The political body in space and time

People live in multiple orders, ranging from the intimate family to cultural, regional, and national communities to global economic regimes. Orders stretch back through the history of a people or nation and shape perspectives on future aims. When we attempt to explain perception of normative threat among a population, we see two more dimensions of normative order that may be at stake – internal and external orders, and retrospective and prospective orders. These categories help conceptualize a political body as located in space and time and therefore subject to threats to its existence. As I indicated previously, a body politic is not and cannot be only (myopically) concerned with itself but attends to the larger external order of which it is a part. Norms govern relationships inside boundaries, actions and orders obtained from an environment beyond one's boundaries (tolerating a range of diversity), and the relationships between the internal/external domains.

The boundary between internal order and external environment provides the basis of a group's conception of its physical protection. In WWII, the penetration of the integrity of the United States through the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor sent shock waves through the country, as did the destruction of the World Trade Center in 9/11. As noted before, the typical discourse about threat uses a metaphor of a unitary physical body interacting in a larger external, potentially lethal context: a nation, state, people, or group fears the possible predatory behavior of an outer group. Thus, the distinction between internal and external orders overlaps with the conventional realist analyses of threat. But the internal/external distinction provides insight into threat interpretation in another way, indeed quite contrary to the implications of the traditional realist line. It is not just physical violation that is feared or that elicits anger but normative violation. Transgression elicits a sensation of harm not because there is no order (chaos) beyond one's borders, but because of an alternative order, and one that may be quite powerful, as I emphasized earlier. The notion of damage arises from the potential of a threatening regime to restructure one's world along divergent lines. In Frank Capra's film depicting the Japanese as America's enemy in WWII – ‘Know Your Enemy – Japan’ – commissioned by the US War Department to justify the Pacific War to American soldiers and the public, the Japanese are portrayed not simply as embodying values contrary to America's but as a powerful alternative civilization whose aim was to impose that regime on the entire world. Indeed, the specter of ‘world domination’ used by many political groups to describe the aims of their nemesis shows that the nature of threat arises in the power of another order to subvert one's own order, not a lack of order per se. I discuss the process of subversion in the next section.

The internal/external order distinction also helps us recognize an ‘order of orders’. That is, threat is not just outside-in, from alien others, or destructive forces; in addition, the borders between inside/outside mark others who exist in a normatively relevant relationship with one's self. All relationships across boundaries sustain internal/external markers but those markers do more than establish distance, competition, and potential violence. They also shape expectations about how the other ought to behave in an international environment and toward oneself. Typically, theorists picture the condition of self-sufficient units in a global context as sovereign and disconnected entities, enjoying independence but also subject to the security dilemmas of ‘anarchy’. While a normatively atomized subsistence may have prevailed among independent communities in some primordial pre-history, this has not been the case among political entities for millennia. Ordering guides relationships between and among relatively separate communities.22 Internal/external orders constitute an order of functional and normative bodies relating to one another across and through the divisions, even if the terms of relationship are quite thin and minimal.23 For example, the system of state sovereignty ratified in the Treaty of Westphalia was far from being a regime of disconnection and anarchy; it essentially set up a system guided by an idea of respect for the autonomous agency of other states like one's self, an idea that presumes a level of functioning and normative interdependence.24 The idea of sovereignty as a normative aim subsequently fueled nationalist, anti-colonial movements in the 20th century as well. An even more surprising example of the implicit normativity of relationships of this type can be seen in the notion of a ‘right of conquest’. As Sharon Korman explores in her fine book on the history of the principle of the ‘right of conquest’: ‘[I]n the Middle Ages … war was seen as a kind of judicial procedure or “trial by conquest”. On this view war was a contest between two opponents, each of which thought itself to have the just cause, but with no court to decide the question between them; and in going to battle they were appealing to the decision of God, who was thought to have ordained that the just side would win’ (1996, 11). War itself appears as a decision procedure. While this may represent the thinnest possible bases of normativity, it is nevertheless a consciously shared will to settle on ‘objective’ means to rationalize relationships between autonomous political bodies. Expectations are built up between those located vis-à-vis internal/external categories and therefore a form of normative threat becomes a possibility, provoking the deeply normative emotion of anger, as much as fear.

