Prospects for civil war
Re-reading Enzensberger
In 1993, when the idea of a symbolic civil war was crystallizing in my thinking (prompted by the study of medieval monetary theory and the social upheavals of the 14th century1), Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote his Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg – a text I’d only noticed at the time in its abridged essay form2. If you pick the book up today, thirty years after its publication, you're struck by the prescient clarity with which Enzensberger approaches his question. If you go back to when the book was written in 1993, it’s surprising the author took this topic up at all – especially since the balance of terror was over and the End of History had begun. Bill Clinton had just been elected president – and if the horror of civil war flared anywhere, it was on the fringes of civilization, in Somalia, Rwanda – or the disintegrating Soviet Union. The only examples Enzensberger could provide in support of his radical thesis were the Hoyerswerda riots and the excesses that Berlin's Autonomists took the liberty of committing during the May Day celebrations3 – splattered venting that, while horrific, could hardly have been considered representative of the overall mood of the softly blurred historical landscape. Now what may seem like an argumentative weakness to contemporaries is, in actuality, the text's great merit. Because Enzensberger grapples with precisely what's the essence of civil war. He starts with the assumption that the nation-state-dominated wars of modernity are historical exceptions (as a formal rationalization of slaughter) – whereas civil war is war’s primordial state.4 With this in mind, Enzensberger leaves the cultivated idyll of the 18th century, as he steps out into the wilderness beyond the bourgeois’ front garden. Because, as to the extent atavism enters the horizon of his thoughts, and the old nation-state’s order gives way to a "new world disorder," it becomes visible that what’s taken for granted in Europe is the exception, not the rule.
We should note that the wars of the nineteenth century which led to the formation of today’s nation-states were more than simply irrational brawls. By focusing only on the emotive chauvinism that characterized old-style European nationalism it is easy to overlook the constructive contribution it made. After all, it helped bring about the drafting of constitutions, the abolition of serfdom, the emancipation of the Jews, the establishment of the rule of law and the enfranchisement of the general population.5
If the world of 1993 bears a signature, it is the beginnings of the modern nation-state's infirmity. This was already becoming apparent by the end of the 1960s. With Bretton Woods’ demise, Capital was no longer at home in the nation-states’ capitals – but following the facelessness of globally operating financial markets. Against this background, Enzensberger's thesis could be read as a sinister variation of Francis Fukuyama's End of History, which, in its oft-forgotten full title, The End of History and the Last Man, puts Nietzsche's ‘last man’ on the world stage. When Fukuyama says that this last man – the consumer – represents "the endpoint of the ideological evolution of humanity” and the “final form of human government,"6 he is saying that capitalism has triumphed above all else. For Enzensberger, this victory – and this distinguishes him from Fukuyama – is a Pyrrhic one. Because of globalization, ever-larger population groups have slipped into a precarity where a no-future mentality seizes them. This can be seen especially in the neo-Nazis, whom Enzensberger understands as guided not by conviction but as fakes and wannabes, as nationalists of the last days: a desperate rag-tag posse. Consequently, unlike the guerrillas and terrorists of the sixties and seventies, they no longer deliver justificatory pamphlets, pedantic catechisms, and ideological justifications.
Today’s lot seem to find all that unnecessary. The complete absence of conviction is striking.7
And since the neo-Nazi is indifferent to his future, it is no wonder he doesn’t care a jot for his country.8 Now, the flaring up of a placeless resentment that, for this reason, only lashes out wildly is not the only consequence accompanying the end of history. The second consequence, though noiseless but much more severe in its psychological effect, is that the juste milieu –as Enzensberger mercilessly observes – transforms itself into a form of lumpenbourgeoisie9, which has the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with its loss of the traditional agreements. If the marginalized react with brute force, the economically better-off respond by compensating for the loss of agency and future certainty with an all the more noble attitude. And just as the impoverished aristocracy took refuge in conceit, they assert a sovereignty that increasingly lacks reality. This is where the media come into play (which Enzensberger, in the pre-internet era, links primarily with the empty null medium of television):
To a certain extent the media magnify the person who has become unreal and give him a kind of proof of existence. This is a consequence of the pathological selflessness that Hannah Arendt diagnosed.10
It is remarkable that Enzensberger, who had been invited by Fidel Castro to Cuba at the end of the 1960s (and experienced great disillusionment in the revolutionary people's factory), refers to Hannah Arendt. Because Hannah Arendt developed her concept of 'pathological selflessness' not on the Federal Republic's petty bourgeoisie but on citizens who’d committed themselves to Nazi totalitarian madness. And just as the character study of Adolf Eichmann led Hannah Arendt to her famous conclusion regarding the banality of evil, it’s to be expected that some form of Breaking Bad is also in store for the lumpenbourgeoisie – except that the slippery slope is not of sheer ressentiment but in the form of hypermorality (confirming de Maistre's dark remark that the road to hell is paved with good intentions). Indeed, the philosophical universalism that made Europe great under the conditions of globalization is proving to be a moral trap of the first order because the television image informing people about real-time events in remote regions of the world compels them to take a stand on these events – making the observer of the horror if he pays attention to the globalized worldview, a confidant. Or, as Enzensberger writes:
