37 Gottwald, Klement, Vlado Clementis and 99 grotesque, employ as means of transgression 98 grotesque interventions, work to defamiliarize events 97 grotesque laughter, cosmic laughter and 96 grotesque narration, people could imagine alternatives 97 grotesque realism, temporality and ambivalence 96 grotesque, the, epistemological double agent 96–7;

INDEX 181

mocks authority and 95; study of examines fabrication of the normal 97 Group of Seven (G7) Summits, use of ‘Sherpas’ 31 gun-salute rating 33 Gurkhas, Nepal and 43 habitual practices, ideal states that pass for real ones 18 Hagia Sophia, Procopius on the building of 79 Hague, William 136 Harding, Alan 7, 145n.34 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time 9 Hera, personification of stasis 8 Hercules, classic version of rapid reaction force 130; horse taming links Alexander with 129; preferred liberty to everything 133; sent to bring Girdle of Hippolyte to priestess of Hera, Admete 130 Herodotus, historical narrative and selfidentification 125; new narrative style reformujlates world of mythos as historiography 118; Persians and sacred chariot of Zeus and 138; questions on Europe 117; stories and ethos 10; Histories 117–18 Herzl, Theodor, anti-Semitism as ally for territorial Jewish state 25; normalization of Jewish state and return to Promised Land 26; Pope Pius X and 28 Hesiod, bad and good discord 9; Hess, Moses 25 Hezbollah 63 Hillary, Edmund 32 Himalayan rulers, joined future durbars after Calcutta visit 42 Himalayas, map displays cartography of historico-topographical amnesia 51; state sovereignty as both obvious and necessary 39

hippocentric conception of the political, resuscitates narrative accounts 126 Hippocrates, ‘Asiatics are feeble’ and cause of despotic institutions 116; Airs, Waters, Places 115 hippodamia (horse-taming), never fully possible, liable to hippolysis 131 hippophilics, hippophobics and 128–32 Hitler, Adolph, crude and complete identification with the German nation 18; personal obsession with ‘the Jewish question’ 24; sanitation policy in form of ‘Final Solution’ 23; Mein Kampf 17–18, 147n.3 Hobbes, Thomas 3–5, 79–80; Leviathan, ‘business’ of the state is ‘salus populi’ 79 Holland, Sidney (New Zealand PM) 32 Holocaust 19, 24 Holy See 60; control of Order of St John 59, 62; diplomatic relations from (1870 until 1929) 62; gender issues and 107; a state within a state 27 Homer, Borysthenetians and 137 Homeric cosmology, mythos is neither a true nor a false story 127 homonoia (concord or same-mindedness), prime political principle 8 horse-rule exemplifications, ancient Greek mythology and 128 horse-taming, Dorian/Peloponnesian conception of power and politics 130 hospital function of Order of St John, problematic reading and selective service 64 ‘Hospitaller, adopted as official name in nineteenth century 66 ‘hospitaller vocation’, secret of resurgence of Order of St John 65 Hospitallers, internal politics of crusading kingdoms and 56, 158n.8; mission to save ‘suffering humanity’ 63, 159n.35 House of Osman, empire and 94

182 INDEX

humanist conception of existentia, absolute subjectivity 9 humans, yoked to the gods 132 Hurewitz, J.C., Ottoman diplomacy and 88–91, 162n.10 and 16; Phanariot Greeks and 90; writings assume a normal type of diplomacy 92 id, energy invested or deployed is ‘mobile’ 21; has not achieved a unified will 22; mental constructions of most archaic past preserved in the 26 id and ego, autonomous parts of new country 20 Iliad, horse-taming hippodamoio last word in the 129 ‘imperial’ Russian cap, confer security degree upon NATO 101 incommensurability, question of how to think about contemporary political phenomena 5 Inden, Roland 40, 154n.45 Indian Maharajas, treated as ‘feudal sovereigns 40 Indian subcontinent, discourse of sovereignty and 40 Indo-Nepalese treaty of peace and friendship (1950) 43 ‘intellectual stature’ of Europe, contradistinction to Asia 119 international law, complicity in historical affair of Knights of St John 57; historical activities of Order of St John both legal and criminal by 66; legitimized and encouraged ‘official piracy’ 58; Pezzana seeks to legislate ‘the chivalric’ into 64; piratic attack on way to Eldorado 54; sovereign status of Order of St John unsettles scene of 67 international relations see IR international studies, not restricted to ‘high’ politics and policy-oriented concerns 11

