(Page 19 of 41) - War Makes the State, but Not As It Pleases: Homeland Security and American Anti-Statism authored by Kroenig, Matthew.

September 11

shattered America’s sense of geographic invulnerability and revealed the

obvious threat that international terrorism posed to the United States.

Second, the U.S. government chose to respond to the security threat, in part, by launching
interstate war. As part of its War on Terror, The United States initiated conflict against
Afghanistan in November, 2001 and Iraq in March 2003. The United States has been
engaged in continuous international warfare since November 2001 and—even if the
United States was the initiator—these are true wars by any definition of the term.

Third, and most importantly, if the War on Terror is mere discourse, it is impossible to
explain the pattern of American state building that followed the 9/11 attacks. An
immediate state building impulse reverberated throughout the United States immediately
after 9/11 and a slough of proposals to expand state power emanated from all quarters of
American society—not just from the ruling administration. Almost as soon as these
proposals surfaced they elicited substantial political opposition, from many sources,
sometimes from within the Bush administration itself. Some of these proposals were
implemented; many more of them were disregarded. The argument that the terrorist
threat exists only as part of the Bush administration’s rhetoric cannot explain the ebb and
flow of America’s post-9/11 state building experience.

Others could argue that a large proportion of rejected state building initiatives merely
reflects a basic principal of negotiation, that is, demand more than you are ultimately
willing to accept. The initial state building proposals may not have been realistic
requests for expanded executive power, but merely the executive’s first bid in a
negotiating process with the other branches of American government.

This argument, if correct, is not necessarily inconsistent with our theory. It merely
suggests that experienced executive branch officials also understand the anti-statist
tendencies inherent in American politics.

The negotiating tactic theory of U.S. homeland security policy, however, does not mesh
well with the empirical evidence. If the administration was purposely highballing its
requests for expanded powers in expectation of push back, it would be difficult to explain
the administration’s extreme reluctance to compromise on certain issues such as the
detention of enemy combatants. Moreover, as stated above, proposals for expanded
executive powers did not come exclusively from the executive branch, and in many cases
Bush administration officials were the main source of resistance to state building
projects. For example, DHS was a Congressional initiative that the Bush administration
initially resisted. The post-9/11 tug-of-war on the American state is the result of forces
that run deeper than the tactics chosen by individual policy makers.

A superior explanation for the relative weakness of American state building focuses on
America’s domestic political institutions. The second image reversed logic of “war
makes the state” assumes that international constraints are seamlessly transformed into
domestic outcomes but ignores the domestic political processes through which these
forces are channeled. The degree to which security threats generate an increase in state
power is partly a function of an individual state’s institutional receptiveness to state
expansion. In states with institutional buttresses against the expansion of state power, we