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SUBST NCE NDSHDOWImages o the nemy

ROBERTW RIEBER NDROBERTJ KELLY

nd perhaps thegreat day willcome when a people, distingu ished bywars and victoriesandbythe highe st development of amil itaryorderandintelligence, andaccus tomed tomake th e heav iest sacrificesforthese things, willexclaim ofits ow n free will , ..We breakthesword , and will sm ash itsentire military establish mentdow n to its lowestfoundations.Renderin g oneself unarm edwhenone has been thebest armed, outof aheight ofeeling that this is themeans to real peace, whichmus talw ays rest on apeaceofmind: whereas the so -calledarmed peace,as t now ex istsin al l countries, is the absen ce ofpeace ofm in d. One trustsneitheroneself nor one's neighbora nd, half rom hatred,half rom fear, does not lay down arm s. Rath erperish thanhate andfear, and tw ice ra therperish than make oneselfhate dandfeared this m ustsomeday become thehig hestmaxim for everysing le commonwealth, too.

Nie tz sc he, T he W andere r and His Shadow p. 204)ROBERT W . RIE ER John Jay College ofCrim in alJustice Cit yUniversity of New York NewYork New York10019 ROBERT J KELLY Brooklyn College G raduate Center CityU niver-si ty ofNew York Brooklyn New York.

R. W. Rieber (ed.), The Psychology of War and Peace

Springer Science+Business Media New York 1991

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SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW 5We are all familiar by now with the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. s long as each nuclear power retains enough weapons toannihilate the population of the other, even after a first strike against its ownweapons, then the decision to initiate a nuclear exchange becomes irrational.

In the language of arms control, the protection of weapons is morally good,while the protection of populations is morally bad. The premise was ex-plained to Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin by Secretary of DefenseMcNamara during the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Kosygin balked.His successors have since studied the proposition, as have rational men in hisworld and in our own, and found the logic sound. So long as populations goundefended, while weapons are sufficiently protected to survive a surpriseattack, then each nuclear power holds the civilian population of the otherhostage and a condition of mutual deterrence necessarily obtains. War willnot occur.But Kosygin s initial demurrer-"But that is immoral -should notescape our attention entirely. For at bottom what is entailed in mutual assureddestruction is nothing less than mutual genocide. f the strategic balance isdesigned to make sure that this does not happen, it nonetheless requires ofboth superpowers that they plan to do i t i f only because the other mustplan to do the same. And this, in turn, requires of their respective societiesthat they must accept the dual role ofbeing potentially both a mass murdererand the victim of another mass murderer equally bloodthirsty.

The psychological demands of such a strategy are very, very high. t issmall intellectual comfort to realize that the whole scenario is never sup-posed to happen. And, in point offact, the nuclear stalemate has been sold tothe public only on the basis of a truly massive process of enmification. Indeed, in some sense, the single most striking feature of American public lifein the last four decades has been the consistent fervor with which the Rus-sians have been identified as the enemy, this despite the fact that uniformedAmerican and Russian soldiers have never faced one another in combat. Per-haps never before in history has one society so hated and feared another forso long-during a period of prolonged peace.2Yet if widespread enmification during peacetime is indeed the singlemost salient feature of our current civilization, it is one that goes largelyundiscussed in the literature of the social sciences. t is as though it is toopervasive to draw comment. Like fish in the ocean, all we know is water, andit doesn't occur to us to take notice of it. Indeed, well over half the popula-tion of this country has never known any other reality than this one, that theRussians are our enemy and that we must prepare to destroy them since theyare preparing to destroy us. The nuclear age thus has brought to a culmina-tion a trend that has steadily been gaining momentum during the 19th and20th centuries: the employment of images of the enemy on a collective scaleas a way of enlisting mass mobilization for purposes ofwar. Such are theemotional exigencies of imagined nuclear genocide that such collective en-mity has become a permanent part of peacetime.

