A body politic: the nature of ‘we’

How does a collective entity come to register harm as imminent? Do the participants experience a mind-meld and group emotion in the face of some (real/imagined?) danger? In focusing on the perspective of ‘a people’, we raise complex questions about the nature of the feeling/judging eye. While the experience is felt by individuals, those persons conceive, feel, and interpret the harm applying not directly to themselves as separate individuals but to themselves as members of a collective self and body, either a national body or an emergent group to which they belong or with which they identify. ‘We’ process the substance of a threat. I want to consider two approaches, which each offer necessary parts of an answer to the question of the mental state of individuals as members of a ‘we’. Social identity theory (SIT) and plural subject theory contribute different tools for understanding how a collective point of view motivates members of the group.

Work in social psychology, specifically SIT, established a paradigm for social scientists to explore processes like prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, ethnocentrism, social mobility, and group conflict. More recently, political scientists as well have used SIT to provide the micro-foundations of political group identification (see, for instance, Jonathan Mercer 1995; Theiler Reference Theiler2003; Moses Reference Shayo2009). Henri Tajfel (Reference Tajfel1970) famously showed in a series of experiments with English school boys that discriminatory behavior occurs to support a ‘minimal group’, the basis of which may be utterly arbitrary and random, such as estimations of the number of dots on a series of slides; individuals were assigned to the overestimation or underestimation group. Affinity with this meaningless division generated group favoritism when subjects were asked to allocate resources. SIT (and Tajfel's later work) moved on from what Tajfel labeled a generic norm of outgroup discrimination to explore other socio-psychological dynamics of social functioning. The most salient feature of SIT remains the imputation of a psychological disposition within individual cognition and emotion to internalize the perspective of groups(s) with which persons come to associate and then identify, and to behave in a group-oriented direction. Nevertheless, as Tajfel has emphasized, social psychology cannot explain political or group conflict.Footnote 10 The observation that individuals discriminate against other collectivities does not show us how a shared point of view of harm arises.

Jonathan Mercer (Reference Mercer1995), in his influential article ‘Anarchy and Identity’, develops an answer to the question of the causal link between SIT and threat at the level of political bodies. Persons as members of a group seek to invest their group identity with self-esteem, which makes other groups competitors in a continual struggle for superior validation (cf. Mercer 1995, 242). The logic is: groups compare, comparison leads to desire for status superiority, this generates competition, hence conflict. For him the theoretical result ratifies a version of realism in that state identity is inherently zero sum. He underscores a direct link between group identity and state behavior: states need positive social identity in the same way that individual people do – ‘a group – however constituted – will be egoistic’ (p. 249). We have to ask, why, at a psychological level, would a need for self-esteem necessarily require demotion or domination of the other? Hegel's master–slave dialectic presented a logic of identity construction and self-esteem as developing toward the ascription of positive value to the Other who grants one recognition; we do so in order to validate the validation one might say. Importantly, we should reject the analogizing of a state to an identity group. All groups and political associations are not alike when it comes to how persons attach themselves, feel and reason as members. Groups have different structures and operate for diverse purposes in myriad contexts. He ignores the essential fact that political institutions and situations transform human drives and motivations, which is precisely why they are established – not simply to pass along tendencies but to reshape and channel them.Footnote 11

SIT and its applications offer a method for linking the individual mind and its energies to social forms and function by recognizing the emotional and agency-giving nature of the individual's attachment to group categories as he/she strives to make sense of the world. But, an individual's internalization of a group identity – the creation of a particular ‘we’ inside one's mind – does not explain when an encounter between individuals so grouped will come to be perceived as dangerous.Footnote 12 The inclination to form groups is as much a part of the solution to human conflict as it is a source of that conflict. Groupism may be an evolutionary trait contributing to the survival of complex social interaction as much (perhaps more) than it is conflict-inducing. There is no inevitability to the genesis of threat purely from the psychological need to categorize groups. The basic problem comes from portraying the objective of the ‘we’ point of view as primarily a matter of self-definition (identity) and comparative status.

Another way to understand the perspective of the social group – the requirements and needs driving people as members – is available through conceptual work on collective agency and the plural self. Margaret Gilbert (Reference Gilbert2006) elaborates a set of concepts to make sense of our everyday language, which takes collective entities as real sources of motivation and action orientation. Her recent work seeks to ground a theory of political obligation through plural subject theory. What I want to take from her work is the description of the collective entity that undergirds the theory of obligation. The basic logic runs as follows: our natural human behavior leads us to engage in ‘acting together’ to achieve goals that cannot be reached individually. Two or more persons collectively espouse a goal and act together as a body in light of it. They share knowledge that they are so engaged in a unified purposive way, and thus constitute a social group, or plural subject. They are jointly committed to uphold their common goals as members of the collective body they have created.Footnote 13

