I. INTRODUCTION
“Security” is the keyword of contemporary governance: economic security, financial security, national security, food security, social security, border security, job security, human security, environmental security, energy security, homeland security, and so on – security pervades political discourse. A basic human want, a normative social good, security is also a mode of power. Provoked by the advent of Homeland Security in 2001, activists and scholars have in recent years offered an extensive critique of the violence done by and in the name of security. This critique, however, has centered on the political technologies of the present, and has – with few exceptions – left unexamined the relationship between latter-day security formations and the longer history of the modern security project. It is my contention that in order to understand the current conjuncture – defined by permanent war and generalized neoliberal crisis – we need to think about the long history of security thinking and governance, in the United States and in modernity at large. This essay undertakes a genealogy of security – its integral place in Western political thought, its constitutive role in the genesis of the modern state and capitalist mode of production, its political history in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. “There is never security without insecurity,” Michael Dillon has written. In the pages that follow, I present a historical and theoretical consideration of this enduring truth of modern political order.Footnote 1
The dialectic of security–insecurity is central to the philosophy and form of the modern state. For John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the insecurity – or crisis – of the state of nature necessitates the ascent of the sovereign and constitution of the social contract; the state arises to delineate what is secured from what is not, civilization from savagery, inside from outside, citizen from noncitizen, the bearer of rights from the rightless. Despite the reciprocal emergence of security thinking and the modern state, the absolute saturation of social and political discourse with security rhetoric is a twentieth-century phenomenon. In the United States, Social Security acquired its rhetorical power and bureaucratic form in the 1930s. The postwar years witnessed the emergence of National Security as an organizing principle of governance. And in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, Homeland Security has attained discursive prominence, giving name to a new state form. In this article, I argue for the efficacy of thinking the above-mentioned security paradigms together – shedding light upon the ways in which, for instance, Social and Homeland Security are bound up in one another, sharing both a genealogy and a political rationality. This is not to deemphasize the profound transformations embodied in the Homeland Security state, but rather to make the paradoxical claim that identifying continuity can help elucidate newness, and vice versa.
Essayed herein, to borrow from Fredric Jameson (for his “capitalism” I substitute “security”), “is a dialectical view of [security] … in place of the latter's breaks and discontinuities: for it is the continuity of the deeper structure that imposes the experiential differences generated as that structure convulsively enlarges with each new phase.”Footnote 2 Newness, in other words, is both a consequence of and lens onto continuity. The current-day expressions of security governance – neoliberal technologies of accumulation by dispossession, the prosecution of a boundless and interminable War on Terror – reveal with a particular clarity the essential tensions and contradictions of the security project over the longue durée. The ascendant assumption that September 11 constituted a historical rupture – a narrative propagated by pundits and politicians but echoed in the moment of critique – obscures the histories that anteceded and are reenacted within the current conjuncture.Footnote 3 Countering ahistorical accounts of post-9/11 political-economic order, this essay situates the contemporary manifestation of security discourse and practice within the longer history of capitalist, colonial modernity – in the faith that such a historicist approach will render newness and continuity alike in sharper light.
The formation of the modern security project can be approached analytically through three elemental relations: security and property, security and race, and security and emergency. Property is the principal object of security governance, race delimits and structures the security state, and emergency is one governmental tactic through which a multifarious politics of security is legitimated and enforced. Each of these relations works with and through the others, and all are fundamental to the constitution of a specifically colonial modernity (the modernity within which we still live). Below I consider property, race, and emergency in turn, explicating the centrality of each to the foundation, the twentieth-century evolution, and the current manifestation of the modern security project.
II. SECURITY AND PROPERTY
Though the lexiconic proliferation of security thinking is a relatively recent phenomenon, the security project was manifold in its inception. The state was founded to secure the sovereign, “the People” as a collectivity, and the identity, personhood, and liberty of the individual subjects that composed the body politic. All of these principles, meanwhile, were underlain by the security of property. Here Enlightenment philosophers of government and political economy were in agreement. Security was central not simply to the rise of the modern state, but also, as Mark Neocleous has observed, to the ascendance of the bourgeois property rights enshrined therein.Footnote 4 The meaning and object of the term “security” is always contested; the vocabulary of security animates movements of resistance as well as processes of dispossession and domination. In its ascendant form, though, the modern security project is constructed and deployed by and in the service of the state and capital – to justify discursively and provide structural mechanisms for the accumulation, uneven distribution, and maintenance of political and economic power.
“In the beginning,” Locke wrote, “all the world was America.” In the beginning, in other words, all the world – untamed and uncultivated – invited the virtuous processes of primitive accumulation. In the opening paragraphs of “Of Property,” the fifth chapter of his Second Treatise of Government, Locke introduces what is often termed his “labor theory of property.” “Every man,” he writes, “has property in his own person.” Thus man is rightfully entitled to whatever he extracts or derives from nature: “For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to.”Footnote 5 Crucially, in claiming land and laboring upon it, thereby increasing the bounty derived from that land, man is in fact increasing, or “improving,” the “common stock” of humanity: “he that encloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres than he could have had from a hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind.” The dispossession of common lands for the purpose of industrious cultivation is, Locke insisted, in effect a gift to the dispossessed, the Yorkshire peasant and indigenous American alike. “I ask,” Locke wrote, “whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage, or husbandry, a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life as ten acres of equally fertile land in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated.”Footnote 6 North American land, lying in waste due to the indolence of its native inhabitants, invites the intervention of the European settler, who through his labor will increase the product of the land and thus the stock of mankind in general.