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SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW 9theory suffers from a failure to distinguish different levels of analysis; itinvokes the social dimension, but only insofar as it impacts on the psychologyof the individual. t thus forfeits any chance to distinguish between processes which can only be understood in terms of the organization of societyand those which can properly be attributed to individual development.

fanything, Freud had less to say about the phenomenon of enmificationattending the Great War. To be sure, he authored an interesting essay on thegeneral euphoria of war in which he highlighted the role of death, the argument being that as death became commonplace, the sense of risk returned tolife, making it more worth living. But Freud had little to say about thepsychology of having an enemy and personally he took what amounted to arooting-interest in the progress of the hostilities. (It has not generally drawncomment, but it was a precondition for relaunching the international psychoanalytic movement after the war that the principals agreed ot to discusswhat they had just lived through.)

t is sometimes said that the war did impact on Freud's theory in onerespect, that it led to his subsequent espousal of a death instinct whosemost frequent manifestation was its outward-turned form of destructiveness.Certainly, later in life, Freud became increasingly sensitized to the role ofdestructiveness in human affairs, both in his theories and, tragically, in hisown social milieu. But the theory of the death instinct in Freud's renditionsheds no additional light on what is involved in destructiveness. Nor can itbe said that Melanie Klein's subsequent, and brilliant, elaborations of thattheory surpass the Master's in that regard. For at bottom, all that is beingdiscussed are the mechanisms by which an inborn capacity to hate is directed in various different directions as psychological structure advancesduring the infant's development. But, intuitively, we know that people areborn with a capacity to hate-this tells us little about what is entailed in thesocial psychology of enmification in the adult.Somewhat more useful in regard to the general idea ofa death instinctis its reinterpretation as proposed by Erich Fromm in the middle of hiscareer. Fromm 1956) proposed that an urge to die arose from what he callednegative transcendence. Where the individual could not find meaning inhis life, indeed where he no longer even sought such meaning, then thecapacity for transcendence which is inherent to mankind turned into a malevolent psychological force which sought death and which could readily beturned outward as a sadistic destructiveness. Certainly, such an evil psychological turn could everywhere be detected in the phenomenon of Nazism,with which Fromm was familiar, just as it can today be found, in somewhatdifferent form, among a certain subgroup of psychopaths.4

The problem with this line of argument is that it relies too heavily on apathological model. The problem of enmification is far too general a phenomenon to be explained solely by reference to this or that clinical entity. Negative transcendence may indeed explain much about the psychology ofcertain

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12 ROBERT W. RIEBER AND ROBERT J KELLYall respects, who is called to do battle with an unspeakable foe. Secondly, thisprocess is readily communicable through emotional contagion while its contrary self-reflection and transcendence is not. For the former entailsheightened emotional expression with inherently powerful suggestive effect, while the latter can be achieved only through mature emotional development and individuation. Thirdly, the internal organization of a society, itsauthority structures and its legitimizing myths, can exercise a decisive rolein the process of enmification. In general the less coherent a society svalues, and the less secure the position of its leadership, the more virulentits appeal to processes of enmification.

DISSOCIATION AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONFLICT

From the foregoing it should strike us that the process of enmification,in its pathological manifestations, exhibits a certain homology between the individual and the collective levels. In both areas, it is regularly associatedwith a loss of hierarchical integration and a concomitant decline in conscious,rational self-direction. We can say that the psychologically well-integratedindividuals is aware of his own vices; he does not need to invent enemies toproject his own evils outside himself. Likewise, the well-integrated societycan approach situations of conflict in a rational manner: it can promote anddefend its interests without the distorting prism of imagining internationalbogeymen. Interestingly enough though the kind of integration we arespeaking of is clearly different on the individual level than it is on the collective, in conditions of breakdown they tend to meet and to converge. Thepoorly integrated individual is likely to become both more conformist andmore subject to the emotional contagions of his group. Likewise, the poorlyintegrated society is likely to resort to the manipulation of emotional contagion on a mass scale to supply what is otherwise lacking, a sense of directionderived from shared values.

An alternative way of phrasing matters is to speak in terms of dissociation, broadly conceived as the counterbalancing tendency opposed to integration. Kurt Goldstein 1963), in his famous book he Organism makes thepertinent point that despite the fundamental unity of the organism, certainprocesses within it have an inner organization of their own and in conditionsof pathology can become functionally independent of the normal integrativeprocesses. This is true for pathologies of the central nervous system, and forsocial systems, as well as for individual psychopathology, where parts of theintegrated system of the personality can become wrenched free from themain system, resulting in varying degrees of abnormality in behavior.Such an overall scheme is readily compatible with the work of JeanPiaget, who clearly demonstrated that a functional unity at the symbolic orego level is achieved only over time and at a relatively slow pace, as the child

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SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW 13moves from one gradually achieved level to the next in the process of development. One can perhaps best conceive the developing child in terms ofbehavioral manifestations that appear as if they were directed by multipleegos. This is quite reasonable, after all, for the child in its developmentliterally has not determined who it is to be. Because dissociation is so intimately related to the breakdown of the integrative mechanisms of the mindit is often confused with psychoanalytic concepts like repression and regression. But, by and large, dissociation can be thought of as potentially normal.In the healthy organism the dissociative processes are part and parcel of theoverall capacity for selective adaptation just as in the individual they contribute to the ability to live in terms of different systems of values at differenttimes.