The virtue of this line of research comes from the emphasis it places on common action and shared goals as the basis of the ‘we’. This commits persons to something beyond a myopic concern with identity, and renders them interdependently oriented toward objective features of the world. A ‘we’ entity perceives the world as more than a cognitive environment for discrimination. Specifically, her description of political society emphasizes the orientation of group perception toward generalizable features of the society. ‘The plural subject account of social rules constitutes…a version of the “imperative theory of norms” in which these are regarded as “imperatives issued by a society to itself”. The account also accords with the idea that social rules have the authority of society behind them’ (p. 200). Her incisive description provides a way to think about the value for persons of the nature and necessity of group membership. One's collective status enables the world to be organized in productive forms. ‘We’ care about how the world works. This approach underscores what I take to be essential in threat perception for a group: normative order. A political body is comprised of a plurality of persons and individuals who come together to achieve order, to which they ascribe legitimacy. The body so constituted cares about a collective state of the world, part of which is the maintenance of a distinct identity, but which cannot be reduced to that identity. Perception of threat will be filtered through the body politic's need to achieve a state of the world, part and parcel of which must be the group's capacity for agency in that world.

SIT and plural subject theory helped conceptualize the collective point of view orienting members of a group. One stressed the image of the larger self (identity) internalized within each individual, while the other stressed the collective goal(s) and beliefs about the state of the world, which orient persons to meaningfully participate in, indeed constitute, a collective entity. I have not tried to make these approaches agree on a core conception of ‘we’ thinking; they tackle the problem from different angles, and enable us to locate where harm to a collectively constituted body will be felt. The question then is: how will acts, events and other groups in the environment come to be perceived by persons as endangering their capacity to be that jointly committed and active body and to live in a world hospitable to their conception of right order?

Functional and normative order

Humans require order for basic cognitive processing, for psychic security, and for group cohesion. Indeed, a fundamental good provided by membership in a collective body is order. Order can be defined first of all as a simple functional arrangement of objects in a specified and reproducible set of relationships to one another.Footnote 15 A precedes B that precedes C; or A occupies a space to B's right, and C a space below B. We grasp what A, B, and C are in part through their location vis-à-vis one another and the repetition of the patterns through time, which provides comprehension and predictability. Furthermore, order establishes the parameters for common perception and through cognizance of it, the basis of communication.

A foundational need for order is a basic human imperative, yet the prevalence of ordering is often taken for granted. Not by Hobbes, however, who writing in the middle of the English Civil War, drove home the unlivability of an orderless world, in which human existence degenerated into survival in a state of war, with no possibility for language, industry, arts, or other features of civilization. Those studying the origins of working institutions in failed regimes are acutely aware of the difficulty of bringing together the elements that solidify a reproducible functioning order. Such an order must be replicated through persons aligned into groups and roles, and marked on the basis of territory, power, status, and norms of treatment. The reproducibility of a system of order over time provides stability and predictability. We care about order at the most fundamental level because it provides the conditions without which we could not have access to safety, stability, resources, and recognition. Functional classification is a good in and of itself, providing the necessary conditions for tolerable existence.

In human communities, however, functional order must be carried out through persons living in cultures, institutions, and values constitutive of particular meaning for them. Human mindedness requires that order involve the assent of agents. As Hobbes also noted, no stable arrangement of relationships could be sustained that required a ruler to hold the population at gunpoint in perpetuity. For him, achieving basic functional social order depended on convincing the people to agree to obey a political sovereign; that is, there had to be normative agreement to the sovereign's legitimacy to maintain the peace necessary for worthwhile existence, and the resulting benefits of civilization justified the absolute sovereignty upon which it depended. Hobbes’ basic insight underscores the importance of normative order for functional order itself.Footnote 16

So far, I have made the following observations: human life at its most elemental requires order in collectivities, and order in collectivities requires normative justification. Important regularized patterns of behavior rest on beliefs about the acceptability and rightness of those patterns. For instance, the highly restrained and scripted roles of woman in traditional societies rests upon a set of beliefs about women's proper place in the natural and human order and the protection of virtue. And for some political bodies, the role of women serves as a central tenet of cultural and social order. To call for civil and political rights for women would be to indict and dislocate a framework of normative ordering, and would be especially threatening if women themselves were to lead the charge. Their public support for new normative beliefs would indicate a disruption of the prevailing (functional) normative order. To understand the concept of normative threat, we need to be clearer about the relationship between normative order and normative beliefs.

A distinction between two types of ordering beliefs will be helpful. Beliefs may be of the form of prosaic norms of behavior. For instance, ‘I am a longshoreman who works for wages set by the union’ or ‘My faith requires that I attend a religious service weekly; or that I give 10% of my salary to the church’. Prosaic norms are beliefs contributing to a functioning order but they are not normative beliefs about defining features of the body politic. Therefore, I use the term normative belief to refer to norms about right, justice, and the nature of the good. These types of beliefs glue together a collective body at a more explicitly legitimating and politically mobilizable level; one self-consciously and emotionally commits oneself to their constraints. Popular language also refers to them as ‘values’, ‘a way of life’, or a ‘world view’ – components of these will qualify as normative beliefs if they are sufficiently important to anchor the political body's conception of what it is committed to. Examples of beliefs about normative order are the following:

• • religious community and doctrines of religious truth (Christian, Muslim, Hindu, etc.)

