Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty

by Eric Wilson

Overview

An expose of what really goes on behind the closed doors of state power

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745326245
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	03/20/2009
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Eric Wilson is Lecturer, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Melbourne.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Deconstructing the Shadows

Eric Wilson

The human mind in its day-by-day operations cannot bear to look the truth of politics straight in the face. It must disguise, distort, belittle and embellish the truth – the more so, the more the individual is actively involved in the process of politics, and particularly in those of international politics. For only by deceiving himself about the nature of politics and the role he plays on the political scene is man able to live contentedly as a political animal with himself and his fellow men.

Hans W. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations

Law is the respectable face of crime. At first glance, this statement is absurd; a facetious 'joke' of questionable taste and wit. That it definitely is a joke, however, a subversive conjunction of appositional terms, reveals far more than is apparent at first glance. Once we dispense with the strictly binary logic underpinning our collective understanding of legality, the paradoxical effect of the assertion evaporates and new insights emerge. Not the least important of these are new understandings of the complex dynamic between macro- and micro-levels of political analysis; 'macro', denoting the allegedly unified entity the 'state' and its equally unified – and unifying – juridical corollary the 'law', and 'micro', denoting the particular and the private, the zone of pragmatic but ultimately uncertain application of formally enunciated rules and procedures.

A fundamental weakness of current sociological theory [which includes legal sociology] is that it does not relate micro-level interactions ['the small group'] to macro-level patterns ['political structures'] in any convincing way ... the analysis of processes in interpersonal networks provides the most fruitful micro-macro bridge. In one way or another, it is through these networks that small-scale interactions become translated into large-scale patterns, and that these, in turn, feed back into small groups.

The anthropological term for the interstitial figure that strategically regulates the multiform flow of exchanges between the micro- and macro-levels is the 'power broker', or 'middleman', whose role is 'to bridge a gap in communications between the larger and the smaller structures'. Consequently, the middleman is a consummately political creature, whose function 'lies in his capacity to acquire and maintain control over the paths linking the local infrastructure ... to the superstructure of the larger society'. From a purely anthropological perspective, the judge may convincingly be seen as analogous to the middleman, as he (or she) performs the mediatory role of applying the general law (the macro-political structure) to the particular person (the micro-small group). So, however, does the mafia chieftain – under certain circumstances.

In every society there should always be one class of person who sets things right when they get out of hand. Generally these people are called civil servants, but when the state is non-existent or too weak, the job is done by private individuals. Don Calo is one of these, the only one entitled to be called 'Don'; all the rest are called 'zu' (uncle).

The ordinary assumption of a unified state presence expressed through the legal principle of concession, that 'no other authority or form of association properly exists in society except insofar as it is conceded the right to existence by the particular sovereign', is the main source of intellectual resistance to such a casual conflation of the legal with the criminal mediatory role. The criminal assumes a (pseudo-) legal role only if the 'state', which is equal to 'law', is weak or absent; indeed, the absence of the state is conventionally assumed to be identical with the presence of crime. However, contrary to expectations, the mafia capo is meticulous in his compliance with legal form; it is no exaggeration that the essence of his identity as mafioso1 lies precisely with his efficacy as legal agent.

What differentiates from, and in a certain sense contrasts the spirit and organization of the Mafia with banditry is the fact that the Mafia.never or almost never sets itself against the law, [or] directly proposes to break the law or protest against its ordinances, as is the case with the bandit in popular myth; but on the contrary presents itself as concerned with order and of course formal respect for the law.

If we were to represent the dyadic relationship between the judge and the mafia chieftain as a formula, we would get:

(1) Judge = Law = Politics = Power = Coercion

(2) Mafia Chieftain = Violence = Honour = Power = Coercion

The crucial link between the two coercing agents lies within the concise formulation offered by Henner Hess: 'All power is ultimately based on the ability to use force.' A parallel, or 'mirror', logic is established between the illicit capo and the legal civil servant as was the case with Don Calo; 'The monopoly of honour implies power; and among the distinctions that derive from holding power is included that of supplanting the official powers in the administration of justice.' Not surprisingly, the lexicon of legality permeates the language of the mafiosi.

The conviction that the law is an instrument of physical force has deep roots in mafia culture. When an enemy threatens him with recourse to the State's laws, the mafioso ... replies that 'law is force, and can never be separated from force.' Force and supremacy, here, create the law much more than they represent the efficacy of any law valid in itself. Of all historical and social worlds, none demonstrates more clearly than the world of the mafioso the extent to which physical force can be independent of any pre-established distributive justice. Individual mafiosi were perfectly aware of the ultimate foundation of their power, and on some occasions took care to emphasize how the concrete 'justice of force' prevailed over the ideal force of justice.

Consistent with our dyadic formula, 'honour' corresponds to 'violence' as 'law' does to 'politics/power'.