In a telling passage in “Of Property,” Locke writes that “the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged … become my property without the assignation or consent of anybody.”Footnote 7 The phrase “the turfs my servant has cut” intimates that the property owner is entitled to the produce of the labor of anyone he hires or forces to work upon his land. The labor theory of property ceases to apply once private ownership has been established; hereafter the product of labor belongs not to the laborer but to the owner of the property upon which the laborer works. “Improvement,” then, might be achieved not just through the enterprising individual whose industry animates the dormant commons, but through the institutions of wage labor and slavery. It is the purpose of government to facilitate, and to secure, this process of appropriation and improvement.
Contrary to Locke, Hobbes argues that property is not intrinsic to the state of nature but is the invention of political authority, of the sovereign who can secure the possession of goods and land and oversee their improvement through industry. Property, in other words, only emerges as a concept when conjoined with security. Hobbes is close to Locke, though, when, in an oft-cited passage from Leviathan, he holds forth on the necessity of labor discipline. While the unable should receive the charity of the sovereign, he writes,
for such as have strong bodies … they are to be forced to work; and to avoyd the excuse of not finding employment, there ought to be such Lawes, as may encourage all manner of arts; as Navigation, Agriculture, Fishing, and all manner of Manifacture that requires labor.Footnote 8
The duty of the sovereign is to provide security for private property, and to compel through law the labor of those who hold no title to the means of production.
Securing the social
One lineage of Social Security can be traced to 1834, when the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed in England and Wales. Systems of localized poor relief had existed since at least the mid-sixteenth century in England, but not until the 1834 Act was the administration of poor law centralized and codified at the level of the state. The 1834 Act created a network of workhouses, which absorbed the unemployed into institutions of disciplined and disciplinary labor. The Act sought a solution to the problem of the general insecurity and “superfluous” populations created by early industrial capitalism. Dispossessed of the means of their own subsistence, the proletariat is forced to enter the market to sell their labor for a wage. But there is, of course, never a guarantee of employment and thus the state must intervene, in a biopolitical manner, to ensure the reproduction of the working classes. In one sense, the poor law provided a measure of security – miserable, horrid security, in the case of the workhouses: “houses of terror,” Marx called them in Capital – to a population defined by its insecure existence, its naked subjection to the basically inhuman laws of the market. In another sense, though, poor law protected the bourgeoisie from the threat of large-scale social unrest and helped ensure the maintenance of capitalist property relations.Footnote 9 This dual purpose – securing the individual (and the hetero-familial unit to which he belongs) and securing the larger capitalist order – characterized the Social Security provisions inaugurated a century later on the other side of the Atlantic.
The idea of Social Security is closely imbricated with the idea of social insurance. If in eighteenth-century England the poor laws provided a “charity” to the unemployed, Social Security, like an insurance program, is allocated only to those who contribute to its funding. The Poor Law Act of 1834 demanded labor from its beneficiaries, while Social Security limits its benefits – with few exceptions – to those who labor. The insurance component of Social Security, Jennifer Klein has argued, inspired the rapid proliferation of non-state, for-profit insurance providersFootnote 10 – a moment of entrepreneurial ingenuity in which a capitalist industry arose to protect people against the ravages of capitalism. The market is the solution to the market: a refrain that will echo loudly in the latter part of the century, and indeed one that continues to reverberate today, in the context of financial crisis and protracted recession. The securitization of the social went hand in hand with its capitalization. Security became not simply something provided by the government, but something purchased on the market. The biocapitalist industries of life and health insurance emerged in concert with the biopolitical functions of the Social Security state. One object of security for both state and business, in other words, became life itself –an evolution which enabled the broadening and deepening of security governance, the intensification of its effect upon the individual and social body.Footnote 11 The tripartite pact between state, business, and labor – consolidated to an even greater degree following World War II – blunted the class contradictions at the heart of the security–insecurity binary and contributed to the hegemonic reach of the security project. The ultimate effect was the continuation of capitalist social relations, the reproduction of a social order based on the security of private property and accumulation in perpetuity.
Security in the shadow of war
From its inception, but with a particularly intensity following World War II, the Social Security project dovetailed with the rhetoric and policy of National Security. During both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, arguments made for the expansion of Social Security deployed the vocabulary of National Security. Major public infrastructure projects such as the Interstate Highway System – inaugurated by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 – and St. Lawrence Seaway reconstruction – a project undertaken jointly with Canada, which enabled the development of massive hydroelectric power works, and which quickened significantly commercial shipping routes from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes – were likewise justified on National Security terms. Sputnik and the Soviet threat it embodied, meanwhile, occasioned sharp increases in math and science funding, initially allocated for in the National Defense Education Act of 1957 – another instance of a major federal investment in domestic, public infrastructure made in the name of National Security.Footnote 12 Generally speaking, the welfare state and the warfare state emerged from the war closely entwined, and would remain conjoined for the next two decades.
Expanding and deepening its social infrastructure at home, during the early stages of the Cold War the United States worked to construct a “Keynesian empire” abroad; this National Security paradigm was founded on a developmentalist logic that rhymed with domestic policy, specifically Social Security. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States asserted itself as a world power intent on creating and dictating a new international political and economic order – the initial expressions of which were the European Economic Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) and the financial framework conceived at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. The intellectual rationale for the Bretton Woods system was capitalist security – the belief that peace amongst nations depended upon a liberal system of international trade, one that would be regulated by select governments and supported by international financial institutions (created at Bretton Woods) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (what was known in 1945 as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or IBRD). Though a departure from the explicitly territorialized logic of the modern colonial system, the international economic order devised at Bretton Woods and instituted in the decades to come maintained the stark divide between the overdeveloped North and underdeveloped South. It maintained, moreover, a commitment to the ethos of “free enterprise.” The architects and authors of US policy during the Cold War imagined the freedom of enterprise as that freedom which conditions the possibility of all others. Here we find a more modern version of the Enlightenment axiom that there can be no liberty and security prior to the liberty and security of private property.