• • political freedoms and self-determination

• • free market and property rights

• • superiority of the white race (or Japanese race; western civilization)

• • ethnic independence (autonomy/separatism)

• • Shariah law

• • individual liberties – Bill of Rights

• • human rights

• • Marxism–Leninism

• • conceptions of family and sexuality.

Social scientists, philosophers, and historians study the genesis of particular normative beliefs; the sources of these conceptions cannot be the subject of this paper. My argument rather takes such conceptions as primary elements for collective self-definition and in terms of which people will feel danger and can be mobilized to fight. Political scientists like Hurwitz and Peffley (Reference Hurwitz and Peffley1987) also emphasize the importance of abstract normative beliefs for the body politic when they argue that ‘core values anchor the general orientations people develop to guide their foreign-policy thinking’.Footnote 17 My contention is not that these beliefs constitute a precisely articulated set of propositions agreed to by members of a body politic. Nor can I offer conclusive observations about exactly how these beliefs are ‘held’ at the collective level; in any one society or group, persons will not all share the same beliefs, though some must gain a group's collective assent. Rather, normative beliefs stand as part of the background political culture, shaping basic perceptions, motivations, sentiments, and public discussion. Members and leaders appeal to them explicitly when controversies of basic order are raised in a public forum. Most importantly, they can play an intensifying and combustible role in confrontations with other groups; because of their crucial role in sustaining order and identity, they act as lightening rods for argumentation and conceptions of threat. Simmel observes their power in this remark: ‘The violence of the fight … has become more pointed, concentrated, and at the same time more comprehensive, owing to the consciousness of the individual involved that he fights not only for himself, and often not for himself at all, but for a great super-personal aim’ (Simmel Reference Simmel1955, 40).

My description of normative order then emphasizes its dual nature: a functional level and the more abstract ideational level – the latter indeed distinctly characterizes normative orders as a subject of threat. Beliefs about specific right or just ways to order life deepen commitments to and engrain the ordering of a particular group of people. We might compare my notion with that of ‘ontological security’ developed by Jennifer Mitzen (Reference Mitzen2006).Footnote 18 Mitzen and I share a concern with non-physical sources of threat but focus on different imperatives of a body politic. She convincingly develops the argument that states need more than physical security and also strive for security of identity: ‘Ontological security is security not of the body but of the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice’ (p. 344); ‘the need for ontological security is extrapolated from the individual level. Ontological security refers to the need to experience oneself as a whole, continuous person in time – as being rather than constantly changing – in order to realize a sense of agency” (p. 342). She argues that we can conceive of states as persons to the extent that like individuals they seek both physical and ontological security – a distinct and stable identity vis-à-vis other states in the international system. People fear chaos, and state identity provides one means of staving off the abyss of no order. The novel application to which she puts her theory comes in explaining the entrenchment of conflicts: ‘states take on the identity that is embodied in the competitive routines and therefore become attached to the competition as an end in itself’ (p. 360). Where Mitzen accepts for purposes of theorizing identity, a basic equivalence between individual and collective agency, I emphasize a distinct logic to collective perception and the problem of creating a collective entity. I also stress a need for more than ‘identity’ insofar as political bodies care about objective rules and states of order in the larger world. Furthermore, political bodies care about and fight for particular orders, not simply in fear of no order.

The reason particularity (or specificity) is important is because collective feelings and articulation of harm must be accessible and observable in a shared forum. A specific set of beliefs enables divergently located people to coalesce and become a sustainable unity. Recall the Gilbert concept of a plural subject. A virtue of this idea, one that she did not dwell on in her book, is that the project of coming together into a unitary point of view takes place because that unified point of view cannot be assumed to be the salient feature of a body politic. In a political body, citizens partake of an overall project of unity and accept a common fate, doing so from various paths to the common orientation. If the divergences within the boundaries of the political order are too large or the attractions of an alternative order so great, the conception of a common life will come apart. Because a political body consists not in a simple unitary point of view but exists always as a continuous work in progress involving a complex web of different groups, members’ interdependence relies on shared, but not identical beliefs about the good provided by their institutions and basic norms of life.Footnote 19 The particularity of the normative beliefs helps overcome too great a plurality (and therefore entropy). We can see how this gets into highly complicated questions about ideological legitimation. Grossly unequal orderings have been stable over long periods of time, and we would not want to conclude that this longevity makes such orderings inherently legitimate. But does it indicate an element of normativity relative to that system? Perhaps. In the Indian caste system, the fact of hierarchical ordering which relegated vast numbers of people to the dregs of society nevertheless contained within it an ideological rationality for interdependent roles. The existence of normative justification does not mean we as observers normatively accept the terms, but it does point to the need to justify.Footnote 20 Political bodies, as internally diverse and shadowed by the complicating factor of inequality within order, will need a set of specific normative beliefs to bring together the various parts of the population.Footnote 21 Normative beliefs accomplish a great deal of work. Margaret Gilbert quotes H.L.A. Hart on his description of laws in human society: ‘Whether laws are morally good or evil, just or unjust, these are focal points demanding attention as of supreme importance to human beings constituted as they are’ (2007, 290; emphasis added). We might likewise say that normative beliefs are focal points demanding attention that people as members of political entities bring to assessing the world in which they must act together.

