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Schmitt and Foucault on the Question of Sovereignty

under Military Occupation


Annmaria Shimabuku
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE
Volume 5, 2014
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0005.007 [http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0005.007]
[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/]
1. A Violation or Production of Sovereignty?
This essay examines the geopolitical underpinnings of Carl Schmitts well-known definition of the sovereign as
he who decides the exception (Political Theology 5) mainly through The Nomos of the Earth (1950). It is in this
later work, written after Schmitt had borne witness to the liberation movements of Europes colonial territories
alongside Germanys defeat in both world wars, that he contextualized the historical formation of sovereignty in
terms of the colonization of the New World and occupatio bellica within Europe from the 16 century onward. In
reading The Nomos of the Earth, one cannot help but sense nostalgia for days pasta romanticization of the jus
publicum Europaeum that grounds his critique of a new global (dis)order characterized by the transnational flow
of capital and concomitant espousal of universal human rights moderated respectively by the American dollar
and U.S. military as world police. His vitriolic critique of American imperialism that violates the sovereignty
of postwar European and postcolonial states certainly carries political clout for critics of American Empire
(Modern Imperialism in International Law 31). However, what exactly is this violated sovereignty? Is this a
violation of the traditional form of territorial sovereignty, or a violation of a new form of sovereignty that has
given way to an order of globalization? If so, what are its contours?
These questions point to the continued relevance of Schmitts definition of sovereignty positioned within a very
different geopolitical configuration from which it was originally conceived. Schmitt himself gave three new
possible accounts: 1) America, the victor of the Cold War would become the sole ruler of the world; 2) regional
blocks would form, ultimately subject to American supervision; 3) several regional powers or blocks could be
formed, which would bring about a balance of power (Rasch, Human Rights as Geopolitics 121). It is not
unreasonable to assume that in this assessment from 1955, Schmitt saw the chips falling somewhere between the
first and second scenarios, i.e., a dominant American power that makes decisions over the rest, while the third is
posited as the hopeful alternative. To this end, Schmittian scholars such as William Rasch have re-deployed
Schmitts decisionism in terms of a critique of American supremacy: a situation in which the U.S. monopolizes
the decision of who is excludable from the law, but does so through an invisibilization of the exception by
cloaking it in moral claims (130). In this way, the New World that had once occupied a zone of exception for
Europe is replaced by new outsiders that the U.S. decides are exceptions to the law (such as terrorists) who
threaten the American way of life.
The most conspicuous difference between this configuration of sovereignty and its traditional precursor is that
the former leans toward unilateralism while traditional sovereignty existed in a tightly knit network of
sovereignties that together fabricated the jus publicum Europaeum. While these recent critiques of American
supremacy are certainly illuminating, this essay asks if it is possible to also conceive of the fabrication of a new
network of sovereignty in the postwar era that emerges from military occupation in addition to American
th
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decisions that exclude others from the law.
This is where Michel Foucault becomes a useful interlocutor for Schmitt. Foucaults raison dtat comes the
closest to Schmitts jus publicum Europaeum precisely on the point of articulating a network of sovereignties
forged through military occupation within Europe that may have been collectively imperial but never the product
of a single Empire. Past this point of intersection, however, the two depart on the status of sovereignty when the
European spatial order caves into the spacelessness of globalization. Whereas Schmitt complained that
globalization invites an erosion of sovereign formations, Foucault showed how it provides the very ground for the
fabrication of sovereignty in a new political order governed by a market rationality. Furthermore, precisely
because of the nature of capital that necessitates circulation for growth, this implies not only the fabrication of a
single sovereignty in isolation, but also the inauguration of a network of sovereignties.
After tracing geopolitical discussions offered by Schmitt and Foucault on the point of sovereignty, I borrow from
both to show how sovereignty in the aftermath of the postwar and postcolonial present is fabricatednot
violatedas an effect of market liberalization.
2. Colonial and Military Occupation under the Jus Publicum
Europaeum
Writing from the position of a subject who had experienced occupation of a defeated nation first hand, Carl
Schmitt traced the emergence of territorial sovereignty toward the end of the 16 century mainly through two
senses of occupation: occupatio of the colonies and occupatio bellica of another European state.
