Abstract
When is a war a war, when is it not, and how does this influence law and politics? These questions are bound up in the idea of ‘wartime’, which is not when it used to be. So argues Mary Dudziak’s compact book on the last 75 years of American history. She contends that rather than a natural or objective period, wartime is a discursive entity constructed by politicians, courts, and scholars (pp. 115, 136). It combines assumptions about the beginning and duration of hostilities in a vision of an extraordinary temporary period that justifies exceptional powers and policies (pp. 35–7, 107). However, this ‘traditional’ understanding of wartime no longer matches the American way with war. Instead, wartime has mutated from large-scaled but delimit-ed, as in the Second World War (p. 62), to a lengthy Cold War of normalized thermonuclear anxiety coupled with low-level peripheral hostilities (pp. 66–71, 108), to a post-9/11 state of perpetual emergency or ‘security crisis’ that is ‘boundless’ and therefore perpetual (pp. 114, 126–7).
Dudziak concludes that without scrutiny wartime poses a natural, determinate condition of temporary exceptions, which enables a ‘culture of irresponsibility’ about civil liberties, executive powers, and the treatment of enemy combatants just when ‘democratic vigilance’, principled judgement, and a ‘politics of war’ are most needed (pp. 54–6, 83–5, 106–7, 136). Two main sources of data support this argument: US campaign service medals awarded (hereafter, ‘medals’) and US Supreme Court decisions during wartime. Dudziak’s innovative tabulation of medals shows that American wartime is more the rule than the exception (pp. 26–9, 137–56). Her reading of Court decisions is that the relationship between wartime and liberty depends upon whether the discourse of wartime exerts a unifying pull (the Second World War, pp. 53, 62), refracts through the lens of partisan politics (the Cold War, pp. 82–4), or encourages ‘inattention’ in the American public (the War on Terror, p. 132).
Overall, Dudziak’s argument is convincing, yet several particulars beg further attention. First, substantial space having been devoted to tracking medals from various incidents to show how frequently the US engages in violent conflicts, it is curious that her discussion concerns only the ‘big’ wars of contemporary American history. The medals help blur the putatively discrete boundaries of these episodes, but the relationship between liberties and smaller/shorter wars remains unexplored. What were the legal implications of America’s brisk engagements in Boca del Toro or Abyssinia, or its slightly longer dalliances in Siberia or Panama (see p. 29)? Perhaps these episodes were too brief to track their impact on civil liberties, but then that point is especially worth exploring inasmuch as it suggests certain limits on the discursive deployment of ‘wartime’.
Second, this is not a book about the idea, history, and consequences of wartime per se, but rather about wartime in the recent experience of one large, powerful country. So when Dudziak writes that the ‘notion that wartime is exceptional is a part of American Military culture’ (p. 71), it is unclear whether this is uniquely American – which calls for further reflection on an exceptional case of exceptionalism – or, if not, how the American view compares with other militarized cultures in history (e.g. Sparta, Prussia) or the present (e.g. China, North Korea). Furthermore, one of her central claims, that ‘catalytic moments’ like Pearl Harbor ‘produce a set of assumptions’ that wars will end and ‘regular life’ resume (pp. 7, 15, 21–2), seems particular to the US, which enjoys the buffer of two oceans, has rarely lost a war at home, and has grown up in the epoch that saw conquest divorced from competition and conflict. Would such an assumption feature in the discursive consciousness of Belgian, Russian, or Palestinian publics, to name a very few? Might catalytic events instead signal destruction, political subjection, and regularized indignities? Only a comparative study could say, and although Dudziak acknow-ledges the limits of her approach (p. 7), she could be asked to reflect more on how this influences the argument.
Third, there is a tendency toward loose language in the explication of wartime. Dudziak covers the old chestnut about linear vs cyclical time (p. 18), but this opposition is neither antithetical nor even oppositional, since a cycle is an undulating line. Additionally, linear time is both ‘natural’ and ‘our’ time, in contrast with ‘cultural contextual’ and ‘social’ time (p. 18) – yet it is unclear why ‘our’ time is not social and culturally mediated. Elsewhere, in the wartime of the First World War, ‘chaos and fear abound[ed], and time [was] suspended’ (p. 80, emphasis added). Or 9/11 ‘bifurcated’ and ‘broke time’, yet it also left its survivors ‘caught in an extended present’ and ‘ushered in a new era’ (pp. 99, 108). Such murky references make it difficult to ascertain precisely what ‘time’ or ‘wartime’ mean in Dudziak’s otherwise clear presentation.
Finally, Dudziak treats wartime as a discursive and cultural product yet finds that the concept ‘eroded’ between the Second World War and 2012 (p. 7). As a persistent and salient discursive construct, against what standard is wartime’s erosion evaluated? Medals awarded? But then wartime is not an exclusively discursive concept. Against itself? But then its malleability might indicate strength as much as erosion. It seems that Dudziak has a vision of wartime as corresponding to something beyond itself. If her goal is to demonstrate that wartime is non-natural and politically implicated, then the book succeeds. However, the additional claim about the abuse of wartime entails that it has a proper use, which is harder to sustain in the argument as presented.