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http://sdi.sagepub.com/ International Politics of Insecurity: Normativity, Inwardness and the Exception


Jef Huysmans Security Dialogue 2006 37: 11 DOI: 10.1177/0967010606064134 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/37/1/11

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Special Section: Theorizing the Liberty-Security Relation: Sovereignty, Liberalism and Exceptionalism

International Politics of Insecurity: Normativity, Inwardness and the Exception


JEF HUYSMANS*

Department of Politics and International Studies, The Open University, UK


This article seeks (a) to show the complexities of the concept of exception in international politics, (b) to suggest that the current politics of insecurity are not limited to a clash over the status and limits of normativity in international politics, and (c) to introduce conceptual groundwork for theorizing international politics of insecurity as a contest of the exception. By combining normative and existential concepts of exception, a conceptual matrix is introduced that distinguishes between political liberalism and realism, on the one hand, and anti-diplomatic ultrapolitical realism and liberalism, on the other. While the focus in discussions of exception is often on the tension between realist assertions of the limited validity of international norms and liberal assertions of the real capacity of international norms to constrain political power, something more complex may be going on in current international politics of insecurity. The conceptual matrix draws attention to an additional tension between those realists and liberals willing to retain common grounds for symbolic mediation in international politics and those seeking to intensify antidiplomatic inwardness. Keywords Insecurity exception 9/11 international law existentialism

HERE IS GENERALLY a feeling that the acts of violence of 11 September 2001 in the USA created exceptional times in international politics. Claims of exceptionality feature prominently in the international politics of insecurity. They can take the form of millennial statements:
In retrospect, the Millennium marked only a moment in time. It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future and assess the choices facing humankind. (Blair, 2001)

2006 PRIO, www.prio.no SAGE Publications, http://sdi.sagepub.com Vol. 37(1): 1129, DOI: 10.1177/0967010606064134

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But, they also take the form of questions about the relevance of international law, the legitimacy of torture, justification for pre-emptive use of military force, the rise of US unilateralism, a crisis of the United Nations, etc. Understanding what exceptionality refers to in international politics is an inroad into understanding the terms of the politics of insecurity today. This article starts from the assumption that what makes political time exceptional is not the expansion of transnational forms of violence as such but their politicization as exceptions. The key questions then become: What do claims of exceptionality do politically? How do they structure the stakes and positions in international struggles for legitimacy and authority? In this article, I deal with these questions by playing a conceptual analysis of exception into current debates in international security politics. I conclude that claims of exception can structure the international politics of insecurity in terms of two cross-cutting cleavages. The first is a normative cleavage that draws a rift between realists and liberals on the basis of their different understanding of the status and limits of norms in international politics. The second is an existential cleavage that defines differences within both realism and liberalism on the basis of the degree to which exceptional politics retain a common ground for symbolic mediation in international relations and the degree to which they become anti-diplomatic and inward-looking. The result is a 22 matrix defining the tensions around which claims of exceptionality implicitly or explicitly organize international security policies. While political and academic debates on 9/11 are most explicitly phrased within the normative problematic of exception (first cleavage), the conceptual matrix makes visible the possibility that the normative debate is only one aspect of a more complex international politics of insecurity today. The matrix introduces the question whether the struggle between those asserting international law and multilateralism and those supporting unilateralism is not overdetermined by an existential rift that distinguishes realists and liberals who wish to retain a common ground for symbolic interaction from those realists and liberals who turn to inward-looking ultrapolitics that substitute anti-diplomacy and divine law for diplomacy and positive norms.

The Limits of Normative Order


One of the debates that immediately followed the acts of violence in the USA on 11 September 2001 turned on whether those events represented an act of war or a crime. This contest of definitions of the nature of violence was not simply about finding the adequate analytical label for the violence. The debate was important because it directly bore upon the normative order

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within which the policy response would be framed and which would provide the normative yardstick for evaluating the legitimacy of countermeasures. From a lawyers perspective, one of the reasons for the debate was that the form of violence did not fit easily into existing categories of international law:
To some observers, the attack can only be regarded as an entirely new phenomenon falling wholly outside the existing framework of international law with its emphasis on (horizontal) relations between states and (vertical) relations between state and individual. For the members of that school of thought, a challenge on this scale by a non-state actor to the one superpower calls for entirely new thinking about the nature of international law. (Greenwood, 2002: 301)

