Al-Ahram Weekly | Focus | For a justice to come

Since 1997, an obscure US organisation has been promoting a preemptive and explicitly aggressive approach to securing American dominance in the 21st century. Under cover of such terms as "benevolent hegemony" and "preventive war", they have spent the last years elaborating their plans for the use of excessive military force to intimidate the rest of the world. Many of the key supporters of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) entered the White House along with George W Bush in 2000, and have been instrumental in designing and launching the war on terror in general, and the occupation of Iraq in particular. This week, a People's Tribunal opens in Brussels, Belgium, to try the PNAC for their part in dragging the world into a state of permanent war. The BRussells Tribunal, inspired by the hearings held in 1967 by philosopher Bertrand Russell into American war crimes in Vietnam, is just the first session in a series of citizens' forums which will be held around the world over the next year, and which seek to expose and condemn the dark face of current American foreign policy. As the Tribunal opens in Belgium,Frederick Bowie spoke to participants about what they hoped to achieve, and what the world needs to know about America's neo-conservative palace revolution.

For a justice to come

At the age of 74, Jacques Derrida remains the preeminent French philosopher of his generation. His 'deconstructive' philosophy was long misunderstood as being apolitical, if not anti-political: but his later work has made his ethical and political commitments plain for all to see. Shortly before the launch of the BRussells Tribunal, he expressed his support for the project. The interview with Derrida was conducted in French and translated into English by Ortwin de Graef and Frederick Bowie

In the first place, I wanted to express my support for the principle underlying your initiative. Reviving the tradition of the Russell Tribunals is an important symbolic gesture today, and a necessary one. I believe that it is a good thing for the world, even if all it does is provide more food for our geopolitical thought. And I believe that such a gesture is even more necessary in the light of all the energy which has been devoted for some time now to setting up and running international legal institutions which, beyond the sovereignty of the state, can bring heads of states and military leaders to judgement. These institutions don't yet have the power to judge states as such -- and that is part of the point of what you are doing -- but they can judge persons who are suspected of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Examples would be the case of Pinochet, even though that is a very ambiguous example, or that of Milosevic. So heads of states can now be made to appear in that role before institutions such as the International Criminal Court, whose status is recognised in international law. The Americans, the French and the Israelis may not be entirely happy with it, but this tribunal exists nevertheless. Even if it is having difficulty finding its feet, even if it is still weak and faces many obstacles when imposing sanctions, it is now recognised as part of the international legal landscape.

If I understand correctly what you are trying to do, your project is not of the same type, even if it is inspired by the same spirit. You do not have any recognised legal or judicial status, and so your initiative remains a private initiative. Citizens from a number of different countries have decided to conduct their own inquiry into a certain policy, and to do so as honestly as possible. You are going to investigate a political project and the way in which it has been carried out. Your aim is not so much to reach a verdict and impose a penalty, as to make the citizens of the world more aware and more vigilant. In particular, you want to make the parties whom you propose to judge aware of what they are doing and have done. I believe that a procedure such as this can have a real symbolic significance, that it can serve as an exemplary gesture.

That is why, even though I will not be directly involved in this experiment, I wanted to take this opportunity to emphasise one point: the case you are going to examine is an extremely serious case, but it is only one case among many. Indeed, the very logic of your project rests on the fact that there are other policies, other political and military leaderships, other countries and statesmen, which could also be brought to judgement in the same way, or which could be associated with this case. I myself have many criticisms to make of the Bush administration, its attack on Iraq, and the conditions which allowed this attack to be carried out unilaterally, in spite of official protests from certain European countries, including France, and in violation of the rules of the United Nations and the Security Council. But despite all these criticisms; which I have expressed elsewhere, I would not want the United States in general to have to appear before such a tribunal. There are a number of forces within the United States that have opposed this policy on Iraq as firmly as anyone in Europe. The American people in general are not responsible for this policy; nor is the American State in general. Rather, this war is the product of a particular phase in American politics, and one which will inevitably be called into question during the run-up to the presidential elections. So it is possible there will soon be changes, at least in part, within the United States itself. I would therefore encourage you to take great care in identifying the target of your accusation.