The political body in space and time

People live in multiple orders, ranging from the intimate family to cultural, regional, and national communities to global economic regimes. Orders stretch back through the history of a people or nation and shape perspectives on future aims. When we attempt to explain perception of normative threat among a population, we see two more dimensions of normative order that may be at stake – internal and external orders, and retrospective and prospective orders. These categories help conceptualize a political body as located in space and time and therefore subject to threats to its existence. As I indicated previously, a body politic is not and cannot be only (myopically) concerned with itself but attends to the larger external order of which it is a part. Norms govern relationships inside boundaries, actions and orders obtained from an environment beyond one's boundaries (tolerating a range of diversity), and the relationships between the internal/external domains.

The boundary between internal order and external environment provides the basis of a group's conception of its physical protection. In WWII, the penetration of the integrity of the United States through the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor sent shock waves through the country, as did the destruction of the World Trade Center in 9/11. As noted before, the typical discourse about threat uses a metaphor of a unitary physical body interacting in a larger external, potentially lethal context: a nation, state, people, or group fears the possible predatory behavior of an outer group. Thus, the distinction between internal and external orders overlaps with the conventional realist analyses of threat. But the internal/external distinction provides insight into threat interpretation in another way, indeed quite contrary to the implications of the traditional realist line. It is not just physical violation that is feared or that elicits anger but normative violation. Transgression elicits a sensation of harm not because there is no order (chaos) beyond one's borders, but because of an alternative order, and one that may be quite powerful, as I emphasized earlier. The notion of damage arises from the potential of a threatening regime to restructure one's world along divergent lines. In Frank Capra's film depicting the Japanese as America's enemy in WWII – ‘Know Your Enemy – Japan’ – commissioned by the US War Department to justify the Pacific War to American soldiers and the public, the Japanese are portrayed not simply as embodying values contrary to America's but as a powerful alternative civilization whose aim was to impose that regime on the entire world. Indeed, the specter of ‘world domination’ used by many political groups to describe the aims of their nemesis shows that the nature of threat arises in the power of another order to subvert one's own order, not a lack of order per se. I discuss the process of subversion in the next section.

The internal/external order distinction also helps us recognize an ‘order of orders’. That is, threat is not just outside-in, from alien others, or destructive forces; in addition, the borders between inside/outside mark others who exist in a normatively relevant relationship with one's self. All relationships across boundaries sustain internal/external markers but those markers do more than establish distance, competition, and potential violence. They also shape expectations about how the other ought to behave in an international environment and toward oneself. Typically, theorists picture the condition of self-sufficient units in a global context as sovereign and disconnected entities, enjoying independence but also subject to the security dilemmas of ‘anarchy’. While a normatively atomized subsistence may have prevailed among independent communities in some primordial pre-history, this has not been the case among political entities for millennia. Ordering guides relationships between and among relatively separate communities.Footnote 22 Internal/external orders constitute an order of functional and normative bodies relating to one another across and through the divisions, even if the terms of relationship are quite thin and minimal.Footnote 23 For example, the system of state sovereignty ratified in the Treaty of Westphalia was far from being a regime of disconnection and anarchy; it essentially set up a system guided by an idea of respect for the autonomous agency of other states like one's self, an idea that presumes a level of functioning and normative interdependence.Footnote 24 The idea of sovereignty as a normative aim subsequently fueled nationalist, anti-colonial movements in the 20th century as well. An even more surprising example of the implicit normativity of relationships of this type can be seen in the notion of a ‘right of conquest’. As Sharon Korman explores in her fine book on the history of the principle of the ‘right of conquest’: ‘[I]n the Middle Ages … war was seen as a kind of judicial procedure or “trial by conquest”. On this view war was a contest between two opponents, each of which thought itself to have the just cause, but with no court to decide the question between them; and in going to battle they were appealing to the decision of God, who was thought to have ordained that the just side would win’ (1996, 11). War itself appears as a decision procedure. While this may represent the thinnest possible bases of normativity, it is nevertheless a consciously shared will to settle on ‘objective’ means to rationalize relationships between autonomous political bodies. Expectations are built up between those located vis-à-vis internal/external categories and therefore a form of normative threat becomes a possibility, provoking the deeply normative emotion of anger, as much as fear.