What we are concerned with here is the specific circumstance whendissociative processes begin to outstrip the integrative processes, resultingin the functional autonomy of certain subprocesses. Specifically, we wouldlike to advance the hypothesis that enmification represents a dissociativebreakdown of the normal processes which regulate social conflict, both internally and externally. t can be taken as axiomatic both that in any complexsocial system, conflict is inevitable and that the capacity for aggression in theservice of one s own values and prerogatives is indispensable. t can also betaken as axiomatic that the same capacity for aggression is one s adversariesnecessarily raises the stakes in any conflict, a defenseless opponent being noopponent at all. There thus exists, in any conflict situation, what Bateson1972) characterized as a symmetrical tendency towards escalation. Againstthis tendency, however, there usually are pitted countervailing processes

between participants, processes which are asymmetrical or, in Bateson s terminology, complementary, that work to end conflict. Thus, for example, theaggressive behavior of one participant may tend to induce submissive behavior on the part of the other.Plainly, for conflict resolution to occur, two things are necessary. Firstthe symmetrical and asymmetrical processes subsuming conflict must be sufficiently well balanced that a behavioral runaway of the system is avoided.And secondly, the nature of this balance must be such that new learning canoccur among participants during the course of the exchange. This new learning, in turn can perhaps be conceptualized in terms of a reevaluation ofperceptions in search of common assumptions with regard to both practiceand outcome. This can be seen even on a simple level. For example, be-tween two members of an animal species involved in mutual threat displaysin the course of a territorial dispute, the nature of the learning is straightforward: as soon as it is mutually established between them which is the stronger, the weaker is allowed to quit the field, the inherent structure of theanimal yielding an implicit value consensus that the stronger animal is entitl,ed to it. In human conflict, of course, such an emergent value consensusmust be mediated symbolically, but the basic structure stays the same. Like-

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14 ROBERT W. RIEBER AND ROBERT J KELLYwise, in the animal, the interaction itself is regulated by inborn mechanismswhich dictate the proper conduct of the struggle-it is not cricket for one elksimply to ambush another broadside. But in the human the conduct of aconflict must again be mediated symbolically, i.e. in terms of mutually acceptable rules of what playing fair consists of.

The intervention of a symbolic layer in the regulation of human conflictdeserves further comment. t is too often assumed that this is somehow amore tentative, and shaky, mode of existence, as compared with the morefundamental, and altogether more visceral, modes ofbehavior that representthe anlage of our species' animal past. Beneath the rational man of compromise and conciliation, the prejudice runs, lurks a demonic beast and, between them the beast is really the stronger. Much contemporary theorizingin both sociobiology and international relations unwittingly adopts just sucha plank. The truth is, however, that we are really quite good at our specialforte of mediating conflict symbolically, so good, in fact, that we indulge in itregularly just for the fun of exploring our abilities. For, throughout history,men have always loved to invent and play games, which are nothing otherthan the creation of wholly arbitrary conflicts for the sheer delight of seeingthem symbolically mediated. Moreover, even when the ordinary process ofconflict resolution breaks down, what emerges is not any putative beastwithin-we pass over in silence the slander against animal psychology-buta process of resymbolization t is important to realize that enmification, noless than the ordinary process of social conflict, involves man's highest capacities as a creature who relies on the symbolic mediation of its behavior.