Others resist the temptation to radically throw existing frameworks overboard:


The fact that the events of 11 September may demonstrate a need to re-examine some of the assumptions on which the international legal order rests does not mean that those events occurred in a legal vacuum. (Greenwood, 2002: 301)1

In the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, this contest of the relevant normative frameworks and the limits of these frameworks turned explicitly into a challenge to one of the cornerstones of the postWorld War II international normative security order: the multilateral, collective security system as institutionalized by the UN.2 At the heart of this debate was the question whether or not the war could be justified on the basis of UN Security Council resolutions, the UN Charter and doctrines of international law more generally. To the extent that this was possible and, above all, if the reasoning was acceptable for the Security Council the political decision to go to war remained within the limits of the normative security order. In that case, one would not have to invoke exceptionality. Kofi Annans (2003) address to the general assembly on 23 September 2003 made it clear, however, that the war in Iraq moved the contest beyond the question of the legality or legitimacy of the war:
We have come to a fork in the road. This may be a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations was founded. . . . Now we must decide whether it is possible to continue on the basis agreed then, or whether radical changes are needed. And we must not shy away from questions about the adequacy, and effectiveness, of the rules and instruments at our disposal.

By suggesting that there may be a rationale for institutionalizing a new security order, Annan accepts that the validity of the normative security order itself is severely contested (Rieff, 2003). By implication, the question of the legitimacy of international political power in the security realm moves from
1 2

See also, for example, Roberts (2003). See, for example, de la Gorce (2003); Dunne (2003); Glennon (2003); Roberts (2003); Slocombe (2003).

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a normatively constituted political power that is subjected to accepted and codified norms to the legitimacy of constituting political power that is creating a new normative security order. The international order finds itself in a legal interregnum, a constitutional moment when the old order is dead and the new not yet born (Ackerman, 1989, 1991). So far, we have identified two interpretations of the exceptionality of the situation triggered by 9/11. The first interpretation focuses on the degree to which organized violence falls beyond the reach of existing normative instruments and thus justifies exceptional policies, though the latter cannot radically challenge the existing legal and multilateral security order. One of the most visible and extreme sites in which this view is played out and debated is the status of the prisoners at Camp Delta in Guantnamo Bay. The second interpretation is more radical. Contemporary international politics is exceptional because the violence of 9/11 is an indication of a radical change in the global security landscape. The question is no longer whether the policy response to 9/11 can be contained within the existing normative security order but whether this order has any validity left. This interpretation suggests that international political power currently operates in a normative interregnum in which the old order is no longer valid and a new order is not yet born. Claims of exceptionality in international politics thus open a division between the constituted nature of international political power (first interpretation) and the legitimacy of claiming constituting international political power (second interpretation). This is the traditional rift that concepts of the exception in political and constitutional theory refer to. In international politics, this traditional distinction between constituted and constituting authority is further complicated by a third interpretation of the concept of exception that stresses that this distinction is irrelevant for international politics. What if the legitimacy crisis of the United Nations and the multilateral security order is not really a crisis but simply a confirmation that normative security orders are an illusion or a fig leaf in international politics? The argument goes as follows: After 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, people started believing that international politics had finally reached the stage in which the multilateral security order could properly function. On 11 September 2001, this illusion was fundamentally crushed, and Western political elites have been brought back to the reality of international politics. This interpretation assumes that international politics is by definition exceptional. The international system is an order without a politically relevant normative content; it is systemic rather than normative. To use Martin Wights (1966: 33) famous words:

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Political theory and law are maps of experience or systems of action within the realm of normal relationships and calculable results. They are the theory of the good life. International theory is the theory of survival. What for political theory is the extreme case (as revolution, or civil war) is for international theory the regular case.

