[...] possessing now
neither the quality
nor the quantity
of humanity

possession

Now that the sky has disappeared …

I have seen hell

And is God innocent?

a or a schoolboy the back lighting enables one to pick out from the central tower the little captive silhouettes in the ring of cells in short the principle of the dungeon is reversed daylight and the overseer’s gaze capture the more effectively than darkness which afforded after all a sort of protection there is no need for arms physical violence material constraints just a gaze an inspecting gaze a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorisation to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over and against himself a superb formula power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be minimal cost mirror with memory memory without a mirror if instead of being hanged by the neck you’re thrown inside for not giving up hope in the world your country and people like a stone at the bottom of a well four o’clock no you no six seven tomorrow the day after and maybe who knows I love my country I have swung on its plane trees I have stayed in its prisons nailed to the sky this is the price and the promise of citizenship for as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the and of the people upon which this nation relies these things are true they have been the quiet force of throughout our infernal possessing now neither the quality nor the quantity of humanity labyrinth of thoughts empty labyrinths madness as a domain of knowledge at each stage of his imprisonment he had known or seemed to know whereabouts he was in the windowless building possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure the cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level the room where he had been interrogated by was high up near the roof this place was many metres underground as deep down as it was possible to go (con)naissance extraordinary rendition I have seen hell labyrinth of blindness and is god innocent innocuous innocent malignant malicious I never borrowed a kettle from you blind eyewitness I returned it to you intact the kettle was already broken when I got it from you under the snow and lava a swimming pool with no bottom let flowing water bring to you the king is but an earthen bowl on the potter’s shelf and victories are told on the ruined walls of the king of kings I carved your name on my watchband with my fingernail where I am you know imprison in prison inprison I don’t have a pearl-handled jackknife they won’t give us anything sharp two gentlemen meet on a train and one is struck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other he asks his companion what is in that unusual package you are carrying there prisoner a prisoner B screen memory the other man replies that is a macguffin what is a macguffin asks the first man the second says a macguffin is a device used for killing leopards in the scottish highlands naturally the first man says but there are no leopards in the scottish highlands well says the second then that’s not a macguffin is it world’s embrace blind witness omnipresent omniscient a prison where the walls are made of glass the guards are watching the inmates, the inmates are watching the guards a dark room single bright lamp in the middle a chair underneath interrogation/inter-rogation/interrelation dis-closure carrying the sky entropy what does solitude taste like pure presence is fetish in a wilderness of mirrors what do you look at subversive mirror simpl(ifi)e(d) drinking emptiness symbol of wholeness I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh because its wounds are not upon the surface and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear therefore the more I denounce it as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay art ceases to be based on ritual and begins to be based on another practice politics the worst thing in the world said varies from individual to individual it may be burial alive or death by fire or by drowning or by impalement or fifty other deaths there are cases where it is some quite trivial thing not even fatal dark moments, such as everyone has when you think you’ve achieved nothing at all when it seems that the only trials to come to a good end are those that were determined to have a good end from the start and would do so without any help while all the others are lost despite all the running to and fro, all the effort, all the little, apparent successes that gave such joy

1842

Looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired….He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years….

 Le front du désert : des camps européens de réfugiés en Afrique du Nord

This article first appeared in the German journal Konkret (issue 12/2004) and traces the implementation of the creation of migrant and refugee prisons, so called off-shore centres, in northern Africa, as part of the EU’s globalisation of migration control. With the example of recent developments in EU and particularly German and Italian relations with Libya, the author highlights the relationship between military, economic and migration control agreements between the EU and third countries and documents the devastating effect these have for migrants and refugees caught up in the militarisation of the EU’s external borders.

 »How can you forget the concentration camps built by Italian colonists in Libya into which they deported your great family – the Obeidats? Why don’t you have the self-confidence, why don’t you refuse?» the Libyan intellectual Abi Elkafi recently asked the Libyan ambassador in Rome, who had initiated the country’s orientation towards the West. «The reason I write to you are the atrocious new concentration camps set up on Libya’s soil on behalf of the Berlusconi government,» Elkafi wrote in an open letter.

 In June 1930, Marshal Petro Badoglio, the Italian governor of Libya, ordered the internment of large parts of the then 700,000 inhabitants of Libya. Within two years, more than 100,000 people had died of hunger and disease in the desert concentration camps. Around the same time, Badoglio had fortified the 300 kilometre long Libyan/Egyptian border line with barbed wire fence. This is how the Italian colonists destroyed the Libyan resistance. For years, they had not succeeded – neither by bombing villages and oases, nor by using poison gas. The current Italian government laughs at any demand for compensation, Abi Elkafi writes.

 Military camps for refugees – the reality of off-shore centres

Four years ago, the western press received first reliable reports on internment camps in Libya. In September and October 2000, pogroms against migrant workers took place in Libya and 130 to 500 sub-Saharan Africans were killed in the capitol Tripoli and the Tripoli area. To escape the persecution, thousands of builders and service sector employees from Niger, Mali, Nigeria, and Ghana fled south. Many of them were stopped at road blocks in the Sahara and taken to Libyan military camps. Le Monde Diplomatique reported on several camps in where migrants and refugees have been held since 1996 – about 6,000 Ghanaians and 8,000 people from Niger are supposed to be held in one of them alone. The Ghanaian president Jerry Rawlings visited the camp to bring back some hundred compatriots. The Somali Consultative Council appealed to Gaddafi on 22 February 2004 «to unconditionally release the Somali refugees who are imprisoned in your country and who have started a hunger strike immediately and not send them back to the civil war in Somalia.» In the beginning of October 2004, the Italian state TV channel RAI showed pictures from a Libyan refugee camp. Hundreds of people were depicted in a court yard, heavily guarded; the barracks apparently do not have sleeping facilities. Reports of some of the Somalis who have recently been deported to Libya confirm the existence of these camps.

Did the Libyan government originally build these camps in order to provide a labour force for major building projects in the south of the country (»greening the desert»)? Or are they an attempt to fight refugees in transit? In any case, the Libyan government already announced some time ago that undocumented immigrants would be imprisoned in southern Libya and deported. In December 2004, the Libyan interior minister Mabruk announced without further explanation that Tripoli had deported 40,000 migrants in the last weeks alone.

