Political community, civil war and secession
'The casuistries of civil war - how vast!' Thomas De Quincey
As David Armitage shows in his Civil Wars: A History in Ideas our concept of civil war is as contested as the conflicts it purports to name. There is a basic sense in which it isn’t contested. We can wonder how is it possible for a war - humans killing other humans - to be civil. But beyond this what it means and how it is used is as much about wider political goals and exculpatory justifications that do not, at least not often, meet. That’s to say, it’s rarely the case that both (or more) sides think they’re engaging in civil war.
Armitage sees Rome as inventing civil war where it consisted of two key ideas. The first that a war is civil if it takes places within a single political community and the second that there should be two competing parties, one with legitimate authority over the political community. Both issues are conceptually difficult. What is a single political community? What is legitimate authority? What constitutes a side and what does a side constitute? Or less obscurely, how are those not directly involved in the conflict represented by those who are?
By the late eighteenth century, Europeans with eyes on the history of Rome distinguished between three kinds of civil war: ‘successionist’, ‘supersessionist’ and ‘secessionist’.
Successionist civil wars are disputes over succession in the monarchies of Europe. Sidney in arguing against monarchy and for republicanism pointed to the tendency of monarchy to experience this kind of civil war, something supported by the fact of continued successionist wars in Europe since the middle ages. He further argued that these were like the civil wars of Rome, with the conclusion of one the beginning of another. The second form, supersessionist, is opposing groups fighting for authority over a single territory. Simple division is not enough here, ‘it was the elevated status of both sides in a civil war — the incumbent sovereign…and the rebels — as “constituting…two separate bodies, two distinct societies” that marked this as novel.
If these largely followed Roman thinking, the third - secessionist - was relatively new:
Secession had been a Roman category but with a much more specific meaning than it would later acquire. On these occasions, in 494,449 and 287 B.C.E, the lower classes of Rome — the plebs — went on strike and retreated to spaces outside the city, actions known as the “secession of the plebs”. These did not lead to civil wars and indeed happened long before those conflicts the Romans would recognize as wars among their citizens.
In contrast:
The modern usage of “secession” referred more generally to the attempt by the part of a political community to break away from the existing political authority and assert is own independence…there were few precedents before the late eighteenth century for such an action, most notably the Dutch Revolt from the Spanish monarchy in the 1580s; it was only after the success of Britain’s North American colonies in exiting from the empire in 1776 that this model began to proliferate and to gain legal recognition. Thus, the Americas provided a truly revolutionary conception of civil war that would be imitated across the world in the following two centuries.
The third kind complicates the questions asked above considerably, for if there is a distinct political community formed, in what sense can it be said that the war is within a single political community? Is it not then an international war and subject to the canons of international war? The American colonies provide a multi-layered case in point. There is the sense in which Great Britain might consider it a civil war, the sense in which there are distinct, if disproportionately sized, sides within the colonies themselves - patriots and loyalists - and then thirteen colonies later independent states fighting against a common enemy. Another, more elaborate in its claims, is that it was the continuation of the British Civil Wars because the same political principles were at stake.
In part the difficulties here are obscured because of the concept of revolution. The rise of this, as Armitage points out, is not merely or even mostly its conceptual merits but rhetorical advantage. Revolution is ‘synonymous with the leading edge of useful transformation across all domains of human activity…The irrational, atavistic, and destructive weed of civil war would wither away, never to find favourable soil again.’ A sense, then, that what one likes is a called a ‘revolution’ and one doesn’t is called ‘civil war’. But underlying this:
The page on which self-consciously modern revolutionaries rewrote the script of political change was in fact a palimpsest — underneath the new version, still very much visible, was the one transmitted by the historians of Rome’s civil wars. That new script, no less than the old was an act of will. It too would feature contestations over sovereignty and be likewise shadowed by the specter of recurrence…a modern genealogy of revolution was re-created, in which civil war was the inconvenient ancestor that had to be suppressed but never quite seemed to go away.
In the United States context it would re-emerge when southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy. What to call this conflict another example in which the meaning of civil war was contested. Lincoln called the conflict, though neither exclusively or mostly, ‘a great civil war’ (‘rebellion’ was another) but, as Armitage rightly observes, this was to presume the Union’s interpretation of the Confederacy’s actions. As well Lincoln might. By contrast the Confederacy argued they had exercised their constitutional right to secede and were fighting to secure their newly formed one in response to the United State’s attempts to stop them. That the conflict has become known as the ‘American Civil War’ is not accidental to its outcome.
The Confederacy’s argument was, Lincoln argued, self-defeating. If secession is a constitutional right then it would follow that the Confederate states should include a right to secede in their own constitution. Lincoln says ‘the principle itself is one of disintegration, and upon which no government can possibly endure.’ Ironically this argument could be applied to the rebellion of the colonies against the British government. That rebellion conveniently a revolution and not a civil war because reasons. Secession, of course, is still not recognised as a right in international law.
The issue is further complicated by the emergence of nationalism - and how that relates to political community - in the 19th century and then, following from this, national self-determination - as it relates to secession. If contesting the meaning of civil war involves contesting the meaning of political community, nationalism pushes back further to the object of politics being (logically) a pre-political community of a certain kind. One whose potency is achieved, at least in part, by nationalists appealing to and engaging a cultural community to back up its claims. Nationalism’s wars then reframe civil war because it would confer legitimacy on the political community nationalists seek to break from but also to admit the nationalism’s emergence from within a political community rather than existing prior to it. It is important for nationalism that its wars to secede from established political authorities are not civil.
But if nationalist wars of secession are not civil, the logic remains the same. Nationalist movements similarly seek to forestall others forming their own nationalist secession movements by appeals to brute fact. Lincoln’s principle of disintegration defeated by mere stipulation. The bottom, just when it suited, has been reached. Civil war’s revolutionary palimpsest redux.
This isn’t mere semantics. The framing, for example, makes a difference to justification. Another question civil war presents is whether a civil war can be just (in the right to go to war sense) from the side of the rebelling. The Union’s civil war made the Confederates the aggressor, the Union’s armies were therefore defending the integrity of the political community. By contrast the Confederate states said they had exercised a right to secede and were defending their political community from an aggressive north seeking to prevent it. Just like the War of Independence. A similar move is made by nationalist movements where conflict arises in response to the denial of a right of secession.
Related to justification is a wider point in how we imagine political communities. The use of ‘civil war’ to describe a conflict implies, entails, something about how we see those engaged in it. Looking from the outside is of course different from looking at it from the inside. Inside inevitably means taking a side because there is something at stake but using ‘civil war’ means something for how the other side is seen. This gets at an issue that, so far, has largely been left aside. Civil war as providing internal legitimacy if not justification. Returning to the Roman definition of civil war, it required two competing parties, one with legitimate authority and one without. If the rebelling party is to establish itself as something other than mere rebellion it must seek to present itself as representative of something bigger that is capable through the mystifications of group agency to act as one against the legitimate authority. Here the logic of civil war - and of revolution and of nationalism - presses division that isn’t easily healed.
Famously Thucydides observed how war in Corcyra had corrupted moral language. He writes:
So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration on the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence…
As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.
As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion. As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves.
Conventionally this is referred to as a ‘civil war’ but as Thucydides describes the effects of the conflict we can see how that is itself part of the corruption. This highlights a final form of civil war as a war of ideas. In as much as the concept itself is contested, its and its accretions use in conflict and in politics should also be.