| The figure of the enemy is constructed from a particular perspective on territory: the enemy penetrates the border. This transgression makes someone an enemy, even if he does relatively little damage and regardless of whether he damages public or private property.
Borders represent the integrity of the state. To eliminate the modern state means to erase its borders. Thus, wars begin with a border penetration; they end when the enemy is driven back across the border. The border has become a geographical representation of national existence.
A cross-border threat, regardless of how limited, motivates an extreme response. The United States has been in a frenzy of border protection since the penetration of 9/11. The enemy must be linked to a threat of border penetration. |
|
The border has the same necessity about it as a person’s own life. The border proclaims the existence of the community as a quantum of power. This community will exert itself—defend itself—within this space.
States attach immense significance even to unproductive or empty land. A state that will no longer assert power to defend its borders is unlikely to continue as a state.
The enemy can be killed even when he is literally doing nothing at all. If he is killed, this act is hardly ‘capital punishment’. When he does act, destroying persons and property, he ordinarily breaks no law. Even when he is taken prisoner, he is detained, not punished.
The criminal, on the other hand, is to be punished for what he has actually done and, for the most part, is not to be killed. Rehabilitation is an appropriate goal for the criminal, but not the enemy. The criminal is protected by a web of legal procedures that do not extend to the enemy, who may be killed or captured.
These procedures recognize the personhood of the criminal. The criminal can demand of the state that it justify its actions against him. That, after all, is the meaning of the most basic right to habeas corpus.
The enemy, on the other hand, is fundamentally not a person at law. His status determines all that we need to know of him. He is figuratively, if not literally, outside the jurisdiction.
The figure of the enemy is constructed from a particular perspective on territory: the enemy penetrates the border. This transgression makes someone an enemy, even if he little damage and regardless of whether he damages public or private property. Territory, unlike property, is not subject to a comparative valuation.
To eliminate the modern state means to erase its borders. Thus, wars begin with a border penetration; they end when the enemy is driven back across the border. The border becomes a geographical representation of national existence.
A cross-border threat, regardless of how limited, motivates an extreme response. The United States has been in a frenzy of border protection since the penetration of 9/11. The enemy must be linked to a threat of border penetration.
President Bush had to claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of reaching the United States. Short of that, how could Iraqis be the enemy? That Iraqis are behaving badly toward each other is not a ground for Americans to sacrifice themselves. They might be criminals, but they would not be enemies.
Of course, the enemy is not always met at the border. Nevertheless, every identification of the enemy must be built on the idea of penetration. We construct a chain of causality that ends at the border.
Timothy McVeigh was not an enemy, but a criminal. He crossed no border.
The terrorist seems equally well attuned to the symbolic geography of the modern nation-state. Thus, the fascination with the aeroplane as the vehicle of delivery, despite multiple alternatives. Many of those alternatives might be easier to use given the substantial investment in airline security, but none better symbolizes penetration. |