 These imprisonments and deportations have now become antecedents of the so-called off-shore centres of the European Union, propagated particularly by Germany’s interior minister Otto Schily. Libya is the first non-European country which allows for its camps to be integrated into the EU’s deportation policies. Together with the new airlifts to Tripoli, by which African refugees are being deported collectively from Italy since 2 October 2004, first facts of this regime have been created. At the beginning of October 2004, the designated and later suspended EU commissioner Buttiglione announced during his hearing before the European Parliament in Strasbourg that the EU did not want to create «concentration camps» in north Africa, but wanted to use the already existing camps «in which refugees are living under the most difficult circumstances.» At their informal meeting in Scheveningen on 30 September to 1 October 2004, the EU’s justice and interior ministers agreed in principle that the EU is striving for the creation of «reception camps for asylum seekers» in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritius and Libya, not under supervision of the EU but of the respective countries.

Mostly unnoticed by the public, the EU states that form the EU’s external borders are creating the preconditions for a new deportation regime. Whereas until recently, refugees and migrants who were stopped by border police were taken into the EU country, there are now enormous reception capacities on the Canary Islands and on the southern Italian and eastern Greek islands. This «initial reception» is no more intended to lead into European cities and the already meagre EU legal protection. The camps at Europe’s peripheries are typically located near airports on former military compounds, guarded by paramilitary troops and hardly accessible even for the UNHCR. Contact to the outside world is made extremely difficult if not impossible. The facilities are secured with modern prison equipment. The Canary islands currently hold camps with altogether 1,950 places.

These camps in the Canaries, southern Italy and eastern Greece, also mark the introduction of a social change initiated by EU states: in the 1990’s the boat people were welcomed by the Mediterranean population. Although the state declared a state of emergency when large refugee boats arrived and put them into stadiums, it remained a public event which attracted many inhabitants who drove to the stadium with clothes, blankets and food. With the new prison camps, the administration now systematically separates boat people from the society they arrive in and thereby creates the organisational preconditions for mass deportations to places outside the EU, far from any legal or societal control. Extraterritorial, law-free zones are being created at the fringes of Europe.

Since the beginnings of the 1990’s, Western European migration and refugee strategy papers point to the EU intending to export the asylum procedures to places outside Europe. They outline a global migration control approach that ensures that refugees and unwanted migrants from Africa, Asia and South America do not reach Europe anymore. Central to this concept are camps encircling Europe.

Up to now these plans could not be implemented. German authorities unsuccessfully attempted to enforce this practise in the early 1990’s after the war against Iraq, when the no-fly zone was created over Iraqi Kurdistan: they wanted to declare the area a «safe haven» for Iraqi refugees, to which they could be deported en masse. This did not succeed until the NATO war in Kosovo. Within a few weeks, the war zone was surrounded by refugee camps, thus stopping hundreds of thousands on their flight to the EU.

In the beginning of the current Iraq war, Tony Blair suggested the creation of refugee camps under the supervision of the EU but outside its territory. His «new vision for refugees», published in March 2003, foresaw returning those who would apply for asylum in the EU to outside the EU’s borders. His vision was one of a ’camp universe’, set up by EU officers and made up of Transit Processing Centres (TPC) in front of the gates of the EU, together with the UNHCR and the notorious International Organisation for Migration (IOM). From there they would be able to bring the refugees back to «safe» zones near their regions of origin and select a few for entry into the EU. When that plan became known to the public, it went down in a storm of protest.

Despite the public criticism, Otto Schily and Giuseppe Pisanu, the German and Italian interior ministers, developed the idea further in the summer of 2004. The European Commission together with the Strategic Committee for Immigration, Frontiers and Asylum (SCIFA) were to test preliminary measures of «a European asylum office with interception functions» in northern Africa (Schily in FAZ, 23.7.2004). In practise, this proposal implies that boat people coming through the Mediterranean were to be returned to camps located in Arab states – in collective procedures and without an individual check on their nationality, their flight route or reasons for flight. This practise is called refoulement and is explicitly prohibited in the Geneva Refugee Convention. EU Member States’ constitutions as well as the European Convention on Human Rights prohibit refoulement as well. However, this practise not only concerns the violation of rights of asylum seekers. In internment camps or when deported to desert areas without support, migrants, no matter if they flee from poverty and hunger or for other «economic» reasons, suffer the same fate they were trying to flee. They are threatened with imprisonment, abuse and death.

Testing and developing military technology in the fight against migration

Recent international events have changed the political, military and economic situation to such an extent that desert camps have now come within Schily’s and Pisanu’s reach. The first barrier for unwanted refugees and migrants is Europe’s external border policy. But since EU enlargement and the global «fight against terror», these policies are being formulated under different conditions. In 2001, the German and Italian interior ministries laid down their dream of an EU border police in EU documents. The plan was intended to bring the unsafe borders of certain members under centralised control. At first, the focus was on the eastern border of accession states, but the accession states were not exactly enthusiastic about the idea that especially German, together with other EU police officers, were to secure their eastern borders. They fear that a total closure of borders will create tensions with their eastern neighbours. Further, the German border guards have reaped antipathy in the local accession population in the Oder and Neiße region with their policing practises and the NS massacres committed by German troops in the Bug river region have by no means vanished from people’s memories.

Politicians of the South European front states – as they are called in official EU documents – have less scruples. The anti-terrorist measures against the Arab-Muslim population has enforced a development of strong external borders. The operative core of a future EU border protection is based on the greater Mediterranean region. The Mediterranean Sea is a new challenge for the control fanatics. The goal is the ’virtual’ extension of European borders to the North African coasts. Even the docking of the wooden boats is to be prevented. Furthermore, the border police long to control the Sahara-Sahel-zone, together with the military and European and American secret services, thus setting up a second ’rejection’ ring around Europe. Besides stopping refugees, the oil and gas production in the desert has to be secured. Thus, the border surveillance agreement between Italy and Libya provides for an internationalised control of the 2,000 kilometres long coast line and also the 4,000 kilometres long desert border of Libya.

This can hardly be achieved by boat and jeep patrols. Control technologies tried and tested in the most recent wars will therefore also be deployed. Detection of refugees by air with optronic and radar technology is currently being tested all over the Mediterranean.