Neoliberal security
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the particular economic expression of US foreign policy underwent a dramatic change. Before the close of the 1960s, “embedded liberalism” – the economic order, based on a market sphere subject to extensive social constraints, that facilitated high levels of economic growth in the advanced capitalist world throughout the 1950s and 1960s – had begun to show signs of distress. In the early 1970s, a conjunction of factors – for example, energy crises, high unemployment, and inflation – resulted in fiscal crises across the advanced capitalist world, and the Bretton Woods system of international financial regulation broke down. Embedded liberalism no longer seemed capable of guaranteeing the conditions for capital accumulation. The alternative that established itself in the early 1970s, and that has remade the capitalist world in the years and decades since, was neoliberalism.
Broadly defined, neoliberalism signifies an economic order wherein markets are deregulated, trade is liberalized, industries and services are privatized, and market rationality is imposed upon all facets of social life. Whereas in classical liberalism the state is thought to confer legitimacy upon the market, in the neoliberal order this relationship is reversed; the market legitimates the state. And whereas in classical liberalism the social and the economic are imagined as separate spheres, each conforming to its own rationality, under neoliberal governance the distinction between the social and the economic, society and the market, is blurred or dissolved completely. American neoliberalism in particular, Foucault observed, “involves … the generalization of the economic form of the market … throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system.”Footnote 13
If starkly opposed in certain respects, New Deal liberalism and neoliberalism share a commitment to the modern security project. “Securitization,” as the term is used herein, signifies the transformation of an issue, concept, asset, or geography into a security concern. Though the New Deal names the largest expansion of public assistance programs in the nation's history, one of its consequences was the securitization of the social, the implication of social welfare within the process and logic of capitalist accumulation. Paradoxically, then, the New Deal moment – the private insurance industries that emerge therein, the appropriation by corporate entities of Social Security rhetoric – prefigured one defining aspect of the neoliberal order: the subjection of the social sphere to market rationality, market calculation. In the late twentieth century, new mechanisms of securitization arose, most notably within private financial institutions in New York and London, and in the context of a dramatic increase in the importance of financial speculation to the engine of capitalist accumulation. In the latter instance, the now more explicit invocation of “securitization” refers to the amalgamation and packaging of financial assets, shares of which are then sold as securities; the stated intention is to distribute risk amongst a wider pool of investors. We are dealing with the effects today, as the engineering and proliferation of ever-more opaque securities – particularly those backed with sub-prime mortgages – contributed to the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.
But the larger point is this: “securitization” is a euphemism for the occupation – or fabrication, in the most recent case – of previously noncapitalized space. It is a euphemism, that is, for the continuance of processes of primitive accumulation – the same processes of capital generation the modern security project was conceived to protect.
Securitizing the homeland
In the nascent stages of the War on Terror, the Bush administration set out to accelerate the privatization of government. Beginning with the onset of neoliberal policy prescriptions in the 1970s and with increasing intensity in the decades since, governmental bodies in the United States – at the federal, state, and municipal levels – have sought to outsource many of their traditional responsibilities. The partial or complete privatization of prisons, airports, hospitals, waste removal, public utilities, war, etc. has proceeded apace under the euphemistic cover of “public–private partnerships,” a term that names a new culture of governance wherein corporations exert an ever-greater influence over policy decisions. The Bush administration's commitment to extending these transformations was symbolized most readily by the advent in 2002 of the Department of Homeland Security, a major reorganization of the federal government – one enabled most immediately by the attacks of September 11 and the culture of antiterrorism to which it gave rise, but one that brought into relief already existing processes of public retrenchment.
“Homeland security state,” Naomi Klein observes, quickly became another term for “homeland security industry” – today a booming $200 billion (per annum) global economic sector.Footnote 14 Though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has occasioned the expansion of government bureaucracy, the tax dollars allocated to DHS are just as likely to end up in the coffers of private entities; between 11 September 2001 and 2006, Klein notes, DHS spent $130 billion on private contractors.Footnote 15 The outsourcing of government operations has been undertaken with diligence abroad as well, as private companies have received untold billions in public money to construct, secure, and carry out the war apparatus in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ever more privatized military, meanwhile, is fighting not only for “democracy,” but for neoliberal revolution. Upon the US takeover of Iraq in 2003, Klein details, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), L. Paul Bremer, declared the privatization of over two hundred state-owned companies, fired over 500,000 state employees, and lowered the corporate tax rate from 40 to 15 percent.Footnote 16
Managing the crisis?
The term “homeland security” signifies a moment defined by its myriad contradictions – between imperial expansion and imperial decline, between the willful performance of state failure (Hurricane Katrina) and spectacular performance of state power (the “shock and awe” conquest of Iraq), between the labor imperatives of business and anti-immigrant nativism, between the hypermodern weapons of info-war and atavistic methods of (neo)colonial expropriation, between the universal aspirations of capital and the territorial exigencies of the nation-state.Footnote 17 Perhaps one contradiction connects all the others: property and the state, if always allied, have never been identical. Potentially, the privatization not only of public space but of government itself will have the effect of rendering the capitalist security project unstable, less able to withstand – or capitalize on – the crises that naturally befall it. Marx observed in the nineteenth century that capital, left to its own devices, is sometimes its own worst enemy, prone to destroy the very mechanisms that exist for its self-protection. The historical role of the state in the modern security project is not only to protect property from its outside and its other, but also to protect property from itself.
