Governing from the Skies. Thomas Hippler
United Nations, leads us back to our point of departure: Libya. As distinct from the air strikes of 1911, those of 2011 were motivated not by a ‘civilizing mission’ but by humanitarian reasons, precisely spelled out by a Security Council resolution. They pertain therefore to what the theorist of ‘new wars’, Mary Kaldor, has called ‘cosmopolitical law enforcement’, designed to tackle forces of fragmentation, the erosion of state power, ‘identity politics’, and ‘asymmetrical wars’.8 And it is precisely these elements that connect the Libyan experience of 1911 with that of 2011: all the factors that the ‘new wars’ theorists present as bound up with globalization were in fact already at work in colonial ‘police bombing’.
In this way, the history of aerial bombing converges with the major themes of twentieth-century history: the nationalization of societies and war; democracy and totalitarianism; colonialism and decolonization; Third Worldism and globalization; the social state and its decline in the face of neoliberalism. From this point of view, the history of aerial bombing offers a point of entry, an ‘Ansatzpunkt’ such as Erich Auerbach demanded for a philological approach to world literature, into writing a global history of the twentieth century: ‘a particular phenomenon, the best delimited, the most concrete possible’,9 yet one that makes it possible, in the manner of a transverse section, to draw together some of the salient characteristics of this century. In short, bombing functions as the starting point of a global history. Its ambition is not encyclopaedic, and the history presented here does not claim to be in any way exhaustive. Yet it presents a series of examples that seem particularly instructive for our understanding of the developments in the world system over the course of the past century.
Our wars are increasingly hybrid, conflating civilian and military aspects, regular and irregular fighters. They are also becoming increasingly asymmetrical on the levels of technology and ‘morale’. Air strikes, which are unilateral by nature, are situated beyond the classic combat that opposes two equal adversaries. And, despite the very complimentary attributes conferred on it (aviation as the weapon of civilization, perpetual peace, cosmopolitism, and the airman as a knight of the skies), nothing is less chivalrous than air war, which substitutes unilateral strike for combat, and transforms the adversary into a nuisance to be eliminated. We can understand, however, why the strategist Edward Luttwak should see it as the privileged instrument of his ‘post-heroic’ war: it has no victims (in the ranks of the justiciars), it eliminates the problem of mobilization and, at the same stroke, makes it possible to dispense with democratic debate.10 In a word, this war is no longer a war but a police operation. The bomb is not the sword of the knight of the sky, but the deadly truncheon of the global cop.
Just as the activities of police and military forces are increasingly less disassociated from one another, so the distinction between the citizen and the enemy to be killed also tends to be effaced. The targeted assassination of the Islamist Anwar al-Aulaqi offers a good example of this. While it was illegal to bug his phone without the authorization of a judge, this US citizen could be killed by a drone on 30 September 2011 without any legal process or the least judicial control, simply on the order of the president of the United States. The evolution of air warfare thus reveals to the world the convergence between the ‘advances’ of international law and the pure violence of the state.
On 25 July 1909, H. G. Wells was doing gymnastics in his garden when his telephone started ringing persistently. With some annoyance, he finally decided to interrupt his exercises and picked up the handset. The message was hard to understand amid the crackling: ‘Blériot has crossed the Channel … an article … on what that means!’1 From his fine house in Sandgate, Kent, Wells enjoyed a superb view over the Channel and could almost see Dover, some fifty kilometres to the east, where Blériot had just landed.2 As Wells had just enjoyed tremendous success with his science fiction novel War in the Air, the Daily Mail editors naturally thought of him to comment on the historic event: Louis Blériot crosses the Channel by aeroplane.
Wells began to reflect. First of all, he greeted the sporting triumph as a gentleman: ‘Mr Blériot has done a good performance, and his rival Mr Latham really did not stand a chance. That is the most important thing for us.’ Wells recognized that he had underestimated the stability of aircraft, along with almost all other experts on aeronautics. But as he pursued his train of thought, certain worries arose. The consequences of these flights suddenly struck him as tremendous, fearful, and terrible:
This event – that this thing invented by a foreigner, built by a foreigner, driven by a foreigner, could cross the Channel with the ease of a bird flying over a stream – poses the problem in a dramatic fashion. Our manhood is now defective … The foreigner makes a better class of men than we others.
Foreigners were cultivated, curious, inventive, enterprising. The British were well brought up but lacked initiative, happy to play golf while the French, Americans, Germans, and even Brazilians rose up in the air. On top of the wound this inflicted on patriotic narcissism, another worry struck the writer. The Channel crossing had needed a combination of will, courage, and technical competence. Blériot was certainly a hero, but a hero of a new kind: he embodied an emerging new elite, a new ruling class ready to assume power. The ‘natural democracy’ of the English could not stand up against the technological heroes of the flying machines.3 These dark thoughts beset Wells to the point of bordering on the paranoid. If a Frenchman had flown in an aircraft, was it rational to conclude that foreigners produced a better class of man than the British? Wells may have exaggerated in seeing this flight as heralding the end of a particular political system, and of democracy in general. But, from his point of view, the British political, social, and cultural system was losing ground vis-à-vis its geostrategic rivals, and an unprecedented military danger suddenly threatened a country that had up till now believed itself invulnerable, protected by its island shores. Planes setting out from Calais would soon be able to drop explosives on London. Great Britain had to change its mode of social organization, its educational institutions, with a view to equipping itself with the means to create its own class of men capable of matching this technological heroism.
With today’s hindsight, we can discern in Wells’s delirium the anticipation of the end of a historical cycle marked by British hegemony on a global scale, a shift that would take half a century to complete. According to such a well-informed observer as Eric Hobsbawm, it was not until the Suez crisis of 1956 that Great Britain recovered from the shock inflicted in 1909 and recognized that after the loss of its colonies it was now only a second-rate power.4
In 1909, however, the United Kingdom remained the hegemonic centre of the world. It had long possessed the military means to control and secure the great sea routes. As a centre of commercial exchange on a global scale, the hegemon had to be in a position to defend its merchant shipping throughout the world; it had to possess what the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan called ‘command of the sea’. This required two conditions: first of all, a navy capable not only of confronting any other, but also – often more difficult – of effectively protecting its own merchant shipping against piracy. This made it necessary to possess naval bases located on the main sea routes, and ideally throughout the world, so as to be able to refuel and repair ships. The advantage of Britain’s island position was clear. Maritime supremacy enabled the dominant power both to establish its hegemony in the world system and to defend the metropolis. In other words, an island hegemonic power that enjoyed maritime supremacy could defend itself at less cost than a continental hegemonic power, forced both to maintain a strong navy in the interest of overseas expansion and a strong land army to defend its home territory. The British army was more like an expeditionary force to be deployed in the colonies in normal times and on the European continent in times of major crisis, as during the Napoleonic wars or the First World War. As long as Great Britain dominated the seas, its home territory was protected against any attack. The great battles of European wars took place across the Channel, on the plains of Flanders.
This makes it easier to understand Wells’s shock. From