The Spanish Guardia Civil has rediscovered the surveillance tower. From above, the visual and electromagnetic identification technique can continuously and automatically scan the Straits of Gibraltar and the Moroccan coast. Other parts of the coast, due to the earth curvature, cannot be controlled by means of towers only. Nevertheless, the Canary Islands and the Spanish South Coast are equipped with the tower technology. Tests are made to link all accessible data in real time in order to identify and follow all ships in the controlled area. This technology, known as SIVE (Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia Exterior), is now exported to the Greek islands.

Meanwhile, Italy is practising the use of drones, which are planned to being used in Libya’s desert borders. In October 2004, the Italian air force general Leonardo Tricarico announced that Italy had purchased five predator drones for 48 million dollars from the Californian arms company General Atomic Aeronautical Systems in San Diego. The US is using predators to chase al-Qaeda; the unknown flight object can also launch rockets. Tricarico explained that the Italian air force was planning to use the drones against terrorism as well as against irregular migration. By the end of October 2004, the Italian air force were trying to detect refugee boats from the air.

Testing of the new technologies at the South European ’front’ is co-ordinated by the so-called ad hoc centres of the EU preceding the future EU border agencies. Two sea surveillance centres are based in Spain and Greece, one air surveillance centre in Italy. Another one is responsible for ’risk analysis’. Taking the insurance business as an example and with the assistance of Europol, it is calculated where the greatest damage by irregular migration is imminent. There, surveillance is strengthened.

The ad hoc centres are combined in Schengen Committees, which by now should have long been subsumed within EU institutions regulated under the Amsterdam Treaty. These circles have launched new power centres to create an EU border protection within five years. Thus, SCIFA+ unifying the Schengen round with all EU border police forces was founded in 2002, and in 2003 the PCU was created – the coordinating unit of the practitioners. The latter sees itself as a crisis centre using focal points at the external borders to push through the centralised command structures, regarding the development of preventive measures and stringent controls of national border guard units as its duty.

It is hard to say whether these EU coordinated methods have failed so far, or whether they already have fatal outcomes. On the one hand, it is reported that a planned EU manoeuvre of various national naval units in the Straits of Gibraltar and around the Canary Islands was halted due to language difficulties. On the other hand, ’high tech’ is regarded as a magic potion that motivates border police and marines who believe their work thereby becomes more valuable. The intensified search with technical equipment in the Straits has already forced boat people to use more dangerous waters to come to Europe. It can also be assumed that EU agencies declared the arrival of boat people on the Italian island of Lampedusa ’a state of emergency’ in order to justify the need to implement extraordinary measures.

It is important to remember that according to official estimates, 400,000 to 500,000 people secretly cross the southern EU border every year. Whoever can afford it, arrives by plane with a false passport. Whoever has relatives and friends might go on one of the ferries engaged in the massive holiday traffic. Only the poor come on wooden boats. According to reliable calculations, more than 10,000 people drowned in the Mediterranean Sea since 1992, that is since visas became obligatory for the EU’s southern neighbours. The European governments, however, do not declare a state of emergency because of the huge death tolls, but because of the arrival of around 30,000 boat people per year. In late summer 2004, around 1,800 people reached the island of Lampedusa. Obviously a high figure for a small island but small compared to the Mediterranean figure as a whole. The Italian state and the EU use them as a warning to others. Deterrence is the goal.

Oil interests and migration control – the economic agenda

The second aspect which brought the Libyan desert camps within reach of Pisanu and Schily is of economic nature. Since the mid-1990’s, Gaddafi has slowly opened up Libya’s economy and thus the oil and gas industry to foreign investors. Besides Russia, Libya is the most important non-European oil supplier for Germany, whereas Germany is the most important goods supplier to Libya after Italy. In 2002, the German minister for trade and commerce announced an ’export offensive’ in the Middle East and North Africa – implying increasing investments in the oil and gas industry in these regions. The potential gains to be made from Libya have first priority here. In the 1970’s, before economic cooperation decreased, most of the German investments in North Africa and the Middle East were made in Libya. Now, the German Association of Chambers of Commerce and Industry does not only predict investment opportunities in the Libyan energy sector but also in infrastructure, telecommunication and health. Another big market is the food supply for the population, most of which has to be imported.

24 March 2004: The British prime minister Tony Blair visits Gaddafi. The Dutch-British oil company Shell receives a 165 million Euro contract to produce oil and gas in Libya, forming the basis of a «long-term strategic partnership». There is talk of a «oil against weapons» deal, because around the same time, the arms company BAE initiates talks on major business with Libya. Libyan’s armed forces want new equipment. The wish list includes night vision gear and air radars.

In July 2004, Libya clears the way for the participation of foreign investors in state companies. The government decides on the privatisation of 160 state companies, 54 of which cannot only sell shares to foreign investors but can be taken over by foreign capital by allowing for majority shareholding. The plan is to privatise 360 firms until 2008. At the end of July, the WTO lobbies for the accession of Libya. In August 2004, the German government re-introduces the so-called Hermes-Bürgschaften for Libya, which allows exporting companies to insure themselves against economic and political risk scenarios (many exporting firms can only export to certain countries with this guarantee).

On 5 September 2004, the Libyan state invites numerous interested firms from all over the world for a presentation on new oil and gas fields. The neo-liberal Libyan prime minister Shukri Ghanim announces that production licences will be put up for bidding in the coming months. According to recent estimates, Libya has the eighth biggest oil reserves world wide. The country currently produces 1,6 million barrels of crude oil per day. The goal is to increase production up to 2 million until 2010, with the help of numerous new foreign investments – in 1970, 3,5 million was produced per day. The low production costs and high quality of Libyan oil is attractive to foreign investors.

7 October 2004: Italian president Silvio Berlusconi visits Libya for the fourth time that year. This time to open the pipeline ’Greenstream’ of the ’West Libyan Gas Project’, built and operated by the Italian ’energy giant’ ENI, the number one of the foreign companies active in Libya. 6.6 billion dollars were invested into the 520 kilometres long pipeline, now supplying gas from the Libyan Mellitah to Sicily. Until now, it is the biggest Mediterranean project of its kind and makes a second pipeline for Algerian gas obsolete. The day for the opening was chosen to coincide with the «day of revenge» in Libya, which celebrates the victory over colonialism since the 1970’s. In consideration of Belusconi, Gaddafi renames it the «day of friendship» and declares the once despised enemy to be welcome guests.

