The category rogue

Prologue

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2011, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans painted a series of three canvases about the American reaction to this disruptive event. The paintings do not depict military action in Afghanistan, nor enthusing presidential rhetoric. A first cloth, The Secretary of State, portrays Condoleezza Rice, who was American Secretary of State at that time. The painting is of Rice’s face only. Rice comes across as a self-assured yet subdued woman. A display of classical virtue, the picture conveys a certain consciousness of the burden of responsibility along classical-republican lines. The second painting, Ballroom Dancing, comments on the fancy for ballroom dancing among New Yorkers after the attacks. People, young and old, although one imagines a class bias, signed up for dance courses and attended soirees en masse. The picture shows an elegant couple – man in tuxedo, woman in gown – moving graciously across the dance floor. The floor, which looks marble and betrays a noble setting, has three letters on it in the lower left corner, ‘XAS’, from Texas, home of President George Bush Jr. The third painting is called The Perfect Table Setting and shows a meticulously set table. Tuymans was inspired to produce this piece when browsing through a 1948 magazine, the pages of which instructed its various women readers on how to set their tables. The black housewife was instructed to be modest. She should not bother with wine glasses. A much more elaborate table, on the contrary, was to be set by the diplomat’s wife. Tuymans notes the irony of a black woman presiding over the diplomatic services after 9/11 and thus bearing responsibility for diplomatic protocol including how tables are set at state dinners. Rice, it appears, cared greatly about these issues, inspecting table settings herself at important occasions. To restore order, one could conclude from Tuymans’ evidence, is to restore style, also in international relations.

Introduction

Rogue states are significant entities in international relations. That is to say, they are considered so. Witness most infamously the 2002 National Security Strategy of the USA, which opines that ‘new deadly challenges have emerged from rogue states’ after the Cold War (President of the United States 2002: 13). And talk is not always cheap in this case, as was evidenced by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and more recently the 2011 military intervention in Libya. Also, philosophers have recognized the need to engage the challenge posed by rogue states. John Rawls (1999: 89–104) spends several pages on how to deal with rogues from the perspective of his liberal Law of Peoples, as does Philip Pettit in his ‘Republican Law of Peoples’. Rawls speaks of outlaw states, Pettit of ineffective and non-representative ones. Both agree, however, that these states pose a normativeand practical challenge and that other states should act to ‘rectify the problem’ (Pettit 2010: 89).

Rogues are a concern of political practice: how ought they to be dealt with? Should rogue states be contained, engaged, or be forced to change regime? This is for politicians to decide, not for social scientists, although social scientific knowledge can help policy-makers to gauge which one policy will work best given a reigning set of circumstances. Or it can clarify why a certain state acts roguish, or why a certain state fails to intervene militarily in another state which it deems a rogue. Alternatively still, the social scientist could try to understand why certain states are considered rogues and others are not. Or, slightly differently, one could query why certain states are named rogues at all. It is this latter endeavor which I attempt in this article.

Standard accounts, and why they do not suffice

One could assume that it is obvious that certain states be called rogues – say, because they are. This position, although not without merit on practical grounds, does not withstand scrutiny. Suffice it to note that disagreement abounds about which states count as rogues and why, which is epitomized most dramatically by works such as Noam Chomsky’s (2000) Rogue States, identifying as it does the United States as the foremost rogue. Whereas reasoned debate might solve differences in assessment, one intuits that more is at stake. The concept is probably not descriptive or ‘criterial’ but more likely political, ‘interpretive’ or ‘essentially contested’, or something of this kind (Dworkin 2011: Ch. 8; Gallie 1956). We should account for this in our analyses.

One obvious such possibility is to argue with reference to certain social processes. Alex Wendt (1998: 113), a well-known theorist of international relations, has made this case. Observing that not all states which exhibit a ‘rejectionist attitude’ are deemed rogues, he stresses the importance of the ‘representational practices of the international community’. There is little to take issue with in this statement, but neither does it suffice as an actual analysis. True in theory, it does not elucidate practice enough. There are at least two ways to cash out the argument.

A first is to point out the common practice of representing a self in opposition to an other, a community in opposition to its deviants. By singling out, and excluding, an other, the self comes into being, or reinforces its sense of self. Often, such a process takes a hostile or even violent turn (Mercer 1995). With the end of the Cold War, and thus the common opposition to the Soviet Union, rogues proved a welcome substitute. A problem with this approach is that it tends to think in terms of exclusion too much. Can a permanent member of the Security Council – the Soviet Union – be said to have been outside of the international community? And how about such contemporary processes as the four-party talks? Not even the paradigmatic example of the Greeks and the barbarians was one of outright exclusion: ‘Although the Greeks distinguished themselves from the barbarian or barbaros … and although the concept of the barbarian acquired a more xenophobic meaning as a consequence of the Persian wars, that term was never strong enough to extinguish their sense of the wider unity of humankind’ (Linklater and Suganami 2006: 197).