For Schmitt, the Roman legal and civil concept of occupatio is inseparable from discovery (The Nomos of the
Earth 130). In the attempt to break away from the nomos of the respublica Christiana of the middle
agescharacterized by a joint maintenance of theological-political power between the emperor and pope who
acted as katechon, or restrainers determined to keep an eschatological paralysis (60) at baythe discovery of
the Americas, backed by the achievement of newly awakened Occidental rationalism, justified a taking of the
so-called free space of the New World (132, 140). That is, if a territory had become known through scientific
investigation, then it was deemed claimable by its discoverer. At issue was the emergence of a new nomos of the
jus publicum Europaeum in which jurists attempted to drive the theologians out of international law with their
newfound rationalism and inaugurate, for the first time in history, a truly global world order that revolved
around a European center of gravity. Here, Schmitt did not hesitate to recognize a point many postcolonial
scholars after him belabored to make: what Europe discovered in its project of colonization was not the New
World per say, but rather Europe itself:
... the elaboration of occupatio as the international juridical title of acquisition was designed to
make each occupying power independent vis--vis its European rivals and to create an original
juridical title independent of them. To the extent that juridical discussion focused on the legal title
of occupatio, European legal consciousness had to forget the common European origin of the
matter. (131)
The spatially closed territorial order that arose in the 16 century begged for the recognition of independent
national identities that could not be achieved within Europe itself, but through the scramble for land
appropriation in the New World that was free to be occupied (128, 198). Hence, individual European states
were able to forget that the function of acquiring an original juridical title in the New World was not merely to
compete with other European sovereign territories, but to establish a common European originthe
th
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inauguration of Europe as the center of a global world. No a priori foundation to the law amongst territorial
states can be found through European introspection but its emptiness is revealed in a colonial reverie. In the final
analysis, the law rests on an empty fiction; it is unambiguously groundless.
Occupied as a space of the outside, the colonial other sealed the spatially enclosed territorial order of the jus
publicum Europaeum that was able to obtain a comprehensive, homogeneous spatial order (203). Curiously, it
was this field of homogeneity that foregrounded the sovereignty of individual states that confronted each other
not only as friends, but even more importantly, as enemies. The friend/enemy distinction, articulated most
explicitly in The Concept of the Political (1927), does not point to any substantive characteristic such as good,
evil, beautiful, or ugly; furthermore, it can be argued by extension that it does not mark any cultural signifiers
commonly associated with the particularistic character of individual states. Rather, the concept of the political
emerges in a relationship of equality amidst extreme conflict that can neither be decided by a previously
determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party (The Concept
of the Political 27). Someone must break the stalemate and decide upon the exception; this is where sovereignty
prevails. Here, Schmitt explicitly rejected any self-sufficient political order that is entirely sustained by internal
dynamics. Immanence gives way to transcendence as the sovereign makes an ecstatic flight to the limits of the
nomos occupying the ambiguous position of an insider-out. The sovereign does not make any reference to the
pre-existing norms or laws, but rather brings into existence; he is an author who renders his fiction a legal
reality (Prozorov 224). As creator, the sovereign who decides upon the exception in jurisprudence is analogous
to the miracle in theology (Political Theology 36).
However, the sovereigns ecstatic flight to transcendence cannot become permanenthe cannot remain god-like,
because the homogeneous field of equality that foregrounds sovereignty must be restored. Simply put, if the
sovereign constantly invoked a state of exception, then there would be no law constant enough to suspend, and
the nomos would dissolve into chaos. While the sovereign monopolizes the decision, his power is paradoxically
limited to the existential form from which it springs; his ability to suspend the law is limited to the extent to
which the homogeneity of the nomos can be restored.
