Transgression/grievance

‘I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination’. These words of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederate States exhibit the first foundation for a perception of threat: transgression of an assumed right or norm of treatment. By transgression of a normative order I mean harm that takes place as a result of a betrayal of presumed norms operating between persons. The norms may be tacit and perceived in the breach, or they may be well articulated and publicly (intersubjectively) acknowledged. The perceiver is attached to those norms; the political body depends on them to sustain expectations about treatments between people. And they care about them because in their very acknowledgment and maintenance, they signify that some element of respect is granted.

The emotional sensation in reaction to transgression appears in the form of grievance. Surprisingly little work has been done on grievance as a basis of threat perception.26 The rhetoric of grievance and insult often accompanies hostile confrontations, and typically the language is taken as a surface rhetoric rationalizing animosity, which ‘in reality’ is driven by a desire for power, greed, or identity antipathy. But grievance cannot be relegated to the status of mere moralizing language hiding strategic motives. It is a powerful emotional orientation resting on reasonable and specific claims. The Oxford English Dictionary defines grievance in the following way: ‘A circumstance or state of things which is felt to be oppressive. In mod. use, a wrong or hardship (real or supposed) which is considered a legitimate ground of complaint.’ Another typical definition describes it as ‘a cause of distress felt to afford reason for complaint or resistance’. The core meaning is encapsulated in the notion of a deprivation or violation of what one expects from a set of rules (legitimate ground, reason for resistance). A grievance stands for a sense of loss or failure to be accorded one's rightful resources, power or status/recognition relative to a situation that has been (retrospective order) or ought to be (prospective order). Thus, grievance is not just a feeling of anger or insult but an emotion essentially tied to a cognitive belief that an order, which ought to be, has been transgressed. When an interpretation of threat to the normative order is posited, it attributes to the threatener a will to violate the order obtaining between the parties. This is not an add-on but acts as a primary trigger to a larger sense of impending violation.

Grievance is an emotionally inflected claim attached to a rational mapping of the world. The public's sometimes inchoate emotions can be formulated, given shape, and directed in terms of this mapping. Not every grievance will take on great significance and many are manageable within a rule-bound regime and can be solved through negotiation and adjudication. But some transgressions are perceived to be willfully disruptive of the principles of interaction. The Locke passages quoted earlier described the people's perception of patterns of harm indicative of what they believed to be the king's will to overturn basic regimes of order. Protestors in Egypt and across the Middle East in the ‘Arab Spring’ (2011) designated a number of specific grievances as provoking major anger and propelling them to take to the streets (e.g. the government's practice of extra-legal detention of political opponents). Aristotle offers perhaps the first theoretical analysis of the underpinnings of this type of normative threat in his theory of conflict in Book V of the Politics on the ‘Causes of Factional Conflict and Constitutional Change’ (Aristotle 1995). Setting the stage and first in Aristotle's depiction was the ‘state of mind’ or psychological predisposition toward pursuing faction or revolution. He argued that any order – embodied politically in a constitution – was based upon some notion of justice – a principle for the arrangement of offices (power and rule). Democracies, he noted, arose out of the idea that ‘those who were equal in any one respect were equal absolutely, and in all respects’ – hence, democracies institutionalized the application of the principle of free-birth to every criteria of worth, including equal share in rule. Oligarchies, in contrast, institutionalized the idea of the value of inequality of worth, that is, the principle of superiority. The wealthy ought to rule in proportion to their superiority, a principle of inequality. Whereas some may reduce these contentions to mere claims of power, Aristotle emphasized the inherently principled nature – the reasoning – embedded in the ordering and in the claims on all sides: ‘In oligarchies … the ground which the masses take in justifications of forming factions is that they are unjustly treated in being denied equal rights although they are actually equal. In democracies the ground taken by the notables is the injustice of their having only equal rights although they are actually superior’ (V.3, 186). The utility of this discussion comes in Aristotle's stress on the justice-based claims inducing conflict. Faction emerges when one or more sides in a constitution believe their rightful share in the order of the society has not been respected according to the conception of justice they believe ought to apply, thus conflict arises out of a belief that a transgression of order has taken place through violation of principle. Aristotle contends: ‘It is the passion for equality which is thus at the root of faction’ (V.1, 180). Perception of threat emerges against this background set of rules of interaction, a normative order.

Aristotle analyzed conflict and motivations for transformations of order (revolutions) arising within a community, but his analysis offers a general model to think through conflict between communities in an international setting as well. Grievance specifically implies a normative background shared to at least a minimal degree by the parties in the threat situation. In the international environment, the acceptance of a minimal order of rules in terms of which a reaction of grievance makes sense is attested to in a number of ways. The idea of a society of nations already captures within it a modicum of shared expectations. ‘Social’ interaction brings about judgments regarding brutality, accountability, hypocrisy, and other claims of transgression among agents, which testifies to a substantial if not fully obligatory collection of interwoven norms. This order of rules does not depend on substantive moral norms like those guiding obligations within a constituted community. The international normative order emerges from worked-out pragmatic relationships between identifiable communities with identities regarded as ‘acceptable’ and capable of interacting with one another, and on the language that nations use to communicate. I am not arguing that justice guides international relationships. But as referenced earlier, even in an age of wars of aggression, when conquest, plunder, and imperialism were acceptable, a thin working normative lingua franca existed among interacting countries. We can find examples in historical texts of the invocation of normative judgments used by actors and built up over time. Woodrow Wilson, for example, writing to German leaders after the bombing of the Lusitania in 1915, appealed to the Germans’ sense of honor and the right of neutral ships to sail in any waters necessary or desired:

Recalling the humane and enlightened attitude hitherto assumed by the Imperial German Government in matters of international right, and particularly with regard to the freedom of the seas; having learned to recognize the German views and the German influence in the field of international obligation as always engaged upon the side of justice and humanity; and having understood the instructions of the Imperial German Government to its naval commanders to be upon the same plane of humane action prescribed by the naval codes of other nations, the Government of the United States was loath to believe – it can not now bring itself to believe – that these acts, so absolutely contrary to the rules, the practices, and the spirit of modern warfare, could have the countenance or sanction of that great Government.

John Dower in his powerful history of the ‘race war’ in the Pacific during WWII notes that ‘scarcely acknowledged during the war years, a submerged strata of common values developed in the very midst of the polemics each side employed against the enemy. Each raised the banner of liberation, morality, and peace. Whatever their actual deeds may have been, moreover, they condemned atrocities, exploitation, and theories of racial supremacy’ (Dower 1986, 28 and 29). In fact, Japan had pointed out the injustice of western colonialism in Asia where half a million British ruled 350 million Indians, or 200,000 Dutchman governed 60 million in the East Indies: ‘Money squeezed from the blood of Asians maintains these small white minorities in their luxurious mode of life – or disappears to the respective home countries’ read one of the Japanese motivational tracts for soldiers as they entered the field of war (Dower 1986, 24–25).

A background of normative judgments provides a basis for grievances to emerge in theory and to be justified in terms of a public perception that a principle of an accepted legitimated arrangement has been violated. With the Japanese in WWII, this perception propelled antipathy toward the United States and the west as a threat and mobilized them toward war to bring about a new order. With the United States in WWI, the perception of a transgression of rules was used to judge Germany a threat and two years later bring the United States into the war. We can see then that a sense of grievance (a great transgression of old or new norms) leads to viewing another's actions as insupportable and thereby to be combated. The outrage in both responses is explicable and made coherent through this framework of transgression of an order; a pure identity or power explanation would leave this dimension unexplained.