international terrorism, security threat and not domestic terrorism 109 IR theory, complex experience of world politics lies beyond models of 51; feminist voices, security not only statecentric but andro-centric 107; heterorealism 95; sovereign thinking and 34 Islam, concerned with justice 76 Islamic fundamentalism, how is it now becoming a threat 109 Islamic Jihad, Beirut attack 71, 159n.1 Israel, problem in and of today 28–9 Japanese military, compensation for ‘comfort women’ 107 Jerusalem hospice, lodging house of Amalfitan merchants 65 Jew of Malta, policy Hospitaller’s profession 56 Jewish Revolt (66–73 CE), discredited Jews in Roman Empire 78, 161 n. 16 Jewish state, universally unlimited as to space 18 Jewry, Freud and being bound to 27 Jews, abnormal Christians who did not recognize Messiah 28 judenfrei Europe 24 Jung, Carl, ‘collective unconscious’ 27; saw Freud working as imperial customs official 22 Justin 138–9, 174n.82 Justinian, Emperor, securing empire by construction works 79 Kafadar, Cemal, study of Ottoman historiography 87, 161n.3 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., legal procuratores of kings sent to Papal Court in thirteenth century 90, 162n.15 Kashmir, twenty-one gun salute 44 Kaulbach, Battle of the Huns (painting) 21 Kenyata, Jomo 114 Kissinger, Henry, limit on NATO expansion 108 knight-corsair, employed religious discourse to legitimate violence 57

INDEX 183

knighthood, the other face of 55–60 knights, church in Jerusalem said abusing their papal privileges 56 Knights Hospitallers, safety through their sovereign therapeutical service 63 Knights of St John, moving via Cyprus to Rhodes and finally to Malta 57 Knights Templars and Hospitallers, internal politics of Jerusalem and Antioch 56 knights-corsairs, flags of convenience 59– 60; operated from principality of Malta 59 Kundera, Milan, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting 99, 164n.1 Kurdish ‘safe haven’ 105 Lacan, Jacques 19 Ladakh, India and China assume existence of ‘traditional boundary’ 37 Laestrygones and the Cyclops, Poseidon father of 75 language of the state, state of political discourse 1 last terror, the 76–80 legal subjectivity, sovereign knighterrantry and 55 Leifer, Walter 39, 153n.39 letters of marque, blurred distinction between piracy and privateering 58; given by the Order of St John 57 Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘Zionisms’ and 28, 150n.56 lo stato, complex and amorous power deals in Machiavelli’s day 3; ‘gamut of meanings’ 2 logos, a polemic and mystical gathering of things 127–8 logothetēs 91 Loraux, Nicole, reflections on stasis 7–8, 146n.36 and 38 Lucrezia, deceived through casuistry to yield to Callimaco’s advances 4; resonance to Lucrezia Borgia 3 Luther, Martin, Concerning Christian Liberty 78–9 Lyall, Alfred 41, 154n.7