It is with these limitations in mind that Schmitt makes one of his few references to the state of exception in The
Nomos of the Earth with respect to occupatio bellica, or the military occupation that occurs after battle between
European states. The occupier explodes the dualistic theory of the relation between internal and external that is
neither purely intrastate nor a purely interstate law (The Nomos of the Earth 130, 207). For Schmitt, military
occupation was not the imposition of one state, culture, or legal system over another, but merely a provisional
and factual occupation of soil that yielded the monotony of the same (205):
...the occupying state exercised state power in the occupied enemy territory; however, it did not
exercise its own power, but rather that of the state of the occupied territory, and this exercise of
foreign state power was based not on empowerment of the enemy states authority, but rather on its
own original legal title in international law. The title in international law appears here to have an
independent legal basis, and not to be derived from the existing states sovereignty. (206)
The power the occupying state draws from is not its own, but that of the occupied state because it is the
existential form of the state which is essential (204). A sovereign can only strengthen his power by
strengthening the field from which his power originates, even if that entails exercising a power that belongs to
another state, rather than his own. Hence, power is neither purely foreign, nor domestic, but stems from the
nomos that underlies both. Whether it is an occupatio bellica of a foreign sovereign within a vanquished state, or
a state of exception within a domestic setting, sovereignty in both cases is defined by the ability to decide in a
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situation that demands extraordinary measures and, thus, breaches the constitution should obtain, yet with the
goal of maintaining the validity of this same constitution (209). Schmitt was compelled to place the emphasis at
the end: the sovereign power to breach the law has the paradoxical goal of maintaining the law. Therefore, it need
not matter who the sovereign isforeign or domesticfor he is characterized by his existential form as someone
who suspends the law with the goal of containing the legal, illegal, and by extension extralegal, under one spatial
order that transcends individual state borders. This points to a transnational network of sovereignties that
operate under the cover of each nation-state. The assumption that a victor-state can assert its will upon the
vanquished as reward for proving the superiority of its power is radically displaced. In both cases, power is not
substantive or normative, it is not a question of who rules, or of whether a legitimate or illegitimate sovereign
rules, but a question of the existential form of the jus publicum Europaeum.
Compared to Schmitts development of sovereignty in On Dictatorship (1921) in which he analyzed commissarial
and sovereign dictatorship, and Political Theology (1922) in which he sharpened his analysis on the decision,
Schmitts emphasis on the sovereigns need to restore the legal order in The Nomos of the Earth (1950) enabled
him to execute a veiled critique of the rise of American imperialism carried out under military occupation.
Schmitt too was an occupied subject as the Rhineland was occupied by Allied troops and Germanys
unconditional surrender after 1945 resulted in total occupation. Both the occupatio of the New World, i.e.,
colonialism that sealed an internal European nomos from the outside-in, and occupatio bellica that reinforced it
from the inside-out, were nostalgic descriptions of the jus publicum Europaeum that collapsed into what Schmitt
thought was one spaceless order of an American imperialism that takes on the guise of military occupation.
Schmitt was already writing about the development of American imperialism (Modern Imperialism in
International Law 31) after the First World War, and as his commentators have noted, he found parallels
between the occupation of Germany and the fledgling postcolonial order of the newly formed protectorates,
mandates, and even independent states in the non-European world [that] was a continuation of colonialism by
other means (Rasch, Anger Management 70). This sentiment came forth in its most naked form in a political
pamphlet he wrote in 1925 entitled The Rhinelands as an Object of International Politics. In this pamphlet,
written with the anxieties of a hideous state of suspense, he correctly identified an international community in
which annexation is tabooed (14, 4). Instead, he argued that the U.S. promoted an openly anticolonial foreign
policy in the sense that it renounced the open territorial annexation of the controlled state (The Nomos of the
Earth 252). But for Schmitt, this was nothing but mere camouflage (The Rhinelands as an Object of
International Politics 15). While colonization as annexation in the jus publicum Europaeum had at least the
merit of being frank and visible (11), by contrast, Schmitt saw nothing but smoke and mirrors in the age of
American imperialism:
... other forms of dominion have come into vogue, avoiding open political subjection, maintaining
the political existence of the controlled country, nay, creating, if it appears expedient, a new
independent State, whose liberty and sovereignty is expressly proclaimed, so that apparently just
the reverse happens of what might be denounced as degrading a people into an object of foreign
policy. (6)
Here, Schmitt remained skeptically unmoved by the Wilsonian era of self-determination claimed for all
peoples, and instead saw an American attempt to forge a new nomos with itself at center (5). Following Wilsons
universalization of the Monroe Doctrine in 1917, whereupon the U.S. interpreted interference in its spheres of
influence as aggression requiring intervention, the U.S. succeeded in disengaging the delicate balance of the
