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The point here may easily be overlooked by those who see politics in terms of movements, processes, forces, and power struggles, and who neglect the difference that has been made to all these things by the legacy of over two millennia of Roman law. Like a firm or a church, a nation-state is not merely a collection of individuals. It is a moral and legal person, which acts on its own behalf and is liable for what it does. The nation-state can therefore be praised and blamed, hated and loved, and the form of membership that it offers is also a bond of trust between individual citizens and the corporation in whose decision-making they share. The very same political process that turns subjects into citizens turns the state into a collective expression of its citizens' way of life. When we speak of the United States as negotiating a treaty, as building up its army, as declaring war on terrorism, we are not speaking metaphorically. These things are the genuine actions of a corporate person, in which all U.S. citizens are to some extent implicated, but which are the actions of no individual. When we speak in the same terms of Iraq or North Korea, however, we are speaking obliquely. There is no such entity as Iraq, only a legal fiction erected by the United Nations for the purpose of dealing with whichever individual, clique, or faction is for the moment holding the people of that country hostage. The form of corporate agency established by Western political systems has not been established elsewhere in the world. The states of the non-Western world are impersonal states, machines in their rulers' hands. They make no decisions, take no responsibility, and can be neither praised nor blamed, but exist merely as shields and weapons in the hands of those whose advantages they secure. This was made explicit under the Leninist system of communist government, which was founded on the theory of "parallel structures." Every office of the Soviet state was shadowed by an office of the "vanguard Party," which exercised all the power but was wholly unaccountable for doing so. This too casts some light on September 11. The attacks were designed to wound the United States in its decision-making part. The Pentagon, the White House, and the World Trade Center represent the three principal spheres of political agency — military, governmental, and economic — and the three ways in which the United States makes itself felt around the globe. And they bear witness to the reality of the country as an autonomous agent that can make decisions on its own behalf and can call upon the loyalty of its citizens to adopt those decisions as their own. The attacks were assaults on the person of the United States, and therefore on each and every citizen of that country. The difference between "the West and the rest" is captured in this idea of the corporate person — an idea that has its origins in Roman law and no real equivalent in the fiqh. The personal state is characterized by a constitution, by a rule of law, and by a rotation of office-holders. Its decisions are collectively arrived at by a process that may not be wholly democratic, but which nevertheless includes every citizen and provides the means whereby each citizen can adopt the outcome as his own. Personal states have an inherent preference for negotiation over compulsion, and for peace over war. They can live peacefully side-by-side despite disputed borders, as do the United States and Canada, while awaiting the outcome of a legal case that will settle the dispute. And they foster the growth of a national loyalty and a territorial jurisdiction in which the absolute demands of religion are tempered by the overarching need for toleration and common obedience to a secular power. The legitimacy of this power resides partly in custom, tradition, and the long-standing habits of the homeland; but it also depends upon the negotiated consent of the citizens who, through their participation in the political process, make the decisions of the state into decisions of their own. Of course, that is a somewhat idealized picture of the modern nation-state. But it conveys the ideal to which Western states have aspired, and which has shaped their distinctive form of politics. Although democracy has been an immensely important component in the emerging nation-states of the modern world, it is more a consequence than a cause of their personality. In the absence of corporate personality, experiments in democratic government lead to social disruption, factionalism, and either the tyranny of the majority or the seizure of power by a clique. This we have witnessed time and again in Africa, and those who believe that the remedy for the "failed states" of the region is to introduce democratic elections fail to see that without the framework of institutions and the underlying territorial loyalty, democratization is merely a staging post on the way to tyranny. The personal state is answerable to its citizens, and its decisions can be imputed to them not least because they, as citizens, participate in the political process. When it fights on their behalf it does not drag them into conflicts that are none of their business but involves them in conflicts of their own. In this it should be contrasted with the principal forms of government that prevail outside the "West": the one-party state, the religious state, individual tyranny, and the so-called "failed state," in which the apparatus of government has simply fallen into disuse, leaving the people unprotected against criminals, marauders, and terrorists, as they are now unprotected in many parts of South America. Although all these varieties of state are represented at the United Nations, and all are accorded there the status of persons in international law, none of them has full corporate personality as I have described it. For one thing, they all lack effective internal opposition. Often during the Cold War commentators wrote of a contest between "hawks" and "doves" in the Kremlin, or of opposition to communist policies in this or that professional or military grouping within the party. And similar things are said today about the Islamic Republic of Iran. The fact remains, however, that there is no defined role for opposition in those states, no way in which an opposing party can peacefully compete for power with the one that currently possesses it, and therefore no way in which opposition can be used to create a government based on dialogue. Decisions are made by an unanswerable minority and imposed willy-nilly on the country. The role of opposition, which is to make government accountable to the people, remains unfulfilled. Any conflict with a non-personal state is therefore a conflict with some faction or individual within it. There cannot be victory in such a conflict unless the faction or individual is destroyed. This we have already experienced in the Gulf War. The Iraqi soldiers who had occupied Kuwait were quickly driven from their positions — after all, it was not their war, and not one of them had the slightest desire to lay down his life for Saddam Hussein. They were helpless conscripts in the schemes of a dictator. But because the allies did nothing to depose Saddam Hussein, the seeming victory was not a victory at all, but merely a restoration of the status quo ante and a renewal of Saddam's implacable enmity. The formal defeat of Iraq was the defeat of a legal fiction. The real victory was that of Saddam, who retained control over his subjects in