A similar point was made less dichotomously by Morgenthau (1933) in his early work on the relation between international law and international politics. Morgenthau argued that there is of course international law, but there is no judicial system of rules that makes it possible to decide on legal grounds when litigation is judicial litigation that is, when litigation has to be subjected to judicial rules. Therefore, the criterion of legality as a restraint on political power is severely limited in international relations. Claiming this form of exceptionality helps to legitimate a form of decisionism in international relations. Decisionism is the legal theory of the authoritarian state: law becomes a technical instrument for the execution of certain political objectives; it is nothing but the command of the ruler; it is a means for serving the stabilization of power (Neumann [1937] 1996: 134). In a comment on the foreign policy of the USA, former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali seems to come close to understanding US foreign policy along these lines:
Multilateralism and unilateralism are just methods for the United States: They use them la carte, as it suits them. The United Nations is just an instrument at the service of the American policy. They will use it when they need to, through a multilateral approach, and if they dont need it, they will act outside the framework of the United Nations. (de Chtel, 2003)

If the political significance of international norms is this severely limited, the distinction between constituted and constituting power does not make sense in international politics. All international politics are by definition exceptional, and therefore the concept does not allow for discriminating between different international times. At most, one can state that 9/11 and the policy responses to it have confirmed the exceptional nature of international politics. There is no fork in the road, because the very road that is, the normative road that Kofi Annan talks about is an illusion. Such claims of the exceptionality of international politics move the debate away from the question of what kind of international normative security order can be an effective and acceptable answer to current forms of international violence. Instead, they draw the debate into the question whether international normative criteria have any relevance at all in international security politics. They structure the struggle for international legitimacy and political authority into a rift between the legitimacy of normatively unrestrained use of violence and political authority, on the one hand, and the restraining capacity of international norms (law and its sociological variant, multilateral institutional arrangements) and their legitimacy, on the other.

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The political significance of these third claims of exceptionality depends on their capacity to move international politics into this rift and thus to structure the political contest into an extremely intense struggle over the status of international norms. The claims of exceptionality that I have looked at so far draw on normative concepts of exception. They share a concern with the limits and status of international law and multilateral norms in international security politics. They either contest the relevance (i.e. status) of international norms or they contest when and how political power can legitimately transgress the existing normative order. When these conflicting claims of what exceptionality means are played out intensively in international politics, as they are in the wake of 9/11, it is the cleavage between the first two temporary suspension of norms and constitutional interregnum and the third interpretation irrelevance of norms in international politics that plays out most radically. When the third claim is used effectively it opens up a radical rift between realist and liberal understandings of legitimate international authority and the legitimate use of violence in international politics. The difference between realists and liberals in international security politics does not rest on a different understanding of the political that is, the concept that frames what political practice is. Both agree that political practice emerges, domestically and internationally, from the tension between law and the arbitrary exercise of state power and violence. The distinction is one of the politics through which one restrains the arbitrary use of violence and state power. For liberals, international law and its sociological variant, institutionalized multilateralism, are the instruments of restraint. The realists agree that this is indeed the case domestically, but not in the international sphere. International politics differs fundamentally from domestic politics for realists because restraint of political power and violence cannot be grounded in law and multilateral norms. The realist position is not one of asserting unrestrained use of violence in international politics, however (Williams, 2005). Realists believe that international law and multilateral security orders play at most a very limited role in restraining international political authority, but this does not imply that they do not seek to constrain the arbitrary use of violence. Since restraint cannot be effectively obtained through law and multilateral order, the question has to be how international politics can be restrained politically rather than normatively or, more specifically, legally. It is here that the balance of power arises as an instrument of constraining the arbitrary use of violence.

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Exceptionality, Political Authenticity and the Inward Turn


In the wake of 9/11, claims of international political authority and legitimacy often compete over the status and limit of norms in international relations. But, they are also characterized by strong assertions of authentic political identity that is, of key values that identify the nature of ones political way of life:
The threat is chaos. And there are two begetters of chaos. Tyrannical regimes with WMD and extreme terrorist groups who profess a perverted and false view of Islam. . . . And these two threats have different motives and different origins but they share one basic common view: they detest the freedom, democracy and tolerance that are the hallmarks of our way of life. (Blair, 2003)

It is fairly common that foreign policy statements assert a political identity. But, in the wake of 9/11 and the lead-up to the war on Iraq, these assertions of identity coexist with and are sometimes explicitly made through intensifying a divide between chaos and order in international relations:
Events during the past two years have set before us the clearest divides between those who seek order and those who spread chaos. . . . Between these two alternatives there is no neutral ground. (Bush, 2003)3

