The notions of «state of exception», «state of emergency», «war on terror» and «sovereign movement» through their relationship to the post-11 September policies against terrorism

Rob Walker provided a political theory perspective of the current state of exception and the so-called «state of emergency». In his view, CHALLENGE responds to many challenges. There are many ways of identifying what these are. The crucial judgement informing this particular project, however, is that these challenges converge on a need to reconsider the way in which we understand what it means to place limits on what are taken to be the normal conventions of modern political life. By limits he referred to two different aspects of modern political life.

On the one hand, he referred to the borders and boundaries in territorial space. In this context, we work with claims about the physical limits of the modern sovereign state, and especially with the territorial framing of the distinction between both friend and enemy and citizen and human. Here we confront large historical questions both about how it is that we came to organize political life by creating such sharp boundaries in space and about the fate of these boundaries.

On the other hand, he addressed the principles, practices and institutions through which we acknowledge the dependence of modern political life on a capacity to declare exceptions to the norm, to suspend the law, to recognize that claims about liberty and democracy must always be in tension with claims about necessity and security. Walker then questioned what it means to articulate all our supposedly defining values, our aspirations for a democratic or liberal affirmation of liberty and equality if our politics ultimately depends on a willingness to suspend all such aspirations in the name of some even higher necessity that demands placing limits on our freedoms? He said that this is a question that has been asked by many famous thinkers in the canon of modern political thought, from Machiavelli and Hobbes, to Kant and Rousseau, to Weber and Schmitt.

Walker sustained that the relationship between security and liberty, between norm and exception, between the legal and the extra-legal and between liberty and security is undergoing considerable transformation. CHALLENGE responds to the challenges articulated by these hypotheses in the specific context of Europe, though with an eye on trends elsewhere. It brings together many different disciplinary and intellectual traditions and skills. It seeks to make a difference to the way we now shape policies and practices at the intersection of claims about liberty and security.

Walker underlined that the international system does not have a sovereign in the sense we understand in relation to the state. But there are certain rules that are widely taken to be sacrosanct and must be accepted by all states. He pointed out four basic rules that seem to have been crucial and that have been always problematic in this regard:

First, no empires: hegemons yes, but hegemons that threaten to turn the system of states into an empire no.

Second, no religious wars: we cannot tolerate a return to the wars of religion.

Third, keep your politics inside; the only legitimate recourse to violence derives from the necessities of self-defence within specific territorial borders; and interference in the jurisdiction of other sovereign states is not permitted.

Finally, no «barbarians» or non-moderns; that is, modern political life must involve a decision about who gets to be treated as a properly human being and who is not fit to participate in the modern international order.

Walker then analyzed the notion of exception. He said that since 9/11 we have seen the exercise of a sovereign exceptionalism. Yet this has not been an exceptionalism of a Schmittean kind at the edge of a ‘state in a state system. He then addressed the question as to who is placed inside the norm, and who is outside? Exception is a powerful capacity associated with the sovereignty of the state. The state of exception legitimates violence, exclusion and the violation of liberty and rights. It provides a division between friends and enemies, between «the civilized» and «the barbarians» and «the modern» and «non-modern». That is the rhetoric that is being used in the war against terror and the consequent permanent state of exception. It is difficult to know where politics and exceptions are made today; are they made within or without the national state? The state and ‘the state system’ have become blurred. Legal, sociological and constitutional borders are unclear. The magic of modern boundaries is that the outside is inside and the inside is outside. The borders don’t even need to be states-borders; the borders can be pitched everywhere. This results in questions on the territory of violence. War is a reality, but how can we nowadays describe world politics in this meaningless world ?