European nomos sealed by colonialism. Instead, Schmitt argued that the U.S. espousal of an anticolonial policy
that recognizes sovereignty as regulated by the League of Nations through mandates, protectorates, trusteeships,
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and even independent statehood couched with security treaties that allow the right of intervention have come
into vogue, avoiding open political subjection. (6)
A parallel transformation occurred under military occupation. Occupatio bellica in the jus publicum Europaeum
was supposed to first, clearly establish a direct administration in the occupied area; second, be only provisional
and temporary; and third, preserve the existing spatial order. However, what Schmitt saw occurring was the
exact opposite. In place of direct administration, the real master deliberately skulk[ed] in the dark by
prefer[ring] to make the native civil servants their agents (16). Without a clear purpose, the meaning of
occupation is perverted into one of those deliberately vague categories and dragged on for indefinite periods of
time, leading areas such as the Rhineland to evaporate among the anxieties of a hideous state of suspense (18,
14). Finally, as we have already seen, the occupier of the jus publicum Europaeum was able to invoke the state of
exception and act as the sovereign, but this power did not belong to the foreign state as it stemmed from the
common nomos itself. For Schmitt, the design of this was intended to circumvent the actual spatial problem:
foreign state power in the territory of a continuing sovereign state (The Nomos of the Earth 207). By contrast,
Schmitt protested the encroachment of this Eurocentric spatial order by what he perceived to be a new
Americentric spatial order. He writes in The Nomos of the Earth,
...the controlled states territory is absorbed into the spatial sphere of the controlling state and its
special interests, i.e., into its spatial sovereignty. The external, emptied space of the controlled
states territorial sovereignty remains inviolate, but the material content of this sovereignty is
changed by the guarantees of the controlling powers economic Gro!raum. (252)
The traditional sense of territorial sovereignty is completely destroyed. The controlled states territory is left
intact while its sovereignty is absorbed into the spatial sphere of the controlling state. Schmitt is one of the first
to identify an American Empire without colonies. No longer would there be an invasion and occupation of a
foreign state, but now a permanent military occupation established by bilateral security treaties that combined a
right of garrison with a right of intervention (The Rhinelands as an Object of International Politics 8).
In a more recent formulation, this is akin to what Chalmers Johnson has called an empire of military bases: ...in
more modern times, unlike many other empires, we did not annex territories at all. Instead we took (or
sometimes merely leased) exclusive military zones within territories, creating not an empire of colonies but an
empire of bases (The Sorrows of Empire 23). Johnson tells the story of an American Empire of military bases
that compromise the sovereignty of states by calling the controlled state satellites that he defines as ostensibly
independent nations whose foreign relations and military preparedness revolve around an imperialist power or
another variant...the client state (31).
But before we rush to the conclusion that the postcolonial moment of postwar occupation is U.S. imperialism in
disguise, it is important to separate two threads that can easily become entangled: Schmitts angst over the
replacement of a Eurocentric order for an Americentric one, and the fabrication of sovereignty through evolving
practices of colonialism and occupation. Schmitt is correct in identifying the imposition of a new nomos as a
spaceless globalized order in which territorial sovereignty is eviscerated by the military backed right of
intervention and transnational economic influence. However, before we charge the U.S. with compromising the
sovereignty of controlled, client or satellite states, it would be misreading Schmitt to assume that this
sovereignty preexists on solid ground. Just as he showed how territorial sovereignty of the jus publicum
Europaeum was fabricated through practices of colonialism and occupation, he must answer the question of how
sovereignty in the new configuration is fabricated before any argument against sovereignty betrayed can be
made.
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3. Institutional Framework X
Enter Foucault. Territorial sovereignty is but one variable in the political equation that is overshadowed by the
populationthe fundamental element...that conditions all the others (Security, Territory, Population 68). No
longer is power measured merely in terms of territorial acquisition, but now in terms of developing a certain
fitness of the population that acts as a conduit for the development of other elements of the political economy
such as natural resources, territorial size, wealth, and so forth. Unlike the static boundaries of a territory, the
population is a fluid organism that reproduces sexually, succumbs to illness, and dies naturally in a way that is
impervious to the arbitrariness of any sovereign law. Precisely because of its nature, management of the
population entails a careful appreciation of it as positioned within a constellation of a series of variables, both
man-made and naturally occurring, that are constantly in flux: climatic change; the intensity with which wealth
circulates; the velocity of human mobility (70). Contingent on x variables of change, it is no longer a problem of
simple addition, but rather a complex calculus. More than an aggregate sum of wills obedient to the sovereign,
the population is a force unto itself that must be managed in order to ensure good government by working within
the ever-changing dynamics of nature itself. This is what Foucault calls the art of government or
governmentality.