If there is no neutral ground, that means that everyone is necessarily directly involved in the conflict. And, if the question is not one of conflicting interest but one of chaos or order, the stakes for security politics are apocalyptic. Here, authentic political identity is asserted under conditions of an exceptionally existential crisis. Asserting authentic identity through the rendition of such a condition has a particular philosophical and a problematic political history. I want to turn to this double history to introduce how such an existential rendition of the exception can be a rationale for an extremely aggressive security policy that combines an inward turn cutting away international institutional and symbolic frameworks with a global projection of ones own political identity. This existential concept of exception differs from its normative rendition discussed in the previous section. Instead of conceptualizing politics of insecurity in terms of the relation between law and its political transgression its exception it formulates politics as the search for and assertion of authentic political identity. The starting point for looking at the relation between claims of authenticity and exceptional crises is existentialist philosophy, and more specifically what Adorno ([1964] 1973) has characterized as the jargon of authenticity. The relation between authenticity and exceptionality was central to existentialism and philosophies of life in the late 19th century and the first
3

See also Blair (2002).

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half of the 20th century. This interest in authenticity was also present in the invention of the psychoanalytical understandings of the subject, the Marxist critique of capitalism and the conservative critique of the decadence of modern Western civilization. One of the things these diverse intellectual perspectives had in common was the belief that modern cultural, economic, social and political processes increasingly suppressed authentic forms of life and subjectivity. Modern individuals were understood to be increasingly alienated because of the domination of objective forms, such as money, technologies and positive law, and instrumental rationality. In these conditions, subjects and society could only recover their true, natural or original being in exceptional circumstances that radically disrupted the instrumental rationality, objective forms and everyday routine through which modern societies sustained the suppression of authentic life.4 Heideggers notion of life as being-unto-death is a good example. Life is defined in the shadow of death, but this is seen as an opportunity rather than something negative. It starts from a trivial observation: human beings die. But, death is much more than an inevitable event for this existentialism: it is the portal to authentic life.5 When the possibility of death radicalizes, an existential crisis is created that can help subjects to break free from everyday routine and the iron cage of instrumental rationality and thus facilitates access to a more authentic definition of ones life. The intensification of the possibility of death does not refer to a subject who is dying. Rather, it refers to an intensified confrontation with human mortality and with the freedom of human beings to create their own identity and world. It does not refer to a potentiality of death becoming actuality but to the extreme accomplishment of . . . an already real and already present possibility (Derrida, 1997: 124). It is the experience of the possibility of death itself that radicalizes. War was one of the favourite examples (Coker, 1994). For soldiers engaged with the enemy, the rules and habits that constrained them in everyday life could suddenly emerge as futile. This falling away of normality could disclose a truly new perspective on their life. It stripped away the artificial layers of identity and revealed a more original and contingent condition from which people, if they wanted to and were strong enough, could define their lives afresh. This authentic moment was seen as being one of freedom in which the historical determination and consciousness of the subjects is destroyed and they become free to create their own destiny ex nihilo (Adorno, [1964] 1973; Lwith, 1993).6 This form of existential authenticity is contingent upon an inward turn (Villa, 1996: 130; Wolin, 2001: 81). The authentic subjects exist solely by them4 5

See, for example, Morris-Reich (2002). For an excellent discussion of the significance of death in the definition of modern subjectivity and society, see Bauman (1992). This view shares the Baroque notion of history as a plane upon which anything can happen but nothing can be finally decided (Weber, 1992: 1415).

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selves. Their social networks (e.g. family, employeeemployer relations, etc.) and historical conditions (e.g. concepts of morality, the dominance of instrumental relations, the distribution of capital) no longer bear upon their identity. To be able to recreate themselves under conditions of rationalization and objectification of life, subjects needed to be radically thrown upon themselves. In the jargon of authenticity, subjectivity . . . is sought in the absolute disposal of the individual over himself, without regard to the fact that he is caught in a determining objectivity (Adorno, [1964] 1973: 105). This is a radical individualist notion of subjectivity. From a political perspective, this concept of subjectivity is problematic. How can these subjects come together into an authentic political community if the precondition for their authenticity is to distance themselves from social and historical bonds? One of the answers is that political existentialism requires a historical decision in favour of the cultural unity and the national destiny of a people. This decision sublimates individual authenticity into an authentic expression of collective cultural identity. It establishes a transition of the existential concept of subjectivity from an individual to a collective standpoint (Neumann, [1944] 1967: 136; Wolin, 2001: 87):
Heidegger had treated the whole framework of Being and Time without any obvious change up to 1933. Then he suddenly gave it a collectivist turn: Dasein was no longer this poor KierkegaardianSartrean individual hanging in the air, in Sorge. But now Dasein was the Dasein of the people, of the Volk. (Habermas, 1986: 189)