Four years into the economic crisis inaugurated by the bursting of the US housing bubble in 2008, the most powerful national and supranational entities within the advanced capitalist world – for example, the United States, Germany, the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB), the IMF – have demonstrated little sign that they are capable of (i) regulating financial capital in a way that will obviate future cataclysms and (ii) buttressing public infrastructure in a way that will prevent or temper widespread and recurring social protest. At the highpoint of the postwar social-democratic moment, the capitalist state provided its citizens a measure of social security in exchange for mass participation in processes of expanded reproduction (production and consumption). Today, the state is ever less capable of upholding its side of the social contract, and an ever-shrinking percentage of the population is able to secure its own existence through market participation. In other words, the dialectical underside of the modern security project – the insecurity it has always produced, particularly for populations in the formerly colonized world – is in the late neoliberal moment on uniquely stark display in both the global North and the global South. The crisis today is not periodic, an anticipated trough in capital's undulating patterns of regeneration, but perpetual.
III. SECURITY AND RACE
“The racial coding of the world,” to borrow a phrase from Paul Gilroy, emerged concomitant with the European conquest and settler-colonization of the Americas. Race discourse configured the state form and helped make available the subjection and exploitation of people within and beyond the boundaries of the political community. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the era in which Hobbes and Locke wrote, Europeans were waging war at home and abroad, enslaving and dominating peoples of Africa and the Americas, and prosecuting a race-inflected assault on the working poor – “the ‘savages’ of the civilized world”Footnote 18 – domestically. Drawing the boundary between inside and outside at the same time it articulated the social body into opposed classes, race was central to the formation and securing of emergent property relations and methods of accumulation in both the Old World and the New.Footnote 19
The state arises to secure the civis, the space of law and reason, from the anarchy and infrahumanity of the state of nature. The distinction is a racial one. With the foundation of the state the crisis of the state of nature is not left behind but delimited and counterposed, remaining that against which the inside is defined, the pretext for and antithesis of the secured body politic. The security project requires the perpetual and simultaneous production and repression of difference: “Race appears in this scheme of things,” David Theo Goldberg writes, “as a mode of crisis management, as a mode … of managing manufactured threats, and curtailing while alienating the challenge of the unknown.”Footnote 20 Race is both that against which society must be secured and the means of its securing.
From the inception of the state form, liberalist promises of progress and assimilation coexisted, uneasily but necessarily, with essentialist racial narratives that confined the other to an ahistorical emptiness from which there can be no escape. This twofold racial imagination endures. Naturalist racisms ensure the reproduction of the imaginary of the state of nature, the outside that continues to occupy a central discursive role in Western political orders. Historicist racisms ensure the adaptability of racial thought, which must undergo perpetual transformation in response to evolutions in the mode of production and periodic crises of accumulation. The other who yesterday lacked the capacity for industry may tomorrow be required as a critical source of cheap wage labor.
IV. RACE, GENDER, AND SOCIAL SECURITY
One effect of Social Security is to clearly define who counts as a properly laboring member of the citizenry and who does not – who is a public concern and who has a marginal or subordinate place in the calculus of public good. Social Security, in other words, draws a line not only between the citizen and the noncitizen, but between different occupations, different forms or sectors of labor. From its inception in the United States, Social Security was highly racialized and highly gendered, reproducing the prevailing gender and racial norms of the time, which confined women and racial minorities to unpaid – as in the case of household work – or lower-paid labor. Agricultural and domestic workers, of whom the vast majority were women and minorities, were not included in the original Social Security Act; nearly two thirds of black workers and more than seventy percent of women workers were not covered by the 1935 legislation. And, of course, “illegal” immigrants and the nonworking population were left out altogether. (This is not to paint the greatest innovation of public services in US history as a reactionary development, but rather to highlight that the content of the original Act did little to challenge – and in important ways even reinforced – the gendered and racialized organization of labor in particular and society more broadly.)
In her study Pitied but Not Entitled, Linda Gordon writes that the Social Security Act of 1935 “excluded the most needy groups from all its programs, even the inferior ones. These exclusions were deliberate and mainly racially motivated.”Footnote 21 The southern Democrats who controlled Congress were determined to limit the bill's provisions to the white industrial working class, thereby exacerbating already existing structural inequalities. The exclusion of women from the legislation, moreover, reinforced gendered power relations within and outside the home. As Gwendolyn Mink concludes, “Reflecting masculinist assumptions, gender conventions, and maternalist achievement, the New Deal reproduced social policies contingent on maternal dependence, tying women's economic security to men's wages.”Footnote 22 Social Security legislation enacted processes of exclusion through incorporation; “by routing women and men toward economic security differently, the New Deal entrenched separate, gendered citizenships.”Footnote 23 It also entrenched separate, racial citizenships. In addition to the marginal place of African Americans in Social Security legislation, the explicitly racialized immigration policy of the 1930s – one based on a national quota system that would prevail until 1965 – ensured that white would remain the color of Social Security citizenship for some time to come.
