Forwarding book review. FYI.
-- Charlie Reid
cjreid@netcom.com
"Salus populi suprema est lex" (Cicero)
The welfare of the people is the highest law.
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Cyborgs and Eco-Ethics: Challenging The Sovereignty Doctrine
By Charles J. Reid
[Beyond Sovereign Territory - The Space of Ecopolitics
By Thomas Kuehls
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 168 pages, notes,
index, biblio., paper]
When the European Princes met at the small German town of
Westphalia in 1648, they did more than end the Thirty Years War that
had plagued the good people of the Holy Roman Empire beginning in 1618. The
Treaty of Westphalia laid the foundation of an international system of
sovereign states that would last worldwide up to our day. The treaty
signers codified a rule that would henceforth govern relations between
states: a recognized ruler of one part of the earth would have no
authority over another part of the earth ruled by someone else.
Actually, the principle adopted at Westphalia took time to
evolve. In the thirteenth century the formula "rex imperator in regno
suo" (the King is emperor in his own kingdom) became a legal device to
challenge the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor that prevailed in
Europe at the time. In 1493 a rather pretentious papal decree, specifying
spheres of authority, divided the New World between Spain and Portugal,
a decision neither France nor England nor others accepted. After 1517 the
Protestant Reformation raised the issue of secular authority itself, an
issue that took years of warfare to settle. The doctrine of sovereignty
and the international system emerged from these disputes.
Over time actors and rules in the international system changed. By
this century global governmental and non-governmental organizations
began having an impact on states, effectively limiting their sovereign
authority. This culminated after ratification of the GATT Agreement in
1993 with the establishment of the World Trade Organization, an entity
intended to independently adjudicate trade disputes at the international
level.
In 1989 the United States invaded Panama, taking the internationally
recognized Chief of State of that "sovereign state" back to its own
jurisdiction to face felony charges as a criminal defendant. This was the
first time since Westphalia that the principle of sovereignty was
independently set aside by one state for some national domestic legal
objective. Previously, Napoleon had been exiled to the Island of St.
Helena, but only after a major war and concluding international
negotiations.
While over time de facto changes in actors and rules in the
international system have extenuated the doctrine of sovereignty, events
have also drawn attention to its limitations. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear
power plant meltdown spread debilitating radiation well beyond the
borders of the Soviet Union. The globalization of economic activity and
information exchange has underscored the weaknesses of sovereign states
in exercising political control over the international economy. And
environmental issues such as the destruction of the Brazilian rain
forests have accented global concern for side effects of economic
activity within the bounds of any sovereign state.
This is the point at which Thomas Kuehls' book, "Beyond Sovereign
Territory," begins. The book opens with a statement of the president of
Brazil: "The Amazon is ours. After all, it is situated in our
territory." This is a traditional expression of state sovereignty. But
as Kuehls notes, "Brazil's sovereignty over the Amazon rain forest has
been challenged by politicians and environmentalists on the ecological
grounds that the importance of this rain forest extends far beyond the
territory of Brazil."
Kuehls' book starts with the question, "How is it that a particular
area of the earth becomes sovereign territory?" The book ends
with the conclusion: "What is needed is a new governmentality -- one that
recognizes that any society must interact with its environment in order
to provide for its members and that society must be thought beyond
sovereign territorial boundaries...Thinking society beyond both sovereign
territorial boundaries and species boundaries means taking into serious
consideration the ambiguity, contingency, and diversity of life."
Between the question and the conclusion lies the presentation of Kuehls'
analysis and arguments.
The issues Kuehls raises are not new. Students of international
relations have long understood that state policies can have intended
effects or side effects that concern other states. We know economic
policies related to comparative advantage in production, currency
devaluation, or subsidies effect other states. War Departments have
always monitored armament expenditures, R & D investments, or training
exercises of other states. Domestic policies related to immigration,
education, or public health obviously can have consequences beyond the
boundaries of a given state.
So what is Kuehls book about? What the author wants to do is lay
an intellectual foundation for beginning to think about the world in global
terms that essentially abandons the doctrine of sovereignty, which
defined the international system in 1648. While the musings of most
international relations theorists occur within the framework of accepting
the doctrine of sovereignty, Kuehls' book is an argument for discarding it.
"A major portion of my argument in this work is that this conception
of sovereign state politics is problematic," he writes. And for Kuehls, the
issue extends even beyond the politics within and between
sovereign territorial spaces. "The problem also involves how these
territorial spaces are constructed...[aa well as] governmentality, a
governmentality that sees the earth first and foremost as a resource for
human consumption." Hence the need for a "new governmentality," one that
might even include nonhumans in human political communities that extend
beyond human spaces.
How successfully does Kuehls argue?
