The construction of a common enemy: Europe, War, Migration

Alessandro Dal Lago proposed to discuss the notion of war from a sociological perspective. He started his intervention by making reference to the conception of war in the time of ancient Greece. He highlighted the fact that a Greek citizen usually spent half of his life at war and that in some Greek poleis and, notably in Sparta, it was even usual to dedicate the whole life to the practice of war. Yet, Dal Lago underlined that Plato devoted no book of his wide production to the very topic of war. According to Dal Lago, the reason for that was that war represented the norm of the Greek culture, whereas the current assumption of the western culture is that an «act of war» corresponds to the exception and that peace is the rule. He distinguished two kinds of wars in the ancient Greece: on the one hand the polemoswhich was a war against the so-called barbarians (in the Greek mentality all those who had not the citizenship of a Greek polis were labeled as barbarians); on the other the stasis which was a civil war among Greek poleis. Plato was mostly central on the study of the stasis, but he did not consider the polemos as a real problem.

Dal Lago went on to say that the contraposition between war and peace is at the very core of our philosophy. Nevertheless the border between these two concepts is not always sharp. He gave the example of the war against migrants which is not explicitly defined as a war, but it is indeed one in actual fact. The Italian law Bossi-Fini allows for example inspections in those boats where clandestine are supposed to be and these inspections are not always carried out with peaceful means. He stressed the idea that the war against migrants just as the war against terrorism are branches of the so-called war against the uncertain and the unknown which is a war even if it is not declared. He went on to read a declaration of the American secretary of defense Ronald Rumsfeld which institutionalizes the strategy of Warfare: this strategy implies the primary of the war practice in comparison with the political institutions action. This gives the impression that there is a new relation between war and politics. Dal Lago wondered if we should consider war and politics as two sides of the same coin.

Finally, he concluded his presentation by discussing the concept of what has been considered as terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic. Theoretical categories are often unable to describe the transformation of reality. The notion of terrorism is thus too old to permit a real comprehension of the phenomenon. Therefore, he recommended working on the empirical field instead of looking for omni-comprehensive categories.