Abstract
Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of an end to history as we had known it and of the arrival of a politics of markets and democracy was one vibrant swallow in a summer busy with euphorically prophetic birds in the years immediately after 1989.3 The end of the short twentieth century was welcomed by optimists who saw an end to conflicts and the beginning of a politics of peacefulness and conciliation. As the new millennium approached there was, for a short while, little sense of danger. The termination of the Cold War, the collapse of state communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the upsurge of democratic and liberal demands by the subjects of imploding despotisms, were all seen as presaging an era of negotiation, co-operation, and civility. Even if history had not come to an end, a politics of grand ideological conflicts and revolutionary confrontations of principles and beliefs was being replaced by tolerance, compromise, and the measured and undogmatic accommodations of democracy and markets, whose intellectual dimension was discussion, negotiation, and the narratives of consultation and compromise. The optimists were not deterred by memories that similar enthusiasms had been expressed almost half a century earlier, when an ‘end of ideology’ was expected to usher in the demise of radicalism and a new age of modest housekeeping and piecemeal social engineering, fixing things only when they were irretrievably broken, and maintaining a scepticism towards grand causes and the political leaders who proclaimed them.
‘As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish he’d stay away.’1
‘That it may please Thee to be her defender and keeper, giving her the victory over all her enemies.’2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Hughes Mearns, lines written for The Psycho-ed, an amateur play, 1910, quoted Angela Partington (ed.), The Oxford Book of Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn, 1992), p. 456.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).
Alex Kondos, ‘The Politics of Ethnic Identity: Conspirators Against the State or Institutional Racism’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 28, 1 (1992), pp. 5–28.
Keith Thomas, ‘Speak of the Devil’, New York Review of Books, 53, 7, 28 April (2006), p. 34.
Jeff Huysmans, ‘Minding Exceptions: the Politics of Insecurity and Liberal Democracy’, Contemporary Political Theory, 3, 3, December (2004), pp. 321–41.
Chris Sparks, ‘Liberalism, Terrorism and the Politics of Fear’, Politics, 23, 3, September (2003), p. 203.
Errol Morris (director), The Fog of War (Sony Pictures, 2003).
David J. Finlay, Ole R. Holsti, and Richard R. Fagen, Enemies in Politics (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), p. 57.
Daniel L. Byman, ‘Al-Qaeda as an Adversary: Do We Understand Our Enemy?’, World Politics, 56, 1, October (2003), p. 161. Andy Beckett, ‘The Making of the Terror Myth’, The Guardian, Friday, 15 October (2004).
Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 18.
Philip Hensher, Pleasured (London: Chatto, 1998),
quoted by Edmund White, ‘Sinister Blandishments’, London Review of Books, 20, 17, 3 September (1998), p. 18.
David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How To Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003).
Didier Bigo, ‘When Two Become One: Internal and External Securitisations in Europe’, in Morten Kelstrup and Michael Williams (eds), International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration: Power, Security and Community (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 171–204.
Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: the Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), pp. 183–9.
Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-war European Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 246.
Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Tom Gallagher, Glasgow: the Uneasy Peace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987);
Andreas Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
David Brown, The Legitimacy of Governments in Plural Societies (Occasional Paper No. 43) (Singapore: Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore, 1984).
Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (London: Yale University Press, 1998).
See, for instance, the accounts of various forms of ‘protection’ against a communist menace described in Richard M. Fried, The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesemmelte Schriften (Liepzig and Berlin, Teubner), vol. V, p. 320, quoted and translated, William Outhwaite, Understanding Social Life: the Method Called Verstehen (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975), p. 35.
Anatole Lieven, ‘The Push for War’, London Review of Books, 24, 19, 3 October (2002), pp. 8–11.
Gary Wills, ‘The New Revolutionaries’, New York Review of Books, 42, 13, 10 August (1995), p. 52.
This is interestingly discussed in Russell Hardin, One for All: the Logic of Group Conflict (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) pp. 101 and passim.
Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) p. 157.
Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change950–1350 (London: Penguin, 1993).
Max Weber, Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, two volumes (London: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 341–2.
Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: a Bourgeois Critique (London: Tavistock, 1979), p. 44.
David Miller, ‘Reflections on British National Identity’, New Community, 21, 2, April (1995), p. 157.
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996 (first published 1964)), p. 31.
Michael Moore (director) Bowling for Columbine (United Artists, Alliance Atlantis, and Dog Eat Dog Films, 2002).
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (London: William Heinemann, 1902).
Kennedy Graham, ‘The Planetary Interest’, in Kennedy Graham (ed.), The Planetary Interest: an Emerging Concept for the Global Age (London: UCL, 1999), p. 11.
Gwyn Prins, ‘Putting Environmental Security in Context’, in Gwyn Prins (ed.), Threats without Enemies (London: Earthscan, 1993), p. 13.
Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982).
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938).
Lucy Noakes, War and the British: Gender and National Identity, 1939–91 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998).
John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 132;
Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 1–8.
William James, ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’, Lecture 11, Memories and Studies (New York: Longman Green and Co, 1911), pp. 291–2.
George Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations, translated by Kurt H. Wolff and Reinhard Bendix (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 100.
Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Europe, translated by Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 82.
David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995);
Martin Albrow, The Global Age (Oxford: Polity, 1996);
David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: an Answer to War (Cambridge: Polity, 2003);
Mary Kaldor, Helmut Anheier, and Marlies Glasius, ‘Introduction’, in Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, Mary Kaldor, and Fiona Holland (eds), Global Civil Society 2004/5 (London: Sage, 2005).
John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
H. J. Laski, A Grammar of Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925), p. 29
and Paul Hirst (ed.), The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G. D. H. Cole, J. N. Figgis, and H. J. Laski (London: Routledge, 1989);
Paul Hirst, ‘Introduction’, The Collected Works of Harold Laski (London: Routledge, 10 volumes, 1997).
Sandra Halperin and Gordon Laxer, ‘Effective Resistance to Corporate Globalization’, in Gordon Laxer and Sandra Halperin (eds), Global Civil Society and its Limits (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 9.
W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’, W. H. Auden: Selected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 88.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 (1891)), p. 14.
Demetrios James Caraley and Alexander Cooley, ‘September 11: an Overview’, in Demetrios James Caraley (ed.), September 11, Terrorist Attacks and US Foreign Policy (New York: Academy of Political Science, 2002), p. 6.
quoted by Lisa Anderson, ‘Shock and Awe: Interpretations of the Events of September 11’, World Politics, 56, 2, January (2004), p. 318.
It is not implausible to argue, as Michael S. Sherry has done, that the single greatest cause and justification of state expansion in all spheres in the twentieth century was war and the threat of war. Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: the United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2007 Rodney Barker
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barker, R. (2007). Enmity Narratives, Politics, and Peacefulness. In: Making Enemies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287532_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287532_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35464-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28753-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)