It is important to emphasize that this collective turn does not aim to create a public space in which authentic individuals come together and deliberate about their historical destiny. It refers to a simple assertion of an organic total unity in which individual subjectivity transmutes into a higher collective political subjectivity. Institutions, objectified symbolic frameworks and social networks are assumed to be cut away for a mere assertion of an authentic organic collective identity and newly invented historical destiny. Of course, sociologically, these communities do not work like this. But, what matters is that apocalyptic visions of the world combined with radical assertions of authentic identity can slip into a political self-understanding that turns inward in this particularly radical way. What is the condition that can trigger such a radical assertion of unity? What is the exceptional crisis through which the authentic identity of a political community can be disclosed? One of the paradigmatic existentialist answers, which is captured very well in Carl Schmitts work, is war:7

For me, Schmitt, especially in Political Theology and The Concept of The Political, binds the normative concept of exception to a philosophy of concrete life that is homologous to some forms of existentialism. For more detailed arguments supporting this view, see Bourdieu ([1988] 1991); Lwith (1993); McCormick (1997: 8385); Sartori (1989); Wolin (1990, 1992).

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It is not by chance if one finds in Carl Schmitt a political decisionism that corresponds to Heideggers existentialist philosophy, in which the potentiality-for-Being-a-whole of individual authentic existence is transposed to the totality of the authentic state, which is itself always particular. Corresponding to the preservation and affirmation of this authentic Dasein [in Heidegger] is the affirmation of political existence [in Schmitt]; to freedom for death [in Heidegger], the sacrifice of life in the politically paramount case of war [in Schmitt]. (Lwith, 1993: 174)

For Schmitt, the intensification of the possibility of war is the exemplary existential condition that makes the authentic disclosure of political practice possible. Authentic revelation of political identity depends on a historical decision that sharply distinguishes between friends and an existential enemy who has the capacity to physically kill:
For as long as the people exists in the political sphere, this people must, even if only in the most extreme case and whether this point has been reached has to be decided by it determine by itself the distinction of friend and enemy. Therein resides the essence of its political existence. When it no longer possesses the capacity or the will to make this distinction, it ceases to exist politically. (Schmitt, [1932] 1996: 49)

This understanding of the political defines it in terms of a politics-unto-war, which functions as the political equivalent of existentialist being-unto-death. It reverses the Clausewitzian dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means (Von Clausewitz, 1976). In politics-unto-war, war is not conditional upon politics but it becomes itself the condition for authentic political practice and identity. This reversal is important, because it eliminates the instrumental restraint upon violence that Clausewitzs dictum implies. For Clausewitz, war should be restrained by its politically defined objective. In the existentialist notion, the extremity of war, the inherent possibility of total destruction, is incorporated in the definition of political practice. The threat of physical destruction that is, the extreme outcome of an unlimited war strips the relation between friends and enemies of normative, instrumental and historical ties, reducing it to a question of physical existence (Schmitt, [1932] 1996: 4849). As a result, the political community becomes detached from the normative and institutional frameworks defining the international society. The community has to derive its strength to survive from itself. The decision to embrace this condition makes the political community authentic in a Heideggerian sense. It shows a willingness to put [itself] at risk in the opening of new possibilities, the willingness to abandon the security and tranquillity of the ground provided by everydayness (Villa, 1996: 133). Politics-unto-war thus makes the spectre of total war the very condition for authentic political practice. This spectre radicalizes the tension between friend and enemy by cutting away any normative, moral or instrumental common ground upon which they could negotiate their differences. Political interaction between them is reduced to a physical confrontation in which the mere existence of the political community becomes the sole value of political