That is why, instead of attacking the US government in general, we have focussed on the Project for the New American Century -- the think-tank which gave birth to all these extremist ideas about unilateralism, hegemony, the militarisation of the world, and so on.

When an explicit political project declares its hegemonic intent and seeks to achieve this aim through all possible means, then we are right to level our accusations at it and to protest against it, in the name of international law and its existing institutions, and in accordance with both their spirit and their letter. When I say this, I am thinking as much of the United Nations as of the Security Council. These institutions deserve our respect, but their structure, their charter and their procedures are in dire need of reform -- especially the Security Council. This latest crisis simply confirms this need. In my opinion, what is needed is not mere reform, but a radical transformation, thought I don't know if that will be possible in the short run. We need to question the UN Charter itself. We need to challenge the respect for nation- state sovereignty, and the refusal to see that sovereignty shared, which are enshrined in the Charter. For there is a contradiction between affirming respect for human rights in general, which is also part of the Charter, and this commitment to respecting the sovereignty of the nation-state. We need to challenge the fact that the states of the world are represented as states in the United Nations, and a fortiori in the Security Council, which is still made up of the victors of the last World War. All these things need to be radically contested. I would like to see them challenged in order to transform them, not to destroy them. For I still believe we need the spirit of the United Nations...

Within the spirit of Kant, at least. For I would also question certain aspects of the Kantian concept of "cosmopolitanism". That is why I believe that initiatives such as yours are very important as symbolic gestures, to make people realise how much these transformations are needed. So I hope that your Tribunal will act as a symbolic call to this kind of reflection. This is a responsibility which the states of the world have so far failed to take up, as have other institutions, such as the International Criminal Court. . .

The BRussells Tribunal is part of the World Tribunal on Iraq network. The teams in charge of the sessions to be held in London and Copenhagen will, as part of their work, be submitting cases to the International Criminal Court, against Tony Blair in particular. So it's possible that our initiative, far from being merely ethical and political, may be at least partly transformed into a legal process in the strict sense of the term.

Which would of course be excellent news! But it seems to me highly unlikely that any such case would ever be heard. There are too many states that will try to prevent your work from having any legal or institutional consequences, in addition to the United States themselves. But even if these legal actions are thrown out, that does not mean your project will have no effect. On the contrary: I believe that it will prove to be of great symbolic significance for society. The very fact that certain facts and conclusions are enunciated and published, even if they do not lead to a "judgement" in the strictly judicial sense of the term, let alone to concrete sanctions, can still have a considerable symbolic impact on the political consciousness of the world's citizens. This effect may be indirect and deferred, but there is still reason to hope that much may come of it. So I hope that you will treat those whom you accuse fairly, and that you will act throughout with real integrity. I hope that you will not show any bias, or let yourselves be guided by ready-made conclusions; that you will not start off by posing preconditions; but that you will proceed with serenity and justice, and that you will accurately identify those people who are really responsible. I also hope that by acting in this way, you will do nothing that might prejudice other tribunals of this sort from being held in the future. For I would not want your actions to serve as an excuse for not holding all the many other tribunals which are just as necessary as yours, to investigate other countries and other policies, whether within Europe or without. Indeed, I hope that your work will be entirely exemplary, and may thus lead to the establishment of an ongoing process, or even a permanent tribunal of this sort.

If you want your proceedings to be perceived as fair, you must not go after this target as if it were the only possible target. Of course, American responsibility may have been decisive in triggering this attack on Iraq. But even they didn't get this far without support from a complex web of complicities which extends into many other quarters. We are dealing with a tangled situation, in which the various responsibilities are almost inextricably intertwined. I hope that you will take this complexity explicitly into account, and that you will not blame everything on one isolated individual. Even if you can identify an ideologue whose work has made this hegemonic project particularly transparent, this person has not been acting on his own, and he would not have been able to impose his will without the consent of others. So to define who exactly should be the accused, who should be counted among the suspects, is a very hard question.