Lysias, on the Amazons and horses 131 Macedon (son of Zeus) 128 Macedonia, secure historical copyrights and 110 Machiavelli, Niccolo, lo stato in Mandragola 2; notion of stasis in understanding stato 9; paradigmatic realist, advanced proponent of raison d'état and realpolitik 2; plays within the commedia erudita tradition 2; unsanctimonious vision of the state 4; Discourses on Livy 2; Mandragola 1; The Prince 2 Madagascar project, ‘evacuation of Jews en masse’ 24 Maine, Henry 41, 154n.47 Major, John (British PM), refusal to meet Dalai Lama 37 Makarios, Archbishop, address to UN General Assembly (7 June 1962) 113– 14, 165n.4 Malta (1522), knight-corsair activity magnet for ‘footloose Europeans’ 57 Mandragola 1–4 mandrake, excites some and sedates others 3–4, 144n.15 mandrake therapy, sedition of the Good Fighter 4; practice to boost one’s estate and position 1 Marxist ideology, Jews and 18 Mattingly, Garrett, Renaissance Diplomacy 90 Mavrocordato, Alexander (the Dragoman), agent of Ottoman diplomacy 90 Mediterranean civilization, charged with ferment of ideas and energetic activity 119 Mediterranean corsairs, limitations of international norms 59 Menander, Protector 92–3, 162n.27

184 INDEX

mental activity separated into two conflicting camps, conscious and the unconscious 20 metaphors, horizon within which concepts are formed and defined 33; politicization of in order to deconstruct sovereignty 52 metaphors like Sherpas, in business of transportation 32 metaphysics of presence, implications from thinking within 36 Metastasis, problem of spreading of staseis 12 micro-political expeditions, the Dog and series of 133 Middleton, Thomas, Game at Chess 97 militia Christi, spiritual struggle as ‘soldiers of Christ’ 55, 59 Mill, James, Indian maharajas ‘sovereign despots’ 40–41 Miracula, venerable antiquity and early scriptural authority of Order of St John 65 mist, image of freedom 84 modern cosmopolitanism, falters because its organization has to delimit a (cosmic) locality 136 modern secular myths, versions of older narratives 124 modern state, stasis and 8 modern statecraft, modern mancraft 35 Morocco (1987), application to join EU 123 mundane security, not real security 77 Murad IV, forbade pipe-smoking (1633) ‘on pain of death’ 91, 162n.23 Muslim Brotherhood 63 ‘Muslim’ features, diplomacy of Ottoman empire and 90 Muslim pirates at Tiber river, Popes accompanied armies 55 myth, not as scientific allegory but as empirical necessity 137 myth and rationality, can co-exist 122 mythic signifiers, words have lost value as to modern mindset 127 mythical appropriations of European unification, legend of Europa 122

mythopoetic constitution of subjectivity, need to unpack in contemporary world 118 mythos of the Other, turn to be logos of oneself 136 Napoleon, occupied Malta (1798) 60 Naqshibandi Order 63 narration, foundation when story is established as part of tradition 122 Native American pipe-of-peace, function of 91 NATO, cap of the enabling Other that was lent to NATO during Cold War 100; capabilities in ‘new’ dimensions of security 105, 108; loss in absence of Warsaw Pact 100; no place in deep ecology world 106; question about future European security and 103–4; raison d’être in the present time 104; redefinition and search for new enabling Other(s) 13; reluctance to be drawn into conflicts between member states 106; role in future of European security 99; Saddamite global risk in aftermath of Gulf War and 101; safe havens for endangered species 107; success in area of ethnic security 105; as ‘vacuum cleaner’ shows Kissinger’s understanding of security 108 NATO officials, members of the Order of St John 67 NATO and Warsaw Pact, ‘partners in arms’ 100 NATO-WEU security issues, could come under ‘double-headed’ formula 106 NATO’s ‘counter-truth’, realpolitik of Soviet Union and 100 Nazi anti-Semitism in form of judenfrei Germany, concerned with normalization of Jews 24 Nazi discourse, Jews in Germany as pathological state 25 Nazi Germany, territorial ethnocracy and 23–4

