Grad - Olsen

Abstract

This presentation explores painful debates arising over the extent and legitimacy of American military sacrifice in the War on Terrorism (with a major focus on Iraq) in three major American newspapers (Wall Street journal, New York Times, USA Today) and two news magazines (Newsweek, The Nation) from September 11th 2001 to March 2008. It then looks at how the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (1979 and 1994) can help us build a theoretical framework to assess how the passage from republicanism to neo-liberalism has transformed the political and symbolic economies of citizenship and military sacrifice in the United States, and thus account for the specific tensions in media debates. These concepts enable us to highlight four questions. First, who fights and who dies in American wars? Second, on what grounds is the distribution of military sacrifice within society rationalized? Third, what dilemmas does this reflect or create for American society? Four, how are the distribution of sacrifice and their modes of symbolic legitimization changing? My central contention, however, is that more profoundly, this transformation in the economies of sacrifice and citizenship must also be understood as a process of responses to address a series of crises of the American imperial society model” (Charle 2001, 2004, 2005 on the European imperial societies for the main inspiration) since the Second World War. Unlike ‘empire’ the concept of ‘imperial society’ focuses on the political borders of citizenship (of exclusion and inclusion, Campbell 1998; Kaplan 2004) within the American polity rather than limiting its investigation of imperial power to the outskirts of the state’s territorial borders. The concept also highlights the imperial society’s specific national habitus which takes the form of a “civilizing mission” and draws it into a fierce competition for symbolic preeminence against other societies. The presentation then examines whether and how debates in the American media highlight crises resulting from contradictions between the symbolic aims of foreign policy (and its corollary war aims) and the very real fissures of class, race and identity across American society? How has the burden of ‘American empire’ shifted among social classes, ethnic and gender groups, first and second class citizens? How have these transformations affected Americans’ willingness to go to war and the population’s capacity or ‘resolve’ to embrace the war aims defined by political leaders and foreign policy elites when the vast majority of families no longer directly feel the effects of war? And most importantly, what social wounds and traumatic memories are being rekindled or buried by the widening gap between army and society? A focus on the political and symbolic economies of military sacrifice in the American imperial society can thus help us recast present dilemmas emerging out of the War on Terrorism in a much denser context than the post-9/11 world.