"Beyond Sovereign Territory" is not a "scientific" work in a
conventional sense. There is little discussion of data, no hypotheses
rigorously tested, few references to the traditional literature related
to the subject. Kuehls is concerned with illuminating the theoretical
concept of sovereignty, but he probably missed an opportunity. A scholar
can spend a lot of time discussing what "sovereignty" is. For example,
F.H Hinsley has devoted an entire, well-documented book to an attempt to
define sovereignty.(F.H. Hinsley, "Sovereignty," 2nd Ed., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986) But how can sovereignty be
challenged given how the principle actually works? Kuehls comes close
to generating usable hypotheses from actual practice in today's world
when he describes how Greenpeace engages states outside the context
of state and interstate politics. The goal of this discussion of
Greenpeace is unclear. We can only conclude with the author, "States are
still present. They still must be reckoned with..." In short, the book will
not satisfy the analytical scientifically oriented mind.
Nor is the book a literary essay. Kuehls does borrow some
metaphorical concepts as explanatory tools. From Deleuze and Guattari
he takes the notions of "rhizomes" and "trees" in his discussion of
spatial interrelations. "A territory is treelike...It has a single trunk
that branches out, sending aspects of itself away from the center while
always remaining connected to a unifying trunk, that in turn is firmly
rooted in one place...A rhizome is a system of roots...reaching into
many different spaces." Turning the concept back on itself, rhizomatic
events, such as pollutants spreading across state boundaries,
deterritorialize like roots that are not limited by boundaries.
creation of virtually organic machines and mechanical organisms, found
both in science fiction and scientific reality. He cites the cyborg
theorist, Donna J. Haraway, who writes, "[the cyborg] gives us our politics."
Interpreting this, Kuehls argues that "contemporary politics exists on
border lines. Not just the border lines between machines and organisms,
or humans and nature, but the border lines that divide sovereign territorial
states, or set apart public spheres from private spheres." What does this
have to do with the doctrine of sovereignty and interstate politics? "The
cyborg," Kuehls writes, "exists on the borderline between the United
States and Mexico, where cross-border corporations, pollutants, illegal
immigrants, and an increasing `feminization of work' disrupt the
certainty of what counts as American and what counts as Mexican, what
counts as the public (male) sphere and what counts as the private
(female) sphere." Cyborg politics problematizes state spaces.
At another level "Beyond Sovereign Territory" is a
philosophical speculation. Sifting through ideas from Nietzsche, Locke,
Rousseau, and Foucault, among others, Kuehls outlines an eco-ontology,
"a worldview wherein humanity's actions pose potential problems for the
earth," and an ecoethics, where `man' through self-assertion takes
responsibility for future condition of the earth. Nietzsche's reasoning
lies at the roots of both. The eco-ontology challenges the relevance of
God; the eco-ethics requires the emergence of the Nietzschean overman,
who "may best be said to exist where the state ends."
Ontologically, Kuehls wants to remove concept of God from the
debate. "In order for the ecologist to be born, God had to die,"
Kuehls writes, echoing Nietzsche's aphorism, "God is dead," etc. Why?
Because if human beings persist in their belief that God cares for the
earth, they will abandon their own responsibility for caring for its
condition. Yet, Kuehls may not understand that, assuming we could succeed in
transforming humanity into a Nietzschean superfolk, it is likely such
a transformation would have its own unintended consequences.
Kuehls also wants to banish the Lockean notion that land left wholly
to nature is waste, because it "hath no improvement of pasturage,
tillage, or planting." This concept of land use is linked close with
legal notions of property rights, an extension of which historically
accounts for the emergence of the doctrine of sovereignty. These legal
concepts have specific economic and ecological consequences that are
untenable today. Land used is often land destroyed.
From Rousseau Kuehls engages in the debate about the nature of
government. Is government a manifestation of authority? Or is its main
raison d'etre to guarantee General Welfare, providing for the needs of
the community? Rousseau's conceptual world does not eliminate the
concept of sovereignty, but his concept of government forces us to
recognize that all governments "must be concerned with the manner in
which the state utilizes its territory." If the interstate system is
powerless to protect environments, what kind of government is required?
Finally, because governmentality is essentially the exercise of
power, Kuehls turns to Foucault, whose meditations on power relations
contain a rule of action Kuehls is looking for: we must critically
examine the power at work on individuals and populations. Foucault sees
power as a productive force that operates to shape subjects. To this
extent, "the sane, law-abiding, heterosexual, religious, normal
individual must be made." The sovereign state is a component of the
power vector that forms people natures. But the "individual is not made
solely by the operations of the state."
A globalizing power is emerging. Governmentality must deal with the
process of meeting the needs and aspirations of the population in the
future. This depends on their being an environment capable of providing
for those needs. Human beings have the power to re-make themselves to
meet this challenge.
If there is any kind criticism to be made, it is that "Beyond
Sovereign Territory" seems to be an unfinished work. It could certainly
become a catalyst for new reasoning about global political reality and the
environment. International relations theorists and diplomats may find it
difficult to entertain a challenge to the doctrine of sovereignty based
on an ethic derived from the romantic musings of Nietzsche. The poetic
images of roots and cyborg may leave lasting and elucidating impressions
along with a faint dissatisfaction with their ephemeral verisimilitude.
In the end, though, "Beyond Sovereign Territory" is a hermeneutic that,
beyond a well-read academic audience, probably has a limited contemporary
appeal, but one providing an understanding that ought well guide the
next generation in understanding the limitations of state sovereignty.