That is one of the reasons why we have abandoned the strict format of a trial. One of the disadvantages of that format is that you can only attack persons, whereas what we want to do is expose a system and its systematic logic. So we name the accused (Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld), in order to show people that we're not just talking about phantoms. But our real target is the PNAC as a set of performative discourses -- by which I mean, plans drawn up in order to achieve something, intentions which are meant to be translated into action. Still, we face an enormous problem of communication. Just to let people know that the PNAC exists and that it is important to understand what it is doing is an incredibly difficult task.

Of course. That's why it's important to address these matters partly in terms of persons, and partly at the level of the system -- of principles and concepts. You have to show how this system has led to the violation of international laws which need to be respected, even though they may also be in need of change. If you take that course, then you will have to address the concept of sovereignty, and the crisis of sovereignty. You will have to discuss the need to find ways of sharing sovereignty, and of setting limits to it. We need to deconstruct sovereignty as a form of political theology, using both philosophical and historical analysis. This is an enormous task. [...] But we must not make the mistake of thinking that what we need to fight for is the total and final dissolution of all forms of sovereignty: that is neither realistic, nor desirable. In my view, there are effects of sovereignty which can still be politically useful when fighting against certain international forces or concentrations of forces -- forces for whom sovereignty is just an empty word. [...]

I was amazed when in The Concept of September 11 you describe the people who will have to deal with the transition to a new generation of political and international institutions as "philosophers". That is a very political definition of a philosopher!

What I wanted to convey is that it won't necessarily be the professional philosophers who will have to deal with this. It may be lawyers or politicians who find themselves wrestling with these questions: these people will be the philosophers of the future. Sometimes, politicians and lawyers are better placed to think these questions through philosophically than are professional academic philosophers, even though there are people in academia who do address these questions. In any case, today it is the duty of philosophy to think these things through in action, by doing something.

To return to the notion of sovereignty: isn't the New Imperial Order which denounces certain states as "rogue states" itself a state of exception? In Voyous, you talk about democracy suffering from a kind of auto-immune syndrome: at certain critical moments, democracy believes it must suspend itself in order to defend democracy. This is just what is happening in the United States today, both domestically and in their foreign policy.

The right to make exceptions is the criterion of sovereignty, as Carl Schmitt pointed out. (I am not uncritical of Schmitt, and I would not want anything I say about him to be seen as an endorsement of either his theories or his personal history). A person is "sovereign" if he has the power to decide to make an exception. So exceptions and sovereignty go hand in hand. In the same way that democracy is, at times, a threat to itself, and may choose to suspend itself, so sovereignty consists in giving oneself the right [ droit ] to suspend the law [ droit ]. That is the definition of the sovereign: he makes the law, he is above the law, he can suspend the law. And that is what the United States has done. They did it when they acted in contradiction with the commitments they themselves had made to the UN and the Security Council. And they have done the same thing within the US itself: they have threatened their own democracy by introducing exceptional police and judicial procedures. When I say that, I'm not thinking only of the prisoners in Guantanamo, but also of the Patriot Act. Since the Act was introduced, the FBI has resorted to kinds of intimidation which have been denounced by Americans, and in particular by many American lawyers, as undemocratic and in breach of the Constitution.