While governmentality over a population starts to gain force in the raison dtat, in the end it remains limited
under this geopolitical configuration. Literally meaning reason of the state, the population is recognized as a
force to be managed to the end of the state form itself as it exists not only in its singularity, but also woven into an
inter-state system that is invested in maintaining a European equilibrium (299). This sets the stage for two
reinforcing dispositifs: Polizeiwissenschaft or science of the police and a permanent military (318, 300). On
one hand, an inter-state police system collectively strengthens the population of all European states by opening
up circuits of circulation while on the other, the military wages war in order to make sure the balance is [not]
jeopardized (315, 301). This is precisely what Carl Schmitt before Foucault called the jus publicum Europaeum
that may have been collectively imperial, but was never the product of a single Empire.
Given that their discussion dovetails on the point of a European balance of power, it is not surprising that
Schmitt and Foucault come remarkably close in their accounts of sovereignty under military occupation during
this period. Foucault simply gives a different name to what Schmitt calls occupation as an explosion of the
dualistic theory of the relation between the internal and externalthat is, the reversibility of power in which
the vanquished did not really regard themselves as having been vanquished and occupied by the victors
(Society Must Be Defended 104). It need not matter if the sovereign is foreign or domestic, for the ultimate aim of
military occupation is to reinforce a transnational network of sovereignty that operates under the cover of each
nation-state.
But nothing lasts forever. As the colonization of the New World external to Europe meets its point of saturation,
the limitations internal to Europe are removed. The equation is effectively turned inside out. In the absence of
the infinite expanse of the external space of the colonies, the internal space of European nation-states caves into
the spacelessness of globalization. The key difference between Schmitts and Foucaults discussions is that
whereas Schmitt lamented that the global economy has a disorienting effect on territorial sovereignty of the past,
Foucault showed how it spins the very threads from which sovereignty is fabricated in the postwar present.
Foucaults differing reading of globalization rests on his articulation of a new form of governmentality that serves
the market instead of the end of the state. This neo-liberal governmentality inverts classical liberalism that posits
the state and market as occupying two separate spheres; rather, good government provides malleable
institutional frameworks that not only constitute the ground of free competition, but also offset its undesirable
effects. The equation is not determined from the beginning with the state as a set variable, but rather is expressed
as an institutional framework x (The Birth of Biopolitics 82). The problem good neo-liberal government must
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solve, therefore, is not determining when to encourage or prevent state intervention in response to naturally
occurring market conditions, but determining which institution framework (i.e., which variable of x), will best
constitute the field of competition. Economic development verifies the validity of institutional framework x a
posteriori; it functions as a siphon...as a point of attraction for the formation of a political sovereignty (83).
And as will be apparent in the next section, it is postwar Germany under occupation to which Foucault turns in
order to show what Terry Flew calls the performative basis for legitimacy of the state as it emerges from the
ashes of defeat (53).
4. Germany and Japan
Geopolitically, the neo-liberal art of government provided the U.S. with the opportunity to enter a world order
polarized by the failing imperial capitalism of Europe and the mounting communist resistance with a third
possibility of globalization. In this way, it asserted itself as the inheritor of the imperial order after World War II,
and differentiated itself from its successors by proclaiming an explicitly anticolonial policy that did not seek to
curtail freedom through annexation, but rather to liberate areas as independent sovereign states in order to
open them up to market exchange.
Specifically, the U.S. introduced forms of global governance based upon experimentation done on home ground.