11 October 2004: The EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxemburg resolve the political barriers to economic cooperation with Libya. The council of ministers revokes the relevant UN sanctions from 1992 and 1993. The arms embargo is also revoked by the general EU framework for arms exports to third countries. The precondition for these changes was the Libyan agreement to pay compensations for the victims of a bomb attack on a Berlin discotheque in 1986, similar to Libya taking responsibility for the attack on the Pan-Am machine which crashed over Lockerbie. Furthermore, Libya is introducing a neo-liberal market economy, as is laid down in the Euromed partnership agreements between the EU and its Mediterranean neighbouring states.

14/15 October 2004: Chancellor Schröder, accompanied by German industrialists, visits Gaddafi. Schröder signs a bilateral investment agreement and is present when oil and gas concessions are granted to the German Wintershall, a subsidiary of the BASF group, represented in the country since 1958 and one of the leading foreign producers with an investment of 1.2 billion dollars. During the chancellor’s visit, the German RWE group also started business in the oil and gas production, and the German Siemens group received contracts worth 180 million. Furthermore, the German government is interested in orders for «technical material like night vision gear or thermal cameras for border protection». Germany’s economic goal is to dominate the Libyan foreign investment market. When Gaddafi mentions to the chancellor that Rommel’s landmines are still causing accidents and that it was high times to clear them, the German side ignores the issue without comment.

The military and migration control – the foreign policy agenda

The third reason for Schily and Pisanu to be interested in the desert is of military nature and is closely connected with border fortification, camp policy and oil and gas production: the German economy openly links economic aims in North Africa and the Middle East with its military planning, because the markets in question are said to «have specific security risks». This is why on 11 February 2005, the Federal Association for German Industry and the Federal Association of German Banks directly linked its ’Conference on Financing in the Region North Africa Middle East’ to the ’Munich Security Conference’, which takes place annually to enable Western states to coordinate their military policies and war tactics. In February 2005, EU foreign policy therefore joined EU strategies regarding refugees, the military and the economy in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Like Pakistan and Turkey, Libya could soon be a privileged partner of the West as a stronghold against Islamism and Africa’s failing states. Because of his leading role in Africa’s integration and the African Union (which replaced the OAU in 2001), Gaddafi has a special influence in a lot of dependent states. This became clear during his role in freeing the hostages from Switzerland, Germany and Austria who were held in the Sahara. Negotiators and money from Libya also played a central role in the negotiations around some Western tourists, amongst them Germans, who were held by extremists on the Philippines in the summer of 2000. Now British officers will operate as consultants to the Libyan army. A military co-operation with Greece is agreed upon.

Resulting from a deal with Italy in 2003, Libya is currently purchasing boats, jeeps, radar equipment, and helicopters for border surveillance. Italian trainers and consultants are already in the country. According to press reports, Rome supplied tents and other material for three camps in Libya in the first days of August. «The camps are being set up», said Pisanu in an interview with the newspaper La Republica, «they were never under discussion». Meanwhile, the Italian navy is guarding large areas of the Libyan coast. Under pressure from Rome, Egypt is controlling the Red Sea for refugee ships. Funded with money from Italy, Tunisia is operating 13 deportation prisons of which 11 are kept secret, safe from public scrutiny. It is said that many of those refugees and migrants deported from Italy are being transported to the Tunisian-Algerian desert and abandoned there.

The German government is also responsible for arming the North African coast. According to the German defence ministry, Tunisia will receive six Albatross speed boats from the German navy. Already two years ago, it was agreed to deliver five speed boats to Egypt. In 2002, Algeria received surveillance systems at a value of 10,5 million EUR, Tunisia received communications and radar equipment for around 1 million EUR, Morocco received military trucks worth 4.5 million euro.

The Western industrial countries have described the assumed danger in and from the Mediterranean region in two scenarios: One focuses on Islamic fundamentalism, the other on uncontrolled migration. It is surprising how these two completely different social phenomena are conflated in this vision of threat. Agreements of the EU countries state that al-Qaeda and the boat people use the same North African networks. In the meantime, search units are being formed whose remits are to fight both enemies together.

Source

The Associated Press

New York Times

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Two retired generals were jailed Sunday in connection with a suspected plot to topple Turkey’s Islamic-rooted government, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

The two men, who were arrested late Saturday, are the highest-ranking former military officials to be detained in the inquiry. They are among 21 people held in the past week in connection with what investigators say is a pro-secular and nationalist network called Ergenekon, the news agency reported.

The two retired generals — Hursit Tolon, who once headed Turkey’s paramilitary force, and Sener Eruygur, a former top army commander, who helped organize a series of antigovernment rallies last year — were being held at an Istanbul jail.

No charges have been filed, and few details about the suspected plot have been made public. Some newspapers close to the government have said the suspects were plotting a series of events, including demonstrations and violent confrontations with the police, that could have created conditions leading to an army takeover.

The labor minister, Faruk Celik, urged people to be patient and to wait for indictments. “We have to trust the republic’s prosecutors,” Mr. Celik said Sunday. “I believe that as soon as the indictment is released, we will all learn what it is about.”

Critics have denounced the arrests as an attempt to silence government opponents. In Ankara, hundreds of people attended a peaceful demonstration against the arrests.

“The day will come when the AKP will be forced to account!” the protesters shouted, referring to the governing Justice and Development Party by its initials in Turkish.

Similar protests occurred in other Turkish cities.

The AKP, the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been locked in a power struggle with secular groups supported by the military and other state institutions, including the judiciary.

Secularists see themselves as the defenders of the modern secular ideology espoused by the Turkish national founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and they oppose groups they say want to impose Islam on society.

The Constitutional Court heard a case last week accusing the governing party of antisecular activity. The prosecutor is seeking to have the party disbanded and Mr. Erdogan and 70 other party members banned from joining a political party for five years.

Mr. Erdogan’s party, formed in 2001 by politicians who once belonged to Turkey’s Islamist movement, denies that it has an Islamist agenda, noting that it has backed changes intended to help Turkey start negotiations toward membership in the European Union.

Sebnem Arsu

New York Times

ISTANBUL — Eighty-six people, including writers, members of civil organizations and former military officers, were charged Monday with membership in an illegal ultranationalist organization and of plotting to overthrow the Turkish government.

Speaking at a televised news conference, the Istanbul chief prosecutor, Aykut Cengiz Engin, refused to give details of the case against the ultranationalist and hard-line secular organization, known as Ergenekon, because the case had not yet been formally accepted by the court.