If these images of terror don’t make terrorists out of us, they turn us at least into voyeurs, and subject each one of us to an enduring moral blackmail. Once we have become eyewitnesses, we are open to accusations: now that we know the situation, what are we going to do about it? Television, the most corrupt of all media, is transformed into a paragon of morality.11
To counter this accusation is what’s subsequently been given the label of "humanitarian intervention" – military interventions that represent a never-ending series of failures: The first Iraq war (1991), Somalia (1992), and finally, the disastrous UNAMIR mission for Rwanda, which allowed the genocide of the Hutu to play out in full view of the world’s public. And so what happens has had to occur; the impulse of omniresponsibility resulting in a moral catastrophe:
If you refuse to intervene militarily, your are accused of discrimination and barbarism. And with this, the anti-colonial argument loses more ground. On the one hand, it preaches sovereignty, independence and non-intervention; on the other, the might of the West is allocated a universal responsibility, so that the party that is really to blame appears both as prospective saviour and invader. This has already led to some voices calling for recolonization in the form of a mandate.12
This excessive demand, which confronts the Kantian World Citizen with conditions not within his power to control, leads not only to all kinds of conceivable aporias – it makes the world’s savior forget his certainties and institutions have long since become sickly in their raison d'etre – that they express more wishful thinking than reality. This is precisely the sinister meaning of Enzenberger's dictum:
Morality is the last refuge of Eurocentrism. 13
In other words: you take refuge in a fantasy world. Because this conjures up an ego that no longer exists, the world’s savior falls prey to an autistic self-image – this, in turn, shows him structurally to be related to his counterpart, the detested neo-Nazi. Now you don't have to look far to get this personality type’s psychogram. Every politician who’s succeeded in today's media world has, nolens volens, been forced into such a moral corset. That they’ve turned away from caring for one of capitalism's degraded creatures, the proletarian, and, instead, have thrown themselves into the moral economy’s arms is almost inevitable. We could speak of a moment of psychic inflation, a mental bubble formation in which desire alone is the father of thought – and becomes the mother of a complete loss of reality. If we consider Dwight D. Eisenhower's problem-solving strategy ("If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it!"), the climate crisis represents something like an ideal way out. In this way, our field of action moves into the utmost abstraction and, at the same time, provides an apocalyptic urgency saving the believer from needing to reconcile their conjured worldview with the reality of their own life. In this sense, hypermorality is just another word for reality loss. If we let the major political events of recent decades pass us by, we see it’s no longer the classical calculation of interests that’s determined political decisions, but images alone that’ve tipped the scales: the burning TwinTowers or the body of the Syrian boy washed up on the beach of Bodrum who became an icon of the migration crisis.
If these images urge us to act, it’s only because they disturb the view of our society’s self-understanding of aroused concerns. It's with this reference to mental autism that Enzensberger opens up the actual civil war scenario. And this doesn’t lie in any ideology but is solely because of a vacuum that has opened up in people – or, more precisely: a sense of self that’s hitherto been taken for granted has dissolved into nothingness. Because something like a moral bankruptcy has occurred here, the free radical strives to fill the void – whereby the farce can take on different forms, be it taking refuge in sheer violence, identitarian promise, or the elation of moral supremacy. Curiously, the very listing of these highly diverse symptoms describes the contemporary dislocations; indeed, we can see the present day’s descriptions of the non-discourses that exclude and marginalize – making it all the more important to address the common cause.
Selflessness not as a positive attribute, but as a lack: the feeling that you yourself are not affected by events, that you can be replaced at any time, anywhere, by someone else...14
This feeling of replaceability is tantamount to existential extinction – and is probably the most profound cause of contemporary malaise, this toxic mixture of ressentiment and a vanished future. It is precisely here Enzensberger sees the reason for industrialized societies to slip into a state of molecular civil war. This is all the more dangerous because the atavisms and civilizational regressions can form an explosive combination with advanced technology. Whereas in the 1960s, we could still indulge in the illusion that the world was becoming a village, the exact opposite has occurred: the village has become the world. And as a result, the tribes can coordinate via Whatsapp, and civilizational regression is accomplished with technology’s help. That's why it’s too short-sighted to brand social media as the troublemaker causing hatred, agitation, and vagrant violence. The actual cause is that moment of inner emptiness taking hold of society in so many different ways, which means that the occasions leading to the discharge of rage and violence are trifles.
What gives today’s civil wars a new and terrifying slant is the fact that they are waged without stakes on either side, that they are wars ‘about nothing at all.’ This gives them the characteristics of a political retrovirus.15
Yet the naked violence and the sensitivities of the language police who incriminate the use of individual words, even silence (Silence is violence), represent both sides of the same coin...