The New Deal policies of the 1930s hailed an expansion of the role of government into the market: banks were
backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), laborers were given collective bargaining rights,
and a system of Social Security was established. This was a testament to the dissemination of market values as
the overriding political rationality of institutions and other spheres of social life. Precisely because the New Deal
was not merely a domestic crisis, but a larger response to the global crisis of capital, the New Deal model had
immense global purchase. As Hardt and Negri observe, the U.S. entry into World War II tied the New Deal
indissolubly to the crisis of European imperialisms and projected the New Deal on the scene of world government
as an alternative, successor model (243-244).
The postwar trans-Atlantic European and trans-Pacific Asian theaters both became testing grounds for this kind
of global governance. Germany and Japan benefitted from the Government and Relief in Occupied Areas
program (GARIOA) from 1946 onwards. But this emergency aid acted more as a temporary fix than a
comprehensive overhaul of the economy. The situation quickly changed after the Cold War started to heat up in
1947 since the U.S. recognized that the stability in Europe and the Asia Pacific was contingent on the economic
recoveries of the German and Japanese economies (Schaller, Altered States 12).
The New Deal model hit Europe with the 1948 implementation of the Marshall Plan that provided government
assistance for the revitalization of industries. However, as Foucault points out, Germany was a curious exception.
Even during the peak years of 1948 and 1949, Marshall Plan aid constituted less than 5% of the German national
income (Henderson). Rather, the economy in the Anglo-American Bizonia was revitalized by deregulation of the
economy through the removal of price controls and currency reform in 1948. This radical policy for market
liberalization, informed by ordoliberalism, not only differentiated the new Germany from the old Nationalist
Socialist state, it also allowed economic freedom to serve as the new ground from which the state could justify its
legitimacy. [1] [#N1] Far from simply being a blank slate for American global governance, the American and
German national modifiers dissolved precisely at the point in which the German variant of neo-liberal
governmentality struck an equilibrium with the American one.
In a remarkable move, Foucault works out the production of sovereignty in postwar Germany through a
Weberian genealogy contra Marxist dialectic. Foucault asks: The problem the Germans had to resolve was...:
given a state that does not exist, how can we get it to exist on the basis of this non-state space of economic
freedom? (The Birth of Biopolitics 86). The good Protestant does not work to become rich. Through his ascetic
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renunciation of greed, he finds unintended wealth as a sign of Gods grace. Likewise, economic freedom produces
political signs of good neo-liberal governmentality as an effect: in contemporary Germany...economic
development...produces sovereignty (84).
When put into comparison with Japan however, the interlocking system of sovereignty under Schmitts jus
publicum Europaeum still remains more useful than Foucault initially allows. While the first years of the
occupation of Japan were marked by sweeping New Deal like reformsthe curbing of zaibatsu combines, [2] [#N2]
egalitarian land reform, and support for labor unionsmuch of Japans conservative big business that fueled the
imperial economy was restored after the reverse course of occupation in 1947. But still, a liberalization of the
economy was not enough. The U.S. was keenly aware of Japans need for regional economic integration that
would provide a circuit of raw material imports and market for exports. As George Kennan stated: We have got
to get Japan back into, I am afraid, the old co-Prosperity Sphere (Schaller, Altered States 20) that inspired
proposals for a Marshall Plan for the Far East (Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan 144) designed to
provide the infrastructure for regional exchange.
In Europe as well, the Marshall Plan did not merely aim to revitalize European industries. Rather, by
underscoring it as an exception to the Marshall Plan, Foucault neglects to show how Germany indirectly
benefitted from the creation of a network of economic sovereignties in a unified and supranational system that
provided the conditions for the possibility of Germanys miraculous growth (Hogan 35). The system of competing
national sovereignties of the jus publicum Europaeum is resurrectedeven as the reason of the state is
subsumed to the reason of the marketas a community of economic sovereignties opened up to mutual trade
that was mediated in large part by the American dollar and U.S. military presence.
However, different from Europe, the State Department ultimately dismissed proposals for an Asian Marshall
Plan. Whereas European states were able to benefit from reconstruction, the former Japanese colonies primarily
needed political and economic development. In short, Europe was able to draw on the legacy of the jus publicum
Europeaum that left a developed economic infrastructure in place whereas the former Japanese colonies were
not as richly developed.