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interaction. Might becomes right (Neumann, [1944] 1967: 135). Homologous to the inward turn of the authentic existential subject, the authentic political community is thrown upon itself. Objectified frameworks, such as international law, multilateral security frameworks and institutional networks based on costbenefit calculations, that are the condition for interacting symbolically rather than purely physically with others, disappear in the radical intensification of the tension between friends and enemies. In line iz eks (1999: 29) reading of Schmitt, we can call this inward turn to the with Z existential facticity of politics ultrapolitics.8 Such an inward turn does not necessarily (at least not conceptually necessarily) have to result in a factual waging of global war. In principle, it can also result in autarkic security policy in which a nation tries to become fully selfsufficient and isolate itself from the rest of the world that is, radically reduce its vulnerability and dependence upon the external environment. However, the real political model in whose shadow the concept of ultrapolitics and the intensification of political inwardness is developed is the rise of fascism in interwar Germany. Fascism in Germany did not assert its historical destiny through isolating Germany but projected its assertion globally. What makes the intensification of inwardness in identity politics so disturbing for the international system is not simply that it cuts away common ground for symbolic interaction but that it links its ultrapolitics to a global projection of its identity. In other words, these policies are problematic and ferociously aggressive because they can turn to a politics-unto-war that not only eats away common ground for symbolic mediation but also tries to impose its own ideological, spiritual, cultural or racial superiority globally. This most radical form of political articulation in the framework of the existential exception is not simply driven by existential crises and collective identification but also by a desire to overcome all estrangement that is, the fact that we have to live with others who are not like us either by eliminating or radically marginalizing those who are different or by turning those who are different into the same as us. James Der Derians concept of antidiplomacy captures this form of identity politics well: the purpose of diplomacy is to mediate estranged relations; anti-diplomacys aim is to transcend all estranged relations (Der Derian, 1987: 136). The anti-diplomatic nature of the politics-unto-war adds to the concept of ultrapolitics that politics-unto-war does not have to be limited to an inward turn that results merely in asserting ones existence from within the community. It also implies an external projection or assertion of ones own historical destiny in the extremely tense relation with the enemies. By destroying the possibility for symbolic mediation, ultrapolitics operates under the shadow of a drive to destroy enemies and gain absolute victory as
8

iz ek borrows the concept of ultrapolitics from Rancire (1995). Z

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an integral part of realizing ones historical destiny. In this case, the inward turn slips into a politics that tries to overcome estrangement through the assertion of ones way of life globally. In his study of war and modern consciousness, Coker (1994: 27) seems to extend this inward turn and its link to aggression into a characteristic of Western modern consciousness in the 20th century: the modern age was intrinsically aggressive because it was selfreferential and therefore self-validating. Without history there could be no self-conscious life. The notion of exceptionality that emerges here is one that does not simply emphasize the suspension or limited status of norms but one that intensifies an inward turn of the political subject. The possibility for such an inward turn develops out of an intensification of the possibility of war. This radicalization of the inimical relation between a political community and its enemies challenges the legitimacy of common grounds for symbolic interaction in which political identity is defined within established intersubjective frameworks that constrain the exercise of political power, such as international law and multilateral security frameworks. It is replaced by a physical assertion of ones identity and destiny irrespective of the symbolic claims of others. The limits to ones interaction are reduced to physical limits, such as military overstretch. Denying the relevance of positive law or other institutionalized norms defining what is right and wrong can be one element of this. But, the inward turn goes much further. It implies that claims of exceptionality define authentic political authority and legitimacy through a heroic confrontation with ones groundlessness and mortality (Villa, 1996: 130). We are alone. We have to look after ourselves. The intensification of inwardness that is particularly problematic in this context is an anti-diplomatic inwardness. Anti-diplomacy is a practice by which one seeks to transcend political estrangement by constructing the world into a mirror image of oneself. An example of policies in the wake of 9/11 that may be indications of such antidiplomatic visions of the world is a foreign policy that links assertions of an apocalyptic era with a policy of aggressively democratizing the world through unilateral military intervention and that substitutes a universal assertion of moral values for institutional deliberation. This political concept of inwardness defines the exception in the first instance on the basis of a break with or in the normal everydayness of politics, characterized by objectified forms of mediating relations with others, rather than a collapse of norms. The politics of security are in this case not first of all judicial but indeed existential.

