Dope

About twenty years ago, when I was an emotional young man - mine was a generation of emotional young men, the seventies guys, always breaking down and retiring to mental hospitals or moving back home -- I resolved to toughen up, to become a much less emotional man. There is a french word I love - desinvolture - which has the sense of lucid, disinterested, and leans towards cynical. I was attracted to writers and thinkers who valued the disinvolte above everything else -- the Tallyrandian ideal, above the fray and participating on one side or the other with the private proviso that such alliances were temporary.

Well, sometimes I think desinvolture comes close to callousness. Yesterday's post is a case in point. Discussing war as if casualties were mere logs on the pyre is a bad thing to do, especially when it is my bombs and cruise missiles that, right now, are hurting and killing real people. And of course real people in those airplanes are themselves targets, although targets of a regime that is ill equipped and incapable of supplying itself with weapons of its own manufacture.

But my point was not callous. In this century, there has been a dominant theory of war. One of the thinkers of this theory, Ernst Junger, called it totale Mobilmachung -- total mobilization. He wrote in the thirties, and in some ways he, along with Schumpeter (to whom I devoted a post a couple of days ago) and other conservatives, tried to come to terms with two historical events: World War I and modern industry. In World War I, the usual feedbacks failed. That is, when both sides started experiencing outrageous casualties, they did not sit down and negotiate -- instead, they extended the theater of conflict, and they applied technology to it. In the end, all sides were, in Junger's term, totally mobilized.

Well, this idea has an intuitive appeal, and a lot of theoreticians of war took it as the model of what 20th century war was all about. But if we look at Junger's model and we apply it to the second World War, we'll find a discrepency between theory and practice.

What, after all, happened at the end of World War I? The powers that were completely mobilized in the West -- France and Russia -- suffered a near revolution and a real revolution. Germany also suffered an internal collapse. The information provided by the casualty count was undisguisable, and eventually a saturation point was reached among the civilian population.
What happened at the end of World War II? Something a little odd, really. There was no internal revolt in either Germany or Japan against the war to the very end. If the populations were really totally mobilized, you would think that the World War I scenario would happen again.

I think it didn't because the partisans of total mobilisation missed something. When you read Speer about Hitler, or general histories of the war, one of the striking things about his leadership of the war was that he tried to cushion total mobilisation. Again and again he refuses to ration a product or do something to disturb the domestic German population even though, theoretically, this is the most logical military thing to do.
Why?
Perhaps the reason is the Nazi leadership did not want to make the mistake the German high command made in World War I - they did not want to totally mobilize the masses. Instead, they wanted to preserve a buffer zone of everydayness, so that majority of the population could live at some plausible disconnect from the war. Of course, the population really couldn't, not with the bombardment of the cities, but Hitler's gesture, here, should not be dismissed. The history of the West since World War II shows, if anything, a tendency to segmented mobilization. This is, of course, partly because of the parameters of the Cold War -- the two sides were defined by their production of nation-destroying armaments . But it is also because the legitimacy of any nation that conducts war under conditions of total mobilisation, or risks appearing to the population as willing to pursue that course, is placed in hazard. The Vietnam war, with its draft and its increasingly visible effect on the US economy, is a case in point.
We have, at the beginning of the 21st century, achieved a convergence of technological distance and segmented mobilisation that has brought about this situtation: the US, and other modern economic powers -- France, Britain -- can conduct wars without even disturbing domestic everydayness. Although nineteenth century powers experimented with this kind of war -- it was, in fact, the heart of the colonial adventure -- the World War I example has weighed so heavily in the mindset of military thinkers that the regime of segmented mobilisation -- the ability of a nation to seem perfectly at peace, to preserve its Alltaglichkeit without flaw - while making war - has grown up pretty much theoretically unperceived.

This puts other less advanced powers in a quandary. A state like Libya, for example, that challenges the United States can be so disabled that it will not be able to sustain its challenge, and might be reduced in the way it sustains its everydayness. A state like Afghanistan is really in the same position.

But... state's like Afghanistan, that are run more like criminal enterprises than like states -- with an adhoc collection of armed bands -- have one paradoxical advantage. They can hook up with those organizations that can risk attacking the everydayness of the great powers. They can even melt into them. This happened in Somalia. The attack on the WTC, whatever else it was, felt, and was perceived to be, warlike. There are those that argue that it was criminal, but perhaps Mary Kaldor is correct to suppose that the line between criminality and war has to be re-drawn in the era of New Wars.

Anyway, I should have taken off the mask of desinvolture yesterday. Sorry.