The final fundamentally important dimension of normative order consists in its maintenance or achievement in time, as an order that must be sustained or brought into being. How is its temporality tied to perception of threat? Political communities embody retrospective order because they have engrained within them paths of behavior worked out over time and expectations about what is owed to one another, through institutions, identities, habits, and norms of right or justice. But as we have already noted, a status quo order will entrench injustices, discrepancies, and resentments, and therefore may lead to a re-creation of ideas of order, and a drive to replace one order with an entirely new one, or intellectual innovators will re-assess the world and construct an alternative vision of order. Christianity and Marxism at their foundings were prospective orders in that they brought into being new ways of interpreting peoples’ relationships to one another – politicizing collections of persons as unitary entities seeking initially iconoclastic aims. In addition, the causes of new visions derive from long-term changes, natural disasters, or crises, which dislocate orders and require that innovative arrangements be brought forth. These sources of systemic change can be labeled prospective normative order. The categories of retrospective and prospective normative order enable the theorist to study threat perception as a dynamic process driven by people's search for meaning (not just power) through their membership. A political body must make efforts to sustain its commitment power over time. It will succeed to varying degrees but constant pressures also demand re-affirmation. In addition, normative orders that worked at one time come to be seen as corrupt, leading people to re-assess those old arrangements and the persons sustaining them as threats to a new vision. As Burke (quoting Addison) pondered the future of the French nation after the Revolution, he acknowledged that people would go on to experiment with a ‘great variety of untried being’. Threats to normative order then can also be interpreted through the prism of securing one's past self against possible destructive forces, or through the desire to break from an oppressive past to invent a new and different order. The latter leads a freshly formed group to re-assess prevailing conditions as threats, where before these had been taken-for-granted parameters.

In this section, I analyzed objective dimensions of normative ordering for a political entity. Order and its dimensions set background cognitive schemas, maintain role relationships internally and externally, provide means and ends, orient a political entity moving in time, and assure the protective power of the political body. Orders of value constitute a people and thereby create a reality, a concretely situated political body in space and time. These objective dimensions help us understand the ‘concreteness’ of normative beliefs. They are not ‘just’ beliefs or values floating around in a public sphere or cultural milieu but anchor a body politic to a world view of itself and others. Nevertheless, we cannot explain the emergence of perception of threat on the basis of these categories.

Before analyzing the ways in which normative harms can be felt and conceptualized, that is, the general modes (types) of threat, I should mention the large issue of the conditions under which normative threats emerge. If normative orders are of essential value, and forces constantly at play to dislocate those orders, why do we not witness normative threats arising all the time? The normative ordering of a political society is highly complex – made up of identities, structures of interest, habits, emotions, and beliefs about how the world works and how it ought to work. We cannot hope to pinpoint with any precision where the causal node of threat emergence will be found. A full explanation would comprehend the subterranean changes taking place at the level of habits, structures of interest, shifts in perceptual frameworks, and so forth, but change at those levels must become accessible to conscious minds and discourses of persons as members of political bodies. Small- and large-scale changes occur incrementally and continuously, and people living within relatively stable institutions and orderings do not usually see this. In addition, not all change will elicit normative threat. Something must happen – some public or dramatic human action, revelations about accumulated (social or other type of) processes, or the articulation of new narratives about justice or right – to sharpen people into a consciousness about a challenge to their order. Events such as an election, a breach of boundaries, a terrorist attack, and an acquisition by a rogue nation of new military technology emerge as infractions of order not simply because they challenge given power arrangements. They challenge power arrangements insofar as a will to prohibit the desired norms of relationships appears behind the act, event or Other. Are there certain conditions making this will to harm more apparent (no general theory is possible)?

Threats of any type arise when political bodies see themselves in a state of self-conscious movement: the ambivalent settling of terms between the Soviets and the United States after joint action in WWII; the Chinese Navy flexing its muscles in the Pacific waters; Oklahomans reacting to Obama's election and conceived pressures of foreign law in the United States. I would suggest that beyond background conditions of salient changes in the power of groups as they grow or diminish, three more proximate states of affairs might be highlighted. Felt weakness or need for consolidation within a collective body may provoke leaders to re-claim collective power for the political body through accentuating a subversive threat or grievance from an alternative group. Evrigenis’ analysis of metus hostilis traces this tendency and its formulation as a principle in the history of political thought (see Evrigenis Reference Evrigenis2008). A second contributing condition would be newly empowered and ideologically energized political bodies – Napoleon's revolutionary wars are famous examples of this situation. Finally, people and leaders may find themselves thrown into sharp contrast with another normative ordering on what they thought was their own stage. This confrontation would have the effect of piercing the veil of familiarity, rightness, and effectiveness. One's ‘habitus’ of performance, we might say, is assaulted and leads to a sense of shame and acute perception of threat. The hostility of neighboring Arab states to Israel's presence in the Middle East might be interpreted in this way. Thus, fear, pride, and shame (all accompanied by anger!) grow in response to transformations in conditions that contribute to the emergence of threats as normatively powerful phenomena. In all of these situations, the role of salient beliefs about order create the framework for interpretation, and they intensify practical and more material tensions. The simple fact of differences in normative beliefs does not in and of itself cause such tensions to erupt.

Transgression/grievance

‘I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination’. These words of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederate States exhibit the first foundation for a perception of threat: transgression of an assumed right or norm of treatment. By transgression of a normative order I mean harm that takes place as a result of a betrayal of presumed norms operating between persons. The norms may be tacit and perceived in the breach, or they may be well articulated and publicly (intersubjectively) acknowledged. The perceiver is attached to those norms; the political body depends on them to sustain expectations about treatments between people. And they care about them because in their very acknowledgment and maintenance, they signify that some element of respect is granted.

