The history of warfare in the twentieth century was marked by a radical transformation in the relationship between opposing forces, of which ‘police bombing’ was the most manifest sign. In the classic conception of war, occupation of territory is in both senses the end of military action. The victor occupies the territory of the vanquished, appropriates it, and pacifies it. As executive sovereign, he establishes a relationship of protection and obedience with the civilian population. War by air bombing undoes this connection. Occupation of the ground is no longer an objective, since bombing is precisely designed as a substitute for occupation. By the same token, occupation no longer means an end to war. The air force is the favoured arm of the ‘endless’ wars we know today, wars that do not speak their name, but are presented simply as police operations on the world scale.
The colonized peoples were the target of the first air attacks, using either bombs, machine guns or poison gas. It was not insurgents that these aimed at but rather whole populations, and through them an entire social and economic structure. In this sense, such practices reflect the dominant approach in ‘small wars’, which, as opposed to ‘real’ wars, in which one state opposes another, aims not to defeat an army but to terrorize a population. From this point of view, colonial air attack simply extended existing practices, attacking civilian populations to punish them collectively, or even exterminate them. With the advent of aviation, however, the principles of ‘small’ wars could be applied to major warfare. This would no longer be a matter of striking enemy armies, but rather peoples, exactly as had been the habit in the colonies.
How should we understand this extension of colonial practices to the world population as a whole? A comparison between air strategies on the colonial periphery and in Europe brings a response that is both obvious and disturbing: in both cases, war is the business of a whole people and no longer simply a matter for the state, as a transcendent entity in relation to its citizens. War is ‘democratized’: if all citizens take part in the war effort, in one way or another, it is absurd to target only those who wield arms and spare those who make possible the use of these by their everyday work. Death in war is no longer the aristocratic privilege of the warrior; it is ‘democratized’ and becomes accessible to all.
Furthermore, since the people now have the possibility of influencing the military actions of their governments, whether electorally or by strikes, it would be doubly illogical to spare them. Civilians are as important as soldiers in the war effort, and as citizens, they collectively constitute the sovereign against whom war is waged. In a democracy, the population is at the same time an active part of the war effort and responsible for the actions of the government. The bomb launched from a plane is in a sense the democratic weapon par excellence: it can strike each and every one, omnes et singulatim, the people and the citizen. With the qualification that some are more a part of this ‘people’ than others, given that class differentiation holds a determining place in air strategy. Anyone may be a potential target, but it is workers above all who are singled out, for reasons both technological and political.
Working-class districts, more densely populated than the bourgeois quarters and less well protected against fire, were particularly suited to the incendiary bombs dropped in the Second World War. On top of such technical considerations, air strategy was guided by the idea that the working class, a key segment of the war effort, was also the least integrated part of the population politically. Behind the strategy of the burned-out city, therefore, lay a ‘revolutionary’ perspective, whose ultimate aim was to trigger a working-class revolt against the existing government. If war had become the business of the ‘people’, then targeting the workers revealed the constitutive ambivalence of this ‘people’. Who were actually being targeted? The collective sovereign, that unified political body that is the subject of politics? Or, on the contrary, the ‘common people’, those fringes of the population who can only be the object of politics?
If the object of air war is that paradoxical entity, the democratic ‘people’ – both unified political body and force of social destabilization, collective sovereign and ‘populace’ – this involves two complementary strategies towards this object, one offensive and the other defensive. On the offensive side, the enemy people are bombed in order to destroy their unity with a view to releasing the forces of anarchy and revolt. In Europe, the people were essentially conceived by reference to the state, their form of political organization. Bombing the people meant attacking the state or, more precisely, acting so that the people would rise against the state. Banking on the lack of coincidence between people and state, the air offensive aims to undo the unity of the body politic and reduce it to the status of a ‘populace’. The conclusion that forces itself on us is that national war in the strict sense never existed, owing to the fact that, ever since its invention with the wars of the French Revolution, war between nations has always hidden a class war. The uncertainty about the nature of the ‘people’ to bomb corresponds precisely to this concealed war that works on a nation from within.
Strategists were well aware of this duality, which is why their doctrines of air offensive were systematically coupled with a defensive strategy. If the object, on the offensive level, was to undo the unity between people and state, the policy of anti-aircraft defence aimed to transform the ‘populace’ into a unified body politic, to actively construct the moral and political unity of a people. A whole series of measures were taken in Europe with a view to strengthening the coherence of the nationalized peoples. The air-raid shelter became the place where the unity of people and state was materially elaborated, but the social system of the bunker could not function without a political and social scaffolding, designed to discipline and train the population and thus integrate them into the nationalized political edifice.
Among these measures, that of ‘welfare’ had pride of place, a social and democratic state taking responsibility for the life and well-being of the people. The symmetry between life and death, social state and air bombing, biopolitics and ‘thanatopolitics’, found its perfect expression in the Rosinenbomber, the ‘candy bomber’ (literally ‘raisin bomber’) exhibited at the former Berlin airport of Tempelhof to commemorate the air bridge of 1948–49. West Berlin, reduced to ruins by Anglo-American bombing, was supplied by air for a whole year. The Allied pilots, viewed until 1945 as ‘air terrorists’, were hailed as saviours three years later. Killing with fire bombs or maintaining life by transporting food and fuel; or, what comes to the same thing, making a statized people or unmaking them by reducing them to the state of a populace.
This unstable dualism between people and state was not found in colonial bombing, which was thus both a clearer and a more ‘modern’ scenario than the massive destruction of certain European cities. Clearer, because in the colonies there was quite simply no state apparatus that could be targeted. But above all, the strategy was more ‘modern’, inasmuch as combatting insurgent groups and their social, economic, and ecological environment directly connected with the global configuration, without the mediation of the nation state. As we shall see, as early as 1864, Victor Hugo formulated the hope that air power would bring universal peace; then H. G. Wells, a Fabian socialist and member of the League for Peace during the First World War, championed a ‘world state’ capable of intervening militarily everywhere in the world in case of manifest disorder.5 And, perhaps more surprising, the Italian general Giulio Douhet was not just content to recommend attacking civilian populations from the air using bombs and toxic gas, but championed at the same time a key idea of pacifism, that of an ‘international tribunal’ that would prevent war by submitting its decisions to sanction by air forces.6
‘Pilot as policeman, bomb as baton’ – this is where the colonial practice of police bombing links up with humanist cosmopolitism.7 While the colonial project is today largely discredited, the idea of a military air force with cosmopolitical ends continues to prosper, so much so that it is found in Article 45 of the United Nations charter: ‘Members shall hold immediately available national air-force contingents for combined international enforcement action.’ Air strikes as not only a ‘democratic’ practice, but also humanist, cosmopolitan, and even pacifist?
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