LITMIR.BIZ

       “All the World Was America”

      THE LONG HISTORY OF HOMELAND SECURITY

      The dialectic of security and insecurity, like that of security and terror, is central to the philosophy and form of the modern state. For John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the insecurity—or terror—of the state of nature necessitates the ascent of the sovereign and constitution of the social contract; the state arises to delineate what is secured from what is not, civilization from savagery, inside from outside, citizen from non, the bearer of rights from the rightless. Despite the reciprocal emergence of security thinking and the modern state, the absolute saturation of social and political discourse with security rhetoric is a twentieth-century phenomenon. In the United States, Social Security acquired its rhetorical power and bureaucratic form in the 1930s. The postwar years witnessed the emergence of National Security as an organizing principle of governance. And in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Homeland Security has attained discursive prominence, giving name to a new state form. In this chapter, I argue for the efficacy of conceptualizing the above-mentioned security paradigms together—shedding light upon the ways in which, for instance, Social and Homeland Security are bound up in one another, sharing both a genealogy and a political rationality. This common genealogy and rationality, I contend, can be traced to the advent of colonial modernity, and to the settler-colonization of the New World in particular. Countering ahistorical accounts of post-9/11 political-economic order, this chapter situates the contemporary manifestation and twentieth-century evolution of security discourse and practice within the long history of modernity at large.

      This expansive historical framework, I contend here, as throughout this book, is essential to any critical reckoning with the political forms and narratives of the imperial present. My objective is not to deny the transformations embodied in the Homeland Security state, but to demonstrate the ways in which those transformations are contiguous with—rather than a departure from—the long and recent histories of the modern security project. Essayed in this chapter, to borrow from Fredric Jameson (for his “capitalism” I substitute “security”), “is a dialectical view of [security] . . . in place of the latter’s breaks and discontinuities: for it is the continuity of the deeper structure that imposes the experiential differences generated as that structure convulsively enlarges with each new phase.”¹ Newness, in other words, is both a consequence and expression of continuity.

      My analysis proceeds through an examination of three elemental relations: security and capital, security and race, and security and emergency. Each of these relations works with and through the others, and all are fundamental to the constitution of a specifically colonial modernity. The security state emerges to guarantee the process and outcome of capitalist accumulation, in the colony as in the metropole. The securing of private property is enabled by and in turn reinforces race thinking and practice, which also functions to structure internally, and mark the external boundaries of, the political community. The capitalist and racial logics of the security state dovetail with the politics of emergency. The enactment of emergency or exception legitimates the preemptive and punitive violence of the security state; sanctions extra-legal forms of accumulation by dispossession; and clarifies the racial distinction between the bearer of rights and the rightless, human and infrahuman.

      SECURITY AND CAPITAL

      Though the lexiconic proliferation of security thinking is a relatively recent phenomenon, the security project was manifold in its inception. The state was founded to secure the sovereign, “the People,” and the identity, personhood, and liberty of the individual subjects that composed the body politic. All of these principles, meanwhile, were underlain by the security of property. Here Enlightenment philosophers of government and political economy were in agreement. Security was central to the rise of the modern state and, as Mark Neocleous has observed, to the ascendance of the bourgeois property rights enshrined therein.² The meaning and object of the term “security” is always contested; the vocabulary of security animates movements of resistance as well as processes of dispossession and domination. In its ascendant form, though, the modern security project is constructed and deployed by and in the service of the state and capital—to justify discursively and provide structural mechanisms for the accumulation, uneven distribution, and maintenance of political and economic power.

      “In the beginning,” Locke wrote, “all the world was America.” In the beginning, in other words, all the world—untamed and uncultivated—invited the virtuous procedures of primitive accumulation. In the opening paragraphs of “Of Property,” the fifth chapter of his Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke introduces what is often termed his “labor theory of property.” Because “every man has property in his own person,” he is rightfully entitled to whatever he extracts or derives from nature: “For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to.”³ Crucially, in claiming land and laboring upon it, thereby increasing the bounty derived from that land, man is in fact increasing, or “improving,” the “common stock” of humanity: “he that encloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres than he could have had from a hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind.” The dispossession of common lands for the purpose of industrious cultivation is, Locke insisted, in effect a gift to the dispossessed, the Yorkshire peasant and indigenous American alike. “I ask,” Locke wrote, “whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage, or husbandry, a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life as ten acres of equally fertile land in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated.”⁴ North American land, lying fallow due to the indolence of its native inhabitants, invites the intervention of the European settler, who through his labor will increase the product of the land and thus the stock of mankind in general.

      In a telling passage in “Of Property,”

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