The emotional sensation in reaction to transgression appears in the form of grievance. Surprisingly little work has been done on grievance as a basis of threat perception.Footnote 26 The rhetoric of grievance and insult often accompanies hostile confrontations, and typically the language is taken as a surface rhetoric rationalizing animosity, which ‘in reality’ is driven by a desire for power, greed, or identity antipathy. But grievance cannot be relegated to the status of mere moralizing language hiding strategic motives. It is a powerful emotional orientation resting on reasonable and specific claims. The Oxford English Dictionary defines grievance in the following way: ‘A circumstance or state of things which is felt to be oppressive. In mod. use, a wrong or hardship (real or supposed) which is considered a legitimate ground of complaint.’ Another typical definition describes it as ‘a cause of distress felt to afford reason for complaint or resistance’. The core meaning is encapsulated in the notion of a deprivation or violation of what one expects from a set of rules (legitimate ground, reason for resistance). A grievance stands for a sense of loss or failure to be accorded one's rightful resources, power or status/recognition relative to a situation that has been (retrospective order) or ought to be (prospective order). Thus, grievance is not just a feeling of anger or insult but an emotion essentially tied to a cognitive belief that an order, which ought to be, has been transgressed. When an interpretation of threat to the normative order is posited, it attributes to the threatener a will to violate the order obtaining between the parties. This is not an add-on but acts as a primary trigger to a larger sense of impending violation.

Grievance is an emotionally inflected claim attached to a rational mapping of the world. The public's sometimes inchoate emotions can be formulated, given shape, and directed in terms of this mapping. Not every grievance will take on great significance and many are manageable within a rule-bound regime and can be solved through negotiation and adjudication. But some transgressions are perceived to be willfully disruptive of the principles of interaction. The Locke passages quoted earlier described the people's perception of patterns of harm indicative of what they believed to be the king's will to overturn basic regimes of order. Protestors in Egypt and across the Middle East in the ‘Arab Spring’ (2011) designated a number of specific grievances as provoking major anger and propelling them to take to the streets (e.g. the government's practice of extra-legal detention of political opponents). Aristotle offers perhaps the first theoretical analysis of the underpinnings of this type of normative threat in his theory of conflict in Book V of the Politics on the ‘Causes of Factional Conflict and Constitutional Change’ (Aristotle Reference Aristotle1995). Setting the stage and first in Aristotle's depiction was the ‘state of mind’ or psychological predisposition toward pursuing faction or revolution. He argued that any order – embodied politically in a constitution – was based upon some notion of justice – a principle for the arrangement of offices (power and rule). Democracies, he noted, arose out of the idea that ‘those who were equal in any one respect were equal absolutely, and in all respects’ – hence, democracies institutionalized the application of the principle of free-birth to every criteria of worth, including equal share in rule. Oligarchies, in contrast, institutionalized the idea of the value of inequality of worth, that is, the principle of superiority. The wealthy ought to rule in proportion to their superiority, a principle of inequality. Whereas some may reduce these contentions to mere claims of power, Aristotle emphasized the inherently principled nature – the reasoning – embedded in the ordering and in the claims on all sides: ‘In oligarchies … the ground which the masses take in justifications of forming factions is that they are unjustly treated in being denied equal rights although they are actually equal. In democracies the ground taken by the notables is the injustice of their having only equal rights although they are actually superior’ (V.3, 186). The utility of this discussion comes in Aristotle's stress on the justice-based claims inducing conflict. Faction emerges when one or more sides in a constitution believe their rightful share in the order of the society has not been respected according to the conception of justice they believe ought to apply, thus conflict arises out of a belief that a transgression of order has taken place through violation of principle. Aristotle contends: ‘It is the passion for equality which is thus at the root of faction’ (V.1, 180). Perception of threat emerges against this background set of rules of interaction, a normative order.

Aristotle analyzed conflict and motivations for transformations of order (revolutions) arising within a community, but his analysis offers a general model to think through conflict between communities in an international setting as well. Grievance specifically implies a normative background shared to at least a minimal degree by the parties in the threat situation. In the international environment, the acceptance of a minimal order of rules in terms of which a reaction of grievance makes sense is attested to in a number of ways. The idea of a society of nations already captures within it a modicum of shared expectations. ‘Social’ interaction brings about judgments regarding brutality, accountability, hypocrisy, and other claims of transgression among agents, which testifies to a substantial if not fully obligatory collection of interwoven norms. This order of rules does not depend on substantive moral norms like those guiding obligations within a constituted community. The international normative order emerges from worked-out pragmatic relationships between identifiable communities with identities regarded as ‘acceptable’ and capable of interacting with one another, and on the language that nations use to communicate. I am not arguing that justice guides international relationships. But as referenced earlier, even in an age of wars of aggression, when conquest, plunder, and imperialism were acceptable, a thin working normative lingua franca existed among interacting countries. We can find examples in historical texts of the invocation of normative judgments used by actors and built up over time. Woodrow Wilson, for example, writing to German leaders after the bombing of the Lusitania in 1915, appealed to the Germans’ sense of honor and the right of neutral ships to sail in any waters necessary or desired:

