militarism, we ought also to recognize the continued importance of the role of the idea,
not just in the myriad wars raging around the globe, but in much more subtle imperatives
of political and cultural self-definition. One of the most oft-quoted questions that
Anthony Smith has raised in his study of contemporary nationalism is “who will die for
– a question raised as well after the votes in France and the Netherlands not to
adopt the EU Constitution.
Given the importance of the enemy idea, we ought to be struck by the absence of
sustained research and conversation on this topic. There is virtually nothing written in
the tradition of political theory – where one might hope to find it – directly on the subject
of the idea of the enemy. Current attention within the field of political philosophy to
cosmopolitanism, for instance, presumes at some level the obsolescence of the enemy
idea or at least a significant cultural and political transformation in regard to it. Is this
tenable, we might ask – one of many questions that may tangentially be linked to
questions about the enemy. The International Encyclopedia of the Social and
Behavioral Sciences
not only fails to treat it as a separate entry, it also neglects to
include it in its comprehensive subject index at the end of twenty-six volumes.
2
Anthony Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1995), 139, quoted in The International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, Vol. 6, 4,
September 2004, Review of Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion, by
Thomas Carothers.
3
From another angle entirely, we might note that the power of the enemy idea will never
die in literature: a young novelist, Harutoshi Fukui, has become the next Japanese Tom
Clancy, with accompanying millions in sales, for his political-military novels depicting
Japanese victory rather than defeat in WWII, clearly filling a demand for overcoming an
enemy rather than the reverse.
4
Which bills itself as presenting the “state of the art” of its broadly conceived subject.
The German historical dictionary of political and social terms, the Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe, does include the term for enemy in its main index.
5
There are numerous specific articles on “war.” In addition, related ideas of “otherness”
and “evil” appear in the final index, indicating where discussions of them may be found
(though no separate entry articles for these two either). In none of these cases is the
concept of enemy used, the encyclopedia writers preferring the terms “opponent” and
“adversary” when discussing war. The absence of any mention of the enemy as a socially
3
Convention