But he said the suspects, 48 of them in police custody and the others free while awaiting trial, were charged with forming, managing and aiding the organization, which is accused of plotting a coup against the Islamic-rooted, governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

The 2,455-page indictment is widely perceived in Turkey as being part of a power struggle between the secular establishment, including parts of the military, and the democratically elected and religiously conservative government.

In another case currently before Turkey’s highest court, AKP and its leadership are charged with introducing religion into government and violating the secular principles on which the Turkish state was founded. Prosecutors seek to disband the party.

The possible coup emerged when a cache of weapons, explosives and illegal documents was found in the home of an ultranationalist retired military officer during a security operation 13 months ago.

Since then, several police investigations have provided information that the Ergenekon group — the name is a reference to a central Asian Turkic legend with strong nationalist overtones — had also been involved in an armed attack on a senior state court in 2006, as well as the 2007 bombing of Cumhuriyet, a left-wing newspaper in Istanbul. Both attacks were included in the charges announced Monday.

A security operation this month led to the arrests of other suspects, including two high-ranking retired generals. These suspects were not included in the indictment on Monday, but will be added in a separate filing, Mr. Engin said.

Military prosecutors have also begun an investigation into the charges against the two retired generals, Sener Eruygur and Hursit Tolon, a private news station, NTV, reported Monday. Military prosecutors demanded copies of evidence that security forces had collected from the former generals’ personal premises, NTV said.

The arrest of the two former generals has stirred controversy in a nation where the military has traditionally seen its role as protecting the secular state.

The military strongly denies any links with the Ergenekon network. It reasserts its loyalty to the secular Turkish Republic in occasional public statements.

Secularists remain suspicious of the governing party, which grew out of previous pro-Islamic parties. Some warn that the government’s policies will lead to Islamic-oriented conservatism.

Opposition parties have heavily criticized the government for appointing religious candidates to critical state positions during its almost seven years in power.

The coup investigation has coincided with the case against the ruling party at the Constitutional Court, where hearings have been held this month.

The timing of the coup indictments, as well as the harshness with which some suspects were forced from their beds after midnight for interrogation, was seen by some Turks as an effort by pro-government prosecutors to intimidate secularists.

Since the founding of the republic in 1923, military coups have removed elected governments from power three times. In 1997, the military also pressured an Islamic-leaning government to step down.

There is widespread concern in some circles that closing down the ruling party, which won more than 45 percent of the vote in the general election last year, might destabilize the nation’s economy and damage reforms aimed at leading the country into the European Union.

Bekir Bozdag, a senior AKP official, strongly denied any links between the government and the continuing investigation into the Ergenekon network.

“These are statements by those that merely aim at diverting the subject,” Mr. Bozdag was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Anatolian news agency. “Government cannot direct an investigation; it doesn’t have an authority like that.”

Some on the left see the cases as reflecting Turkey’s struggle toward democracy.

“Circles that do not trust their political power to fight against the threat of fundamentalism on a democratic platform look up to the military, as antidemocratic as their ways are,” said Mithat Sancar, a law professor at Ankara University.

“Therefore both the closure case and the Ergenekon indictment are not about whether you support AKP or elitist military, but about whether you support a law state and better democracy in Turkey,” he said.

In a separate investigation, into the armed attack on the United States Consulate last week that killed six people, Turkish authorities arrested but released Cebrail Kocanarslan, who they said had driven the gunmen to the consulate and then fled in the same car, NTV reported.

Mr. Kocanarslan still faces charges and will stand trial, the report said.

An Istanbul court formally charged one suspect late Sunday with belonging to an illegal organization.

An excerpt from State of Exception

FRANCE

We have already seen how the state of siege had its origin in France during the Revolution. After being established with the Constituent Assembly’s decree of July 8, 1791, it acquired its proper physiognomy as état de siège fictif or état de siège politique with the Directorial law of August 27, 1797, and, finally, with Napoleon’s decree of December 24, 1811. The idea of a suspension of the constitution (of the “rule of the constitution”) had instead been introduced, as we have also seen, by the Constitution of 22 Frimaire Year 8. Article 14 of the Charte of 1814 granted the sovereign the power to “make the regulations and ordinances necessary for the execution of the laws and the security of the State”; because of the vagueness of the formula, Chateaubriand observed “that it is possible that one fine morning the whole Charte will be forfeited for the benefit of Article 14.” The state of siege was expressly mentioned in the Acte additionel to the Constitution of April 22, 1815, which stated that it could only be declared with a law. Since then, moments of constitutional crisis in France over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been marked by legislation on the state of siege. After the fall of the July Monarchy, a decree by the Constituent Assembly on June 24, 1848, put Paris in a state of siege and assigned General Cavaignac the task of restoring order in the city. Consequently, an article was included in the new constitution of November 4, 1848, establishing that the occasions, forms, and effects of the state of siege would be firmly set by a law. From this moment on, the dominant principle in the French tradition (though, as we will see, not without exceptions) has been that the power to suspend the laws can belong only to the same power that produces them, that is, parliament (in contrast to the German tradition, which entrusted this power to the head of state). The law of August 9, 1849 (which was partially restricted later by the law of April 4, 1878), consequently established that a political state of siege could be declared by parliament (or, additionally, by the head of state) in the case of imminent danger to external or internal security. Napoleon III had recourse several times to this law and, once installed in power, he transferred, in the constitution of January 1852, the exclusive power to proclaim a state of siege to the head of state. The Franco-Prussian War and the insurrection of the Commune coincided with an unprecedented generalization of the state of exception, which was proclaimed in forty departments and lasted in some of them until 1876. On the basis of these experiences, and after MacMahon’s failed coup d’état in May 1877, the law of 1849 was modified to establish that a state of siege could be declared only with a law (or, if the Chamber of Deputies was not in session, by the head of state, who was then obligated to convene parliament within two days) in the event of “imminent danger resulting from foreign war or armed insurrection” (law of April 3, 1878, Art. 1).

World War One coincided with a permanent state of exception in the majority of the warring countries. On August 2, 1914, President Poincaré issued a decree that put the entire country in a state of siege, and this decree was converted into law by parliament two days later. The state of siege remained in force until October 12, 1919. Although the activity of parliament, which was suspended during the first six months of the war, recommenced in January 1915, many of the laws passed were, in truth, pure and simple delegations of legislative power to the executive, such as the law of February 10, 1918, which granted the government an all but absolute power to regulate by decree the production and trade of foodstuffs. As Tingsten has observed, in this way the executive power was transformed into a legislative organ in the material sense of the term. In any case, it was during this period that exceptional legislation by executive [governativo] decree (which is now perfectly familiar to us) became a regular practice in the European democracies.

