Introduction: State of Emergency Regimes in the First World War Era

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the theme of states of emergency during the First World War era, and provides details on the 13 different case studies presented in the special issue. It makes the case for seeing states of emergency as being shaped by historical experience as opposed to emerging from the abstract reasoning of legal principle and moral philosophy. Equally, though, it recognises that moments of exception do have legal and philosophical, as well as historical-political, dimensions. The article follows the Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben in regarding the year 1914 as a key turning point, not least in the lived historical experience of states of emergency. But it is highly critical of models, Agamben’s included, that emphasise the purely coercive potentials of emergency powers. Instead, it calls for a more pragmatic and empirical approach, focusing on what neutral and belligerent governments did, on how they arranged, regulated and communicated their actions, and on the different political and legal expressions of exceptionality that subsequently emerged, both during and immediately after the 1914–18 conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• First World War
• emergency powers
• law
• politics
• states of exception

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all those who attended the three workshops at which the articles published in this special issue were initially presented. The first two workshops took place online during the COVID-19 pandemic in July 2020 and July 2021, and the third occured in person at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) in Munich in July 2022. We are particularly grateful to those colleagues who acted as expert commentators and discussants at one or more of these events: Martin H. Geyer, John Horne, Matthias Lemke, Amerigo Caruso, Maximilian Buschmann, Stefanie Middendorf and Alexander Korb. Professor Geyer also co-organized the third workshop at the IfZ and, together with Annette Meyer, hosted Matthew Stibbe’s Visting Fellowship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität’s Center for Advanced Studies in summer 2022.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Head, Emergency Powers, 40.

2. Agamben, Homo sacer.

3. Ibid., 166–80.

4. For an excellent account of the situation in Germany, which also takes a wider comparative angle, see Caruso, “Blut und Eisen auch im Innern.”

5. Wolff, Der Krieg des Pontius Pilatus, 355–6.

6. See, for example, Farrar, The Short-War Illusion.

7. Horn, “Economic Planning.” Also quoted in Schneider, Die Schweiz im Ausnahmezustand, 67–8. Afflerbach, On a Knife Edge, 28, also makes the same point specifically in relation to Germany, where the ‘General Staff had a plan of operations rather than a strategy and the war ministries (not only in Prussia, but also in Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg) had made only hesitant and substantially flawed economic preparations for war’.

8. Farrar, “Nationalism in Wartime,” 141.

9. Bartov and Weitz (eds.), Shatterzone of Empires.

10. Clemens, “Delegated Governance,” 296.

11. See, for example, Huebner, “The Internment Camp at Terezín.”

12. Tingsten, Les pleins pouvoirs.

13. Llanque, “Le concept de ‘dictature’”, here esp. 132.

14. Chrisafis, “Uproar as Macron bypasses parliament.”

15. On the similarities between the post-1914 and post-2001 eras, as well as the exceptional and unprecedented aspects of the latter, see Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, esp. 31–48. On the 2008 financial crash and its decade-long aftermath see Tooze, Crashed; on the importance of the Bataclan attack see Lemke, Demokratie im Ausnahmezustand, 246–58; and on the COVID-19 pandemic see Florack, Korte and Schwanholz, “Coronakratie.”

16. Agamben, State of Exception, 4, 10.

17. Berda, Living Emergency, 36.

18. Lau, “Sie haben Recht.”

19. Agamben, State of Exception, 1–31.

20. Schmitt, Political Theology.

21. Roffenstein, Zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Gegenwartsgeschichte; and Stransky, Psychopathologie der Ausnahmezustände.

22. Fraenkel, The Dual State.

23. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 294.

24. Bauman, “Das Jahrhundert der Lager?”; Kotek and Rigoulet, Le siècle des camps; Greiner and Kramer (eds.), Welt der Lager; and Jahr and Thiel (eds.), Lager vor Auschwitz.

25. Agamben, State of Exception, 3.

26. Ibid., 23; See also Agamben, Homo Sacer; and Fassin and Pandolfi (eds.), Contemporary States of Emergency.

27. Paye, Das Ende des Rechtsstaats, esp. 53–4.

28. Agamben, State of Exception, 4.

29. See, for instance, Bratton, The Revenge of the Real; Lemke, “Die Empirie von Ausnahmezuständen”; and Florack, Korte and Schwanholz, “Coronakratie.”

30. Agamben, State of Exception, 7, 10, 12.

31. Lazar, States of Emergency, 161.

32. Agamben, State of Exception, 14–16.

33. Garnett, “Emergency Powers in Northern Ireland.”; and Head, Domestic Military Powers, 23–5.

34. Hewitt, The British War on Terror.

35. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.

36. Agamben, State of Exception, esp. 19, 32–6; Paye, Das Ende des Rechtstaats, esp. 41, 211–13, 221; and Odent, Europe, état d’urgence, esp. 110–12.