That being said, we must also point out that the United States remains a democracy. Bush was elected with the narrowest of margins, and he may well lose the next elections. He only enjoys sovereign power for four years at a time. It is also a very legalistic country, where many kinds of political freedom can be openly exercised which would not be tolerated in many other countries. I am thinking not only of countries which are widely recognised as being undemocratic, but also of our own Western European democracies. When I saw those massive marches in the United States against the imminent war in Iraq, which passed in front of the White House, right by Bush's offices, I remember thinking that if thousands of protesters were to assemble here in France in a similar situation and march on the Elysée, it would not be tolerated. So to be fair, we have to recognise this contradiction within American democracy -- on the one hand, the tendency to an auto-immune syndrome, in which democracy destroys itself by trying to protect itself; and on the other hand, a hegemonic tendency that is also a crisis of hegemony. In my opinion, the United States openly clings to hegemony only at times when that hegemony is fragile, is in crisis. Of course, the crisis does not contradict or disprove the hegemonic drive. The United States knows all too well that within the next few years, both China and Russia will begin to punch closer to their weight. Oil played a crucial role in determining the invasion of Iraq. And this concern about oil is directly linked to long-term forecasts concerning China: where China will get its petrol from, and how to keep control over oil in the Middle East ... All of this points to the fact that American hegemony is as much under threat, as it is arrogant and in-your-face.

The result of all this is an extremely complex situation. That is why we should not be making blanket accusations against the United States. We need to recognise the whole critical dimension within American political life. There are forces in the United States that are fighting against the Bush administration, and we should recognise those forces and work with them. At times, indeed, they express their criticism in ways which are much more radical than anything in Europe. That, in turn, raises the enormous problem of the media, of who controls the media, and of this display of media power which has played such a decisive role in the unfolding of this story, from 11 September to the invasion of Iraq. In any case, I am sure that the invasion of Iraq was scheduled well before 11 September.

That's clearly one of the things we need to demonstrate. In 2000, the PNAC wrote: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." So they were already writing this in September 2000: it was already decided. All the rest is just an alibi.

I have had this debate with Baudrillard. He claimed that the attack on Iraq was a direct consequence of 11 September. I cannot agree with him. In my opinion, the war was bound to happen anyway. The foundations for the war had been laid a long time before. So to some extent the two sequences of events were independent. When the history of all this is finally written, and all the documents are made public, it will be clear how 11 September followed hard on the heels of a series of highly complex secret negotiations, often held in Europe, over the routes for future oil pipelines. We are talking, after all, about a period when the oil clan was in power. The result has been countless intrigues and threats, and it is not impossible that one day we may discover that the real target of the 11 September attacks was not the country as a whole -- Clinton's America, so to speak -- but the Bush clan. Not should we reduce this just to oil: for there are many other things at stake, in terms of geopolitical strategy, including tensions with China, Europe and Russia. All these alliances are constantly shifting, as is always the case with the United States, which has a long history of attacking people whom it had previously supported. Iraq was once the United States' ally -- and it was France's ally too. The whole story is riddled with diplomatic infidelities and hypocrisies, on every side, not just the United States'. There is much more at stake here than just oil, especially since oil only has a few more decades to go: in 50 years' time, there won't be any left! So while we must take oil into account, we shouldn't let it monopolise our analysis. There are also military issues at stake here -- territorial questions of occupation and control. Nor is military power reducible to territorial power, as we now know: there are many forms of non-territorialised control too, such as technological communications channels, and so on. All of this has to be taken into account.

Many have said that the American-Israeli alliance has something to do with the intervention in Iraq, and I believe that this is true to some extent. But here, too, matters are very complicated. The current Israeli government -- and here I would take the same precautions as for the United States: for there are Israelis in Israel who are fighting against Sharon -- officially welcomed the invasion of Iraq. Yet while the war might seem to have given Israel greater freedom to pursue an aggressive programme of colonisation and repression, the actual consequences are extremely ambiguous. Here too we seem to be dealing with a sort of auto-immune syndrome: to the extent that Israel has enjoyed a free hand, it has only served to provoke more Palestinian terrorism, while reawakening symptoms of anti-Semitism across Europe...