INDEX 185

Nazi and Zionist, ‘abnormalities’ 30; common political assumptions about the Jews 25 Nepal, British representative changed from ‘Resident’ to ‘Envoy’ 43; marks territorial distinction from India 38 new partner(s) and cap(s), NATO to be capable of new security discourse 100 Nicias (The Victorious One), Lucrezia and 1, 3 Nicolson, Harold, acknowledges role of Phanariot Greeks 90, 162n,18; biography of Byron 94; colonial map-maker, cartography of diplomacy throughout the ages 87–8; Diplomacy 92, 93n.28, 94; English genius for government and 88; ‘extreme importance attached to questions of protocol and ceremony’ 91; Public Faces (novel) 92; quotes Byzantine historian Menander Protector 92–3; resignation from Foreign Office (September 1929) 95; telegram to Virginia Woolf 94; writings confirm normal type of diplomacy 92 Nietzsche, Friedrich 32–3, 151n.14; Beyond Good and Evil 113 Nimrod/Ninus, supernatural genius 139, 174n.83 Nineveh, epitome of imperial hubristic conception of cosmopolis 138; king Ninus and expansion of 135 Ninus and Alexander, ambiguous similarity between 139 Nisko (central Poland), Jewish state and 24 Nkrumah, Kwame 114 Non-Aligned Movement 114, 166n.5 ‘non-Western’ conceptualization, problematization of ‘Western’ thought 128 Norbu, Gyaincain, eleventh reincarnation of Panchen Lama (29 November 1995) 45, 155n.70 normal state, Freud’s definition 17;

Westphalian model of territorial statehood 25 North Atlantic Council, Report of the Committee of Three (1956) 105 Nyima, Gedhun Choekyi, eleventh reincarnation of Panchen Lama (14 May 1995) 45 Olympian pantheon, Poseidon most unstable god of 75 Olympic games, Diogenes and 133 Onesicritus (disciple of Diogenes), lifetime companion of Alexander 134–5, 172n.61 Opium war, ‘threatening’ China for banning trade of opium 109 Oppenheim’s International Law 60, 158n. 26 Order of St John, the, associated with crusades 62; corso system of licensed privateering 57; de facto and de jure situation 61; distinction between spiritual and temporal legislation 61–2; Fort St Angelo (Malta 1998) 67, 159n. 54; full diplomatic relations despite lacking territory 54; houses of hospitality (domus hospitales) for pilgrims to Holy Land 65; internal and international sovereignty 60; knight-errantry as organized violence and piracy 66; mission not disinterested or uniform hospital service 66; not uniform entity 64; ‘owed vassalage to ruler of Sicily, king of Spain and later Bourbon kings’ 59; rules and decisions subject to canon law 62; scopic sovereignty over ascetic bodies of Knights 63; sovereignty is historical, social and political reality 61;

186 INDEX

splinter groups throughout the world 66; vows of chastity, obedience and poverty 63, 159n.39; why privileged international status? 60 Oriental officials, how diplomatist should conduct negotiations with 93, 163n.28 Orlando, appointed by King Charles as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople 86, 161n.1; in need of to expose absurdities of modern diplomacy 98 Orwell, George, Animal Farm 128 Other, the, the cap of but still cap of sovereignty 110; Christian love as caritas for is possible 78; ecstatic gnosis and 10; NATO and the enabling 100; necessary to enter world of, to see Dionysus 124; only prepares the way for summiteers 32; political limits and story of 136; ‘seditious state’ and 10; sovereignty implicated in representation or misrepresentation of 34; story of a condition of knowing the self 125 Ottoman diplomacy, continuous diplomacy and 90; mubadele (exchange of ambassadors across the frontier) 91, 162n.20; reluctant to send resident missions abroad till eighteenth century 89, 162n. 13; the bostancis as emissaries of death 89 Ottoman diplomatic historiography 13 Ottoman subjectivity, discursive spatiotemporal practice 91 pacifism, notion of armed priests and 55 Pancatantra 128 Panchen Lama, death of tenth, Chinese government and confirmation of eleventh reincarnation 45;

