9/11

By W. Bentley MacLeod 

W. Bentley MacLeod, Leon Levy Foundation Member (2011-12) in the School of Social Science

In 2003, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case of Grutter v. Bollinger and upheld the right of the University of Michigan Law School to use race as a criterion for admissions. At the time, the majority speculated that in twenty-five years the consideration of race may no longer be necessary in admissions. This year, the Supreme Court will hear the case of Fisher v. University of Texas, which turns on the same issue. In other words, we may have a change in the law in less than ten years!

This, like many decisions of the Supreme Court, can have a major impact on our day-to-day lives. The decision in this case affects the set of schools to which we may be admitted in a world where access to the best schools is considered by many to be an important career stepping stone. The more puzzling aspect, particularly for non-Americans, is that this change does not result from any change in the law enacted by Congress. Both cases appeal to two laws. The first is constitutional law, namely the Fourteenth Amendment, which ensures that all citizens have equal protection under the law. The second is a statute passed by Congress, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination by agencies that receive federal funds. In Grutter v. Bollinger the judges created new law. They argued that the state had a compelling interest in allowing schools to use race as a factor in admissions. In essence, judges, rather than elected politicians, created a new law that allows universities to choose students on a basis that is arguably inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States.

By Mary L. Dudziak 

When Mary Dudziak was the Ginny and Robert Loughlin Member in the School of Social Science in 2007-08, she intended to explore the history of war's impact on American law and politics. Instead, she found herself puzzling over ideas about time, which resulted in the book War-Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Does war have a time? The idea of “wartime” is regularly invoked by scholars and policymakers, but the temporal element in warfare is rarely directly examined. I came to the Institute in 2007–08 intent on exploring the history of war’s impact on American law and politics, but assumptions about wartime were so prevalent in the literature that first I found myself puzzling over ideas about time. Ultimately, this resulted in a book, War ·Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012).

The idea that time matters to warfare appears in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: “War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war.” Time’s importance calls for critical inquiry, but time is often treated as if it were a natural phenomenon with an essential nature, shaping human action and thought. Yet our ideas about time are a product of social life, Émile Durkheim and others have argued. Time is of course not produced by clocks, which simply represent an understanding of time. Instead, ideas about time are generated by human beings working in specific historical and cultural contexts. Just as clock time is based on a set of ideas produced not by clocks but by the people who use them, wartime is also a set of ideas derived from social life, not from anything inevitable about war itself.

Yet war seems to structure time, as does the clock. Stephen Kern argues that World War I displaced a multiplicity of “private times,” and imposed “homogenous time,” through an “imposing coordination of all activity according to a single public time.” During World War I, soldiers synchronized their watches before heading into combat. In Eric J. Leed’s description of trench warfare, war instead disrupted time’s usual order. Battle became an extended present, as considerations of past and future were suspended by the violence of the moment. “The roar­ing chaos of the barrage effected a kind of hypnotic condition that shattered any rational pattern of cause and effect,” so that time had no sequence. And so one meaning of “wartime” is the idea that battle suspends time itself.

By Daniela L. Caglioti 

A memo from the Institute archives explaining the process of reclaiming a camera seized during World War II from Shizuo Kakutani, Member in the School of Mathematics from 1940–42.

­­­­­The security of a nation and the safety of its population versus the protection of constitutional liberties and human rights is a quandary that arose in the aftermath of 9/11, but it is not novel to the twenty-first century. Discrimination between citizens and aliens, ethnicization of citizenship, the use of emergency powers in order to deal with the enemy and bypass the constitution, and the tendency to shift guilt and responsibility from the individual to a collective category (e.g., the Jews, the Muslims, etc.) are practices rooted in the past.

In my research, I have been looking at how governments and armies during World War I began to deal with these issues. The governments of almost all the nations that took part in World War I issued decrees and implemented measures against civilians of enemy nationalities who at the outbreak of the war were within their territory. Persons with ties to an enemy country were presumed to be more loyal to their origins than to the countries in which they worked and lived. German and Austro-Hungarian subjects living in France, Britain, or Russia, and later in all the countries that joined the Allies, and British, French, and Russian citizens who lived in Germany or in the Habsburg Empire, and then in Turkey or Bulgaria, were recast as dangerous, sometimes extremely dangerous, internal enemies.

Individuals with connections to enemy countries were in some cases passing through as tourists, students, or seasonal workers, but in most cases, they had been residents of the country for many years. Some of them were born in the country, some had married a national, others had acquired nationality papers, others were in the process of getting them. Many owned houses, land, or firms and spoke the local language. The outbreak of the war transformed them––independently of their personal story, feelings, ideas, and sense of belonging––into enemy aliens, accused of posing a threat to national security and the survival of each country.