John Dower in his powerful history of the ‘race war’ in the Pacific during WWII notes that ‘scarcely acknowledged during the war years, a submerged strata of common values developed in the very midst of the polemics each side employed against the enemy. Each raised the banner of liberation, morality, and peace. Whatever their actual deeds may have been, moreover, they condemned atrocities, exploitation, and theories of racial supremacy’ (Dower Reference Dower1986, 28 and 29). In fact, Japan had pointed out the injustice of western colonialism in Asia where half a million British ruled 350 million Indians, or 200,000 Dutchman governed 60 million in the East Indies: ‘Money squeezed from the blood of Asians maintains these small white minorities in their luxurious mode of life – or disappears to the respective home countries’ read one of the Japanese motivational tracts for soldiers as they entered the field of war (Dower Reference Dower1986, 24–25).

A background of normative judgments provides a basis for grievances to emerge in theory and to be justified in terms of a public perception that a principle of an accepted legitimated arrangement has been violated. With the Japanese in WWII, this perception propelled antipathy toward the United States and the west as a threat and mobilized them toward war to bring about a new order. With the United States in WWI, the perception of a transgression of rules was used to judge Germany a threat and two years later bring the United States into the war. We can see then that a sense of grievance (a great transgression of old or new norms) leads to viewing another's actions as insupportable and thereby to be combated. The outrage in both responses is explicable and made coherent through this framework of transgression of an order; a pure identity or power explanation would leave this dimension unexplained.

Subversion/insecurity

The basic logic of harm through transgression consists in the betraying of shared expectations. The next mode of harm – subversion – consists in the perception that the sustainability of one's way of life is undermined by a source outside or alien to one's self. Both types of threat to normative order (transgression and subversion) trigger emotions of fear and anger or outrage, but the emotional content of each is shadowed by other sensations as well, as we discussed in the case of grievance. While the experience of ‘insecurity’ may apply to all forms of threat,Footnote 27 I take it as most tightly linked to subversion. Insecurity is a pallid word for the sense of falling apart that perception of subversion brings about, yet it captures the core of emotional response to subversion. Experiences of subversion will arise from a variety of encounters. An ostensible material or physical endangerment may actually point to a normative insecurity. A prominent line of argument holds that the provocation to anti-US sentiment among radicalized fundamentalist Islamists grew out of the presence of US military bases within the sacred lands of Islam.Footnote 28 Here the concrete presence of an alien Other leads to the perception of being overtaken or infiltrated, even though the US government has no intention of literally occupying and making impossible the realm of Islam. A milder version of infiltration through material means can be found in the French sensation of cultural insecurity through the prevalence of American films from Hollywood. Both examples show how normative threats can be triggered when a customary space or stage of one's action has been metaphorically invaded by an alien order.

A perception of normative threat as subversion comes not only via physical carriers of a foreign force, but also from a sensation of internal vulnerability. Thus, the Other appears powerful because the structure of one's inner commitments opens up specific weak spots. The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union exemplified to some degree a mutual perception of threat due to their offering contrary conceptions of normative order, each of which held up an inverse mirror to the other, accentuating the weakest parts of the other in the reflection. The United States portrayed the Soviets as tyrannical and destructive of freedom and individualism. The Soviets portrayed the United States as selfish, inegalitarian, individualistic, and destructive of collective goods. These inverse depictions rendered each vulnerable to the critique of the other's normative ordering, and made the other to some extent a subversive threat. Liberalism and communism stood for contrasting explanations and prescriptions about sources of equality, freedom and well-being. The threat they posed to one another should be viewed as powerful because of the profound claims about the best and right human order each maintained.Footnote 29

A susceptibility to sensations of subversion is built in to some groups’ normative identities, e.g., societies conceptualizing their political identities such that proselytizing for their ideals is intrinsic to who they are. Part of their DNA seeks to judge and transform the world, therefore to tolerate and live among alien Others signals a weakness in one's mission. Social orders built upon ‘truth’ render themselves continually open to subversion. When Aquinas sought to enforce uniformity of belief, his fear was not of simple otherness of belief. Indeed, the Church allowed for a notable plurality in its orthodoxy, so long as its authority determined the domain of acceptable belief. But the unorthodoxy of heretics would have an enormously destabilizing effect on the order of believers, because differences of religious belief posed a threat to the social order premised upon the Church's sacred and singular authority at the apex of ideological hierarchy. The following passage provides an especially forceful example of the connection between claims about collective truth and anxieties about the destruction of order as found within the Islamic notion of apostasy:

This explanation of the purpose of one of Islam's core tenets – apostasy as the crime of disaffiliation from one's religion faith – makes rejection of one's Muslim faith a threat to the sanctity of the larger Islamic community. The ambivalence of the nature of disorder is also displayed here: the apostate's rethinking of his religious beliefs might be taken as an opening to broader social chaos or to the infiltration of an alien-order (‘victory of the enemy’).