The categorical exclusions contained within the original Social Security act did not go uncontested, as the claims of African Americans and women to political recognition and a fuller citizenship translated into significant, if limited and limiting, changes in the form and content of Social Security policy. But the point remains: Social Security is one way of separating the citizen sphere from its outside, and one way of dividing the inside into racial and gender hierarchies both symbolic and real. Like the security project more broadly, Social Security is simultaneously about social inclusion and social exclusion.
The Cold War and Racial Security
During the Cold War the security of identity existed alongside economic security and military security as an urgent National Security concern. Integral to the embryonic Cold War order was the discursive enunciation of US exceptionalism, which strictly delineated what is “American” from what is “un-American,” what is to be secured – freedom, capitalism, individualism – from what is a threat to “our” security – totalitarianism, communism, collectivism. Reworking enduring colonial binaries, the National Security narrative of the Cold War imagined the communist threat to global capitalist hegemony as irrational and degenerate – a retrograde recapitulation of barbaric tendencies.Footnote 24 The ownership of property in common, for example, was understood as a savage trait, in opposition to the free system of private property that undergirds US civilization and is the prerequisite for all human progress.Footnote 25 The racial content of these oppositions is apparent. The “primitive” peoples the United States must uplift through developmentalist programs or discipline through counterinsurgency warfare are cast in an explicitly racial nomenclature. The convergence of the “red scare” with the “yellow peril,” in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere, for example, represented the synthesis of various racial tropes, each with its own unique history; but it represented as well the reproduction of the foundational binary between (Western) civilization and its outside. Domestically, moreover, the McCarthyite effort to purge communist contagion from within the national political body occasioned an attack on all manner of radical or alternative social identities and formations. Just as the line separating inside from out needs to be perpetually retraced and reinforced, so too did the composition and social structure of the interior body politic require perpetual definition and control.
That said, the racial nomos of the United States – its national and international manifestations – was throughout the Cold War subject to and altered by critiques emanating from within and without. The civil rights movement at home, and a combination of Soviet and anticolonial voices abroad, highlighted the contradiction – inherent to the domestic and foreign expression of US powers – between the rhetoric of democracy, freedom, and equality and the endurance of racialized forms of social exclusion and political repression. The contours of this basic contradiction were already apparent during World War II, when the United States' claims of anti-imperialism and its corresponding affirmation of the right to “self determination” clashed with its transparently expansionary geopolitical ambitions, with the realities of Jim Crow, and with the wartime policy of Japanese internment. “By framing their war propaganda as a struggle for democracy and against the Third Reich's racist tyranny,” Thomas Borstelmann has observed, “the Western Allies opened themselves to intensive critiques of their own colonial and segregationist practices.”Footnote 26 In the early stages of the Cold War, this critique was taken up by the Soviet Union, who highlighted the inequality and discrimination endemic to US society. If failing to alter radically the dominant racial paradigms of the war, this line of criticism did have significant consequence, pressuring administrations from Truman to Johnson into a less tepid – if still profoundly qualified, motivated as much by diplomatic as by moral concerns – embrace of civil rights transformations.
The conjoined critique of segregation at home and militaristic meddling abroad had less impact on US conduct in the world – compelling not major foreign-policy changes but the addition of further euphemistic cover to the proxy wars and counterinsurgency conflicts sanctioned by the containment doctrine. Moreover, as Mary Dudziak, Carol Anderson, and others have argued, McCarthyite repression blunted the anticapitalist, internationalist potentialities of the civil rights movement.Footnote 27 In other words, Cold War concerns over image nudged the US government in a slightly more progressive direction on civil rights issues but deradicalized the civil rights movement itself – marginalizing its anticolonial voice and preventing the emergence of a more comprehensive struggle for social and economic change.
Broadly speaking, the securing of racial order in the moment of the Cold War involved the careful balancing of exclusionary and inclusionary narratives and policies – the line separating us from them was rigorously defined and policed while a measured politics of inclusion reshaped the United States' racial landscape. The dual nature of the modern security project's racial logic – the delineation of inside and outside and differentiation of the inside – was transformed but not transcended by the struggle for civil rights nationally and independence globally.
Race and neoliberalism
The neoliberal transformations begun in the early 1970s and intensified in the 1980s were accompanied by evolutions in the way racial difference was thought about and acted upon – not the invention of a completely new conceptualization of race, but the subtle adaptation of racial narrative and practice to the changing imperatives of both capital and state. The “flexible,” post-Fordist forms of accumulation heralded in neoliberal doctrine require more “flexible” racial imaginaries.
Theorists such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Fredric Jameson argue that in the late capitalist moment there is no longer an outside: the process of modernization is complete; nature has been completely assimilated into the social order. For Hardt and Negri the movement from “modern” to “imperial” sovereignty represents the movement beyond the “fixed and eternal boundaries” of modern colonial racism toward a racism defined by “the play of differences and the management of micro-conflictualities within [imperial order's] continually expanding domain.”Footnote 28 While right to note the more “fluid and amorphous” – yet still “stable and brutal” – racial ideology deployed in neoliberal governance, they go too far in pronouncing the disappearance of the outside altogether. “The central moment of modern racism … the global antithesis between inside and outside”Footnote 29 persist, even if the precise delineation of that foundational boundary is subject to periodic redrawing. A racism that rests upon a “strategy of differential inclusion” can coexist with a racism that rests upon binary exclusion. Indeed, the modern security project has always maintained a balance between these two forms of racial practice. The newness of the neoliberal moment is evinced by the great dexterity with which imperial order navigates between these two forms of racial practice, casting superfluous bodies or convenient enemies into the outside, while incorporating noncapitalized space and a multiplicity of others into its sphere of power and tribute. In the neoliberal moment, triumphalist narratives of an imminent “post-racialism” coincide with loud reassertions of absolute civilizational alterity. The premature universal and the retrograde particular stand side by side.