 Predictably, the expansion of the executive’s powers into the legislative sphere continued after the end of hostilities, and it is significant that military emergency now ceded its place to economic emergency (with an implicit assimilation between war and economics). In January 1924, at a time of serious crisis that threatened the stability of the franc, the Poincaré government asked for full powers over financial matters. After a bitter debate, in which the opposition pointed out that this was tantamount to parliament renouncing its own constitutional powers, the law was passed on March 22, with a four-month limit on the government’s special powers. Analogous measures were brought to a vote in 1935 by the Laval government, which issued more than five hundred decrees “having force of law” in order to avoid the devaluation of the franc. The opposition from the left, led by Léon Blum, strongly opposed this “fascist” practice, but it is significant that once the Left took power with the Popular Front, it asked parliament in June 1937 for full powers in order to devalue the franc, establish exchange control, and impose new taxes. As has been observed, this meant that the new practice of legislation by executive [governativo] decree, which had been inaugurated during the war, was by now a practice accepted by all political sides. On June 30, 1937, the powers that had been denied Blum were granted to the Chautemps government, in which several key ministries were entrusted to nonsocialists. And on April 10, 1938, Édouard Daladier requested and obtained from parliament exceptional powers to legislate by decree in order to cope with both the threat of Nazi Germany and the economic crisis. It can therefore be said that until the end of the Third Republic “the normal procedures of parliamentary democracy were in a state of suspension.” When we study the birth of the so-called dictatorial regimes in Italy and Germany, it is important not to forget this concurrent process that transformed the democratic constitutions between the two world wars. Under the pressure of the paradigm of the state of exception, the entire politico-constitutional life of Western societies began gradually to assume a new form, which has perhaps only today reached its full development. In December 1939, after the outbreak of the war, the Daladier government obtained the power to take by decree all measures necessary to ensure the defense of the nation. Parliament remained in session (except when it was suspended for a month in order to deprive the communist parliamentarians of their immunity), but all legislative activity lay firmly in the hands of the executive. By the time Marshal Pétain assumed power, the French parliament was a shadow of itself. Nevertheless, the Constitutional Act of July 11, 1940, granted the head of state the power to proclaim a state of siege throughout the entire national territory (which by then was partially occupied by the German army).

 In the present constitution, the state of exception is regulated by Article 16, which De Gaulle had proposed. The article establishes that the president of the Republic may take all necessary measures “when the institutions of the Republic, the independence of the Nation, the integrity of its territory, or the execution of its international commitments are seriously and immediately threatened and the regular functioning of the constitutional public powers is interrupted.” In April 1961, during the Algerian crisis, De Gaulle had recourse to Article 16 even though the functioning of the public powers had not been interrupted. Since that time, Article 16 has never again been invoked, but, in conformity with a continuing tendency in all of the Western democracies, the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.

 GERMANY

 The history of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution is so tightly woven into the history of Germany between the wars that it is impossible to understand Hitler’s rise to power without first analyzing the uses and abuses of this article in the years between 1919 and 1933. Its immediate precedent was Article 68 of the Bismarckian Constitution, which, in cases where “public security was threatened in the territory of the Reich,” granted the emperor the power to declare a part of the Reich to be in a state of war (Kriegszustand), whose conditions and limitations followed those set forth in the Prussian law of June 4, 1851, concerning the state of siege. Amid the disorder and rioting that followed the end of the war, the deputies of the National Assembly that was to vote on the new constitution (assisted by jurists among whom the name of Hugo Preuss stands out) included an article that granted the president of the Reich extremely broad emergency [eccezionali] powers. The text of Article 48 reads, “If security and public order are seriously [erheblich] disturbed or threatened in the German Reich, the president of the Reich may take the measures necessary to reestablish security and public order, with the help of the armed forces if required. To this end he may wholly or partially suspend the fundamental rights [Grundrechte] established in Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153.” The article added that a law would specify in detail the conditions and limitations under which this presidential power was to be exercised. Since that law was never passed, the president’s emergency [eccezionali] powers remained so indeterminate that not only did theorists regularly use the phrase “presidential dictatorship” in reference to Article 48, but in 1925 Schmitt could write that “no constitution on earth had so easily legalized a coup d’état as did the Weimar Constitution.”

 Save for a relative pause between 1925 and 1929, the governments of the Republic, beginning with Brüning’s, made continual use of Article 48, proclaiming a state of exception and issuing emergency decrees on more than two hundred and fifty occasions; among other things, they employed it to imprison thousands of communist militants and to set up special tribunals authorized to pronounce capital sentences. On several occasions, particularly in October 1923, the government had recourse to Article 4 to cope with the fall of the mark, thus confirming the modern tendency to conflate politico-military and economic crises.

 It is well known that the last years of the Weimar Republic passed entirely under a regime of the state of exception; it is less obvious to note that Hitler could probably not have taken power had the country not been under a regime of presidential dictatorship for nearly three years and had parliament been functioning. In July 1930, the Brüning government was put in the minority, but Brüning did not resign. Instead, President Hindenburg granted him recourse to Article 48 and dissolved the Reichstag. From that moment on, Germany in fact ceased to be a parliamentary republic. Parliament met only seven times for no longer than twelve months in all, while a fluctuating coalition of Social Democrats and centrists stood by and watched a government that by then answered only to the president of the Reich. In 1932, Hindenburg—reelected president over Hitler and Thälmann—forced Brüning to resign and named the centrist von Papen to his post. On June 4, the Reichstag was dissolved and never reconvened until the advent of Nazism. On July 20, a state of exception was proclaimed in the Prussian territory, and von Papen was named Reich Commissioner for Prussia—ousting Otto Braun’s Social Democratic government.

 The state of exception in which Germany found itself during the Hindenburg presidency was justified by Schmitt on a constitutional level by the idea that the president acted as the “guardian of the constitution;” but the end of the Weimar Republic clearly demonstrates that, on the contrary, a “protected democracy” is not a democracy at all, and that the paradigm of constitutional dictatorship functions instead as a transitional phase that leads inevitably to the establishment of a totalitarian regime.