A second possibility is not to argue in terms of identity and otherness, but in terms of signaling worry or impatience. There is a community, which the rogue is part of, but this community, or its representatives, are growing insecure about one or more of its members and threatens to punish them. Paul Sharp (2009: 197), a diplomatic theorist, makes this point:

The problem with this argument, which it shares with the first, is that it fails to explain just why such states are considered rogues. They explain that some such entity as a rogue would appear but not how or why. In their defense, it could be argued that any reason would do as long as it is constructed as a threat to the community. But this is a theoretically informed hunch, not an empirically substantiated argument. The case would be strengthened if one would find an arbitrary coming and going of the label. To make the case requires evidence.

Some empirical observations

A preliminary observation is that there is no consensus within international society on these issues, which puts into further doubt the value of analyses in terms of self and other, identity and difference. Disagreement concerns the identification of specific rogues as well as the best way to deal with them, but also, and more fundamentally, whether states should be named rogues at all (Saunders 2006). So-called ‘Old Europeans’ have typically been reluctant to speak of rogues, as have the Russians and the Chinese, while Americans showed themselves more willing to do so. But also Americans differ among themselves, and their willingness varies over time. In a similar way, even if it has never become official policy, there are certainly European public intellectuals and opinion-makers ready to name states rogues, or to warn of the threat of rogues getting hold of weapons of mass destruction. Former secretary-general of NATO, Willy Claes, now retired from active politics, is a good example. ² Nonetheless the history to be told here is an American one foremost.

Moreover, it is fairly recent. The Clinton administration introduced the category into official foreign policy discourse in its first term. President George Bush Jr was reluctant to refer to the label at the start of his first term, but wielded it with some fervor after the attacks of 9/11. The Obama administration is so far unwilling to adopt its use. This does not imply that second Clinton administration, the Bush administration at the beginning of its first term, or Obama at present have not been concerned with the behavior of certain states, or even that they have not been willing to act to do something about it. Rather, they have preferred not to call these states rogues, but, for instance, ‘states-of-concern’. The defining elements that were identified throughout this period held that rogue states sponsor terrorism, seek to obtain weapons of mass destruction, and treat their population inappropriately (Litwak 2000). They are guilty, in other words, of the willing and stubborn breach of international law and morality. However, a detailed empirical analysis of the American discourse on rogue states, with data from 1993 to 2004, reveals that the discourse largely signs up to that definition, but that it is not constrained by it (O’Reilly 2007). A ‘legalist’ definition demands that all three criteria be met for a state to qualify, but in the discourse the relationship among the elements is much looser. A second finding from the analysis is that, although the concept has been deleted from official discourse, it has nonetheless gained a strong footing in public discourse. References remain numerous. A third finding is that the concept is not integrative but ‘multi-dimensional’ and different actors and institutions entertain a different understanding of it, from narrowly legalist to broadly culturalist.

First conceived among American Defense intellectuals and strategists, rogue states were originally presented as a tangible, albeit future, security threat. More specifically, they were a threat because of their desire to acquire dangerous weapons of mass destruction. Analysts typically explain this assessment by Defense to the gap left by the demise of the Soviet Union, and related, as a way to find continued support for the development of new weapons programs (Klare 1995: ch. 1). This sounds plausible. More important to observe, however, is that the label found resonance and was soon adopted by people in broader political and diplomatic circles. But as support for it spread, its meaning subtly changed. Focus shifted from the future but tangible aggressive behavior to an assessment of a more general dysfuntionality as a sign of, or as resulting from, a certain ‘cultural degeneracy’. The problem lies not primarily with the physical threat that emanates from rogue states, but with rogue states’ renunciation of the international community’s internal and external standard of civilization and the international rule of law. This becomes very apparent with respect to the ‘lesser’ rogue states: Syria, Cuba, Burma, Zimbabwe, Pakistan (as opposed to ‘major’ rogues like Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya): ‘these secondary states have earned the label of rogue not so much for the fact that they present threats due to overt power capabilities, but rather due to the fact that they are perceived as nondemocratic’ (O’Reilly 2007: 305–7).