The final fundamentally important dimension of normative order consists in its maintenance or achievement in time, as an order that must be sustained or brought into being. How is its temporality tied to perception of threat? Political communities embody retrospective order because they have engrained within them paths of behavior worked out over time and expectations about what is owed to one another, through institutions, identities, habits, and norms of right or justice. But as we have already noted, a status quo order will entrench injustices, discrepancies, and resentments, and therefore may lead to a re-creation of ideas of order, and a drive to replace one order with an entirely new one, or intellectual innovators will re-assess the world and construct an alternative vision of order. Christianity and Marxism at their foundings were prospective orders in that they brought into being new ways of interpreting peoples’ relationships to one another – politicizing collections of persons as unitary entities seeking initially iconoclastic aims. In addition, the causes of new visions derive from long-term changes, natural disasters, or crises, which dislocate orders and require that innovative arrangements be brought forth. These sources of systemic change can be labeled prospective normative order. The categories of retrospective and prospective normative order enable the theorist to study threat perception as a dynamic process driven by people's search for meaning (not just power) through their membership. A political body must make efforts to sustain its commitment power over time. It will succeed to varying degrees but constant pressures also demand re-affirmation. In addition, normative orders that worked at one time come to be seen as corrupt, leading people to re-assess those old arrangements and the persons sustaining them as threats to a new vision. As Burke (quoting Addison) pondered the future of the French nation after the Revolution, he acknowledged that people would go on to experiment with a ‘great variety of untried being’. Threats to normative order then can also be interpreted through the prism of securing one's past self against possible destructive forces, or through the desire to break from an oppressive past to invent a new and different order. The latter leads a freshly formed group to re-assess prevailing conditions as threats, where before these had been taken-for-granted parameters.

In this section, I analyzed objective dimensions of normative ordering for a political entity. Order and its dimensions set background cognitive schemas, maintain role relationships internally and externally, provide means and ends, orient a political entity moving in time, and assure the protective power of the political body. Orders of value constitute a people and thereby create a reality, a concretely situated political body in space and time. These objective dimensions help us understand the ‘concreteness’ of normative beliefs. They are not ‘just’ beliefs or values floating around in a public sphere or cultural milieu but anchor a body politic to a world view of itself and others. Nevertheless, we cannot explain the emergence of perception of threat on the basis of these categories.

Before analyzing the ways in which normative harms can be felt and conceptualized, that is, the general modes (types) of threat, I should mention the large issue of the conditions under which normative threats emerge. If normative orders are of essential value, and forces constantly at play to dislocate those orders, why do we not witness normative threats arising all the time? The normative ordering of a political society is highly complex – made up of identities, structures of interest, habits, emotions, and beliefs about how the world works and how it ought to work. We cannot hope to pinpoint with any precision where the causal node of threat emergence will be found. A full explanation would comprehend the subterranean changes taking place at the level of habits, structures of interest, shifts in perceptual frameworks, and so forth, but change at those levels must become accessible to conscious minds and discourses of persons as members of political bodies. Small- and large-scale changes occur incrementally and continuously, and people living within relatively stable institutions and orderings do not usually see this. In addition, not all change will elicit normative threat. Something must happen – some public or dramatic human action, revelations about accumulated (social or other type of) processes, or the articulation of new narratives about justice or right – to sharpen people into a consciousness about a challenge to their order. Events such as an election, a breach of boundaries, a terrorist attack, and an acquisition by a rogue nation of new military technology emerge as infractions of order not simply because they challenge given power arrangements. They challenge power arrangements insofar as a will to prohibit the desired norms of relationships appears behind the act, event or Other. Are there certain conditions making this will to harm more apparent (no general theory is possible)?

Threats of any type arise when political bodies see themselves in a state of self-conscious movement: the ambivalent settling of terms between the Soviets and the United States after joint action in WWII; the Chinese Navy flexing its muscles in the Pacific waters; Oklahomans reacting to Obama's election and conceived pressures of foreign law in the United States. I would suggest that beyond background conditions of salient changes in the power of groups as they grow or diminish, three more proximate states of affairs might be highlighted. Felt weakness or need for consolidation within a collective body may provoke leaders to re-claim collective power for the political body through accentuating a subversive threat or grievance from an alternative group. Evrigenis’ analysis of metus hostilis traces this tendency and its formulation as a principle in the history of political thought (see Evrigenis 2008). A second contributing condition would be newly empowered and ideologically energized political bodies – Napoleon's revolutionary wars are famous examples of this situation. Finally, people and leaders may find themselves thrown into sharp contrast with another normative ordering on what they thought was their own stage. This confrontation would have the effect of piercing the veil of familiarity, rightness, and effectiveness. One's ‘habitus’ of performance, we might say, is assaulted and leads to a sense of shame and acute perception of threat. The hostility of neighboring Arab states to Israel's presence in the Middle East might be interpreted in this way. Thus, fear, pride, and shame (all accompanied by anger!) grow in response to transformations in conditions that contribute to the emergence of threats as normatively powerful phenomena. In all of these situations, the role of salient beliefs about order create the framework for interpretation, and they intensify practical and more material tensions. The simple fact of differences in normative beliefs does not in and of itself cause such tensions to erupt.

Modes and perceptions of harm to normative order

In this section, I present three modes of harm to a normative order and the corresponding subjective experiences people as members of the political body will have in response. Normative order creates objective value in the eyes of those so committed, and the failure to achieve it will cause strong emotional reaction.25