rule for identification 47, 156n.84 Papadopoulos, Tassos (President of Republic of Cyprus) 113, 165n.1 Papal Bull (Pie Postulatio Voluntatis 1113), established the Order of St John 62; Hirosolimitani Xenodochii under ‘protection of Apostolic See’ 65 paradoxography 2, 144n. 8 pathological state, definition 17 Paul I, Tsar, Grand Master of Orderof St John after loss of Malta 62, 159n.35 Paulian discourse, wider world community possible by being hospitable to cosmic spirit 136, 173n.72 Pausanias, sepulchral mound of Hippolytus in Athens 131, 171n.34 peace and security, will not protect after Second Coming 77 Pelops, father of Atreus 130 Pelops and Hippodamia, romantic story of 130 People’s Republic of China, ‘embodying sovereignty’ of feudal imperial dynasties 46 Persian and Greek mythology, according to Dio 137 Pezzana, Professor Aldo, international ius singulare precept 64, 159n.43; law that is descriptive and uncritical 66; on original legislation 62; on religious and humanitarian objects 62–3; on singular law 64–6; sovereignty for discharging religious and humanitarian aims 62–3; ‘Theory and Practice of the Sovereignty of the Order’ 60–61, 159ns.30&31 Phaedra, control eros through hipparchy and fancies herself an Amazon 132 Philippians 2.12 160n.15; Christians in ‘fear and terror’ while working towards salvation 77 Philippians, Paul warns ‘against those dogs’ 77 Phocylides 137; cosmopolitan location and 135–6;

INDEX 187

Nineveh and 138 Phoenix, one of Europa’s brothers built cities seen as non-European Others 123 pipe-smoking, different conceptualizations and approaches to diplomacy 91 piracy, knight-errantry and statehood 54–5 Pius X, Pope, if Jews converted church could sanction return to Palestine 28, 150n.53 Plato, love-hate relationship with Diogenes 132; ‘monotheism’, ideal political rule in opposition to stasis 9; philosopher-king and 36; philosophical problematization of stasis and 8; the Republic 3–4, 132, 146n.49; states of mind affect ways of living politically 22 Plato and the Academy, Diogenes and 133– 4, 172n.52 Platonic ideational philosophy, victory of logos over mythos 127 ‘plausible deniability’ concept, ‘maximum freedom with minimum responsibility’ 59 Plutarch, biography of Alexander 129 poetic-word exploration, freeing political narratology from sentential storytelling 73 polis and its dog 132–5 polis of Zeus, cosmos is material-spiritual entity, community of gods and humans 137, 173–4 politicization of dog image, cynic way of life 128 politicization of horse-taming, hubris against Aphrodite 132 politicized Sherpa, metaphoreas or carrier of tools and knowledge 53 Pope Urban’s Bull (1634), Papacy acquired right to nominate Grand Master 62 Portillo, Michael (‘cosmopolitan’) 136 Poseidon, cult title Asphaleios 75, 160n.9; not a popular poliouchos 76 postmodern world, pretend to validate standards of knowing 52 Potala Palace in Lhasa 37;

drawing of lots in 47, 156n.85 ‘primitive’ Turks, highly instrumental ceremonial system for diplomatic signalling 93 Prince, The 2, 4 Procopius, Buildings, panegyric of security 79 Promised Land, that betrays its ‘chosen people’ 29, 150n.60; where lies? 26 psychic health, depends on balance of power between id and ego 21 psychoanalysis, aim is ‘to strengthen the ego’ 22, 149n.29 psychoanalyst, role as interpreter of the unconscious 22 Qaddafi, Colonel, diplomacy has true Almodovarian effect 97 Qur’an, believer (mu’min) 83; Moses and Khizr or Al-Khadir 82 Reading, Lord 41 Red Crescent 63 Red Cross 63 Redhead, Brian, Plato to NATO: Studies in Political Thought 104, 164n.12 Reformation, inspiration from Paul’s Epistles 78 reincarnation of major Lamas, opposing views about 46, 155n.73 reincarnation principles 33 religious charitable service, service not for personal glorification 55 religious knighthood, principles of early Christian church and 55 religious military orders, ‘moral objective’ and 56 Remus, worshipping rituals 10 Renaissance carnivals, collective spirit and 96, 163n.42 representation, delegitimizing every act must be avoided 52 representative thought, sovereignty cannot be dissociated from 34 repression, normal ‘defence mechanism’ of the ego 22