There are rogues, then, that do not pursue weapons of mass destruction and that do not per se sponsor terrorism. What ties them together is that they are not democracies and, consequently, that they do not meet what some have called a new ‘standard of civilization’ (Hobson 2008). ³ At the same time, however, there are certain states which are patently not democracies but that are nonetheless not considered rogues. Think Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Congo, Cameroon, Guatemala. Failed states some of these may be, and undemocratic probably all of them, but rogue states they are not. Why is this so? Upon closer inspection of the data, it turns out that the notion of cultural degeneracy takes two distinct meanings. A first meaning covers substance, consciously held values and norms. Here one encounters passionate defenses of human rights and democracy, and accusations of a lack thereof. A second meaning has more to do with style and procedure. Here one encounters a certain contempt for the rough international conduct of rogue states and a dislike for their lack of civility and restraint. Rogue states are taken to charge for being ‘reckless and rash’, for ‘breaking promises’, for ‘randomly attacking’ (O’Reilly 2007: 314). The issue is not always entirely one of moral right and wrong but also one of ‘cultural status and relative sophistication’ (2007: 299; emphasis added). The North Korean leadership is accused of ‘hurling unusually personal criticism’ at the American president (Kessler 2004: A14), and Iranian president Ahmadinejad for hijacking BBC 4’s alternative Christmas message with anti-Semitic slander. ⁴ Similarly negative reactions were voiced in 2009 when representatives from Libya, Iran and Cuba took the stage at the Durban Review Conference, which dealt with the UN battle against racism. Their leaders’ theatrical performances evoked disgust among many Western commentators (Lambsdorff 2009). The United States and Canada had already boycotted the conference, and many a European representative left the conference room when Ahmadinejad was delivering what they considered a distasteful speech. Khaddafi’s desire to camp out in Central Park for the duration of the 2009 General Assembly of the United Nations was met with amazement and amusement, and perhaps considered silly by some. His decision during that same meeting to rip apart a copy of the UN charter while delivering his speech, for its part, was met with incredulity and contempt. Note, finally, that the leaders of many rogue states tend to challenge the international community on a sartorial level too. They typically shun the Western business suit, preferring to don alternative outfits. And compare this behavior to that of the Chinese leadership. It is likely that the Chinese are tougher negotiators and pose a more formidable strategic challenge than, say, Hugo Chavez, but ever since Deng Xiaoping assumed power they submit to the diplomatic protocol. While the Chinese are occasionally reprimanded on issues of human rights, they are rarely dismissed as rogues. States can practice realism, or even realpolitik, so it appears, but preferably a ‘realism with manners’ (Sharp 2003: 860). States should practice diplomacy – ‘the application of intelligence and tact to the official relations between governments’ in Satow’s classical definition. Rogue states do not. This is, to an important extent, why they are labeled so.

This last sentence will inevitably offend many a reader in light of past and ongoing policies of some of the states involved. The violence in Libya is real. The violence of the Khaddafi regime is real. So is that of the rebels and of NATO troops. As stated in the introduction, I do not intend to belittle this. But I do want to argue that these raw facts do not fully cover even the Libyan case, nor can they explain why certain states are named rogues at all. With respect to this latter question I have suggested that style and etiquette matter somehow. We need theory to clarify, and history to strengthen, this case.

The category of the person

The title of this essay speaks of a category. The notion of a category traces back to Aristotle, but I do not claim this legacy here. Rather, my source is Marcel Mauss’s 1938 essay on ‘A Category of the Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self’ (Mauss 1985). Mauss’s essay is relevant to our present purposes for the simple reason, but seldom observed, that the practice of naming this or that state a rogue is a personifying practice (Luoma-Aho 2009). A rogue is a type of person, much like a Good Samaritan is. The better we know what a person is, the better we might know what a rogue state is. The central thesis of the essay is that the ‘notion of a person’ is a fundamental category of the human mind indeed. This means that human thought (and action) cannot be imagined without it assuming the existence of personhood. Other such categories are cause, quality, position. Different sciences study different aspects of the categories. A psychologist could study their role in cognitive processes. A philosopher will want to discover just which categories exist and what their ‘ontological status’ is (Studtmann 2008). A typical concern of the sociologist or the historian (e.g. Gurevich 1985) is to trace how the categories evolve, if they do, and how their changing meaning relates to other forms of social change. Thus, Marcel Mauss sketches a ‘social history’ (Mauss 1985: 3) of the shifts in meaning of the category of the person, although he retains an interest in discovering a certain fundamental ‘person-ness’ throughout this evolution (Collins 1985). At a time when sociology was still freeing itself from philosophy, this ambiguity is comprehensible. Nor is it unattractive. In my summary of Mauss’s findings I will nonetheless follow N.J. Allen (1985) in assuming that also the final paragraphs, which draw on theology and modern philosophy, should be read as empirical illustrations, not metaphysical pronouncements. The discovery of metaphysics is a sociological finding, not a metaphysical statement itself.