Japan needed an additional value as the profit-yielding institutional framework x became more pronounced. This
value was the U.S. military, an institution (even as a foreign one) that cannot be separated from the production
of sovereignty in the Asia Pacific. As early as 1945, military planners announced the need for a network of U.S.
military bases that dotted the peripheries of the Pacific: Japans former South Pacific Mandate, the Ryukyus, and
Japan. [3] [#N3] Plans for this network must be contextualized by two pivotal events that also took place in 1947.
First, the promulgation of Japans Peace Constitution that stipulates under its famous Article 9 the Japanese
renunciation of war and a standing army. Second, the Emperors Message in which the Japanese Emperor
Hirohito offered Okinawa to occupation authorities to serve as a U.S. military outpost in exchange for the
recuperation of Japanese sovereignty (Gabe 51). This set the stage not only for a recuperation of Japanese
sovereignty, but for the recuperation of a network of sovereignties in the Asia Pacific that reproduced the
infrastructure of the Japanese Empire through the installation of a constellation of U.S. military bases in the
region. In this way, the U.S. restored the sovereignty of Japan, Okinawa, and the mandates through the
respective formations of independence, residual sovereignty, and strategic trusteeship, while making sure that
each formation was configured in a way that facilitated the presence of the U.S. military. Accordingly, Japan
became independent through the 1952 San Francisco Peace Accords with an accompanying U.S.-Japan Security
Treaty that stipulated the conditions under which the U.S. military could remain in Japan. In turn,
administrative rights over Okinawa were handed over to the U.S. through the San Francisco Peace Accords, and
the island was occupied under the premise that its sovereignty was residually [4] [#N4] present in Japan and hence
did not constitute a colony. Finally, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was placed under a U.N. strategic
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trusteeship administered by the U.S. until deemed mature enough for self-governance, while the U.S. carried out
atomic bomb testing in the Bikini Atoll.
In this way, the U.S. resurrected the legacy of the Japanese Empire and established a network of military bases
that operates under the cover of national sovereignty. Understandably, there is much ambiguity as to exactly
what kind of Empire this is: an American one, a Japanese one, or better yet, a joint U.S.-Japanese one
where both states work together collaboratively while somehow maintaining the autonomy of their respective
sovereign spheres even if only in theory. The political left in both the U.S. and Japan favor a critique of American
Empire while more well-read authors might suggest a pecking order in which the U.S. bullies Japan into bullying
its former colonies. But if there is a colonial aspect to the U.S. military presence in the Asia Pacific, it is not
merely an American one, but one that also encompasses the legacy of Japanese Empire. The fact that Okinawa
today bears the burden of 74% of all U.S. military bases in the state of Japan even though it only makes up 0.6%
of total Japanese state territory attests to the collaborative nature of this arrangement. The military in Okinawa
may certainly be an American one, but it is the sovereign right of the Japanese government that not only chooses
to station military forces there, but also generously covers 78.9% or $5.0 billion in basing costs to maintain them.
This figure is unprecedented in the world, making it impossible for the U.S. not to maintain U.S. military bases in
the Japanese state (Department of Defense). Yet to what extent can we say that the U.S. military violates the
sovereignty of Japan when the inauguration of Japanese sovereignty is predicated on the re-colonization of
Okinawa as an American military outpost in the first place?
Even if Japan is ultimately subordinate to the U.S., this is a position from which it has profited greatly. Japan
grew into the worlds second largest economy by 1968 (currently third after being surpassed by China in 2010),
followed by the U.S. However, the sheer size of the economy, calculated in terms of its Gross National Product
does not take into account the fact that Japan is a country smaller than the state of California and has/contains
half the population of the United States. When calculated in terms of per-capita GNP, the Japanese economy in
fact surpassed the United States in 1986 (Ito 3).
5. Folding the Postwar into the Postcolonial
The system of sovereignty fabricated under practices of military occupation that both Schmitt and Foucault
illustrate in their very different trajectories with remarkable points of agreement is just as relevant today as it was
in Europe in the past. Occupatio bellica perhaps comes the closest to exposing Schmitts definition of sovereignty
as tenuously predicated on a common nomos, or in other words, a grammatical structure evoked in the
constitution of sovereignty as a performative speech act. For Foucault, however, this tight field, grid of
intelligibility, or homogeneity of...discourse is not achieved through a docile submission to sovereign
performances, it is achieved through a series of rebellions superficially coded as opposition that actually
(re)produce the internal grammatical structure as an effect (Society Must Be Defended 208, 228, 208). Indeed, it
is precisely the cry of sovereigntys violation that reinforces the discursive field of sovereignty as an effect.