Examples of alarm from destabilization and subversion of one's inherited order are numerous. Antipathy toward immigrants reflects a type of fear of being socially overrun. Samuel Huntington's warning about the coming destruction of Anglo-American culture through the influx of Mexicans has been presented in this way. Sayyid Qutb's dawning hatred of the United States after his stay as a graduate student in Colorado, might also be viewed in this light. Would Qutb have devoted his life to fighting a libertine modernity if it had not threatened the chances of his own preferred orthodox commitments? The perception of this type of harm to order acts as a powerful background orientation for many political bodies, and operates more consistently in some cases than others.Footnote 30 Otherness itself does not frighten if it is not taken as portentously on the verge of destroying one's particular normative and cultural order.

Abomination/indignant aversion

Finally, I turn to the last main type of normative threat. The mode of harm through abomination consists in what I shall call an affront to the status of the human being. This challenge to order occurs when some act, event or Other stands as intolerable against background assumptions about the proper parameters of human behavior. The normative order setting the stage here is not specific to one's own immediate political body but to the larger context in which humans perceive their collective entity to move (an order of orders). The intolerability of the act, event or Other does not derive from sensations of having been betrayed or of fearing infiltration because of a vulnerability in one's self. Rather, it arises in the face of an affront to more basic norms of human treatment, and is analogous to the logic of transgressing a natural law. One might question whether persons in political bodies will be mobilized to act against this type of threat. Body politics have a more obvious incentive to act against subversive or transgressive threats because these are more closely tied to the internal/external and past/future orders that anchor a particular political entity. If abomination pertains to the idea of human status itself, in what way will this move a collective body to respond?

This opens up many complicated questions I cannot address here, but I want briefly to comment on the role this perception may play in political threat. First, I have linked this form of normative threat to the sensation of indignant aversion. This enables us to describe a particular range of emotional response located with persons as members of collective political bodies rather than with individuals considered separately. Indignation and aversion taken together capture a unique reaction when persons face and judge the rightness of the world at large. People appraise acts, events and Others not only relative to the welfare of their own particular group, but according to often tacit conceptions of justifiability writ large, according to the measure of conceivable human life. Indignant aversion names the reaction against defiances of the most basic human norms. Taken singly, aversion connotes too physical or unarticulated a reaction; indignation on the other hand includes the element of a standard of some sort by which to judge, but devoid of the element of repulsion that we want to keep in the picture when describing rejection of abominations.Footnote 31 I believe this concept of a compound emotion accurately captures some important political responses to acts and events. It could be argued that the decision by NATO to intercede on behalf of Libyan rebels against Qaddafi's bombardment of his own people was in part motivated by a sense of indignant revulsion against allowing this kind of behavior to be perpetrated on a world stage while everyone else sat mutely on the sidelines.

Claims about the nature of the ‘human status’ will be disputed. Nevertheless, they have served in history as a major source of mobilization to achieve new orders. Abominations may not pose a threat of undermining an entire body politic but they do stand as an affront which brings about indignant aversion in many people and which can consolidate groups to take up action. Slavery, ethnic cleansing, torture, child pornography, and incest are examples of some of the most profound abominations. And many people have felt that to not act against such threats is to allow a type of corrosion of human standards necessary for humane existence. Many (but not all) will feel that such normative threats cannot be allowed to continue unpunished, although they often are. Still, the incentive to build legal regimes to take on abominations of this sort testifies to their powerful political effects, which this perception of normative threat can bring about.

I presented three modes in which harm is conceived to happen to normative orders. The archetypal emotions elicited were described as grievance, insecurity and indignant aversion. Certainly this analysis of collective normative life remains a very reductive account of the complex cultural–ethical–political environments in which a people move – relating within and across groups – and it may appear as too neatly packaged. Nevertheless, these enable us to sort through the often vehement but ill-defined emotions and variety of arguments accompanying actions against threat undertaken by people in political groups, when normative orders appear to be on the line. Returning to one example with which I began the paper – the Oklahoma International Law Amendment passed by the people of Oklahoma in the last election (2010) – we see that explanations based on strategic thinking or identity difference do not seem at all sufficient, but we gain a greater purchase on the meaning of that case by using the concepts I developed here. Oklahomans were not afraid of physical or material dislocation. Very few Muslims live in Oklahoma. They were asked to consider and make a decision in a public political process on the impact to their state of what they perceived as powerful forces at work in the larger, global world. They acted as if subversion of their world were a possibility.Footnote 32 This extreme and dramatic pronouncement via the mechanism of an election can be deconstructed at so many levels, but I believe the proposition that collective bodies see and feel their normative commitments to be at risk and will act to counter the threat provides an illuminating interpretation of a puzzling phenomenon. Normativity is ballast for a body politic, not a superficial overlay to more hard-core power and self-interest. In no way are the latter unimportant. The point has been to make the case for the equal relevance of beliefs about order in explaining human behavior.