War and the Politics of Cultural Difference

Abstract

What I have referred to as the global matrix of war is constituted, as I indicate in Chapter 2, of two dominant sets of practices that are in many ways related, though the relationship often remains unacknow­ledged. These two sets of practices include wars fought in the name of humanity, wars legitimised variously in terms of discourses centred on rescue, care, and human rights; they have also come to include wars and confrontations that are targeted against an enemy deemed to con­stitute an existential threat. While Kosovo is seen to represent the former set, Afghanistan and Iraq are considered to represent the latter. Nevertheless, as I argued in the last chapter, these two aspects of the global matrix of war are historically related, for they both constitute a mode of exceptional politics that seek to render actions that stand beyond the law legitimate and, more significantly, necessary. Beyond the obvious fact that they have both involved the use of a high tech­nology military machine and that they therefore both represent a mode of asymmetrical warfare that predominantly injures populations targeted, they are both liberal wars, enacted by liberal regimes and, more significantly, in the name of what are represented as distinctly liberal, and cosmopolitan, values. The exceptionalism of these wars is a liberal exceptionalism, self-legislating, self-legitimising, and above all else, universalising in its remit.

Hegemony … is a whole body of practices and expectations; our assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of the nature of man and his world. It is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming.

Raymond Williams¹