In a different vein, it is also important to realize that the ordinary processes of social conflict may generate massive, even revolutionary, socialchange without enmification. While it may be true that the history of man islargely the history of warfare, and thus of enmification, it is not necessarilytrue that that is the only way to alter fundamentally the way societies operate. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, for example, were both able to alterprofoundly the social structure of entire nations without resorting to processes of enmification. For Gandhi, it wasn't the British people who opposedIndia's demand for Independence a cultural value the British understoodand cherished). Rather, the problem lay in the inability on the part of theBritish administration to appreciate that Indians had learned and absorbedsuch a concept from their British stewards. Likewise, Dr. King avoided theprocess of enemy-making in that he did not accuse white Americans of racism, and then blame them for racial oppression, but instead argued that thevalues of the American way of life had to be applied to all in accordance withour basic concepts of freedom and equality. White Americans were not theproblem racism was. In both cases, there was a strong push for an underlying agreement on values, and an avoidance of the strategy of particularizingthe opponents as enemies per se

With enmification, the reverse is true: The opponent is particularized

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SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW 15and he is resymbolized to appear both implacable and menacing. He is menacing in that he is portrayed as representing a clear and dangerous threat tosurvival. And he is implacable in that he is held incapable of sharing in thefundamental value system of the protagonist. The result is that processeswhich subsume aggression become dissociated from those subsuming and,unless the parties can be effectively isolated from further contact, a runawaybehavioral system necessarily results.

t would be comforting to suppose that enmification is always a pathological process, and indeed such a proposition, though unprovable, may betrue. But the dangerous reality is that enmification can and does get loose inhuman affairs and, once it does, it impinges on the peace-loving no less thanon the warlike. Consider the revolutionary fervor of the Ayatollah Khomeiniin his address on the anniversary of the prophet Mohammed's birthday in1983:

f one permits an infidel [a nonbeliever] to continue in his role as acorrupter of the earth, his moral suffering will be all the worse. f onekills the infidel, and this stops him from perpetrating his misdeeds, hisdeath will be a blessing to him. For if he remains alive, he will becomemore and more corrupt. War is a blessing for the world and for all nations.t is God who incites men to fight and kill. The Koran says: Fight until allcorruption and all rebellion have ceased. The wars the Prophet led

against all infidels were a blessing for all humanity . . . [A] religion withoutwar is an incomplete religion. f his Holiness Jesus ... had been givenmore time to live, he would have acted as Moses did, and wielded thesword.This man, by his own declaration, s an enemy-and proud of it. One cannotconfront him without at once suspecting that there may be no basis for conciliation, nor any rules for playing fair. One tends immediately to be pulledinto a symmetrical relation with him.But, we should notice the structure of the Ayatollah's argument. Foressential to his portrait of the infidel is the element of dehumanization.This is the ultimate omega point for all forms of enmification. A mentalRubicon is crossed in thinking about enemies. Where most cultures prescribe rewards for controlling violent emotions and behaviors, the process ofenmification constitutes a resymbolization process which heightens and nurtures angry and violent feelings. As Keen 1986) put it, a consensual paranoia emerges in war-oriented societies. Jt is a pathological process thatresults finally in a delusional system of thought and feeling. From a religiousangle, the enemy becomes nothing less than evil incarnate, a fake person,an imposter, a malefactor pretending to be human. In more general terms,the enemy may be characterized as racially, linguistically, ethnically, orphysically different; but the difference is invariably held to be both fundamental and noxious. From a psychological standpoint, the creation of an

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SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW 21Deprive a paranoid schizophrenic of his persecutory object, and he or sherapidly falls into confusion.But if the strategy of wary avoidance can be employed effectively inpersonal matters, surely it is out of place in international relations. After all,we live in an age of complex international interdependency, and it wouldappear that there is no way to escape various confrontations around theglobe. In such a context, wary avoidance rapidly gives way to isolationism,the dangers of which are well known, or so the argument goes. Here let uscounter, first of all, that isolationism is as American as cherry pie. Indeed,early in our nation's history, it was the cornerstone of American foreign policy- "No foreign wars " and it is only in this century that the oppositeprejudice has come to prevail. Moreover, as with any strategy, there exists arange of possible implementation. The chief danger with regard to a trulythoroughgoing isolationism would be economic: If we cut ourselves off fromworld markets, we will suffer. But it is not this danger which springs mostrapidly to mind for most people. No, what they imagine is that by withdrawing from armed conflict in this or that area of the world, we will let this orthat enemy prevail. In the long run, the thinking goes, our enemies will onlygrow stronger and in the ultimate confrontation we will pay dearly for nottaking up the struggle sooner. This seemingly "tough-minded" preferencefor engagement, for interventionism rather than isolationism, has latelycome to form part of the prevailing consensus in contemporary political life.Its historical roots are relatively recent in origin, however, and it is to thesethat we now turn.