The racial state after September 11
Within the discursive frames of the War on Terror, the term “homeland” evokes a bounded territorial space with a definitive outside that must be resisted and policed. This boundary, moreover, is understood to define not just geography but the limits of a distinct ethno-political or ethno-cultural community. It suggests, in other words, the enduring dream of the perfect imbrication of race, space, and nation. And it implies as well that abiding imperial anxiety: the specter of difference encountered in the world returning home to taint the essential cultural homogeneity and political-economic integrity of the nation-state. In this way, the term “homeland” is ideally suited to the security project in its postcolonial yet still manifestly imperialist incarnation. It describes the peculiar predicament of a fading imperial power reverting to blood–soil nativism as its military marches around the world under the banner of Enlightenment universals.
The racial logic of Homeland Security governance was laid bare by Katrina floodwaters. Following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans's poorest residents, of whom the vast majority were African American, were left to fend for their own survival, or – as was the fate of nearly two thousand people – to die. Tens of thousands crowded into stadiums and convention centers, or along elevated stretches of highway, without adequate food, water, or medical attention. Affecting images of government failure in New Orleans played across the television news, but so too did images of “out-of-control” black residents “looting” abandoned supermarkets. When the federal relief effort did arrive its loyalties were ambivalent – divided between protecting the property of New Orleans's wealthier residents and aiding in the survival of its most marginal and most vulnerable. The security of the former seemed to take precedent, as the incessant media invocation of “looters” and marauding “armed gangs” served to criminalize the hurricane's victims and highlight the final sanctity of private property. Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco gave soldiers authorization to “shoot to kill” in the course of their order-restoring mission:
These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle-tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets … They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded … These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.Footnote 30
Subsequently, those displaced by the hurricane were labeled “refugees” by the media: first criminalized, and then symbolically stripped of their citizenship.
When Governor Blanco highlighted the Iraq war experience of the soldiers called upon to enforce order in post-Katrina New Orleans, she revealed the profound connections between racialized militarism in the homeland and in the world. This connection is further clarified in the governance of and public discourse surrounding immigration. Dispossessed of economic self-determination by free-trade agreements, the legacies of colonial expropriation, and related geographic inequities, migrants from the global South arrive in the North as living reminders of imperial brutalities present and past. Their presence in the metropole, though, does not provoke a serious reckoning with either neoliberal governance – the state failures and social death it engenders – or the living sediment of colonial histories. Instead, the presence of immigrants is either affirmatively cited as proof of democratic tolerance and multicultural vitality or condemned as an attack on domestic labor, drain on government service, and threat to normative national identity – as a cause, in other words, of both cultural and economic crisis. This ambivalence should not disguise the central import of each racial narrative – the universalist and the nativist – to the Homeland Security project in particular and the modern security project in general.
V. SECURITY AND EMERGENCY
As elaborated above, property and race are two keywords of the modern security project. The triad of security terms “prerogative/emergency/exception” – all of which here refer to the political movement, by an executive power, beyond the normative constraints of legislative or juridical democratic process – is another crucial entry in the security lexicon. Executive prerogative is unsurprisingly central to the preliberal or “absolutist” philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. But as Neocleous demonstrates, prerogative and exception are also of great import to the liberalism of John Locke.Footnote 31 There are moments of political exigency, Locke allows, when the legislature is incapable of acting with the required expediency; the executive power must in these instances arrest democratic deliberation and enact the power of decision. The “public good” (which is, as Neocleous observes, often merely a euphemism for the protection of private property), the “safety of the people,” and the security of society more generally periodically demand the exercise of prerogative power.Footnote 32 The prerogative power of decision is not in fact exceptional but a basic and permanent feature of the modern liberal state.
Before the procedural enactment of emergency powers, the particular threat that occasions the emergency must be identified or imagined. In the settler-colonial context, the emergency that required or sanctioned the exception was the (racialized) state of nature broadly conceived. Following 11 September 2001, the “terrorist threat” was quickly established as an emergency that demanded the invocation of emergency powers. In all cases, “security” is the reason of state that permits the invocation of emergency or enactment of prerogative within the normative body of the liberal state; when the “security” of the political community is under threat from the savage or the terrorist, exception is justified – indeed, is legally provided for. Perhaps it is more appropriate to think not of a power that moves beyond “the rule of law,” but one that is sanctioned by it, that is essential to it. The instances in which a state of emergency might be invoked in the name of security today, within the normal procedures of liberal governance, are various, ranging from economic crisis, to natural disaster, to foreign or domestic war. But in each case a fundamental contradiction is at work: the suspension of the law, by the law, in the name of the law.