188 INDEX

Rhodes, centre for corsairing and slavetrafficking 57 Roman law, contrasts ius singulare with ius communis 64 Roman Lucretia, raped by Sextus 3 Roman saturnalia, collective spirit and 9 Romantic response, continental identity and 121 Rome, co-existence of psychic images and 26 Rose, Jacqueline 6, 145n.28 Rosenzweig, Franz, national-territorial predicament and 29, 150n.58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3 rule the world, rule over the meaning of words 73 Rumi, Jalaluldin (Sufi) 73; has Mohammed instruct Ali to seek protection of the Sage 81; one who is on Sufi way seeks to overcome Man-God separation 82; radicalizes security as self-annihilation 83; Shams of Tabriz as his sage 81; surrender to divine fire are escape from egotistical and false identity 85; writings: Mathnawi 1 1373–4 81; Mathnawi 1 3124–6 83; Mathnawi 2 30 83; Mathnawi 3 3694 8 Mathnawi ‘the Persian Qur’an’ 80 Sacian Feast, Freudian catharsis and 6 Sackville-West, Vita, Orlando 94 Sage, cultivates faith and puts Sufi on the way 83; Mohammed instructs Ali to seek protection of 81; submission to even after shocking actions 82 Said, Edward 28, 150n.54 St Bernard of Clairvaux, De laude novae militiae (In praise of the new soldiery) 55–6, 158n.5

St Catherine of Siena, Knights of St John ‘bathe yourself in the blood of Christ crucified’ 55, 158n.6 St George (soldier-saint) 55, 158n.4 St John Alliance, ‘to reduce to silence the enemies of Christ’ 63, 159 n.34 Saint Paul 73; biological safeguards and 77; employs military metaphors and terminology 78; faith for dealing with salvation 79; favourite apostle of apostates and heretics 78; hope of salvation liberating 85; soteriology terroristic 77; writings: Corinthians 1 (18–24) 77; Corinthians 1 (2.3) 77; Corinthians 1 (2.5) 77; Corinthians 2 (1.24) 78; Corinthians 2 (5.15–17) 78; Ephesians (6.12) 78; Galatians (5.12) 77, 161n.14; Romans (3.20) 78; Romans (5.10) 78; Thessalonians 1 76; Thessalonians 2 77; Timothy 1 (6.20–21), biological safeguards and 77; Saladin, hero of Arab-Muslim history 56 salvation, fight for against cosmic powers 78; God’s reconciliation with sinful humanity and power of crucifixion 77– 8 Schmitt, Carl, antinomy of stasis and 7, 145n.35 Sea Dogs, pirates knighted 58, 158n.21 securitas, secularization of Christian salvation and 79 securitization, works by synchronizing security, safety and certitude 72, 75, 79, 160n.2 security, cultural and ethnic 105–6; dissociating from certainty Archilochean poetry and 75; environmental 106–7;

INDEX 189

‘freedom from danger or risk’ in popular IR texts 73; gender 107–8; internarrational 85; manner in which constituted 71; mist of 83–5; real is posthumous salvation 77; result that God provides to vice-regent on earth 79; time of colonized; the uni-versal 72; use of stories of 85 seditious state, investigating character of 6; a transversal 5 Sedivy, J., on European security with or without Russia 108, 165n.21 self-annihilation, unity with the divine secured through 82 Seychelles, the Order of St John and 67, 159n.53 shade, image of protection for Near and Middle Eastern people 81 Shaw, Malcolm N. 60, 158n.27 Sherpas, representations of 31–3 Siachen Glacier, India and Pakistan fight unreported war 37 Sidon, abduction of Princess Europa from by Timocharis (ruler of Marion) 114 Sikkim, British and unpredictable shifting of dynastic ‘sovereignty’ 43; six gun salutes short of independent statehood 44; sovereign state or not 52–3 Sikkim and Bhutan, rulers and durbars 42 Sikkim (Gangtok), architectural planning changing 38 Sire, H.J.A., The Knights of Malta, resurgence of the Order of St John 66, 159n.52 Skinner, Quentin, history of political vocabularies 6–7, 145n.33 Socrates 132–3 Solana, Javier, identification of European integration with NATO membership 123, 168n.45 Somalia, female circumcision 107 Son of man, conquered through humility and faith the terror of death 77