So it's very complicated. [...] I'm not sure it will turn out to have been in Israel's best interests for the Americans to have attacked Iraq in this way. The future will show us. Even Sharon is now encountering opposition within his own government, within his majority, because of his plan to withdraw from Gaza. One of the problems facing a project such as yours, however just and magnificent it may be in its original impetus, is how to take all of this complexity into account, and how to exercise due caution in handling it, so as not to be unfair to any of the parties involved. That's why I wanted to express my solidarity with the principle that underlies what you are doing. Since I can't actually take part in this inquiry and help you come to a judgement, I prefer to restrict myself for now to this support in principle. But afterwards, I will be among the first to applaud you, if you do your work well!

By way of a post-script, perhaps we could take a moment to discuss the issue of messianism? By messianism, I mean what Walter Benjamin called "the weak force". You refer to this in the preface to Voyous . Allow me to quote you: "This vulnerable force, this force without power, exposes to what or who is coming, and coming to affect it (...) What affirms itself here would be a messianic act of faith -- yet irreligious, and without messianism. (...) This site is neither soil nor foundation. It is nonetheless there that the call for a thought of the event to come will take root: of democracy to come, of reason to come. All hopes will put their trust in this call, certainly, but the call will remain, in itself, without hope. Not desperate but alien to teleology, to the expectancy and the benefit [ salut ] of salvation. Not alien to greeting [ salut ] the other, nor alien to bidding farewell or to justice, but nevertheless rebelling against the economy of redemption." I find this passage very beautiful. It is almost a prayer, which we could insert into our everyday life, and into our project. What is it, this messianism without religion?

When I talk about this weak force, you are right, I am referring to Benjamin's interpretation; but his interpretation is not exactly the same as mine. This force is what I call "messianicity without messianism": I would say that today, one of the incarnations, one of the implementations of this messianicity, of this messianism without religion, may be found in the alter-globalisation movements. These movements are still heterogeneous, still somewhat unformed, and full of contradictions, but they gather together the weak of the earth, all those who feel themselves to be crushed by the economic hegemonies, by the liberals' free markets, by sovereign powers, etc. I believe it is these weak beings who will prove to be strongest in the end, and who represent the future. Even though I am not a militant in these movements, I am staking my hopes on the weak force of the alter-globalisation movements. They still need to explain themselves and unravel their contradictions, but they are already working to oppose all the hegemonic organisations of the world. Not just the United States, but the International Monetary Fund too, and the G8: all the organised hegemonies of the rich countries, the strong and powerful countries, to which Europe belongs. These alter-globalisation movements provide one of the best figures of what I would call messianicity without messianism, that is to say, a messianic practice that does not belong to any determined religion. Many religious factors are involved in the conflict with Iraq, on all sides -- from the Christian side as well as from the Muslim side. What I call messianicity without messianism is a call, a promise of an independent future for what is to come, and which comes like every messiah in the shape of peace and justice -- a promise that is independent of religion, that is to say, universal.

The Iraq war is a war between three Abrahamic religions. The promise which I am talking about is independent of the three religions, insofar as they are opposed to each other. It lies beyond the Abrahamic religions: it is universal, unrelated to revelations or to the history of religions. When I say this, I am not speaking against religion: I do not want to wage war on the strictly religious forms of messianism, whether Judaic, Christian or Islamic. What I want to do is mark out a space where these messianisms are exceeded by messianicity, that is to say, by this waiting without waiting, without horizon, for the event to come, the democracy to come, with all its contradictions. And I believe that today we must seek, very cautiously, to give force and form to this messianicity, without giving in to the old concepts of politics (the concepts of sovereign power, and of the territorialised nation-state), without giving in to the churches or to religious, theologico-political or theocratic powers of whatever order, whether they be the theocracies of the Islamic Middle East, or whether they be the disguised theocracies of the West. [...] So, by messianicity without messianism, I mean independence in respect of religion in general. A faith without religion, so to speak.

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