THE NAZI THREAT AND THE AMERICAN SOCIAL DREAMInterventionism became a permanent part of American foreign policy

during the course of the Second World War Prior to that time, isolationismstill held the upper hand, though popular enthusiasm could be whipped upfor the occasional military contest, whether with Spain or Mexico or whomever, so long as it was quick and one-sided. To be sure, the First World Warwas scarcely one-sided, and it clearly engendered great enthusiasm; but letus recall that it had been billed as the war to end all wars" and that it wasthought that the "boys" would be home in time for Christmas. In short,though Americans were willing to intervene internationally, they did so withthe presumption that it would all be over quickly and they could go back tothe satisfactions of peacetime. So much was this a part of the national consensus that the Roosevelt administration, convinced that a long and costlywar was inevitable, had to whip up public sentiment in the last two yearsprior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. (It has been suggested, in fact, that onereason why the administration was so relatively unprepared for war withJapan was that it was too busy trying to sell the prospect of war withGermany.)

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22 ROBERT W RIEBER AND ROBERT J KELLYIn historical retrospect, the Nazis made almost ideal enemies. They

were indeed dangerous, unappeasable, and evil. Moreover, in their case,wary avoidance simply would not work, as first the British and then theRussians discovered too late. They had to be fought; more, they had to beannihilated. But, if the Nazis were the perfect enemy, the horror of whosedeeds became only more clearly substantiated after the war, we should pauseto consider their case all the more carefully, lest we draw the wrong histori-cal conclusion.

To begin with, we must note that Germany had not always been eitherpowerful or militaristic. Indeed, until the forced unification brought aboutunder Prussian domination in 1870, Germany had been no more than a col-lection of independent principalities, each with their own separate foreignpolicy, and incapable of coordinating a common cause, except under thedirest threats from without. In the political cartoons of the early 19th century, Germany was usually depicted as a callow youth dressed in a nightshirtand holding a candle- Sleepy Michel -who invariably arrived too late ininternational disputes to make a difference. Bismarck and his successorschanged that, of course, but whereas Bismarck himself pursued a most care-ful foreign policy based on maintaining protective alliances above all, hissuccessors mistook his belligerent posturing for the essence of his policy, andultimately led the nation into the catastrophe of the First World War. Whendefeat and subsequent humiliation at the negotiating table was followed bythe Great Depression, German political authority was bankrupt.

During the long years of political fragmentation prior to Bismarck, Ger-man aspirations had predictably focused on issues of race and culture. f heywere not yet a nation, the Germans could claim to be a Volk. In the crisisyears of the 1930s, this provided the soil for a new, extraordinary develop-ment. Under the skillful guidance of Hitler and Goebbels, Nazi ideologistspersuaded large segments of the depression-ridden citizenry of the WeimarRepublic to embrace racial doctrines of spurious moral and scientific worth.The Nazi program was to build through blood and violence, if necessary, apure Aryan Volk, a warrior community led by an elite of blond supermen.In retrospect, Nazi beliefs are astoundingly incredulous, but at the time andin the grim climate of economic and social disintegration, they offered ahope- however farfetched and delusional- of survival.

t is the function of any ideology to organize the common perceptionaround certain shared images in the pursuit of a policy for collective action.What was distinctive about Nazi ideology was that it prescribed the biolog-ical perfection of the people as the prerequisite for social transformation andnational glory. That the 'Aryan race, as such, did not exist-it was no morethan a fallacy thrown up by the still unscientific disciplines of philology andanthropology-was no real obstacle. Nor was the fact that the biological per-fection of any race-eugenics-was and remains substantially beyond thecapacities of science. For, as an ideology, Nazism generated a new national

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SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW 23enemy, one that could be used as a rallying cry-the inferior races. In MeinKampf Hitler's political testament, he writes, anyone who wants to curethis era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up thecourage to make clear the causes of this disease. The cause in question wasthe pollution of the pure Aryan race with the inferior, degenerate blood ofJews and Slavs. And what the inferior races did genetically was mirrored inwhat they did politically and r a l l y t h e y contaminated and polluted thebody politic. The ultimate cure was nothing less than the extermination ofEuropean Jewry and other inferior races, such as the Poles and Slavs. Theimagery of this vision of a purified world was medicaVbiological. Nazismmetamorphosed into what Lifton has called a biocracy.