soteria, asphaleia and 74 soteriology, provokes uncertainty, fear and terror 78 South Asia, colonial practice 42 South-Asian rulers, ‘complete’, ‘partial’, ‘semi’ or ‘imperfect’ sovereigns 40 sovereign identities, claims and counterclaims made in name of 38; political representation and 34 Sovereign Order of St John (Knights of Malta) see Order of St John, the ‘Sovereign Princes’, use of term 44, 155n. 65 sovereignty, Cartesian device masked as rational thinking 34; critical attitude, general antirepresentational hostility 52; dismounting 50–53; global architectonics of 51; intertwining with representation 49; legal status of Order of St John and multiple claims of 66; logics of representation allied to claims of 37; paradoxical effects of 38; principle for organizing reality into separate domains 35; problem, the Other is never there 32; rating of 40–44; reincarnation of 44–50; of representation 33–6; representing on the Himalayas 36–40; rhetorical play over location 47; scientific sovereignty of IR discipline 35; stability of norms 52 sovereignty of man, linked to idea of Enlightenment 35 sovereignty-representation problematic, approaches to 34 staseis 11 stasis, conceptual modifications of 12; guarantees polyphony and polymorphy of the polis 7–8; Hera as personification of 8; part of the world movement that cannot be deciphered 8; questions about 10–11;

190 INDEX

renders polis both one and many 7, 145n.37; sense of political disease 8; Western political and international theory 128 state sovereignty, fundamental questions about nature of political community and world politics 34; homogenizes and essentializes political identities 38; normalized as tight fit universal 35; politically problematic rendition of world politics 50; scientific and human sovereignties, accomplices 35 state, psychological meaning 6; sedition to another state of being 4; seditious affair product of originary violence and deception 4; ‘status par excellence’ 1 state, the, art of the (arte dello stato) 2, 143n.4; for Asiatics to be avoided 39; conventional international relations (IR) and 11; etymology 6–7; paradoxical image and language of 5; role to facilitate putting people into an orbit 29, 150n.61 State within a State (ein Staat im Staat) 17; Holy See 27; Jewish people and 18 state-scientific sovereignty, predicated on ‘the sovereignty of man’ 35 statehood, missing territory and legal interpretation 60–61; on original legislation 61–2; on religious and humanitarian objects 62–4; on singular law 64–6 states, archaic and diasporic 25–30; ethnocratic 23–5; exhibit presence of sovereignty through policies in name of sovereignty 51; normal and pathological 17–19; psychic 19–22; things we are possessed by 30

States of Political Discourse, state as global actor and 11 Strabo, Geography 116, 119, 167n.18 struggle against power, ‘struggle of memory against forgetting’ 99 subjectivity, constitution of and role of diplomatic process 92 Summerhayes, Christopher (British ambassador in Kathmandu) 32, 150n.7 summit, general metaphor for sovereignty 32; specific metaphor for intersection of discourse of sovereignty with Himalayas 33 ‘summit of summits’, exemplars of sovereignty and 31 superego, frontline power-broker between id and ego 20–21 surrender and self-annihilation 80–83 Tashi Lhumpo lamasery (Tibet) 46–7, 49; China Buddhist Association and 45 Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second World War 23, 149n.31 Tenzing, Bhotia 32, 151n.10 theogamy, not only mystic pact 97 theoria, ecstatic gnosis and 10, 146n.54; Western political and international theory 128 Theseus, saves polis from invasion of horses and Amazons 131, 171n.29 Thessalonians, reminded they may have security on earth but it is bogus 76 Thomas, Caroline, intrastate dimension of security 104–5, 164n.15 Thomson, Janice E. 58, 158n.18 Thucydides, ‘common safety’ opposed to ‘safety-of-servitude’ 75; ‘sedition of names’ 8, 146n.40; European Constitution and 122, 168n. 44 Thymic-Poseidonian security of Archilochus, religious or political rituals and 75 Tibetan government-in-exile, golden urn not exhaustive symbol 47

