development spurred the vast American expeditionary adventures which began in earnest with
our entrance into the Great War in 1917.
The massing of armies was matched by widespread
domestic mobilization. This disseminated a relatively immediate interest in war-making to
nearly every position in society and created a space of political opportunity containing high
stakes and urgent motivations. By 1917, any substantial project of war needed to be forged in
society, and social projects could with profit be recast in terms of war.
With this general trend in mind, I claimed, against one tradition of political thought, that
war powers may be drawn from emergency powers rather than the other war around. I suggested
that to think clearly about how war bears on the position of the Citizen we had better give
priority to emergency powers.
The effort to track consequences of the relationship between emergency powers and war
powers is complicated by two additional themes I have already brought forward in this final part
of this book. One is the proposition that we adopt a wider perspective on what counts as war.
The other is the proposition that we understand war as the continuation of politics in light of
various versions of politics. We will re-enter this weave of factors in the coming chapters.
Before that, we need to consider one further element. How does all this appear from within the
position of the Citizen?
War intrudes into the life of the Citizen as emergency. When the two overlap it seems
that striking images of war are what give shape to our experience of emergency.
When the two
drift apart in time or space we can see that emergency has its own inherent dynamics. Citizens
tend to impose their personal experience of emergency on the image war and then import that
image of “war” into their experience to characterize emergency.
At the very beginning of this chapter I wrote that a more thorough answer to Justice
Goldberg’s question — Is this war or not? — would lead us back to the fact that war-making
power is grounded in politics in the broadest sense. We are still working towards a full
development of that point and shall not complete it in this chapter. But, having seen the circular
0I note, but will not dwell on here, the crucial “demographic” effect of technological change: a
thousand men can kill a thousand of their kind with swords forged by a single man; a handful of
men can kill thousands with a nuclear weapon made by thousands of people far removed from
the scene of battle. This fact is at the base of the vision of Donald Rumsfeld and others who
want to use new technology to diminish the number of front-line soldiers necessary for
“delivery.”
0Notice that witnesses described Columbine High School as a “battleground” [cite] even though
no battle can occur when just two cooperators have weapons. No one thought to call Harris and
Klebold “crazed hunters” or “accelerated serial killers.”
Convention