Strategy Is Dead. Long Live Strategy! Hannah Arendt on Imperial and Total War

the question of war. National security gave way to human security and almost everything else
became ‘securitised’, potentially representing the creeping militarization of the language of
foreign policy.

In many ways this was a good thing. It continues to enhance our understanding of what
constitutes crisis and conflict in world politics. We now more clearly see the interconnections
between health, gender, migration, and poverty and the multiple causes and consequences of
war. According to some in the old guard, however, this inclusiveness meant that the concept
of security was in danger of adding up to almost nothing (Walt, 1991) and strategic studies
was at risk of losing its main disciplinary home (Krause and Williams, 1997). ‘The
conclusion might be’, as Strachan recently declared, ‘that strategy is dead, that it was a
creature of its times, that it carried specific connotations for a couple of centuries, but that the
world has now moved on’ (2005: 47).

This should and should not be our conclusion. There is a much deeper source of confusion
over strategy, what it is, and how it relates to politics and war than the proliferation of
security agendas. The danger for traditionalists is that ‘Strategy is about war and its conduct,
and if we abandon it we surrender the tool that helps us to define war, to shape it and to
understand it’ (Strachan, 2005: 48). It is certainly right and proper to remind political leaders
of the dangers of loose talk about strategy and war. But this does not mean we have to
nostalgically hark back to the day when the political and ‘national policy’ were treated as the
same. It is possible to read with traditional strategy against traditional strategy.

Recent scholarship has challenged the classical rendering of Clausewitz, the phenomenologist
of war, as concerned only with state policy in the narrowest sense (Shaw, 2005: 41; Reid,
2005, 2006). War, in his words, reflects ‘the nature of states and societies as they are
determined by their times and prevailing conditions’ (1976: 586). It is an act of policy, but it
is also more importantly an act of force. War is an ‘act of policy’ because ‘were it a complete,
untrammelled, absolute manifestation of violence (as the pure concept would require), war
would of its own independent will usurp the place of policy’ (Clausewitz, 1993: 98). It is
therefore the purpose of the state to subordinate the phenomenon of war to the continuation of
state policy. This was clearly a contingent, rather than fundamental relationship. War was also
generative, an act of creation; it could not be understood in purely instrumental terms.

This paper offers a contribution to the wider project of rereading classical strategy against
classical strategy by turning from the phenomenologist of war to the phenomenologist of
politics. Hannah Arendt’s account of how late nineteenth century imperialism set off socio-
military processes in the direction of total war in Europe helps us rethink some of the
foundational assumptions of classical strategy in a way Clausewitz cannot. Outside the
civilized confines of Europe, Clausewitz considered the world to be in a constant state of war;
he regarded primitive peoples as having an especially war-like spirit. Civilized war depended
on the distinction between war and peace; it ended with the clear victory of one side over the
other after a large-scale battle. The Prussian military similarly distained any lessons
concerning strategy that might come from small colonial wars. Civilized and savage wars
were kept in separate boxes in nineteenth and twentieth century military thought.

Arendt, in contrast, is an important forerunner of emerging efforts to read the post-colonial
into strategic and security studies (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006).

She shows how imperial wars

resulted in more than just useful adventures for European armies, an outlet for superfluous
capital, or strategic assets in great power competition. Arendt shows how colonial violence
acquired a dynamic of its own that belies the common assumption that such war could safely
be ignored. Colonial struggle was not only existential for the colonized. It unleashed a

Barkawi and Laffey (2006) term this project ‘post-colonial security studies’ but it is not clear whether

this is appropriate terminology given their focus is so narrowly focussed on the traditional strategic
studies agenda. War, its conduct and meaning, is central to their analysis in the way much writing on
security is not.