Harald Wydra (University of Cambridge)
New Wars and the Symbolism of the Victim
In many of the recent wars organised attacks against enemies have been justified by self-attributed victimhood (as vengeance for past humiliations, or, as prevention of ethnic cleansing). After 9/11 (‘we are all Americans’) even the ‘international community’ has based security strategies and interventionism on the experience of being victim to terrorist attacks.
This paper connects ‘new wars’ to the material and spiritual effects of ‘old’, total wars in the twentieth century. My argument is that the transformations of the meanings of ‘victimhood’ occurred through the very modes of total warfare. Total warfare is a liminal phenomenon, where violence loses the ritual aspect of a duel and becomes open combat (Zweikampf). The dynamics of the two world wars transformed the meaning of victim and sacrifice, turning the European civil war into a global civil war, based on military deterrence but also a mimetic relationship of ‘twins’. The transgression of boundaries blurs the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, turning cities into (potential) battlefields, and lacking proper ends (and beginnings of) hostile actions. As the example of the Yugoslav wars and radical tendencies within the Middle East suggest, far from producing difference, this latent continuity of warfare makes antagonists ever more identical. In Girard’s reading of Clausewitz, the rise to extremes makes each antagonist lose its own intentionality, turning them into mimetic doubles. Reciprocity (Wechselwirkung) among enemies dissimulates their strong resemblance, if not identity, under narratives and images of diversity. War thus continues in ‘peace’ times, turning defenders into aggressors.
The genocidal aspects of many conflicts suggest that the symbol of the victim has become ambiguous, unable to achieve reconciliation. This is reflected in the cognitive failure by which one never belongs to the persecuting party, making one’s own aggression legitimate or ‘just’. If enmity is a reciprocal mimetic process, nurtured on the disfiguring of enemies as evil and radicalised by technological armament and speed, attempts to resolve conflicts by objective mechanisms such as the rule of law is unlikely to break the spiral of violence. Empathy with victims requires a spiritual conversion inside oneself. Conversion can only occur by the moral recognition that beyond the cultural and historical differences, one’s enemy shares the same humanity.
Harald Wydra is a Fellow of St Catharine’s College at the University of
Cambridge. After studies of history and political science at the Universities
of Regensburg and Salamanca, he took a PhD in Social and Political Sciences
from the European University Institute in Florence. Before coming to Cambridge
in 2003 he taught Politics at the University of Regensburg. He held visiting
fellowships at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Australian National University in
Canberra. In 2009 he was a Visiting Professor at the Université Paris
Ouest Nanterre La Défense. He is also a
founding editor of the journal 'International Political Anthropology'. His most recent books are Communism and
the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge
University Press, 2007) and Democracy and Myth in Russia and Eastern
Europe (co-editor) (Routledge, 2007). He
has research interests in European Politics, comparative democratisation,
political anthropology, and interpretive methods in the social sciences.