By portraying the inferior races, and most especially the Jews, as adisease upon the nation, Nazi ideology succeeding in making them appearwhat they were in fact not-dangerous and implacable. No objective evidence could be adduced for these propositions, nor was there any possibilityof confirming it in everyday reality. But the iconography of the Nazi propaganda machinery made it appear otherwise: the Jew was everywhere depicted as physically repugnant, as sexually ravenous and hideous, as obese orunaesthetically thin and frail. The images were always extreme and the physical and moral baseness they suggested made the disease metaphor seem likea reality readily confirmed by perception. Indeed, so thoroughly did imagesubstitute for reality that in the wake of Kristalnacht it was the Jews themselves who were made to pay for the damage-the disease must pay for itsown cure.

t was, of course, the classic case of pathological enmification. A defenseless minority was turned into a public enemy as a means of providing asense of vitality to a policy that was rationally and morally bankrupt, and as ameans of uniting and mobilizing a disorganized and disheartened populace.Dehumanizing this enemy went beyond the extreme of what Erikson(1969, p. 431 has termed pseudo-speciation, for the Nazi ideology ultimately depicted the Jews as something even lower than an animal. In theprocess, the psychological needs of a highly disturbed leadership were assuaged as they projected onto others the evil within themselves.

But it was most decidedly not for these reasons that war was waged withthe Nazis; Nazi racism had no part to play in the American decision. On theone hand, though it was widely known what was happening to German Jewsin the late 1930s, no efforts were made either to assist them or to allow themto immigrate. On the other hand, neither Americans nor their British allieswere the targets of that racism. With regard to us, as opposed to the Russians, Nazi propaganda had it that we were misguided and duped, ratherthan racially inferior. No, the reason we went to war was to check Nazimilitary expansionism. That our enemy was manifestly evil, and easily characterized as such, was a propaganda bonus, not a cause.We are still paying for the luxury of having had such a genuinely evil

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4 ROBERT W RIEBER AND ROBERT J KELLYenemy. World War II was as crude and as brutal as any war today, but theclarity of the issues and the effective characterizations, or caricatures, of theparticipants strengthened the way Americans felt about and defined themselves. In a word, we felt good about ourselves. Some of the moral andpsychological premises that grew out of the war have continued to shape theattitudes of Americans toward their military involvements in the postwarworld. Americans have come to see themselves as a new kind of warrior-herowhose best qualities emerge in wartime; the image, popularized in countlessmedia products, embodies the following assumptions:

1 Behind every war in which America is involved is a moral impulsethat justifies its participation-even if the causes are unclear ordubious.

2. Military combat has character-enhancing qualities. War teachestruths about oneself and others impossible to learn in any other way.3. The very foreignness of enemies is proof of their inherent potentialfor evil. Only foreigners who have acquired or assimilated Americancultural values are tolerable.4. American objectives in war are never selfish or chauvinistic. Americans are better friendlier, and more accepting of others than anyoneelse.5. In war, Americans are better fighters and have a stronger will to winthan others.6. As proof positive of their essential altruism, bravery, and willingnessto prove themselves in the crucible of combat, Americans are willingto fight anywhere in the world where they are needed.

The books, films, and television programs which convey this messagetypically make no pretense whatsoever at offering a political analysis of war.War is reduced to a personal drama in which the individual explores hisrelationship to himself, to his family, friends, and comrades and, ultimately,to a misty sense of patriotism. War minus its political and economic complexities becomes the individualized melodramas of Rambo, the Green Berets,and the hard-as-nails Clint Eastwood/John Wayne supersoldier. The iconography of war becomes focused around intensely lonely struggles, aroundtests of will and character; conspicuously absent from these standard scenarios is any examination of the institutional interests of competing politicalgroups that derive benefits from war-making.

There is no question but that this aspect of the American self-imagethe All-American soldier-became solidified during the Second World Warand has persisted as a dominant cultural motif ever since. That there is selfinflation involved is obvious. What is not so obvious, perhaps, is that thisself-portrait cannot stand by itself. What is needed is an enemy. This theRussians were obliged to provide in the post-War world.

t should be edifying to us how easily America s alliances shifted in the

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SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW 25post-War period. Not only did West Germany become part of the NATOmilitary consortium, and the recipient of Marshall Plan aid, but Nazi rocketscientists were greedily snapped up for the American missile program. Indeed, it now appears that even Nazi social scientists were enlisted by prestigious American universities for their thinktanks. How, after a war ofunprecedented destructiveness, did it prove so easy to ally with former enemies? On one level the answer is simple: Because there was a new enemy.On another level, we have to reckon with the delusory tenets of the American myth of the warrior-hero. Having defeated the enemy, Americans believed that the dangerousness had been taken out of him. The beliefs inAmerican goodness and in American power led readily to the assumptionthat West Germany, at any rate, had somehow become a part of us. And soSoviet proposals for a unified ut un rmed nd neutr l Germany fell on deafears. But, then, the Soviets were now the enemy-and scarcely to betrusted.