If we look at what has happened in France in recent weeks, we can say that the political retrovirus has long since taken over the stage. And because nothing is at stake, ressentiment, following psychic inflation's logic, is only looking for the right occasion. So the killing of a young person becomes social fanfare; the feeling of unworthiness procures satisfaction in the sign of a martyr (however unsuitable he may present himself16 ). The fact that this orgy is destroying the neighborhood you live in; your neighbors’ cars; your children's schools; and even devasting your local library only proves the depth of feeling alienated. No less disturbing, however, is the reaction of the lumpenbourgeoisie. Because instead of naming the senseless destruction as such, it sweepingly accuses the law enforcers of systemic racism. Something like a clandestine acquiescence, even complicity, shines through (which, in symbolic form, is only the repetition of the senseless act of self-destruction). In this sense, naked violence and the lumpenbourgeoisie are twin siblings – conjuring up reasons where, in truth, there is nothing – or, as Max Horkheimer once put it with beautiful clarity:
Are not violence and senselessness ultimately one and the same?
No, civil war doesn't begin only when stones fly, blood flows, and the streets go up in flames. When Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, speaks of a pessimism "that does not merely say no, wants no, but [...] does no”, he has described that logic of escalation leading from negation to activism to atrocity. Now this descent is not a conscious decision. Instead, we're dealing with a creeping devaluation of values, a limbo economy where undercutting has gradually become the economic rationale.
Where everything is available below cost (copy & paste), the epistemic is hijacked by bullshit, the aesthetic is overwhelmed by social kitsch, and morality by what is called ‘moral grandstanding’17 : virtue flaunting.18
If we remember the insight that Hannah Arendt describes in her lecture Some Questions of Moral Philosophy19 as the root of all evil, it consists in the fact that the person concerned refuses to remember all the dissonances we have to deal with in modernity. To think them and spell them together into a new form of self-understanding (that which I call the dividuum) would be the order of the day. Or, as Leonhard Cohen put it in a beautiful line of a lyric:
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light comes in.
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
Video showing the mother of the slain teenager leading a protest
Many of Martin’s central leitmotifs are relieved-out from his studies of Nicole Oresme, particularly the latter’s writings on proportions and money. Here, he’s referencing the question: Who owns the money as a starting point of Modernity’s understanding of representation – which came fully into being with the Leviathan at the end of the 17th century. See Oresmé, N. – The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresmé, in The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresmé and English Mint Documents. Translated by Charles Johnson. London/M, 1956. [Translator’s note]
Published initially as Ausblicke auf den Bürgerkrieg in Der Spiegel, #25, 6/20/1993 [Translator’s note]
The Hoyerswerda riots were part of a series of xenophobic events in Germany beginning in 1991; they also include the Rostock-Lichtenhagen riots; and the Solingen arson attack in 1993. The May Day celebrations in Kreuzberg refer to May 1st street festivals and demonstrations organized by leftist groups starting in 1987. Kreuzberg was known for squatters and autonomist skirmishes before 1987 but became particularly riotous on the first May Day celebration and continued as such through 1993 when an attempt was made to expel them. Of note is these rioters were mostly young men inspired not by Marxist theory – but a resentment party of violence attacking police and destroying the neighborhood. [Translator’s note]
There is an unexplained linkage between hating one’s neighbour and hating a stranger. The original target of our hatred was probably always our neighbour; only with the formation of larger communities was the stranger on the other side of the border declared an enemy. See Hans Magnus Enzensberger – Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia, New York. 1994, pp. 12-13.
Ibid, pp. 22.
See Fukuyama, F – The End of History and the Last Man, New York / Toronto 1992, p. XI.
Ibid, p. 21.
Ibid, p. 24.
The lumpen in lumpenbourgeoisie can be translated as a rag-tag group. Here, Martin is referring to how Enzensberger notes the participants become more difficult to tell apart...begin to resemble each other in their behaviour and in their moral attitudes...the police and army act like any other armed gang...The lupenproletariat gives rise to a corresponding lupenbourgeoise, which in its choice of means copies its enemy – ibid, p. 47. [Translator’s note]
Ibid, p. 54.
Ibid, p. 59.
Ibid, p. 64.
Ibid, p. 59.
Ibid, pp. 26-27.
Ibid, p. 30.
Seventeen-year-old Nael Mertzoouk had already amassed a list of 15 criminal records by his young age: including driving without a license; without insurance, and with a false license plate; receiving stolen property; drug trafficking; and five charges of resisting law enforcement.
Tosi, J. & Warmke, B. – Moral Grandstanding. In: Philosophy & Public Affairs 44(3), June 2016. pp. 197-21.
Burckhardt, M. – Sham and Delusion. In: Lettre International, #138, Fall 2022.
This is from a course Hannah Arendt taught between 1965-66 at the New School of Social Research in New York. See Arendt, H. – Some Questions of Moral Philosophy, in Responsibility and Judgement, New York, 2003. pp.49-158. [Translator’s note]