It will be interesting to start with the ethnographic findings, ⁵ where the person appears as a personage. A person is a member of a tribal society, but not every member is a person. Every such society has a fixed stock of names. A person bears such a name and every name is born by only one person. The name represents a mythical ancestor, which the current bearer of that name is said to reincarnate. At rituals these bearers of a name take on certain symbols, sometimes body-paint but often a mask. The Latin word for mask is persona, which derives from the Etruscan phersu, also mask. Hence our word person, but it is important to note that the people involved simply spoke of people, or human beings. Wearing the mask, or body-paint, and hence being the person for the duration of the ritual, the personage would often dance, which is why the old were often barred from being persons anymore. It is in part the skilful performance of the dance which marks out the person as worthy of being the bearer of a name. Steve Caton (1993: 365), in an analysis of ‘Icons of the Person’ in North Yemenite tribal wedding ceremonies, makes a similar observation.

The differences are important: Mauss’s dancers allegedly re-enact ancestral cosmologies, Caton’s male prowess, although the assumption here too is that this prowess is a virtue in and for tribal society. Another similarity is more important for my purposes: personhood shows itself a practice involving the body.

Or so it did. The modern conception of the person is less about personages than it is about selves (Mauss 1985: 14–23). It is more about minds than it is about bodies. This modern concept finds its first expression in Roman law, where is has political roots in the revolt of the Plebs, that is, in the Plebeian claim to equal citizenship. The novelty here is that personhood becomes individuated. Every individual is a person (barring the usual suspects – women, children, slaves). Gradually, connotations of moral personhood – of consciousness, freedom, responsibility – became infused with it, and fed back into the legal concept. Through the interference of Christian theology and Enlightenment philosophy, the category of a person is established in the metaphysical, Aristotelian sense; but Mauss insists that its ontological status is still fundamentally sociological. The end result is a concept of personhood which holds that a person ‘is a rational substance, indivisible and individual’ (Mauss 1985: 20), and which founds science, action and society on this self. It is these persons, these rational minds, that one encounters, for instance, behind Rawls’s veil of ignorance and in liberal political philosophy more broadly. It is these persons too that sovereign-states-as-persons are typically imagined to be (cf. Wendt 2004; Philpot 2001; Reus-Smit 1999).

But this story leaves us with two questions. First, what happened to the body? And second, what is the exact relationship of all of this to rogue states? To name a state a rogue might well be a personifying metaphor and the above might well be a plausible, though terribly abridged, history of the category of the person, but the argument connecting the two has to be explicated in more detail.

Ideologies of personhood

So let’s talk rogues again. Originally ‘rogue’ was a synonym for vagrant – an idler, a sturdy beggar, a vagabond. Soon its meaning expanded to refer more generally to shifty people doing suspicious stuff, also within the bounds of society. Compare Defoe’s Moll Flanders, written in 1722. The plot is simple enough. A brief resumé from the introduction:

In the preface, Defoe apologizes profusely for the course language which litters the book, but which he felt compelled to use in order to correctly convey Moll’s story. He insists, however, that he piously left out the most scurrilous deeds and events. His novel was meant to educate, not needlessly provoke. Defoe’s story is one of the many ‘rogue biographies’ that appeared in England from the late 16th century on. They were a means to come to grips with the many outcasts and low-lives that sprang up in the modernizing cities of Great Britain. While it is clear that these rogues committed crimes against the law and reigning morality, one does nonetheless suspect that no crime had to be committed, legal or moral, for them to be scorned. It sufficed for them to be around to upset the order (Dionne and Mentz 2006). A similar conclusion derives from Walter Block’s (2008) Rogue’s Gallery from 1961. He lists

As a libertarian economist, Block’s intention in the book is to argue that what rogues do is beneficial for society. They should be valued. For my purposes, it is more important to note that there is something indeterminate about being a rogue. While every entity on the list can be said to have certain shortcomings, it is less clear if they actually share a flaw. It is not even sure if all of them even break the law: being a curmudgeon or an importer is hardly illegal. As a result, a rogue is something different from a law-breaker; criminals can be rogues, but they need not be so, nor need rogues be criminals. What the Gipsy cab driver, the slumlord, and the pimp do share, however, is that they have a certain general offensiveness about them. A rogue is, in sum, a person that other people take offense with. A rogue state, we have argued above, similarly gives offense. Its political behavior certainly goes some way towards accounting for the offence taken, but the lack of manners appears to tip the balance.

