Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper offers a contribution to the wider project of rereading classical strategy against classical strategy by turning from the phenomenologist of war, Clausewitz, to the phenomenologist of politics, Hannah Arendt. In particular, Arendt’s account of how late nineteenth century imperialism set off socio-military processes in the direction of total war in Europe enables us to 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. As a result, civilized and savage wars were kept in separate boxes in nineteenth century military thought.

Hannah Arendt, in contrast, is an important forerunner of emerging efforts to read the post-colonial into strategic and security studies. Her ground-breaking work on the links between colonial war and total war in Europe in Origins of Totalitarianism has been central to all subsequent historical accounts. To date, the association, and the constitutive relationship between war in the North and South, has been rejected by classical strategy and military history. Following Clausewitz, this literature prefers to keep ‘small wars’ and conventional European war in separate boxes. Accordingly, Arendt provides an important corrective to this and a number of other conceptual and historical flaws of both strategic and international studies. Reading Arendt this way also contributes to filling a gap in the vast secondary literature on her work. There is no systematic account of Arendt’s writing on the war question and there are very few treatments of her thinking on imperialism. The few that have been attentive to the latter dimension of Arendt’s work misread her intentions and the subtlety of her thought.