As with race, the concept and practice of “emergency” was developed in concert with the exercise of colonial power. The colony, Achille Mbembe has argued, is the zone of exception par excellence:
Colonies are zones in which war and disorder, internal and external figures of the political, stand side by side or alternate with each other. As such, the colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended – the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization.”Footnote 33
“That colonies might be ruled over in absolute lawlessness,” Mbembe writes, “stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native … Savage life,” Mbembe continues, “is just another form of animal life.”Footnote 34 Unrecognizably human, capable of neither political commonwealth nor industrious labor, the savage exists outside the moral and rational calculus of the modern state. The state of nature, the pure space of exception, is the laboratory within which colonial power synthesizes methods of dehumanization with processes of extrajuridical violence. The extra legal violence honed there is subsequently sublimated in the legal apparatus of the modern liberal state, and in the security project that is its raison d’être.Footnote 35
Economic emergency, capitalist security
Until the late nineteenth century, the invocation of emergency powers – usually expressed in the enactment of martial law – was limited to moments of imminent physical threat or danger, due to invasion from without or rebellion or civil war within.Footnote 36 In the decades surrounding the turn of the century, however, martial law was in multiple instances imposed to suppress labor unrest.Footnote 37 Further, during World War I but most profoundly in its aftermath, exceptional executive power was enacted in the economic realm, as a response not to violent disorder but to capitalist crisis. In continuance of this trend, the purview of emergency powers would continue to expand throughout the twentieth century.
The economic recovery legislation that gave initial form to the New Deal was enacted by President Roosevelt under a legally declared state of emergency and was conditioned by the recurring invocation of “emergency” in public discourse – a rhetorical proliferation that coincided with the heightened discursive power of “security.” The exigent circumstances of the Great Depression, Roosevelt held, required a countervailing exercise of emergency executive power. Roosevelt was responding not simply to mass unemployment and a dramatic fall in national income, but also to a wave of labor protest and intensifying culture of class struggle more broadly. Immediate and decisive intervention was an imperative if people were to be put back to work and economic growth were to resume, but intervention was also required to mollify class fracture and obviate the possibility of socialist revolution. The emergency, that is, referred not only to the welfare – or security – of the citizenry but also to the security of capitalist social relations.Footnote 38
Cold War emergency
The emergency declared by Roosevelt in 1933 marked the beginning of an unbroken line of emergency governance that remains continuous today.Footnote 39 The normalization of emergency has had profound political and social effects, occasioning the dramatic expansion of executive powers and contributing to the militarization of society.Footnote 40 President Truman's declaration of emergency in 1950, in response to China's invasion of Korea, represents one particularly important moment in this twentieth-century genealogy; Truman's proclamation consolidated the emergent but already hegemonic “National Security” state – a new political order founded on the specter of total and permanent war, which blurred the spatial and temporal distinctions between war and peace and incorporated all of society into the military sphere.Footnote 41
Truman's declaration of emergency in 1950 concretized and escalated an extant policy program, one the President had famously articulated to a joint session of Congress in his 1947 “Truman Doctrine” speech. In that address, Truman outlined a new, more anticipatory and interventionist foreign policy based on “containment” rather than détente. The emergency declared by Truman in 1950 – in the name of the nation's economic and military security, and in the defense of capitalist freedom against “communist imperialism” – was premised not just on the actuality of military conflict but on the “looming peril” of an existential threat to the nation. The infamous internal policy document NSC-68, drafted by the National Security Council and approved by President Truman just two days before his declaration of emergency in 1950, outlined the culture and rationale of Cold War emergency governance. The intellectual and spiritual antecedent of the Bush Doctrine, NSC-68 – which warned of “the ever-present possibility of annihilation,” and argued that at stake was the survival “not only of this republic but of civilization itself” – argued for constant and anticipatory military and security mobilization in the face of the communist threat.Footnote 42 It argued, moreover, that the struggle against communism would necessarily be waged internally to the United States as well as in the world. As Neocleous notes, NSC-68 defined the ways in which National Security is more than a mode of US global power, but a technique for policing individual citizens and the structuring the national body politic. In the Cold War emergency order, military buildup and McCarthyite repression went hand in hand, just as the War on Terror and the Patriot Act exist in tandem today.
Neoliberal emergency
In the neoliberal moment, the expanding scope of emergency powers – an expansion that has coincided with security's ever-greater purchase on human social life – is on full display. In the case of the New Deal, emergency was enacted to mitigate class contradiction and ensure the reproduction of capitalist social relations. In neoliberalism, emergency powers have a different intent and effect: not the mollification of class contradiction but its intensification; not the preemptive management of economic insecurity and crisis, but the deliberate cultivation of a general culture of insecurity and crisis. If the security of capital has always been prior to and above the security of the person or the public – the latter only privileged when it acts as a conduit to the former – this enduring hierarchy is in neoliberalism utterly transparent. The neoliberal state of emergency demands the constant and militarized securing of capital, and the constant and militarized policing of the insecure spaces inhabited by the multitudes that fall through the chasms of the “ownership society.” Capital, in neoliberal order, is always embattled, always in danger – because only the feeblest of attempts is made to assimilate its other into the realm of achieved security. In place of the social contract are the gated community and the private security force on the one side and the proliferating slum on the other.