INDEX 191

Tibetan National Assembly, confirmed fourteenth Dalai Lama (1939) 48, 156n. 86 Tibetan religious leaders, embodiment of sovereignty of Chinese government 44, 155n.66 Timocharis, Europa coin and 114–15, 166n. 8 Tod, James, Indian maharajas ‘feudal sovereigns’ 40, 154n.46 Toumanoff, Cyril, Order of St John polymorphous (persona mixta) 64, 159n. 40 transcendency of spatial imperatives, real reincarnation of Panchen Lama 52 transversal and irregular practice, international relations and 55 Treaty of Westphalia, territorial statehood and 60 Tribhuvana, King (Nepal) 32 Trojan Horse (Doureios Hippos), play on words 130, 171n.27 tropes 32 tropological mode, process and discourse of investigating 33 ‘true king’, one who cultivates good attentive demon 134, 172n.58 Turkey, Cilix (brother of Europa) went to 123, 168n.47 Tyre, William of 56, 158n.10 unification of Europe, esoteric process of integration 122; political quest 123 United Nations, the Order of St John and 67; ‘peace and security’ founding principle of 76 United States, soldiers saving birds from oil discharge in Kuwait 106; splinter groups of the Order of St John 66 uniting with mist, living with higher vibrations that desynchronize security from safety and certitude 84 unity with God, comes after surrendering to the Sage 82

Valéry, Paul 36, 153n.31 Van Miert, Karel, uses of the myth by European countries 120–21, 167n38 Vanuatu, the Order of St John and 66, 159n.53 Venizelos, E.K. 94 Versailles peace Conference (1919), Nicolson on the Turks 93 Victoria, Queen (‘Empress of India’ (January 1877)), gun salute and 41, 154n. 49 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) 88 Villaret, Fulk de (Grand Master), agreement with Vignolo de Vignoli to capture Rhodes 57, 158n.12 virtù 2, 4 Voltaire, European civility and ecclesiastical morality 54 Voltairian fashion, discursive character of knight/pirate and law/crime 54–5 Walker, R.B.J. 5, 145n.25; International Studies Quarterly 35 web of myths, words and 127 Western European Union (WEU) 104, 105– 6, 109 Western powers, forced permanent legations and continuous diplomacy on Chinese emperor 89 Westphalian legacy, modern state and attachment to 30 Westphalian states system, secularization thesis of 63 White, Sir Claude 42, 154n.57 Wicquefort, Abraham de, ambassador as ‘a kind of comedian’ 98 Wight, Martin 52, 157n.100; criticizes Nicolson for assuming his diplomacy the only form 88 Woolf, Virginia, grotesque image of diplomacy possible because her writing is borderless 88; Ottoman protocol 86–7; narrations offer extreme and exaggerated images 92;

192 INDEX

nomadization of thought about diplomacy 87; Orlando 86, 94 words, as narratives 72–3; meeting points and places of rest 127 World Population Conference in Cairo (September 1994) 107 xenodochium 65, 159n.44 Xenodochium Romanorum, ‘prison’ for foreign delegates 91 Xenophon, Anabasis and Horsemanship 130 Yorkshire industrial chimneys, acid rain in Scandinavia and 106 Yugoslav conflict, has taught us a lesson 110 Zeus, Hera and 8–9 Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and Hestia, aether, air, water and earth 137 Zeus (in form of golden bull), abducted princess Europa from Asia 117 Zionist discourses on statehood 12 Zionist Israel, territorial ethnocracy and 23 Zionist project, Nazis for time associated with 24