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Towards a Topology of the International Politics of Insecurity: The Relation Between Normative and Existential Concepts of Exception
The existential concept of exception belongs to a particular historical and cultural setting: in my reading, mainly interwar Germany and the postwar critique of German existentialist thinking. The Schmittean politics-unto-war was an intervention in political debates about the Weimar Republic and the settlements after World War I. And, like Heideggers philosophy, it was embedded in a cultural critique of liberal civilization, a cultural flirting with death as a creative force, a philosophical critique of the domination of technology, etc. The current debate about security policies and the conditions of international (in)security in the West is taking place in a very different historical and cultural setting: a post-colonial world in which the ideological and normative frameworks of the Cold War have collapsed; a cultural disposition that does not embrace death but is obsessed with postponing and controlling it; an embracing of technological progress and a doctrinal assertion of the values of liberalism. Therefore, one has to be careful not to uncritically import the full cultural and historical baggage that comes with the existential concept of exception into the current politics of insecurity. However, I think the existentialist interpretation is important to draw out an important stake in contemporary debates about international insecurity. It sharply exposes how, if authentic political identity is expressed through apocalyptic visions of the world, these may facilitate an inward turn that will challenge the legitimacy of institutionalized common grounds for symbolic interaction, such as diplomatic relations, institutions like the United Nations, and international legal and quasi-legal frameworks. The existential concept of exception thus raises an important question for the international politics of security: to what extent does binding claims of exceptionality to disclosing authentic political identity intensify a political inward turn that shifts the tension between law and politics, which is central to how politics is defined in normative claims of exceptionality, to an assertion of a politics-unto-war that implies a collapse of institutionalized frameworks for symbolic interaction, leaving only the simple, and often brutal, facticity of being alive? But, what is special about this? Is this understanding of exceptionality that different from the normative concept of exception? Is the rift between realism and liberalism, which the normative exception opens, not precisely the fracture between an assertion of common grounds for symbolic interaction and the simple political assertion of ones own might and collective identity without regard for the institutional and historical frameworks? Looked at in these terms, the existentialist interpretation does not seem to contribute much to the normative understanding of international politics of exception.

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Figure 1. Layered Representation of Concepts of Exception Realism | | | Intensification of ultrapolitical inwardness Liberalism Interregnum | | Sustaining common ground for symbolic interaction General layer: existential concept of exception Suspension Specific layer: normative concept of exception

Claims of exceptionality help to undermine the legitimacy of law and multilateral norms, or at least emphasize their limits. In so doing, they weaken the existing common ground for symbolic international politics, of which international law and multilateral norms are a central part. Should we therefore conclude that the existential concept is simply a more general formulation of the specific problem that the normative concept refers to? I would suggest not. The two concepts of exception are not two layers, with the existential concept the more general basic layer and the normative concept being a specific manifestation of it (as represented in Figure 1). Instead, the two concepts define two cross-cutting axes resulting in a matrix that identifies multiple variations of international politics of insecurity on the basis of a particular mix of existential and normative claims of exceptionality (as represented in Figure 2). The matrix replaces the layered structure based on a general and specific concept with multiple tensions of equal generality that arise when claims of exceptionality structure the political contest of international security. This topological shift from layers to matrix is important. It shows that the layered interpretation hides that claims of exceptionality do not just intensify the traditional rift between realist and liberal politics but also open up a cleavage within both of them between an ultrapolitical form of realism and liberalism and a political form of realism and liberalism that seeks common grounds for symbolical mediation of conflict. In Figure 2, the positions located in Quadrant 1 assert that international law and multilateral normative arrangements have only a limited impact on restraining arbitrary exercise of political power. For them, international politics is by definition exceptional in a normative sense. That means that quite radical expressions of power politics beyond normative restraints can be easily legitimated, especially when the survival of a political unit is at stake. But, an exercise of realist power politics in these terms does not

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Figure 2. Politics of Insecurity Normative and Existential Axes of Exception Normative Axis Realism Retaining common ground for symbolic mediation Existential Axis Intensifying political inwardness (3) Ultrapolitical realism: asserting physical existence and historical superiority (1) Diplomatic Realism Liberalism (2a) Normative liberalism 1: interregnum between normative orders (2b) Normative liberalism 2: temporary suspension of norms