Political philosophy feels embarrassed about such conclusions. Ideologies rarely account for it explicitly. One reason could be that ideology is too systematic, too much a product of the mind, to give pride of place to the body. ⁷ It is no surprise, therefore, that neither Rawls nor Petitt mention manners. Liberalism demands rationality from its citizens and expects that rational minds will eventually reach agreement on how to organize society. Once so agreed, rational minds will follow the rules and society will run smoothly. Liberalism sees no reason to involve the bodies of the people involved. Bodies are merely the tools of minds. In the history of republicanism there are traces of a proper concern for the body. One is inclined to speculate on athletes and ancient democracy here. However, contemporary readings shun these associations and value reason over performance, much as liberalism does. ⁸ Moreover, republicanism’s concern for virtue, which I think is central, does not generally translate into etiquette. Its virtues are either more explicitly moral or more explicitly martial. Republican bodies, when they appear in their own right, perform prowess and virility (Wingrove 2000), not restraint. A republican theorist will be more comfortable with Tuymans’ Secretary of State than with his Perfect Table Setting.

There is a reading, however, of the history of liberalism which traces its origins back to the attempts of a group of modern philosophers, relatively close to practical affairs, who sought to adapt classical republicanism to the conditions of a modern market society. These authors – including Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Germaine de Stael – were aware of the growing irrelevance of, say, warrior virtue, but also understood that an unrestrained liberal conception of citizenship would not sustain society in the long run. To escape from the dilemma they articulated a ‘liberal republicanism’ (Kalyvas and Katznelson 2008), which conceived of the market as an ethical space, and which allowed for the cultivation of good ‘manners’ (Pocock 1981) or propriety. This political philosophy of manners was in tune with broader cultural patterns. As interaction thickened in modern society, observed sociologist Norbert Elias, and as this led to a certain democratization, there was a simultaneous promotion of refinement in behavior. Rowdiness was punished with social disapproval. The process was in part driven by a concern for distinction from aristocrats losing power, but it had straightforward practical benefits to it too (cf. Elias 2000, also Bourdieu 1984). What theorists like Smith did was to re-infuse the practical arguments with ethical connotations (while getting rid of the hierarchical arguments): good manners make for orderly intercourse, but they ‘maketh the man’ too. This ideological matrix, with its strong ethical dimension, is still operative today, not in the least when we denounce a set of states as rogues.

Conclusion

As a concept of international society, the category ‘rogue’ can best be understood in relation to the more basic category of the person. Personhood signifies membership, and it is performed in collective, ritual, bodily practices. Modern personhood becomes individuated, and it values mind more than body. However, because it was soon realized that the modern person cannot ultimately sustain modern society, a new notion of personhood was introduced, which articulates a modern concept of virtue in terms of manners. Interestingly, this concept of personhood reintroduces the body in that it values bodily restraint as a sign of ethical worth. The good person is no virile warrior but a tactful diplomat. Diplomacy becomes modernity’s being-in-the-world. Rogue states, it appears, do not sign up. This we take offense with.

I am not quite comfortable with this conclusion. The historical narrative, drawn from the analysis of Marcel Mauss and the history of political ideas, is not implausible. And that narrative does shed interpretive light on some of the relevant data. But at the same time, I feel that I am downplaying the normative and policy-challenge that the states involved pose, notwithstanding the disclaimers I have inserted throughout the text. I want to offer two more arguments in my defense. First, language and semantics matter. When we expect diplomacy from others, we should practice diplomacy ourselves. To name a set of states rogues is to draw in a whole slew of connotations, which other designations avoid. ‘Outlaw’ states is one possibility, but is not the outlaw up for grabs, dead or alive? ‘States-of-concern’ is another such possibility. Something that is of concern requires our care and attention. Punishment is an option but not pre-ordained. Second, if my analysis holds true, it speaks to the future by reminding us of a past. Imperial history, that is, was replete with sensuous encounters. The empire was shot through with smells, sounds, and alien bodies, which sometimes triggered the erotic imagination but which were just as often met with repugnance. Civilization was never only about values and norms, but also always about habits and style. ‘The making and unmaking of empire in India and the Philippines’, concludes one historian, ‘had something to do with the deployment of the senses and sense organs according to a Western vision of respect for good manners and hygienic practices’ (Rotter 2011). Empire, I imagine, remains an option for the future too. We should think hard about whether we want to take that option, knowing that certain linguistic practices set us well on our way already.