STYLES OF ENMIFICATION IN THE COLD WAR

The shift from the Nazi menace to the Soviet threat took place withincredible rapidity. Scarcely was the Second World War over, then our for-mer ally, Uncle Joe Stalin himself, came to be cast into the role of a monster,worse perhaps then even Hitler. And again, any objective appraisal wouldhave to conclude that Stalin was indeed a monster, one whose crimes haveeven yet to be fully catalogued. But, Stalin himself did not become the enemy of record; that honor fell to something new in the American politicalimagination- international communism.

The political reality was that following the war, the United States andRussia emerged as clearly the two most powerful nations on earth. But, thepolitical regime inside the Soviet Union, though it pursued the same foreignpolicy objectives that had previously obtained under the czars, was characterized by both methods and rhetoric which were quite unlike our own, anddifferent again from that of the Nazis. Initially, it was not easy to get a handleon the significance of the differences. Marxist notions of the inevitability ofclass conflict sat side by side with Leninist principles concerning revolutionary political organization in an ideological mixture quite alien to Americansensibilities. Even for the thoughtful American strategist, it was not easy toderive from official communist ideology either a clear picture of Soviet national aims and interests, or a basis for engaging in a mutual dialogue. Moreover, quite unlike the Nazis, communist ideology was careful to advance theproposition that there is no such thing as an enemy people. Lenin himselfwrote:

The Socialists of the oppressed nations must particularly fight for andmaintain complete, absolute unity also organizational) between the

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SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW 33

The Berlin Wall 1985 the image of the enemy. Photo by R W Rieber and R Posner.

The Berlin Wall January 1990. The wall of the enemy is broken. Photo by R. Posner.

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38 ROBERT W. RIEBER AND ROBERT J KELLYThe rapidity and skill with which enmification occurs, we suggest, isclosely linked to the size and influence of military elites in societies poisedfor war. Conversely, in states with relatively benign military apparatuses and

establishments, the capacities for enmification pale in comparison.In concluding this chapter we would like to raise an important issue thatmay play a crucial role in the future regarding the process of enemy-making.With the current dramatic changes in the political economy of world culture,we must face the following problem, namely the fact that national identitiesand boundaries are significantly changing and diminishing in importancewhile latent ethnic identities emerge from the social fabric causing seriousrivalries and conflicts throughout the world. Such a developmental patternin world culture must be recognized and understood, especially if we are toavoid the dangers described in Aldus Huxley's Brave New World.

NOTES

1. The word enmification is used throughout this essay to refer to the psychological and socialfactors and their concomitants that go into the process of enemy-making. We know of noother uses ofthe term in the social scientific literature. Etymologically, the term is a derivative of enmity, although there are no ostensive definitions in the dictionary. This absencespeaks to a lack of conceptual refinement in the study of enemy-making.

2. Peace is the prevailing status, but it is different from what is ordinarily meant by peace aset of relations among states where mutual suspicion and fear are not the currency of politicaldiscourse. t may be more correct in defining peace to characterize it in Kissingerian terms: aperiod in which military conflict has abated but psychological tensions still run high.3. Studies of draftees suggest that decisions to cooperate with the process are not primarilybased on a hatred of the enemy. Knowledge or ignorance of the political issues underlying aconflict appear to be less important than the desire to conform to what is perceived as afundamental obligation of a citizen: to serve one's country against its enemies. The enemyis always a useful notion in generating social solidarity Oanowitz, 1957).4. Lifton 1986) argues persuasively that Nazism and its biocracy represented a new spiritualaristocracy with a lofty, if ill-defined social mission. Hitler's expatriations were filled withmiscellaneous racial theories and prejudices that he utilized to lend some appearance of ascientific basis for his ravings. The focus and perhaps the ultimate appeal of Hitlerian rheto-ric was the economic regeneration of Germany which had been emasculated in the FirstWorld War as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. To put the point briefly, Fromm's idea ofnegative transcendence is suffused with too much polemic to qualify as a scientificdescription.

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