The socio-economic system [of Calabria] faced a constant and real threat of disintegration, and there was thus an urgent need for some supra-individual and public power, capable of creating even a semblance of public order. This need for some self-regulation of the system met with the sense felt by the uomini di rispetto to maintain their honour, and as a result the latter came to be entrusted with a series of important functions, protecting traditional laws, arbitrators and executioners, exercising in their own persons many sensitive powers that were normally the prerogative of the State. Honour was thus transformed into legitimate power, into authority. The latter then appeared in its turn as a means by which honour was itself confirmed and extended.

The terrible logic at work in mafia discourse is that, in the final analysis, law can indeed be effectively reduced to power – or 'force' – obviating altogether the otherwise crucial factor of the legal agent's social identity.

Jacques Derrida, in his seminal essay, 'The Mystical Foundations of Authority', has re-drawn our attention to the brutal interrelationship between law and power and its implication for deconstruction. Through its primary focus of inverting, or 'de-constructing', socially accepted hierarchies of meaning, revealing thereby the absence of a unifying 'metaphysics of presence', deconstruction forces attention onto the extreme iterability of all systems of meaning, now governed by a 'rhetoric of reversibility'. All textual meanings, or sign-systems, are dependent for their efficaciousness upon a prior tactical deployment against an opposite/oppositional meaning, this 'reversibility of placement' serving as the ground of meaning for each individual word/meaning. 'Law' or 'judge' depends upon the intelligibility of 'crime' and 'criminal' in order to be able to operate within any system of discourse; the meaning of any individual word is exhaustively determined by its strategic place within the text. As every sign necessarily requires the existence/presence of its 'other', any conventionally accepted hierarchy of meaning ('the judge is the mediator of the state applying the law'), is always subject to a radical form of inversion/ subversion ('The mafia capo is just like a judge'). Every manifest term necessarily invokes its opposite; 'the essential property of the sign is its iterability'.

In this way, a transversal of meaning is accomplished; from constituting 'associations of armed strongmen and their followers who exercise jurisdiction on the local level in conjunction with formal authority', the mafia familia may also be intelligibly defined as 'a pragmatic extension of the state'.

The relevance of deconstruction to our problem becomes self-evident when greater attention is paid to the complexities of the middleman, the transversal figure that bridges two political orders, micro and macro. For Charles Tilly, middlemen

[c]onsist of those who simultaneously carry on active roles in the community and in the national structures that intersect it. [This] elite are the mediators, the brokers, between those national structures and the relevant activities within the community. They gain power through their extraordinary access to information and to powerful individuals on the outside, and frequently have a good deal of influence over the contacts of other community members with 'outsiders'

Similarly, for Eric R. Wolf, middlemen, or 'brokers'

[s]tand guard over the crucial junctures or synapses of relationships which connect the local system to the larger whole ... [Brokers] must serve some of the interests of groups operating on both the community and the national level, and they must cope with the conflicts raised by the collision of these interests. They cannot settle them, since by doing so they would abolish their own usefulness to others. They thus often act as buffers between groups, maintaining the tensions which provide the dynamic of their actions

As middlemen, both judges and mafia capo derive their respective identities – 'their mutual conceptual interdependence' – from an underlying constitutive force linking law with crime; namely, power. Without pressing the analogy between deconstruction and psychoanalysis too far, the sub-text – that which 'governs' the expression(s) of the surface text – may be interpreted as the 'unconsciousness' of the text. As with the human unconscious, the sub-text contains the polar inversion of the manifest meaning; every invocation of the law necessarily invokes the defining 'presence' of crime.

The repressed 'presence' of 'the other' is never consciously acknowledged; this facilitates the interpretative re-construction of texts, with the critical reader performing the role of terminally suspicious 'psychoanalyst'. The very real possibility of deep and hitherto unacknowledged correspondences between the lawful state and its alleged binary opposite, the criminal cartel, elucidates the mechanisms of repression and denial that psychoanalysis posits as the foundation of neurosis. In precisely this way was Freud able to postulate murder as the originary act of cultural formation.

Certain transformations [go to] work on [historic memory], falsifying the text in accord with secret tendencies, maiming and extending it until it was turned into its opposite ... The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in the doing away with the trace. One could wish to give the word 'distortion' the double meaning to which it has a right, although it is no longer used in this sense. It should mean not only 'to change the appearance of', but also 'to wrench apart', 'to put in another place'. That is why in so many textual distortions we may count on finding the suppressed and abnegated material hidden away somewhere, though in an altered shape and torn out of its original connection. Only it is not always easy to recognize it.

The self – culture – owes its existence to the presence of the other: violence.

POLITICAL PLURALISM: THE POST-MODERN IS THE PRE-MODERN

The nature of man cannot be confined by any single value, expressed by any single kind of relationship. The potential diversity of the human mind must be matched by a diversity of types of community within the social order, each as autonomous as possible within its own sphere of function, each with a measure of authority of its own based upon its unique function and no more disposed to transgress upon the function and authority of any other community than to have its own function and authority invaded.

