Quiescent Leviathan? Citizenship and National Security Measures in Late Modernity

AuthorBarry Wright
Date01 June 1998
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00088
Published date01 June 1998
The systematic study of political trials and national security measures
tends to be associated with the old-fashioned genre of ‘state trials’.
Although whiggish or critical reductionism has since tended to prevail,
recent social historical work on protest movements, ideology, and rights
struggles opens up fresh approaches. The current scholarly shift of
attention away from the repressive powers of the state to plural sites
of power, while representing an advance, also threatens to relegate
the area to neglect. The modern renewal of national security measures
can in fact be seen as part of a more complex deployment of law
and linked to current debates around state formation, governmentality,
and citizenship. As the late modern state is eroded from above
by globalization, and from below by demands of identity politics
and differentiated citizenship, will such repressive measures be
revealed as an anachronism or continue as a final resource of the
state in crisis?
INTRODUCTION
We must eschew the model of Leviathan in the study of power. Michel Foucault1
The systematic study of political trials is associated with the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century collections of state trials, a body of scholarship displaced
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
* Associate Professor, Department of Law, Carleton University, Ottawa K1S
5B6, Canada
I am grateful to Alan Hunt, Wesley Pue, Trevor Purvis and the anonymous reviewers selected
by the Journal of Law and Society for their encouragement, helpful comments, and suggestions.
213
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 25, NUMBER 2, JUNE 1998
ISSN: 0263–323X, pp. 213–36
Quiescent Leviathan?
Citizenship and National Security Measures in Late Modernity
BARRY WRIGHT*
1M. Foucault, ‘Two Lectures (1976)’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings, 1972–77, ed. C. Gordon (1980) at 102.
largely by modern social historical work on protest movements and scattered
civil libertarian critiques of national security cases. The classic political trial
is a rarity in most advanced common law countries in this century, with
activities formerly prosecuted as political offences tolerated or dealt with by
more complex and subtle forms of legal regulation. Despite rejecting claims
about the democratic achievements of the modern state, critically-inclined
scholars appear to have diminishing interest in national security laws and
their administration, especially in recent years as broader preoccupations
with the state (the modernist omnipotent Leviathan) have given way to atten-
tion to plural sites of power (especially moral regulation and governance of
the self), as the nation-state is increasingly seen as a institutional formation
of the past, eroded under pressure from globalization, local identity politics,
and the contradictory demands of differentiated citizenship. Despite trends
which appear to diminish the significance of political trials and national
security measures, a basic question remains. In an era of a fragmenting public
sphere and new discourses of political rationality, will the repressive mea-
sures of the past be revealed as anachronisms – or will they be resurrected?
A huge array of national security laws continues to be found in juris-
dictions such as the United Kingdom and Canada, despite the appearances
of the dispersal of central state power which, in the case of Canada, has
recently given rise to the interesting suggestion that we may soon see the
rst post-modernist state. I suggest that comprehensive understandings of
these laws and the historical record of their administration remain important
as we confront questions of power in the late modern state. There are dangers
in assuming that our most repressive laws are moribund historical remnants,
administered in highly particular circumstances, when they remain the state’s
nal resource, short of military force, in perceived crisis. The essay will begin
by reviewing scholarly trajectories around the study of political trials and
national security, then examine their relevance in light of recent theoretical
debate around modern state formation, governmentality and citizenship,
and conclude by looking at the persistence of national security measures as
part of a complex deployment of law in the face of identity politics, inter-
nationalization, and waning central state authority.
STATE TRIALS AS A GENRE AND MODERN SCHOLARSHIP
British interest in the study of political or ‘state’ trials developed after the
seventeenth-century conflicts and the return to stability. Repressive uses of
the law, such as the ‘bloody assize’ of 1685 where over 1,300 were charged
and many duped by Judge Jeffreys into pleading guilty of treason, would be
checked, it was hoped, by the procedural safeguards set out in the 1696
Treason Act (right to defence counsel, advance look at the Crown’s case,
two-witness rule, and so on) and other constitutional and legislative advances.
214
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998

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