After Japan regained its sovereignty in 1952, a number of U.S. military bases still remained within its territory.
Many from the political left charged that this was an ongoing manifestation of American imperialism. As a
result, the Marines in Gifu Prefecture and Yamanashi Prefecturebases geographically closer to the volatile
Korean Peninsulawere shifted to the much more distant Okinawa in 1956 (Yara 58). The proportion of U.S.
military bases continued to decrease in Japan while increasing in Okinawa after 1972 when Okinawa formally
reverted to the Japanese administration (Arasaki 26-27). It was precisely this charge of a violation of Japanese
sovereignty that (re)produced a U.S.-Japanese system of sovereignty in which Okinawa came to occupy a
semi-extralegal space that falls through the cracks in international law and is constantly subject to a series of
legal exceptions by both states.
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Hence, in a curious turn, the continuity between Japanese Empire and postwar U.S. military occupation breaks
down the dogmatic exclusiveness of the so-called dualistic theory of the relation between internal and external
as Schmitt had originally characterized it, but in a slightly modified form. In other words, if the constitution of
Japanese sovereignty is predicated on a U.S. military presence, then Okinawa is the simultaneous convergence of
four vectors: 1) Japanese colonialism 2) American military occupation with 3) intrastate law (within Japan) 4)
interstate law (between Japan and the U.S.). Okinawa dissolves into a void precisely at the point in which any
discursive strategy attempts to separate these threads. For Okinawa, it matters little who the sovereign or
colonial master isforeign or domestic, American or Japanesefor sovereignty is characterized as the power to
subsume the extralegal space back into the fabric of this law.
Notes:
As early as 1946, a U.S. Army officer trained in economics, William H. Draper, advocated the economic
magnet thesis in Germany (Gimbel 112-113). Draper, who as Army Undersecretary later went on to push for
similar deregulation policies in Japan, argued that a successful bizonal economy would serve as a magnet for
the adjacent French and Soviet zones and lead to German unification while also relieving American taxpayers
from the financial burden of occupation. Framing the Anglo-American bizonal unification in terms of the
economic instead of the political so as to avoid offending the Soviets, Draper fostered an environment that was
receptive to the ideas of the Sozial Marktwirtschaft (social free market) school coming out of the University of
Freiburg. Members such as Wilhelm Rpke and Ludwig Erhard were radically anti-Nazi during the Nazi
regime from an economic perspective. Erhard advised General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the U.S.
zone, to execute their proposals for no price controls and currency reform (Henderson). [#N1-ptr1]
1.
Zaibatsu, literally meaning property agglomeration, were a set of interlocking commercial enterprises
closely held by the same family. The four most prominentMitsui, Mitsubishi, Yasuda, and Sumitomo
accumulated wealth during the Meiji era and profited from military procurement spending that drove
Japanese imperialism. [#N2-ptr1]
2.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State reached a consensus on the need to create a
comprehensive base system in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans although both disagreed on the political
architecture of the arrangement. The former demanded outright annexation of Okinawa and the former
Japanese mandates, while the latter advocated for trusteeship arranged by the United Nations so as to avoid
charges of aggrandizement or colonialism explicitly denied in the 1943 Cairo Declaration and 1945 Potsdam
Declaration. [#N3-ptr1]
3.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles promoted the concept of residual sovereignty after the San Francisco
Peace Treaty officially ended the Allied occupation and established Japanese sovereignty in 1952. According to
Article 3 of the Treaty, the U.S. had the right to place Okinawa under U.N. trusteeship, but because this posed
a series of legal hassles for the U.S., Dulles instead mandated that Okinawas sovereignty residually reside in
Japan. In effect, Japan had de jure sovereignty over Okinawa while the U.S. practiced de facto sovereignty
over the area, thereby locking Okinawa into an effectual state of exception. This arrangement allowed the U.S.
to escape charges of colonialism since it argued that Okinawa would ultimately revert to the Japanese
administration. This was actualized in 1972. [#N4-ptr1]
4.
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