Robert Nisbet, The Social Philosophers

It is the presumed unitary nature of the state signified by the legal doctrine of concession that guarantees the legitimacy of the commonly accepted binary opposition of 'crime' with 'law'. Mainly because of its Platonic heritage, Western political theory has fetishised the unified state; 'the idea of sovereignty, which clearly implies but one absolute power laying in the social order, with all relationships, all individuals indeed, ultimately subject to it, has been the characteristic approach to the political community'. The belief in political monism has caused Western jurisprudence to conflate law with reason, establishing a chain of signifiers that demarcate the parameters of orthodox – or 'acceptable' – juro-political discourse. Monism logically presupposes that that which is not constitutive of reason – the 'irrational' – cannot exist as a necessary attribute of the 'true' state. Consequently, the history of Western political philosophy is marked by the ruthless denial of all pluralistic forms of political discourse.

It has been the fate of pluralism in Western thought to take a rather poor second place to philosophies which make their point of departure the premise of, not the diversity and plurality of things, but, rather, some underlying unity and symmetry, needing only to be uncovered by pure reason to be then deemed the 'real', the 'true', and the 'lasting'.

This has been all the more surprising when one remembers how recent an innovation the 'state' and its necessary attributes, such as the 'public domain', actually are. Prior to the fairly late figure of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the 'state', or stato or status, denoted the personal position or private estate of the sovereign, signifying the absence of any clear demarcation between the 'private' and the 'public'. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, stato was deemed equivalent to the typology of the prevailing regime, expressed through territory and institutions; 'when status and stato are employed by [pre-modern] writers to denote an apparatus of government, the power structure in question is not in fact viewed as independent of those who have charge of it'.

Significantly, pluralism constituted a robust form of political discourse in the centuries immediately preceding that grand historical construct known as 'the Enlightenment'; that is, the era of the formation of the modern nation-state.

The properly medieval system of thought started from the idea of the whole and the unity, but to every lesser unit down to and including the individual, it ascribed an inherent life, a purpose of its own, and an intrinsic value within the harmoniously articulated organism of the world-whole filled with the Divine Spirit. Thus in accordance with the medieval scheme of things it attained a construction of the social whole which in effect was federalistic through and through ... Between the highest Universality or 'All-Community' and the essential unity of the individual there is a series of intermediate unities, in each of which lesser and lower units are comprised and combined. The political theories endeavour to set up a definite scheme descriptive of this articulation of mankind; for the church they follow the existing hierarchical system, and for secular societies they set up a parallel system by enlarging the Aristotelian gradation of communities.

Due to its feudalistic pedigree, political pluralism operates as a freestanding refutation of the Myth of Enlightenment, foundationally premised upon a meta-historical supra-session of the archaic/pre-modern by the progressive/modern. For Immanuel Wallerstein, the central component of the ideological system, or 'geo-culture', of the modern world-system is continuous, self-directing political transformation. In world-system theory, 'liberalism' is virtually identical with 'modernity' which is, in turn, premised upon an incessant and unconditional rupturing of the capitalistic present with all lingering 'traces' of the pre-capitalistic past. One of the principal consequences of the French Revolution for the modern world-system was that it

[m]ade acceptable for the first time the idea that change, novelty, transformation, even revolution, were 'normal', that is, not exceptional, phenomena of the political arena, at least of the modern arena. What at first appeared as statistically normal quickly became perceived as morally normal.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction:Parapolitics, Shadow Governance and Criminal Sovereignty
Robert Cribb (Australian National University, Canberra) and Peter Dale Scott (University of California, Berkeley)
PART I: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
1. Deconstructing the Shadows
Eric Wilson (Monash University, Victoria, Australia)
2. Democratic State vs. Deep State: Approaching the Dual State of the West
Ola Tunander (International Peace Research Institute, Oslo)
3. Governing Through Globalised Crime
Mark Findlay (University of Sydney)
4. Prospering from Crime: Money Laundering and Financial Crises
Guilhem Fabre (Le Harve University, France)
5. The Shadow Economy: Markets, Crime and the State
Howard Dick (University of Melbourne)
6. Transnational Crime and Global Illicit Economies
Vincenzo Ruggiero (Middlesex University)
7. Redefining Statehood in the Global Periphery
William Reno (Northwestern University, Illinois)
PART II: CASE STUDIES
8. The Sicilian Mafia: Para-state and Adventure Capitalism
Henner Hess (University of Frankfurt)
9. Drugs, Parapolitics, and Mexico: The DFS, the Drug Traffic, and the United States
Peter Dale Scott (University of California, Berkeley)
10. Parapolitics and Afghanistan
Rensselaer W. Lee III (Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia)
11. From Drug Lords to Warlords: Illegal Drugs and the 'Unintended' Consequences of Drug Policies in Colombia
Francisco Thoumi (Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá)
12. Covert Netherworld: Clandestine Services and Criminal Syndicates in Shaping the Philippine State
Alfred W. McCoy (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
13 Beyond Democratic Checks and Balances: The Propaganda Due Masonic Lodge and the CIA in Italy's First
Republic
Daniele Ganser (Freelance historian, has taught at universities in Switzerland including Basel)

Notes on Contributors
Index