Thinking Without a Banister by Hannah Arendt Jerome Kohn

Author:Hannah Arendt,Jerome Kohn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST

Wars and revolutions have thus far determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century; and in contrast to the ideologies in the last twenty years, which have more and more degenerated into empty talk, war and revolution still constitute the two major political issues that confront us. In actual fact, the two are interrelated in many ways, and yet for clarification of these matters they must be kept apart. Historically, wars are among the oldest phenomena of recorded history while revolutions in the modern sense of the word probably did not exist prior to the end of the eighteenth century; they are the most recent of all political data. Moreover, revolutions are very likely to stay with us into the foreseeable future whereas wars, if they should continue to threaten the existence of mankind and hence remain unjustifiable on rational grounds, might disappear, at least in their present form, even without a concomitant radical transformation of international relations. Hence—in anticipation of what I have to say—short of total annihilation and short of a decisive technical development in warfare, the present conflict between the two parts of the world may well be decided by the simple question of which side understands better what is involved and what is at stake in revolution.

In the following I would like to take up, almost at random, a few considerations which all seem to point in the same direction.

1. Obviously, Clausewitz’s definition of war as the continuation of politics with other means, however appropriate it might have been for the limited warfare of European nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no longer applies to our situation. This would be true even without nuclear warfare. Since the First World War, we know that no government and no form of government can be expected to survive a defeat in war. A revolutionary change in government—either brought about by the people themselves, as after World War I, or enforced by the victorious powers through the demand of unconditional surrender and the establishment of War Trials—belongs among the most certain consequences of defeat even if we rule out total annihilation or complete chaos. Hence, even prior to nuclear warfare, wars had become politically, though not yet biologically, a matter of life and death.

At the moment when we are so preoccupied with the threat of total annihilation this may appear irrelevant. But it’s not at all inconceivable that the next stage of technical advancement may bring us back to a kind of warfare which, though probably still horrible enough, will not be suicidal and, perhaps, not even spell complete annihilation to the defeated. Such a development seems to be within the range of definite possibilities for the simple reason that our present stage of international relationships, still based upon national sovereignty, cannot function without force or the threat of force as the ultima ratio of all foreign policy. Whether we like it or not, our present system of foreign affairs makes no sense without war

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