 Given these precedents, it is understandable that the constitution of the Federal Republic did not mention the state of exception. Nevertheless, on June 24, 1968, the “great coalition” of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats passed a law for the amendment of the constitution (Gesetz zur Ergänzung des Grundgesetzes) that reintroduced the state of exception (defined as the “state of internal necessity,” innere Notstand). However, with an unintended irony, for the first time in the history of the institution, the proclamation of the state of exception was provided for not simply to safeguard public order and security, but to defend the “liberal-democratic constitution.” By this point, protected democracy had become the rule.

 SWITZERLAND

 On August 3, 1914, the Swiss Federal Assembly granted the Federal Council “the unlimited power to take all measures necessary to guarantee the security, integrity, and neutrality of Switzerland.” This unusual act—by virtue of which a non-warring state granted powers to the executive that were even vaster and vaguer than those received by the governments of countries directly involved in the war—is of interest because of the debates it provoked both in the assembly itself and in the Swiss Federal Court when the citizens objected that the act was unconstitutional. The tenacity with which on this occasion the Swiss jurists (nearly thirty years ahead of the theorists of constitutional dictatorship) sought (like Waldkirch and Burckhardt) to derive the legitimacy of the state of exception from the text of the constitution itself (specifically, Article 2, which read, “the aim of the Confederation is to ensure the independence of the fatherland against the foreigner [and] to maintain internal tranquility and order”), or (like Hoerni and Fleiner) to ground the state of exception in a law of necessity “inherent in the very existence of the State,” or (like His) in a juridical lacuna that the exceptional provisions must fill, shows that the theory of the state of exception is by no means the exclusive legacy of the antidemocratic tradition.

 ITALY

 In Italy the history and legal situation of the state of exception are of particular interest with regard to legislation by emergency executive [governativi] decrees (the so-called law-decrees). Indeed, from this viewpoint one could say that Italy functioned as a true and proper juridico-political laboratory for organizing the process (which was also occurring to differing degrees in other European states) by which the law-decree “changed from a derogatory and exceptional instrument for normative production to an ordinary source for the production of law”. But this also means that one of the essential paradigms through which democracy is transformed from parliamentary to executive [governamentale] was elaborated precisely by a state whose governments were often unstable. In any case, it is in this context that the emergency decree’s pertinence to the problematic sphere of the state of exception comes clearly into view. The Albertine Statute (like the current Republican Constitution) made no mention of the state of exception. Nevertheless, the governments of the kingdom resorted to proclaiming a state of siege many times: in Palermo and the Sicilian provinces in 1862 and 1866, in Naples in 1862, in Sicily and Lunigiana in 1894, and in Naples and Milan in 1898, where the repression of the disturbances was particularly bloody and provoked bitter debates in parliament. The declaration of a state of siege on the occasion of the earthquake of Messina and Reggio Calabria on December 28, 1908 is only apparently a different situation. Not only was the state of siege ultimately proclaimed for reasons of public order—that is, to suppress the robberies and looting provoked by the disaster—but from a theoretical standpoint, it is also significant that these acts furnished the occasion that allowed Santi Romano and other Italian jurists to elaborate the thesis (which we examine in some detail later) that necessity is the primary source of law.

 In each of these cases, the state of siege was proclaimed by a royal decree that, while not requiring parliamentary ratification, was nevertheless always approved by parliament, as were other emergency decrees not related to the state of siege (in 1923 and 1924 several thousand outstanding law-decrees issued in the preceding years were thus converted into law). In 1926 the Fascist regime had a law issued that expressly regulated the matter of the law-decrees. Article 3 of this law established that, upon deliberation of the council of ministers, “norms having force of law” could be issued by royal decree “(1) when the government is delegated to do so by a law within the limits of the delegation, and (2) in extraordinary situations, in which it is required for reasons of urgent and absolute necessity. The judgment concerning necessity and urgency is not subject to any oversight other than parliament’s political oversight.” The decrees provided for in the second clause had to be presented to parliament for conversion into law; but parliament’s total loss of autonomy during the Fascist regime rendered this condition superfluous.

 Although the Fascist governments’ abuse of emergency decrees was so great that in 1939 the regime itself felt it necessary to limit their reach, Article 77 of the Republican Constitution established with singular continuity that “in extraordinary situations of necessity and emergency” the government could adopt “provisional measures having force of law,” which had to be presented the same day to parliament and which went out of effect if not converted into law within sixty days of their issuance.

 It is well known that since then the practice of executive [governamentale] legislation by law-decrees has become the rule in Italy. Not only have emergency decrees been issued in moments of political crisis, thus circumventing the constitutional principle that the rights of the citizens can be limited only by law (see, for example, the decrees issued for the repression of terrorism: the law-decree of March 28, 1978, n. 59, converted into the law of May 21 1978, n. 191 [the so-called Moro Law], and the law-decree of December 15, 1979, n. 625, converted into the law of February 6, 1980, n. 15), but law-decrees now constitute the normal form of legislation to such a degree that they have been described as “bills strengthened by guaranteed emergency.” This means that the democratic principle of the separation of powers has today collapsed and that the executive power has in fact, at least partially, absorbed the legislative power. Parliament is no longer the sovereign legislative body that holds the exclusive power to bind the citizens by means of the law: it is limited to ratifying the decrees issued by the executive power. In a technical sense, the Italian Republic is no longer parliamentary, but executive [governamentale]. And it is significant that though this transformation of the constitutional order (which is today underway to varying degrees in all the Western democracies) is perfectly well known to jurists and politicians, it has remained entirely unnoticed by the citizens. At the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has entirely lost its canon.

 ENGLAND

 The only legal apparatus in England that is comparable to the French état de siège goes by the term martial law; but this concept is so vague that it has been rightly described as an “unlucky name for the justification by the common law of acts done by necessity for the defence of the Commonwealth when there is war within the realm.” This, however, does not mean that something like a state of exception could not exist. In the Mutiny Acts, the Crown’s power to declare martial law was generally confined to times of war; nevertheless, it necessarily entailed sometimes serious consequences for the civilians who found themselves factually involved in the armed repression. Thus Schmitt sought to distinguish martial law from the military tribunals and summary proceedings that at first applied only to soldiers, in order to conceive of it as a purely factual proceeding and draw it closer to the state of exception: “Despite the name it bears, martial law is neither a right nor a law in this sense, but rather a proceeding guided essentially by the necessity of achieving a certain end.”