(4) Ultrapolitical liberalism: asserting Divine Law

necessarily slip into an intensification of anti-diplomatic inwardness or international ultrapolitics. Both shared moral and cultural dispositions and instrumental calculation and bargaining can retain common grounds for symbolic interaction. Realist power politics can argue for retaining forums that facilitate symbolic engagement and practices that remain predisposed towards diplomacy. In contrast to anti-diplomatic practice that seeks to overcome difference, diplomacy seeks to symbolically mediate it. There is thus an important difference within realist renderings of exceptional politics according to the degree to which common grounds for symbolic mediation are retained in international politics. I have labelled the difference as one between diplomatic realism and ultrapolitical realism. The latter (Quadrant 3) represents a politics of breaking down the institutional and symbolic conditions that provide common ground for symbolic mediation that is driven by a predisposition towards overcoming all estrangement. It aims at turning the world into an image of oneself. Such a vision of the world justifies an extremely aggressive security policy that seeks to secure the political community by deleting difference and thus the need for its diplomatic mediation. Political positions in Quadrant 2 emphasize that exceptional politics may be required under certain circumstances but that they do not question the important status of normativity in international politics. They recognize that the normative order has its limits, that it might need changing, and that emergency measures that operate beyond the normative order can be justified for security reasons. These positions try to bind exceptional policies strongly to the normative framework by limiting their scope and time and by rendering them as an affirmation of the validity of normative order. I have called this position normative liberalism.

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The political position in Quadrant 4 is the most difficult to explain, because it combines an assertion of a normative order with cutting off common ground for symbolic interaction. Is this position possible? Does the normative order not provide by definition a common ground for symbolic mediation? I think this fourth position, which I labelled ultrapolitical liberalism, is conceptually possible and, more importantly, seems to be a particularly powerful strand in the Western debate about international politics after the end of the Cold War. I cannot sufficiently argue the latter in the space of this article, but let me try to explain how international politics can combine an existential concept of exception with an articulation of international law. This position recognizes the existence and importance of an institutionalized international normative order in international politics. In other words, it recognizes the value of law and multilateral arrangements in international relations. However, it understands law and other normative arrangements first of all as institutionalizations of universal substantive values rather than as a procedural framework that offers common ground for international symbolic interaction through which values can be negotiated and institutionalized. Ultrapolitical liberalism turns law and norms into a universal ethics. It shifts from a modern concept of law that mediates the difference between facts and norms through procedures that structure a common ground for debate to a notion of divine law that asserts and imposes universal values by divine representatives that claim a moral or civilizational high ground. At that point, the assertion of law becomes exceptional in the existential sense. It turns inward and anti-diplomatic. It asserts a particular authentic spiritual identity globally for the purpose of overcoming competition between moral claims.9 For example, humanitarian intervention without the backing of the UN to impose a universal ethics that are embedded within certain human rights instruments, followed by peacebuilding that imposes a particular economic and political structure upon sovereign actors, can, depending on the details of the policies, be interpreted as a possible expression of this position. The conceptual matrix allows us to formulate what I think is an important hypothesis about the politics of insecurity in the West in the wake of 9/11: Is the key stake in the struggle over exceptionality in especially Western international politics not first of all about the intensification of anti-diplomatic inwardness and about the nature of this intensification (realist or liberal antidiplomacy) rather than the normative debate about the status and relevance of international law? To raise this question, the politics of insecurity cannot be limited to the legal debates about exception but needs to venture into existentialist renditions of the relation between exceptionality and authenticity. As a result, two conflicts enrich the usual distinction between liberal
9

For an excellent discussion of this distinction in the context of 9/11 and the original use of the term Infinite Justice for the US response to 9/11, see Rancire (2002).

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and realist politics: (a) conflict between those searching to retain significant common ground for symbolic mediation in international politics and those intensifying anti-diplomatic inwardness [conflict between quadrants 1 and 2, on the one hand, and quadrants 3 and 4, on the other], and (b) conflict between those representing a realist ultrapolitics and those supporting a liberal ultrapolitics [conflict between quadrants 3 and 4].
* Dr Jef Huysmans is Senior Lecturer at the Open University (UK). His research centres on the political significance of security practice in Western societies, the securitization of immigration, asylum and refugees, and the politics of fear and exception. He is author of The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU (Routledge, 2006), and edited, with Andrew Dobson & Raia Prokhovnik, The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency (Routledge, 2006). Jef Huysmans would like to thank Claudia Aradau, Costas Constantino, Mervyn Frost, Vivienne Jabri, Raia Prokhovnik, Michael Saward, Antje Wiener and the anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to the British Academy for an overseas travel grant.

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