The New Deal and the “embedded liberalism” it helped entrench is one example of the second phase of what Karl Polanyi called capitalism's “double movement”: first, the movement toward the liberation of markets and universalization of the commodity form; and second, the countermovement – encouraged by labor primarily but at moments in the twentieth century by capital as well – toward the lessening of capitalism's most alienating and destructive effects. Without the second movement, Polanyi contends, capital would completely destroy the “fictitious commodities” that are its foundation – land and human labor most of all – and thus destroy itself. The actual complete disembedding of the market – the dream of the market fundamentalists – is, Polanyi contends, an impossibility, as it would mean turning nature and people into pure commodities, and thus ultimately destroying nature and people.Footnote 43
In embedded liberalism, the state recognizes this danger and responds by instituting various protective measures to guard against the violence and reach of the market. Neoliberalism, though, disregards the imperative of the second movement. According to neoliberal doctrine the brutalities of the market are not to be counteracted; indeed, neoliberal policy proceeds through the annihilation/privatization of the public institutions and services historically created in the countermovement. In neoliberal order, emergency powers regulate not the stability of society at large – “there is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher intoned – but the security of private property, and the security of the ongoing processes of commoditization and privatization that make up the first movement described by Polanyi. Whether the current economic crisis will provoke a new and sustained countermovement remains unclear. Thus far, the US executive has used its powers of emergency intervention – outsourced, in large part, to the Federal Reserve – to bail out precarious financial institutions and to stimulate dormant credit markets; but tellingly, it has not as of yet – with the tentative exception of last year's healthcare reform legislation – “exploited the crisis” to buttress beleaguered social safety nets or establish new ones. And at the state level, the invocation and enactment of “emergency” has enabled the imposition of antiunion legislation and other austerity measures. In Michigan, to cite just one example, Governor Rick Snyder oversaw in the spring of 2011 the passage of a law that gives him the power to remove elected officials, abrogate union contracts, and eliminate services in any municipality or school district declared by the state to be in a condition of “financial emergency.”Footnote 44
New and old states of exception
The War on Terror was imagined, by its neoconservative authors, as a “forever war.” Indeed, the interminable temporality of the conflict is implicit in the very idea of a struggle against terror, which is not a material entity that can be eradicated but an animating idea, a mode of representing a particular – if fluid in definition – form of violence or difference. The declaration of a War on Terror, in other words, explicitly posits the emergency as permanent. But as I discussed above, the emergency – and the war that it compels – has been a structural component of modern political order since its inception. And as Julian Reid and Michael Dillon put it, “when emergency becomes the generative principle of formation of community and rule,” the political sphere is determined by the urgency, “the compelling political economy,” of war.Footnote 45 This inherency is most visibly expressed in the space of the colony and by colonial processes.Footnote 46 The colonial rationality of the War on Terror thus betrays – even as it strives to obscure – the other, deeper, permanent war with which it is continuous.
The principal policy documents and laws of the War on Terror – the USA Patriot Act (2001), the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), the National Strategy for Homeland Security (2002) – introduced a series of terms and categories into the political lexicon, many of which are cited by critics as evidence of the “state of exception” within which we now live: “enemy combatant,” “battlefield detainee,” “extraordinary rendition.”Footnote 47 These categories name the novel forms of liminal, rightless subjectivity produced by the extrajuridical mechanisms of the US-led War on Terror and experienced in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and untold secret prisons located throughout the world. The word “extraordinary” nicely captures the simultaneous newness and mundanity of the War on Terror's emergency formations – extraordinary as exceptional, and extraordinary as extra-ordinary (really ordinary). In the latter meaning, the vocabulary of “enemy combatant” and “extraordinary rendition” – the violence it names – represents an exceptionally acute manifestation of long-established norms, Manichean frames – civilization and barbarism, human and infrahuman – basic to colonial modernity.
It bears emphasizing here that my intention in this section is not to suggest any perfect congruence between this and that emergency formation; an emergency declared in response to a national disaster of course differs profoundly, in its political intention and effect, to an emergency declared in wartime or in the face of economic crisis. Rather, my purpose is to locate the contemporary proliferation of emergency – as a narrative and as a governmental form – within the longer history of emergency as a technique of state power. This argument about the politics of emergency mirrors the overall argument of this article, which sheds light upon the ways in which ostensibly discrete instances of security thinking and governance – Social Security and Homeland Security, for example – in fact share a political genealogy and rationality.
VI. CONCLUSION
Summoning Walter Benjamin, and invoking as well the work of Giorgio Agamben, a common critical refrain insists that in the moment of the War on Terror the state of exception has become the rule.Footnote 48 The ongoing state of emergency declared by the US executive in the immediate aftermath of September 11 stands as compelling evidence in support of this thesis. As I have argued in this article, though, the contemporary iteration of emergency governance is not in fact exceptional but proves or evinces the rule. “The state of exception,” Agamben himself has written, “is included in the nomos as a moment that is in every sense fundamental.”Footnote 49 The exemplary sites or subjects of the post-9/11 state of exception, such as Guantánamo Bay or “battlefield detainee,” direct our critical attention to the longer history of modernity's exceptional violence – a violence practiced by the imperial state and predatory capital upon its outside and its internally excluded others. The financial crisis inaugurated in 2008 likewise acts as a revealing lens onto deeper histories of dispossession and domination. In the ongoing moment of neoliberal crisis, the fundamental contradictions of capitalist modernity are brought into especially stark relief. The pervasive insecurity produced by neoliberal crisis illuminates those spaces – the colony and the excluded zones of the metropolis – wherein insecurity has long been a basic and not exceptional aspect of social life.Footnote 50 The contemporary manifestations of security discourse and practice, in other words, allow us to see the essential logics of the modern security project with a particular clarity.
The security project arose concurrently with and in support of the settler-conquest of the New World, the establishment of the modern state form, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. Centuries later, new and old technologies of primitive accumulation continue to propel capitalism into new worlds both fictitious and real; new and old racisms continue to shape human social life; and new and old narratives of crisis and emergency – of nature, of war, of economy, of culture – continue to inspire the innovation and intensification of state and market power. Intrinsic to each of these processes, security – as a political ideal and governmental technique – also acts as one binding thread between them. All this is to say that the critique of security, and not merely its pursuit, is today an urgent – and necessarily historicist – task.
