Around the hegemonic centre was a ‘semi-periphery’, a zone made up of a series of contender states that generally presented ‘Hobbesean’ features, in the sense that the state played a directly dominant role, with interventions in society that were far more frequent and direct than in the Lockean model. This meant that the ruling class maintained a closer link with the state, functioning as a genuine ‘state class’ with all the risks of authoritarianism this involved. Finally, around the Lockean hegemonic centre and the Hobbesean semi-periphery lay the actual periphery, colonial or post-colonial.
The spatial distribution of violence on the world scale was arranged according to this tripartite pattern. If violence could be total on the margins of the system, it took a statized form in the Hobbesean semi-periphery. As for the Lockean centre, this passed for a haven of peace, a country open to refugees, the promised land of liberty. But it could only appear as such inasmuch as it externalized violence, unleashing this in wars between different rival states or on the periphery of the world system. At all events, the centre was constitutionally invulnerable, and had to be so. The mere possibility of an attack could thus shatter a whole system of representations of the world order. If, to cite Gilles Deleuze, ‘delirium is geographico-political’, geopolitics is also a matter of perceptions and affects. The division of the world into centre, semi-periphery, and periphery is not simply the invention of world-system theorists, but is actually rooted in our mental structures, sensations, and deliriums. To attack the centre is thus equivalent to shaking a whole world, in a sense both geopolitical and mental.11 If Wells was driven mad by the idea that London could be taken as a target, what can we say about the consequences of a real attack on the hegemonic centre, such as the United States experienced on 11 September 2001?
Wells’s delirium becomes more understandable still if we consider the implications of this arrangement of the world in terms of foreign policy, defence policy, and the conduct of war in general. British foreign policy was conducted on two levels, in conformity with a tripartite division of the world: a policy of aggressive colonial expansion outside of Europe had been paired since the eighteenth century with a policy of balance of powers, collective security, and indirect intervention on the European continent. Contrary to the continental powers, the United Kingdom did not aim at territorial conquest in Europe, with the exception of certain naval bases that enabled it to control sea routes. The British custom was to base themselves on one or more ‘contender states’ in order to contain others, and those European states that were weakest militarily could count on British aid to finance their war effort. The success of such a strategy is evident: out of the seven wars fought with France between 1689 and 1815, Great Britain only lost one, the war of American independence – which was also the only time that it did not succeed in creating a continental alliance against France.12 In the same way, the First and Second World Wars, which put a stop to the German claim to world hegemony, were won above all thanks to the alliance with the Russian and then Soviet contender.
The conduct of war in general, moreover, depends on the geopolitical distribution of violence within the world system. Since the seventeenth century, European war has been conducted between states.13 The state first of all puts an end to the ‘state of nature’ by establishing on its territory a power capable of containing civil war. Internal armed conflicts steadily came to an end. The corollary of this statization was a limitation of warfare: once this was defined as a relation between states, it ceased to denote a relationship between individuals. It followed from this that the latter had the right to be protected from warlike violence. Rousseau only repeated a common opinion when he wrote that, even in war, states were bound to respect the persons and goods of citizens:
The purpose of war being to destroy the enemy state, its defenders may rightfully be killed so long as they are carrying arms; but as soon as they lay them down and surrender, ceasing to be enemies or agents of the enemy, they become simply men again, and there is no longer any right over their lives.14
If Europe perceived itself as being de facto united, first of all in a Res publica christiana, then in a common ‘civilization’ or ‘society’, outside Europe things were very different. In colonial wars, the civilian population was never seen as having the right to a particular protection. Military theorists explained this in the clearest possible terms. Colonel Callwell, for example, a British colonial officer, summed up in the late nineteenth century the principles of ‘small’ colonial wars:
The main points of difference between small wars and regular campaigns … are that, in the former, the beating of the hostile armies is not necessarily the main object even if they exist, that effect on morale is often far more important than material success, and that the operations are sometimes limited to committing havoc which the laws of regular warfare do not sanction.
Since colonial wars did not oppose two states monopolizing legitimate violence, as embodied in an army, the distinction between ‘defenders of the state’ and ‘ordinary men’ was not applicable. Thus, a regular war ‘may be terminated by the surrender or capitulation of the hostile sovereign or chief, who answers for his people; but in the suppression of a rebellion the refractory subjects of the ruling power must all be chastised and subdued.’15 In Europe, the enemy was considered as ‘just’ (justus hostis) inasmuch as it was sovereign states and their regular armies that confronted one another.16 The attribute of justice distinguishes an enemy from a rebel or a criminal. Outside of Europe, on the other hand, the attribute of justice was not applied, and neither combatants nor civilians had this right to protection.
It was thus in regions outside of Europe that most bombings took place. In 1855, the Americans bombed the town of San Juan in Nicaragua, provoking the indignation of the British, who condemned an action ‘without precedent among civilized nations’. But this did not stop their own armed forces from bombing Canton the following year. The Chinese had arrested the crew of a British ship. After intervention by the consul, the authorities agreed to release the prisoners, but refused to make a public apology and give guarantees that such an incident would not happen again. The British then decided to open fire. In London, the Liberal MP Ralph Bernal Osborne justified the action in these terms: ‘Talk of applying the pedantic rules of international law to the Chinese!’17
In the nineteenth century, however, the first cracks already appeared in this binary arrangement, divided between a European sphere, with limited state wars, and a ‘peripheral’ sphere that was the theatre of unlimited war. Quite logically these cracks appeared on the border between the European centre and the colonized periphery, in the US during the ‘second war of independence’ and in Russia during the Crimean War. North America, traditionally external to the space of European international law, was gradually assimilated into the sphere of civilized Christianity.18 As for Russia, it was always situated on the margins of Europe: without being as ‘civilized’ as other European nations, it was nonetheless geographically close and of Christian religion.19 During the war that Great Britain fought with the United States in 1812–15, British naval forces bombarded Baltimore, Washington, and other US cities20 – with the aim, according to the strategist Alfred Mahan – of giving the American people21