the face of an alliance of nation-states that proved powerless to unseat him. The asymmetry between personal states and the impersonal forces that now confront them can be witnessed in the case of Israel. The British protectorate of Palestine, carved out of the defunct Ottoman Empire, was opened to large-scale Jewish immigration by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Later, in the wake of the Holocaust, the desire of Jews for a state of their own became irresistible, and the retreat of the British from their protectorate was hastened by the terrorist methods of the Stern Gang. Israel quickly transformed itself thereafter into a nation-state by allying a historical national identity with an existing territorial jurisdiction. The Jews' pre-existing attachment to the Promised Land endowed the rule of law that the British had begun to establish in Palestine with the much-needed territorial loyalty. The result is that the state of Israel exhibits personal sovereignty on the Western model, and a genuinely democratic system of government. Few people doubt the injustice done to the Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, in this process. But the fact remains that, for better or worse, Israel now exists in the heart of the Middle East, a personal nation-state surrounded, since the virtual annexation of Lebanon by Syria, by tyrannies, factional groupings, and terrorist movements that have only a fictitious personality either in fact or in law. There is as yet no Palestinian state, nor was there ever, strictly speaking, a Palestinian nation, over and above the collection of historic creed communities that coexisted in the Holy Land under a succession of imperial rules — most recently Ottoman and British. The nominal leader of the Palestinians — Yassir Arafat — has never been elected by them, but was projected into eminence by the PLO, itself a terrorist organization on the model of the IRA, with a global network devoted to a local cause.6 By astute diplomacy on the world stage 'Arafat has won recognition for that cause; but he has neither the authority to pursue accommodation with Israel, nor the power to lead the Palestinians in an all-out war. Nor can he control the terrorist organizations that reside under his aegis and draw on the support of Islamic militants throughout the world. Organizations like
Hamas and the Islamic Jihad take their inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood
and the Hezbollah. They do not work through diplomacy or negotiation, In the face of this, the argument for a Palestinian state is surely overwhelming. However it is doubtful that a Palestinian state, if founded, would easily develop the kind of corporate personality that I have attributed to the United States. For this would require, if my argument is right, the emergence of territorial loyalties that transcend the bonds of religion and asabiya and express themselves through some participatory form of citizenship. It would require, in other words, the same kind of radical break with local history that we see in Israel. Israel, meanwhile, suffers all the agonies of a personal state at war. It takes collective responsibility for its aggressive gestures, and its politicians rise and fall in response to the constant internal dialogue over principles and policies. Its leaders are subjected to criticism both at home and abroad, and, in its efforts to maintain the freedoms and rights that are the hallmark of personal government, Israel exposes itself to a constant stream of atrocities. The world supposes that Israel is at war with the Palestinians: but the Palestinians do not exist as a genuine agent in this war, and besides it is only in Israel that any Palestinian Arab can cast his vote in an election and expect to have some influence on what is done. To say this is not to approve of Israel's current policy towards the West Bank. Nor is it a reason to deny the plight of the Palestinians. It is simply to indicate the structural difficulty of the problem, and the near impossibility of making peace when there is no accountable agent with whom to negotiate. If we see the Palestinian conflict in this way, we shall be led to reject the currently fashionable view that the terrorist threat to America comes from America's support for Israel. On the contrary. It is Israel's relation to America that makes Israel the target of militant Islam. The Palestinians have a legitimate grievance. But the Muslim states of the Middle East have done little or nothing to support them in this grievance. Instead they have exploited it for their own imperial ends, like the Syrians and the Iranians in Lebanon, or Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. When Israel became the target for the Islamic militants of Hezbollah it was not in order to achieve some settlement favorable to the Palestinian people. It was in order to punish Israel as an outreach of the West in the dar al-islam. The Islamic militants can therefore be satisfied with nothing short of the total destruction of Israel. For Israel is a nation-state established where no nation-state should be — a place where the only law should be the sharia, and the only loyalty that of Islam. Meanwhile, the occupation of the West Bank, proceeding as it does not through administration but through modernist architecture, is a vivid symbol of the globalizing process: it exhibits a will to permanent and irreversible change, by which local identities are razed and the earth re-shaped as an ubiquitous nowhere. The problem posed by conflict when one of the parties has no real corporate personality is not confined to the Middle East. Globalization is spreading it to the West, and the terrorist attacks are our first large-scale encounter with it. Furthermore, they bring home to us the fact that the remedies devised for dealing with global problems are ineffective against the new kinds of agency that globalization has created. International law can do nothing to control al Qaeda, nor is the United Nations effective against organizations that neither are, nor aspire to be, nation-states. While it is possible to bring pressure to bear on individual states that harbor terrorists, this pressure is ineffective against a failed state, or against a state like Iran, which is happy to ignore requests from Satan. — Roger Scruton is among the most prominent contemporary English writers. A philosopher who was a formerly a professor at Birkbeck College in London and at Boston University, he is now a freelance writer living in Wiltshire. |
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nterestingly,
the principal target of al Qaeda, as of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, is
neither Western civilization, nor Christianity, nor global capitalism,
nor anything else that an be given an abstract profile — it is the
United States, conceived as a sovereign nation-state. In an uncanny way,
the Islamists have identified the core component of the system that they
wish to destroy. It is not the American people who are the enemy. It is
the American state, conceived as an autonomous agent acting freely on
the stage of international politics, and so calling on itself the wrath
of God. When Khomeini described America as "the Great Satan"
he meant it literally. And his doing so showed that he had grasped the
fundamental difference between the West and the rest: Namely, that in
the West, but not in the rest, there is a political process generating
corporate agency, collective responsibility, and moral personality in
the state.