37. Mbembe, Necropolitics; Head, Domestic Military Powers; Berda, Living Emergency; Neal, “Foucault in Guantánamo”; and Pugliese, State Violence; Siegelberg, Statelessness.

38. See, however, Van Middelaar, Pandemonium.

39. Other important exceptions are Middendorf, Macht der Ausnahme; Caglioti, War and Citizenship; and Heymann, Die Rechtsformen der militärischen Kriegswirtschaft.

40. Harris, Act of Oblivion, 41.

41. Gerstle and Isaac (eds.), States of Exception in American History, 11.

42. See, for example, Morton, States of Emergency.

43. See note 41 above.

44. In particular, we are indebted to Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization; and Raphael, Imperiale Gewalt und mobilisierte Nation.

45. See De Schaepdrijver, ‘Special Issue: Military Occupations’.

46. Stibbe, “Gewalt gegen Zivilisten,” 79.

47. See Liulevicius, War Land; and Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse. Also Stibbe, “Gewalt gegen Zivilisten.”

48. Berda, Living Emergency.

49. We use the phrase ‘spaces of exception’ here in the same way that Agamben uses it to describe the twentieth-century concentration camp as the ‘“Nomos” of the Modern’. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 166, 169.

50. Keil, “The Captives of the Kaiser.”; and Stibbe, “Krieg und Brutalisierung.”

51. Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, 28.

52. Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars, 164.

53. Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, 207.

54. Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 37, 213.

55. Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, 201.

56. Osterhammel, “Europas unendliche Arroganz.”

57. Schneider, Die Schweiz im Ausnahmezustand, 12.

58. Mandry, “Der Ausnahmezustand in Frankreich,” 13.

59. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 82–3.

60. Agamben, State of Exception, 12.

61. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 103.

62. See, for instance, Schudnagies, Der Kriegs- oder Belagerungszustand.

63. See Scheer, Zwischen Front und Heimat, 55–6.

64. Keil, “The Captives of the Kaiser,” 67–8.

65. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 97–102.

66. Head, Domestic Military Powers, 26. See also Heck, “Der Ausnahmezustand in England,” 193–4.

67. Heck, “Der Ausnahmezustand in England,” 208–9; and Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 148.

68. Head, Domestic Military Powers, 25.

69. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 149.

70. See, for instance, ibid., 172–7; and Townsend, Making the Peace, 86–8.

71. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 77.

72. Ibid.

73. Bratton, The Revenge of the Real, 8. Italics in the original.

74. Müller, “Feindliche Ausländer.”

75. On the at times overlapping and at other times quite separate roles of nationality and race in global internment policies during the First World War, see also Stibbe, “Ein globales Phänomen.”

76. On the latter, see also Caglioti, War and Citizenship; and Stibbe, Civilian Internment.

77. Schneider, Die Schweiz im Ausnahmezustand, 55–6.

78. See in particular Agamben, Homo Sacer.

79. Horton, The Blight of Asia, as cited in Milton, Paradise Lost, 67.

80. Milton, Paradise Lost, 62.

81. Schmitt, Dictatorship; and Schmitt, Political Theology.

82. Mosse, “The Brutalization of German Politics,” 160.

83. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 28. Also cited, with additional translations of terms cited by Schmitt in Latin and Greek, in Tracy B. Strong’s foreword to Schmitt, Political Theology, xvi.

84. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 19, 28. For a critical discussion of the role played by considerations of sovereignty – including which peoples were and were not entitled to it – at the Paris Peace conference of 1919–20, see Manela, The Wilsonian Moment; and Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

85. Tingsten, Les pleins pouvoirs.

86. Koblik, Sweden, the Neutral Victor.

87. See, for instance, Mondini, Roma 1922, 212–16; and Foot, “The March on Rome.”

88. Foot, “The March on Rome,” 163.

89. On the Webbs, see Keil, “Zwischen Kooperation und Opposition.”

90. Orzoff, Battle for the Castle, 177.

91. Ibid.

92. La continuité constitutionnelle en France, 97. For the first two of these ‘full powers laws’, see also Mandry, “Der Ausnahmezustand in Frankreich,” 28; and for the 1924 law in particular, see Tingsten, Les pleins pouvoirs, 15–57.

93. Haegenborgh and Verrijdt, “The State of Emergency in Belgian Constitutional Law,” 18.

94. Ibid. See also Meerten, Capital Formation, 207; and Tingsten, Les pleins pouvoirs, 137–47.

95. See Stibbe, Civilian Internment, 271–3; and Boswell, “From Liberation to Purge Trials.”

96. Farrar, “Nationalism in Wartime,” 145. While we accept Farrar’s claim that state decision-makers before 1914 largely based ‘their choices on … prevailing assumptions about state relations – secret diplomacy, state power, the balance of power, and war as a valid tool of state policy’, we would question whether this still applied after the opening weeks of the First World War, when new ways of imagining and catering for internal and external emergency came to the fore at the same time as the world entered what Hobsbawm calls an ‘age of extremes’.

97. Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, 21.