World War One played a decisive role in the generalization of exceptional executive [governamentali] apparatuses in England as well. Indeed, immediately after war was declared, the government asked parliament to approve a series of emergency measures that had been prepared by the relevant ministers, and they were passed virtually without discussion. The most important of these acts was the Defence of the Realm Act of August 4, 1914, known as DORA, which not only granted the government quite vast powers to regulate the wartime economy, but also provided for serious limitations on the fundamental rights of the citizens (in particular, granting military tribunals jurisdiction over civilians). The activity of parliament saw a significant eclipse for the entire duration of the war, just as in France. And in England too this process went beyond the emergency of the war, as is shown by the approval—on October 29, 1920, in a time of strikes and social tensions—of the Emergency Powers Act. Indeed, Article 1 of the act stated that

if at any time it appears to His Majesty that any action has been taken or is immediately threatened by any persons or body of persons of such a nature and on so extensive a scale as to be calculated, by interfering with the supply and distribution of food, water, fuel, or light, or with the means of locomotion, to deprive the community, or any substantial portion of the community, of the essentials of life, His Majesty may, by proclamation (hereinafter referred to as a proclamation of emergency), declare that a state of emergency exists.

Article 2 of the law gave His Majesty in Council the power to issue regulations and to grant the executive the “powers and duties…necessary for the preservation of the peace,” and it introduced special courts (“courts of summary jurisdiction”) for offenders. Even though the penalties imposed by these courts could not exceed three months in jail (“with or without hard labor”), the principle of the state of exception had been firmly introduced into English law.

 UNITED STATES

 The place—both logical and pragmatic—of a theory of the state of exception in the American constitution is in the dialectic between the powers of the president and those of Congress. This dialectic has taken shape historically (and in an exemplary way already beginning with the Civil War) as a conflict over supreme authority in an emergency situation; or, in Schmittian terms (and this is surely significant in a country considered to be the cradle of democracy), as a conflict over sovereign decision.

 The textual basis of the conflict lies first of all in Article 1 of the constitution, which establishes that “the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” but does not specify which authority has the jurisdiction to decide on the suspension (even though prevailing opinion and the context of the passage itself lead one to assume that the clause is directed at Congress and not the president). The second point of conflict lies in the relation between another passage of Article 1 (which declares that the power to declare war and to raise and support the army and navy rests with Congress) and Article 2, which states that “the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

 Both of these problems reach their critical threshold with the Civil War (1861–1865). Acting counter to the text of Article 1, on April 15, 1861, Lincoln decreed that an army of seventy-five thousand men was to be raised and convened a special session of Congress for July 4. In the ten weeks that passed between April 15 and July 4, Lincoln in fact acted as an absolute dictator (for this reason, in his book Dictatorship, Schmitt can refer to it as a perfect example of commissarial dictatorship. On April 27, with a technically even more significant decision, he authorized the General in Chief of the Army to suspend the writ of habeas corpus whenever he deemed it necessary along the military line between Washington and Philadelphia, where there had been disturbances. Furthermore, the president’s autonomy in deciding on extraordinary measures continued even after Congress was convened (thus, on February 14, 1862, Lincoln imposed censorship of the mail and authorized the arrest and detention in military prisons of persons suspected of “disloyal and treasonable practices”).

 In the speech he delivered to Congress when it was finally convened on July 4, the president openly justified his actions as the holder of a supreme power to violate the constitution in a situation of necessity. “Whether strictly legal or not,” he declared, the measures he had adopted had been taken “under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity” in the certainty that Congress would ratify them. They were based on the conviction that even fundamental law could be violated if the very existence of the union and the juridical order were at stake (“Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?”

 It is obvious that in a wartime situation the conflict between the president and Congress is essentially theoretical. The fact is that although Congress was perfectly aware that the constitutional jurisdictions had been transgressed, it could do nothing but ratify the actions of the president, as it did on August 6, 1861. Strengthened by this approval, on September 22, 1862, the president proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves on his authority alone and, two days later, generalized the state of exception throughout the entire territory of the United States, authorizing the arrest and trial before courts martial of “all Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels against the authority of the United States.” By this point, the president of the United States was the holder of the sovereign decision on the state of exception.

 According to American historians, during World War One President Woodrow Wilson personally assumed even broader powers than those Abraham Lincoln had claimed. It is, however, necessary to specify that instead of ignoring Congress, as Lincoln had done, Wilson preferred each time to have the powers in question delegated to him by Congress. In this regard, his practice of government is closer to the one that would prevail in Europe in the same years, or to the current one, which instead of declaring the state of exception prefers to have exceptional laws issued. In any case, from 1917 to 1918, Congress approved a series of acts (from the Espionage Act of June 1917 to the Overman Act of May 1918) that granted the president complete control over the administration of the country and not only prohibited disloyal activities (such as collaboration with the enemy and the diffusion of false reports), but even made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.”

 Because the sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in the emergency linked to a state of war, over the course of the twentieth century the metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential political vocabulary whenever decisions considered to be of vital importance are being imposed. Thus, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to assume extraordinary powers to cope with the Great Depression by presenting his actions as those of a commander during a military campaign:

 I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.…I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken Nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.…But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take [the necessary measures] and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

 It is well not to forget that, from the constitutional standpoint, the New Deal was realized by delegating to the president (through a series of statutes culminating in the National Recovery Act of June 16, 1933) an unlimited power to regulate and control every aspect of the economic life of the country—a fact that is in perfect conformity with the already mentioned parallelism between military and economic emergencies that characterizes the politics of the twentieth century.

 The outbreak of World War Two extended these powers with the proclamation of a “limited” national emergency on September 8, 1939, which became unlimited on May 27, 1941. On September 7, 1942, while requesting that Congress repeal a law concerning economic matters, the president renewed his claim to sovereign powers during the emergency: “In the event that the Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act.…The American people can…be sure that I shall not hesitate to use every power vested in me to accomplish the defeat of our enemies in any part of the world where our own safety demands such defeat.” The most spectacular violation of civil rights (all the more serious because of its solely racial motivation) occurred on February 19, 1942, with the internment of seventy thousand American citizens of Japanese descent who resided on the West Coast (along with forty thousand Japanese citizens who lived and worked there).

 President Bush’s decision to refer to himself constantly as the “Commander in Chief of the Army” after September 11, 2001, must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible.